It’s the cat that does it. Leonard should have known that the overly sticky thing would only bring trouble to his doorstep.

But when it meows so urgently, bony in a starved kind of way that makes one wince, Leonard coaxes it from the shaded depths of the bushes around his family home against his better judgment, promising food and the temporary warmth and security that comes with shelter. The evenings have turned unseasonably chilly for mid-autumn. Leonard knows what it is to be burdened with cold, shut out from any welcome that could make a miserable existence even slightly more bearable.

Securing the cat in an old blanket (so as not to incite more clawing, for the feline is as scrappy as it is scruffy), he remembers how important it is to put some kindness back into the world. This is just a thin unhappy cat, he thinks, maybe lost or, worse, discarded like him, getting too old to be appealing to anyone and very bitter about that.

The cat is, in fact, quite angry. It wants to bite him for feeding it. It shreds half of the blanket, then a spare nightshirt. It hunkers under the coffee table in the living room and hisses all night long.

Leonard says to it, “Fine, find somebody else to give a damn about you,” and goes to bed.

In the morning, it’s perched on a windowsill haloed by sunlight and licking its paw, all of last night’s ferocity banked. It gives him a perfunctory glance before ignoring him entirely.

He makes a cup of coffee and finds something in the pantry the cat can have for breakfast. Eventually, it joins him in the kitchen and eats the meal without complaint from a chipped plate.

Leonard decides then, “You’re weird. Like a changeling.”

The cat jumps onto the table and eyes Leonard suspiciously before trying to share his coffee. Leonard might have scolded it, except the healing scratches on his hands remind him the one with the distinct advantage is not the human.

“I don’t need a pet,” Leonard murmurs to no one in particular, as the cat visibly inspects more interesting subjects than the grim-faced, middle-aged man.

McCoy’s shoulders hunch inward as he adds, “But I don’t make a habit of turning out strays.”

The cat truly isn’t paying attention, as if it already knows that Leonard wants its company more than it wants or even needs Leonard.

Sometime later, the man pours out the cold remnants of his coffee and spends time on debating what should be added to his shopping list for his new housemate.

Much later than that, Leonard McCoy will remember trouble has never come to him slinking in alone. Where there is one chaotic agent, another is certain to follow.

~~~

Leonard wakes to darkness. It takes him a moment to remember the room is always sunless because he shuttered up its windows. But this morning—or possibly it’s still last night, he doesn’t know—the shadows hang like drapery around a clutter of furniture. He lies in silence and watches the crook-necked shadow of a lamp lengthen along the wall until it splits apart in a familiar shape.

He grumbles, “Who let you in?”, pulling the bedcovers up to his chin.

The shadow solidifies into the cat as it leaps to the foot of the bed and hunkers there. Its fur is an inky black, darker than the room, though the cat had seemed tawny in daylight. Tonight, the reflective shine of its stare sits strangely with Leonard.

Sometimes McCoy likes pretending that he is invisible but this cat always seems to see him.

“You can’t be hungry. I know I put out plenty of food.”

The cat’s tail swishes forward and curls over its feet.

Leonard groans. “Go away. It’s rude to interrupt a man when he’s wallowing.”

There is a rumbling that causes Leonard to squint at his companion in disbelief. “By gawd,” he drawls, “you find this pathetic show entertaining, don’t you? Shoo! Take your sadism elsewhere!” Elaborating on the complaint, he scolds, “Just ’cause I let you sleep inside doesn’t give you the right to trespass all over someone else’s house.”

Leonard is certain he had closed his bedroom door when he felt his mood darkening, so he doesn’t even want to guess how the cat dealt with that. But he knows he should get up to throw it into the hallway.

He sighs. Moving from the bed feels daunting. He closes his eyes, a familiar numbness enclosing him once more.

After a while, the rumbling begins to sputter, at last dying into silence. Leonard is aware of the cat’s movements; it steps softly across the bedcovers in order to settle much closer to his head.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warns. “I bite back.”

But something about the cat being so near lulls his mind into feeling secure, which he will find unsettling later on given they rarely cross paths in such a big old house plus one of them is feral.

Leonard must doze at some point but knows he does not dream because with dreaming comes remembering. He gets lost in a darker place when he remembers how happy he used to be with… them.

But they are gone, and Leonard is alone, except for this cat, a small, aloof addition to his home.

The cat who, when Leonard rouses from his bedroom an indeterminate length of time later, is nowhere to be found. Leonard gives its nearly full food dispenser a bemused look and chooses not to worry about it quite yet.

~~~

Leonard considers himself intuitive but not superstitious. Perhaps this is an ironic position to take when, before his voluntary leave-taking, his years of service often landed him in the most unbelievable, thoroughly unsettling experiences of his life. But that was part and parcel to taking a commission aboard the USS Enterprise under that person’s command. Impossible became probable. Unlikely became common. Life existed in ways and in realms that made Leonard feel like a naïve child despite his decades of learning.

