Title: All Fall Down
Author: klmeri
Fandom: STXII (Star Trek Into Darkness)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 4093
Pairing: Spock/McCoy, Kirk/McCoy, pre-Kirk/Spock/McCoy
Warnings: sexual content; new movie spoilers
Summary: If they weren’t together before, they are now. The aftermath.
Read here or at AO3

I am so torn up inside by some of the things I saw in Star Trek Into Darkness (that’s not to say I didn’t like it!), I am breaking a cardinal rule of mine that I do not write explicit sexual content, i.e. good old porn. Doesn’t matter. JJ ruined me. Therefore I am spreading the ruin.

Also, everybody is gonna have their own version of the ending. It’s nothing less than therapy. Here’s mine.

There were long days of waiting, of hiding their dead commander in secret as they prayed fiercely to every known deity (some unknown ones too) and clung to their sanity by the skin of their teeth. After they fought for the time needed to be certain, to see that first blip on the bio-monitor which caused weeping behind hands and hugging in the corridors, actions the interlopers in and around the Enterprise saw as bewildering and possible symptoms of PTSD, after a large portion of the crew had all their lies in order for the upper echelons of Command because god knows the last thing any of them needed was this knowledge Leonard had stumbled upon during the most devastating moment of his life to fall into the wrong hands and give bastards like Admiral Marcus the power to play with life and death in the name of science, Spock came to him. Leonard should have felt surprised but he didn’t.

The thing about loving James T. Kirk was that one knew Jim would be loved by others too. It was unavoidable. It was something Leonard didn’t dwell on when he had had his nights in his captain’s bed. He couldn’t say for certain if Spock had known that kind of intimacy with Jim, but there was no mistaking the look in Spock’s eyes now or the stiff movement of the Vulcan’s body as Spock entered the small supply closet-turned-bunker that Leonard’s staff had set up for him in the medbay so he could be close to Jim at all times.

Jim had—did—mean a great deal to Spock. Jim dying had meant more, had carved through the Vulcan’s hard exterior to leave him raw and exposed in the same way it had bit into Leonard, and had wrested Spock from the person he thought himself to be.

No words were shared as Spock approached him. Leonard rose slowly from his cot in the corner of the room and put his back to the wall. On the other side of it was Kirk’s recovery room, any noises therein softened by a thick layer of metal alloy, though Leonard had often pressed his ear up against that wall to listen while his body lay prone but refused to rest. Afterwards, he would return the cot to its original position in an adjacent corner, not knowing why he couldn’t keep the cot in the same place or why he felt he had reason to hide his need to know Jim was still with him, even when he couldn’t be there to see it with his own eyes. He had considered keeping a feedback monitor with him at all times but with the total number of injured, courtesy of the Vengeance, they had little equipment to spare as it was. Even now, with Spock so near at hand, Leonard strained to hear something of the sound of Jim’s heartbeat.

Once the Vulcan came to a full stop in front of him, their gazes remained locked, faces shadowed in the dimmed overhead lighting. Seconds stretched into a full minute. Then Spock put a hand on Leonard’s breastbone and pressed him into a retreat until his back met the wall. Maybe in another time and place Leonard would have panicked. Instead he curled his fingers into the collar of Spock’s starched uniform and dragged the Vulcan along with him.

Those long fingers of Spock’s—as deadly as they could be graceful—hovered between his cheekbone and temple before dropping suddenly to his bicep to dig into his flesh. Leonard drew in a sharp breath, then, and opened his mouth.

Spock used the opportunity to kiss him. The meeting of their mouths wasn’t gentle. Leonard was grateful for that.

They broke apart as quickly as they collided, and an unblinking Spock stared at him. Leonard self-consciously licked at the swelling of his bottom lip and shifted to brace his shoulders against the wall and slant his hips. The angle was perfect, connected them all the better in more tantalizing places. Spock’s hand, which was still pressed flat against Leonard’s chest, seized in his shirt. Leonard heard stitches rip and didn’t care. Following impulse, he slid his hands under Spock’s uniform tunic.

