Title: For the Sake of Nothing, Part 25
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: pre-Kirk/Spock/McCoy
Summary: A friend tries to help.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

” Why am I not surprised to see you?” Leonard tossed over his shoulder.

Jocelyn ignored him as she stepped into his apartment and proceeded to look horrified by her surroundings. “Oh my god, you live here? It’s like a box. A condemned box.” She eyed something on the floor. “A diseased, condemned box.”

“That’s my underwear,” Leonard said, indignant and flushed. He scooped the boxers up and, not having a proper place to put the underwear, shoved it under a couch cushion.

Jocelyn hid her face in her hands and muttered something. Leonard dared not try to figure out what she was saying. “Okay,” she announced at last, dropping her hands, “this is not my best idea ever, by far, but you can move in with me.”

Leonard boggled.

“Clay won’t mind. And this is, this is…” Jocelyn faltered and avoided eye-contact with kitchenette (that is, the one blackened hotplate by the sink) and said determinedly, “You’re my friend. I won’t let you live in squalor.”

“Clay would definitely mind,” Leonard told her once he rediscovered the ability to speak. “Oh, he would mind, Joss, believe me. I would mind. ‘N I do not live in squalor.”

She pointed at an overflowing trash can, two mountainous piles of empty beer cans and clothes, an up-ended pot of ramen on the floor that had bugs bathing in it, and his sagging, old couch with the boxers peeking out from under a cushion.

Leonard winced. “I’ve been gone a couple of days. I forgot to take out the trash.”

“Ew, Leonard.”

“I’m a guy, all right! These things don’t occur to me until the mold becomes sentient!”

Jocelyn laughed and tried weakly to smack him with her purse. “Where can I sit?” she asked, sobering.

“I guess I shouldn’t say with the roaches?”

Jocelyn commandeered his wooden chair but not before she pulled out a packet of napkins from her purse and wiped the seat to her satisfaction. Leonard was fairly certain his apartment was not disease-ridden (okay, maybe the bug community disagreed) but he was wise enough not to argue with her about it.

“So…” he began once they were settled, “wanna tell me why you’re here?”

“I’m visiting. Don’t I get to visit?”

“We could visit at your place. Or did you just want to be reminded of my great housekeeping skills?” His fingers, resting on his knees, twitched. Leonard was a little embarrassed after all.

In Jocelyn’s lap, her purse folded in half under the pressure of her hands but she sounded very calm when she said, “What I want is to make certain you don’t dump me again.”

“Dump you?” Leonard echoed.

Her eyes studied a worn patch on the couch. “We are friends, aren’t we, Len? I mean, you didn’t need me to just—” Jocelyn flicked her eyes to him then bit her bottom lip. “I’m sorry. I’m acting foolish.”

Leonard sorted through what she didn’t say and was surprised by his conclusion. “Do you really think…? Jocelyn. Jocelyn,” he repeated her name in earnest as he leaned forward to touch the back of her hand. “If you’re afraid I’m going to push you away again, don’t be. I’m smart enough not to make the same mistake twice.”

Her sigh was a soft, sad sound. “You don’t need me now, I think. Isn’t that why you haven’t called me in two weeks?”

Stunned, he disagreed, “Of course not! I just haven’t—” Oh damn. How awful would be if he had finished that sentence and told her he hadn’t actually thought of her once in several days? Leonard concluded with real regret, “I’m a bad friend. Shit. I’m sorry, Joss.”

She nodded slowly. “Okay, apology accepted. But if you’re serious about us,” Jocelyn warned with a hint of fire in her voice, “you won’t stay out of touch for more than five days at a time. I worry.”

With a quirk of his mouth, Leonard called her on that lie. “First, one phone call a week isn’t going to stop you worrying if you’ve set your mind to it. Second, I think we both know if I was constantly ‘in touch’ with you, Clay would have an aneurysm—or simply try to break my face.”

“Clay’s a sweetheart.”

