Title: The White Horse (18/18)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk, Spock, McCoy
Summary: Jim Kirk was a strange man. A silent man. No one knew much about him or, if they did, were not willing to say what they did know, especially to the town’s newest magical occupant. Not that Leonard McCoy cared. He had an old curse to track down and unravel by the year’s end. Meanwhile a killer was tracking him. AU.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
or at AO3

Epilogue

“What happened next?”

Leonard reached out and adjusted the blanket that Joanna kept pushing at with her hands. “What’d you mean, what happened next?” He pretended to be offended. “I saved his life!”

The child sneaked a glance over Leonard’s shoulder then started fiddling with her hospital covers again. “Did you get hurt?” she asked.

His girl was a little too perceptive sometimes. “Do I look hurt, munchkin?”

Her eyes skimmed his face and at last she shook her head.

Leonard smiled and tweaked her nose. “Your old papa is fine—except, of course, that now he’s got no more adventure stories to tell you! Not that that matters,” he said. “It’s bedtime.”

Joanna protested.

“Darlin’, you can’t fool me.”

“But I’m not sleepy!”

He tucked her hands under the blanket and smoothed it down over her arms. “It’s okay, Jo. I know you’re tired. Go to sleep.”

Her eyelids started to droop but in the next second shot open again. “I don’t wanna.”

And he knew why. Leonard leaned down to kiss her cheek and whisper in her ear, “The sooner you rest those eyes, the sooner you can see me again.”

“You won’t leave?” she whispered back.

“No, I won’t,” he promised her, and that seemed to be enough for Joanna.

She closed her eyes. Leonard turned down the lights in the room and watched her for a long time. When he was certain she had actually drifted off, he went to the man slumped in a chair in the corner and poked his shoulder. “C’mon, cafeteria break,” he said, and nodded towards the door.

The guy trundled after him as they moved down the corridor of the pediatric unit.

Leonard was thinking about how he wished the first-floor coffee shop kept late hours when he ran into his father exiting the elevator.

“Len,” his dad greeted, before staring at the man behind him. “I see your friend’s still around.”

“Can’t get rid of him,” Leonard complained. “I’ve tried, believe me.” He said to his shadow, “Jim, you remember my father.”

Jim Kirk nodded, looking much too grave.

“We’re headed to the cafeteria,” Leonard explained. “I need caffeine.”

“You need sleep.”

“No can do, old man. I’ve slept enough for a lifetime.” He eyed his father suspiciously. “It’s late. Why are you here anyway?”

David McCoy held up a paper bag. “Mazie said this here is your dinner, and she’s expectin’ you both back at the house by ten to get some decent rest in a decent bed.”

Leonard sighed softly as he took the proffered bag. “She’s such a marionette.”

“Go on home, Len. I’ll stay the night.”

But Leonard shook his head. “You’ve done more than your share already, Dad. Besides I… I just want to sit here with her awhile. I was gone too long.”

David clasped his son’s arm. “You’re here now, and that’s what’s important.”

Leonard had to resist the strong urge to hug the man. He said instead, “Jim’ll go with you. That ought to placate Mazie a bit.” Leonard handed Jim the bag, then pushed the silent man towards his father.

“I guess the boy will have to do. Come along, then,” Leonard’s father ordered as he turned back to face the elevator door and pushed the Down button.

Clutching the bag, Jim’s expression was trapped somewhere between bewildered and panicked. He had been subject to Mazie’s mothering before, and apparently it had left a lasting impression.

Amused, Leonard caught Jim’s eye and mouthed good luck, kid.

By the time Jim parted his lips, the elevator had dinged and he was being hauled backwards into it by the elder McCoy.

