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Bones stays up, the night they leave Ceta Alpha V for what they hope – what they are all praying – will be the last time. He's got work, lots of work really – the wounded Enterprise crew members need attention, and the crew of the Reliant are all more or less dehydrated and wind-blasted, because apparently Khan dropped them off about a hundred miles from even his own miserable encampment, and two hundred and fifty damaged scientists is a lot for any medical department to take care of. So Bones changes their bandages and checks their vital signs and administers painkiller as needed and prays that no more of them are going to die in the night. And, all right, Lieutenant Saavik comes by at one point and gives him a pointed Vulcan look and says something to the effect of "Your shift ended long ago, Doctor, should you not be resting?" but Bones gets out of that one with a look and a grumble of his own, and after that nobody else comes by to comment.
Chekov has an ear infection despite the antibiotics they've given him and his fine motor skills are probably never going to be quite the same, but he's going to be fine, and Bones sends him off to his own bed with a warning that he's going to check on him every four hours or so. Scotty isn't doing quite as well as Bones was hoping, but then, the engineer is getting on a bit. He'll be fine too; he just needs time. They all just need time.
Bones keeps expecting, as he leans over his patients to check their temperatures and pupils and pulses, to hear that bland gravelly voice say behind him, "You know, Doctor, your approach here might be much more effective if you–" He keeps forgetting. Well, that is sort of the point, isn't it. It's easy to forget, when someone is that ingrained in your physical memory, when you're so used to having them right behind you that you keep turning around to check whether they've missed a step. Bones is a medical, doctor, sure, but he'll go head-to-head with Jim Kirk on psychoanalysis any day – he's seen people lose people, lots and lots and lots of times, and he knows the mechanisms they use for coping. He knows exactly what he's doing right now, and he isn't about to stop doing it. It's only human, after all. You have to do something or you'll go insane, and what Bones does is keep busy. There is no way he's going to stop and lie down and stare at the darkness inside his eyelids right now, not after the things that happened today.
Jim doesn't come to check on him, but that's understandable. Bones sees him come blinking into the control room early the next morning with Dr. Marcus on his arm (Bones sees a lot of things, Bones notices a lot of things, and this one isn't exactly hard to notice), and... well. He's not about to blame Jim. Everyone deals with things in their own ways. He's maybe a little hurt, but only a little. This isn't about him. It generally isn't.
It's going to take a couple days to get back to Starfleet, and that's a lot of open time to fill. Jim – Captain –Admiral Kirk sends the Academy a message detailing what happened, what Khan did and what they did. They get formal acknowledgement from Starfleet and not much more. There's not much more they could say.
They give about half of the dead cadets space burials, depending on their wills, if they'd written them yet, and put the other ones in cryo to bury once they reach the planet. Bones keeps busy in the sickbay when he's not needed. He's holding up all right, actually, he thinks, apart from the occasional stabbing pains between his eyes that come out of nowhere. He just doesn't really want to sleep.
This day passes too, somehow, and he remembers hearing somewhere that the day right after is the hardest. Bones keeps an eye on the others, but mostly on Jim, because Jim really does not look all that okay. He's holding up, sure, keeping control of his command, years and years of practice letting him give the orders and even hold the posture mostly without effort, but when he thinks no one's looking, his eyes go blank and he looks so damn lost. Bones thinks about what he said this morning, about feeling young, and wonders a bit about how his friend is going to make it. In the long run, you know. It wasn't like he hadn't been having some midlife crisis before, but now this...
Bones has made up his mind to go talk to him later, after he's finished making his rounds of the sickbay, but in the end it's Jim who comes to him first, while Bones is in his quarters having dinner and checking forms (mostly date-of-death forms) and, most importantly, sitting down for the first time in what must be ten hours or so, even if it is sidesaddle on top of his desk. Jim comes in unannounced, sits down – sinks down – in a chair next to him and stares at the wall. "Hey, Bones," he says.
"You doing okay, Jim?" Bones asks him, not so much because he doesn't know the answer as because he wants Jim to talk. The admiral is staring awfully fixedly at that wall, and Bones knows there's nothing there even before he follows his gaze.
"I seem to have broken the glasses you gave me," Jim says, his voice catching in a chuckle at the end of the sentence. "Sorry, Bones. I'll try and hold on to the next pair a little longer."
Bones almost responds with something about how he knows a man who can fix them, no problem, and then he stops himself, because this is about something much, much less fixable than a pair of cracked glasses.
"Jim," he says instead. "Forget about the damn glasses. I don't care about the glasses. Talk to your doctor, I'm here to listen. I need to know how you're holding up."
Jim Kirk stares at the blank off-white shipboard wall for a very, very long time, until it seems like he's not going to answer at all. Then he says, very softly, "It's just the two of us now, Bones. You think we're ever going to get used to that?"
"No," Bones says. "No, I don't think I ever will."
Jim closes his eyes and leans forward in the chair. On his perch on the desk, Bones can't think of anything to tell him. There's nothing he can say that is going to change things, or that Jim doesn't know already. The three of them have – had spent too long together for any two of them to know something that the third didn't.
Finally he settles on "He cared for you, Jim. More than anyone like him should, actually."
"I know," Jim says. "I know..." His mouth twists and he's trying to hide it, but the third "I know" is choked almost beyond intelligibility, and then, without much transition, without much anything, Admiral James T. Kirk is sobbing wordlessly into his chief medical officer's chest (or, anyway, close enough to it) and Bones can't do a thing but hold on to him, arms around his best friend's shoulders and back, and wait.
If it had been a normal day and a normal time, he would have – should have – backed up and said something like "Dammit, Jim, get ahold of yourself," and it would probably have worked too. But today is neither of those, and Bones is not going to do that, because he's fairly sure that it would break Jim beyond all repair. And so he holds on, staring over his friend's shoulder at the slightly dirty spot on the floor in the corner where it meets the counter and the wall, and listens to his captain break down and thinks about all the other things that have been broken in the last day and a half, things that aren't fixable anymore. Holes that are going to stay holes until the last day either of them is alive.
Bones McCoy is a doctor, and he knows that later on people are going to say he fixed Jim Kirk because fixing things is what doctors do. But that's not actually true, Bones knows. Mechanics fix things, but Bones McCoy has is not a mechanic.
Doctors aren't the people who fix things, Bones knows. Doctors are the people who put patches over unmendable wounds and trust that they'll be enough to hold the sides together. Doctors are the people who come to you when something unfixable has happened to you and tell you that you have to carry on regardless.
Here's to carrying on regardless, Bones thinks, and holds his captain tighter.