“I’m sure he is but he’s also a man in love, Jocelyn. If he thought I was poaching, he’d be about as sweet as a bear. An awkward, skinny bear, maybe, but still a bear. Third, that demand is just ridiculous.”

Jocelyn inspected her nails. “Men are more prone to behavioral regression than women. Why is my request ridiculous?”

“Demand,” he corrected smartly. “It’s ridiculous because you don’t want me bothering you that often. Also, I have a life of my own.”

She widened her eyes. “You do? With who?”

Leonard groaned. He walked right into that, which was undoubtedly where Jocelyn had been herding him the entire time. “I don’t have to answer any nosy questions.”

Jocelyn’s eyes widened a little more. Her mouth trembled.

“Stop that! It’s not working on me, Joss!” He put his hands over his eyes but couldn’t help peeking at her seconds later. Her look of hurt was so perfect it was clearly fake. Yet somehow it still had power over him. Leonard cursed. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Everything!” she cried happily. “Let’s start with: where are you living?”

“Here?”

“Pssh,” she responded, flapping away that claim with her hand. “Clay says you don’t walk home anymore; you ride with Spock and sometimes Jim in that lovely expensive car. Spock drives west. You don’t live on the west side of town!” Her spread hands implied obviously!

Leonard was horrified. “Clay is spying on me?”

“Why are you surprised? You knew he was spying.”

“The one time!” Leonard cried. “I didn’t know you were crazy enough to make him tail me permanently!”

Jocelyn made a fizzling noise and stood up. Leonard didn’t realize what was going to happen until too late.

“Fuck!” He clutched at his leg.

“I am not crazy!” Her incensed expression said she was considering kicking him a second time.

“Do you terrorize your fiancée like this too?” he asked through gritted teeth. Clay must go to bed crying at night.

“It’s your fault!”

“The hell it is!” And what was his fault anyway? Her insanity? Her abuse of poor Clay?

“You don’t keep me informed!” Jocelyn shot back. “I just explained this to you!”

Leonard rubbed his shin one last time and sat up. “When did you explain what to me?”

She clutched her purse in a manner which indicated she was restraining herself from throwing it at his head in frustration. “You don’t call, stupid. You’re supposed to talk to me and tell me things so I don’t have to ask someone to spy on you or set up meetings with your—” Jocelyn stopped abruptly and put a hand to her mouth.

Leonard had no words, or at least he didn’t think he did until they stumbled out of his mouth, all tangled up. “You don’t, oh fuck, you’re not… you are. Jesus. With both of them?” The idea was preposterous, impossible, and yet no one had a better chance of doing such a preposterous and impossible thing than Jocelyn. (He worried vaguely that Jim or Spock would turn out to be just like her.)

“No?” Jocelyn relaxed her grip on her purse and sat down. “Oh, it doesn’t matter, Len. My point is that because you won’t tell me about your life, I have to find out how you’re doing from other people. It’s just awful. It’s like before. The last time you shut me out,” she said more quietly, “almost ended our friendship. I don’t want to lose you.”

He mulled over that and figured he had to admit the truth. “I feel too awkward,” he said. “Telling you about—I mean, Joss, we dated. We talked about marriage and kids. Do you really want to hear about my love life?”

“I want to hear about your life, period. Who you chose to share your heart with is a part of that.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “We were friends before we were lovers, Len.”

“So you aren’t bothered at all?”

She was momentarily silent before she answered. “I think if we hadn’t been friends first, it would have hurt to know you’re happier with someone else. If it doesn’t work out with Clay, it will hurt me when he moves on. But, Leonard, you’re different. I was trying to help you find happiness with someone long before I ever thought I might be that person—and, well, just because I wasn’t does not mean it is something to regret. To be honest, I feel relieved.”

“Why?” he asked, knowing she wouldn’t mean to imply anything hurtful by what she had said.

“We could have married. More than likely, if we had, we would have divorced when we finally realized we weren’t right for each other as a couple. Can you imagine staying friends after that?”

“Not really,” he admitted.

Jocelyn gave him a weak smile.

