Title: Things He Knows
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: McCoy
Disclaimer: Writing for fun.
Summary: A bit of AU fun. “…that’s her job, to find the secrets he can’t give voice to.”

“Tell me about your friend.”

The man fidgets, his fingers nervously folding and refolding the bottom flap of his brown jacket. “I don’t think I can.”

The woman smiles and re-crosses her legs. “Of course you can,” she reassures her client. “We’ll begin with a simple question. How did the two of you meet?”

His eyes are caught by a framed diploma on the farthest office wall. He darts a quick look at the neatly dressed woman, at her French-manicured nails drumming a rhythm on one knee, before re-reading the name gilded in gold on the paper.

“I had a girl—a-a wife,” he begins. “She had the same name. Jocelyn. Josie,” he adds quickly, pupils dilating.

The psychiatrist’s hand stills in its repetitive motion. “Mm, I see. Is she whom you wish to discuss, Mr. McCoy? I thought that we might talk about—”

“No,” he interrupts abruptly. “I’m sayin’, my wife, I mean, Josie was… nice. It was good, what we had.”

The dark-haired woman nods, her lips curving softly. The man looks at them, feels embarrassed that he is looking, and drops his eyes to his lap.

“Your wife,” asks Jocelyn, the psychiatrist, “how did she feel about Jim?”

Mr. McCoy presses his back into the couch and frowns. “She didn’t know ‘im.”

“So Jim and… Josie,” The man wonders why she hesitates over the name; it’s her own, after all. “—never met?”

The man—brown hair, brown jacket, ordinary in all but the fine shape of his mouth and the deep lines in his forehead—shakes his head. “It’s not that,” he insists. His gaze flicks over to the closed door. He thinks about the man in the waiting room. The man he doesn’t know, who looked at him like he was a bug under a magnifying glass.

“Mr. McCoy?” is the soft call. “Can you elaborate?”

He refocuses on Jocelyn. Pretty, the color of her eyes. “Josie never liked Jim,” he confesses, holding his breath. “She said he…” He can’t finish the sentence. She can read the words in his face, he thinks. Of course, she can; that’s her job, to find the secrets he can’t give voice to. Was that man outside looking for his secrets, too? Not everybody is supposed to find them.

She has made some decision about him. The way her mouth pursues, it says she needs more. “Is this hard for you, talking about Jim, Mr. McCoy?”

He nods.

“May I ask why?”

He broke the nail on his pinky on Sunday; he picks at its ragged edge absently. “Jim’s special,” he says quietly. “Jim’s my—mine.”

“I wonder,” she remarks so quietly that he has to stare at her to catch the words, “if your wife did not like Jim because he was special. Sometimes significant others feel jealousy over their partner’s relationships outside the marriage.”

“Yeah, that’s it.” He fumbles for the flap of his jacket again, rubbing the rough fabric between his fingers. “Me and Jimmy, we’ve been together a long time. A long time,” he repeats.

“Before your marriage then?”

“Yes.”

“When did Josie find out about your friend, Mr. McCoy?”

Should he answer that? Could he answer that?

“Mr. McCoy? I only want to help you, to understand what troubles you.”

She’s nice, this Jocelyn. “I don’t know, ma’am.” He tries to be honest.

“Then you never shared Jim with your wife.”

He shakes his head. “Jim’s mine.” Jim’s mine, he thinks.

She nods once, uncrosses her legs and reaches for a stack of cards on the long table between them. “I’m afraid we’ve run out of time today, Mr. McCoy. I would like to see you again. Would you like to see me again?”

Her diploma says PhD. Jocelyn in gold; PhD in black. “Okay,” Mr. McCoy says. She hands him the little card with a note on the back, some kind of shorthand that he can’t read, and tells him to pass it on to her secretary.

The secretary is an older woman. She says his first name sharply—“Leonard” short, like a gunshot—as his grandmother used to. “Leonard McCoy,” she says, typing in his name on a computer. “You’re booked for the 3rd of August at ten.” He agrees. Anything to make her stop looking at him.

On his way through the waiting room, escorted by the secretary, he is dismissed for the man with the prying eyes, who has a barely pronounceable name with a sss quality to it that catches his attention. In the hallway, Leonard McCoy stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets, flinches away from the open elevator door, and heads down the stairwell.

The clock on the wall says 10:06 am. The woman is still walking around her office. They can’t start the session until she sits down.

