Pat Detmer

It was time.

Hell, it was past time. Nine-and-a-half shifts with no captain on the bridge was officially too much for McCoy’s bruised and rattled system to bear. And irony of ironies, it had been his suggestion. “Take some time, Jim,” he’d said in the transporter room as he’d gauged the flatness in his friend’s eyes. “Take some time on this one,” he’d said.

Who knew that James T. Kirk would take him up on it? Up to now the captain had been unbeatable, unbreakable, bendable only when necessary, and prior entreaties from his chief medical officer to “take it easy” or “take some time” had always been met with predictable and comfortable disdain.

Kirk had said not one word in the transporter room, had left McCoy’s concern unacknowledged, had brushed past a hovering Spock with no comment, and had disappeared around the night-shift-lit corridor curve as McCoy and Spock, wearing identical frowns, had watched.

Thinking about it now as he stood at the door to Kirk’s quarters, McCoy was fairly certain that the last full sentence that he had heard Jim utter was “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

He cleared his throat and shifted the jeweled bottle of Saurian brandy in his hands.

Jim could refuse him entrance, of course. That was his right. The captain knew that the ship could run just fine without him for the short term. Everybody knew that. He had a com unit in his quarters. He could check on their status with the push of a button and had been doing so with some regularity the whole time, according to Spock. And they were currently sailing through placid seas, as if the universe knew that what had just happened was Enough.

But nine-and-a-half shifts…

McCoy had avoided looking up Starfleet regs for anything like this. Besides, he was sure that Spock had already committed whatever there was to memory, including the goddamned regulation number, so what was the point?

With the Guardian of Forever three standard days behind them, McCoy had sent a message to his absent captain: “I have some (illegal) Saurian brandy. I think it’s time to get legal by removing the evidence. I’ll be by your quarters at 1900 hours. McCoy.”

Never much of a letter writer, he’d struggled over it for nearly half an hour. He didn’t want to be too obvious. Didn’t want to hover. Wanted to temper his concern with a life-goes-on attitude, a kind of eat, drink illegal substances, and be merry joie de vivre. He’d actually grimaced as he’d hit the “send” button, and had sucked air through his teeth as he’d seen it confirmed that the system had deemed his twenty-six-word note acceptable and had sent it away to the addressee, a note that had—according to a check of his “sent” queue later—been opened and read. McCoy had longed briefly for the ability to go beyond merely knowing that it had been received. He wished for an empathetic system that would tell him how it had been received.

But James T. Kirk was not captain of a Federation starship for nothing. Psych profiles on all captains had one thing in common: a high probability for making cosmic lemonade out of lemons. McCoy knew Jim would get over this and would show up on the bridge, even of temperament and firm of resolve.

He just wanted to kick-start the process.

And he needed a little forgiveness.

If only…

If only he’d remembered all the lessons he’d learned in the Academy. If only he had paid better attention during the Deep Space Medicine: The Reality lecture series—a parade of old CMOs and medical technicians, incident-weary veterans telling funny, bitter stories about mistakes made, about botching surgeries while warping through spatial sinks, about bone-knitters misfiring during power surges, about removing kidneys twice in temporal anomalies, about treating Orion plasma cannon burns with alien critter shit while planetside and cut off from sickbay; relating how to counteract the effects of a Klingon Mind-Sifter (you couldn’t) and what to do if you yourself took a phaser hit. (Nothing. You go down just like the rest of them.) And in there somewhere was something about turbulence and loaded hyposprays. If he’d taken any decent notes in his student days, he would have looked them up now just to punish himself a little more effectively.

Handling Loaded Hyposprays During Turbulence:

Drop them. Don’t hesitate. Just drop them. You can pick them up off the deck later, but only if you’re conscious.

But he didn’t drop it, of course. After he’d shot Sulu with it and had allowed himself a brief moment of doctorly congratulation, he’d stood there like an idiot, holding it up in front of himself like a damned award, and then the Guardian had thrown another angry wave at them and…

The whisper of some passing crew members shook him from his reverie.

No sense putting it off, he thought, and he leaned into the face-plate, seeking admittance. The door slipped open. He stepped in and the door slid closed behind him.

It was dim in the captain’s quarters. The only light came from the com unit.

The place smelled of uneaten food and cold coffee, of overly ripe bedsheets, of meals that had been eaten and found the stomach inhospitable. It smelled of unwashed hair and of man sweat and despair, and McCoy nearly took a step backward under the weight of it. He had not expected Jim’s grief to be so unsubtle, and he feared his ability to deal with it effectively.

“Bones.” It was the scratch of a voice unused.

