Celandine's Chronicle (celandineb) wrote in cels_fic_haven, @ 2010-10-27 10:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | star trek fic hotm, star trek fic kirk/mccoy |
ST fic: Can't Break Free from the Things That You Do [Kirk/McCoy, general]
Title: Can't Break Free from the Things That You Do
Author: celandineb
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: general
Length: 3479 words
Warnings: angst, infidelity references
Summary: In the midst of the Romulan attack, McCoy learns something that provokes a personal crisis.
Note: Twenty-fifth in the Heart of the Matter series. Dialogue differs somewhat from the film; my feeling is that personal memory is untrustworthy. Chapter title taken from Joan Jett's "I Hate Myself for Loving You."
The way that Kirk lounged in the captain's chair in the simulation room was almost offensive in its casualness. He crunched his teeth into an apple and grinned around it, chiding Uhura for failing to address him as "Captain" and practically smirking as he ordered the crew to hold fire. The level of bafflement in the simulator room was so high that McCoy could have used it for an operating table; of Kirk's mock crew, only one responded with equal lightheartedness to Kirk's insouciant attitude.
Kirk had jimmied the program somehow, no question about it. There was no other explanation for the results. McCoy only hoped that Kirk wouldn't get caught.
He did.
They had tacitly agreed to put aside their discussion of what their relationship was about and where it was going, in order to have celebratory sex, skipping lunch to make the time. It was during the languid afterglow phase that Kirk's phone rang.
"Guess I'd better get that." Kirk picked it up. "Jim Kirk here."
There was a short pause. "Yes, of course, sir." He hung up. "There's to be a general assembly of all Starfleet Academy cadets and commissioned officers tomorrow at 0900 hours."
McCoy frowned. "And they're calling each of us, individually?" Assemblies were usually scheduled in advance, and although mandatory whenever they occurred, cadets were notified by electronic message, not telephoned. Everyone was warned on arrival at the Academy to check messages often, for they would be held responsible if they missed important information.
Kirk shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe because it's last minute? If they're calling everyone, I bet it's alphabetical. You'll probably have a message waiting for you when you get back to your own room."
"Maybe," said McCoy. He had his doubts, and his suspicions.
"Or, I know," Kirk snapped his fingers, "maybe they're going to commend me on defeating the Kobayashi Maru test?" He laughed. "Now wouldn't that be great? And it would explain why I got a personal call."
"Maybe," McCoy agreed again. He hoped Kirk was right. Receiving a phone call did suggest a special reason to ensure that Kirk was present, but if the instructors had realized what Kirk had done, a reprimand seemed far more probable than a commendation. He kept the thought to himself, not wanting to spoil the mood.
"I guess we'll find out tomorrow." Kirk stretched, as unselfconscious in his nakedness as a cat. "Not to throw you out, but maybe you'd better go; assembly or no assembly, I have a paper due tomorrow, and Sidhu will be back soon. I'll see you at dinner?"
"Sure. No, wait. I have a clinic shift starting at four today, so how about if we meet for breakfast and go to the assembly from there?"
"Breakfast it is." Kirk gave McCoy a light swat on the ass. "Usual table, seven-thirty."
McCoy worried at it the whole time he was working. His hands bandaged injuries, administered injections; his voice gave orders to nurses or spoke in soothing tones to patients; but his thoughts were always on Kirk, hoping his lover was right yet fearing that Kirk had doomed himself by his drive to win by any means.
He snatched a scant few hours sleep, and was up, bathed, shaved, and dressed in formal uniform to meet Kirk for breakfast as promised. He wasn't hungry and only managed a bowl of cornflakes and a glass of juice, plus coffee, while Kirk ploughed enthusiastically into a plate heaped high with scrambled eggs and hash browns and sausages.
"At least have some fruit or something," McCoy felt obliged to suggest.
Kirk grinned at him around a mouth full of sausage, swallowed, and said, "Bring me some and I'll eat it."
Rolling his eyes and grumbling, McCoy stalked over to the fruit counter and chose a half-grapefruit to take to Kirk. Really, the man was ridiculous.
"Thanks, Bones." Kirk dug in his spoon and slurped up a juicy bite.
McCoy refrained from saying anything more, listening instead to the general chatter and gossip of their table mates. Most of the talk was speculation on the purpose of the assembly; luckily Kirk did not share his theory that it was being called on his account.
"Maybe they're announcing our ship assignments?"
"Can't be. There's still weeks of classes left before the end of term."
