Chapter Text
Leonard McCoy ignored the pain in his knees, and his stiff back while he crouched on the wooden floor of his father's home. He didn’t want to give in to the notion he was getting old. Thirty-two was hardly something to complain about, then again, the things his body and soul had endured these past two years more than likely aged him well-beyond his sixty-four-year-old father.
He was a doctor, not a carpenter or a farmhand, or a damn butler, but since he’d been home in Georgia, his father saw fit to treat him like all of the above, and now after a week of physical labor, the demands he put on his body had reached its limit. Leonard's muscles were sore and tired. Not that he minded all that much. It kept him busy and his mind off the events leading up to moving back to the farm, and most importantly off the people—or person—he refused to let occupy his mind.
The sound of his hammering on the floorboards was replaced by a hammering on the old, farmhouse door. It should have been hard to hear over the steady drops of rain on the tin roof, but whoever was at the door was rather insistent.
“Len!” his father yelled from his office. “See to the door. I’m elbow deep in these payments.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, then grumbled under his breath about not being a damn house slave.
“Under my roof!” That seemed to be his father’s stock answer anytime Leonard griped about something. Leonard now lived under his roof, so he’d do whatever his father told him.
Yes, Leonard was definitely too old for this shit.
Removing the nails nestled between his lips, he waved an irritated hand over his shoulder as he rose to greet the shadow of the visitor standing on the porch.
Even soaking wet, Leonard recognized the shaggy blond hair through the frosted, front door window.
He didn’t hesitate to think what the consequences of the visitor's presence here in Georgia meant. Leonard should have stopped and ran for the back door so he could figure out what to say to the man who, for the past five years, had gradually nestled his way bone deep inside of him. But Leonard had already run away, and distance hadn’t helped him. So instead, he threw open the door and all but growled at James T. Kirk, the man who never seemed to give up.
“What in blazes hell are you doing—”
“You didn’t say goodbye.” Jim cut him off, fire in his eyes, and right fist clenched like he was about to slam it into Leonard’s jaw.
“Leonard, who is it?” yelled his father.
“I got it, Dad!" he said, competing with the old man. "Come on.” Leonard grabbed hold of Jim’s elbow, dragging him alongside the house to avoid the rain. When they reached the old shed and were out of earshot and out of sight, Leonard laid into Jim about his sudden appearance halfway across the country.
“You look like hell,” Leonard said. “You’re soaking wet. The last thing you need is to compromise your immune system.”
Jim wrenched his arm free of his grip, giving Leonard a two handed shove to his chest. “You didn’t even say goodbye.”
Yeah, kid, neither did you, Leonard thought but didn’t voice it.
“Jim—”
“No, Bones! I can’t believe you. I get discharged from the hospital by Boyce of all people, and then find out from him you’ve left Starfleet.” Jim’s face flashed from anger to confusion. “What’s going on?”
There was steam coming off of Jim’s shoulders from his soaking wet shirt, and drops of water fell from his hair to his face. Leonard didn't need any instruments to tell Jim's pulse was elevated, and for someone who had just come back to the land of the living, a heart rapidly racing, pumping too much blood to newly regenerated cell tissues, wasn’t a good thing. He was liable to end up with pneumonia.
“Jim, you need to calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Bones! I hate that. I want an explanation.” He raised a finger in the air, hovering it in front of Leonard’s face. “I deserve an explanation. Maybe not as your captain, but at least your friend.”
“Who gave you the clearance to fly? You shouldn’t be traveling.” Leonard’s hands itched for his tricorder, or a hypospray at the least. “Your body’s not up to it, and if you tell me you transported here, so help me, I’ll—”
“Bones. Stop.” Jim ran a hand through his hair, slicking it back. “Just stop.” He let his arm fall to his side surveying the shed, like he weighed Leonard’s actions by taking inventory. His eyes glanced from the hard-packed, dirt ground, to the tin and wood walls, then up to the exposed rafters where they eventually landed on a rusty scythe, weathered and destroyed by rain and age hanging from an exposed wooden beam. The shed was the only thing never upgraded over the years. It had been patched up and fixed when the storms came through, but the tools and the memories it held had been passed down from McCoy generation to generation. As a kid, the shed had been a terrifying mystery to Leonard and his cousins. It was the one place where they feared to tread, thinking it was haunted by the ghosts of McCoys past. With the sound of the rain pounding on the tin roof, and the air thick with humidity making it difficult to breathe, Leonard thought he might prefer to take his chances with the ghosts over an irrational Jim freshly back from the dead.
