Work Text:
Bones had a problem.
It started small, as most things did, with fingernails scraping palms as he uncovered Jim's lifeless form in sickbay.
One might have expected elation to follow, some alleviation after Khan's blood first entered Jim's bloodstream, a product of hope. In reality, it was two weeks of uncertainty and fear and misery that gouged crescents into his arms and knees and the back of his neck.
It was fine though; he was fine. Minor anxiety; to be expected under the circumstances.
Spock noted his distress several times, but he was careful to avoid doing or saying anything suspicious, even when the man illogically gripped his hand and asked him how he was. He was, after all, fine.
He was a doctor, of course, and if there was one thing about it that really was unsanitary, it was the lack of hygiene. A small, sharp, sterile blade would do much better. Real scalpels were not used in surgery any more, but he had just the thing, given to him by his father at the age of seven, a little boy growing up wild on a Georgia farm.
It was strange just how quickly and easily his mind rationalised his own behaviour; perhaps if he'd taken, or been given the time to analyse it, he might have realised what was happening, but it seemed to him like his self harm wasn't real self harm; it was not like other people's.
Most people who self-harmed were children and teens; he'd had a late enough start.
It was only a scratch. It was not that deep. He healed it the second he no longer needed it. It did not get infected. There was no real risk. It would be attention seeking to tell anyone. It was pathetic, really, to consider something so minor self-injury. As a doctor he'd seen cases ten, a hundred times worse. If he did seek help, he could be declared unfit for duty. He could lose his job. People would know, and they'd know how pathetic it was, that he was an attention seeker. That he was selfish, compromising their healthcare for his own groundless self-pity.
He didn't even do it that often; it wasn't even different from digging those nails in, except it was safer. It wasn't different from smoking except there were no passive victims or long-term effects. He was fine, and to deny that was to demand attention he did not deserve, help for a problem that was not real. For every problem, ther was an equal and opposite excuse.
It went on for a long time. Years, in fact. In the first year of their five year mission, he did it six times. Each of them he healed within the hour. None of them cost him more than a few ml of blood; the knife was sharp and clean; it cut straight, narrow lines that clotted quickly, and the pain of which was really minimal.
The second year he did it only twice. It was not a stressful year; broadly speaking, he was okay. He was fine.
The third year, though. The third year was really not as good. Joanna started school, without him there to hold her hand or hear about her day. That cut deep, and so did he. So did her birthday.
Then came his father's diagnosis. Two years to live, maybe three. The anxiety cut him, burned him once. Sometimes it pulled out his hair. He missed his father before he had even really begun to slip away.
When he went to visit he made sure he cut a vein, made sure there was something to drip down to his elbow, to stain the water in the sink.
It was understandable, though, and no one had to know.
The fourth year he did it perhaps once a month. Not too often; what's twelve injuries a year when you're a doctor? He became paranoid that someone would notice something was off, but of course strange behaviour was expected when one's father was dying, and it was selfish of him to imagine anyone would notice a change about him.
The second visit was the last and by far the worst. David McCoy lay pale and sick and in agony and older than his years, begging for a release he could not grant.
He could not break his oath. And then he did. Halfway through the fourth year of the five year mission, he killed his father with a lethal dose of pilfered pain medication. There was suspicion about his involvement, but no actual evidence, and he was back on the Enterprise only a week later, to bleed onto tissues in his office.
The cuts spread across his arms and chest and thighs, and he did not heal them until the day after, and then only to clear the way for fresh, angry red slashes. Each only lost a teaspoon or so of blood, and after a month or so the pain abated. He did it less and less; recovered. One a day. One a week. One a fortnight. He'd done the right thing, killing his dad. He'd helped him. He felt released.
Until he didn't. He could tell something was being hidden from him, because there was no way that no single report of a specific disease was filed in over a month. Kirk didn't want to talk about it, which meant he had something to do with it.
Leonard was no lover of technology, but even he could hack the ship's data banks. He hadn't got into Starfleet off of good looks alone.