Leonard slumped into the couch. It never failed to amaze him how much sense she could make sometimes. “All right, I see your point. I’ll tell you about Jim and Spock but only if—” He fought down a blush and drummed his fingers on his thigh. “—I don’t have to share the intimate details.” Jocelyn laughed and that annoyed him. “What’s so funny?”

“Do you want me to describe how Clay and I make love?”

Leonard clamped his hands over his ears. “Oh god no! Not another word, Joss, or I swear on every holy saint I will find a way to open that window and throw myself out of it!”

She rolled her eyes. “Thank you, Mr. Drama Queen. See? Nobody wants to hear those kinds of details about their friends! So you spare me and I’ll spare you.”

Cautiously he lowered his hands. “But you asked before.”

“I am saddened that you are so gullible.”

“How was I to know you were goading me!”

Jocelyn arranged the folds of her skirt and crossed her legs. “You take things too seriously, Len. Now, can we get back to our chat?”

“Thought we were arguin’,” he muttered.

“Best friends do not argue,” she said primly.

He snorted. “Or kick each other in the leg.”

Jocelyn narrowed her eyes and he wisely shut up. “About the meetings…” she began.

“Who do I have to kill?” Leonard butted in. “Jim or Spock or both of them?”

“Neither. Spock and I met, ironically, for coffee one time. We talked about science.”

Leonard wasn’t certain he believed that.

“Jim, on the other hand, I would love to gossip with on a regular basis.” Jocelyn pursed her lips, bothered. “I may have coincidentally run into him at the grocery store. He waved politely and not-so-subtly avoided me. So I guess he was actually rude?”

Leonard just shook his head. “Lately Jim’s been as jumpy as cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs. He has nightmares,” Leonard explained, his worry rising to the forefront of his thoughts. “Is it normal to have nightmares three or four times a week?”

“It can be a symptom of a lot of things. So you’re sleeping with him?”

“In some sense of the word, or I was. I tried getting him to talk about what’s bothering him and that blew up in my face.” Sighing, Leonard rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Spock’s not too pleased Jim is bunking at his own place again.”

“Hm,” Jocelyn murmured thoughtfully. “What’s his address?”

“No. No, Jocelyn. That’s not going to help!”

“He won’t talk to you or Spock. He’ll talk to me. I’m a veritable stranger, aren’t I? And I’m not someone he is sleeping with.”

“You mean he might talk to you.”

Her smile was more ruthless than playful. “Who says Kirk’s going to have a choice?”

Leonard thought the terror he felt was very appropriate for the situation. In the end, however, Jocelyn got her way and Jim’s address.

“I told you,” a woman with short hair and no expression stated flatly as Jim opened the door, “I would kill you if you hurt Leonard.”

Jim did the smart thing and shut the door again—or he tried to. Leonard’s ex-girlfriend knocked it right out of his hands with a purse that had to be laden with bricks.

“You can’t come in,” Jim said, taking a wide stance, though the woman made no move to breach the threshold of his apartment.

“You haven’t invited me in,” she agreed. “So invite me in.”

“Fuck off, lady.”

“My name is Jocelyn, Jim. You have my permission to use it.”

“I don’t know why you’re here, and I don’t care,” Jim said. “Leave.”

“Why the hostility? Is it because I threatened you?”

Jim ground his back teeth. His night had already been piss-poor and if his hands were not balled into fists they would be shaking from days of fitful sleep. “Don’t psycho-analyze me on my own doorstep.”

Oddly, Jocelyn laughed. “That’s something Len would say! What else is he teaching you?” She craned her neck to see around him. “Clearly you picked up his tendency to be a slob.”

Jim couldn’t decide if he was insulted or amused on Bones’ behalf. “…You can’t say that about him.”

“Oh, I can. I’m his friend. Which is why I am here, Jim. He’s concerned about you, and so I feel concern for you on his behalf.”

“Concerned people don’t generally announce they are going to kill me.”

“Then you have never met the real Leonard McCoy.”