"Besides, they'd only need the graduating class for that."
"I heard it was some kind of bad news."
"Yeah? What?"
"There's an asteroid headed towards earth and Starfleet has to divert it."
McCoy laughed with the rest at that one.
"Well, I'm ready to go find out what it's all about."
The group dispersed somewhat on the way to the auditorium, but McCoy stuck close to Kirk. They found a pair of seats together near the front. McCoy took controlled breaths to calm the butterflies in his stomach, and thought Kirk might be doing the same, from his silence.
The assembly began, and the butterflies turned to bats.
McCoy had to admire Kirk's poise as he stepped down to face the accusation that he'd cheated. He'd been so sure that it would be the other way around, that he would be commended for his initiative. Personally McCoy could see the matter both ways: technically, yes, Kirk had cheated, but on the other hand, he suspected that most members of Starfleet would prefer to serve under a captain whose primary concern was saving lives rather than always following the letter of the law.
The Vulcan instructor who had filed the charge intrigued McCoy. He'd heard of the man in passing – not a full Vulcan, but half-human. McCoy fairly itched to get his hands on Lieutenant Spock's medical records. The biochemistry of humans and Vulcans was sufficiently dissimilar that he could not imagine that either conception or gestation could have occurred normally, but he could not recall seeing anything about the case in the medical literature.
He brought his attention back to the hearing before him, where Kirk was still defending his actions, and if not quite giving as good as he got, doing a damn fine job nevertheless.
How it would have ended was anyone's guess, for the proceedings were interrupted by an urgent message of a distress call from Vulcan itself. The cadets were dismissed to pick up their ship assignments – fourweeks early and without a formal graduation, but who cared? – and McCoy moved forward to put a sympathetic hand on Kirk's shoulder and assure him that all would be well sooner or later.
"Yeah, Bones." The smile that Kirk summoned was less devil-may-care than usual, but it was a smile. "Come on, let's go find our ships."
In the shuttle hangar, they crowded around one of the officers in a knot of other excited cadets.
"Jang – U.S.S. Hood. Leibowitz – U.S.S. Newton. McCoy – U.S.S. Enterprise. Moore – U.S.S. Wolcott."
The officer's voice continued reeling off cadet names to the end of the alphabet, but Kirk's was not among them. He and McCoy looked blankly at each other for a moment, then Kirk stepped forward.
"Excuse me, sir, but I believe you skipped my name? Kirk, James T."
The man looked at his PADD and shook his head. "I'm sorry. You're not assigned. You're on suspension pending the ruling of the Academy Board."
Another man would have physically reeled, perhaps; as it was McCoy put his elbow his hand on Kirk's elbow to steady him.
"Look, Jim, I've got to go." McCoy said it with regret. All of their hopes, all of Kirk's plans, were crumbling around them, yet if McCoy didn't obey orders and get on the Enterprise right then, he would be kicked out of Starfleet for sure – and what else was there for him? Until they knew if Kirk would overcome the accusation against him, it would be the height of idiocy for McCoy to risk losing his own commission.
Kirk's attempt at a grin was sickly. "I know. Go on, Bones. You can't miss your ship."
McCoy grabbed his hand and squeezed it for a second. He could do no more, not here, not now. Then he turned and strode away.
After twenty yards or so he looked back. Kirk still stood where McCoy had left him, looking lost. McCoy swore. It seemed unfair that Kirk, who wanted to go to the stars so much, should be left behind. A thought tickled his brain. Something they'd talked about last fall, that a doctor could keep with him a patient whom he was treating. He snapped his fingers and hurried back.
"Come on," he said brusquely. "I'm going to get you onto the Enterprise with me."
"What? How?"
McCoy didn't answer right then. He pulled Kirk into the area where medical supplies were waiting to be loaded, and looked around, frantic with haste. There, that would do. Not perfect but the best he could hope for on such short notice.
"I'm giving you a vaccine against a virus carried by Melvaran mud fleas," he told Kirk as he injected a dose into Kirk's neck. Thankfully the stuff acted quickly. "It will give you a mild case of the symptoms."
Kirk was already blind in one eye and staggering as McCoy hauled him over to the shuttle headed for the Enterprise. The officer on duty was inclined to dispute him, but McCoy cited chapter and verse of the regulation that allowed a patient to remain under his doctor's care, and pointed out that the man did not want to be held responsible if the Enterprise was missing one of its doctors as it traveled into an emergency situation.
They got on board.