With his eyes still stuck on the scythe, Jim swallowed, fighting back whatever emotions had surfaced. “Why?” he asked, his voice cracking.
Leonard was in turmoil just as much as Jim, so he let Jim stew a bit longer before answering. “The fact you have to ask that, only makes it the right decision.” Leonard crossed his arms, hoping he was strong enough for this conversation. “You were dead, Jim. It doesn’t get any deader than dead.”
“Yet, here I am,” he whispered loud enough over the rain, turning to face him. “Thanks to you, Bones.”
Leonard’s surly facade faltered. His heart was fractured, trying to pump much needed blood, but the fissures left behind from Jim made it so damn difficult to work. If he ran a scan over himself, he’d see he was bleeding out throughout his chest cavity, and his only chance of surviving was to cut out the dysfunctional organ.
“I can’t do it anymore. Dammit, Jim! Two catastrophic events in two years. My ol’ bones can’t take another one.” It had nothing to do with his bones, but Leonard wasn’t about to let Jim in on that secret. “And with you, there’ll always be another one. That’s just who you are, and I wouldn’t have you change that. If a mission doesn't kill you, staying planetside surely would. But I’m tired.” Leonard raised his chin up, staring right into Jim’s weary eyes.
“So, what? You’re going to be a country doctor, raise some chickens, pick peaches in the orchard and take sweet tea on the porch at night?”
“I’d prefer a nice mint julep, myself.” Leonard tried a smile on Jim.
“You’re the best doctor Starfleet has ever seen. You’ll be bored in weeks, enough you’ll want to stab your eyeballs out.”
“Better self inflicted than some Klingon doing it for me.”
Jim shoved his hands in his hair, pulling at the roots. It had grown during the weeks spent in the hospital, and he hadn’t found time to cut it to regulation length. He wiped the droplets off his face, but managed to miss an important one resting on his upper lip. It hovered there, waiting to fall, taunting Leonard, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s lips.
“This isn’t a joke, Bones.”
“You’re goddamn right it’s not.” Perhaps he was more annoyed with himself than Jim.
“What’s wrong? Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to me?”
“It’s my decision. My life,” Leonard growled, “and I don’t want to waste it gallivanting in space with some hyperactive, space-pirate with delusions of grandeur who has a death wish!”
Jim’s face fell, and Leonard regretted the words as soon as he said them.
“Wow,” Jim’s head snapped back, “so, that’s really what you think of me. All these years, Bones, and that’s how you sum me up.” He turned his back on Leonard, looking up to the scythe again.
Leonard hadn’t meant to crush Jim like that. For the past few months he’d been so frustrated with the man, it was impossible to have a normal conversation with him anymore. He’d changed ever since Nero and the Narada, like he had something to prove, driving everything and everyone around him right to the edge. He was barely holding on by his fingertips, and that included their friendship. It wasn’t always this way. Leonard used to enjoy the rush and adrenaline that embodied Jim Kirk, but then Khan happened, and after Pike’s death, Jim was unrecognizable with his anger, more reckless if that was possible.
Leonard understood what it meant to grieve. His marriage, his mother, his grandparents, it was a common thread in his life, but for Jim, he’d never cared enough about anyone to know what it felt like to grieve. Pike was the father figure he’d desperately been lacking in his life, and when Khan killed him, something in Jim reverted to a time before Leonard knew him. Leonard saw it happen right before his eyes. Jim pushed everyone—including Leonard—away, demanding things of his crew they never should have endured. It frightened Leonard, but more importantly, it broke his heart. He loved Jim, and Jim had taken their friendship and Leonard’s trust, and casually tossed it away all in the name of vengeance.
