Chapter Text
McCoy doesn’t notice that he’s become friends with Jim until it’s way too late.
McCoy is blind-drunk the first time they meet, so focused on vomiting as little as possible that he barely notices the bruised kid chattering in the seat beside him. He reluctantly accepts the distraction, but his thoughts are still in Georgia. Not with Jocelyn, who took the damn state away from him, but with Joanna, his daughter. Will she miss him? Will she resent that he left? Or will she be grateful, like her mother, to not have McCoy in her life?
It takes him a week to realize that Jim isn’t going away.
With Jim’s command track and McCoy’s accelerated medical courses, they only overlap for one class—the Starfleet introductory history and ethics course required for all first years—but Jim just keeps showing up. He’s greeting him in the cafeteria, stopping off to give McCoy an extra fruit cup before he continues his apparent mission to flit by every table in the room. He drags McCoy to dinner one night, insisting that they try the dim sum place around the corner. He’s at the bar beside McCoy off-campus, matching him shot for shot without seeming to notice or care that McCoy isn’t playing the game.
It’s like those videos of people doing serious exercises while a nearby dog bounces around and mimics them, glancing sideways every few moments for approval.
When McCoy starts to come out of his depressed haze, he looks at Jim in bafflement. “What are you doing, kid?”
Jim looks up from a mouthful of noodles. “Eating?” Jim says, as though McCoy is the strange one here.
McCoy just grunts and goes back to his own food.
Now that he’s paying attention, it’s as though a heavy drape has been pulled back from a window. It’s shocking that he didn’t fail his first few weeks of courses, though he thinks maybe those nights where Jim prodded him to study together weren’t just for Jim’s benefit.
Though Jim may have helped him, it doesn’t seem as though that makes McCoy special.
Jim seems to be everywhere at once. He’s flirting with cute males and female of every species, leaning forward on the bar and twisting his hips like he’s in a commercial for blue jeans. He’s antagonizing pompous professors and every other authority figure he crosses paths with, mocking them to their faces and then acing every exam they throw at him. He helps people all the time, bending over backward to help near-strangers move dorm rooms, or study for their exams, or find their way around campus.
He’s difficult to get a grasp on. Bold and brash and cocky, but brilliant and empathetic and curious. What did he say that Pike had called him during his informal recruitment? A ‘genius-level repeat-offender?’ Jim has too much energy, and not enough direction, even here at Starfleet.
Though Jim is everything to everyone, it doesn’t seem as though anyone is looking out for him in return. All those friends who greet him in the halls, and none of them seem to have any better idea of who Jim Kirk really is than McCoy does.
Maybe it’s none of McCoy’s business. Maybe he shouldn’t be asking more of the kid than he’s offering. Look where McCoy’s loyalty had gotten him—divorced and alone on the west coast. He shouldn’t be feeling the stirring of…whatever he’s feeling toward this unmanaged nuclear warhead of a cadet.
#
The first time Jim nearly kills himself at Starfleet, it’s in the cafeteria.
Jim is doing his usual butterfly routine. He’s eating as he walks, an open fruit cup and fork in hand and a sandwich tucked under his elbow. “Heya, Bones,” he greets as he passes by. Ah, yes, that ridiculous nickname. McCoy honestly isn’t sure whether Jim really knows his actual name, or if he’s just very dedicated to his nicknames. “How are you doing this fine day?”
“It’s raining,” McCoy grumbles. He’s at his table alone, poring over his course notes. You’d think that being a medical doctor already would make these Starfleet classes seem like a joke, but you don’t encounter much xenobio in Georgia.
Jim takes a bite from the fruit cup. “We’re in San Francisco, Bones. It’s always raining.”
“So the days are never fine,” McCoy says.
“That seems like a terrible way to look at…” Jim clears his throat. “At…” He coughs, wheezes, and then the fruit cup falls to the tile floor.
“Kirk?” McCoy says, torn between concern and suspicion.
