Title: The Man in the Shed (#30, J ‘N B Series)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk, McCoy
Summary: Comment!fic inspired by this pic post at jim_and_bones; Leonard’s job is to take care of the dead, in more ways than one.
Warnings: character death
Previous Parts: Another Day, Another Dollar, and a Daily Show? | Fight the Good Fight | Don’t Touch the Rock | A Tear Worth Gold | Another Day, Another Dollar, Part 2 | Pirates Read Too | The Case of the Mondays | Today’s Topic -Helmets! | The Case of the Mondays, Part 2 | Marked | Awesome Ideas Come from Awesome Brains | In the Keeping of a Spirit | The Case of the Mondays, Part 3 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 4 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 5 | Forewarned is Forearmed | The Case of the Mondays, Part 6 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 7 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 8 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 9 | Serenade | Another Day, Another Dollar, Part 3 | Tied to You | The Amateur Pigeon-Catcher | The Amateur Pigeon-Catcher, Part 2 | The Art of Beginnings | The Amateur Pigeon-Catcher, Part 3 | Two Birds of a Feather | The Beautiful Bay

The once white-and-red Tom Petty t-shirt was wet and mud-covered, somewhat torn, when they discovered him in the backyard of the abandoned Banner House. James T. Kirk, college student, missing for six days. One parent still living, a mother, the town’s librarian. McCoy’s mind flashed with words from the newspaper articles. They painted a heartbreaking picture now that James (or ‘Jim’ according to his friends) had been found.

The young man almost looked peaceful in death, like he’d fallen asleep, except his neck was twisted at an unnatural angle from a bad fall (or worse, by the hands of a killer, but no one had declared the scene as a homicide yet). Leonard, with gloved hands, lightly touched the juncture where shoulder and neck met, studying a protrusion. It must have been a fall, not an expert snap of the kid’s neck. But from where? he wondered, looking around the unkempt yard. Not the steps leading up to the house, they were too shallow. The body had been moved, then.

There was a loud bang, a knock against the rusting gate around the front of the house as someone went through it in a hurry, and suddenly voices were breaking up the hushed chill of morning with questions and demands. A grim line flattened McCoy’s mouth. Someone had alerted the media. He felt more than heard cars pulling in close at the dead-end of the lane. Over the overgrown hedges blocking the street view, people would be filing out of their reporter vans, talking and taking orders, ready to investigate this mystery for themselves.

How long until Ms. Kirk heard about her son’s body? If the media had any decency in them, Leonard thought, they would wait until the poor woman had been informed by kinder people than strangers on television soaking up tragedy like vultures picking at carrion.

He briefly returned his attention to the body, knowing what he couldn’t guess at now he would have time to inspect and conjecture about at the coroner’s office. McCoy stood up and stepped back, letting the police do their work in order to prep the body for transport to downtown. He spoke to the detective pacing the yard, a man with hawk’s eyes drawing out clues from bent grass blades and marks in the dirt. Their conversation was almost scripted, since they had to deal with one another on a frequent basis. Satisfied that there wouldn’t be any delay in the police-work (and, more importantly, in his process), McCoy wandered around the side of the Banner house.

He couldn’t go in. He was a doctor who ran a morgue, not a CSI unit and nobody would let him through simply because he was curious. And if he tried to give them a better reason, they would laugh in his face.

The prickling sensation between his shoulder blades wasn’t aimed at the interior of the house anyway. There was a woodshed, as derelict as the rest of the property, standing alone in a corner of the wide backyard. After checking to make certain no one from the detective’s team had eyes on him, Leonard slipped up to it. The door, half-hanging from its hinges, had no lock. Leonard went inside.

James T. Kirk looked better here, if a little wan, than he did sprawled in the weeds of the yard.

“Hey,” Leonard said softly, not wanting to startle him.

Kirk didn’t react immediately (most of them didn’t) and when he finally focused on McCoy, his stare was murky and dazed. “Hello?”

“I’m Leonard.” He leaned against the wall of the shed like he had no other place to be—or like he belonged there, talking to a dead person.

“…I’m…Jim,” the other said.

“I know.”

Jim’s eyes tracked slowly past Leonard, across the wall and floor to an overturned, rotting wheel barrow. “I don’t understand. Do I know you?” His voice wavered.

Leonard sighed noiselessly. The entire county knows you by now. “We’ve never met.” He hesitated. This part was not easy but because of his gift he felt some obligation to give comfort where he could. “Look, Jim… it’s okay, you’re okay now. But I think you should know something bad happened to you.”

Some spirits hunched in on themselves at those words; others, afraid because they had some inkling of what Leonard was trying to tell them, got angry. Jim looked resigned.

“Your body’s dead.” Leonard had long since learned the blunt truth was less painful than stumbling over a poor explanation.

Jim shivered. “I’m dead?”

“Your body is,” he emphasized, “but not what makes you, well, you.”

