Title: For the Sake of Nothing, Part 14
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: pre-Kirk/Spock/McCoy
Summary: In which Spock is of the angry variety that would frighten small children.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

These boys make my brain hurt. Badly.

Leonard was asleep face-down on his couch when someone started pounding on his door much too early in the morning. Groaning, he wedged his face farther into the corner of the couch, not having enough coordination or willpower to lift his head. After Clay had ruined Jocelyn’s rug last night, not less than three times, Leonard spent the better part of an hour alternately cursing his newfound acquaintance with a lightweight drinker and soaking the rug in bleach. Then Jocelyn came home, took one look at what he was doing and screamed.

Apparently the rug wasn’t white, it was cream. Or French vanilla or some such sorta-white-but-not-really color that Leonard was supposed to have known about. And he was bleaching it.

Oops.

Scratching his head, Leonard had looked down at the vividly bright white patches dotting the rug (he had scrubbed and scrubbed until the puke stains were obliterated) and said over his ex-girlfriend’s horrified shrieks, “Joss, you said it was white. …Huh, I guess that explains why the whole thing looked old.”

She had chased him out of the condo and halfway down the stairwell. The experience would have been comical if he hadn’t been certain he was going to die very painfully once Jocelyn caught him.

Flowers, Leonard thought now that he was awake. Or a teddy bear. What kind of gift said I’m sorry I ruined your rug even though I was only doing what you wanted?

He decided it might be better if he stayed scarce for a while, at least until Jocelyn cooled down and no longer threatened to put his balls through a meat grinder every time she saw him.

The pounding started up again.

“Fuuuuck,” Leonard rumbled into the couch. He slung one limb over the arm of the couch and set about hauling himself into an upright position. It wasn’t easy. He’d had a little more beer than he meant to, his arms ached from the repetitive motion of scrubbing, and he was pretty sure he had rug burn on both of his knees.

The pounding continued.

Leonard snarled at the door to his apartment, “Damn it, man, for the love of God, STOP! I’m comin’!”

Limping (or rather stumbling as his legs tried to remember what walking was) to the door, he jerked it open, already snapping out, “What the hell, Spock—”

Spock didn’t apologize for his impatience; he didn’t say “How did you know it was me?” Pushing Leonard aside, the tall, dark-haired man stalked into the apartment and gave it a glare that should have stripped the paint from the walls. “Is he here?” he asked in a low, tightly controlled voice.

Leonard’s brain processed that question a second too late for Spock. Curiously wondering if Spock was actually going to shake him like his expression said he wanted to, Leonard wrapped one hand around the man’s fist twisting into t-shirt and remarked mildly, “You seem agitated.”

Spock’s agitation was so great, in fact, he could form only monosyllabic sentences. “Jim. Is. Not. Here.”

“Was that a question? It didn’t sound like a question.” Sighing at the lack of response, Leonard untangled Spock’s fingers from his shirt. “Jim’s definitely not with me, Spock.”

Spock’s ire dropped away almost immediately. In its place was something much more frightening: fear, barely managed by Leonard’s usually poker-faced employer.

Alarmed, Leonard demanded, “What’s happened to Jim?”

“I cannot find him,” Spock answered, albeit with a slow heaviness that indicated he thought his news of the apocalyptic variety.

Leonard relaxed. “Oh.” He meant is that all?

Spock took a step backward, his expression shuttering. “I have disturbed you. My apologies.”

Leonard caught Spock’s arm as he pivoted toward the door. “Now wait a minute! Spock, Jim’s an adult. Just because he’s decided to—”

“You know nothing about Jim.”

A rush of air expelled from Leonard’s lungs as if Spock had punched him in the gut. It felt like he had. Leonard’s hand dropped away from Spock’s arm. “Well, isn’t somebody a prissy bitch this morning?” The words came out more snappish than taunting.

“It is not my behavior which is questionable. If you do not consider Jim or his disappearance of importance, waste no more of my time.”

“Of course I consider—!” Leonard stalled that, said pointedly instead, “I think your overactive imagination has gotten the better of you, Spock. Jim is probably fine. Hell, knowing him, he’s already trying to open the…” Leonard stopped, glanced at a small clock. It was past nine. “Or not.” Damn, how long had he been oblivious to the world?

“Do you understand my concern now, Mr. McCoy?” Spock said coldly. “I cannot find my employee.”

Leonard rubbed a hand across the stubble on his chin. “All right,” he said after a moment. “All right, I’m sorry. Just… give me a minute to change.”