Jim grabs his throat, and his face is growing mottled with purple splotches. And, yep, that’s an allergic reaction if McCoy has ever seen one.
While Starfleet’s finest cadets panic around them, McCoy launches out of his seat and helps lower Jim onto the ground, narrowing avoiding the spilled syrup and fruit chunks.
Jim waves toward his uniform pocket, and McCoy pulls out a compact hypo. Without stopping to think, McCoy jabs it into Jim’s neck and compresses the trigger. .3 milligrams of epinephrine shoot into the idiot’s neck, lacing his veins with adrenaline and helping his body beat back the reaction.
Finally regaining the ability to breathe, Jim wheezes and gasps. When his breathing is finally under control, he blinks up at McCoy. “My hero,” he says, and then moves to stand.
“And just where do you think you’re going? That was an extreme allergic reaction.”
“And you saved me,” Jim says. “Problem solved.”
“Oh, no,” McCoy says. Jim seems determined to stand, so McCoy helps him to his feet and hooks Jim’s arm around his shoulders. “You’re not just walking away like this. You’re coming to medical. Now.”
“I have class, Bones,” Jim says, rubbing at his throat.
“I don’t care, Jim,” McCoy drawls.
#
In the end, McCoy has to practically drag Jim to the medical wing of the Academy. McCoy spends half his time in classes and half on rotation seeing patients, so he has an examination room he can commandeer to look over the still-protesting Jim.
Once he uses a tricorder to make sure there aren’t any lingering effects from the attack, McCoy pulls up Jim’s official medical chart. Jim starts to stand from the bed, but McCoy pushes him back down with one hand, not looking up from the data.
“Is this a medical chart or an encyclopedia?” McCoy mutters.
“You’re not my doctor,” Jim shoots back.
“According to this, you don’t have one on this coast yet. You haven’t been to a doctor since… Jesus, kid, it’s been years. How did you even get on campus? You could have been carrying an Altairian death virus.”
“They don’t nag last-minute recruits about vaccines. I knew I was clean.”
McCoy shakes his head. “Maybe you don’t have any diseases, but with a chart like this, you should have a physician on hand. Jesus, kid, if you have this many allergies, you really shouldn’t be eating whatever’s put in front of you,” Bones says, scrolling through the list on his PADD. “You know the mixed fruit here is a grab-bag.”
“The lady at the counter gave it to me for free,” Jim says. “She was flirting. I mean, I was flirting first, but it was working.”
“So you just ate it?”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Maybe check the ingredients? Or just say thank you to the nice lady and throw it away? I mean, look at this. You’re allergic to pears. You know how often the syrup in fruit cups comes from pear juice?”
“No?”
“At least you had the hypo on you. Do you have another to replace that one?”
“My prescription might be out…” Jim says thoughtfully, like it’s not a matter of life and death.
“I’m writing you a new one.”
“Can you do that?”
“I’ve just assigned myself as your new Primary Care physician,” McCoy tells him. “I can do whatever I want, and you clearly qualify for it. Keep it on you at all times.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jim says. “I survived this long without you, you know.”
“Jesus only knows how,” McCoy mutters.
#
That night at dinner, McCoy pulls out his tricorder and scans the dish Jim has just been handed by the wait staff. They don’t always get dinner together, but Jim seems eager to even the score between them after the earlier disaster.
“What are you doing?” Jim asks, stopping halfway through snapping his chopsticks and leaving them a gnarled, splintered mess.
“Making sure you’re not going to poison yourself again.”
Jim rolls his eyes. “What, are you going to follow me around from now on?”
“If I have to.”
Jim puts down the chopsticks. “Seriously, Bones. I don’t need taking care of. This is ridiculous. You’re not my babysitter.”
“Feels like it,” McCoy mutters. “The noodles are safe.”
“Thanks,” Jim bites out sarcastically. “Seriously, this is above and beyond even for a Starfleet doctor. Do you follow around all your patients to make sure they don’t kill themselves? Do they pay you extra for this?”
