Title: The Light In Which We’re Cast (#39, J ‘N B Series)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk, McCoy
Summary: Comment!fic written for this pic prompt at jim_and_bones; mysterious little piece about knowing ourselves—or rather, Jim and Bones knowing each other.
A/N: I am retiring the J ‘N B Series at 40 entries. This is #39, so there will be only one entry left to write. That said, I am thankful for the attention these short stories have received over the last year and eight months. I hope some part of this has entertained you immensely, at least once, and that you will take away a fondness for Jim and Bones (and others), as well as an appreciation for how versatile their roles can be, though the core of who Jim and Bones are always remains the same.
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 Man in the Shed | Bad Business | A Fortunate Friend | Blind to Love | The Westerner | A Plot Above All Others | We Fight to Win | An Intergalatic Fandom | Playing Life to Win

He first fell in love with an idea. The light would hit the side of the face just so: outlining the plane of the jaw, hinting at the serious line of the nose and touching lightly upon the curve of the upper lip. Then the man would shift, turning his face back into the darkness so that the only bright part of him is the long line from neck to shoulder. That is how the character enters the stage, walks into the life McCoy’s imagination has created solely for him and begins to live it the audience, who has been already ensorcelled by the character’s presence long before the first word of the opening monologue is spoken.

Leonard works day and night on nurturing this idea. He dreams about it when he isn’t writing it, and he sees his vision in every person passing on the street: in the way a delivery boy leaps off his bike with a package under his arm; the business man steps around a puddle to preserve his leather shoes; or in the gentleness with which the old man at a bus bench feeds a small flock of fat white-breasted pigeons. Between bouts of worrying a pencil between his teeth, he tries to capture all of the nuances that make fiction kindred to real life.

The character could be the guy next door; maybe on a bad day he is the man from which people avert their eyes in passing. So many details to choose from, to give the creation, and methodically Leonard goes through them, one by one, until he finds what fits.

But the face is still hidden in the darkness, turned from the light. Even as Leonard finishes the last part of his script and hands it to an old friend, a theater director, for review, he knows nothing of the character’s features and how the man looks; Leonard does not know if his lips thin when he feels anger, or what is the shade of his eyes during the scene where he meets the person who is going to change his life.

He worries about the lack of knowing all throughout the script revisions; he thinks about it during the construction of the stage sets (which management lets him give his opinion on after much convincing). Then the day of the casting call arrives, and Leonard can only sink into his flimsy folding chair, fingers tight on the bound copy of what he believes will be his most important piece in his career (not to mention his last), and simply holds his breath.

By the second hour, the worry is gone, replaced by a deep frustration.

“No, not him,” he bites out when the director glances speculatively his way, probably to judge his expression.

The director sighs and waves at the casting manager to send in the next actor. Then he turns to face Leonard and says in exasperation, “McCoy, we have only two more left on the list. Two more. Then the audition’s over. I know this isn’t the Hollywood setup you’re used to, but don’t forget how limited we are by our production funds.”

Leonard would have nodded his understanding, if only to appease his friend, but he finds himself rising from his chair without a second’s thought for a lecture he’s heard time and time again since the process began.

The actor who is walking across the stage, stride long and easy, freezes at the sight of Leonard’s swift approach. The young man opens his mouth slightly, only to close it a moment later with a click, as Leonard grabs his face and twists his head to a new angle.

The light… no, the position is wrong.

“Move to the left,” Leonard orders.

The guy shuffles two steps to the side, perhaps too struck by Leonard’s forcefulness to protest.

An annoyed sigh explodes from Leonard. “Your left, damn it!” he snaps, and drags the actor in the other direction. “Finally,” he mutters immediately after, a tension in him uncoiling as the back light of the stage properly frames the young man’s head.

Leonard’s eyebrows draw together as he stares up into that bright halo of light, wondering how every person he meets can have the wrong face when not even he, the creator, knows what the face should look like. But that tiny, insistent voice in his head never lies to him. When the voice’s no is so vehement, he has to believe it.

“If you let go of my face, I can read my lines now,” a quiet voice tells him.

Leonard feels himself twitch in surprise, surfacing from his thoughts back to where he is—

—standing on the stage like a lunatic, cupping a man’s jaw in one of his broad hands. Leonard backs away, embarrassed, and averts his eyes, an apology springing to his lips but not past them. A hand drops to his shoulder from behind; it’s the director, come to intervene with “You should take your seat, McCoy.”