When Leonard brought Jim back from death’s firm hold, he finally faced the grueling truth of their relationship. He could never love someone who didn’t wish to be loved, or more importantly, someone who would never be able to return that love. It would eventually destroy Leonard far beyond any damage his ex-wife had ever done to him, and he would not survive it this time.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Not exactly.”
When Jim turned around, his eyes were moist, and his jaw was set. He nodded a few quick nods. “Enjoy your simple, country life, Dr. McCoy. Best of luck.”
He tried to brush past Leonard, but he stopped Jim with a firm grip on his arm. Leonard was stronger than him. Jim’s muscles hadn’t fully recovered from the tissue damage the radiation had done, but even after weeks of lying in a bed, Jim still gave off an energy that hummed through his body. The man trembled under Leonard's fingertips.
“I can’t let you leave like this,” Leonard said, even though he knew better. He should let Jim go and finally be done with it all. This goodbye was always going to be harder than Leonard could imagine. It was why he left San Francisco. James Kirk did something to Leonard McCoy he couldn’t explain, something he'd never felt. He turned Leonard’s world upside down, and Leonard was the kind of man who liked to be right side up. What the two of them had went beyond friendship. It went beyond any relationship Leonard had ever been in, at least Leonard thought so, but with Jim, it was too hard to tell.
Jim Kirk was a whirlwind of emotion, catastrophic in some regards. He was the eye of the storm for so many people, sharing bits of himself all over the galaxy, blowing in and leaving a path of heartbreak in his wake. Leonard knew damn well Jim was spread too thin to ever give himself fully to one person. Regardless of what his head told him, Leonard’s heart made him feel a godforsaken bond for Jim he didn’t know how to diagnose, and it annoyed the hell out of him.
When Jim died, that bond tore a piece from not just Leonard’s heart, but his soul, a piece which could never be replaced, and that scared the hell out of him.
“Let go. We’re done here,” Jim said, like it was that easy. His muscles were still tense under Leonard’s hands.
“Now hold on. You know I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I just never expected you to show up on my doorstep. I’m off kilter here.”
“How can you walk away like that?” Jim shook his head. “Has our friendship meant so little to you?”
Friendship, Leonard thought, yeah, that was the problem, wasn’t it? The cataclysm of emotion Leonard was experiencing was one sided.
“Fine, I get it,” Jim said. “As my acquaintance, you don’t owe me anything, Bones, not even the courtesy of a goodbye, not if you don’t want to. But as a member of my crew, you left without so much as a by your leave. I am your captain!”
“Not anymore, Jim.”
Jim sought Leonard’s eyes, like he needed confirmation from Leonard’s expression to understand the validity of his statement.
“Bones, I need you.” Leonard’s heart fluttered, then went still again when Jim continued. “I need the best, and you’re the best there is. You make me a better captain. We had plans, Bones. To seek out the ends of the galaxy, find a distant planet no one has ever stood on before. There’s a whole universe out there meant for us, Bones. Don’t do this. Tell me what's wrong. Be like Spock, make me see the logic in this decision, because from where I’m standing, there is none.”
They were inches apart, and the look of anguish on Jim’s face was too much for Leonard. As a healer, he couldn’t bear to be the cause of so much pain.
“Jim...it’s not that simple.”
“It is! Bones, come with me. Follow me to the end of the galaxy.”
“You died chasing that dream.”
Jim took a step back from Leonard as if he’d hit him. “You’re right. I did die, but I didn’t give up, and neither did you or I wouldn’t be here. We defied death. So now we have to make sure to live. I’m alive.”
Leonard was all too aware how alive Jim was. The flush on Jim’s cheeks made the dark circles under his eyes a little less pronounced. Even at this distance he could feel the heat radiating off of Jim, and there was a fire in his eyes which held that strong will to survive, something Leonard thought he would never see again.