Jim’s mouth lifted in a ghost of a smile, and Leonard found himself suddenly caught by a disturbing sense of familiarity. They could have been two old friends meeting on a street corner rather than inside the semi-darkness of a shed, one man in his after-life and the other not.

“Why are you so calm? And you’re trying to be nice to me. I’m not your first, am I?”

Leonard debated on how to answer that. “Not my youngest, either.”

Jim turned away at the cutting reality of the admission. A panicked expression momentarily flitted across his shadowed face. “Oh god… Oh god!” he gasped repeatedly. “I’m really…”

Leonard’s voice rumbled with sympathy. “I’m sorry, kid.”

“But I was walking home—what happened?”

“Don’t know.”

Jim moved then, much more swiftly than before, crossing the room to confront Leonard. “Okay, I’m d-dead, I get that,” he said fiercely even though he faltered over the word, “but I shouldn’t be! I had things I wanted to—shit, my mom. Does my mom know?”

He nodded, because if Winona Kirk didn’t know already, she would within the hour.

Jim lifted a hand as if to touch him but hesitated. He probably wasn’t ready to acknowledge he was no longer corporeal.

Leonard stiffened anyway because being touched by a spirit was an unpleasant experience. The only worse experience was being possessed by the dead, and that was akin to drowning in a cold lake. Afterward, it had taken Leonard close to a year to put himself back together emotionally.

Jim stepped back. Leonard’s tense expression smoothed and he relaxed his fisted hands.

“Can I see her?” the young man asked Leonard.

Leonard shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Most people won’t be aware of you.”

“You can see me, though. Because you’re psychic?”

He smiled mirthlessly. “I don’t know what I am, Jim.”

Jim studied him, and Leonard could feel the turning of his thoughts. Leonard was about to protest Jim’s idea (he had tried to help spirits with their unfinished business before and it never ended well) when the shed door rattled.

Jim immediately backed up to the far wall, face frozen by uncertainty. Leonard closed his eyes.

The door opened and a tall shadow stooped inside the low doorway. The detective did not enter, but the fast sweep of his eyes took in the state of the shed—moving past Jim without pause—and Leonard awkwardly poised within it. “Dr. McCoy,” he said, settling on Leonard’s title with disapproval. “I thought you had left the premises.”

He gave the detective, named Spock, who lacked a sense of humor, a thin smile. “I had something to do first.” He looked directly at Jim, who watched Spock with a strange expression.

Spock stared at McCoy for a long minute, saying nothing.

“Black,” Jim said without warning, eyes unfocused. “He had black hair and…a scar above his eye, I think.”

“Who did?” Leonard asked. He ignored the scrutiny of Spock’s gaze.

Jim shivered again. “I don’t know. I just, I saw the face for a second.” The bleakness in Jim’s tone stabbed at Leonard’s heart.

Leonard drew in a quiet breath. The sound of his first name caught his attention. He realized then that Spock had been talking to him. “Sorry,” he apologized.

“Are you well?” Spock’s look said he didn’t think Leonard’s health was the issue. But then again, the detective knew Leonard was a strange man (though not how strange).

McCoy pushed away from the wall. Spock yielded and let him pass through the shed’s door. Leonard turned and looked directly at Jim, who was still a frozen pale shadow in a dark corner, knowing that Spock would assume the question was for him. “Unless you had plans to hang about in that rat trap, are you coming?”

Jim followed on Spock’s heels. If Spock felt a cold chill along his spine, he didn’t mention it.

They passed the tarp covering the body. Jim skirted around it without looking.

“Doctor…” the detective’s voice trailed off. Maybe the man vacillated between reprimanding Leonard and worrying for him.

Leonard decided to throw him a bone. “The killer,” he said as if it wasn’t a big deal, “had dark hair and a scar on his face.”

People were always so stunned when he said things like that. Spock, however, simply narrowed his eyes. Leonard knew he had to get away as quickly as possible before the detective questioned him about how and why he would say something so random but with such conviction. Especially because, though it wasn’t known yet, Spock had clearly concluded James T. Kirk had been murdered.

“C’mon,” Leonard muttered under his breath. The spirit of the body soon to be autopsied by Leonard’s own steady hands did not protest. Spock’s eyes never left McCoy’s back until he was hidden from view.

It wasn’t for the first time, as Leonard headed to his car, that he wondered why he let himself care for the dead. Probably because most of the living can’t, he thought tiredly, watching Jim ponder the door handle on the passenger’s side to Leonard’s Volvo.

“Don’t worry about opening it,” he said gruffly, keeping his voice low enough not to be overheard by curious people waiting for glances of what had interested the reporters from behind a police barrier of tape and patrol officers. “Just get in.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Jim said with a grimace. Yet he did as Leonard instructed and was surprised when it worked.

“Me either,” Leonard McCoy agreed. He folded himself behind the driver’s wheel and started the car. “But we’ll muddle through somehow, Jim.”

-Fini

Bad Business

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• Playing Life to Win (#38, J ‘N B Series) – from March 14, 2013
• An Intergalactic Fandom (#37, J ‘N B Series) – from January 15, 2013
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