He was in one of the chairs in the seating area across from his desk, one arm thrown over the chair back, the other crooked on the chair arm, and his chin was in his hand. McCoy could barely see him, the light was so spare. McCoy would allow him that, the darkness, this last vestige of privacy in a ship of four hundred plus souls.

He gave Jim what he knew to be a pathetic excuse for a lopsided grin, and hefted the gaudy bottle up in front of him.

“Just what the doctor ordered,” he said. Yep. Drown your sorrows, Jim-boy, he thought, feeling foolish and inept. God forbid we actually talk about this. And he’d taken psych for how many years?

Jim waved him to the sideboard where he kept the glasses, and McCoy let his doctor’s eye roam as he headed there, scanning the uneaten platters of food, looking for empty liquor bottles. There were none. That, at least, was a relief, and he only realized the irony of that thought as the sweet/spicy odor of Saurian brandy wafted up to him while he poured. He recorked the bottle, put it under his arm, and went to the chair next to Jim. He sat and held the glass out toward him.

“I’ve had this for at least seven or eight years. Hauled it around with me. I was waiting for the right moment to crack it.”

“This is it, then?” Jim asked, reaching for the glass. “The ‘right moment’?” His lips formed a rueful and bitter line. “I’d hate to see the ‘wrong moment.’”

No tremors, McCoy thought as he looked at Jim’s reaching hand, and he did a quick examination of the rest of his friend over the top of his glass as he sipped: beard stubble, hair disheveled, dark smudges under the eyes. McCoy could not remember having seen the fine lines around the mouth and on the forehead even in the harshest light, but the hazel eyes were intelligent and clear, and in those eyes McCoy saw pain so encompassing that he shut his own eyes as he finished off his sip so he wouldn’t have to look any longer than he had to. Despair looked odd on the captain, like an ill-fitting uniform. He looked…surprised. Surprised and confused.

Small wonder.

There were jokes back at the academy about Captain Kirk, McCoy knew, jokes about his propensity to bed the universe, to charm the blue of skin and silver of hair. Language barriers had never stopped him. Curious appendages had never stopped him. He was a lover of life, and therefore a lover of women.

McCoy figured that only about half of the stories were true. Jim Kirk was not a talker, but the belowdeck rumors were rampant nonetheless, and many a lovesick yeoman had committed the curve of the captain’s derriere and the breadth and cut of his shoulders to memory as they’d walked behind him down the ship’s corridor.

Eros had never fired an arrow across Jim Kirk’s bow before. Infatuation? Yes. Fascination? Yes sir. Sexual attraction? Sir, yes sir.

But Edith Keeler had been different. Edith Keeler was a hot ball of belief and energy, so flush with her philosophy that she was almost frightening, almost a zealot. She was radiant. She was smart. She knew what she wanted. She was charismatic and brave, fearless, a visionary, a leader of people, lit from within. She was…She was…

She was Jim Kirk in a skirt.

She was Jim Kirk in a skirt. James Tiberius Kirk had been brought down by a distaff version of himself, someone who could captain a starship and give birth.

Too late, McCoy realized that the snifter had frozen halfway to his lips and that his mouth had dropped open and that he was staring wide-eyed at a spot on the wall just left of the captain’s ear as his brain struggled to wrap itself around this morsel.

“Bones?”

“Hunh?” McCoy shifted his gaze back to his companion.

Jim squinted at him. “What? What are you thinking?”

Shit. He couldn’t tell him what he was thinking. So he lied:

“I was thinking that you should have left me back there.”

It wasn’t a lie after all. It was a truth that had seared his nightmares, and his tongue pushed the words through his teeth before his lips had a chance to close around them.

Jim’s face went slack as he considered this. It was obvious to McCoy that he’d not given it any thought. Jim didn’t think like that. Never had.

“And if it had been someone as…as anonymous as a…as a Yeoman Weathers, for example, you probably would have left her back there.” McCoy couldn’t help himself. He was here for a good old-fashioned whipping, and if he had to twist the truth and wound an already wounded Jim Kirk to get the process started, so be it.

Jim frowned and shook his head. “Who?”

McCoy took another sip. Actually, a gulp. His right eye watered a little.

“Yeoman First Class Jamie Weathers. Been on board for four months. Xenobiology lab technician.” McCoy watched as that bit of data clicked in. He had no doubt that her files would be accessed by the captain as soon as this session was over. “If she’d fallen on a hypospray and gone loony and jumped through that goddamned thing, I think you might have had the good sense to leave her behind.”

Jim’s features settled into a face that McCoy almost recognized. Jim was mentally chawing on something, and the puzzle of it suited his taste. Crinkle lines—part bemusement, small part anger—appeared at the corners of his eyes and he turned those eyes on his CMO like a weapon, armed for deep penetration. All eyes ahead full.