“You can’t stay in one place, Bones.”
“No, you can’t. I can be quite content.”
“You can’t quit. Who knows what’s out there? That’s what it’s all about. Seeking the mystery of the unknown around the corner, and I want you with me when I turn it.”
“Jim, I just can’t.”
“Tell me what you’re so damn afraid of! We all die sometime. It’s how you live that counts. You know who said that to me? Pike did. And he’s dead. A good man is dead, and I’m not going to waste his memory holed up in some desk job or some sleepy little Earth town because it’s the easy way out.”
“It’s got nothing to do with being afraid of dying.”
“Then tell me the truth. Make me understand.”
There was no good way to tell Jim the truth. It was the reason he left San Francisco before the news had become public knowledge. The medical board had taken his license from him, and without it, he wasn't much good to Starfleet. They had granted Leonard one condition when he accepted Starfleet's terms of dismissal. The official report wouldn’t be filed until Jim was discharged from the hospital, and on his way to a full recovery, which meant that unless someone went looking for the information regarding Leonard’s Starfleet status, his suspension would go unnoticed.
He loved being a Starfleet officer, but most of all, he loved being in space with Jim. So, when he saw Jim lying in that body bag, he felt like he’d lost everything. Leonard did exactly what Jim would’ve done. He’d stared death down and demanded what was his to be returned to him. Jim’s life had cost Leonard everything he had gained in the last five years.
It was Leonard’s sacrifice to bear. Better to have Jim think he quit than brand him with the guilt of Leonard’s loss. Jim would never forgive himself, forever responsible for what Leonard had done for him. He was liable to risk his captaincy and the Enterprise, storm into headquarters, and demand Leonard’s re-instatement. He loved Jim too much to let him do that; a revelation he had come to while hovered over Jim's hospital bed. He spent the better part of four years following Jim, longing to make him smile and hear him laugh. Whether it was a pat on the back, or a gentle slap to the cheek mocking him, Leonard knew they were cavalier touches on Jim’s part, but he savored those precious imprints, always wondering what it would be like to replace the pads of his fingertips with the soft curve of Jim’s mouth.
With anger and frustration in his heart at everything he was being forced to give up, Leonard grasped Jim’s face between his hands, pulling him near. He caught the faint smell of antiseptic mixed with Jim’s familiar scent of soap and sweat. His breath was warm on the inside of Leonard’s wrists and Jim's lips were close enough he only needed to press forward an inch or two, and then he'd finally know the taste of Jim Kirk. Leonard’s eyes fixated on Jim’s lips, and the drop of water still hovering there. He could reach his tongue out and lick it with one sweeping move. It would be a simple gesture, but then Jim’s mouth fell open in what Leonard might have mistaken for invitation if he hadn’t known him so well. In this moment, it was about resentment, and if this was to happen he wanted it to be about so much more. A kiss between them shouldn’t be a fleeting attempt to coerce the other into something they weren’t ready to start. Jim would kiss him, it was kind of man he was, but Leonard wanted his body to be alive with the knowledge that Jim loved him back.
When he met Jim’s wide eyes, they were startled and filled with confusion, somewhat shiny with embarrassment. No, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. It would do nothing to mollify the ache in Leonard's heart, especially if a goodbye went with it. If he kissed Jim, it would be impossible to let him go. Jim belonged in space, while Leonard was now fated for Earth. There could be nothing more while they lived worlds apart. Leonard wanted all of Jim, and one awkward kiss would never satisfy that deep-seated hold Jim had on his soul.
As much as he wanted to know those lips intimately, Leonard pulled himself away, slightly shoving Jim’s head like he needed the extra force to break the hold Jim had on him.
To save Jim he had to lose Jim.
“What the hell, Bones?”
Leonard turned away. He couldn’t stand to look at Jim any longer, not when his eyes were filled with pity. Leonard mumbled an apology under his breath, but he doubted Jim heard it over the rain.
“You just don’t get it. You never have.”
