Title: I’m Yours (#1, You Have My Heart)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: pre-Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2175
POV: Jim’s
Prompt: I’M YOURS: Sometimes, underneath that veneer of bravado, Jim just needs to be reminded that he’s got someone who loves him no matter what. And maybe Leonard does, too.
Other Prompts: Why Not? | Bonus
Or read at AO3
A/N: Matching story is the Bones’ POV by caera1996.

On the day after Jim Kirk meets Leonard McCoy on the shuttle in the Riverside shipyard, Jim shows up at a recently vacated dorm room at the precise moment Leonard is about to let himself into his new home. Without preamble, he slings an arm around the man’s shoulders and says, “I will be the best roommate you’ve ever had.”

“What?” is all Leonard can reply, clearly too preoccupied with trying to figure out if Jim has the magical ability to appear in hallways or if the guy had been following him the entire time.

“You’re going to love me,” Jim insists, then punches in their door’s security code and breezes into their room.

“Booones,” a man slurs as he is dragged from a chair in the hospital’s waiting area to an examination room by a grumbling man in white. The other medical personnel simply shake their heads at the sight, for it isn’t the first time Dr. McCoy has treated a patient so disrespectfully.

“For god’s sake, Jim, what did you do? Stick your head in a blender?”

“You should see the other guy.”

“Sit down,” Leonard growls and lets his friend drop backwards onto a metal table. He proceeds to glare down at a padd and stabs at its screen with his finger. “No recently updated blood-work panel. You allergic to anything, kid?”

Jim squints his un-swollen eye. “Erm, dunno.” He spies a tray nearby. “Hey, painkillers! Painkillers would be great, man. Load me up.”

Leonard rolls his eyes ceiling-ward but pops a new clip into a hypospray. “First things first. This should make you sober. Now hold still.”

“Yessir,” comes the obedient reply as Leonard rolls up Jim’s shirt sleeve. “I swear I’ll be the best patient you’ve e—” Leonard jabs him a little too hard with the hypospray. “—ver had. Ow,” Jim protests, then grins stupidly. “You’re going to love me, Bones.”

All he gets in response is a huff and a second hypospray shot to the sensitive juncture of his neck and shoulder that makes him see double.

“Awesome,” he says at the same time Leonard—both Leonards grab at his toppling form.

Three and a half years later, a newly re-christened starship and her youngest captain prepare to leave the space dock orbiting Earth at top warp. Jim, seeming very at-home in his captain’s chair, activates the line between the bridge and Sickbay. “Bones, strapped in yet?”

A sour voice replies, “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Relax, old man,” Jim tells his friend, “I’ll be the best captain you’ve ever had.” He smirks for the benefit of his eavesdropping bridge crew. “You’re going to love me.”

“Don’t let him up,” Jim orders. He bends over to look his CMO in the face while Sulu and Spock pin the struggling man down on either side. McCoy is sweating, sneering, and generally scaring the shit out of the remaining members of the landing party. The look in his eyes is so un-Bones-like, it gives Jim a minor heart attack.

“Bones,” he coaxes. “Bones, calm down.”

Leonard jerks his head up and tries to take off the end of Jim’s nose with a snap of his teeth.

“Captain,” Spock interjects, “I do not believe he can be reasoned with in this state.”

As Leonard, fuelled by whatever ‘deity’ a clan of humanoids had let inhabit his body, nearly lifts Sulu off the ground in his rage, Jim joins his officers in holding McCoy down and demands, “How much longer?”

“Until sunrise,” Sulu supplies, voice strained.

Leonard twists and bucks and continues his unnatural growling.

Jim grips his friend’s shoulders until his knuckles turn white and drops his forehead to the man’s chest, both weary and afraid.

Bones, he prays soundlessly, come back. Please. You were right. We shouldn’t have come down here. I promise I’ll be a better listener—the best listener you’ve ever had. If you just… come back.

There is no point in thinking or saying You’re going to love me.

This mindless, angry creature under him knows nothing of love.