“And here for the past three days I thought I was the center of the universe,” he said, and he saluted McCoy with his glass and drank.

“Guess I was wrong.” He smiled, and McCoy swore that he could hear Jim’s facial muscles scream from the effort. “Are you here for a whipping or for forgiveness? Or both?”

“All of the above,” McCoy said. “I’ll take anything.”

“Poof,” Jim said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You’re forgiven. Even though there’s nothing to forgive. Or have you forgotten that there was no Enterprise to leave on, even if I’d thought that might be an option?”

Of course McCoy hadn’t forgotten. Unfortunately, he couldn’t forget anything that had happened once he was free from the grip of cordrazine.

“As for a whipping…” Jim took a thoughtful sip of brandy.

“Don’t have the energy. Maybe tomorrow.”

McCoy looked over at him through hooded eyes. “Does that mean you’ll be back tomorrow?”

“Are you counting?” A challenge.

“Yes.”

Jim nodded down at the snifter as he rolled it between his palms.

“We’ll see,” his lips formed without sound. He cleared his throat and looked back up. “We’ll see,” he said loud enough to hear.

“It’s time, Jim,” McCoy said, leaning toward the table between them and uncorking the bottle. Jim held up a hand in refusal. McCoy shrugged and sloshed some more in his glass. The damned stuff had cost him nearly three months’ salary. Another glass and it would be gone.

“I’ve been thinking about the Academy a lot,” Jim said, gazing over toward his desk, “about how it doesn’t prepare you for…” He looked back at his friend. “…for this kind of shit.”

“Me, too,” McCoy admitted after another healthy swig. “Sometimes, though, I think the lessons were there and we just chose to think we knew better.” He grinned. “Education is wasted on the young.”

“You know what example they used in Prime Directive 101, Bones?”

No. But he could guess.

“Hitler,” Jim confirmed. “Adolf Hitler.”

“No imagination, those professors,” McCoy said in a slur, shaking his head.

“But it’s perfect, isn’t it?” Jim frowned into the middle distance. “One-Size-Fits-All Monster of the Universe. So you land on a planet and you have a chance to stop Hitler—”

“…or T’Hitler or Hitler Khan,” McCoy added, feeling giddy.

“—and what do you do?” He looked back at McCoy as if he expected a cogent answer. “What do you do?”

“Well,” McCoy drawled, and he crossed his legs, expecting a good old Kirk/McCoy ethics debate, “I’d think the firs—”

Before he could fully grasp what was happening, McCoy realized that Jim’s grizzled face was a mere half-meter from his, and Jim’s eyes had nailed him to the chair like a paralyzer beam.

“Did she see it coming, Bones?” he whispered in a voice baked in hell.

“What?”

“Edith. Did she see it coming? The truck?”

McCoy looked away and up at the ceiling, at the pool of light above the com unit. “Ah, Jimbo…I…”

Kirk would not be redirected. McCoy could feel his hot breath on his neck. “You’re a doctor, Bones. Did she feel pain? Did she die right away?”

McCoy’s mouth had gone dry. He couldn’t make sound. Didn’t want to. There were no good sounds to make to that question.

Jim looked back into his dim quarters, his eyes tracking furiously as if the answer might be written on the walls, and he beat his free fist on his chair’s armrest, harder and harder, and McCoy pressed down into his own chair as a howl came from Jim’s throat. Part sob, part tribal cry, it made all the hairs on McCoy’s arms stand at attention. The captain rose from his chair like a dark wave reaching a rocky shore and threw the snifter, unfinished expensive illegal Saurian brandy notwithstanding, into the opposite bulkhead.

McCoy watched as the purple/red liquid tracked down the wall. Like blood. Like the blood he’d seen on Edith Keeler. He licked his lips. He wanted nothing more than to escape down the corridor, to escape into sleep where there was no escape. But this was no time for cowardice.

Jim was standing in front of him, and he was burning a hole through the bulkhead with his eyes, chest heaving, fists clenched.

McCoy took a deep breath.

“Well, I hope you’re happy,” he said in what he hoped was an unconcerned, nonchalant tone, and he took another sip and pointed at the wall. “Do you have any idea what that was worth?”

Slowly, slowly the captain turned to look at him, to look down at him as if he was a newly discovered species. As in: Hello. What’s this? As if Jim didn’t even realize that his self-imposed exile had been broken by another being. McCoy stared back, facade un-flinching, and his insides danced and twitched. And as he watched, Jim Kirk deflated like an enviro suit in a decompression chamber and dropped back into his chair.

And started to laugh.

McCoy listened to it carefully, listened for something sharp, listened for some kind of edge to it, but found none. It was a Holy Smokes I Can’t Believe I Just Did That chuckle. No belly, all throat and brain. There was no desperation in it, and McCoy sighed and relaxed back into his chair. He felt as if he’d been held captive in a muscle-restrictive stasis field for weeks and had just figured out how to work the controls. Everything was going to be all right.