You made sure that I wasn’t flunking out the first few weeks of the Academy, McCoy doesn’t say. You made sure I wasn’t drinking alone, even when I wanted to be. “I’m your friend, you backwater hick,” McCoy says. “If I don’t look out for your dumb ass, who will?”
“Oh,” Jim says, seeming to lose the momentum of his annoyance.
“Yeah, ‘oh,’” McCoy says. “Shut up and eat your noodles.”
#
After that night, Jim goes from being a fly that occasionally buzzes around McCoy to being an absolute barnacle. Jim doesn’t stop spending time with other cadets, couldn’t stop flirting with every cute person or challenging every authority figure if he tried, but he always ends up back with McCoy.
If Jim hadn’t already lamented about McCoy being ‘tragically straight,’ McCoy might have thought he was being wooed.
Jim brings him coffee in the mornings, chats with him over lunch, drags him to the library to study at all hours, and brings him barhopping across town at night. More than that, he starts to see Jim the rare times that he’s quiet. The nights he’s drained from taking more courses than any other student in their year, the nights he seems haunted by ghosts he can’t talk about, the nights he’s wide-eyed and jittery until four in the morning. A wall has fallen between them, and Jim has stopped performing all the time.
McCoy grumbles constantly about his new shadow, but Jim doesn’t take it personally. Somehow, he seems able to look straight through McCoy’s blustering and see that, maybe, McCoy appreciates the friendship.
So when they’re picking housing for second year, Jim doesn’t even raise an eyebrow when McCoy sends him the roommate request form and a list of his dorm preferences.
Living with Jim isn’t the complete nightmare McCoy half-expects it to be. Though he hooks up with people all around campus, he never brings them back to their shared room, and never spends the night out. He’s always back by two, and that’s when he goes out at all. Now that they’re living together, they often skip the bars altogether in favor of splitting a bottle of bourbon on their couch.
It’s still a little bit of a nightmare, of course. It’s Jim Kirk, after all.
Jim has no sense of modesty, and McCoy has seen him in the altogether at least five times more than he would have ever wanted.
Though he lives with a doctor, Jim is still practically allergic to seeking medical attention, even when he needs it. McCoy ends up bringing a dermal regenerator back to their dorm after Jim gets into a brawl off-campus and refuses to come to medical to get his bloodied knuckles repaired.
Those quirks are predictable. Others are more surprising.
Jim Kirk hides food everywhere.
When McCoy feels something crinkle when he sits on the couch and he lifts the cushion to find a neat row of granola bars, he thinks he’s losing his mind. What kind of goddamn weird prank is this? There were bags of pretzels under the sink by the drain cleaner, shitty nutri-packs tucked inside the guitar case Jim never actually opened, and now this.
“Jim!” he calls, folding his arms.
Jim practically falls out of his room. He’s been trained to respond to that tone in McCoy’s voice. It’s something McCoy takes great pride in.
He sees what McCoy has found and freezes. For a moment, his face doesn’t have the shit-eating grin he gets when he’s pulled one over on McCoy, or the breezy ease when he’s doing something stupid that no one’s ever stopped him from doing before—it’s fear.
McCoy rethinks the rant he’d been about to deliver about roaches and being generally annoying, and starts to wonder if there isn’t more to all this. Jim isn’t exactly an open book about his past, but McCoy has noticed that he doesn’t go home for any of the Academy holidays. It’s obvious from even his vague references that his childhood couldn’t be considered ‘good’ by any standard.
In a different light, this hoarding might not look so much like a prank as a defense mechanism, a safety blanket for a kid who once didn’t trust the people in charge of feeding him. It’s a symptom McCoy has seen before in young patients that were an hour away from getting a visit from CPS.
Jim recovers quickly, but it doesn’t erase what McCoy saw.
