Fic: A Fever
Jul. 5th, 2009 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fringedwellerfic posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
singularityAuthor: fringedwellerfic
Title: A Fever
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: NC-17 for safety; a little swearing and some off-page sex.
Summary: The inevitable happens, and McCoy can't fix a broken Kirk
Warnings: A character dies, but they get better, I promise.
Author's Notes: This is the eighth in a series charting the Kirk/McCoy relationship through the poetry of John Donne. All the medical stuff in here is nonsense cribbed from Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure that nanites were a TNG invention. However, as TOS had McCoy reattach Spock's brain, I'm pretty sure that I'm allowed to have a few nanites.
Oh do not die, for I shall hate
All women so, when thou art gone,
That I thee I shall not celebrate,
When I remember, thou wast one.
But yet thou canst die, I know;
To leave this world behind, is death,
But when thou from this world wilt go,
The whole world vapors with thy breath.
When he had a spare minute in his busy working day, Leonard McCoy wondered if other Chief Medical Officers had his particular problems, or if he was just being crapped on from above because the Great Bird of the Galaxy had a particularly perverse sense of humour.
The Enterprise was a Constitution class heavy cruiser, with a complement of one thousand, one hundred crew. Of that one thousand, one hundred, approximately one hundred were model patients. They appeared for their six month check-ups on time, they took their inoculations without grumbling and then disappeared to never bother McCoy until he called for them. McCoy liked those one hundred souls and deliberately tried not to betoo brusque with them.
The other thousand...well. Was it possible that the crew on the Enterprise were selected for their clumsiness? He was positive that the Engineering Department had the worst safety record of any ship in the fleet. It didn’t help that its chief had a gung-ho attitude towards experimentation. McCoy had a deep suspicion that if Scotty saw a big red button marked “Danger! Do not push!” he would do exactly that. Or, at least, send a minion to do it for him .Which is why so many of them ended up in Sickbay.
Engineering staff came in with burns, mostly. There were a few nasty cuts from laser cutting tools, and the occasional fracture or break from limbs being trapped in places they shouldn’t be. Communications staff came in with headaches and eyestrain. They’d come in, get fixed up and immediately head straight back to their stations again, to reappear in eight hours. No sense, any of them. Security staff, by the nature of their role on board ship, had the highest mortality rate. McCoy could never understand their motivation; “Join Starfleet and die in new, horrible ways!” wasn’t much of a recruitment line. Security was the first down to new planets, the first to beam across to new ships of unidentified origin. They were shot, stabbed, gassed, strangled, poisoned and sometimes had the salt sucked out of them. They were the first to house new parasites, and the first to die in bleeding, puking agony. Botanists got attacked by seemingly innocuous plants, bridge staff got bruises and sprains from tumbling off their chairs when the inertial dampeners inevitably failed, the mess staff sliced off their fingertips with depressing regularity.
The whole damn ship got ill just to spite him, and nothing would convince him otherwise.
Then, of course, there was the captain. Jim was young for such a command. Too young, was the opinion of a lot of the admiralty, which spurred him on to prove to the whole damn galaxy just how good he could be. He led away teams he should have left to Spock, putting himself in mortal danger at least three times a week. Spock was annoyed about it too, in the calmly logical way that Vulcans got annoyed about things. They had spent an uncomfortable twenty minutes discussing it once, with Spock trying to hint that as CMO and Kirk’s lover, McCoy was in an ideal position to influence Kirk’s behaviour. However, as their relationship was supposed to be a secret, neither man could reference it outright. The conversation had ended as awkwardly as it began, and McCoy was left worrying, again, about the day that Jim was beamed up broken and bleeding and he couldn’t save him. Or the day he didn’t come back at all.
If the crew found him grumpy, his bedside manner brusque, he couldn’t blame them. The worry, the panic, was so much that it was in danger of leaking out of him sometimes. He knew that one day one of them was going to give the game away and he had the awful feeling that it would be him. Jim, for all his youth and energy, was better at hiding his feelings about McCoy than McCoy was about him. Calling McCoy to the bridge every day to hear his report when it could have been submitted via PADD was the limit of Jim’s indulgence. To McCoy’s eternal surprise and surprising regret, no turbolift ever ‘jammed’ when they were alone in it. Jim refrained from playing footsie under the lunch table and there were no hour long ‘conferences’ in his ready room.
Jim had explained one night, as he traced meaningless shapes over McCoy’s body, fingers ghosting over sweaty, exposed skin.
“As long as I know I have your love, Bones, I can play the captain all say.” His dangerous blue eyes had glowed as he mouthed his way down Bones’ body. “I won’t touch in public if I can touch you privately.” That had sparked round two for that evening, and the conversation had drifted away. Words weren’t necessary in their bed.
The day that James T Kirk died had started the same as any other. McCoy kissed his sleeping forehead (warm, he noted idly, but not unusually so given that Jim liked to roll himself up in the blankets), dressed and left to head back to his own quarters. He had showered, shaved, dressed and sent his daily message to Jo before heading down to check who was on mess duty. Seeing as some of the more competent staff were on duty he had enjoyed a leisurely breakfast before heading off to Sickbay to relieve M’Benga and find out how many morons had managed to harm themselves in the emptiest, most boring stretch of deep space he had the misfortune of warping through.
His day went to hell around lunch time, as an even toned Spock called him to the bridge to treat the captain. Grabbing a med kit and his best nurse, he ran to the turbolift and barked his destination at the computer. On arriving at the bridge, he had eyes for no one but Jim. He was slumped over in his seat, glassy eyed and with sweat pouring from his brow and staining his gold uniform top. Spock was kneeling at his side, monitoring his pulse rate the old fashioned way. As soon as McCoy and Chapel arrived, he stepped back.