Up close, Spock’s eyes were darker than Leonard would have thought; his expression, eerily like a mask with something wild moving beneath. The wild thing had no use for reason or cold logic, wanted nothing to do with restraint. It didn’t like its trappings.

Leonard understood with a shock of clarity that at that moment he knew Spock’s thoughts and feelings better than anyone else on the ship, and Spock knew his. Tonight was a first time for them in more ways than this desperate attraction that made them yank impatiently at each other’s clothes.

And they had no one but each other.

He lifted his face and welcomed Spock’s mouth again. The pressure of the kiss mimicked the slow grind of their hips but it promised nothing beyond the moment.

Who needed or wanted promises? Leonard thought. All they would get in the end was reality.

His hands quit wandering under Spock’s shirt when he had to shed his own. Then he gave in to the urge to trace one of those pointed ears and determine if it was as sensitive as it looked. At the way Spock’s teeth bit into his collarbone, the answer was yes. At some point during his exploration of a Vulcan’s more unique features and Spock’s determination to leave a map of bruises over his shoulders, he lost the rest of his clothes.

His heart rate was no longer sluggish, the pain he suffered no longer confined in his own head. When he cried out, just once, at too sharp a nip, Spock was there to swallow the cry. The goal became what Leonard could feel and how fast he could feel it.

Spock broke off another one of their air-stealing kisses, leaving Leonard nearly dizzy. He raised two fingers to Leonard’s eye level and as Leonard gasped for a breath, a memory came to mind of Uhura and Spock sharing a Vulcan kiss during one of those early months at the start of their commissions aboard the Enterprise. Leonard had walked in on them in the turbolift; he had been embarrassed on their behalf. Once Uhura and Spock had separated later on, he hadn’t been able to look Uhura in the eyes without picturing that strange, intimate display between a Vulcan and a human.

Ironic, now, that feeling was with the taste of Spock on his lips and short, coarse black hair fisted in his hand.

He extended his forefinger and index finger in the same manner and tentatively touched them against Spock’s.

Something surfaced in Spock’s eyes and for a second Leonard thought, startled, he had amused the Vulcan. Then Spock’s fingers caressed against his in one slow stroke before Spock lowered his fingers to rest against the edge of Leonard’s mouth.

Oh.

Leonard felt a flush start at the back of his neck at his mistake and quickly opened his mouth. He didn’t have to think too hard to decide what Spock was going to do with those fingers, given that he was disheveled, bruised, and naked, whereas Spock only had his clothes askew. Leonard captured Spock’s wrist to hold his arm in place and made certain to coat the two fingers well with his spit, though it was fun to see how Spock’s eyes grew hooded as Leonard spent some time sucking on the fingers first. Just when he felt the beginnings of a reaction between Spock’s legs, where he had shamelessly stuck his free hand, he pictured something very pornographic in a curious experimentation to see what would translate through those psy-sensitive finger pads. In the next second, Spock jerked his fingers out of Leonard’s mouth with a wet plop and wasted no time in lifting one of Leonard’s legs and anchoring Leonard farther up the wall.

Somebody didn’t believe in starting out slow, Leonard learned almost immediately, feeling a quick flash of annoyance. He might have bitched about that, but the burn from the two fingers twisting up inside him was good, was definitely needed. He groaned deep in his throat and grappled at Spock’s shoulders to steady himself, having suddenly started to tip to the side. His cock, trapped between their stomachs, gave an appreciative twitch at Spock’s ministrations.

He thought he knew what Spock was about, but Spock kept working him open, twisting and prodding and thrusting his fingers in a peculiar rhythm until Leonard began to pant and squirm. His mouth shaped the Vulcan’s name, but Spock leaned in to stop the sound before it could be born. There was nothing else to do then except ride those fingers the way Spock wanted him to and beg with his body instead of his voice.

He knew Spock had to have a good idea of the location of a human’s prostate, and the green-blooded bastard was avoiding it on purpose. Beginning to feel cheated, Leonard pulled out of their sloppy kiss enough to sink his teeth into Spock’s bottom lip and give it an impatient tug. Spock retaliated by forcing him against the wall until Leonard’s spine was almost flat and their ribs met painfully.