Spock turned, his silence unfriendly, and strode for the door. Leonard got there first and planted his hand against the wood to keep Spock from opening it, feeling something faintly volcanic curl just beneath his breastbone. “I said give me a minute.”

“I do not need your help.”

“Well too fucking bad,” Leonard bit out roughly. “You’ve already got it.”

Somehow that was the right thing to say. Spock relented, nodding slightly, and let go of the doorknob. In under five minutes Leonard had himself cleaned up (not his personal record but close), and Spock waited for him by the door in the meantime, almost too calmly explaining the details of Jim’s disappearance.

Tugging down his new shirt—unfortunately the last clean one McCoy had—Leonard wanted to know, “If he’s not at your place or his place or the shop, where the hell are we supposed to look for him?”

Spock’s face was once again unreadable. “I do not know but I must continue to search.”

Leonard understood. Giving up, even going so far as to ignore the situation, went against the very nature of Spock’s affection for Jim.

Damn it, kid, Leonard thought to himself as he followed Spock from the apartment building to a dark-grey car, what’s the matter with you? Why would Jim do this to Spock when he knew a vanishing act would freak the man out? How could Jim do it?

Leonard wanted to think that Jim simply couldn’t. Which meant (and here Leonard’s heart started to pound, no doubt mirroring the rapid, fearful beating of Spock’s) something bad had happened to their resident trouble magnet.

“What do we know about his friends? Where do they live?” Leonard asked, jerking open the passenger side door and getting in the car.

“Jim has no friends that I am aware of.”

Leonard opened his mouth to say that’s fucking crazy, because Jim was a people magnet as much as he was a trouble magnet, then thought about it. He concluded succinctly, “Shit.”

Jim had no friends, and according to the paperwork filed at the hospital, Jim had no family either.

“Precisely,” Spock agreed.

Leonard sat in silence inside the car as Spock drove them through the city, turning over a newfound truth about the person he thought he knew, a truth so obvious that he had missed it entirely.

Jim didn’t talk about friends or acquaintances or family members. He practically lived at work and there he had Spock and Leonard, whom he always entertained with wild stories of his sordid past, but… a huge gap existed between what Jim spoke of as personal and what he considered to be personal. Which was clearly none of what he ever said; not a single detail was private, in a sense, or meaningful.

My god, Jim has…

“…been trickin’ us this entire time,” Leonard murmured to the glass of passenger side window. He voiced a graver question: “Who is James Kirk?”

A voice answered, not Kirk’s, but firm and convinced nonetheless. “He is Jim.”

“Our Jim,” Leonard interpreted Spock’s statement softly.

Leonard could accept that, for now. But once he had his hands on the kid, he wanted answers. He really and truly did.

Another voice, of the kind that never spoke beyond the conscience, whispered a silent Hypocrite. Leonard ignored it, jumping out of the car as Spock eased to a stop at a street curb. This was Jim’s neighborhood, Spock had explained. “I’ll take the south,” he told the man behind the wheel. “Meet back here in an hour?”

Spock held his eyes for a long moment, weighing something about Leonard. At last he said, “Thank you.”

“I’m doing this for you more than Jim,” Leonard admitted. You can’t do it by yourself, Spock.

“It only matters that we find him.” With that, Spock pulled the car back into traffic to locate a place to park.

Bad news, Jim thought the moment he saw a familiar car swing to a halt about a block from his apartment. Then McCoy got out of the car, leaned down to say something to the driver (who had to be Spock), and Jim decided this was really, really bad news indeed.

He hadn’t slept last night and so he had taken to prowling the neighborhood once it was light enough to see by. The farther he walked, the clearer his mind had become so Jim had ended up by the river bridge almost four miles away. He had stayed there at the base of the bridge, feeling nothing except the weight of a hard decision, and watched steam from an upriver paper mill curl into the sky. A homeless man napping under the bridge had given him a cursory glance but did not approach Jim, perhaps having seen something familiar in the way Jim was comfortable being so close to the under-belly of the city, to where all things discarded or lost or in hiding found their way.

There had been no answers for Jim’s silent questions in that cold, dark place but there had been a peace he craved. Jim left it reluctantly behind when he heard a siren in the distance, remembering too well that this city had no love for listless wanderers. He took a detour then to a small cafe that did not know him by sight (or likely wouldn’t remember him). Here, that fateful day Spock agreed to hire him, Jim had lurked until an odd hour of the night, watching and studying the resident barista and everything she did. Maybe it had surprised Spock when Jim had shown some experience in the coffeehouse business but it had also pleased him which was exactly the reaction Jim wanted from Spock. Jim Kirk was the best at making an illusion seem real until that illusion could become reality. The ability, one he cultivated in his youth, was a survivor’s skill.