But such things are Out There, not waiting to surprise someone in a small suburb of Old Georgia.

The cat appears and disappears on a completely indiscernible schedule. For months now used to being alone, Leonard does not mind this. He settles for assuming he is alone unless he spies a cat-like silhouette from the corner of his eye. The thing is quite at home in the shadows of the house, an odd extension of them, until it wants Leonard to feel its presence.

He chastises it sometimes for the literal creeping up on him, like this evening. “There you are, stalking me again. If you were a human, I’d get a restraining order. Where have you been, anyway?”

Leonard passes a doctor’s critical eye over the animal from a distance, because attempting to touch it has led to generally unpleasant reactions. The cat isn’t so thin anymore, and it never returns to Leonard with injuries, sores, or any signs of illness. If anything, it seems to enjoy defying his expectations of something feral, yet obstinately refuses to be domesticated.

“You’d like this,” Leonard goes on. “Swear I heard a mouse scratching in the wall the other day.” A faint noise had woken him from an impromptu nap on the downstairs sofa. He’d lain there drowsy, trying to come up with an explanation for it. “Why don’t you investigate that while you’re skulking around?”

The cat doesn’t respond, in the midst of grooming itself.

“You’re an arrogant one today. Can’t even spare me a glance while—”

The cat jerks its head around to look behind Leonard in the semi-dark kitchen.

Bang!

Leonard nearly startles out of his chair at the crack of sound. When he twists around, the cylinder canister holding his coffee beans lies on the floor in front of the kitchen counter. He just stares at it, unable to parse why it could have fallen. Had he set it on the edge? He doesn’t remember.

Carefully, he goes to pick it up, relieved to find the seal hadn’t popped open upon impact. As he sets it against the tiled wall beneath the cabinets, Leonard nearly startles again when the cat appears beside his elbow.

It settles on its haunches and stares toward the end of the countertop. Leonard looks as well.

Maybe the coffee nearly spilling is a warning that he needs to pull back on his daily consumption. For an instant, the refrigerator’s shadow seemed to shrink.

He blinks. The shape and size of it look normal now.

“Well,” he says tightly, “I, ah, I’ll go to find that article I’ve been meaning to read.”

The cat’s tail brushes languidly back and forth against the countertop’s edge.

Leonard swallows hard, turns, and takes very controlled steps into the other room. He refuses to glance behind him.

It was just his imagination.

And the cat’s, apparently.

“Cats are very imaginative,” he mutters.

But an ill-at-ease feeling, a premonition perhaps, stays with Leonard until dawn. Only then does his tired mind allow him some respite.

~~~

Leonard wakes up in a sweat, heart racing, from the nightmare of the day he wishes he could forget. He rolls to the side and counts silently, taking measured breaths. Once he feels calmer, he reaches for his bedside lamp.

“Bones!“

He freezes.

That voice is an echo of the nightmare. It sounds crystal-clear, a voice he hasn’t heard in his ears in so long; Leonard would recognize it anywhere, even if the nickname wasn’t a dead giveaway.

But he’s not asleep.

His heart returns to pounding.

“Bones!“

The bedroom is empty, and the doors to the hallway and bathroom are shut—and that cry is coming from the unlit corner of the room anyway.

“Bones!“

Leonard claps his hands over his ears and squeezes his eyes shut.

The silence only lasts a moment. He hears a muffled “Bones.” The eerie giddiness has drained away from that voice, leaving it flat and low.

Leonard knows the tone so well that the unspoken please is almost a command to open his eyes and listen.

Fear clears his head. “You’re not real.”

Silence returns. When the quietness is only broken by Leonard’s harsh breathing for several minutes, Leonard removes his hands from his ears.

That sense of premonition from yesterday creeps back, a chill settling low in his stomach.

It’s longer still before he can leave his bed. He moves into another part of the house for two days, until the cat peeks in on him in a guest room and then later meows repeatedly until Leonard tracks it upstairs.

From then on, Leonard leaves his bedroom door slightly ajar to allow the cat entry as it pleases as a small comfort to himself.

~~~

The voice doesn’t return, but the coffee canister nearly rolls off the kitchen counter again (in surprise, Leonard catches it mid-roll), the news channel turns on by itself at least twice per day, and the cat appears more frequently, staring pensively at length into murky corners of the house.

Leonard is no fool. He’s just uncertain of what to do: either vacate the house (he has other options, as his data padd’s inbox contains numerous offers to visit him or host him, all of the senders imploring if he is okay by himself) or tell the unwanted guest to find another poor soul to haunt.

In the cat’s presence, his state of mind seems relatively stable. But around a ghost? Not so much.

An unnerved Leonard leaves the newsfeed playing all day, muted with the subtitles on. Who knows, maybe this stupid ghost is going deaf, given how the volume likes to rocket up at night!

“This is your fault,” he blames the only other living being in the room. “I didn’t have a ghost until I had a cat.”

Currently, the cat is stretched out in the middle of the sofa, relegating Leonard to a half-portion of the cushion at the very end. It’s purring again.