“I see you’ve found my midnight snacks,” Jim says, leaning against his doorframe. “Sometimes you just don’t have the energy to get all the way to the kitchen, you know?”
“I don’t care about that. I know I’ve told you about how I feel about oatmeal raisin in my house,” McCoy says, all bluster. He lifts one of the bars. “Really, Jim? You know this is an abomination. I’m a doctor, and even I won’t encourage this. Next time, at least go with the chocolate kind.” He jabs a quick finger at the kid. “No peanuts.”
Jim relaxes slightly, his smile becoming a touch more real. “I haven’t forgotten my own peanut allergy, Bones,” he says. “I’ll get the better kind next time.”
“See that you do,” McCoy grumbles, and shoos him back to his room.
#
As Jim’s GP, McCoy has access to all of Jim’s records, stretching back to the birth certificate that lists his place of birth as ‘USS Kelvin – Escape Pod.’ Before their third year, while McCoy is confirming that Jim is up-to-date on all of his vaccines, he finds a discrepancy.
In 2248, there was a planet-wide distribution of an updated avian flu vaccine. Every child under the age of eighteen on planet at the time would have been given the shot. McCoy himself had just aged out of it, but he had already been planning to pursue his medical career at the time and had done a paper on the effort.
But Jim’s medical records are blank for that entire year.
Not just blank in that Jim had managed to avoid doctors—blank of any sort of notes. Even though Jim’s absent mother and neglectful stepfather didn’t enforce regular visits to the doctor, Jim’s four-month epinephrine hypo prescription was ongoing from the time his allergies had been discovered at age eight. During 2248, no prescriptions were filled.
McCoy assumes that there’s a computer error, but he goes back to the file again the next day. Thinking about it overnight, he’s come to realize there are two options—either it really was a glitch in the system… or someone tampered with the files. And being Jim’s friend, McCoy knows which option he’d put his money on.
If it was Jim, it’s a clumsier job than the hacks he’s seen from the kid since they met. Jim handles code as easily as he does the controls of his flight sims, dancing through data that’s incomprehensible to McCoy. Last year, when McCoy was desperate for a seat in Professor Raine’s lecture, Jim had slipped into the system to help him. When McCoy had berated him for giving him the spot and kicking some other poor sap out of the class, Jim had explained that he hadn’t kicked anyone else out—he’d just altered the system to believe there was one more seat available.
Though his personality was that of a bulldozer, he was usually too smart to make his hacking detectable at all unless he was proving a point. This here, in his medical records, was the code equivalent of a sledgehammer. What point had Jim been trying to make? Or had the files been altered years ago, before Jim had learned to wield code like a scalpel?
It nags on McCoy, but he already knows that he’ll only get a deflection if he asks Jim. There are some fights not worth picking. If Jim hid something, it’s probably worth hiding. Jim will tell him if it was important. Eventually.
Won’t he?
#
During their first year of friendship, Jim seems to be drunk as often as he is sober. He’s determined to ace his classes—he’s never met a challenge he can say no to—but he doesn’t really care.
As their friendship develops and Jim realizes that he’s actually good at all this, that changes. He goes out less, stays in more. He stabilizes in a way it doesn’t sound like he ever had before Starfleet.
McCoy knows the feeling. After his divorce, he had half-expected to continue crashing and burning right into his grave. He had joined Starfleet after all—if that doesn’t reek of subconscious suicidality, what does?
Instead, they’ve found an anchor in each other. McCoy doesn’t admit it out loud, but he’d be lost without the kid, and he thinks the feeling might be mutual.
That’s why when he comes home to find Jim so drunk that he’s not able to stand up straight at four in the afternoon on a Wednesday, he’s immediately concerned. First, he double-checks the date—they’re far from Jim’s birthday, which is a usual trigger. Jim hasn’t been seeing anyone lately, so he can’t have been dumped. There’s no way he failed his Introductory Klingon course, not which his skill in languages.
