Chapter Text
These days, McCoy's relationship with alcohol starts and ends with one stiff drink. He has his ex-wife to thank for that, setting aside his own inability to lay down and die like a dog (her words). That stubbornness gets him through the first six months of Starfleet's big ol' Academy. God help him. And it's that tail between his legs that lets James T. Kirk follow him home.
Kirk's an odd one: studious by day and playboy by night. Against McCoy's better judgement, protests, and attempts to shake him off like a flea, Kirk sticks around. He's a whiz kid; cotton balls for ears and a sponge for a brain, he absorbs facts and little else, not reason, not sense, and definitely not the word 'no'.
For some godforsaken reason, he takes a shine to McCoy. Or, McCoy takes a shine to him, it's hard to say. Those first couple a' weeks are blurry, tryna cut himself off cold turkey. No alcohol, no wife, no Georgia. One drink is a necessary compromise. And San Francisco can rot in hell. Jocelyn wouldn't take him back if McCoy was the only man on Earth, but before he can mope about that too much, there's Kirk.
Having Kirk around is kind of like having a wife and kind of like having a cat. He does what he wants when he wants, and he's damn brilliant at it, and he likes to sprawl himself across McCoy's lap. If they were fucking, then maybe it would make sense. But Kirk has never looked twice at him.
That doesn't stop him from ending up in McCoy's bed, or vice versa. Over the last six months, McCoy has perfected the art of nursing a lone drink while Kirk tries his luck with the ladies. Some nights, Kirk is wagging his cock at a girl before McCoy has even tamed a darn bar stool into not swivelling around. But for every one of those nights, there is another where Kirk's eyes are glued to his beers and his books, barely making conversation, and it's McCoy slung under his arm for the ambling walk home.
Again, if they were fucking, McCoy might have the grounds to protest being "the girl". It ain't likely Kirk would listen to him anywho, but at least he'd feel better about his shit turning up in Kirk's pockets: bookworm, playboy, and thief. Seriously, McCoy can carry his own damn wallet. He only tried to drunk-call Jocelyn one time.
"Thank me later, Bones," Kirk had said that night, pocketing McCoy's shit with a fox-like grin.
With no means to get home, call a cab, or order himself another drink, McCoy had nursed the first of many lonely drinks and pretended not to know exactly what Kirk was doing to the most convenient girl over in the bathroom stalls. She looked pleased about it, after, stumbling out with her lipstick smudged. Kirk hadn't even bothered to zip up his fly.
McCoy never has thanked him. The next day, they were back to respectable normal: Kirk deepthroating textbooks and eating only what McCoy put in front of him; and McCoy still hapless and sober, and every day a little less, missing Jocelyn.
So, for six months it goes on: class, bar, dragged back to Kirk's bed. Kirk's a clingy bastard when he sleeps. Every damn time, McCoy insists on sleeping on the floor; and every damn time, he wakes up super-glued to Kirk's chest. It's a thing. It happens. He's twenty-eight years old for crying out loud, he can tell his pseudo-wife best friend to take a hike if he wants to.
He doesn't want to. Kirk is a wildering son of a gun but he's gonna go far. McCoy's not joking about that sponge-for-a-brain. Nobody else is crazy enough to chew up and spit out Starfleet's Command track in a measly three years.
"You are," says Kirk, and gosh darnit, if Jocelyn had ever said anything as half as nice as that to him, they'd still be married.
"You can't sweet-talk me into taking piloting credits," McCoy retorts, side-eyeing Kirk over his Early Starfleet History essay. "So get that look off your face."
"What look?"
"That one," McCoy says, but when he blinks, he doesn't see it anymore. "I saw those puppy-dog eyes."
"Only you call them that, Bones."
"Like I'm listenin' to anyone else. Did you reference Atkinson in your essay or am I right in thinkin' he's talking a load of shit?"
Kirk's expression goes utterly serious. Yeah, he had them puppy-dog eyes all right. Goddamn teacher's pet. How someone so high-strung manages to whip his head right back on straight is anybody guess. Sometimes, talking to Kirk is like flipping a switch.
McCoy wishes he could do that. It would be a helluva thing, turning his big mouth off at the drop of a dime. It might could've saved his marriage.
"You don't want Atkinson. Here." Kirk swipes an assortment of chapters and journals onto McCoy's PADD. "Yamanaka's '51 paper actually gets to the point. And if you didn't read all of the key text, don't. It was a load of rubbish. We still getting drinks later?"
McCoy might actually finish this paper on time. "Seems like a sure thing. Temple?"
"Ambrosia," Kirk offers. "It's been ages."
"Pretty sure you got your dick sucked behind there the other week," McCoy counters, wishing he didn't remember accidentally walking in on the scene. He'd been worried about Kirk getting into another fistfight for god's sake. He should've known Kirk's libido hadn't wandered far.
"Like I said," Kirk says, with a slant to his look. "Ages. Unless you want to hit the dance floor at –?"
"Nope."
"See, I know you, Bones," he says, but then he all but rockets off his chair when McCoy kicks him under the desk, so it can't be too well.
##
McCoy wakes up somehow not stuck chest-to-chest with Kirk – alone in bed, for once, praise the Lord – and promptly brains himself on the edge of the desk when he trips over the sprawl of Kirk's limbs across the floor.
He limps into the bathroom, black dots overtaking his eyes. The light bursting on almost kills him. McCoy's shout shakes the toothbrushes in their cup. Kirk doesn't bother to come running, all too used to McCoy's foul waking moods.
A shower doesn't help much. He only had one drink last night but he throws up a little in the sink. It's a bad omen for the rest of the day – whatever day it is, goddamn – and then he hears Kirk clamouring around. Drawers slam open and shut. Something crashes. The wardrobe door rebounding against its frame echoes even into the bathroom. McCoy turns the taps off with a squeak and hurries back into last night's clothes.
Kirk's room is upside down. Anything not bolted down is strewn about: clothes, books, sheets, bag. The contents of McCoy's jacket are scattered across the bed – candy packets, old receipts, his communicator and ID. Kirk's jacket is in the midst of suffering the same fate as Kirk shakes it upside-down, dropping condoms, an epipen, a pocket-sized journal attached to a pen, and lo and behold, McCoy's wallet, onto the floor.
Kirk snatches the journal and flips it open. His eyes skim ten, twenty, maybe even thirty pages before he acknowledges McCoy calling his name, and only then because McCoy kicks aside a t-shirt to stomp into the room.
"No," says Kirk, of all the things. "No, no. I'm not doing this again! Where are we? Where's my comm? Where the fuck has he put my comm –?"
He snaps the journal shut and swings it like a brick. McCoy staggers against the bed to avoid it, and from the tangle of sheets drops Kirk's communicator, clattering onto the floor.
"Hell, Kirk –!"
Kirk dives for it. He almost gets a knee in the face for his trouble and he would deserve it, acting like a goddamn animal like that. He's only in his underwear for pity's sake, a rabid look about him, hair mussed from sleeping on the floor, and as soon as he unlocks the communicator, he hurls that against the wall, too.
"Fuck! Fuck. Shit! Where the fuck –?"
Staggering past McCoy's attempts to stop him, he yanks the roller blind away from the window. A clear March morning and a seagull squawk from the other side, taking flight, but it's Kirk's voice that breaches atmo with shock.
"Fucking Starfleet!?"