Leonard turned away and, in that moment, remembered after many, many months of hardship, fear, and guilt how it felt to laugh.

~~~

He had meant to die. It was as simple as that.

Like the white horse had claimed, a life could be traded for a life. Leonard had offered himself in order to help Jim Kirk return to the living. He hadn’t considered his ill daughter, still faithfully waiting for his return, or those who might have taken offense to his sacrifice. He hadn’t thought of anything at all beyond finding a way to counteract his terrible deed. And so he died, the light in his eyes fading even as Jim’s brightened. It caused a ruckus among the bystanders but he was too far-gone to care. He was transversing a long tunnel, the place where one world stopped and another one began.

Then something strange happened: a figure blocked his path and said, “Bad.”

Leonard was surprised enough to stop and respond, “What?”

With a child’s height and a manner that was no better, it hissed again, “Bad. Bad human.“

Leonard didn’t feel very human just then, so he shrugged without arguing and kept going.

But it refused to let him alone, following at his heels and taunting, “Bad, bad, bad!”

Leonard sped up but couldn’t seem to shake the damn thing.

“Bad human, baaaaaaaad.”

Finally Leonard stopped again and snarled back, “So what! So what if I’m a bad human, you fugly little—” It dawned on him just who was dogging his steps. “—Keenser?”

Keenser hopped up and down at the mentioning of his name and pointed a recriminating finger at Leonard. “Bad human and bad friend!”

“What are you even doing here?”

“Stupid human die.”

“Yeah, Jim, but I don’t… wait.” He thought about it. He thought hard, then looked towards the end of the tunnel. “Oh hell,” he concluded. “I’m the dead one, aren’t I?”

“Very dead.”

“You’re not good at comforting people, I can tell.” Leonard hesitated and asked, more to himself than anyone else, “I guess it’s over for me?”

But once again it was Keenser who had a different opinion. “Not yet,” it said and veered off into the darkness at the tunnel’s edge.

Leonard had a moment to wonder if following a demon was a smart thing to do. Then he decided he wasn’t likely to have another chance to do something other than quietly slipping off to the afterlife. Maybe he would end up like Winona; or maybe he would find himself in a place far worse than death.

But did that really matter?

Did it, when Keenser was right about his selfless yet very selfish choice?

Keenser’s hissing came out of the dark, a warning for the human to get his ass into gear.

Leonard did, plunging into the darkness after him and into a shadow world beyond it.

~~~

“Did it die?” Leonard’s daughter asked him the next morning.

She had woken, been delighted to see her father still at her bedside, and promptly bombarded him with the questions she hadn’t thought of the day before.

Leonard considered this particular question with a comically thoughtful face which made the little girl giggle. Then he cleared his throat and answered somewhat truthfully: “There’s something about the supernatural, Jo, that a lot of people don’t figure out until much too late.”

She pulled a stuffed toy off her small nightstand, tucked it beneath her arm, and gave her father a very serious nod. “They can’t die.”

“That’s right. They can be stopped, they can be contained, and they can be removed from the world but we can’t make them cease to exist.”

“Like magic.”

His mouth thinned into a smile. “Like that, sweetheart. A lot like that, actually.” In fact, he wondered why it had taken him so long to see the parallel.

No… he didn’t wonder, he knew why. Hatred made a man blind to many truths.

“Grandpa says you wish you weren’t different…” Joanna tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth. “…but I think it’s okay to be different. I don’t want you to be un-different, Daddy.”

Leonard glanced down at his hands, turned them over and inspected them. “I might not be different anymore, Jo,” he confessed.

“Is it because of the bad thing?”

“Yes,” he answered, deciding that was a little bit true. He would never tell her about dying, or about coming back. He would never tell anyone except those who had experienced it with him. In truth, he didn’t think he could explain it if he tried. It had been too surreal, and even now seemed more like a dream than a certainty.

The man gripped his knees and stopped himself from going down that path. There were more important things to focus on at present, the main one being the child who watched him so closely. He was glad to be at her side again.