Jim sat in that cafe for nearly two hours, contemplating the other survivor skills he had and how they had carried him from an Iowa farmstead to this city. If he was going to start again, where should he go? Or perhaps the better question was: where hadn’t he been?

No answers were forthcoming at the cafe either. Jim put a generous amount of cash into the tip jar on the counter and took to the streets again. Tired yet simultaneously restless, his body seemed to know where it wanted to go—home, to the sparsely decorated bedroom and the pain medication he left there.

That was how Jim came upon the unexpected sight of Leonard McCoy exiting a car and why, reacting on instinct, he ducked into a nearby pawn shop. He nodded to the owner, a grizzly old man who knew him well enough through their occasional transactions, and headed to one of the side aisles where he could look inconspicuous but keep an eye on the street through the shop window. Dragging a hand through his hair, Jim waited for some sign of what to do next. This feeling was familiar, vaguely unpleasant; he was being hunted.

This was the mistake, Jim realized. An attachment, however emotionally superficial it might seem, was always a connection; a connection meant a bond. Spock—maybe Leonard too—would feel he had the right to hunt Jim because of that bond. At another time, Jim might not have minded; he might have thought here is someone I want to find me. Here is someone I can trust to find me when it counts.

But for that desire, the time had passed in the moment Jim shoved the old duffle bag under his bed instead of returning it to its hiding spot. What was coming for Jim now wasn’t kind in the least; it was a monster he had made by wanting too much. It would drive him across the country, dogging his footsteps, until he put his duffle bag away again and promised himself no more wanting.

The catalyst of why he had broken his vow this time finally came striding by the shop window: long jean-clad legs, an unshaven jaw, a flat press to a mouth that frowned more than it smiled. Jim’s heart thudded dully in his chest. Two thoughts crashed together: here I am! and keep walking, Bones. He didn’t know which had come first.

Then the worst possible thing happened. Leonard stopped, as if he had heard Jim, and considered the neon OPEN sign inside the pawn shop window. Time crawled by in long seconds in which Jim did not breathe. Leonard reached for the door handle, stopped, frowned.

Then he dropped his arm back to his side and kept walking.

Jim blindly shoved a hand against a shelf, rattling miscellaneous items in the process, and focused on standing upright through a sudden wave of dizziness.

“If you’re gonna be sick, Kirk,” the owner said gruffly from the front of the store, “get outta my shop.”

Jim straightened mutely and gave the man a sharp nod. At the door, he scanned the sidewalk for Leonard, shuffling slowly back into the sunlight when he did not see him. It was too easy to skirt along the store fronts and turn into an alleyway. Recalling an alternate route to his apartment, one which Jim had had an opportunity to try more than once in the past, Jim slipped past a dumpster and into a second alley. The route would require jumping a fence or two and scaling an old fire escape to a rooftop. He set his foot on the edge of a stack of wooden crates that he had positioned by the chain-link fence over a year ago and reached up to grip the top wire of the fence.

At the same time he lifted himself up, someone jerked him by the neck of his shirt. Jim slipped backwards, tumbled into his assailant, and let his fighting instinct take over. Drive the elbow into soft flesh, use brute strength to break the hold against his chest, spin around and land the first blow—

His assailant deflected his flying fist with amazing ease and drove Jim back into the fence with a well-aimed shove to his shoulders. Kirk’s arms were pinned to his sides.

Jim froze, face-to-face with a looming figure, and drew in a ragged, surprised breath. “Spock?”

“Jim,” Spock said, and Kirk’s name had never sounded so menacing until now.

“Spock,” Jim repeated mindlessly, sagging against the fence. “Fuck. Spock.” His heart was trying to tear itself out of his chest. The world went fuzzy and gray for a moment.

Spock had hauled him forward by the time Jim’s vision had cleared (and when did Spock take a liking to manhandling him so?) and was saying darkly, “I plan to kill you, Jim.”

So, even Spock had his limits. Jim wasn’t going to fault him for that. “Oh, okay. G-Good, maybe, I should—”

“After,” Spock said abruptly, cutting into Jim’s stilted speech, and before Jim could wonder what after meant, Spock dipped his head and covered Jim’s mouth with his own.

That wasn’t the optimal time for Jim to pass out, he would think (much aggrieved) later on, because he would not be able to readily recall what kissing Spock had been like, other than it was an electric shock which could render a man unconscious. Sadly, Spock would not find Jim’s cheeky description amusing at all.

Next Part

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