Title: Bonus (#3, You Have My Heart)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4591
POV: Jim’s
Prompt: Bonus story for jim_and_bones‘s 2014 Sweethearts Challenge; I wrote this in addition to the prompts because the story refused to be put aside. Actually, I wrote it first. When I realized it didn’t fit I’M YOURS or WHY NOT, I cried a little then finished it anyway.
Other Prompts: I’m Yours | Why Not?
Or read at AO3

They never talk about love. It simply isn’t a word they use, an expression in their eyes or a confession they whisper at night in each other’s arms. How could it be any of those things? When they started this relationship, they agreed on “Don’t love me.” Love is to be avoided at all costs. The price for loving is pain.

But Jim has never been one to abide by the rules, even when he means to. He wakes up in a cavern with water dripping into his face and realizes his friend and partner means more to him than anyone else he can think of.

He loves Leonard, and Leonard is dead.

~~~

Jim sits on a rock in the dark, watching the light from his activated beacon shiver into fragments across a pool of water. Occasionally he stirs, restless, and picks a pebble out from a crevice in his perch, plopping it into the water to watch it sink. He had washed his face and hands earlier but the lingering smell of blood is still strong enough to disturb him.

If he wasn’t alone, he imagines a hand would have landed on his shoulder in understanding. Leonard had always been quick to yell at him but also quick to provide comfort.

All Jim can think about now is how he wants to hear Bones say “Captain—”

He jumps, startled by the actual sound of a voice.

It says again, “Captain Kirk?”

Jim slides off the rock and grabs his abandoned communicator, surprised because he had been certain it didn’t work.

“Kirk here,” he croaks, having not spoken aloud in some time.

But the voice from the communicator repeats mindlessly, “Captain Kirk?”

Jim sits back, letting the useless device dangle from his fingertips. Eventually it goes silent, and he falls back into silence too.

~~~

Jim wakes up cold and hungry and staggers toward the side of his prison that would have been his way out if it hadn’t caved in. Digging and scraping at the large boulders gives him something to do. He stops once his fingertips are bleeding. Then he goes to the pool and soaks his hands where the water is icy enough to numb the pain.

The communicator has been talking to him on and off for days. Sometimes it just calls him; at other times it provides tiny snippets of information—but none of which he can bring himself to care about. Today he puts the speaker against his ear because the signal is so faint, the words are merely murmurs. He had drifted off to sleep to those murmurs a little while ago.

It must be Uhura who is talking to him, because at times the flow of words will stop and Jim will hear a humming instead, a melody—almost a lullaby—specific to her people. It’s as if she knows he is alone and seeks to ease that for him.

“The ship never made it to Xtal,” she is currently whispering in his ear. “As soon as we heard that, Spock turned the Enterprise around.”

Spock will take care of the ship, Jim thinks, maybe better than he ever did.

“We know you and Doctor McCoy are down there, Captain. All of us are looking. We will find you, I swear it. I wish—” Her voice catches.

Jim lowers the communicator, feeling his lungs tighten and tighten until he can’t force any more air into them. Why can’t he breathe?

C’mon, kid, work through it.

Jim tries. The result is a sputtering wheeze. He thumps a fist against his ribcage hoping to loosen the painful knot there. It doesn’t work.

The Bones’ voice in his head grows angry: Breathe, damn it! You’re not dying on me!

Bones, he thinks, helpless, falling forward slightly as his vision turns gray. Bones.

I know, Jim, Leonard would say in turn, but you have to fight for me. Breathe.

And Jim does, his lungs relaxing enough to let him. The air he pulls in through his mouth is crisp, almost sweet-tasting. He spends several minutes simply appreciating it.

At last, when he is calmer, Jim swipes at his eyes and raises the comm back to his ear.

