Title: His World Collapsed
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: Kirk/Spock/McCoy
Warnings: Character death(s); angst
Summary: When he fell, the whole world collapsed with him—cutting, terrifying, and chaotic like a rain of broken glass.

When he fell, the whole world collapsed with him—cutting, terrifying, and chaotic like a rain of broken glass. He was told he was screaming when he arrived, that he couldn’t be subdued and had to be forcibly removed from the transporter room by two officers and then sedated by his head nurse.

The body of the First Officer was never recovered. They found pieces of the Captain after thorough searching—the lower portion of a leg, a partially eaten rib cage, a finger bone (DNA confirmed).

Everything had changed in a heartbeat.

~~~

“If I agree to go down to the surface with you, I want compensation later.”

Jim removes the towel from his shoulders and spares a glance for the doctor. “Starfleet pays you, Bones.”

“Not nearly enough” is the muttered response.

The green or the gold? Jim’s grown rather fond of his green wraparound tunic. “I can give you extra compensation,” he says while tugging on a shirt, “but it won’t be monetary.”

“Who says I was fishing for credits?”

Jim watches as Bones comes up behind him in the mirror. One kiss is dropped onto the top of each of Jim’s shoulders.

James T. Kirk smiles. Before turning around, he pretends to be engrossed in straightening imaginary wrinkles from his uniform. “What is it, exactly, that I can provide you with, Doctor McCoy?”

Bones runs a thumb along Jim’s jaw line. “Ignore me,” drawls the doctor at last. “I’m a fool for complaining when I already have everything I need.”

Jim leans in, closing the distance between them and murmurs against Bones’ mouth, “Whatever you want, Bones—I’ll give it to you.”

“I want just you, Jim.” Bones’ eyes are lit with amusement when he pulls out of the slow kiss. “And Spock, of course.”

“Let’s not forget Spock,” agrees Jim. “That would be rude.”

“Indeed,” mimics Bones in a Vulcan monotone. Then, “Don’t tell him about the compensation bit.”

“Why not?”

“I’d rather not get lectured. It kills the mood for making out.”

Jim laughs and steps away to look for his missing pair of boots. Bones says he needs to grab his kit from Sickbay and they’ll meet in the transporter room. Jim nods, remarking offhandedly “Bye” and “Love you” in the same breath. It’s the last time he will utter those words to Leonard McCoy—but neither of them could know that.

Doctor McCoy drags the wounded ensign under the closest rock outcropping and rips off the top of his medical kit. Blood is on his uniform, his hands, his face. If he were green in his field, such a sight would give him pause, mayhap turn his stomach; but Leonard is long used to having a man’s life in his hands both figuratively and literally.

In the distance comes the sound of phasers discharging and the snarls of the indigenous predators against which the phasers are defending the landing party. These creatures—they are the worst kind of enemy; they have no reason or pride, nothing but the animalistic drive to kill, as is evident by the near-disembowelment of this young man Leonard is cradling.

He isn’t going to be able to save the ensign. McCoy knew that with his first look at the horrific damage. A standard doctor’s kit doesn’t have the tools for the kind of extensive surgery needed to repair—and likely re-grow—shredded intestines. Yet Leonard could not abandon the young man and had tried his utmost to follow his captain’s sharp, frantic order to retreat. Pushing aside his fear for Jim, for Spock, and for the remaining men attempting to hold the fang-and-claw creatures at bay, he bends over the ensign and takes another silent inventory of the injuries. His hands are steady, always steady, even when his heart is not.

The ensign had unknowingly stumbled upon a nest of the vicious, long-bodied creatures. Whether the creatures pressed forward in relentless attack because their nest was disturbed (like bees swarming out of a hive), or because they feel threatened by the presence of the landing party, or because they are simply reacting as their nature demands, no one could know. Leonard is certain he had heard Spock attest that the tricorders showed no life readings within a sufficiently long range of their beaming down point. Spock wouldn’t make a mistake in that regard; and, in truth, the landscape gives credence to the supposition with its almost barren mountainous terrain. Therefore they had had no warning, no inkling of what would come bounding out of the rocks on all sides, preceded only by the terrified scream of the mauled officer running toward Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and then falling down, hands never leaving his midsection, dripping red.

The ensign returns to consciousness, and McCoy wishes for the man’s sake that he hadn’t. The young man moans in spite of local injections of an anesthetic and his unfocused eyes (severe blood loss, shock, thinks the doctor) track to the side. “C-Captain?” The word is slurred but understandable.

Leonard leans over so that the man doesn’t have to turn his head to see him. “It’s Doctor McCoy, Ensign,” he says, then makes a shushing noise. “No, don’t move. It’s a’right. Just be still, I’ve got you.”