“Aren’t cats supposed to protect the living? Chase the damn thing out!” He grumbles soon after, concluding of himself, “Useless. Maybe I’m just losing my mind.”

But it doesn’t feel like he is crazy. The grief has been overwhelming at times, to be certain, but nowadays with random objects moving about and other oddities, Leonard feels more clearheaded than he has in months.

He checks his messages and chooses an update from a nurse of his former medical staff. She speaks of missing him, speaks of what she knows about the goings-on of their mutual friends, and—inevitably—asks when he will change his mind about this extended leave of absence.

“I won’t return,” he divulges to the cat, feeling sadness creep over him again. The paperwork for a formal retirement is in order. He just needs to send it in.

This is why others might believe him crazy, acting like a defeated man when doctors should know best that the living must move on.

It’s understandable that no one truly understands what broke him.

The vidscreen on the opposite wall unmutes, startling Leonard. The reporter is speaking about the upcoming inaugural event at Starfleet Academy for the unveiling of a new ship: the maiden voyage of the Excelsior-class, a ‘generation ahead of Constitution-class models.’

“Jim would hate that,” Leonard remarks loudly. “The Enterprise has become a classic.”

Abruptly, the vidscreen goes dark.

Leonard stills. Then, tentatively, feeling unmoored, he calls out, “Jim?”

Nothing. Not a whisper.

Now feeling foolish, Leonard glances at the cat, realizing it too has gone quiet. “I need a drink.”

The cat slips off the couch and disappears beneath the side table. It doesn’t come out again, even when Leonard turns up the room’s overhead lighting to dispel all the shadows in the room. It’s left the house entirely and without a sound.

Leonard drinks to the bottom of a whiskey bottle and, when his head spins, drapes himself over the sofa. He feels a breeze against his face, like cool fingertips gliding from his cheekbone to his chin. The person who used to do that was always just as gentle, tasting a hint of his emotions like they were a delicacy to be savored.

That person isn’t around anymore, not anywhere Leonard could find; but oh how Leonard misses him.

Nothing catches the wayward tear as it spills from the corner of his eye to the sofa. The night feels excruciatingly long and lonely until Leonard passes out.

~~~

Even the strongest (or most apathetic) person will reach a breaking point. Leonard finds his temper shattering on a cold sunny day.

“Enough!” he cries, flinging the nearest thing to hand across the living room. His personal padd connects with the foyer wall with an awful crunch.

“Leave me alone, by god!”

No one is there to watch him lose his mind, save the poltergeist that has been straining his nerves for weeks.

The house falls to a hush, even the faint buzz of electricity becoming muted. Leonard storms out of the front doorway to stand on the porch, chest heaving, until the sun sinks below the horizon. Then he breaks for the yard and the winding driveway, and finally to the edge of the main road. There, he reconsiders his options.

But with shoulders sagging, the man is gradually drawn back to the house. A reluctant Leonard enters the foyer, stepping over the broken device to walk the main hallway. When he reaches the farthest room of his home, he slides down against the wall, resting his hands on his knees.

While Leonard lays there, a light sound—a repetitious tinkling—approaches from nearby. He thinks he is imagining it, but no. It is the cat, coming to greet him.

Leonard stares at a collar, adorned with a tiny silver bell, around the neck of the cat. “I didn’t give you that.”

The cat has chosen to linger just within the threshold of the room.

“You came here when someone owns you.” Leonard’s eyes suddenly feel wet. “That’s not fair.” So this companion has never truly been his, not when another has a claim on it.

Leonard has a sense of déjà vu. Though he doesn’t want them, the memories swell over him: of Jim’s muffled speaking to Spock while Leonard was restrained from coming near; of horror as Jim cast a look of sorrow his way before the energy field engulfed him (this stupid, awful Nexus, someone described it later); of feeling angry and frantic when Spock said he alone would go after Jim, as if rescuing their captain was not something they usually did together.

For Leonard, there had been no thought otherwise; he would go too. But Spock had remained shielded by cold authority and precise logic as he denied Leonard exactly that choice, all the while Leonard’s emotions rocked from incomprehension to shock to fury.

Spock left. Leonard had cursed Vulcan stubbornness and tried to follow anyway. It didn’t work out.

In a single day, Leonard lost them both.

Since then, he has wondered over and over again if Spock and Jim were always meant to be each other’s more than his. Had Leonard been fooling himself for years that his claim to them was as strong as theirs to him?

“I thought I had everything,” he tells the cat. “But look at me, making the same mistake with you.” He turns his face away. “Go on, stop staring. Go back to whoever you belong to and just leave me the hell alone. And take that damn ghost with you!”

The cat does something unexpected, then. It comes to Leonard and butts its head against his arm.

Leonard just watches it, until the cat’s third attempt pulls a reaction from him. Cautiously scratching behind its ears (which the cat allows magnanimously), Leonard remarks softly, “Well… Apology accepted, I guess.”

The cat appears unconcerned as Leonard delivers a last scratch before moving on to inspect its collar.

Leonard hopes to find the owner’s information there, but the letters inked into the back of the collar shock him cold. The language is Vulcan; the short phrase translates to my dear one.

Leonard clearly recalls Spock’s last words to him: “My dear one, I do not wish you to come. I cannot wish it.”

Leonard had always recognized the love imbued in that endearment whenever Spock said it; even at that moment, it sounded as it always had despite Spock using it to gently break his heart.

McCoy’s hand is trembling when he releases the collar. “Where did you come from?”

The cat settles nearby, partially in shadow, unwilling to be anything less than a mystery.