He whirls back around, back lit by morning. McCoy watches in real time as the colour drains from his face, so fast that he sways in place, freckles bleaching white from his nose to his chest. His eyes go all at once far away, then his legs buckle. McCoy leaps up to catch him.
"Whoa, whoa! Easy. You're all right."
"Oh my god," Kirk mutters, voice small. Over and over again he says it, palm splayed across his eyes. In his lap, that little journal has fallen open, and in it McCoy's sees scribblings in various colours and dates from years ago.
Lord, none of that matters right now, not even the strop Kirk's gone and woken himself in. McCoy's still going to give him hell for all the shouting later; throwing his best friend's shit around, who does Kirk even think he is?
"Tip your head forward," McCoy directs, rubbing up and down his back. "List over this way if y'all think you're gonna pass out. You feelin' any numbness? Pain?"
Kirk laughs exactly once. "And a shrink, too! Fantastic! Do we fuck before or after you re-traumatise me with my shit?"
That one's a kick in the teeth. Cold shock spurs McCoy into action: he grabs his comm and punches in the emergency number but Kirk knocks it from his hand before the second ring goes through.
"James!"
"Don't call me that! And don't –!"
They tussle for the communicator. McCoy ends up facedown amidst the contents of a book bag, one arm twisted behind his back. He never was any good at hand-at-hand; and Kirk helped lead the class. Kirk sounds just about as mad about it as he does though, in this moment, swearing and apologising, half the words coming out of his mouth insane:
" – So you're not my new therapist, fine. Fine! I'm kind of wishing you were because I don't know how to explain this shit and I'm gonna fucking kill James the next time he tries to – Stop fighting, seriously, I don't want to break your arm –"
"Then don't," McCoy hisses into the carpet. He tries to buck Kirk off one last time but only serves to hurt himself, tears stinging into his eyes. "Christ! Let me up!"
"Let me explain –"
"Let me up!"
Kirk clambers off of him. McCoy rises gingerly to his knees and sags against the bed, his shoulder pulsing with pain. Christ alive, it's too early for this shit. His face is sweating. He licks a drip of salt from the side of his mouth, breathing hard. Just a foot or two away, Kirk mirrors him, curling into a ball on the floor.
Fear has McCoy's eyes tracking for the communicator – and there it is, peeking out from under the bed. He won't be able to reach it first. He might have to, for Kirk's sake over his own.
"It's Jim," Kirk says into the aggressive silence. The ashen slant to his skin makes his eyes seem all the more blue. His wipes flaxen hair from his forehead; he's breathing hard, too.
Sure, all right, McCoy will bite. "What is?"
"My name. Not James. Not –" He cuts himself off; he must realise he sounds mad. "I don't even know you."
Amnesia, McCoy's training supplies. Dissociation. He suspected Kirk had some skeletons in his closest – a criminal record, food-based trauma, maybe neglect – but not complex post-traumatic stress. That's a childhood's worth of skeletons. That's something nasty bearing its teeth right under McCoy's nose.
Because Kirk is bearing his teeth – maybe not his actual teeth, but it's in his eyes, his posture: he's willing to bite. McCoy's seen a lot of terrible things come through the ER with a lot of terrible expressions, but this one he only ever sees in children – teenagers, usually, tearing apart at the seams.
He needs to call that emergency line. A psychiatrist might know what they're looking at here. McCoy sure as hell doesn't – he's a surgeon, not a shrink, no matter what Kirk thinks of him. Although, he'd be damned side better than whatever therapist Kirk has apparently been seeing
He hopes that off-colour quip about sleeping with his shrink was just Kirk's mouth sprouting bullshit and nothing more. There'll be hell to pay if not.
McCoy takes a deep breath, forcing himself to relax. Kirk's dorm room is hardly the ER and thank god for that, but that doesn't make Kirk any less his patient, and it don't mean they aren't friends.
Roll with it, McCoy tells himself. That's what Jocelyn always wished he would do: get that dang stick outta your ass.
"Well, I'm Leonard McCoy. An' there's a lot of stuff I know diddly-squat about, but if you think I don't know you're a pain in the ass, then you've got another thing coming, Jim."
##
They compromise: Kirk will not start another wrestling match if McCoy orders breakfast burritos instead of calling the emergency line. McCoy is less than thrilled at leaving him alone for the five minutes it takes to collect the order from the door, but Kirk promises to tidy up in the meantime, which he does by dumping everything into the back of his wardrobe, claiming he doesn't know where any of it goes.
Yesterday, McCoy would have called him out on his bullshit. Today, he fears Kirk's claim might actually be true.
It is a tense breakfast. Kirk has a twitchy sort of energy about him that McCoy isn't used to seeing. Oh, in bars he's all over the place, hitting up girls and wagging his tail, chasing a wink or two into an alley, pent-up and pants down, but he's confident about it, fun and cock-sure, and dare McCoy say it, absurdly attractive. Kirk knows what he wants and how to get it. There ain't a pretty girl in California immune to that – hell, McCoy's not immune to that.
But he sees it from the other side, too: the focus in class, the As in his grades. Kirk and nervous are planets apart. Nervous doesn't start a fistfight in a club full of cadets and tell a captain how to stick his dissertation up his ass.
Kirk's nervous now. He wolfs down two breakfast burritos as though he might never eat again and picks at the corners of his journal as he flicks back through.
McCoy has never actually seen him write in this journal – and it surprises him, really, that Kirk even keeps one – but the pages are full with colourful writings, and Kirk twiddles a multi-pen between his fingers, clicking it from blue to green to red.
"And you said…?"
"Riverside, Iowa. I sat next to you on the shuttle," McCoy repeats, remembering that morning in fragments of alcohol and lack of sleep. He hadn't wanted to board that shuttle. He wanted to throw himself in front of it, something quick. "You had blood on your face. Jim, I've got a duty of care –"
"You promised."
"To hell with my promise! That's six months you've forgotten! You need blood tests and an MRI –"
"It's more than six months," Kirk says, licking his fingers to turn another page. "Eight months, maybe, who knows. Like it's so hard to pick up a pen."
He flicks forward to the latest entry and clicks his multi-pen to blue. Something other than the absolute nonsense coming out of his mouth stops him for a moment, something on the page, and then he scribbles a sentence down.
"Would you relax if I say this is normal?"
"No!"
"What if I gave you a blowjob?" He laughs at McCoy's sputtering rage. "Okay, okay, so we're not an item. Weird."
And that's another thing about him – he jokes. Kirk is a playboy and a teacher's pet depending on the angle of the moon or whatever, but he is not a jester. He's the "fun guy" in their relationship solely because McCoy's a miserable bastard all the dang time.
"Seriously," says Kirk. "It's fine. James can go fuck himself next time he wants to come out, but he's pretty good at being me. You want that last burrito?"
McCoy wants to wake up into last night and have this entire morning be a dream. He throws the wrapped burrito over because he's a realist, dammit. And what little psychiatric training he has pings in the back of his brain.
"Hell, Jim, you're making it sound like –"
"Yeah." He tears off a chunk with those animal teeth. "The amnesia's a load of shit, but it is what it is. At least it's just California. I normally wake up in jail."
McCoy is still trying to wrap his head around eight months. He's seen patients dissociate for hours before, sometimes a full day, but never longer than that. The mind just can't handle its own trauma response: it's a catch twenty-two. He decides not to poke the wasps nest called jail.
"I'm guessin' I don't know you that well after all."