10:09. She asks how Mr. McCoy is doing. He says he is fine. She asks if he did anything of interest since their last chat. He says not really.

10:11. She asks if he has spent time with Jim.

He asks who Jim is.

She crosses her legs, the skirt creasing around the widest part of her thighs. “I’m sorry. I must have forgotten his name. What was your friend’s name, Mr. McCoy?”

He licks his lips. “Spock.” His drawl drags out the S.

“Tell me about Spock,” she says with a careful smile.

Leonard rubs his chin. On the woman’s desk, situated unobtrustively in the corner of the office, is a photograph of her and two little girls. He points at it. “They’re pretty.”

She turns to look at the picture and her smile becomes genuine. “Yes. The littlest one is Jessica; the other is my eldest daughter, Christine.”

The sunshine mostly shaded by the office blinds manages to glint off the corner of the glass. It illuminates the already golden hair of the girl, Christine, like a halo.

“My sister,” he says, “likes Spock. Her name is Chrissy.”

Today, the psychiatrist has a pen and a notepad. The pen goes skritch-skritch on the notepad. Leonard wonders if she is drawing circles. No, triangles are better.

“Why does Chrissy like Spock?”

“His ears. He has—” Leonard lifts a hand to the outer edge of his own ear. “—a scar, here.” He points at the round tip. “It’s not smooth.”

“Did Spock tell you how long he has had this scar?”

“Always. It’s part of ‘im, what he is.” That’s important.

She nods slowly. “I would like to know more about your friend’s unique feature. Can you tell me about it?”

He tied his shoelaces too tight this morning. His right foot is falling asleep. Leonard reaches down and unties the laces of the right shoe, then slowly loops them back together. When he sits up, she is watching him but not complaining.

Leonard puts his hands back into his lap. “Spock’s my friend,” he says. “We weren’t always friends. H-He hated me. Once.” A flush is building under the collar of his shirt. He had forgotten his jacket today. A mistake.

“Why would Spock hate you?”

“I.” No. Leonard swallows hard. “I cried. Some times. Most times.”

Men don’t cry, Spock said. Spock was a man and Leonard was not. Leonard learned to stop crying. Spock approved of this.

He adds hastily, “Spock’s my friend now. ‘N Chrissy—she likes him.”

What is the woman writing? What was her name? Leonard forgets the simple things, like names. He does a visual search of the room.

Oh. Jocelyn—Dr. Jocelyn Treadway. If Leonard had a girl named Jocelyn he’d call her Josie.

There’s another name, elusive. Josie and—

Someone.

Jocelyn, the psychiatrist, is asking him a question. She repeats patiently, like the clock isn’t ticking away, “You said that Spock is your friend. You said that Spock does not like it when you cry. Can you tell me more about Spock, Mr. McCoy?”

He tries, really. He tries to be honest. He talks about Spock who sees everything, who knows everything, and who never cries. She writes as he talks.

Leonard leaves the office building at a quarter after 11 am. The bus bench is short, and his seat is too close to a young man with an angular face, a head of curls, and a peculiar lilt to his voice. He smiles at Leonard, then past Leonard, and leaves on the white bus. Leonard waits an hour for the next white bus before going home.

At his following session, he has a friend named Pavel. Pavel speaks in a foreign language, a special language that only Leonard can understand. Pavel is naive and bright like sunshine and Leonard’s neighbor Helen—like Helen Noel, the author of a set of yellow books on a shelf in the lady psychiatrist’s office—is indifferent to Pavel because when Pavel comes and goes from Leonard’s house, Helen is always asleep.

Those are the important details, Leonard knows, that the woman with the dark hair needs. She is finding out secrets—carefully hidden, carefully crafted secrets.

Secrets that Leonard McCoy only shares with his friends. She seems to want to learn about those friends, who they are, how they change Leonard’s life, why they are important. He explains, when he can and when he isn’t distracted by the soft strands that won’t stay tucked behind her ear or the way voices are always at a low murmur on the other side of the closed door.

He is bad with names, but he remembers hers eventually. Jocelyn. The other names ebb and flow around them both, building a list on a notepad he can never quite see. But Jocelyn remains, asking and smiling sometimes and learning about the most important name of all: Leonard.

It helps, knowing that, because he can never ever talk about the man named Leonard McCoy himself.

-Fini

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