~~~

Something has shifted in Leonard almost without his being aware of it.

He doesn’t jump when he hears, impossibly, someone calling to him. He doesn’t pretend he is unable to recognize who is doing the calling.

He responds, “Jim, is that you? Spock?”

What’s the point of being sane if you live in a haunted house?

The voice—no, voices—the two he has desperately wanted to hear for a long time—are just a distant echo, like reverberations inside a tunnel almost too lengthy to carry the sound.

“This isn’t right,” Leonard states for the record. “You don’t get to leave me and then decide on your own when to come back. You don’t get to make me crazy with searching for you and then decide you’ll find me instead.”

He admits the painful truth too. “I’m tired. I’m hurting. I don’t feel fit for frontier work anymore. Being on a ship without you feels wrong. Did you consider at all what leaving me behind would do to me?” His words settle into a whisper. “I thought we promised ourselves to each other. Why make that promise if I’m not allowed to face death with you?”

“Stupid,” Leonard adds after a while, thinking of himself. “I always knew it was risky to love either of you and I did it anyway.”

“Oh, Bones.“

The voice strikes him low in the stomach, leaving Leonard to pivot clumsily in its direction. “Jim?”

A moment of deafening quiet and then—

“Did you hear that?“

Leonard shuffles toward a shuttered window. “…What the heck.”

“Bones, can you hear us?“

“What the hell, Jim,” Leonard amends. “Are you the ghost?”

Laughter rings out, sharply joyous and clear-as-day belonging to none other than James T. Kirk.

An odd tingling starts in Leonard’s limbs. His eyes slide from the window frame to dusty drapery then down toward a thin sliver of darkness between the cloth and wall.

As McCoy leans in to better hear the sounds coming from that space, Jim crows, “Spock, this is the place!” and is instantly answered with an empathetic “Indeed.”

Such delight is lost on Leonard. “I’m reconsidering the possibility that I’ve lost my mind.”

“Bones? We’re real. This is—just a moment and—”

Since his body might go into shock any minute now, Leonard preemptively sits on the floor. “I don’t understand—Jim, is that really you—?”

When the now-familiar sound of the lightest tinkling returns, Leonard looks around for the cat and instead notices the sliver of darkness where he pinpointed the voices is changing shape. It lengthens and warps until a dark blob detaches from the bottom of the wall. The blob solidifies into the cat, who leaps toward Leonard.

Leonard is grateful that he is sitting down. It’s a long minute before he can convince his hand to touch the blob-turned-cat. “I just watched a cat ooze out of my wall.”

“My dear one.”

Leonard stops stroking the cat’s back, who takes offense at this inaction and swats at his hand. “Spock,” McCoy gives a name to the voice.

“Affirmative. I am here with Jim.”

“I’d ask if you’re a ghost too but that would be—”

“Illogical.”

“So it is you.” Without realizing it, Leonard gathers and presses the cat to his chest. “Forgive my skepticism, but are you going to ooze out of the wall too? There’s not enough room in my lap for a cat and a grown Vulcan.” Leonard’s throat works once. “Also, Jim and Spock are officially declared missing. Command gave your ship to someone else.”

This brings Jim back, who sounds aggrieved. “How long?”

“Thirteen months, nine days.” As if Leonard could stop counting. He needs to still count, he absently thinks, because this feels like some variety of a mean trick—presenting a mirage of an oasis to a man dying of thirst.

“Bones… where are you?”

Leonard falls momentarily silent. “Where are you?”

“Far from home,” comes Jim’s careful answer. “You kept… moving. I didn’t take that into account.”

“I don’t understand.” Leonard glances around, wishing at least for his auditory hallucination to make more sense. “And to answer your question, I am at home.”

“Georgia?” Jim sounds surprised, then mournful. “We were going to see the house in the fall.”

“You… Jim, you remember that?”

Spock interjects, “Interesting. By my estimation, we have been trapped in the Nexus for four-point-two weeks, but now I must conclude the concept of time here is equal in deception to the other properties of the—” Spock’s voice fades out towards the end.

Leonard asks sharply, “Of the what?”

Jim is saying, fainter than before, “This can’t be an illusion too—I won’t believe it!—found Bones—that cat!”

The cat squirms out of Leonard’s hold.