Kirk flops the burrito at him. "If it makes you feel any better, I don't know me either. What's the date? Do you think I got a new therapist? James has written fuck-all about it. Where's my comm?"
Funnily enough, that doesn't make McCoy feel any better. He watches Kirk retrieve his comm from where he threw it with a sick taste in his mouth. Dissociative disorders are not his field of expertise. The only poking around people's heads he does is the physical kind.
"You know an Ana Moreno?" Kirk asks, tapping through his comm. He sticks his tongue between his teeth in thought. "She might be my girlfriend, hard to tell. Damn, I call her a lot."
McCoy flips open his own communicator to check Starfleet's medical registry. His qualifications are woeful inadequate for this, but he finds Doctor Moreno under the list of C-PTSD specialists. Sweet hell, he was right about one thing at least.
"You should set up an emergency appointment with her," McCoy suggests, still hankering to call the medical line.
A therapist Kirk knows and trusts is a better shout than an ER full of strangers, anywho – not, he reminds himself, that this Kirk knows or trusts anyone on this godforsaken campus. Fantastic.
"Yeah, she's not James' type," Kirk says, blasé. He frowns at his comm for a moment and then snaps it shut. "I guess I could."
McCoy should swing a brick like a brick.
"You guess!?"
"Oh, come on. Chances are I'll go dormant again tomorrow and you can go back to being study-buddies with James or whatever," Kirk says with a roll of his eyes.
He doesn't seem at all frightened by this possibility, especially when he shrugs and adds, "He's the one who signed us up for class. I'm not doing homework. He can deal with that."
##
"How's that assignment going?"
"Fuck you," Kirk says, sliding into the seat beside McCoy. A jug of iced coffee thunks onto the desk. The Kirk that McCoy has come to know – the bookworm, James, and isn't that a baffling thought – refused to drink anything except jet black coffee, boiling, or a morning glass of orange juice – which, thinking about it, begs the question of who has spent many nights downing jello shots in the club.
James never seemed the type to start a fistfight either, but what did McCoy know? He sure as hell didn't know there were multiple people rattling around in Kirk's head.
Kirk pats down his jacket to find his comm. For a young man whose memory blanks range in the weeks and months, he really should keep his belongings on a lead. McCoy will buy him a retractable key chain for Christmas. Hell, is it rude not to buy his alters one each?
"Here. Got you something," Kirk says, slapping a paper bag onto the library desk. It smells sweet, whatever it is. White icing oozes from the bag. "It comes with a price."
McCoy eyes the bag like it might bite him. "I ain't writin' any essays for you."
"Neither am I," Kirk chirps. "I just want to know who the hell Bones is."
McCoy's laughter echoes through the atrium. He peels the pastry from the paper bag and gobbles it up, all the while saying nothing, chuckling to himself until he chokes on the goddamn bun.
"So?" prompts Kirk, shaking the ice around his jug.
Wrestling his alter-ego to the floor was worth it.
"More homework," McCoy drawls, laughing in the face of Kirk's beautiful pout. "I didn't think you'd written much in that little book."
"I've written shit," Kirk agrees, patting himself down again to locate the journal. He doesn't find it. Seriously, a lead. Maybe a bell. "But we've mentioned some Bones guy a couple of times in notes and stuff."
"Is that how you communicate? Sticky notes?"
Kirk glances around at the other occupants of the library: students bent over textbooks and staff rushing about. McCoy hadn't picked an end booth expecting Kirk to turn up, but he had been aware of the possibility. James likes the corners.
"We used to be better at it," Kirk says. "My old therapist was, like, super strict. He used to read all our chats and stuff. Sometimes, we'd make shit up just to piss him off."
McCoy's eyebrows hit his hairline. "Doctor Moreno ain't as lousy, I hope? What's this guy's name?"
Kirk smiles around his straw. "Why? You gonna go off about your duty of care?"
"Damn straight I will," gripes McCoy. "Some assholes shouldn't have 'Doctor' in front of their name. Dammit man, I'm a surgeon, not a psychologist, and even I don't drive my patients to lie."
"Well, you do," Kirk quips, a twinkle in his eyes. "You know, on tables. That's kind of how surgery – Ow!"
The scary thing is, this Kirk is even easier to befriend than the other. Others. Hell, McCoy ain't counting. The playboy's a pain in the ass – but he does take McCoy's semi-sobriety seriously, so there's a heart somewhere behind those pretty eyes. The bookworm is a pain in the ass, too, too clever for his own good and a good liar, if flying under the radar as Jim for six months is enough of a clue.
In fact, Kirk's just a pain in the ass, period. Somehow, that makes this whole dissociation thing easier to bear.
"Look," says McCoy, grabbing the bottom of Kirk's jug to stop the incessant rattling of ice. "Just gimme a holler if Doctor Moreno gives you any trouble. Now, I don't know her, but she ain't gon' wanna know me. All right?"
"It's Alabama, isn't it?" Kirk chirps. "Georgia? Fuck! I bet you grew up on a ranch."
Well, it ain't like they're getting any studying done. McCoy swipes out of his student account to pull up holos on his PADD: the McCoy family homestead; the stables; and the biggest rascal of them all, Snowmane, his nasty ol' girl.
"She's the biggest bastard y'all ever meet," McCoy says, accent deepening with that Southern longing. Goddamn, San Francisco ain't got nothing on Savannah. "I'll bet she's almost as old as you."
"She'll like twenty-one," Kirk says, laughing at Snowmane's dead-eyed stare as the stablehand tries to saddle her.
The holovid loops twice. It's even more ridiculous on the second go-around but McCoy doesn't laugh.
He does not remind Kirk that he's twenty-three.
##
Dissociative disorders may not be McCoy's area of interest or expertise – he dabbled in the idea of undertaking a PhD in psychology before his divorce; anxiety disorders, although maybe he should have looked at family counselling – but that doesn't stop him from poring over literature on the subject.
One good thing about signing up to shoot himself into space à la Starfleet is gaining access to every scientific and medical database under the sun – and not just from Earth, but across the entire Federation. He doubts the Vulcans will have anything of use – goddamn telepaths with no emotions; hardly the sort to admit to suffering from a stomach ache, let alone a mental disorder – but there are some points of interest in the Andorian literature, and plenty from Starfleet's deep space sites.
It's a hub of research out there – space stations floating in the black. Some of the Federation's most groundbreaking research has occurred on the frontier. McCoy spends a week with his nose in a PADD, reading anything he can find. He scours abstracts between patients at the clinic, and trawls through references instead of listening to professors drone on. Doctor Moreno's work is heavily cited and – thankfully – heavily peer reviewed, and he deliberates a full day before downloading the latest edition of her book, just in case Kirk somehow finds out and accuses him of snooping.
He doesn't see much of Kirk that week. This is not entirely McCoy's fault; Kirk flitters in-and-out, doing whatever it is he is wont to do now that James isn't in control. McCoy catches him here and there across campus, in the library, and racing back and forth from the Command departments, a golden spot in a sea of red.
Each sighting is an assurance that Kirk is keeping himself together to some degree, at least; and though McCoy assumes Jim is still fronting since their wrestling match in his dorm, it ain't easy to tell. Maybe if he sat Kirk down – or sat on him – and actually grilled for those six months of missing memories, McCoy would know for sure. But he's not Kirk's keeper, therapist, or someone who really knows him – unless one asks the campus administration staff, who reach out to McCoy in exasperation after Kirk skips a second week of class.