He couldn’t help a hint of smile at that. This woman was too smart for her own good.

“Can I come in?”

Jim considered her, how small in stature she actually was; she wouldn’t physically be able to overpower him but that meant nothing in the scheme of things. He stepped aside. “Remind me later to thank Bones profusely for telling you where I live.”

“I rather think,” Jocelyn said, placing her purse on the floor and taking a few tentative steps into the middle of his living room, “you ought to be living elsewhere.” Frowning as she inspected one of the shelving units built into the wall, Jocelyn muttered, “How interesting.”

A normal man might have felt self-conscious to have another person in his home, judging it; Jim had never called this apartment ‘home’, for a reason, and thus he felt nothing. He shoved his hands into his pants pockets and waited for the questions. Bones’ friend always had questions, generally ones he did not like.

Instead she turned to him and requested politely, “May I have some water?”

“Ice?”

“Yes, please.”

Jim uncoiled his muscles and went to a small kitchen area. When he came back with the ice water, Jocelyn was poking at the items on the shelving unit. Dust stirred as she inched a book to the side. “Are these yours?” She accepted the glass he handed to her and took a small sip of water.

“No. The place was furnished when I moved in.”

“And the little china figurine?”

“Not mine. It’s junk,” he told her. What did it matter anyway?

Jocelyn turned to study a pair of dirty socks on the floor. “I guess those came furnished too.”

“The maid quit.”

“Tragic,” she said airily and pointed to a table and two chairs. “Mind if I sit?”

Jim stayed still. “I’m not going to stop you.”

“You’re an interesting man, Jim Kirk,” Jocelyn said as she sat down and gave him her full attention. “Why did you want a relationship with Leonard and Spock if you weren’t planning to make it work?”

If he flinched, it was because he was caught by surprise her use of the past tense. “Nothing’s wrong with us,” he lied, “and also it’s none of your business.”

“I’m not having that conversation with you again. I gave you my reasons. So tell me why you are trying to ruin things.”

“I’m not!” he blurted out before he could stop himself. “Shut up!”

She looked pitying, like she knew he had been telling himself to shut up and not her. “Jim, you are. I can’t decide if it’s a conscious choice on your part. You did try to isolate yourself from them before.”

“That was—” He felt the lie even as he said it. “—a mistake.”

“Oh, Jim,” the woman said.

He knew that tone, had heard that tone before: when a school teacher watched him pretend not to care that he had been caught forging his mother’s signature on a permission slip for a field trip (somehow she knew, like everybody in town, that Jim’s mother could not be roused from one of her stupors to do it herself); when the waitress he slept with a few times at a bar in Memphis turned him down for a final tryst because she had a boyfriend who wanted to take her back and she knew he had no one waiting for him; on the day he encountered Bones and Spock in some random place and the two men were together, still, and happy and Jim was a thing of their past—

He closed his eyes and willed the pain to leave him alone. “Get out, Jocelyn.”

“Jim?”

“If you can bring yourself to do a nice thing for someone someday, let it be today,” he said, voice not quite steady. He felt numb; it had to because he couldn’t sleep. “I need you to leave.”

Silence. Then he heard the scrape of the chair legs against the floor, the rustle of a coat.

Jim opened his eyes to the sight of Jocelyn standing an arm’s length from him instead of picking up her purse. “Oh, Jim,” she said for the second time, and her face crumpled.

Alarmed and shocked, he didn’t know what to do when the woman—this strange woman he didn’t really know—hugged him and started crying. He lifted a hand and put it on her left shoulder blade.

“Hey, don’t cry.”

Jocelyn cried harder.

Jim shifted, uncomfortable, and tried patting her back. “Whatever I said, I’m sorry. Jocelyn?” He was shit with this comforting stuff, and she really needed to stop crying because the sound of her sobs were just like his mother’s on the days she remembered he was her son, not just some random kid who lived in the house, and then she started crying “George, George” and the tears went on forever. And Jim, being a stupid kid, always cried with her, feeling so bad, so overwhelmingly bad about it all.