“Wait!” Leonard cries. He falls forward in trying to catch it. “Don’t go!”

The cat lets out a yowl as Leonard just manages to grab a hind leg and drag it forward from the shadow creeping up its tawny coat. The cat twists around, all teeth and claws, landing a vicious bite on the back of his hand. Then it darts off as Leonard scrambles backward, afraid of a full-on frontal assault.

With the cat gone, Leonard drops to his side and curls up, using the bottom of his shirt to bandage his bleeding hand.

“Damn it!” He kicks out a leg in frustration, hitting the wall, and curses louder. Of course the wall is solid! Why had he started to think otherwise?

And that’s when the realization hits him: the only person making noise now is him.

He stills, straining to listen for the faintest whispers. But Jim and Spock have vanished like the ghosts Leonard doesn’t want them to be.

~~~

Leonard prowls the house, drinking coffee to keep awake, afraid to sleep and dream, or to confirm that this all has been a dream from the beginning.

The dreaming-while-awake explanation seems the most plausible. Leonard is used to strange things, but it seems a bit much to allow for talking shadows that mimic loved ones. He recalls, though, that Spock had once spoken about consensual reality: that a thing can exist if all those around it agree that it exists.

Maybe it’s the same with a dream. If Leonard agrees—and Jim and Spock also agree—this is real, then being a dream or not is irrelevant.

Leonard’s urge to go muttering into all the dark places he can find is very strong. He tests the shadows too, poking at them and hitting a lot of wall and blunt furniture edges, repeatedly jamming and scraping his knuckles.

“Listen up,” he tells the old, silent house. “Either you get on board with this madness, or I finally sign up to see a grief counselor like everybody wants me to.” The latter option is less appealing than ever, given he’ll have to admit his depression has begun inching towards psychosis. He might not be able to hold a command position in field medicine again once his sanity becomes questionable, not even if he changes his mind about resigning from Starfleet.

He warns whoever might be listening and deliberately keeping out of his way, “This is your last chance. Give me back my Jim and Spock!”

And with that, Leonard McCoy settles in to wait for a response.

~~~

The response takes two days, more or less.

In that interim, Leonrad enjoys a long shower and dresses in clothes that make him feel more like himself. He fusses a little over his outfit in the mirror: the almost-threadbare jeans at least a decade old and thick sweater Jim had given him as a holiday gift, which is looser at the shoulders now (age, he thinks sourly, does the body no favors), clearly well-worn and still faintly smelling of that special incense Spock prefers for celebratory events. But it’s his own face that McCoy frowns at, seeing sunken eyes, the patchwork of stubble, and a leaner frame than should be on record for his last physical exam.

So, he muses, self-loathing has been eating at him as much as the betrayal.

“What a sorry sight. You fellows seeing this?” he throws out, one of many attempts over the stretch of hours to garner some kind of reaction. “All that hard work I did for muscles to impress y’all, and now a strong wind could probably snap me in half.”

“Most concerning.”

“Ain’t it,” Leonard starts to agree. Then, “Hold up! Who said that?”

“Ah, this channel appears functional.”

Leonard hisses. “Spock! Where are you at?”

“Unfortunately I cannot provide a precise answer to that inquiry, Doctor. I am unable to calculate the distance between my position and yours.”

Leonard inhales sharply, “Just keep talkin’, all right? I’ll follow the sound of your voice.” The ensuing moment of silence nearly gives Leonard a heart attack. “Spock, come back!”

“I have not moved.”

“By the saints, man, if you were finally going to decide against speaking your mind, you should’ve done it years ago!”

“Then we would had have less opportunity to engage in one of our fruitful discussions.”

That surprises a laugh out of McCoy. He starts a slow circuit around the kitchen, giving special attention to cobwebby corners. “That’s quite the positive spin, given most discussions we had ended in petty arguments. Though mind you, the pettier one has always been you!”

“It is not quite logical that the one who is right should be the one who is petty.”

Leonard slaps a hand to a closed cabinet door. “But I’m the one who is always right!”

“Have you located the connection point?”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Spock.” Leonard approaches the opposite end of the kitchen. “Say something nicer, and I’m sure I’ll find it.”

That moment of silence ensues again, scraping at Leonard’s raw nerves. But then Spock says, “We miss you.”

Leonard closes his eyes briefly. He could echo the sentiment but… “You left me,” he points out, both as a reminder and an accusation.

“Yes.”

“It’s like you didn’t care what that would do to us.”

“I assure you that I was acutely aware of the consequences my choice could have for our relationship.”

“Saying you knew leaving would hurt me makes the hurt worse, Spock.”

“Leonard, please consider that under the circumstances in which Jim was taken, he could not survive alone.” Although the explanation is presented so matter-of-factly, Leonard easily catches Spock’s regret.

“I heard Jim describe the Nexus before I was dragged back. He said it was like Heaven.”

“A more accurate description would be a false Heaven. The Nexus takes what one desires most and gives it existence.”