He stared blankly at the journal title for a full half an hour, unable to process. He did not need to read the contents. How the cure was designed or tested or worked did not matter. All that mattered was that it was too late, he'd already failed the man who raised him. Who'd lain on that bed and begged for help. He'd failed his father, in the most vulnerable time in his entire life; he had murdered David McCoy.
He turned off the screen, locked his office door and dimmed the lights, and cleaved flesh from bone with the knife the father he did not deserve had given him. The wounds gaped and cried red reflections of the hot salt tears he could not stop coming.
He did not deserve to ask for help. Anyone who saw him would tell him he deserved worse than this; that this was barely punishment.
The next morning, half an hour before his shift, he healed the wounds, gave himself saline and walked out of the office to see his first patient.
Even though he deserved worse, it crushed him that nobody noticed. That was when he knew just how in-genuine he was; he had murdered his own father unnecessarily and he was feeling self-pity because no one was there to lick his self inflicted wounds! He tore at the skin of his arms in disgust. All his fault. It was all his fault.
After that, there were only four more months of the five year mission left. Somehow, cutting was not the release from utter torment it had been, but a coping mechanism for minor stresses. Sometimes, if his mind wondered for too long into melancholy, the answer was obvious. A little flick knife given to him as a boy. His father would turn in his early grave if he knew what it was being used for. The thought made him cut more, cut daily, litter his arms with criss-crossed lines, only to heal them away because not only had he committed patricide, but he was a coward.
He'd grown so used to no one noticing, that he was shocked when it finally happened; he no longer expected it.
The mission should not have been dangerous, but if there was one thing five years in space had taught him it was that should mean very little to the universe. Spock should not have been wounded, should not have been poisoned with whatever it was. Leonard should have waited for some kind of backup, should not have gone back for him.
They should not have been stranded on Sigma Draconis III, but the Prime Directive prevented them from seeking high ground for the search parties, and whilst Spock's injuries were healing well, Leonard was not.
He scratched at his wrists when Spock was not looking.
And then he had to go and get too close some adorable local fauna, which looked like a squirrel and bit like only a spider native to Australia could, and flopped down to the rainforest floor like a lead weight.
“Doctor!” Spock rushed over, checking his life-signs. He was conscious, but Spock couldn't know that; he was barely breathing, almost entirely paralysed. His pulse was slow in his ear. “Doctor McCoy!”
Spock hauled him back to their cave and lay him down, and before he knew what was going on there were hobgoblin fingers pressed against the meld points on his face, and everything he was came rushing out at Spock.
He leaned, later, that Spock had only probed lightly with the intention of ascertaining his well-being; that it was his desperation to have some witness to his pain that had revealed all it had.
Spock waited until he could sit up before speaking.
“You are ill, doctor.”
“I'm fine,” He griped shakily, fully aware of the fact that Spock was not referring to the bite or the poison.
“No you are not.”
He should have replied that he was, insisted it, until Spock went away, but suddenly he had the opportunity to talk about it, hell he was practically obliged to, and he no longer felt like giving that up. The realisation and the poisoning made him sway, off balance. “I can't stop.”
Spock gripped his arm and shifted him so that his back was supported by the cave wall. “You need not do so alone.”
McCoy shook his head, scraping it against the stone. “I'll lose my job. Can't have a crazy doctor enlisted on a starship.”
Spock's hand was still on his arm. It was warm. “Only if Starfleet finds out.”
“Ain't you obliged to tell 'em?” He grumbled, looking determinedly ahead.
Spock cupped his face and forced him to make eye contact. His eyes were slightly shrunken, a vestige of the injury to his leg, but they were just as piercing as they'd ever been. Maybe more so; they looked right into him. “Leonard.”
Bones swallowed, unused to intimacy and certainly not used to it with Spock.
Spock's other hand traced invisible scars up his wrist to his inner elbow, gently tingling and tickling the skin.
