Title: A Cage of His Own (#4, The Drabble Bin)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: McCoy
Warnings: potential trigger-y mentions of domestic abuse
Summary: Leonard cannot free himself. Drabble, AU-ish.
Previous Drabbles: The Old Four | Those Neighborhood Hoodlums | Trapped

He thought he was free the moment he left Georgia. Had Leonard known then his destiny was simply an exchange of cages, he would have remained trapped within a miserable existence in the sultry heat of Atlanta, navigating the treacherous balance between duty and family politics as the next male puppet-heir to the McCoy lineage. As it stands, he did escape—both from the iron fist of his tyrannical, cold-hearted bastard of a grandfather and an arranged marriage—but walked straight into a new orbit of brutality, one far more cruel and far less forgiving than what he left behind.

This he contemplates as his fingers trail over the purpling bruises painted across his ribcage. The brutality’s face is beautiful, coldly so; its temper, vicious. The brutality is a man not unlike Leonard but, as he discovered within the first few months of their meeting, also a beast at heart.

And Leonard loves him, despite all.

That is, perhaps, the knowledge which hurts him most: his cage is his feelings. Day after day, he adds another layer of bars to it, another steadfast lock, when he leans into the chest of his lover and says “I love you. I forgive you.”

A shirt, coupled with Leonard’s long-cultivated control of his body’s responses, will hide his physical pain. But what he has done to himself, this emotional hurt rooted in his heart, cannot be hidden so well.

People say to him:

“If you leave him…”

“If you’ll just save yourself…”

He replies “I can’t” and means it.

Love simply won’t let him choose otherwise.

Of Perky Starfleet Bottoms

Related Posts:

• Trapped (#3, The Drabble Bin) – from February 21, 2012
• Those Neighborhood Hoodlums (#2, The Drabble Bin) – from February 4, 2012