He has had fevers before but this one is the worst. He manages to crawl partway inside the bathroom despite how dizzy he is before passing out. Probably Spock finds him like that hours later, face-down in his own drool and sweat. He recalls the rest of the events in hazy impressions: noise, voices, lights, and insufferable heat. Always and forever the heat.

Leonard tells Jim during one of his rare, lucid moments that he has contracted Vegan choriomenigitis. Jim might have replied, “Put that on my tombstone.” He can’t remember.

They knocked him out for three days, he is later told. Bones doesn’t use the word coma but Jim recognizes what goes unsaid. Apparently he came very close to dying on his biobed.

“But I’m good now,” he half-jokes to the pinched and tired-looking face of his doctor.

“For now,” Leonard agrees too slowly.

The second time he wakes up, feeling much stronger than before, M’Benga is at his bedside instead of McCoy.

Jim has a moment of panic in which he thinks he has passed on the virus to Leonard, but M’Benga assures him they had him in a proper quarantine from start to finish. Dr. McCoy needs his own rest, he is informed, per the orders of the First Officer.

Jim silently commends Spock for sticking to that decision in light of Leonard’s temper.

“I’ll ask you a few routine questions, Captain,” M’Benga goes on to say now that Jim is placated and in the right frame of mind to respond. He asks after Jim’s pain level, his appetite, and any memories surrounding his treatment. Jim replies to all of those questions as best he can.

But a small something which concerns him he keeps to himself… because who knows, when a man is dying, if what he sees hallucination or reality?

At his most feverish, his Leonard or a dream-Leonard had tried to soothe him, had said things like “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had” and “Now tell me I’m going to love you, Jim. Tell me that, and I will tell you I already do.“

Jim closes his eyes after M’Benga is gone and thinks, I wish you did love me, Bones.

“Brat.”

“Grump.”

“Jackass.”

Jim raises his middle finger to his companion. “Asshole.” Then he glances to his left. “C’mon, Spock. We’re playing the name-game.”

“If you are referring to your insults of each other, I would rather not.”

“Vulcan,” Leonard shoots over Jim’s head.

“Indeed,” agrees Spock, who then says no more.

Jim adjusts the swath of fabric around his head. His nose hurts from sunburn, and his legs hate him.

They have to carry on.

“He’s too goddamn comfortable in this environment,” Leonard gripes on Jim’s right. “Like a lizard. A green, cold-blooded lizard.”

“Bones.”

“What? I’m dying here, Jim—we both are! If sunstroke doesn’t get us, dehydration will. Probably not before the pustules burst on our feet and get infected and—”

Jim whirls on McCoy and slaps a hand over his mouth. “Enough!” he cries. “You may be the best doctor the Fleet’s ever had but enough already. I’m not going to love you anymore if I have to hear of all the gruesome ways I’m going to die!”

Leonard starts to say something, only to look cross-eyed at Jim’s hand against his mouth and rip it away. “Blugh, disgusting, Jim.” Then, “What was that second part?”

Jim frowns at him. “Second part?”

Spock states matter-of-factly, “I believe the Captain declared his affection for you.”

Jim’s ears turn bright red. Thankfully they are covered up by his headwrap. “What? No!” he denies, turning partly toward Spock to show the stupid Vulcan how betrayed he is by this remark.

Leonard narrows his eyes.

“Look!” Jim declares, tossing out his arm in a random direction. “Civilization! We’re saved!”

Leonard turns to look, shielding his eyes from the sun. Jim tries to figure out how far he can run before Spock gets annoyed, stuns him with a phaser and drags him back to their three-person group to die of embarrassment.

“Huh,” Leonard says, sounding pleased.

Spock follows up with an infinitesimal hint of relief in his “Let us proceed” and starts forward, Leonard on his heels.

“Hey, wait!” Jim calls, surprised, and catches up to them. “Where are we going?”

“To the settlement, Captain,” Spock replies.

Jim squints. “That’s a rock, a lot of colored… rocks?”

“He needs glasses,” Leonard tells Spock, “because he’s allergic to the corrective treatment, and laser surgery is a temporary solution to a permanent problem… but of course he won’t sign the damn form for them.”

“If you submit the form to me, Doctor, I will approve it.”