“Then tell me. Tell me what this is really about.”
Leonard flinched when Jim placed a soft hand on his back. He was pissed off with himself for letting Jim back into his heart. “I can’t be around you. It’s too much. I want an easy life.”
“That’s bullshit!” Jim spun Leonard around, grabbing him by the shoulders, pressing his thumbs into the muscle. “You’ve never been a coward. You’re better than this, Bones.” He shoved Leonard up against the wall of the shed, his head hitting the wood much harder than intended. Leonard took the pain, letting it compete with the pain in his chest.
“I thought you were different, but you’re just like everyone else!” Jim was yelling now, his eyes hard and narrowed. “Maybe you should’ve left me dead.”
Leonard’s right hand curled into a fist as his left shoved Jim away just enough so he could connect with his jaw. Jim went down quick, surprised by Leonard's punch. He no longer carried the stamina he was used to, so he fell hard against the packed dirt. Leonard hovered over him, raging with a ferocity he never knew existed.
“Don’t you ever say that to me again.” He pointed at Jim, jaw clenched and eyebrows furrowed. “Do you have any idea what we did for you? What we all risked for your goddamn mission of vengeance? You don’t have the right to say that to me!” Leonard’s chest heaved, while his hands still shook with fury. Jim met his eyes, and for the first time since Leonard had known him, Jim Kirk was humbled.
The two stared for long, painful minutes, neither knowing exactly what to say to break through the tension weighing them down, and keeping them in place.
“Leonard!” His father called out to him from the front porch. “Where’d you get off to, son? You left the door wide open. Water’s everywhere. Come clean this mess up!”
The trance was broken and Jim’s blank look was restored with deep concern. “Bones...”
“Don’t,” Leonard said raising a hand to stop Jim from saying anything further. He swallowed to get rid of the lump in his throat. It felt like he was being ripped apart all over again. “You fucking broke me lying in that body bag.” Leonard blinked back the tears he’d never shed when Jim died. “I lost everything that ever—” Leonard let out a frustrated sigh, stopping himself from revealing too much. Shaking his head, he looked at the ground for a few breaths then back to Jim. “You’re just gonna have to give me some time, Jim.”
Jim rubbed his jaw where Leonard’s fist had connected, the skin already bright and bruising. He stood, keeping his eyes fused to Leonard, then he shoved his hands in his pockets. “I can give you all the time you need, Bones.” Jim’s face didn’t betray any emotion. It was the same look reserved for handling difficult negotiations. Having never been on the other side of it before, Leonard felt the full force, and a shiver ran down his spine.
“Just don’t quit on me,” Jim said, piercing Leonard with his gaze. “Don’t let this be it.”
Leonard didn’t want to quit, but he wasn’t given a choice. It was better to push Jim away for his own good, before either of them did something stupid. The Enterprise, along with Jim, would be embarking without him, and it would break Leonard apart far beyond his own healing capabilities.
“I can’t do this anymore. Not right now.”
Leonard couldn’t look at him. The dark circles under Jim’s eyes and the wet clothing were enough for Leonard to know the kid was past due for some much needed rest. If he gave him one last glance, he couldn’t do what he needed to. He would cave because Jim’s whole essence was full of sorrow, and Leonard’s heart was programmed to heal Jim in any capacity. What he wanted to do was take Jim inside, get him a change of clothes and feed him a warm meal. If he did that, then he’d insist Jim stay the night, where they’d sit on the porch until the stars were high in the sky, and in the morning he’d never be able to let him go.
There was an old plaid jacket hanging on a hook on the wall behind Jim. Leonard reached for it, holding it out for Jim until he wrapped himself in the flannel. Leonard needed to walk away from Jim, but it didn’t mean he’d let the man slide back in his recovery. Taking a deep breath, Leonard ran a hand over his face, rubbing the scruff raw until he mustered up the courage he needed.
“Leave, Jim,” Leonard said. “Don’t come here again.” He brushed past Jim without another glance, not even when Jim called out after him through the rain.