And he was more than glad that he wasn’t as useless to her as he had once been.

~~~

In the shadow world, Leonard McCoy met Winona Kirk.

Initially he thought it was some kind of trick. Then she hugged him and said, almost disapprovingly, “You’ve been stupid.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

Winona tugged him through a murky grey mist until they were standing over a small sun. It wasn’t actually a sun, he came to realize quickly. It was her son, Jim Kirk.

“Weird,” muttered the man.

“Not really,” Jim’s mother replied. “He’s always been bright. You saved him. Thank you.”

“What about you?” Leonard asked. “Are you all right?”

“I’m no different than I have been.” Her eyes searched his face. “Leonard, will you go back?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I can.”

“Look down” was all she said.

He did and frowned. “What is that?”

“A light. A hope.”

“What’s it doing in my chest?”

Winona smiled at him. “They’re trying to keep you with them. So, yes, you can go back.” She hesitated. “If you do, will you help him understand?”

“You mean Jim.”

“He never hurt me, Leonard. Tell him that until he believes it.”

“What about you?” he asked again.

“I’m okay now,” the woman said, and without another word disappeared.

Leonard looked around for Keenser but couldn’t find him either. There was a voice he heard, though, and when the mist parted he saw it belonged to Pavel Chekov.

“McCoy!” the young man cried, eyes wide.

Leonard was confused. “You can see me?”

Pavel started to recede a little. “No! Mr. McCoy, can you hear me? Come here, come here!”

Leonard went after him, until a long distance suddenly became tiny indeed and Pavel was right upon him—who then seemed very fierce despite his adolescent face.

“You will come back now! The Government is very angry. He—yes, he says he did not give you permission to die.”

Leonard hmphed. “No deal.”

“No…? Oh, I understand.” Pavel said to someone else that stood like a blur of color to the right, “He wants to make a deal.”

Leonard sputtered.

Pavel returned his attention to Leonard. “Okay. Here is deal as told to me: no… jail? Good. I like this already… and retraction on your arrest warrant.”

If Leonard could have laughed, he would have; but he also thought that he ought to take advantage of the situation, however ludicrous it was. “That’s not good enough. I want a cleared name, a clean record and paternal rights to my kid.”

Pavel relayed this message quickly, and then spat something in a flurry of Russian. To Leonard, he eventually gave the verdict.

“Government says he does not know why he is going to this trouble for you. He also says it is very bad form to blackmail a federal agent when the federal agent is attempting to save your life. That last part I personally do not agree with, of course.”

“I’m with you on that one, kid.” Leonard gathered his courage. “Okay, what should I do?”

“It is simple,” Pavel said. “This, I can do. Take my hand.”

Leonard saw him extend it and in turn extended his own.

Pavel was true to his word. He was, Leonard started to understand, somebody who could actually bring back the dead.

And so waking up inside an ambulance was deja-vu; finding a crowd of faces around Leonard whom he recognized, less so. Jim, he noticed before blacking out, sat in a corner beneath a blanket looking positively stunned.

Leonard could empathize with him.

~~~

It seemed strange at first that Jim had a desire to come with Leonard to the hospital on a nearly daily basis. Leonard figured this had to do with the fact that Jim insisted he owed Leonard for saving his life, which was a stupid idea in itself. Then Leonard began to think Jim was just paranoid about losing all that he had regained—the ability to speak and his humanity—and somehow believed that sticking close to Leonard would keep him safe.

But that turned out to be wrong too. In the end, Leonard simply decided Jim had an unfathomable reason for trailing behind him.

That didn’t stop his father from asking, “Why’s he here?” to which Leonard had replied honestly that he didn’t know. Then, when David McCoy had pressed, “Why haven’t you done something about it?”, Leonard had just stared a little too blankly, unable to think of a good response. Oddly his father never brought the matter up again, perhaps realizing a heart of the matter which Leonard was oblivious to.