“You mean it creates fantasies.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. The Nexus is self-sustaining; to enhance the fantasy it creates, it feds on the recipient’s energy, which in turn weakens one’s ability to perceive reality from fiction.”

Leonard’s throat clicks as he swallows hard. “So the longer you dream there, the more difficult it is to want to leave.”

“Affirmative. When Jim realized this would happen to him, he knew his own strength would not suffice to separate himself from the Nexus’s influence.”

A horrible realization sinks into Leonard. “But yours could. He asked you to follow him because you could shield him from sinking too deep into the Nexus.”

“That is correct. However, we have learned that the visions can be exceptionally strong.”

“I would have been an extra passenger then—a burden you didn’t need.”

“Never.” The sharpness in Spock’s tone sends a shiver down Leonard’s spine. “Leonard,” Spock goes on, “you were the reason I chose to follow Jim. I have helped Jim retain his awareness, but it is you who have the power to bring us out of the Nexus.”

“Me?”

“You are the anchor Jim and I have in common—the one exception that the Nexus cannot imitate to perfection, even employing our memories of you against us.”

Leonard’s ears heat at the sincerity in those words.

“We have searched for the proper crossing between this world created by the Nexus, where we are, and the world where we rightfully belong, where you are.”

So they depended on Leonard to be some kind of north star? How very Jim-like. “What if you cross over somewhere that I’m not?”

“I have come to believe the Nexus is universe-agnostic. I suspect there are an infinite number of crossing points along the Nexus’s border, leading to universes like ours but that are not precisely ours.”

Shit, shit, shit. He could lose them thoroughly if they don’t locate the exact spot to leave the Nexus. Just when he thought that he only had to find the wayward Nexus and drag them home again… this is far more complicated than that.

“Bones?”

“Jim, you’re there?”

“Spock should have woken me sooner, but yeah. And, remember, Vulcans don’t lie. Spock means it. We miss you. We want to come home.”

Leonard swipes at the tears on his cheeks he didn’t realize he was crying. “Then come home, you fools.”

~~~

Apparently, Spock caught Jim up on their conversation and retreated to take his own nap. Leonard doesn’t know whether or not to be concerned that Spock could be right next to Jim, listening, without Leonard knowing about it. But that doesn’t stop him from speaking his mind.

“So whose idea was it to send me a creepy shadow-hopping cat?”

“Well, Bones, you know I am not good with small animals. Also, I think the correct term is interdimensional.”

Leonard harrumphs. “The creepy interdimensional cat is gettin’ on my last nerve. It never announces where it’s gonna be, and it’s always somewhere it shouldn’t be.” Like watching Leonard sleep.

“It’s Spock’s.”

“How convenient.”

“No, seriously. It only listens to him. I’m just the scratching post.”

Kirk says this so dryly that Leonard cracks a smile and admits, “You and me both.”

They lapse into an awkward silence.

Leonard leans over the sofa’s back to peer down into the space between it and the wall. “Don’t quit on me now, Jim.” He can’t stand the silence, given he has no idea how or when to predict the Nexus and his house are correctly aligned to open their communication channel, so to speak.

“Sorry, just thinking,” Jim responds immediately.

Leonard is long-practiced at picking up the muted exhaustion in Jim’s voice. He hears it now. “Worrying, more like. When was the last time you slept more than a couple of hours at a time?”

“Define sleep.”

“Humor me.”

“Maybe—” Jim stops and starts again. “I don’t know, Bones. It feels like my body has lost any sense of a circadian rhythm. Sometimes it’s day; sometimes it’s night. Everything changes. Can’t trust anything,” Kirk ends in a mutter.

“I’m sorry. I just wish…” Leonard releases a controlled sigh. “I wish you would have let me choose.”

“Bones.” Jim says this so softly, his tone hushed by a pain that likely isn’t physical. “I’m sorry too.”

Leonard can only repeat what he said to Spock, that heartbroken “You left me.” He closes his eyes, feeling pain too, imagining Jim as he was when their gazes met for the last time. It’s the same rawness from when he had accepted that Jim and Spock were beyond his reach, that no amount of searching would bring them back to him. He had asked for a leave of absence to cement his giving up the search in order to grieve their loss properly, and knowing he had done that would always bring him pain.

“We have a lot to discuss,” he tells Jim, “but it needs to be in person. I need you here.” Only then will he contemplate what forgiveness might feel like.

“Understood. And, Bones? I want that too. I meant it earlier. I miss you.”

A tension Leonard didn’t know he has loosens inside him. “Then tell me the plan. Between you and Spock, you’ve started on one, haven’t you?”

Jim chuckles, sounding more like himself. “It involves the cat.”

Leonard groans.

“See, I told Spock you would enjoy that.”

“At this point, I’ll agree to anything, including a seance with some actual ghosts!”

“Bones,” Jim teases, “this spirit wants you to help him quite literally pass through the boundary between one world and the next. You can do it. We believe in you!”

“You and your stupid pep-talks, kid.”

Leonard hates the idea of anyone having that much faith in him, but Jim and Spock continue to be the exception. For them, he can and has performed miracles, at times with only his grit to back him up. “Fine, whatever,” he agrees more confidently than he feels. “So what is the cat’s role in all of this? Sidekick?”

“Conduit,” intones another voice. “Our friend is talented at identifying the weakest points in the Nexus and exploiting them for the purpose of teleportation. I determined that his unique energy signature is adept at stabilizing the tunnel, for a lack of a better term, perhaps long enough that Jim and I could make use of it.” Spock pauses briefly before adding, “His other talent is finding you, Leonard. I believe he understands how integral you are to our mission to leave the Nexus—and why we have continually thwarted all attempts to keep us complacent.”

Well, that’s simultaneously heartening and disturbing news. The only recurring thought Leonard has is that he has been supplying this special-powered cat with replicated food instead of quality ingredients, all when said cat is key to the rescue mission.

“I solemnly swear that if we succeed I will give your precious kitty a feast fit for kings.”

“Seconded,” echoes Jim. “Spock, how long will it take you to update the cat on our escape plan?”

“I have already done so, Jim. He is most excited to get started.”