“Hey, kid,” he says, helping Jim sit down. “You all right?”
“Me? Fine. Just fine,” Jim says, toasting him with a nearly-empty bottle of gin that McCoy takes from his loose grip. Jim is still staring in confusion at his own empty hand when McCoy returns a minute later with a replacement glass of water.
“What happened, Jim?” McCoy asks.
Jim just shakes his head. “Absolutely nothing,” he says, like it’s a private joke, and then slumps back onto the couch.
“Drink that water and let’s get you to bed,” McCoy instructs. He half-drags, half-carries Jim to his bed, forces another glass of water on him, and then covers him with his blankets.
“Bones?” Jim asks blearily before McCoy can make his exit. “Will this ever get easier?”
McCoy isn’t one for false platitudes, but he can’t help saying, “Yeah, Jim. It will.”
Back out in the living room, McCoy spots Jim’s PADD lying on the table, still open. He glances back at the bedroom, and then picks it up. He expects to find a message, maybe from Jim’s absent mother or, hell, some pregnant one-night-stand.
Instead, the PADD is pulled up to a word processor. At the top of the page, Jim has pasted the assignment, and he seems to have gotten only two sentences into his paper before giving up and going on his bender.
Ethics in Leadership: COMM 206
Professor Jon Yengle
Leadership involves making difficult decisions, and balancing the needs of the many compared with the needs of the few. Over Starfleet history, infamous leaders have made controversial decisions leaning toward either camp.Discuss the pros and cons of the leadership decisions of General Kodos during the Tarsus IV famine, with historical examples.
Jim’s opening line is factual. His second is unfinished.
Bones frowns at the assignment—who dropped this professor on his head as a baby? Having students discuss the merits of a massacre. Honestly. Next they’d be debating the genocide on Retaine VII, or the European Holocaust.
Bones begins to exit out of the paper to search for the cause of Jim’s distress when part of Jim’s introductory sentence catches his eye.
The famine on Tarsus IV happened during the year 2248.
McCoy knows that year. He’s been puzzling over it for months now. That’s the missing year in Jim’s medical file.
It hits him like an eighteen-wheeler. The pieces slot together, the moment when an optical illusion bounces from one image to another, and it becomes impossible to unsee that the vase is two people, that the old woman is a rabbit. It’s too obvious.
The sloppily-hidden data.
The food hidden in every corner of the dorm.
The way Jim ate whatever was put in front of him, even if it might kill him.
Fuck.
#
“Doctor McCoy, do you know why I asked you to come meet me?” Pike asks, sitting behind his desk. McCoy has seen him give this look at Jim a dozen times, but it’s never been directed at him before. It’s a strange mix of exasperation and affection, buried under a mask of irritation.
“No, sir,” McCoy drawls.
“Professor Yengle came to my office to complain about you this morning,” Pike says.
“Oh, really?” McCoy asks, voice tight and angry.
“He seemed to be under the impression that you were threatening him,” Pike says.
“That cowardly little… Did he tell you that he was assigning his students to write papers justifying a genocide? That he was asking them to discuss the merits of massacring half a planet? That he was treating mass-murder like a topic for debate?”
“It came out during the conversation,” Pike says carefully.
“And?”
“I’ve ordered him to alter the assignment. That type of discourse does not belong in Starfleet. Our official stance on the Tarsus IV disaster is one of unequivocal disapproval. Some arguments do not deserve time in the light.”
“Good,” McCoy says, nodding.
Pike watches him quietly for a long moment. Then, he laughs. “Yengle was terrified of you. He seemed sure that you were going to poison him. I knew Kirk was ruthless, but siccing you on his teacher is crueler than I thought even he was capable of.”
McCoy folds his arms. “Jim doesn’t know I did this. And I don’t want him to.”
Pike’s expression stills. “No,” he says softly. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Do you know, sir?” McCoy blurts.