Leonard nods, a gruff acknowledgement and less of an I’m sorry to the vicinity of the actor he manhandled, and hurries back to the safety of his chair away from the stage

“My apologies… Kirk, is it? That was the playwright of our production. He… was making a point to me about a scene,” Leonard hears the director explaining in an attempt to cover for the impulsive—and unwarrantedly intimate—behavior.

“Yes, sir, it’s James Kirk. Just call me Jim. And,” the actor pauses, “there’s no problem here.”

“Good. Welcome, Jim. Let me get out of your way. Then you can begin what you’ve prepared.”

Leonard sinks farther into his chair, folding his arms. The good thing is, he decides as the man named Jim starts in on a piece of Shakespeare, something is finally right in this damnable audition. Jim stays in the spot Leonard put him in without looking awkward about it. Unfortunately the angle of the actor’s stance is so perfectly matched to what Leonard imagined, the stage light hides Jim’s face in shadow as if he is the very character for whom Leonard has been unable to discern a true identity since first putting words to paper.

The last actor is the best; even Leonard has to admit so, if grudgingly, despite that something tells him Mitchell still isn’t right person for the part. But low production funds, as management had so aptly hammered into his brain, cannot cater to his intuition at every turn or they’ll be without a main character and, therefore, no show to run.

“Who’s going to be the understudy?” Leonard asks the director as they and a few others of the team sit at a long table and sort through acting dossiers.

The director picks up a piece of paper. “I liked Kirk. He’s inexperienced but…”

“…but he’s got the raw talent to carry him through if we need him in a pinch,” Leonard finishes. “I agree.”

Others echo the sentiment.

It’s settled, then. They’ll extend an offer to Mitchell, and bring Kirk in to work alongside him.

Leonard shoves fingers through his unkempt hair and sighs, letting his co-workers’ voices drift into meaningless noise in the background. This has to work out, he tells himself, or he’s leaving behind this business in the worst way possible: with a tiny whimper, and not a single grand bang in sight.

Two weeks into rehearsals, a cup of coffee appears in Leonard’s periphery. He takes it without thinking, grunting his thanks to the stagehand that makes the morning coffee run. But it’s not the usual stagehand, he realizes a moment later as someone different leans against the empty chair to his right. It’s the understudy who has been following him around puppy-like and whom Leonard can’t seem to get rid of.

“So what’s he doing wrong?” Jim Kirk asks, watching the stage.

Leonard slouches into his seat. “Shouldn’t you be memorizing lines or something?”

“What is Gary doing wrong?” the understudy repeats with a stubborn-streak Leonard is coming to know well.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, kid.” He sips coffee surprised that it’s black, just as he likes it rather than the latte crap he normally gets handed. Frothy coffee concoctions—what is the world coming to?

“You look like you want to throw your script at his head, Bones. So he must be doing something wrong.”

“I told you, don’t call me that.”

“Is it the delivery? Can’t be,” Jim says, shaking his head at his own supposition and acting as if Leonard hadn’t spoken. “The delivery is pretty good.”

Leonard thwaps a hand against the script in his lap and grouses, “It’s just wrong. Now go away.”

The young man’s gaze lingers on him longer than necessary. Leonard knows if he turns to look he will see eyes the color of a cloudless sky. His fingers twitch for a pencil to capture his string of thoughts. Instead, he fixes his attention in another direction, at the wildly gesticulating woman standing next to the director, Mitchell’s busty redhead co-star, and wishes Jim would stop pitying him for being a friendless bastard and stay the hell away.

“Well, let me know when you figure out what’s wrong” is all Jim says before suddenly disappearing from the corner of Leonard’s eye.

If I knew, I’d tell this whole damn crew, Leonard thinks to himself unhappily. He swallows a mouthful of the rich black coffee and flips open the script to the current scene, jotting down notes as they come to mind. Later, he emerges from a long stupor to the sight of an empty paper cup crumpled in his hand and, magically scrawled along the length of a page margin, a list of traits about the main character he never considered before.

He reads the list through twice and thinks at the end, You’re not who I thought you were.

A long day has run into an even longer night, and at the end of it Leonard finds himself a poorly padded bench and lays there with a sigh of relief. He throws an arm over his eyes, grateful for the silence of the theater now that the cast and crews are gone.