Leonard only knew that Jim had his good days and his bad days. Today was quickly turning into one of the bad days, and Leonard frankly didn’t have the patience to prod the man out of his pensive state. It was plenty for him to keep Joanna company in between minutes of prying progress reports out of the tight-lipped hospital staff. They didn’t know why the treatments were miraculously working, and for some reason that made them antsy. Leonard just wanted to know if she was going to be alright but no one would offer him that much hope—yet, at least. He knew something they didn’t, of course, and so he kept quiet about a hope of his own—and the small hex bag of Bella Winters’ bones he had unearthed from an Arkansas grave on his way home. Someone had told him once that a person who cursed ill fortune on another person wasn’t the same as someone who wished for it, the difference being that latter had tenuous control until the next spell came along. Leonard had never been good at spells but he knew plenty who were.

But none of that was anyone’s damn business anyway, except for his family’s.

Leonard had come back from just such a teeth-pulling conversation with Clay Treadway to find Joanna drawing alone.

“Where’d Jim get off to?” he asked, because there was an unspoken agreement between him and Kirk that if Leonard went off to wrangle the doctors, Jim stayed behind to keep an eye on Joanna.

Suddenly he was furiously mad.

Joanna must have seen the flash of anger in his face because she said, “It’s not his fault, Daddy. I think he heard something bad.”

How did she know that? “Did he tell you something?”

She hunched a little and made a noncommital noise. “Mr. Jim’s not so good with his words.”

He snorted. That was the understatement of the century.

“He’s upset, is all,” the little girl insisted. “Don’t be mean to Mr. Jim.”

“Okay, okay… but you shouldn’t be on his side anyway, baby girl. I’m your father, and he’s just… Mr. Jim,” he relented. Damn. “I guess I’ll have to find him now. Will you be okay for a minute, Jo?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll tell the nurse to check in on you.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not a baby.”

He touched the edge of the cap that covered the fuzz of her regrowing hair. “I know. You’re a lot braver than I ever was at your age.”

She cut her eyes at him then put down her colorful marker and folded her drawing, handing it to him. “This is for Mr. Jim. Don’t look at it! He has to look at it first!”

With a wry expression, Leonard tucked the paper away in his pocket. “Joanna, you don’t like Mr. Jim, do you?”

Her face lit up.

“Never mind,” Leonard said hurriedly because, god no, the last thing he could handle was Joanna having a crush on the weird, bullheaded stranger who had invited himself into Leonard’s car and subsequently forced Leonard to endure listening to a cat yowling in a pet carrier for the duration of a trip south to Mississippi.

It was true, he thought. Jim owed him his soul for that fuckin’ awful ride.

Jim wasn’t in the cafeteria or the coffee shop; he wasn’t lurking in the breezeway between buildings or inside the Pediatrics playroom playing checkers with some of the young patients.

Leonard did finally locate him in the small park across the street. It brought back memories, walking across the strip of grass, seeing the bench he had shared with his father once upon a time. The park was nearly empty that late in the day, and cast in pale golds and oranges. Leonard unthinkingly paused to lay a hand upon the bark of a tree and, for a moment, was stunned to learn that he could still hear the faint whispering of a dryad.

He went to Jim, who was standing silently under the canopy of two trees with intermingling branches. His head was bent as his sneaker toed at a pile of fallen leaves.

Leonard almost spoke, almost, but then he had the impression Jim already knew he was there. So he waited patiently for the kid to say what was on his mind.

Jim half-turned towards him, a second later. “D-Drownings,” he bit out the word roughly, as a person did who was still re-learning how to speak. “Minnesota. Last week.”

Leonard sucked in a breath.

“Four kids,” Jim continued.

“Young?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus.”

Jim turned to look at him fully, then, the shade of the trees and sunlight warring on his face.

“It’s not your fault,” said Leonard. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Not so sure, Bones.”

“What do you want to do?”

Jim made a face.