“The c-captain?” asks the ensign, so like the rest of Jim’s crew—always thinking of the commanding officer first, the man who is a beacon of bravery for them all.

Leonard, too, is thinking of Jim. “He’s fine,” lies the doctor.

Truth be told, Leonard is terrified that Jim isn’t fine. He remembers his fleeting glimpse of thick claws neatly dissecting the sleeve of Jim’s shirt and the flesh beneath it. He remembers, over the panicked, sick roar of oh god, oh god in his own ears, Jim’s bitten-off cry. But McCoy had to leave his captain behind; his only consolation is the knowledge that Spock stayed by Jim’s side.

If they aren’t all right…

No.

Cold, uncertain—except of what his duty requires of him—Leonard brushes away the sweat-matted bangs from the ensign’s forehead. The young man whimpers under his touch, asks him in a bare whisper for a prognosis.

“It’s bad, son,” Leonard says heavily.

Leonard receives a nod, as though the answer was not unexpected. Leonard could have easily lied, might have lied if he had been younger and standing over a patient’s bed in a hospital rather than holding a dying man straight off a battlefield. Here, false hope is worse than the truth. The ensign knows he won’t make it to the ship in time, not now.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor apologizes.

The ensign weakly tries to squeeze Leonard’s hand in reassurance, and that makes Leonard want to cry. But there’ll be time for grief later.

Leonard’s gaze is pulled over his shoulder even as he presses futilely on the open wound to stop the ensign’s innards from pushing out. Sometime over the course of the last few minutes, the noise of the on-going battle has stopped. He dares not move, nor call out for anyone. His phaser is still firmly attached to his belt; his communicator, however, had been dropped somewhere between the dash for the injured man and a two-handed hauling of said-man across the ground and to this shelter on the other side of a small mountain of rocks. So he can’t contact Jim; can’t report the location of his hideaway spot, either, or tell the captain that the man in his arms just took a last shuddering breath and died.

Leonard bows his head, fingers still splayed across the exposed abdominal cavity, throat working but producing no sound.

The silence seems to extend on indefinitely. The doctor tucks the body into a corner, whispering a prayer for the dead man and asking forgiveness for himself. He then retraces his meandering path back to the initial site of the ambush, noting bootprints in the dirt, blood too, and a residual odor of burnt hair (fur? Leonard wonders). A dozen or so large boulders are marked with the discoloration of energy blasts.

Heart pounding, he searches quickly and quietly but finds only two communicators: one broken, possibly trampled, but the other functional. Of the rest of landing party—no one. No bodies, at least.

Communication with the Enterprise is immediately met with the voice of a concerned Chief Engineer. Scotty grills him, not pausing for breath between sentences. “What’s happening doun there, Doctor? Where’s the Capt’n? He came through for only a second—yellin’ he was—before the line cut out. We couldnae reach him or Mr. Spock!”

Leonard forces out the words “I don’t know.” He explains about the sudden attack on the landing party, carefully mentioning that an ensign died in the line of duty. “I’ll keep looking, Scotty.” He does not ask for backup since the area is unsafe and he doesn’t want to see more death.

Mr. Scott, as aware of protocol as the CMO, sounds unhappy. “Ye’ve got to come back to the ship, Doctor.”

“No,” Leonard says and flips the communicator closed.

He looks for the nest. Before the sun sets he has found a gaping crevasse in the earth where he believes the ensign had been exploring and thinks about slipping inside; but he doesn’t try to right away. He isn’t certain. He is scared.

By the time the moonlight has transformed the dull brown land into shades of grey, Leonard is clutching a scrap of green cloth (had thrown up when he had seen it) with the smell of blood like cologne on his skin and his emotions rampant in his head. The man edges to one side of the wide hole and just crouches there in shadow.

In one of his hands, the medical tricorder is useless, useless, useless. It reads no life signs.

Of course they’re alive, Leonard thinks desperately. They are. They are.

Phaser ready, he eventually eases through the opening and into the mountain in increments. The process takes hours—full of too-shallow breaths and slow, cautious movements—yet the rise of the sun finds Leonard McCoy alive and completely enclosed in a den-like area of the natural cave. Except this nest is empty, has been the entire time, save a scattering of old, clean bones and random tufts of shed fur.

The rescue party from the Enterprise discovers the doctor stumbling out of that deep darkness, despondent and pale. Then someone—Scotty himself, equally pale—lays a gentle hand upon his shoulder, and that is when Leonard begins to fall apart, his world collapsing.

-Fini

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