It’s a peace not meant to last, he learns in short order.

“Hello?” a voice calls cautiously out of the dark of the dressing room. “Oh, hey… is that you, Bones?”

Leonard rolls onto a side, putting his back to the voice. “Go home, kid.”

Footsteps. The door leading to the hallway clicks shut. Floorboards creak with the shifting of body weight. “Why aren’t you going home too?”

It’s inevitable Jim Kirk should be this curious. “I am home,” Leonard tells him. “I have to live where I work, or the work doesn’t get done.”

And a fickle muse will take flight at the first opportunity it has. Leonard has experienced that the hard way; it’s what put him on this path more than a year ago, when he couldn’t turn a good idea into a lucrative venture and it just kept happening, again and again.

“I don’t think you’re literally supposed to do that,” the nosy Kirk says. “Do you need a ride? I can take you to your house.”

Oh, the aggravation of this one. “Look, if I damn well want to sleep here, I will!”

Silence. Then, “So you don’t have a place to go.”

Caught. But Leonard isn’t about to admit it to such a foolish young man.

“But… you’re famous,” Jim says, as if he is puzzling out a problem. “When I visit my mom in L.A., we always go to one of your plays.”

“Quicker to rise, quicker to fall. What I’m doing in this little two-bit town is the last thing the entertainment business will ever get outta me.”

Jim’s “Oh” is quiet, disappointed.

It kind of breaks Leonard’s heart. Something occurs to him, then, as he recalls Jim’s casual remark. “A Passing of Bones,” he says, tears unexpectedly stinging his eyes. One of his earlier works, that play, seeming so distant in his memory he almost can’t recall writing it or seeing it to come to life on the stage.

“The first one I ever saw,” murmurs Jim. “I loved it.”

“Why?” Leonard asks, incapable of letting go now that he knows why he is Bones. He turns over onto his back on the bench, but the room is too dark to see more than an outline of Kirk by the door.

After a minute of silence he thinks Jim isn’t going to answer but then he hears, “I wanted to be that guy, Sam. I wanted to be him so badly… sometimes I think that’s why I’m here.”

“In acting, you mean,” surmises Leonard.

Jim hesitates before he agrees. “Yeah.”

“Sam’s not real,” Leonard tells Kirk, the words blunt but his voice not unkind. “I made him up.”

“But you made him to do things we never can. You made him so selfless—forgiving.”

There was truth to that, Leonard thinks. He almost asks, Who do you need to forgive, Jim? but decides against it. Instead, he allows silence to stretch between them, hoping Jim will realize that’s the clue to leave Leonard to his own miserable existence.

“…Bones,” the voice comes out of the dark again, softer, close to a whisper, rather than going away. “I could stay.”

“I don’t plan to give you a reason to,” he replies. “Go home, Jim.”

Leonard is mildly surprised that Jim listens. As the dressing room opens enough for the young man to slip through it, Leonard turns his head in time to catch the dim glow of the hallway lights spilling into the room. For an instant, he sees a face, a pale mask born out of the darkness.

The line of the jaw is hardened with resolve, maybe with desperation, too, or just a desperate kind of unhappiness; the slant of the mouth is weary. So this is what the man truly looks like.

“Wait,” he calls to the kid, “wait!”

In the doorway Jim turns, the irises of his eyes eerily pale.

“What do you want most?” Leonard questions.

“To be remade.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t do that. I don’t have that power—not in real life.”

“Then you aren’t who I thought you were,” Jim murmurs softly.

The door is left ajar in his wake, and the darkness has completely scattered. Leonard cannot look away from the objects in the room, the structure of it, now that he can see.

“None of us are, Jim,” he whispers. With that truth as companion, he closes his eyes and tries to sleep.

In his dream Leonard chases after an elusive man, a creation that he could never truly understand, and wakes to a new realization: the mysterious character has never known himself. In that, they are the same.

-Fini

Another Day, Another Dollar, Part 4

Related Posts:

• Another Day, Another Dollar, Part 4 (#40, J ‘N B Series) (40/40) – from March 29, 2013
• 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
• We Fight to Win (#36, J ‘N B Series) – from January 4, 2013
• A Plot Above All Others (#35, J ‘N B Series) – from September 13, 2012