“Do you want to go after it? You’ve got a life now, Jim—a real one, not whatever fucked up existence that thing forced on you. You have a chance to live free, and believe me there are a lot of people who can’t say the same.”

“Like you?”

“Hell yes, like me! I may not be what I was, but I’ve still got this—” He flashed the Mark. “—and it will always be there. So I’ll ask you again: are you sure you could give it up?”

Jim glanced away.

When the man didn’t reply, Leonard huffed, exasperated. “Jim… I’m trying to save us a lot of pain here. If you go, then I’m gonna have to go too—”

“Bones.”

“—and what are we, really? We ain’t specialists at this kind of thing! I mean, I know there’s Scotty and god knows, it’s bad enough that he’s converted poor Chekov to the dark side.”

“Bones,” Jim said again, this time amused. “Shut up.”

“Why?” Leonard said.

Jim just shook his head, a hint of a smile quirking his lips.

Leonard had a bad feeling. He really did. But that could have been the park’s doing because it suddenly had a little extra charge of energy, like a reaction to an incoming wave of magic.

Leonard’s bad feeling turned into a bad suspicion. He closed his eyes, just briefly, and thought at the earth, What are you?

The answer made his eyes pop open and caused him to turn around.

“No,” he denied, spying the thin figure eating up the distance between them with a long-legged stride. “Oh no.”

“Sorry, Bones.”

“There’s no way in hell—are you outta your mind, Jim!”

Jim’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “J-Just hear him out.”

“If he comes near me, I’ll gut him!”

“He said… he can f-fly us first-class.”

“I’ll string him up by his pointy aristocratic nose!”

It seemed all of the ranting in the world wasn’t going to make a difference: Jim moved in to pat his shoulder pityingly, the spirits in the trees started tittering in welcome of the earth magic, and Spock’s hawk-eyed stare had them pinned.

Leonard didn’t know whether to run or curse his luck. In lieu of both, he pulled the first thing to hand out of his pocket and threw it in the agent’s direction. The paper made a pathetic projectile, however (in addition to giving him a serious paper cut); it floated to the ground to lie innocuously in the sun.

Leonard stared down at his daughter’s drawing in disbelief.

Jim leaned over and squinted at it. “Cool,” he murmured. “You look funny.”

And Leonard did: as a stick-figure with spiky brown hair clearly in the middle of a rage over something. Next to him was a yellow-haired stick figure loosely portraying Jim which wore, of all things, a cape; on the other side of Leonard was a stick man with an angled hat who was as tall as the green squiggly trees near them and who also had an enormous nose sticking out to the side.

Mr. Jim, Joanna had written across the top, and His Friends.

Jim picked up the drawing and folded it neatly, tucking it out of sight.

“I give up,” Leonard sighed.

“Good,” Jim replied, and moved forward to meet Spock.

Leonard hung back for a moment, rubbing his thumb against the thin cut on his finger in irritation as the prim-and-proper agent held a low conversation with Jim. Because his pain disappeared in almost an instant, Leonard looked down in surprise. The paper cut was gone.

Magic, it seemed, had found its way back to him.

The End

A/N: Some headcanon things I didn’t mention…
– Sulu is the one who called Spock about the Minnesota drownings since he’s ‘in charge’ of that region
– Pike survives but is tried for the murder of Matt Decker and still somehow mysteriously disappears (although I’m guessing he keeps in close contact with Jim)
– Uhura figures out the underground network of hunters and becomes one herself, which isn’t easy given her family
– Scotty is gleefully cruising around in Zelda with Chekov riding shotgun and Keenser blasting rock songs on the radio

But I’m not going to write that because there’d be no end to this story otherwise. That’s it. Thanks for following along!

Related Posts:

• The White Horse (17/18) – from May 10, 2014
• The White Horse (16/18) – from May 10, 2014
• The White Horse (15/16) – from April 4, 2014
• The White Horse (14/16) – from March 7, 2014
• The White Horse (13/16) – from February 3, 2014

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