“I appreciate that, Spock.”

Jim trudges along behind them, not certain if it is a good or bad thing that the two men are suddenly getting along.

If Jim had thought at any point he had escaped the nosiness of Leonard McCoy, he turns out to be wrong.

“Got a question for you,” the man says, giving Jim’s cabin entrance a perfunctory knock.

Jim stops rubbing at his eyes and puts a padd aside. “Ship’s business?”

“Nope.”

This isn’t an abnormal thing to Jim, so he waves the man toward his desk. “Shoot.”

“How much do you love me?”

Jim falls out of his chair in the process of placing his feet on his desk. Then, in his attempt not to come across as a complete and utter clumsy fool, he hits his head on the underside of his desk.

Bones drags him away from the furniture and not to Jim’s surprise at all starts waving a tricorder around Jim’s head.

“You’re lucky you’ve got a thick skull,” McCoy concludes, “and that I came prepared.”

“Prepared?”

“For you to run into stuff,” Leonard explains.

Jim is fairly certain he has just been insulted. He pushes none-too-gently at the man next to him, then climbs to his feet with the claim “It’s your fault for surprising me!”

Leonard stands as well and lays the tricorder down on Jim’s desk. “So back to the question.”

Jim’s palms start to sweat. “Uh, hit my head harder than I thought. Did you ask me something?”

“Don’t play the innocent with me, kid.”

“Totally not playing you, Bones!” Jim laughs.

Leonard tilts his head in a disturbingly Vulcan kind of way. “You seem nervous.”

“I’m not nervous!”

Leonard indicates the little beads of sweat that have popped out on Jim’s forehead. “Then are you overheated, Jim?”

When there is no escape, Jim is very good at improvising. “Yes! Really overheated. In fact, I’m gonna go take a shower. A cold shower, because I can totally do that. Water ‘n all.” He grins too widely. “Captain’s privileges.”

“Okay,” Leonard agrees too easily. “I’ll just wait here.” He locks his hands behind his back and looks about the room with faux-curiosity. “Should warn you, though. Spock’s locked his side of the bathroom.”

Jim can hack it.

“You can’t hack it,” Leonard adds, “completely before I hypo you. We did a trial run.”

“You’re in this together?” Jim boggles at the notion.

Leonard shrugs a little. “Spock thinks it’s more efficient for the ship if you stop pining after me. Also, he really doesn’t like getting involved with emotions, and he knew I wouldn’t stop pestering him until he helped me sort this out.”

Jim’s brain started fizzling somewhere around the part where Leonard defined Jim’s feelings as ‘pining’. Because he is, he realizes, pining after his best friend.

“Shit,” he says.

“Shit good, or shit bad?” Leonard wants to know.

Jim finds a chair and drops into it. “It depends. Am I about to ruin our friendship if I admit that I love you?”

Something sparks in Leonard’s eyes, but he doesn’t move forward and his voice is too contained for Jim to read much into it. “We’re friends, Jim. I doubt anything could change that.”

“I don’t know,” Jim expresses his doubt. “I am really good at being short-sighted. And stupid.” He lifts his shoulders slightly. “Sometimes conceited?”

“Arrogant,” Leonard amends. “Foolhardy. Thoughtless. And ridiculously irritating.”

Jim makes a face.

“But you’re also selfless, kind, courageous, steadfast, and fair-minded. I’d say that’s a nice balance.”

“I think you think too highly of me, Bones.”

Leonard comes to him, then. “Jim, how much do you love me?”

Jim sighs noiselessly. “Too much.”

“Good,” says Leonard, “because I also love you more than can possibly be healthy. I figure that’s a start for us both.”

Jim resists the urge to reach out and grab Leonard’s hand. Perhaps sensing this, Leonard offers his hand to Jim. Jim takes it, grateful for the connection. It anchors him.

With a wry twist to his mouth, Leonard snorts softly. “You’re going to love me, kid.”

“Moot point,” Jim counters, rising to his feet. “I already do.”

-Fini

Related Posts:

• Bonus – from February 14, 2014
• Why Not? – from February 14, 2014