McCoy prides himself on two things: gumption and honesty. He's always been a terrible liar, even as a boy. As an adult, that gumption got him through the toughest parts of his marriage; and that honesty was the reason it ended. As he swipes out of the library with his comm cradled against his ear, he sees Kirk on the edge of the Andoria fountain, feeding the ducks, and hangs up on the campus administration staff.
Kirk is not in uniform. His tattered jacket crumbles with bird seed as he fists it out of his pocket. McCoy jogs over in case he takes flight.
"Fancy a drink?"
Kirk shakes his head. So does a duck, waterboarding itself to scoop up the seed. "Kebabs? I know a place."
"You know a place?"
It slips out. McCoy's momma should've taught him to keep his mouth shut when that honesty went too far.
Fortunately, this Kirk has a sense of humour, so it must be Jim.
Still Jim, in fact. So much for ducking out of the pen again and leaving James to ride the rodeo. Maybe they're arguing about it in that brilliant head of theirs – his, hell, whatever.
Kirk does indeed 'know a place'. It's not the sort of place McCoy would feel comfortable walking into; the type of place aspiring to front a drug dealer's den if it doesn't already, off the road and down an alley, dimly lit, signage and menus scribbled in some alien language from a non-Federation world. There are no other customers. The chairs are plastic and squeak. The tables would squeeze in besides his nanna's dressers and not look out of place, and she has a hoard of vintage tat.
"You bring all'y'all friends here?"
"Just the pretty ones," Kirk quips.
An alien pops up from behind the counter before McCoy can strangle him: a stout individual with little hair and a sloping face. McCoy doesn't want to admit that he hasn't got a clue of their species or customs, although his sharp side-eye at Kirk probably gives him away.
Kirk greets the alien warmly, wittering in another language. He must be darn good at it, too, because the alien doesn't immediately start throwing spatulas about. They give McCoy a critical look partway through the conversation and then nod in a goopy sort of way, making Kirk laugh.
"The hell'd I miss?" McCoy asks, as soon as the alien turns away to sling some kebabs together.
"Know any other languages?" Kirk asks. "Spanish?"
"Only if you're tryna tell me where it hurts."
"He wants to set me up with his daughter," Kirk explains, still in Standard. He rips napkins from a napkin square, apparently not too bothered if the alien overhears. "I told him you might have a problem with that so he said I should dump your ass."
"This kebab ain't gonna be poisonous, is it?"
"Might be," Kirk says as they watch the alien tip a wagon load of garlic powder onto one of the kebabs.
McCoy keeps his mouth shut.
It's a good kebab. Hell, maybe Kirk does 'know a place'. It comes with the caveat of not stopping to consider what meat they might be eating – thin curls of it, tender and charred – but that doesn't stop McCoy from demolishing it with wolf-like snaps.
Kirk looks outrageously pleased. "There's a van a few blocks from here that does these crazy loaded fries."
McCoy's stomach gurgles. The irony is not lost on him: he has to all but trick James into eating. Every other word from Jim's mouth seems to be about food.
That might not discount the food-related trauma. He doesn't understand dissociative disorders enough to know what bleeds through.
The fries are pretty dang good, too. They spear an extra large portion with little wooden sticks and wander back towards the Presidio as it gets dark. Kirk fists the last of the bird seed from his pocket and scatters it across the park.
"This what you've been doin' all week?" McCoy asks, watching Kirk face off against half a million birds.
"Pretty much."
"Class not good enough for you?"
"What's the point?" He shows the pigeons his empty hands but they continue to descend in droves. "I can't serve on a starship like this. What if I switch on the Bridge?"
"What if you don't?" McCoy counters. "You ain't switched back yet, not that I've seen. Weren't you just harping on about three years?"
"Weren't you just best buds with the other me?" Kirk throws a cheese-loaded fry at the birds, causing a frenzy. He shouts over the squawking and hurricane of wings: "Just 'cause Koda thinks with his dick doesn't mean I do, Bones!"
They retreat before the pigeons resort to murder. McCoy snatches the tub of fries before they lose it to hungry animals and fool ideas, and Kirk cries aww, Bones!
So, that wasn't a fluke. McCoy won't ever admit to having missed the nickname, but if he waved a tricorder at himself, he would see his heart damn near doubling in size.
"Finally asked someone, did you?"
Kirk scoffs. "Like who? No, I figured it out. Sawbones, right? No? Is there something else? Your face says there's something else. But I'm right?"
"I suppose if you hafta be."
"You're such an asshole," Kirk laughs. "I can't believe you haven't slept with me."
"Now who's thinkin' with their dick?" McCoy asks, shaking the dregs of their fries. "There anything in that little diary of yours about my shitshow of a divorce?"
Kirk squeaks. "Divorce? Oh my god, what was – No, wait, don't tell me." He pauses for dramatic effect. "Ex-wife."
McCoy rolls his eyes. "You had a fifty-fifty guess."
"Eighty-forty at least," he retorts, claiming the last few fries. "Fifty-fifty is so very binary of you, Bones."
##
"Do I hafta ask if you've been seeing your therapist?" McCoy asks, a whole month into this 'will he, won't he' with Kirk and Kirk's classes.
Campus administration have started sending him vaguely threatening emails in a desperate bid to pin Kirk down, so heaven knows what they've been sending Kirk: cops to his door, most likely, if the amount of time he's spent sleeping literally anywhere else is any indication.
Sometimes, that somewhere else is McCoy's room, curled up in a chair or sprawled out on the floor. Once, McCoy found him fast asleep in the corner of the shower – two AM and in the dark, staggering out of bed to take a piss. He'd almost had a heart attack when Kirk rolled over in the shower tray. That night had been a narrow miss with the ER for the both of them. Once he was over the shock, McCoy had ordered a futon to bash Kirk around the head with (and also, god willing, to actually sleep on).
Other times, that somewhere else is a medley of semi-sensible places: the library, gym locker rooms, on the edge of the Andoria fountain, Golden Gate Park. McCoy isn't always the one to find him – in fact, he's often not. But after an Engineering cadet spots Kirk snoozing beneath a stairwell and decides to notify McCoy about it, the floodgates open, and everybody does. Almost every night, McCoy's comm buzzes with a snapshot of Kirk drooling on some park bench.
So much for not being Kirk's keeper. McCoy can't say he really minds. He'd rather know the inane shit Kirk is up to before it causes trouble, and if that means buying that bell, lead, and maybe a microchip, well.
He can be overprotective. Paranoid, even. Anxiously attached. Jocelyn used to think it was sweet before her eyes started drifting elsewhere.
"Ask, no," Kirk replies, scribbling in that little journal. One of the few benefits to having him invade McCoy's room three times a week is getting to witness him actually using the damn thing. It's a weight off McCoy's mind, even if what he says isn't: "Therapist, also no."
"I told y'all to holler if you've been havin' problems."
"I've got enough people breathing down my neck, thanks," says Kirk in a clipped tone. "This Pike guy cornered me in the nav labs, like, yesterday. I looked him up after. Did you know he wrote a dissertation on my dad?"
The gaps in Kirk's memory can be hard to predict and harder to follow. McCoy is starting to wish he had one of those little journals just to keep track of it all.
"Jim, he's your academic supervisor. I'd expect him to be tore up about y'all missin' class."
"Yeah, he said something about that." Kirk gnaws on the end of his multi-pen. "He's the guy from Hooligans?"
The bar in Iowa: fistfight, napkins. McCoy nods. "You said he dared you."