Static greets him. Uhura is gone.

~~~

His eyesight is a little weird today. There might be a person sitting on the other side of the pool, someone with long, spindly arms and a nearly opaque body that looks like rippling water when a fingertip touches the pool. Jim is afraid to move, lest he disturb it.

Gradually, as he watches, the surface of the water takes on a different hue, not the cold deep black of the rocky bed beneath but something lighter, like the pearlescent sheen of the inside of a seashell. A face rises up toward the surface, stopping just shy of it as a reflection sits behind glass. Jim sees a wave of hair, much darker than his own, and the line of a nose; the eyes, which in his last memory were open and sightless, remain closed in peaceful slumber.

The image melts away as quickly as it had taken shape. The mysterious chameleon fades with it.

Jim comes back to himself to discover he has dragged his body to the edge of the pool. But when he dips his head down to look into the water, he sees two bloodshot eyes staring back at him and is, for a time, transfixed by the agony in them. Then he moves, too abruptly in his disappointment, and the eyes blink.

Jim does not want to look at himself any longer. He eases back and pillows his head on an arm.

From past experience he knows he is in trouble once the hallucinations start. No wonder he hadn’t felt too affected by the cold since he woke up. A fever is the only explanation, and with fevers come imaginings he would never picture in his right mind.

Bones would be so pissed off right now.

Jim’s throat tightens. He closes his eyes as they start to water of their own accord.

His regret seems more poignant than ever. If he had been smarter, faster, anything that could have prevented a tragedy… He wishes he had never agreed to take on the mission in the first place, or coaxed his Chief Medical Officer into playing sidekick.

Hadn’t he teased McCoy by saying they would share quarters and have plenty of personal time on the convoy to Xtal?

Bones had smacked him for not thinking with his primary brain but agreed to join him nonetheless, saying something about keeping Jim from making a diplomatic mess because he couldn’t keep his pants on for more than five seconds at a time.

Jim had read between the lines and heard, Yeah, I want to spend time with you too.

That makes Leonard’s death his fault.

Jim drapes an arm across his eyes and presses his mouth flat when it trembles.

There have been mistakes and mishaps he has learned to forgive himself for over the years, but he knows this will never be one of them.

~~~

The cavern is full of dream-shapes: not rocks but more long-armed creatures, different sizes—two of them, then four, then eight—all luminescent in the dark. Some appear to be in movement, though when he looks straight at them, they still.

He tries to communicate with these creatures at first, but they don’t talk back and his words begin to trip over each other anyway. His face feels hot to the touch, he realizes. Soon his eyes become painfully swollen and difficult to keep open. At last he gives in and closes them, if only to block out the strangeness he feels surrounds him.

There is a sensation against his skin sometime later on, a cold touch or a droplet of water. He cannot tell which and finds he cares even less.

When Jim next wakes, his fever has passed, taking his imaginary cave-dwellers with it.

~~~

The beacon falls prey to time and the lack of an energy source. In the moment Jim comprehends that the signal has died, he grips it terribly hard then shatters it against the nearest rock without remorse.

He will surely die now, he thinks, experiencing a measure of satisfaction.

But in truth, to his great surprise, the beacon does save him after all.

“I found it, I found it…” sputters the broken communicator not long after. “I don’t know how, how, oh god, but it’s there—mixed up—yesterday’s transmission—Captain? Captain, if you can hear me, we’ve found you!“

Jim can only stare at the happy buzz of chaos filtering through the speaker. That he should be elated is lost on him.

He curls his fingers at his sides. They’ve grown cold.

~~~

It had been a dream, he thought. A hallucination. A brain malfunction.

Then the drilling starts.

The sounds are faint in the beginning on the other side of the rock wall, growing steadily louder until the first pebble dislodges and falls, leaving behind a sliver of light. Jim retreats to the opposite side of the water pool and huddles there, feeling strange, like a mole being exposed in its den.