~~~

Following the lead of a cat isn’t the craziest thing Leonard has ever done, but it makes him fairly uncomfortable. He’s also uncomfortable because the cat didn’t like his bribes of a giant fleece-lined pillow and cat tree for its extended stay in his home. Instead, Leonard has to allow it free reign to any and every perch it wants. Leonard follows it around, feeling like a sycophant trying to please a very picky entitled person.

He honestly thought the cat would bop right into his reality with Jim and Spock hustling along, attached by some leash. But no, the cat is the door-opener only, it seems, not the human-Vulcan wrangler. And Leonard is being judged very harshly for his poor performance as the wrangler.

There have been some infuriatingly embarrassing failed starts. Naturally, Leonard is the one who keeps getting embarrassed, practically becoming one with the wall like some gigantic awkward spider while the cat sits and watches in morbid fascination and Jim and Spock keep claiming, “You’re not coming through, Bones! Try again!”

A man can only try so many times before he presses a pillow to his face and screams and has to take a nap to calm his nerves. The cat likes to accompany him during those times, as if to eek out the final seconds of Leonard’s mortification and despair.

Spock says that the cat says Leonard is a novice at portalling. The cat also thinks Leonard is a little bit stupid (Spock didn’t say this, but Jim swears the cat thinks all humans are the lesser species).

Leonard is ready to all but chuck the cat at the shaded areas of the wall instead of himself when Leonard is woken abruptly by the cat whapping his face. Not gentle bap-baps, no, but the kind of paw-slaps that make Leonard feel slightly afraid. He levers up out of bed, just barely throwing on a dressing robe over his pajamas before the cat howls from the bottom of the hallway’s staircase. Leonard cannot not sense the urgency from the cat, and so he goes hurtling downstairs after it, with the banister his only saving grace from death by stairs-tripping.

“What’s happening?” he calls. “Is someone there?”

“Here!” the ring of Kirk’s voice is as if the man himself is standing in the hallway. Leonard never heard his words—or Spock’s—come through this clearly and strongly.

The cat stops in front of a shadow slanted at an odd angle across the first-floor hallway. That shadow has no reason to exist there, not in broad daylight, thinks Leonard with a chill.

He approaches it with his heart in his throat. This is not a wall or a corner he can press against. He lets his fingertips hover in front of the shadow first; then pressing forward, his fingers push against a firm substance that seems permeable if he presses deeper. Then his hands slide in. He stops abruptly at his elbows when he feels the first grasp of something; a moment later his brain identifies the grasp as warm fingers against his.

Tears prick at the corner of his eyes. He knows the feeling of Jim’s hand in his own. Sometimes they would catch each other’s fingers just briefly whenever they stood close enough to touch, for steadiness, for comfort, for love.

From within the shadow, where Leonard cannot see but only feel, another invisible hand takes his other outstretched hand. Cooler, long elegant fingers that have a careful hesitance–Spock, always seeking permission to hold on so intimately. Leonard reflexively grants permission by gripping back hard.

Can it be them? Are they really there?

He starts to take a step forward but is halted by a weight draping over his foot. The cat swishes its tail as if daring him to move at all.

Oh, right. The anchor. He can’t fully enter through the barrier separating their worlds if he is to bring them back to this side. Only the cat can come and go as it pleases.

Leonard leans backward as a slight test of what resistance will meet him. The hands in his never slacken, sliding forward with him, but he still feels it when the shadow seems to shrink counter to his movement.

McCoy tries again, his biceps tensing, his body braced for more resistance. The more he pulls one way, the more the shadow sucks in, like a strange tug-of-war where he cannot see his opponent.

But the hands in his only tighten. Kirk’s other hand finds a solid grip on McCoy’s forearm, squeezing it in reassurance. Continue.