Leonard let go of Spock’s lip, grated out, “Damn it, man,” in frustration.

That seemed to satisfy Spock. The next twist of those fingers inside Leonard hit his prostate with deadly accuracy and, like a fiddle that had been played to an exact tune, Leonard came.

With eyes squeezed shut and a pulse beating rapidly in his throat, Leonard lost himself in his climax. He forgot where he was, and why, and who held him. He returned to his body some time later to the realization that Spock had not come with him. His muscles didn’t want to cooperate, were clumsy as he reached out to do something about that. No one had or should be able to accuse him of being a selfish lover.

Spock intercepted the hand and tucked it against Leonard’s chest, then disentangled his fingers from Leonard’s hair (when had Spock done that?) and stepped back to fall into parade rest. Except for the sweat at his brow and the wrinkles in his normally pristine clothes, Spock looked the same as he always did.

Leonard was confused. He was more than confused and starting to feel the return of the awful sensation of being unable to catch his breath. Since he had opened the body bag brought from Engineering, every time he looked at Jim it was like he was drowning. Now, seeing Spock so still, so silent, he thought he was going to die for certain.

It’s the reality we wake up to, a cruel little voice chimed in his head.

Leonard braced himself for the inevitable dive back into what he’d tried so desperately to escape a moment ago, weakly tried to draw a single second of air—

—until Spock shifted and the shadows left the Vulcan’s face. There was gratefulness in those dark eyes. Inexplicably Leonard’s panic vanished.

Spock made an abrupt turn for the door.

It took a moment but Leonard battled the dryness of his mouth to ask, maybe more desperate than merely hopeful, “Will you come back?”

“Yes,” Spock said, and disappeared into the corridor.

Leonard stumbled over to his cot before his legs could give way. He picked up his clothes and sat on the cot’s edge, holding them for a long time before he managed to put them back on.

That first experience was not their last.

Spock seemed to know Leonard had given up on sleep and for once showed no intention of chastising him for it. Instead, Leonard took his rest periods like every other member of the medical staff who was stretched thin and Spock spent that time turning him inside out. Leonard had no problem with being taken. His intuition told him under normal circumstances Spock did not care either, but their couplings were driven by their own demons. Spock needed to know he had control over Leonard’s reactions, and Leonard only wanted to get away from the ball of hurt in his chest trying to break his strength of will. So he gladly gave over the responsibility and decisions to Spock and focused solely on feeling. He enjoyed the slow build of each climax he was brought to; he revelled in the keen urgency as he pushed back into Spock’s hard thrusts; he felt grounded where their skin met and slipped in sweat.

They almost never spoke during those hours, except in monosyllabic words, and didn’t call each other by name. But there was nothing impersonal about their trysts. One time Spock did something that had Leonard laughing aloud and when Leonard’s laughter suddenly stuttered and turned into tears, Spock simply tucked the one blanket from the cot around him, abandoning their moment’s pleasure to sit with him, one hand a steady presence on the back of Leonard’s neck until the episode passed. Later, as they were preparing to face yet another battle with a Headquarters Admiral, Leonard explained, seemingly out of the blue, “Jim did that once, too.” Spock gave no reply but Leonard saw from the look in his eyes that he understood the message Leonard wanted to convey.

Then, of course, things changed. Jim’s vitals edged into the lower ranges of deathly ill rather than technically-should-be-dead, and they didn’t have to hide him anymore. During the flurry of activity that followed alerting Starfleet Medical of Jim’s transfer to a facility off-ship—and thereby flummoxing the Powers That Be by their change in attitude from Kirk who? to yes, they knew where Jim was and why, yes, he wasn’t dead, contrary to some stupid engineering log that said the Captain had done the outrageous by walking into a live warp core—it seemed natural to end what they had.

Jim came first. For Spock and Leonard, he always had and always would.

Intermittently the thought that he missed his closeness with Spock would stop Leonard in his tracks, but then he would see the movement of Jim’s eyes behind closed eyelids and all thoughts would dissolve, except for You’re what binds us together, kid. Don’t leave us yet.