Then suddenly the light spills inside, washes over him, overwhelming eyes which have grown accustomed seeing only shades of darkness. Jim drops his face into his arms and waits, tensed, for the contact. It comes in the form of a pressure against his arms. Hands pressing material to him, around him. A blanket? A coat?

This person assures him, “Captain, we have you.”

“Where’s McCoy?” someone standing farther away asks.

Jim lifts his head to look into the faces of his rescuers. As their light spreads and paints the rocky walls and illuminates the depths of the pool in a search for Jim’s missing half, the words come from Jim, unbidden: “You won’t find him.”

Sulu, at the back of the cavern, comes forward and crouches across from the medical officer kneeling beside Jim. “Sir?”

Jim fixes his eyes on the tiny marks of Sulu’s rank that dot the neck seam of his tunic. “McCoy,” he clarifies, voice soft. “You won’t find him.”

For a moment, the silence in the cavern is deafening. Then Sulu flips open his communicator in a business-like manner and tells ship-side personnel to lock onto Kirk’s signal.

Jim refuses to raise his eyes, lest he recognize the comprehension and restrained grief in the gazes of the men around him. They will stay behind regardless of what order he gives them now, he knows.

They will want to search for their fallen comrade’s body.

~~~

At first the ship is unbearably bright and noisy to Jim when he returns. He automatically suppresses the panic it triggers, an old habit coming back to him from years long past when he fought to recover his spirit and mind after the horrors of Tarsus IV. The signs he gives of his discomfort are the tightening of his shoulder blades and the constant whistle of breath through his nose.

No one is in the transporter room who would recognize them.

The medics who are on stand-by try to load him onto a hovering stretcher but Jim shakes his head and refuses the ride. He begins to limp his way to Sickbay instead, feeling in some respect like he has sea legs when he occasionally totters. But Spock, with him every step since the Transporter Room, unobtrusively steadies him as he needs it. Jim doesn’t thank him, just simply tells his First to debrief him on what they know so far.

Voice hinting at an unusual amount of concern, Spock responds with “There is nothing to report which cannot wait, Captain.”

Jim has no desire for kindness right then. “It wasn’t a request, Mr. Spock.”

Perhaps hearing something within his superior’s emotionless tone, Spock acquiesces and launches into a verbose but coherent report, updating Jim since the time of his and McCoy’s departure from the Enterprise. When Spock is finished speaking, Jim is within a private section of the med bay being prepped for examination by M’Benga.

At length, Jim can stand the Vulcan’s loaded silence no more and asks M’Benga to give them a moment of privacy.

Spock speaks one word: “McCoy?”

“Dead,” Jim answers.

His long-time friend looks away, the control of his grief personified in the stiffness of his back and stone-like features of his face. Then he pivots on the ball of his foot and leaves Jim behind. M’Benga returns shortly thereafter, during which time Jim dares himself not to think at all.

Once the examination is done and Jim is informed he is in no condition to leave the bay, M’Benga states politely, “I want to give you a sedative.”

“Go ahead,” Jim tells him. The truth is, he thinks his salvation will come only once he is knocked out.

If M’Benga is surprised by the easy manner in which Jim agrees, he says nothing of it.

~~~

He’s asleep, and he’s dreaming.

The Sickbay is in chaos. Someone has called in with a near-shriek of he’s alive! Everyone goes mad. Patients sit up in their beds. Nurses shout nonsensical things.

But Jim is dreaming and presses his hands to his ears. He shakes his head.