"Yeah, that's Koda's type. I wonder if we fucked behind the bar."
God almighty, McCoy does not need to hear this. "As long as y'all ain't fucking him now…"
"Well, I'm not," Kirk vows, popping the pen from his mouth. He clicks it from blue to red to blue again. "But if Koda says he is, do me a favour and don't let me know."
##
As the end of the semester rattles in, so does the day McCoy assumes he'll wake up to a text on his comm: Ciao, Bones! and a salute emoji, because god forbid Kirk do anything like a normal person, including saying goodbye.
He knows it's coming – knows and dreads it. Christ alive, it ain't like he's not got enough on his plate. Grinding his teeth because he doesn't want his only friend to strike out to pastures unknown isn't the most pathetic thing McCoy's ever done in his life – trying to patch his marriage with a band-aid holds the first place spot – but it's up there. A twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine, year old man has no business putting all his eggs in one basket and just hoping his Starfleet malarkey works out, but hell, that didn't stop him with Jocelyn.
McCoy supposes he was to learn a lesson from his marriage, something something, strong independent woman something something man. All he remembers is the drunken haze of the court room and letting the best goddamn thing in his life walk away in her kitten heels. He doesn't have it in him to go through that again.
God knows what he'll do about it. He never tried to stop Jocelyn from leaving; even at the bottom of the bottle, he wasn't that much of an asshole. And he's got no right tryna stop Kirk. That doesn't stop McCoy from fretting about it, though, and it definitely doesn't stop him from obsessively checking his messages for any hint of that goodbye.
And yet, when that day dawns and he double-triple-quadruple checks his final assignment before reluctantly handing it in, freeing himself from lectures and seminars and the drivel of teenage gossip for the summer, the only pings from his comm are the automated messages reminding students not to make an ass of themselves over the break. We look forward to welcoming you back in the fall.
"Provided we get the damn credits," McCoy grumbles.
He packs up his bag and heads out of the library. Campus is almost deserted: only the unlucky few with assignments due today are still about, or anyone crazy enough to sign up to summer classes. McCoy convinced the neurology department at Starfleet Medical to give him a summer job instead: lab work, not his favourite, but a good opportunity to get the lay of the land. Who knows, he might well end up working there once he graduates. He should at least make himself known.
Ha, networking. Another thing he hates. It didn't do him any good at Emory but he had just killed his father, so them's the breaks.
He does a double-take as he detours past the Skylab: a blur of colour through the tinted café window, green and gold. A spread of datapads and textbooks cover a circular table, and drinking a black coffee out of a gosh darn ceramic mug is Kirk; and opposite him, an Orion girl with dye or engine oil in her hair.
McCoy has no reason to interrupt. Kirk is here, on campus, instead of riding off into the desert or the sun, and that's all he needs to know.
Then Kirk looks up and spots him through the window. He doesn't smile, but his mouth does take the annoyingly familiar shape of Bones. That might be a call for help. Or it might just be an acknowledgement of McCoy gawking on the other side of the glass.
McCoy never used to be a betting man. He goes inside.
The Orion girl doesn't seem to mind the interruption. She is a pretty thing – big, red hair and matching lipstick, and eyeshadow that shimmers when she blinks. Kirk's age or younger, McCoy would guess. Dragging over a chair to sit between them makes him feel like a senile old man.
They make space for him amidst the scattering of textbooks. He glances numbers and equations and a frightening spread of graphs: navigational, maybe, although he wouldn't know. Kirk has never mentioned an Orion classmate in any of his Command seminars, although McCoy doesn't write-off the possibility that one of Kirk's alters has taken to flirting with her and the rest haven't mentioned it because they haven't got a clue.
Speaking of – introductions are made, pleasantries are had, and McCoy pats himself down to locate his wallet and buy them both another drink. Kirk hasn't been quite so attentive – so thieving – since Jim started to front. It's in his jeans. McCoy's momma didn't raise no moocher, even though he wishes she had when Gaila orders an oat milk, calorie-bomb monstrosity with extra syrup, and Kirk confirms McCoy's suspicions by asking for a filter coffee refill.
Hell, that explains why Kirk hasn't taken off. Two months he's been digging his feet like a goddamn horse, just raring to bolt. Hand on heart, McCoy was expecting to go knocking on Kirk's door today and find it empty, cleared out. Of course, it was Jim making all the fuss in this Starfleet stable and McCoy's almost certain it's James sitting at the table, and he ain't sure how he feels about that.
So much for Ciao, Bones! Frankly, he would have preferred that.
He grumbles to himself as he orders their drinks, grabbing a handful of flapjacks to throw onto the tray. If he's back to dealing with James, then chances are he hasn't eaten a goddamn thing today and isn't about to unless McCoy shoves something under his nose.
When he returns to the table, Kirk and Gaila are discussing summer classes. Gaila is an Engineering cadet, turns out, just finished her second year, and Kirk is hankering for a slot on an intensive survival course that'll take him out into the Mojave for three weeks. Neither of these things are connected, except for the fact that Kirk also wants to take extra Engineering credits over the summer because of course he does.
That sounds like James. The survival course, not so much. Jim's idea, if McCoy had to guess; payback for crashing out and making him wrap up with classes.
What a goddamn mess. How Kirk gets anything done with the different facets of his personality at constant war with each other is anybody's guess.
"And you, Bones? What are you up to?"
"Workin'," McCoy grunts. "Figured I might hit up the ol' beach a couple of days or something, ain't thought that far ahead."
Kirk chews on a flapjack. "Fancy a trip to the Mojave?"
"Nope."
"They might need medical volunteers."
"If I'm gonna be treating a bunch of captain wannabes for heat stroke and dehydration then I better be gettin' paid for it."
"Or you could rack up some extra credits."
"You enjoy yourself," McCoy says. Knowing the trouble Kirk has gotten himself into is not worth camping out in a desert for three weeks; not even his heart bleeds that much. "I've got a lab bench with my name on it over at 'Fleet Med and we're gonna be getting cosy these coming weeks. Hell, I'm almost looking forward to it."
"How do you spell McCoy?" Gaila interrupts, batting those sparkly eyelids over the top of her PADD.
McCoy spells it out for her. Kirk's flapjack goes crunch.
In retrospect, that should have been the moment McCoy realised any friend of Kirk's is just as much trouble as he is, but all he knows of Gaila after that first cup of coffee is that she is drop dead gorgeous and whip smart to boot, and every time she twirls her hair McCoy is reminded that he is only a man.
##
The Mojave is a deep fried hell McCoy doesn't deserve.
Objectively, the Command cadets have it worse. Two weeks they spend running, hiking, climbing, fighting, and getting shot at by Starfleet personnel in the name of survival training or some shit, and McCoy only has to slap 'em with sunscreen and ensure nobody dies of thirst.
Well, not only. All sorts of cuts and bruises limp into his medical tent at the end of the day, but rarely anything more than the product of overzealous teenagers racing up and down hills. There's some minor phaser burns and a snake bite, of all things, by the end of the first week, but only one major injury by the end of the second – a broken femur halfway down a cliff, joy of joys. The medical evac goes about as smoothly as it can a million miles from civilisation, which is to say, it's piss-dark by the time they scoop the girl out of the ditch and they are almost mauled on by coyotes, but she lives.
