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It’s dark. Early hours. Alarms wailing, staff at odds. So much activity, so much well-meaning. So little help.
Jim doesn’t want any of them. He wants Bones.
The alarms have gone off because his temperature is up again, and because he is in pain. Still. He wants to feel better, and he knows that this is what every one of them is aiming for. But really, he just wants Bones to come. Bones would make it better.
Disconsolate and weak, he resigns himself miserably to their hands.
Then the doors to the quarters in the corner slide open, and Bones appears. Jim’s heart leaps. And then sinks again, to his core.
Bones looks tired. So, so tired. He is in his black undershirt and slacks, and he is all-over creased, dishevelled, and slightly grey – apart from the circles beneath his eyes. Those are dark purple. Aside from his regular (too-long) shifts, he has been getting up with Jim three, four, sometimes five times a night, for over a week now, while Jim has been particularly ill. Jim doesn’t know how he’s doing it.
Now, standing grim and unkempt in the doorway, he is glowering at the scene before him. And he looks strangely determined.
“Get out of my way”, he barks.
He strides over to Jim’s bed, scattering nurses. He bends down to Jim, and as he puts his strong hands on his shoulders, things are already just so much better with the world.
But he doesn’t sit, and he doesn’t check the monitors. He doesn’t even produce a hypo. Instead, he pulls Jim’s arm around his neck and turns so that his shoulder lifts Jim by the underarm.
“Come on Jim – up”.
Jim does his best to stimulate a reaction from his debilitated limbs. He doesn’t need to try too hard, Bones already has him up, and is bearing most of his weight as he takes him away from the biobed.
“I thought I wasn’t allowed up yet”, he queries, like a child.
“You’re not”, Bones retorts. “But this time I’m making an exception”.
Carefully but swiftly, as only a doctor can, Bones pushes through the various med-team members and the clamour and the noise, and manoeuvres Jim through to his own quarters. He sits him on his bed, then turns back to the doors.
“Turn the goddamn alarms off”, he snaps at the team. “Then clean up, change the bed, replace the fluids – and for the love of God, just be quiet!”
Then he slams his palm onto the door panel, and the doorway slides shut, suddenly sealing the two of them within a blissful sphere of peace, and calm.
Bones draws a hand over his face.
“I sometimes honestly don’t know if they’re doctors or gannets”, he mutters, more to himself than to Jim. Then he comes back to the bed. Standing beside it, he pulls back the covers, and inclines his head at Jim.
“Get in”.
Jim looks up at him, bemused.
“Wh……really?”
“No Jim, this was all a joke that I thought it’d be fun to play at 2:30 in the morning – you can cartwheel back to your own bed now. Yes, you idiot, get in”.
Smiling to himself at Bones’ characteristic irritability, Jim lies down. The mattress is still warm from where Bones has just left it. Jim stretches his aching body over that warmth, its comfort a far greater balm than any hypo. Bones waits until Jim has made just enough room, and then gets in beside him. He lies down facing Jim, puts an arm over him and pulls him into his chest.
“Lights, five percent”.
The room darkens. Then Bones lets out a sigh that sinks him immediately back into reassuming a sleeping position, and he is still.
Jim stays unmoving under Bones’ arm, the faint scent of Bones' t-shirt in his nostrils, their bodies pressed together from cheek to toe - and closes his eyes in blessed relief. He feels terribly, terribly ill. Hot, cold, sick, and shaken. But Bones is warm and solid, and oh-so-safe it makes Jim want to weep.
There is quiet for a little while. Then Jim asks, quietly -
“Why?”
Bones neither moves, nor opens his eyes. His voice is deep and low, and so close to Jim that Jim feels rather than hears the words.
“I brought you in with me because I thought you could do without that biobed for a few hours. We both could”.
Something in Jim tightens at what he believes is the insinuation in this.
“I’m sorry”, he whispers. “Bones, I’m sorry – I know you’re really tired, I’m – “
But Bones pulls him in closer, and hushes him.
“Shhh Jim, don’t be silly”, he grunts, shifting slightly so that their last edges fit together. “That’s not what I mean at all. It’s just that sometimes, you perhaps just need to be ill for a bit. Out of the way of alarms and medics and sprays. Or, more specifically, out of the way of that eager but rather over-enthusiastic bunch of rabid-medical-morons who think it’s their job to make as much noise about everything as humanly – or non-humanly – possible. God love them, they’re masters at what they do. But when it comes to causing absolute chaos in the middle of the goddamn night…. Well they seem to have majored in that too”.
Jim pressed himself into Bones’ strong form in wordless thanks. He feels Bones’ broad hand move slowly up and down his back a few times, and suddenly he feels just a bit less sick.
He does want to ask though.
“But you’re always the one who staples me to med machines like you’re screwing down an amphitheatre plinth”, he says from the depths of Bones’ chest. “You’d sooner marry Spock than let me away from the medical equipment. And you yell at anyone else who lets me away from it if you’re not there. What’s different? Why take me out this time?”
He feels Bones smile slightly in the dark. Then Bones’s other hand – the one that’s been underneath their shared pillow, slides out and searches briefly between them for Jim’s wrist. His fingers close around it, with the first two digits placed firmly over the dip that contains Jim’s pulse. His other hand, the one that’s been running gently up and down Jim’s back, comes up to wrap around the back of Jim’s neck, his palm flat to the overheat of Jim’s skin.
“Because I can do this”, he says, matter-of-factly.
And Jim realises that as they’re lying there, close and warm and alone in the dark, private safety of Bones’ bed, that Bones will be the one monitoring his condition through the night. Not with the use of tricorders and screens and biomonitors and sirens and PADDs, but purely through the touch of his own hands. Bones will wake up if there is any change in Jim. He always wakes up, always knows. Bones will be his biobed for the time being.
Jim marvels to the very depths of his being at this man. He really is, undoubtedly, the most incredible doctor. But more than that, he is also the most incredible human being. When those two qualities cohere, as they are doing right now as Bones tunes himself in to Jim’s heart rate, his temperature, to any indicators of further pain or discomfort, Jim is overcome with gratitude for Bones’ presence – here in bed, and in the whole emotional, physical, mental, professional, and social commotion of his life. Bones keeps him alive. But, more importantly, Bones keeps him alive. In every sense of the word.
He puts his head down under Bones’ chin, and lets out the final pre-sleep sigh.
“Are you feeling ok enough to get some sleep for now?” Bones asks, softly.
Jim nods.
“Alright”.
Then he adds in a whisper, “I’ve got you, ok Jim? I've got you.”
Jim nods again, just once, the threatening tearfulness adding to the soporific weight descending comfortingly over his body. And finally, for what feels like the first time in years, Jim falls asleep in quiet, the only sound that of Bones’ settling breathing – the persistent, inescapable beep of the ever-present biobed replaced by Bones’ steady, ever-present heartbeat.
[FIN]