Dreams and reality are by far two different things.

~~~

“Captain? Captain Kirk?“

Jim blinks open his eyes, already groping for his communicator, the one that talks of its own accord. Then he realizes why he doesn’t have it anymore and drags in a deep breath.

“Captain?”

He looks to the side to find a petite woman in medical blues standing by his bed. She smiles at him. “Welcome back. How do you feel?”

“How long was I out?” he asks, then coughs to clear his throat.

“A little over twenty-four hours, sir, altogether. When your initial dose of sedative wore off, we gave you a second one.”

He almost asks why but decides against it, instead focuses on trying to sit up. His body is weaker than he thought. He supposes he will need to fix that.

“Sir?”

Jim realizes belatedly the nurse had been talking to him. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Would you like to see him?”

“Who?” Spock? No, Jim has no desire to see anyone.

“Why, Dr. McCoy, of course.”

For a moment in time there is no noise, no color, nothing. If Jim makes a sound, he cannot hear it.

The body, he realizes. She is talking about the body. His gorge rises.

“N-No,” he chokes out.

“All right,” she agrees, her expression strange. She moves away from his biobed, adding as she goes, “But he’ll want to see you when he wakes up, so try to stay here, okay? I’ll get Dr. M’Benga.”

Goose flesh rises on Jim’s arms.

Something significant happened while he was sleeping. Something—

He’s alive!

He remembers now, waking up thrashing, screaming the two words for the whole of the ship to hear. People had pinned him. And put him back out.

But, but—

Jim flings away his covers, unmindful of the sudden wailing of any biobed alarms, and staggers into the open section of the Sickbay. He doesn’t believe it, can’t believe it, can’t ever hope for it—

—until he sees the man behind the glass in the IC unit.

Jim falls against the barrier, but it doesn’t support him and he slides down it to the cold, hard floor. He stares at the very reason he had been willing to die in a cave in the earth of a little-known planet. Eventually his gazes slips sideways to the shockingly white face reflected in the glass and another angular, pinched face beside it.

“Captain,” Spock says, a mere whisper, from where he is kneeling at Jim’s side.

Jim closes his eyes.

Spock lifts him like a child to his feet.

“Where?” Jim asks.

“Near the entrance to the mine. As the search party returned to the surface for the exchange, he was simply there.”

Jim opens his eyes to stare down at the floor and his bare feet. “How?”

There comes a significant silence. Then, “We were hoping you could tell us.”

~~~

“Cave people,” McCoy claims in his debriefing report. He’s anemic from severe blood loss but otherwise intact and in full control of his mental faculties.

Jim hasn’t the courage to look him in the eyes.

It is Scotty sitting on Jim’s right who says, “Come again?”

“Cave-dwellers,” Leonard repeats patiently. “Granted, my memories from around that time are fuzzy but I swear I wasn’t alone. Only…” He frowns.

“Go on,” Spock urges.

“They were humanoid, I guess, but sort of plain in coloring. Gray, almost. I don’t know. Like I said, it’s all fuzzy.”

Jim feels the stares turn to him. “Could be,” he murmurs. “They had really long arms.”

“Yeah,” Leonard agrees, sounding somewhat surprised that Jim might have encountered them too.

“We detected no life signs below the planet’s surface.”

Leonard spreads his hands, remarking, “And yet…”

“The point does not elude me, Doctor.”

“Would it kill you to admit you were wrong, Spock?”

Jim pushes away from the conference table and stands up, startling the others gathered in the room. “Thank you all for your time. Dismissed.”

“But, Captain…?” Scotty begins.

“Jim, what’re you going to do?”

Spock echoes the same question in a more formal way.

“Nothing,” Jim replies. “Whoever, or whatever, lives in the abandoned mines is not our concern. They aren’t trapped down there, and we’ve no right to force them to the surface or invade their homes. They saved our lives, Bones, and while we are grateful, our gratitude is best shown by not interfering. Spock, set a course for the nearest starbase. Uhura, the reports already filed on the incident are to be transmitted to Command without delay.”

“And the men who almost killed us?” McCoy wants to know.

Who did kill you, Bones, Jim doesn’t correct. “They’ll be in the next quadrant by now—but we know what ship they’re on and we know they’re a threat to the delegation which was meant to arrive on Xtal. If I could go after them—” and wipe those bastards from galaxy “—I would, but my duty is to this ship. For now, we report in. However, mark my words: if they are so unlucky to cross paths with us again, we deal with them our way.”