Kirk is always in high spirits whenever he ducks into the medical tent, no matter what condition he or his classmates are in. McCoy can't say which Kirk it is and that irks him, if only because he still expects Kirk to up and disappear as soon as Jim is back in control, and now they're in the goddamn desert. If Kirk falls down the wrong hole or pisses off the wrong animal then they'll never find him, skin or bones, and if he doesn't want to be found then there's a whole heap of sand just lying around he can bury himself in until this Starfleet thing blows over.
Suffice to say, McCoy is not looking forward to the third and final week of this horseplay: a race across the national park, handicapped and alone. The cadets are allowed to carry one tool of their choosing and a metal water bottle, plus an EPIRB for emergencies. McCoy imagines most of them will choose a phaser as a convenient weapon and firestarter. He would pick the keys to the goddamn shuttle parked behind base camp if anybody cared to ask.
He can't fly the damn thing – and frankly doesn't want to – but sitting in a tin can for a week would be a small price to pay to avoid parading around the desert hoping something didn't eat him.
"You're a marvel, Bones," Kirk says, biting back a smile. He knows McCoy will kick him out of bed if he laughs – the bed in the relatively bug-free, sand-free, idiot-free safety of the medical camp that Kirk isn't supposed to be sleeping in, the night before the race.
It's a bit of a squeeze, only being a single. McCoy doubts the fold-out supports were designed for two people in mind, and if he wakes up on the floor because the damn thing's collapsed then Kirk better be taking a goddamn medical kit with him because he'll need it.
"I'm picking the hatchet."
"I reckon you ain't supposed to tell me that."
"Which checkpoint are you going to be at?"
McCoy wishes he could turn over and see Kirk's face in the dark but he really doesn't trust this bed not to fall apart. He bets they're not the only cadets doubling up tonight, too. Starfleet probably made them super flimsy to deter cadets from having sex.
"I reckon I ain't supposed to tell you that."
"Like you're not supposed to let me in here?"
McCoy frowns at a dark splodge on the ceiling that better not be another one of those goddamn spiders. It's a circus of creepy crawlies and crazy cadets out here.
"The last one," he grunts, wondering why he bothers.
Kirk presses closer, making the bed creak. His back is warm and solid and definitely not one of those insects, although McCoy jumps as though it is.
"Thought you'd be used to me crawling into your bed by now," Kirk says, not that he attempts to move away. There is a slant to his voice that he usually only tries with the ladies, two beers deep and eyeing up the miniskirts hanging around the bar. That means he probably isn't James.
McCoy should care about that, but – "You hafta say crawlin'?"
The darkness in the tent laughs. "You are such a Southern belle."
"Say that again and I won't meet you at the finish line."
"Sure you won't." Kirk's foot presses daringly close to McCoy's shins, and McCoy lets it happen. "C'mon Bones, we've got you figured out."
##
Sitting on his thumbs at the finish line is, quite frankly, the worst week of McCoy's life. He didn't think anything could top the drunken haze of divorcing Jocelyn in that court room – the tears, the anger, the resignation – but McCoy's no fool: he had seen that coming. In his heart, he had known he would be better off for it, be that dead or alive (he hadn't cared at the time), but waiting for Kirk at the other end of the Mojave desert is altogether a different beast.
Divorcing Jocelyn was child's play compared to a whole week of worrying if his only friend is lost or dead. Watching everyone else stumbling past the finish line but Kirk staying stuck out there, in a ditch somewhere, a cave, some coyote's den, dehydrated or devoured doesn't do McCoy's shining personality any favours. He's a mean son of a bitch all week and he knows it, and every cadet that does pass the finish line is quick to wish they hadn't.
The thing is, Kirk aced every ludicrous challenge Starfleet set him over these two weeks. He should have been first past the line. His classmates seems to think so, too, as they slowly trickle in and find out their places; first, second, and third are hours apart, but fourth through eighth appear almost as a group, each one more hungry and tired than the last.
Jesus, maybe Kirk has done a runner. Maybe that's why he wanted to know which checkpoint McCoy would be at. Maybe he thinks McCoy won't turn this entire desert upside-down trying to make sure he's all right.
"Doctor McCoy?"
He jerks to attention. It's late, a night without a moon. One of the park rangers is half ducked into the mess tent, radio crackling against her chest. McCoy abandons his casserole and his stewing in a heartbeat, and he tastes all three in his mouth as he follows the ranger across camp.
The night buzzes with animals and lamp light. The entire solar system seems to be hanging in the sky. It's hard to imagine he'll be up there one day, beyond there, even, let alone out of this godforsaken desert. But he doesn't have time to feel small beneath the stars if there is a patient to see. By god, if it ain't Kirk, he's tossing this ranger out by her ears to go and look for him, this stupid race be damned.
They duck into the medical tent. McCoy hears the paramedic and the Starfleet instructor first – arguing – and then he spots the foil-wrapped cadet in the chair. Blond-brown hair and still clutching a hatchet, it's Kirk, thank the lord, glassy-eyed and shivering, with a frightful complexion to his face that McCoy doesn't like. He is sunburnt to hell and back, for starters, filthy and stinking of sweat, and there are cuts on his face that McCoy can't easily explain: dozens of them, mostly around his mouth and chin, like he tried eating something that fought back.
"You," McCoy barks at the instructor. "Out."
He shoves his hands into a pair of gloves with a menacing snap. The instructor might be stupid enough to argue with a paramedic but he has the god-given sense not to argue with the look on McCoy's face. The paramedic mutters some choice words under her breath as the tent flaps closed.
McCoy has never met a paramedic he didn't like. Nutcases, the lot of them. "Catch me up to speed."
The paramedic runs through what little she knows of the incident, patient, and presenting issues – this stupid race, Jim Kirk, and idiocy – including a suspected head injury and a GCS of ten, considering, "He hasn't said a word."
"All right, we can take it from here." The on-duty nurse appears right on cue: another Starfleet volunteer. An actual one, unlike McCoy. "Let's grab his blood pressure."
He kneels down in front of Kirk and watches those startlingly blue eyes track him with the white look of an animal. Hell, the way Kirk's holding himself, he might as well be one of those coyotes in disguise.
"You with me, Jim?" He points at the scuffed head of the hatchet. "I'm gonna need that off ya while we check you out. Don't want nobody nicking themselves."
Kirk clenches his mouth, saying nothing. The sharp whistling of air through his nose suggests that something might be broken – and that he might break something else. Last time, on the floor of Kirk's bedroom, that something was almost McCoy's arm.
The nurse peels open the pressure cuff with a screech of velcro. McCoy watches every muscle in Kirk's body tense; his shoulders crinkle with foil and the sweat-slick handle of the hatchet squeaks. McCoy wraps his hand over the top of the blade to stop it from swinging.
Let go. The demand is clear in Kirk's eyes. Unfortunately for him, McCoy's tolerance for the silent treatment started and ended with his ex-wife, so he keeps a firm grip on the hatchet despite the threatening look. He has seen and heard worse than an exhausted twenty-three year old in the ER.
"The race is over, Jim. Ain't nobody in here worth hackin' at with your silly axe. Give it to me or I'm gonna hafta ask this lovely ranger to take it away."
Kirk seems to consider his chances. It would be a damned good chance if he weren't a week out from a good meal and a solid night's rest, and maybe the sensible part of him is still kicking about in that coyote-brain somewhere because he relents his hungry grip on the hatchet and lets McCoy tug it away.
"There you go, the world didn't end."