On the day it was determined Jim could be brought out of his induced coma, the entire floor of the hospital was teeming with visitors. Leonard, as Kirk’s primary physician, had the authority to pace through those final hours inside Jim’s room. He all but demanded Spock be there with him to wait, a demand made for his sake as much as Spock’s.

Spock was not in control of himself, stood like a live wire at Leonard’s back, until the moment Jim opened his eyes. The shift of reality—from dead to alive, my god—was almost too surreal for Leonard, but Spock had instantly grown calmer as Jim blinked in bemusement at the ceiling, and that made Leonard calmer too. It gave him the strength to pretend, as Jim turned those blue, blue eyes to him and recognized him, all was fine. He made a joke about Jim being barely dead.

Then he stepped aside for Spock, moving to the opposite side of the bed to busy himself with a tray containing not one item useful for distraction and to fight down a sudden wave of nausea. Jim thanked Spock for saving his life. It was typical McCoy to butt in and point out others were involved in that saving process too, so he did. Miraculously no one paid much attention to the way he stood, how his shoulders curved downward, or to the softened drawl of his voice.

No one need pay him any mind, he decided, so long as that spark in Spock’s eyes kept growing the more lucid Jim became. Leonard and Spock had done what they could to sustain each other until Jim’s return, and now it was time to really live again.

Typically, Jim wanted out of the hospital the next day. Leonard managed to delay the inevitable by putting Uhura in charge of visitor rotations. Jim was never alone in his room unless he specifically asked to be, or Leonard shooed everyone out because Jim was too damned sensitive to the needs of others to put his own need for rest first.

But less than a week later, the day came when he had to let Jim move freely in the world again. They made it, just the two of them, to Kirk’s assigned apartment before Jim said, “When’s the last time you slept, Bones?”

“You’re the one wobbling like a newborn colt,” Leonard had retorted, steering the man toward the bedroom. “It’s beddy-bye time for Captains.”

Jim let Leonard fuss over him and tuck him into the wide bed, but he wouldn’t allow Leonard to retreat to another room. All it took was a simple “please stay” and Leonard was pulling off his boots and shedding his shirt. He laid on his side to face the bird’s eye view of San Francisco through the floor-to-ceiling window that made up the outer wall of the building. Sleep was a distant concern, a buzzing at the edge of his consciousness which had become pest-like in the last week or so, because he knew his mind would betray any attempt at it.

Jim ordered the lighting system to a setting which tinted the entire stretch of window until the light filtering through was proportionate to a sunset instead of an early afternoon. Leonard listened to Jim’s breathing as he had for nearly a month, acutely aware of the moment Kirk fell into a light doze. Jim roused an hour later when Leonard restlessly tucked one of his arms into a different position under a pillow.

“Here yet?” his friend murmured as if still caught at the edges of a dream.

Leonard didn’t know what that meant so he just encouraged Jim to go back to sleep.

Soon enough, though, Leonard learned Jim had been asking after an expected guest. Leonard tensed when he first saw, reflected in the window, a shadow in the shape of a man just beyond the open bedroom door, and sat up, thinking wildly he didn’t have a weapon and what asshole would break into an apartment to accost a sick man?

The shadow was Spock, dressed in Starfleet standard-issue greys, both uniform and cap. In a disturbingly feline manner, Spock had made his appearance known when he was ready to be noticed. It was a distinct possibility, Leonard realized slowly, his brain clearing of his initial alarm, that Spock had been inside the apartment for a while before he came to the bedroom.

Leonard didn’t move as the Vulcan walked to the unoccupied side of the bed. He watched Spock watch Jim.

Jim shifted, hummed under his breath, and said sleepily, “We’re napping.”

Leonard swallowed a sudden urge to laugh and met Spock’s eyes. “He means ‘get your ass in the bed.'”

Spock raised one eyebrow and reached for the buttons of his uniform jacket. Not understanding the mysterious appearance of the lump in his throat, Leonard stretched out again onto his side and faced away. He still watched Spock, now bare-chested like himself, in the reflection of the window. Once Spock was settled atop the bed sheets on Jim’s left, Leonard couldn’t see the Vulcan at all.