When no one argues with his decision, Jim once again dismisses his senior commanding officers. This time they obey, filing out of the room until Jim alone remains.

~~~

Days pass into weeks. It seems like nothing much has changed. Life goes on.

But to Jim nothing is the same. He knows Leonard is worried about him. He knows, too, that Leonard worries Jim’s problem is one which he won’t be able to fix.

Jim would have to agree that nothing can heal the wound inside him. Having his lover alive may have cauterized it but it’s still wide-open and raw. Frankly, Jim kind of wants it to stay that way. He needs the reminder that without blind luck, Bones would be dead.

It’s rare that they have an evening together. Jim has seen to that, mostly, because while he can meet Leonard’s eyes now, he can’t hold them. And he certainly can’t share affection with a man he can’t look at for any length of time.

But tonight Jim makes the mistake of returning to his sleeping cabin early. Leonard has taken to napping in his quarters when he’s off shift like the bed is his own. In days past, Jim loved this. Now he dreams Leonard dies in his bed without a word or a sound, and he lives in fear of the moment he discovers the dream is a reality.

At first Jim doesn’t realize he isn’t alone. The lights in the cabin are on a low setting but he can see well enough. He finds nowadays that he prefers darkness over light, and so does not change it. Stripping off his sweaty shirt from a long run, Jim drags a hand through his short hair, achingly tired and debating on whether or not he should shower or simply sleep.

Then the bathroom door slides open, emitting Leonard in a towel into the room.

Jim freezes, half-in, half-out of the runner of light.

“Hey,” Leonard says, going over to the wall with the built-in storage compartments.

Jim watches, wordless, as Leonard pulls out a pair of pants, drops the towel and puts them on.

How many times have they done this? Dressed in front of each other without care, out of comfort, secure in the knowledge there is only affection coloring their judgement of each other?

Even knowing where the bed is, Jim gropes for it and sinks down onto its edge. A single word lodges in his throat.

Leonard stops in the process of unfolding a blue tunic as if he senses Jim’s distress, calling his name as a question. When Leonard angles his torso towards the bed, the scar tissue across his side is a pale, silvery slash in the dim lighting, a leftover relic from a healing no one can explain.

Staring at it, the unspoken word turns into a hard knot that chokes Jim.

“Jim, is something wrong?”

Leonard comes to him, then, moving in until their knees are close enough to touch.

“Bones,” Jim forces the word out. Then, in defeat, “Everything.”

Fingers drift through his hair. “Do you think you can talk to me now?”

No.

“Please?”

Jim closes his eyes. “You’re—I wish—” He seems incapable of making his thoughts known.

“C’mon, it’s okay.”

Jim makes a noise that might have been a laugh if it wasn’t so hollow-sounding. “You are worth so much more than this,” he finally tells his Bones.

“I’m not sure I understand your meaning, kid.”

Jim catches Leonard’s wrist to still the fingers in his hair and cradles the hand between his own. The contact is so familiar, and yet he’s deprived himself of it for so long, it feels like a cold shock. He presses his thumb into Leonard’s palm. “You deserve more than this.”

Leonard jerks his hand away, a strangeness creeping into his tone. “This what, Jim?”

“Me.”

Leonard is silent for some seconds. “You make it sound like you’re breaking up with me.”

“No,” Jim says and, “Yes.”

Leonard curls the hand Jim had hoped to hold a while longer into a fist. “Well, which is it?”

Jim looks him in the eyes just briefly. “The second,” he answers as steadily as he can. “We should break up.”

“Not without a good reason.”

“I can give you one but you won’t like it.”

Suddenly Leonard is angry. “Don’t fuck with me on this, Jim. Just say it.”

So Jim does.

As he expects, Leonard doesn’t react well. The man blanches and steps backward.