Moving slowly, he fishes Kirk's arm out from beneath the foil blanket and motions for the nurse to start taking his blood pressure. Kirk's fingernails are black with dirt and blood, and McCoy wipes them with disinfectant as the pressure cuff squeezes his arm.
Kirk stays quiet. McCoy examines his head and face, and whizzes a dermal regenerator over the cuts around his mouth. With a neurological cause unlikely, the cause of Kirk's muteness could be an injury to his tongue or throat. The paramedic hadn't reported an issue with his airways but McCoy double-checks anyway, first with his tricorder and then with his hands, trusting nothing when Kirk squirms and pulls away.
"Talk to me, Jim. You hurtin'? Hell, tell me in Spanish even. Dónde le duele or whatever."
He is not expecting Kirk to redden until he matches his sunburn. But he is relieved to hear a rasping voice finally finds its way out of his mouth: "I don't know Spanish."
"Sure you do," McCoy says, seizing the chance for conversation. He seizes it too quickly, in fact, catching himself a moment too late: Jim knows Spanish, and this might not be Jim. "How about Vulcan?"
"A bit," Kirk says, eyes pinching with suspicion. His voice is higher, hurting. "I'm – I was learning. You don't look like Starfleet."
Ah, hell. McCoy didn't want to be right about this.
"That might well be the nicest thing you've ever said to me," he drawls, taking his hands from Kirk's shoulders. His attending back at Emory would've had his ass for being friendly with a patient. McCoy could kick his ass own for not seeing the forest for the trees.
He gestures behind his back for some space. It ain't exactly private in this tent – it's cramped and stuffy and somehow colder than a witch's tit – but he'll have to make do. Thankfully, the nurse has a sensible head on their shoulders and ushers the ranger outside.
McCoy takes a new look at Kirk. Behind the fading cuts and bruises and the disco-light of the tin foil, he is tense, and wary, and thin. The sunburn gives him an angry colour. Large patches of it are starting to peel.
He looks like Kirk and not like Kirk. Smaller. Vulnerable. McCoy is reminded of the day Jim came out to front for the first time, screeching about Starfleet and tossing shit about. He had been explosive, then, turning his room upside-down. But it's the memory of him hugging his knees that sticks with McCoy: I don't even know you, Kirk had said, like he'd expected it to hurt.
A sour feeling settles in McCoy's gut. Jim had been dormant for months, maybe years, while his alters rocked around the US doing whatever they fancied: getting into bar fights, enjoying questionable sex, taking up Captain Pike on a frankly ludicrous dare.
How long has it been since this alter came out?
Christ on a cracker. McCoy’s been calling him Jim. He ain't even sure it was Jim crawling into bed with him last week. It could have been James. It could have been the troublemaker, Koda. It could have even been an alter he didn't know existed: the Kirk glaring from behind his desert-spun hair.
Hell, this Kirk might not even know the other alters. All this time, McCoy's been thinking of Kirk's lot as a dysfunctional but tight bag of cats all swiping at each other, fighting over the same space. There could be cats in an entirely different box.
He is talking at least, so whatever the hell scratched up his face hasn't damaged anything major. McCoy twists the cap from a bottle of water and offers it over.
"Slowly, all right?"
Kirk downs it in four large gulps and then throws up in his mouth. McCoy grabs a wad of paper towel.
"Easy, easy. You're all right –"
Kirk slaps his hand over his mouth. Bile runs through his fingers. There can't be much of anything in his stomach to hurl.
"Betcha knew that was gonna happen. Here." McCoy holds out a cardboard bowl. "Rinse your mouth out before you drink a little more."
"Ugh, you are Starfleet," says Kirk, snatching the bowl.
"I'm a cadet. Doctor Leonard McCoy. We've been runnin' around the Mojave for three weeks on a training –"
"I know we're in the Mojave," Kirk spits. He screws up the ruined paper towels and drops them into the bowl, thrusting the whole lot at McCoy. "This was Jim's stupid idea."
McCoy takes the bowl and sets it aside. He grabs a clean one just to have a moment to himself, mouthing rude words where Kirk can't easily see.
"I'm guessing Jim ain't around right now?"
"No," Kirk says, petulant. "He's always running away."
That much, McCoy knew. It's whatever the hell's been happening this past week while he's been sick with worry that he would like to know.
"An' I reckon you stopped him?"
Kirk scoffs. "Not like I had a choice. Some of us –" He gags again, wet vomit splashing into the bowl.
McCoy needs a manual for this shit. And a stiff drink. For god's sake, Kirk dragged him away from Starfleet Medical for this. Why he couldn't've just sent that stupid text – Ciao, Bones! – and been done with it, McCoy doesn't know. Surely that was easier than this: this Kirk, some kid, scared and alone in the desert, vomiting into a bowl.
McCoy grabs more paper towels. Some solid food and a full night's rest will do Kirk a world of good. Another round with the dermal should take care of that sunburn. And a quick jab of antibiotics should stave off anything he might have picked up out in the sand.
McCoy pops a cartridge into a hypo and calculates the dose. In the corner of his eye, he watches Kirk draw the foil blanket tighter around his shoulder, the bile-filled bowl balanced in his lap. He doesn't look twenty-three. He looks like he expects something to jump out of the tent and attack him. Maybe McCoy.
"What's your name, kid?"
"Why do you care?"
Lordy, that's a teenager all right. Kirk's got that angsty shrug down pat.
"Last time I called one of y'all the wrong name, I got pinned to the floor."
Kirk's mouth twitches into an almost-smile. Cynicism always works with the teens. He doesn't offer up an answer to the question but he does let McCoy approach with the hypo and jab him in the neck.
"Antibiotics," McCoy explains. "Quick pinch."
"Can I have something to eat?"
"You drink the rest of that water and you can." He takes the bowl and paper towels away, and then switches his gloves for the second time in order to prep another hypo. "I can give you something to settle your stomach."
Kirk gnaws on the plastic rim of the bottle. "Will it make me tired?"
"Smart one, ain'tcha? It will, but I bet y'already are."
He nods with a sore look and accepts the second hypospray. He must be sore all over, in fact, but probably now only feeling it. God forbid a teenager admit to even the slightest hint of weakness, though. McCoy feels tired just looking at him.
"Y'all mind if I call you Kirk then?" A one-shouldered shrug; he takes it as permission. "Those idiots rattling around with you tend to call me Bones."
"You're Bones?"
McCoy blinks. That's not the incredulous question he usually gets. "Sure am. You know me?"
"Not really," says Kirk, but then he rummages inside of his jacket for something – please god, not another hatchet – and pulls out a piece of paper, folded in four. He thrusts this at McCoy, too. "There was – this."
McCoy unfolds the square of paper. One edge is roughly torn and both sides are lined; a page from a notebook, perhaps, or a certain elusive journal that he has seen but never read. Most of the message has been crossed out in gashes of blue lines, partially faded, the page worn. It's been in that pocket for a while, changing hands. He can make out a short phrase in red near the bottom:
stick with bones?
"Think one of the others wrote it," Kirk says, talking straight over McCoy's pre-cry breath. "I don't know. They don't tell me stuff. I know it wasn't Jim."
Oh lord. McCoy re-folds the page before he embarrasses himself by weeping. Less than a year he's known Kirk and – goddamn, goddamn. Getting that text now will lay him to waste. Ciao, Bones! Damn.
"It wasn't Jim?"
"Nah," Kirk replies, sounding sure. It's about the only thing he has sounded certain of since stumbling into the tent, and McCoy takes note. "Jim doesn't know shit."