Hours passed. Beyond the darkened room, the sun did set. Leonard didn’t sleep. Nor could he tell if Spock slept. Jim however, dressed in two layers of clothing and cocooned under the comforter because his body temperature seemed to have stabilized just at the cusp of the lower end of a human’s spectrum (probably due to lingering effects of being cryogenically frozen, Leonard guessed), slept solidly enough to fall into soft snoring, a pattern so familiar to Leonard it aggravated the ache in his chest.

Spock left before midnight, eerily quiet as he rose from the bed and dressed in the dark. His fingers brushed against Jim’s cheek before he exited the room, and Leonard didn’t tell him goodbye. What was the point when Spock would return? There was no need to wonder this time.

Not long after, Jim quietly called for the time. Leonard responded before the room’s computer could, because the digital clock was a glare in the window and he had been staring at it all night.

At the realization Leonard was awake, Jim rolled onto his side. A hand found Leonard’s hipbone and stayed there, thumb tracing circles into the cloth of Leonard’s pants.

The confession burst out of him, unbidden: “Spock and I had sex.”

Immediately he hated himself for not saying the whole truth: while you were dead, Jim.

Shock, silence, rejection, disgust, disappointment—any of those things would have been normal reactions. Leonard held his breath in anticipation of them.

But Jim never did the expected, something Leonard always forgot when it mattered most. A breath huffed against the bare skin of Leonard’s arm. It was a poorly disguised laugh.

“If I’d known dying was what it took to get you two together, I’d have done it sooner.”

The aching in Leonard’s chest exploded into real pain. He made a noise, a wounded sound perhaps. He wasn’t sure. The tears surprised them both, but something had broken open inside Leonard and there was no point of return. His body shuddered from head to toe as the tears kept falling.

“Bones,” Jim said, clearly taken aback yet also instantly apologetic.

Jim’s hand cupped Leonard’s shoulder and gave a gentle tug but Leonard rolled forward onto his stomach and pressed his forehead into the bed sheets, ashamed he couldn’t find his control and not wanting Jim to see the mess of emotions stewing behind the banter and insomnia. Jim needed none of his failures and insecurities. Jim had died.

A mouth pressed to the back of Leonard’s head, murmured his name against the shell of his ear before moving downward. It peppered kisses and words of comfort and small reassurances everywhere within reach of his neck and upper back, straight across the line of his shaking shoulders.

The man holding Leonard was someone he thought he’d never see, hear, or feel again. This was Jim, his Jim. Who had died but was not dead.

The knowledge was almost enough to suffocate Leonard.

Eventually his eyes had no more tears to cry, grew gritty and hot and dry. Jim was a quiet weight draped over him; the room around them shared their silence. Leonard’s heart decided at last to settle, though it still ached horribly, and his breathing matched the rhythm of Jim’s. He let his body sink farther into the mattress of the bed, limbs made heavy with exhaustion and spent grief. Without knowing why, he moved his jaw, uncertain if the words were in his mouth or stuck in his head, and swore, I’m not gonna cry over you anymore.

The warm body against his back barely moved but a breath stirred Leonard’s hair just beyond where a nose was digging into his scalp. “Okay,” that breath might have said. “Okay” and “I’m sorry.”

Leonard didn’t have the energy to respond beyond grasping weakly at the fingers curled into his. He fell asleep somehow, some time later, and probably slept harder than he had in weeks, not giving thought to worries that would crowd him on the morrow.

Only when he was ready to face the morning would he wonder: what would become of him and Jim; how three fit together instead of two because there was no turning back for Spock, Kirk, or himself; what Khan’s blood cells were doing to Jim’s that they couldn’t foresee; how he was going to manage when his surgeon’s hands locked up in abject terror the next time Jim was laid out on a slab of cold metal dying or already dead.

He would wonder, and then he would conclude (but never claim out loud) that in their plummet through the Earth’s atmosphere they had all died in some way and come out on the other side. They had all been born anew.

Whether that meant the worst was past or, with this five-year mission, the worst was just beginning, Leonard would never truly know. But it was a question he would always ask himself when he looked at Jim.

-Fini

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