McCoy was so overcome by what he had just done – a maneuver worthy of Kirk himself – that he didn't even feel space sick as the shuttle took off. Beside him, however, Kirk looked almost green in the grip of his reaction to the vaccine.
"I may throw up on you," he muttered, swallowing, but McCoy was too enthralled by the beauty of the space station, with the great ships spaced evenly around its perimeter, to be concerned.
"Jim, look. It's so beautiful," he said, absently reaching for a hygiene bag at the same time.
Somehow Kirk managed to control his nausea, to McCoy's relief – not so much that he was offended by vomit as that it would draw unwanted attention to them. They disembarked with the other cadets, and just barely managed to avoid being seen by Lieutenant Spock, who McCoy doubted would listen to the story McCoy had cooked up. They had better get to sick bay as soon as possible. He could hide Kirk there for a while, until he figured out what to do next.
Kirk would not be long confined to sick bay, however. Following the announcement that gave more details of their mission, he first insisted on locating cadet Uhura, and then racing to the bridge. Not only was he going to blow their cover, he was having an allergic reaction that McCoy feared might actually stop his heart before he would slow down enough for McCoy to treat it.
McCoy did his best to follow the conversation between Kirk, Pike, and Spock busy though he was attempting to apologize and haul Kirk back to sick bay.
Events moved quickly after that point, but he snatched a moment after the Romulan attack to ask Uhura if it had been at the Xenolinguistics Club meeting that she had talked about intercepting the Klingon distress messages to which Kirk had referred when talking to the captain.
"No," she said, her head tilted, resembling a raptor sizing him up to see if he were rival or prey. "No, I told Gaila, my roommate. Kirk was hiding under her bed, I assume because I had told her I didn't want her to bring any more men back to our room. So it wasn't common knowledge, but he certainly heard accurately, as is now proven."
The look of concern on her face was fleeting, erased first by a slight frown and then by a neutral expression. "Excuse me, I need to monitor the communication frequencies."
McCoy felt as though he had been kicked in the stomach. Gaila he knew slightly, although she was not exactly in their crowd at the Academy; he had treated her once or twice at the clinic. There was only one reason that an Orion woman would have brought a man back to her room, and it wasn't to show him her etchings. Had Kirk...? He couldn't tell from the little Uhura had said whether she had interrupted them before anything much had happened, or not.
Hurrying back down to sick bay, where he knew that Dr. Puri would need his help, he was unable to force from his mind the image of Kirk and Gaila in an intimate embrace. Although they had never explicitly promised to be exclusive, he rather thought they both had been – and Kirk's insistence on getting them assigned to the same ship by means of persuading the computer to treat them as if they were married had strongly suggested that Kirk tacitly thought of them as such.
The unwelcome thoughts were crowded out of his mind, however, when he reached sick bay and saw the devastation that the Romulan ship had wrought.
"Dr. McCoy!" Chapel's strained expression relaxed a trifle when she saw him. "Thank heavens you're all right. Dr. Puri is dead. Come on."
The injured were everywhere, with more pouring in as fast as they could hobble or be carried by luckier crewmates. Grimly McCoy got to work, moving among them, assuring those less gravely injured that they would be seen to as soon as possible, patching up those whose wounds were life threatening as rapidly as he could manage. He couldn't save them all. Even if Puri had made it, the two of them together could not have done so. Nevertheless he had to keep reminding himself that the deaths were not his fault. It was the Romulans who were responsible.
He resented Spock's interruption, and snapped at him before returning to the urgent and delicate task of removing a large splinter of metal that had become lodged dangerously near a crewman's lung. The man was lucky to be alive. McCoy refused to acknowledge how much of his irritation with Spock had nothing to do with the Vulcan at all, nor even with the destruction and waste of life caused by the Romulan attack.
Some time later – just how long he couldn't be sure; time always behaved strangely for McCoy when there was a catastrophe to deal with – when he had gone in person to report to Captain Spock, it was his continuing anger at Kirk that meant he could not bring himself to support Kirk's demand that the crippled Enterprise should chase the Romulan ship instead of regrouping with the rest of Starfleet. He told himself that if Kirk were more sensible in his approach, presenting the necessity more calmly and persuading Spock through logic rather than showing impetuosity almost to the point of childishness, he would support him. The disillusioned look that Kirk gave him hurt McCoy to the quick, yet was less painful than the knowledge that Kirk had gone home with Gaila, and McCoy could not find it in himself to regret supporting the captain.