##
Kirk sleeps in the medical camp again that night, curled into a ball in McCoy's rickety, one-and-a-half people bed. He doesn't wake for anything – not even the shadows of coyotes slinking throughout the night.
McCoy sleeps on the floor. It's even worse than he imagined, down there where the spiders crawl, wondering if and when Kirk sneaking out will disturb him at all.
But Kirk doesn't sneak out. He's still sound asleep when McCoy staggers out across the camp at dawn to take a piss. And he's still asleep through breakfast, nearing lunch, and when his instructors want to debrief. McCoy puts the fear of god into anyone who tries to enter the tent, but secretly he's worried, and he re-scans Kirk with a tricorder until he's convinced it's just a deep, much needed sleep.
The last of the cadets trickle past the finish line that day. That means, come tomorrow, they'll finally be packing up this pony show and flying home. The influx of desert-weary cadets keeps him busy for the rest of the day, but Kirk is always there in the back of his mind. Funny, the way that works. Jim's in nearabout exactly the same position, just going about it in entirely the worst way.
His alters seems to be in two minds about leaving, excusing the expression. Some days, McCoy knows what that feels like. Starfleet hasn't been all that impressive so far – nothing he'd write home to his nanna about – but he'll go out on a limb and say that's what every foundational year of any course is like. Them's the breaks and all that. Gotta shift through the shit to get to the gold.
Anyhow, it's been peanuts compared to med school, and with this ridiculous survival course wrapping up and some lab techie keeping his bench warm at 'Fleet Med, McCoy is almost looking forward to flying back to California. The dry heat of the Mojave ain't exactly Georgia – nor is it the yellow-tan corn stalks of Iowa, rustling in the warp-wind of spaceships. But McCoy should be forgiven for getting 'em mixed up when Kirk sidles into the jump shuttle West Coast-bound and salutes the haggard mass of cadets.
"Bones! We're even now."
Kirk whips an empty cardboard bowl out from god knows where and drops it into McCoy's lap. Then he buckles himself into the seat on the right, still rosy from the sunburn but otherwise downright sprightly. A smear of blood on his shirt would complete the scene.
McCoy's eyes must be goggling for Kirk flashes him a wonky smile. "Brings back memories. What do you think: Nevada better than Iowa?"
"At least I was shit-faced in Iowa," McCoy grumbles, taking a swig from his thermal flask before offering it to Kirk. There ain't enough coffee on the planet to deal with this, and yet deal with it McCoy does. He didn't get his M.D. PhD by being a gutless shirk.
"Aww, but decaffeinated is such an improvement."
The shuttle rumbles as it prepares for takeoff. McCoy clings to the straps of his harness as the cabin shakes off three weeks of desert dust and a squabble of ravens hopping about for food. If he was a superstitious man, he would consider that an ill omen. As it stands, McCoy's anxiety is more than capable of causing ill omens on its own.
Kirk passes back the thermos, amused. "Still working on that phobia?"
"Still not talkin' to your therapist?"
He laughs from the side of his mouth. "Ask James."
"Why? Your answer not gonna be good enough?"
"Oh, you're mad," grasps Kirk, taking back the thermos. He lifts it in cheers. "Therapy's not my problem. Ask Jim. Make him deal with it. Maybe he'll listen to you."
Fat chance of that. If Jim can't agree with the offshoots of his own personality, then what chance does McCoy have? Half the time, he doesn't even warrant a straight answer. He didn't even deserve goodbye.
And yet, that note. At least one of Kirk's alters feels halfway decent about him – two, if he counts the desert-spat teenager who cringed at McCoy's attempt to string a Vulcan sentence together and gobbled down stew. But McCoy doesn't even know his name.
"Go on then. Give me Jim."
Kirk laughs. "You don't think it's that easy?"
Of course not. McCoy wouldn't be squabbling with a different amalgamation of his best friend every damn day if it were. And he does consider all of them his best friend – one body, four times the trouble – if only to lighten the burden of keeping shit straight in his mind. For heaven's sake, he couldn't even maintain a friendship with Jocelyn and she was one person. Someone up there with almighty powers needs to cut him some slack.
The shuttle lurches as it lifts off and spins towards San Francisco. McCoy lurches, too, back into his seat. He digs his feet into the rug covering the metal grates across the floor – the height of comfort for Starfleet personnel. Other cadets turn to look out of the windows as the bronze expanse of Nevada drops away. McCoy wills his stomach not to turn inside-out.
Beside him, Kirk leans forward to get a better view through the window. His freckles are back, saved from the red rash of sunburn. The cuts that marred his mouth and neck have healed to obscurity. McCoy can hardly imagine what it was like tracking through the desert alone.
All the more reason to avoid a starship posting. He ain't got it in him to be running around alien planets in the name of diplomacy or whatever. The inside of a medical tent looks the same no matter what corner of the galaxy they're in. He might as well stay on the ground.
He could be content with that. Kirk, not so much. Even the parts of him that want to stay in Starfleet are destined for something other than a desk job. Everyone and their dog knows Kirk will have aced his first year exams. Starships will be fighting over where he'll have his second-year placement if they've got the good sense god gave to a goose.
Whether or not Kirk has the good sense is another matter.
"Which one of you is it, then?" McCoy asks, drawing Kirk's attention away from the window and the trio of attractive girls seated beside it, all three of them made up and glittering like taking their fancy eyeliners and lipsticks out into the desert was a Starfleet priority. Goddamn.
It's funny. Kirk could've had any one of his hot, young classmates on a questionable stable camping bed these past three weeks but he chose to bother McCoy.
Kirk turns to him with a guarded look. He's not such a hotshot once someone's putting him on the spot now, is he?
McCoy would gesture if he dared let go of his harness. "Which one's of y'all's dreamin' of the black? Can't be all'y'all."
"Why not?"
"We're talkin' about the same Jim, ain't we?"
"Jim… James… me…" says Kirk, sloshing McCoy's coffee about in its flask. "At least I'm not a coward. We wouldn't have taken Pike up on his dare if it weren't for me."
"So, you weren't thinking with your dick?"
He scoffs, the coffee like blood in his mouth. "C'mon Bones, of course I was. Have you seen Uhura? She is smoking. And if I had to pick a guy, well –"
"He's your academic supervisor –"
"I said if," Kirk assures, waggling his eyebrows. "Tell me you don't think he's hot."
That's beside the point. "He's twice your age!"
"I should've sucked him off before I enrolled."
"Because that makes all the difference," McCoy drawls, ignoring Kirk's dreamy tone. He can't tell how much of it is genuine and how much is an act, and frankly, he doesn't want to know.
"Yeah…" Kirk sighs, eyes crinkling at the corners. "Got you through takeoff though, didn't it: imagining him bending me over that stupid glass desk in his –"
"Christ, stop!"
But it is true that the shuttle is cruising, quieter now, only humming as it glides through the sky. Sunlight sweeps through the cabin as they pass through layers of cloud. Nevada is long gone; America; Earth. That doesn't encourage McCoy to risk a glance out of the window, but he does release his death grip on his seat belt.
"Still wish you were shit-faced?" Kirk asks.
Funnily enough, no. But another year of dealing with Kirk not dealing with his shit could drive a man to drink, and McCoy says as much. He is going to need something stronger than coffee if these alters keep on popping up.
"About that…" says Kirk, and he returns the mostly empty thermos with a smile.