“Told you,” Jim murmurs, standing up. His body obeys slowly, as though he has endured a three-day beating instead of sitting quietly, if tensely, for the past few minutes. “It’s so good of a reason that it scares the shit out of you. Well, it scares me too, Bones.” Jim takes a breath. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t think either of us can handle this.”

“Why now?” the other man whispers.

“Why do you think?” Jim almost snaps back. “I let you die.”

“I didn’t die.”

He counters, “What, you don’t remember that part? Bullshit.”

Leonard’s mouth presses into a thin line.

Jim pushes to his feet because he needs the movement. “What’s worse is that I really mean it… I love you. I love you as a friend, and I love you as more than a friend. Unfortunately it took you dying for me to realize it. God, it’s so cliché, Bones, it makes me want to puke.”

“Finding out you love me makes you want to puke?”

“You know what I meant.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Jim stops pacing abruptly, hands flexing. Then he goes over to Leonard’s abandoned tunic and picks it up. “What else should I say? Haven’t you heard enough?”

But Leonard says to him, “Jim, did you just hear me?”

Jim turns to the man he loves too much and offers the shirt. “Here.”

Leonard takes it and, much to Jim’s surprise, throws it over his shoulder. Then he blows out a breath and, just briefly, purses his mouth. “You’ve always had more courage than me, Jim. You’ll have to forgive me for being shocked.”

Jim feels an unexpected wash of relief. Maybe, at the very least, they could stay friends. If Jim could learn to look Leonard in the eyes again, that is.

“The thing is,” Leonard goes on to say, “I was shocked because I didn’t think you’d love me back.”

Jim swallows hard. It’s everything he wanted to hear, and everything he dreaded too.

“Why won’t you say something? I’m telling you I understand better than you think.”

“Bones, don’t.”

“Why not?” the man demands. “You love me, and I love you. I thought that would be something to celebrate!”

“You died!” Jim yells back. “On my watch. When I should have done something—fuck.”

“You know what you could have done?” Leonard says, stepping right into his personal space. “You could have taken that knife to the gut for me.”

Jim feels sick. Yes, he wants to say. Yes, why didn’t I?

He doesn’t realize he has said that last part aloud until Leonard grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him hard.

“No,” Leonard tells him, fiercely. “Never, Jim, never. You never die for me, do you understand?”

“But I should have done more.”

“You did,” Leonard says, voice shaking now. “You did, darlin’. I told you to press on the wound, and you did.”

Jim brings his hands up to clutch at Leonard’s arms, his arms shaking as badly as Leonard’s voice. In fact, all of him is shaking. “It wasn’t enough. You just kept bleeding.”

“There wasn’t anything else you could have done. I knew that, Jim. I’m a doctor, remember?”

A sob tries to crawl out of Jim’s throat, and he pushes from McCoy’s arms, forcing himself to regain control as he turns away. “You don’t understand. I know it’s over, but the fact that I can’t change it is the worst part. It’s… it’s killing me, Bones.”

“Jim, let me help you.”

“Like you said, when it’s this bad, there’s nothing you can really do.”

“Damn it, Jim.”

He hears the heartbreak in Leonard’s voice. “I’m sorry. I know an apology isn’t enough, but I’ll keep saying it.”

“I won’t give up on you,” Leonard promises him.

Jim wishes he would. He just shakes his head. “You should go now.”

“I…”

But Leonard falls silent and, in the periphery of Jim’s vision, fetches his shirt from the bed and dons it. Leonard stops just abreast of the door. He sounds tired, strained, as he says, “I want you to talk to somebody. Not me, well, because… not me.”

Jim doesn’t reply. He knows he has no choice in the matter.

Leonard lingers a moment longer before finally leaving.

Jim lets his head hang.

This, he thinks, is exactly why they should have never broken their word. Love will always bring pain.

-Fini

Related Posts:

• Why Not? – from February 14, 2014
• I’m Yours – from February 14, 2014

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