Jim hated the tears that began to prick at his eyes and begged, “Please stop crying. Please!” He promised irrationally, “I’ll fix it, I swear I will!”

Jocelyn’s breath hitched but she quelled a sob to ask, “You promise?”

“…Yes.” And what had he just promised to do? Oh shit.

“Good,” Jocelyn said, pulling away and wiping her face with the backs of her hands. “That’s really good, Jim. I just know if you tell them everything, you’ll be all right.”

Jim blanched and the world swayed. Or maybe he did. He wasn’t certain. His voice, like his body, didn’t seem to want to work either. “W-What?”

“I can tell you’ve been hurt very badly. Your face earlier—I don’t know what memory that was but your pain showed.”

He shook his head mutely, moved away from her. She was wrong because he was careful. He had never let anyone see so deeply into him before.

“Jim, no, it’s all right. You’re safe here.”

Shit, shit, shit. How could she know about the bag? That he was thinking about the duffle bag, back in its hiding place but so close within reach?

Jocelyn grabbed his hand like that might prevent his escape. Jim regained his footing, though. He stilled his breath, tried to calm his heart rate to something that didn’t reach dire levels. He realized belatedly Jocelyn was actually coaching him to do so.

She squeezed his hand. “You should sit down.”

He opened his mouth, only to close it again when she guided him to the chair and pushed him into it.

“That was a panic attack,” she told him.

“It was?” he asked in surprise.

“The beginnings of one. I said something to trigger it. I’m terribly sorry, Jim.”

“I-It’s okay. I’m okay,” he answered, voice somewhat weak.

“Jim…” Jocelyn looked guilty. “I should have known better. Sometimes I think I know more than I do. Please forgive me, please.”

“Okay.”

For some reason, his easy acquiescence caused Jocelyn to look even guiltier. She chewed on her bottom lip. “Len’s going to kill me when he finds out!”

His limbs felt heavy, his response sluggish. Jim forced himself to sit up straight and focus. That meant clinging to the edge of the chair seat with his free hand. “Bones won’t know. I won’t tell him.”

“Well, I don’t get that choice,” she said, miserable. “I have to tell him.”

She wasn’t making sense again. “Why?”

“He trusted me to come here and not make a mess of things or hurt you. I screwed up, but it would be a bigger screw-up if I wasn’t honest about it and he found out later.”

Jim’s thoughts cleared slightly. “But who’s to say he will find out?”

Jocelyn sighed and patted his hand. She had yet to let it go. “That doesn’t matter. He trusts me, Jim. And he cares about me like he cares about you, except maybe not as much or in the same way—”

Swallowing, Jim didn’t think she could know what those words meant to him.

“—but I have to believe it’s enough that he won’t be angry for too long and will forgive me.”

“Bones would forgive you,” Jim whispered in agreement.

She squeezed his hand one last time and released him. “Yes. He’s a good man with a generous heart. I’m lucky.”

Jocelyn might as well have said you’re the lucky one. Jim shoved his fingers through his hair. “I know. Shit, I know. Because of Spock, too.”

When Jocelyn spoke again, after a long minute, it was with quiet conviction. “Maybe you think you’ve done a lot of things wrong in your life, Jim, but the truth is what happened in the past doesn’t matter as much as what happens now. In this moment, you do not trust the two people who trust you. Or in the case of Len, who wants to trust you with his pain but can’t until you trust him with yours.”

Bitterness swelled at the back of his throat. “You can only give out your trust so many times and live to regret it before—never mind,” Jim said. “You wouldn’t understand.” He was surprised when she didn’t argue with that.

Jocelyn retrieved her purse and turned for the door. “What I said about telling them everything? Forget that for now. Work on trusting them first. That is all I will ask you do to keep your promise, Jim. Goodbye, and I hope our next meeting is under happier circumstances.” She let herself out.

Jim waited until he could no longer hear footsteps in the hall to confess aloud, “I wish I remembered how.”

Next Part

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