When Spock made the decision to maroon Kirk, however, McCoy had second thoughts. He recorded the fact in the medical log, noting in addition that the vaccine and successive treatments might have impaired Kirk's judgment. Such evidence could help once Kirk was retrieved after the crisis was over, when he would presumably be court martialed.
After that McCoy turned his attention to the refugee Vulcans. Had they been human, he would have treated them for shock, for what shock could be greater than the destruction of one's planet? He had to assume that a Vulcan would experience a similar reaction, but they did not demonstrate it as humans or most other species would have. Their calm was not the numbness that a similarly traumatized human would have displayed. All he could do was to treat any physical injuries, and encourage them to speak with one another about their bereavement.
Discomfort with the unfamiliarity of Vulcan response, along with the realization that however angry he might be with Kirk, it would be infinitely better to have him here on the Enterprise instead of marooned on Delta Vega, contributed to his continuing annoyance with the captain when Spock thanked him for supporting his actions. Honestly. Kirk's impulsiveness went overboard, no question, but McCoy wasn't sure but that Spock's cool logic wasn't worse. It was more annoying, too, since Spock was after all half-human and to McCoy's way of thinking ought to have shown a little more humanity in his actions.
"It's empty." Chapel nudged him.
He was back in sickbay again, helping now with the remaining lesser injuries.
"What?"
"Your hypospray."
"Oh."
He shouldn't be this distracted, he told himself, getting a refill of anaesthetic. Kirk was probably safer on that bleak planet than on the ship, chasing Romulans... assuming they would eventually get around to that.
Kirk's miraculous reappearance, with engineer Scott in tow, overwhelmed McCoy. When Kirk provoked Spock first into attacking him and then resigning the captaincy, it didn't occur to McCoy that the Vulcan would never have done so had he not known that there was a first officer who could take command. That it should be Kirk himself was nothing short of astonishing, but McCoy didn't really care, nor did he mean to insult Kirk by his disbelief. All he wanted to do just then was drag Kirk away and have it out with him, demanding to know what had happened with Gaila. In return McCoy would have apologized for failing to have supported Kirk against Spock.
That desire would have to wait. Survival, and the safety of Earth itself, came first.
McCoy gritted out the time from Kirk and Spock's departure for the Romulan ship in the company of the equally distraught Uhura. They haunted the transporter room together. Both of them could justify their presence: Uhura as the communications expert, who would try to reestablish contact whenever the field put out by the Romulans' drill ceased, and McCoy standing ready as doctor in case either or both of their partners came back injured. It was possible also that they might rescue Captain Pike, if he still lived.
A moment's warning before Kirk, Pike, and Spock materialized on the transporter pad was barely enough for McCoy to be ready to help support the staggering Pike. He touched Kirk's arm to reassure himself that his lover was all right, eliciting an exhausted but triumphant smile in return, before turning his attention to the injured man.
It would take the better part of an hour for Chapel to get Pike stabilized to the point where McCoy could determine the best course of treatment and begin it. Once he'd seen that she had matters under control, McCoy returned to the bridge. He knew Kirk could well have minor – or even major – injuries that he had neglected to report because he felt something else was more urgent. McCoy needed to determine for himself but that was not the case.
He missed seeing the final destruction of the Romulan ship, not that he minded. Relief was palpable among the bridge crew that Kirk's rapid thinking, and Scotty's, had saved them from the gravitational pull of the red matter-created black hole. The Enterprise would have to limp back to Earth and Starfleet headquarters for a complete refitting, but they had survived, and triumphed.
Fighting successfully was what captains did. Doctors, thought McCoy with resignation, got to clean up afterward. He made both Kirk and Spock stand down and get some rest, but did not do so himself until he had seen to Pike. Preliminary scans were unpromising; the Centaurian slugs with which the Romulans had tortured Pike were not easily removed. The Enterprise's medical database was limited. He needed to have access to the far more extensive records maintained by Starfleet. In the meantime, he treated Pike for the pain and sedated him, hoping that a decreased level of response would slow the progress of the nerve damage.
He checked on the progress of the other patients, praised the rest of the medical personnel for all their efforts, and then at last was able to find his own bed and sleep for a few hours.
Kirk was already on the bridge again when McCoy woke. He took the turbolift up and pulled the captain aside.
"We need to talk." He made his voice serious.
Kirk looked surprised, but nodded. "We should be back to Earth in a few more hours, even at the slow speed we're managing. How about after that?"
"All right," said McCoy. "We'll talk when we're home."
#24: Not Go Tamely | #26: Heart of the Matter