Eventually.

Jim heaved a great sigh and rubbed his face with his hands. He turned to McCoy, a weak and sheepish grin on his lined face.

“Hey. It’s okay.” McCoy said, and he smiled. “I can always bootleg more. But I’ll need a bump in pay.”

Jim gave him a blank nod, not appreciating the humor in it. “I guess that…” he said, and he stopped. He stared at the table between the chairs, at the green and gold bottle there. He was a still life in sadness. He began again.

“I guess that I don’t think I’m going to have many chances at it.” He looked at McCoy. “At love. At being with someone, being committed to someone. And here my best chance may have been a hundred years ago, on my own planet.”

McCoy wanted to blow that notion off, to tell him that he’d have plenty of chances, that there were thousands of proverbial fish in the seas that they sailed, but he was struck mute. He couldn’t provide those assurances because he knew in his heart that they weren’t true. Not for him, and not for his friend. The life they led was the excuse that he might use, but that was only part of it.

Jim looked down at his hands. “But I also realized something, Bones. I’ve run from commitment my whole life. Wasn’t it convenient that I happened to fall for someone that I knew I couldn’t have? Even if she hadn’t been the catalyst that had changed the universe and made the Enterprise disappear, I couldn’t have stayed back there.”

“I know.”

Jim’s eyes grew soft. “I couldn’t have.” He raised his eyebrows and looked at McCoy.

“Could I.”

It was a statement, not a question, McCoy told himself as his gaze left Jim’s face and ranged through the cabin. Jim would never have considered it. The Enterprise would have been captainless. Captainless, but not without adequate interim leaders. And a new captain would have been commissioned as quickly as possible. Starfleet—slow as glacier melt when it suited them—didn’t hesitate when it came to a captainless starship. And life would have proceeded. Minus James T. Kirk, but it would have proceeded. As it always did.

McCoy felt Jim’s eyes on his face, felt them bore through his skull and into his brain, and McCoy knew that Jim read the thoughts there as easily as he might read something on his com unit screen. McCoy turned to him.

“No. Even if she hadn’t been the catalyst, you couldn’t have stayed,” he lied. “You did the right thing.”

Jim nodded and rubbed the back of his head, as if it hurt to read the truth and hear the lie.

“You know what really pisses me off?” he asked.

“What?”

“What I gave up to keep the universe the same, and the universe doesn’t give a damn. It rolls right along, marking time, and it doesn’t give a damn.”

McCoy grunted. This was getting dangerous. This was beginning to sound like the nightmares he’d been having, and he didn’t need to visit those places awake.

“Hey!” he said, and he took the last swig of brandy. “I give a damn!”

Jim smiled at him. It was genuine and unprotected, and it made McCoy’s heart ache.

“Gotta go,” he said, and he leaned forward and squeezed Jim’s knee. “Go back to work, Jimbo. It’ll be good for you.”

The captain nodded. McCoy pressed his lips into a pensive line and nodded back, then rose and headed for the door. It swooshed open and then closed behind him and McCoy stood outside it and did the thousand-yard stare across a corridor that was only four.

It was a good fifteen seconds before he heard the breathing.

It was Spock, and he was to McCoy’s left, next to the door, and he had become the corridor wall: still, gray, waiting. McCoy turned to face him, his brain screaming: Don’t quote me regulations, Spock. Don’t quote me any goddamned regulations.

McCoy stood in front of him, deliberately closer to Spock than he liked, breaking that unspoken meter-apart rule that he telegraphed through every pore of his green Vulcan hide. McCoy felt his heart pound. He was just drunk enough to yell out loud what was pulsing through his brain before Spock even had the chance to spout the chapter and verse.

His vitriol faded when he saw the depth of concern in Spock’s eyes and noted the hollows under his cheekbones, made stark in the half-light of the corridor. McCoy cursed the receding Guardian of Forever yet again and watched Spock take a deep breath. When he spoke, it was one word, filled with feeling. He said:

“Well?”

“Well.” It was without a doubt the most human thing he’d ever heard his friend say, and he considered carefully how to answer him:

“Well, I don’t feel any better, and I’ll be the first to admit that that was one of the reasons I went in there.”

“Well…ignore the stuff dripping down the wall.”

“Well, he’ll be back soon. I give it a shift, tops.”

“Well, the universe doesn’t give a damn, but I think you knew that already.”

And he leaned forward and squeezed Spock’s upper arm, allowing himself a moment of surprise when Spock didn’t flinch, and he said:

“Well. Another visit from another friend who gives a damn will do him a world of good.”