McCoy wondered when he had started crying, or what it was that possessed Spock to kiss the tears away; he wasn't complaining.
“Leonard, you are not fine,” He murmured into McCoy's cheek.
“I know,” He replied hoarsely. Drugged and aching, he fell asleep, head against the wall, side pressed up against the Vulcan, unwilling to face the conversation he'd started.
If he'd hoped Spock telling him not to self harm would work, then he was in for the same unsurprised apathy that presumably all of his patients with the same problem had felt when told to simply stop and take up a rubber band.
And if he'd hoped for the privacy his shame had enjoyed for the five years since Jim's death and subsequent reviving, he was going to be disappointed, because three weeks later when he loses his first patient since Sigma Draconis, Spock is in his office with an override code that must surely have been illegally acquired.
“I'm fine,” He tells the Vulcan like a mantra.
“If I came to you in this same situation, would you deem me to be fine?” Spock never took the softly softly approach.
“I would deem you unfit for duty and kick your ass off this ship, but you ain't a Doctor.” He grouched, defensive even though he knew Spock was there to help.
“Indeed.” Spock crossed his office and leant on his desk in a very unSpock-like manner. Then he took Leonard's bleeding wrist in one hand. It wasn't his most enthusiastic work; several long, lazy lines that wouldn't ooze enough to fill a hypo between them. He was a little ashamed of how half-assed the work was.
The anabolic protoplaser was in Spock's hand, going over every wound far slower than strictly necessary, as though extra time might heal the mental damage as well.
For some reason McCoy felt like he was letting his ability to cope go, and it was unbearable. He watched the wounds close with tears running down his cheeks and dampening the collar of his scrubs.
"It is not a coping mechanism," Spock told him, as though he had read his mind. Perhaps he had. "It is a symptom of a lack of suitable ones."
He wasa doctor, he knew this, but by the time the last wound was a fading pink line, he was sobbing and shaking, and Spock still would not let go of his hand.
“All I wanted was for someone to make it better. Or even just to see.” He said weakly. “Sorry. I'm sorry.”
Spock was kissing the tears away again, soft lips and Vulcan scent. “I can see you, Leonard.” He whispered, mouth bare millimetres from McCoy's cheek.
Bones turned his face slightly so that they were breathing the same air, Spock's breaths even and calm and measured, his own rapid and uneven, on the verge of hyperventilating. Their noses bumped.
He closed the tiny gap by tinier increments, giving Spock a chance to back out and slip away, but he didn't. The kiss was salty with tears, and maybe a little snot, but Spock did not complain and he certainly wasn't. He lapped at his mouth and then his tongue and bit Spock's lip and sucked, like he was trying to draw him in, to fill every gap where a person should have been but where none was. He was still crying.
When they broke for air, his sobs shook the pair of them and he clawed at Spock's back because he could not break away to claw himself.
“Help me,” He moaned into Spock's neck. “Please, it has to be you.”
Spock's arms were strong and solid and settled around him properly. He nuzzled at McCoy's cheek.
“I am here. People are here, Leonard, they always were.”
The unnecessary nature of his own loneliness tore at his chest and racked it with fresh sobs and a long, despairing groan. “I'm sorry,” He said again, not to Spock but to himself, this time. “I'm sorry.”
“It will be okay.” Spock squeezed him. “Not straight away and not forever.”
He was never certain if it was the specifics of Spock or simply that Spock had been there at the right time. Eventually, he stopped caring. It didn't matter. What is, is – a Vulcan phrase he picked up from Spock, which he preferred to translate as “shit happens”. It was just the way it was, and this time, after so long of waiting, he was grateful.
It was not the last time he self harmed, by a long shot. But it was the last time he used that knife. When the mission ended, he took it home to his father, without Spock or Jim or anyone, and he buried it above his father's grave.
“Rest in peace, Pa.”
Then he trudged back the way he came, for dinner with Joanna and Jim and Spock, feeling sad but strangely at peace with the universe. He wasn't fine, but he would get there.