Pike taps his fingers on his desk. “Juvenile records are sealed,” he says, which is such a non-answer that it tells McCoy exactly what he wants to know. Pike knows about Jim’s time on Tarsus, and from the clench of his jaw, he’s as angry with Yengle as McCoy is.
McCoy wants to ask more, to see if Pike has more insight on the situation than McCoy has managed to gather, but he can’t sit here and talk about Jim behind his back. “Is Yengle bringing me up on a conduct code violation?” he asks finally.
“I talked him out of it,” Pike says. “I assured him that he didn’t want this issue to be brought to the administration.”
McCoy nods. “Thank you, sir.”
“Dismissed. And McCoy?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Kirk is lucky to have you in his corner.”
#
Now that the issue has been resolved, McCoy leaves Pike’s office and holes up in a bar off-campus for the rest of the day to drink himself into oblivion.
Jim had been on Tarsus IV. McCoy had studied the famine, seen the records of starved, emaciated bodies. How had Jim survived? Lord in heaven, it was no wonder that Jim had been so messed up when they’d first met. How many years had he spent in brawls across the Midwest trying to forget what he’d seen?
Winona Kirk is absent at the best of times. McCoy knows better than to hope that she might have supported Jim during the aftermath. Hell, he’s not even sure she would have come back to Earth for him.
Has anyone tried to help Jim with this? Considering the way the kid butchered his own medical records, he doesn’t even want his doctors to know what he went through. He’s probably never told a soul. Did he think McCoy would treat him differently? Was he afraid of his reaction?
Does McCoy want to treat him differently? He’s pissed and terrified and upset, but this overwhelming need to make sure the kid is okay isn’t new. He knows better than to think that this makes Jim weak. Hell, Jim is stronger than McCoy had ever imagined.
“How the tables have turned,” Jim declares, sitting on the stool beside McCoy. He’s looking better than he should considering how drunk he had been the night before. Jim has always been able to bounce back from benders quickly.
Apparently he’s had practice bouncing back from things that would destroy another man. Kid. Fuck.
McCoy grunts at him and takes another swig from his drink.
“What’s going on? How long have you been here? Is Joanna okay?” Jim came back with him for the holidays last year, and he had hit it off with McCoy’s daughter like a grease fire.
“She’s fine,” McCoy says shortly, but doesn’t elaborate.
Jim sighs. “You know you’re supposed to invite me to these things.”
McCoy puts down his glass and looks over at his friend. “You think I’d encourage you to drink like that two nights in a row? Your liver and I are going to be fighting it out in twenty years as it is.”
“Only you would think of my internal organs as your personal enemies,” Jim says. “All right, Bones, it’s time to get you home.”
“Don’t wanna.”
“It’s either that, or I’m joining you for the rest of the night,” Jim threatens. When McCoy doesn’t answer, he turns to the bartender. “Okay. Looks like we’re staying. Let me have what he’s—”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” McCoy says. He glares at the bartender. “Ignore that. We’re going home.”
“If you insist,” Jim says lightly, and then lets McCoy lean on him all the way back to their dorm.
As they stumble back into their shared living space, McCoy looks at Jim solemnly. “You know I love you, right, kid?”
“Of course, Bonesy,” Jim says.
McCoy vaguely pats Jim’s face, missing his cheek and ending up stroking his nose. “You’re a good kid.”
“Oh boy, we really need to sober you up,” Jim says.
McCoy just sighs and lets Jim usher him into bed.
In the morning, with his hangover pounding at his temples, he sits at the kitchen table nursing a coffee while Jim eats dry cereal from the box. He watches Jim open up his PADD, read a message, and then practically slump with relief. He blinks rapidly, and then his expression settles like the sea after a storm. Professor Yengle sent out the cancellation, then. Good.
“I’m too hungover for cereal,” McCoy announces. “I want a bagel. Want to come?”
“If you’re buying,” Jim says with a bright grin.
McCoy rolls his eyes. “Don’t push your luck, kid.”