Oh, how Leonard pulls. He thinks of catching the rumor that the legendary Kirk and Spock are probably dead. He remembers being asked if he wanted to pack his partners’ personal belongings and place them in storage. He recalls feeling the emptiness inside him echoed by this home—until the cat showed up and revived Leonard’s hope by doing so.

At last, there’s a pop of released pressure. Leonard stumbles backward at the sudden loss of a counterbalance. Stumbling beside him are two inky forms that slowly resolve into familiar figures. At that final second, as Leonard’s eyes widen in recognition, the cat appears behind Leonard to unbalance him entirely, causing Leonard to spill right to the floor with his companions.

Jim lands on top of him with a loud whoosh of air. Leonard takes in the man’s hitched breaths just as Jim shifts aside, to burrow a hand under Leonard’s shoulder and pull him into an embrace. Leonard yelps when he feels Kirk’s other hand shove right up under his nightshirt, fingers pressing against the curve of Leonard’s ribcage.

“Bones.” Jim makes a small noise like a whimper. “You’re real.”

Leonard wants to repeat the sentiment but words fail him; returning the tight hug is the best he can do.

The other person he’d rescued—or resurrected, Leonard is not quite sure of the circumstances yet—is on his knees beside Kirk and McCoy. Spock tilts Leonard’s head back just enough to rest their foreheads together. Leonard hopes Spock doesn’t mind what a mess he is; emotions are welling up strongly in Leonard and leaking out in tears.

The softest brush of the Vulcan’s mind to Leonard’s reflects a deep relief and an aching kind of joy.

Leonard tries until he succeeds in saying, “Welcome home, both of you.”

Jim’s laugh is more of a sob, his face tucking itself into the crook of McCoy’s neck. Spock presses a hand on Leonard’s cheek and refuses to remove it.

The three men are too entangled to separate and none of them care.

Not until the cat worms its way between them and, according to Spock’s slow explanation, demands that promised feast.

~~~

Epilogue

“Dr. McCoy! Welcome back.” Chief Engineer Scott reaches out in greeting as Leonard steps out of the spacecraft secured in the shuttle bay of the flagship Enterprise. The man hastily retracts his limbs. “I see you’ve got your hands full.”

“Thanks, and don’t I know it,” says McCoy, shifting the bundle in his arms.

“Who’s this wee one?” Scott chucks the narrow-eyed feline under the chin and withdraws quickly enough that the cat’s teeth only nearly miss his uniform sleeve.

Leonard smiles. “I finally met somebody who’s a worse spacefarer than I am.” The cat had displayed a definite dislike for the shuttle’s take-off from Starbase One’s docking ring. The claw-like rends in the knees of Leonard’s pants are the proof. “Mr. Scott, I’m pleased to introduce to you to the ship’s new ghost cat!”

Scott flicks a startled gaze at Leonard’s amused one.

Leonard warns him dryly, “This one prefers hidey holes and shortcuts. So don’t be surprised if you find him where you least expect him.”

The engineer huffs. “A sneaky fellow, then.”

The cat squirms and meows in protest.

Leonard placates, “Yes, yes, we’ll find your favorite shipmate.”

“That’d be the Captain’s cat?”

Leonard rolls his eyes. “Nope. Spock’s. Jim hasn’t managed to charm this little fella yet and not for lack of trying.”

Scott laughs when the feline purrs at the mention of the Vulcan commander. “So, sneaky but discerning. Good to know.”

“I won’t tell Jim you said that.”

Leonard allows Scott to accompany him to the nearest turbolift. Then he traverses the main corridor with the ease and familiarity of years spent aboard one particular starship.

“You might not like this ship as much as my old house,” he says to his small companion as they head for his quarters, “but at least now you have a designated job. If we encounter any more weird tears in the fabric of time and space that might swallow somebody, we’d appreciate some advance warning.” He pauses, and adds, “And don’t get lost yourself. You fit right in with this motley crew.”

The cat springs from his arms just as the cabin door of Leonard’s quarters slides open and rushes between the legs of the man standing near the threshold.

Jim Kirk glances over his shoulder. Leonard’s gaze follows. The cat lands on the table next to a seated Spock and deliberately knocks against the 3-D chess game already in progress.

Jim huffs. “That was my winning move that was just obliterated. Bones, I don’t think we’ll ever be the favorite.”

“The real question is who does Spock like better: us or that furry beast?”

Spock turns to raise an eyebrow at them, placing the agitated cat in his lap to stroke its fur. “I believe I explained at length that my humans are my dear ones.”

The cat makes a low growl.

“Naturally,” Spock agrees to whatever has passed unspoken between him and the feline, “no one shall force you to share.”

Kirk’s arm slips around McCoy’s waist, tugging the man into the room. “Well, for the record, Bones and I can take the higher road. We know how to share.”

Leonard can’t help but lean into Jim at that and lifts a challenging eyebrow specifically at this territorial interdimensional cat of theirs, thinking that no other time and place feels the most like home than where he is now.

The End

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