Chapel scanned Jim quickly with the medical tricorder, as McCoy did his own analysis. Jim was shivering, and clutching his arms into his body while the sweat continued to pour off him. McCoy forced himself to keep his voice as light as he could manage.
“Feeling bored, Jim? Not enough going on?”
Kirk snorted in response, looking at McCoy for the first time since he had arrived on the bridge.
“You know me, doc, I’m always looking for new reasons to get a hypospray in the neck.”
Chapel silently passed him the tricorder and started to assemble a hypospray from the drug kit she had brought with her. McCoy’s face tightened as he saw the readout. Kirk’s body temperature was high-grade, pushing on hyperpyrexia. Internal scans of his organs showed evidence of liver trauma, and his red blood cells were infected by merozoites. Just fantastic. Somehow, in the middle of deep space, Jim had found time to be bitten by a parasite and now his body was beginning to shut down.
“What’s wrong with me, Bones?” Jim’s hand shot out to grab McCoy’s wrist, a strong hint of panic in his voice.
“You’ve been bitten by a parasite Jim. It’s given you a disease your body is trying to fight off. We’re going to get you to Sickbay and help you out.“ McCoy injected him with the prepared hypo as Chapel spoke to Sickbay to relay news of the incoming patient. To Jim’s obvious disgust he couldn’t walk unaided, and McCoy and Spock half walked, half dragged him to the turbolift and then into Sickbay itself.
As soon as the CMO entered the door, his staff took over. They took Jim, laid him on a bio bed and engaged the privacy screen. He was stripped from his uniform and put in the standard patient gown. McCoy took the time to formally relieve Kirk of duty and promote Spock to Acting Captain. As soon as he turned to check Kirk’s vitals on the diagnostic board it started to flash and wail alarmingly.
“He’s haemorrhaging,” reported Chapel calmly as she selected the surgical tools McCoy would need to open his lover up, find the internal bleed and seal it. Spock retreated as other nurses swarmed around to create a sterile field around McCoy and dress him in the sterile over garments he needed to operate.
McCoy refused to panic as he saw Jim stretched out unconscious on the table on front of him. He took his fear, his worry, his panic and put them all away in a far corner of his mind with his love and his passion. As soon as he made the first incision into his lover’s golden skin, he thought about nothing other than saving his life.
Hours passed. The internal bleeding had stopped thanks to the hasty surgery, but the initial problem remained. Somehow Jim had been bitten by a parasitic life form that had infected his hepatic system. This had spread to his red blood cells and despite his spleen working overtime to filter out the diseased cells, the infection had spread. McCoy was keeping him sedated in an effort to halt the progress of the infection to his brain. Scans of Jim’s body had found a mostly-healed bite bark under one of his arms; Spock had investigated the recent ship’s logs and found that Jim had insisted on going with one of the landing parties to explore a jungle planet three weeks ago. McCoy would bet his collection of antique medical textbooks that the idiot had complained of being hot, took off his uniform shirts in the hope of catching a tan and had got bitten. Chapel had screened the other landing team members. They had showed similar bite marks but no fever or infection. It took her an hour sequestered away in her lab to determine that the captain had an allergy to the vaccination he had been given prior to leaving the ship, rendering it useless.
Once again, it came down to his goddamned allergies. If McCoy could have predicted his life path when back in medical school, he would have specialised in allergens, not surgery. It would have been of far more use.
Jim was currently sedated, on fever-minimising medication, on anti-parasitic medication, on standard post-surgery antibacterial medication and was having his blood screened in the plasma cleansing unit the staff reserved for his own personal use. The machine left the medication in his system but was supposed to cleanse it of parasitic infection. It wasn’t working, though. Something about this particular little bug was insidious. Biological sciences were dissecting and analysing samples they had collected from the surface, but it was slow work. They were four days away from any sophisticated medical services at maximum warp, and McCoy was desperate for any help he could find. He had been searching the medical database for hours, but nothing was of any use. There had been no reported cases of allergy to vaccinations of this kind. Once again, Jim was making the record books. He was pulled from his search by a knock at his office door.
“Go away!” he bellowed, not taking his eyes from the screen. The doors opened anyway.
“Do you have a minute, doctor?” Mr Scott was the last person McCoy expected to find in Sickbay at the moment. After Spock’s grave ship-wide transmission of the captain’s status many crew had formed an unofficial vigil outside the Sickbay doors. Scott should have been busy in Engineering, keeping the ship going at maximum warp.
“What is it?” McCoy replied brusquely. He didn’t have the time for this, whatever this was. Jim was dying.
“It’s more of a question of what I can do for you, really.” Scott’s voice trailed away as McCoy caught him with a piercing look. Scott put down the metal case he was carrying on McCoy’s desk.
“Have you ever heard of nanites, doctor?”
Or if, when thou, thy world’s soul, goest,
It stay, ‘tis but thy carcass then,
The fairest woman, but thy ghost,
But corrupt worms, the worthiest men.
O wrangling schools, that search what fire
Shall burn this world, had none the wit
Unto this knowledge to aspire,
That this her fever might be it?”
And yet she cannot waste by this,
Nor long bear this torturing wrong,
For such corruption needful is
To fuel such a fever long.
An hour later, McCoy was still not totally convinced, although Spock was obviously interested. Jim’s temperature had spiked into hyperpyrexia, and he had fallen into a coma. Starbase Twelve was still three days away and the longer Jim remained unconscious the more damage was being done by the parasites. McCoy knew that it was time for desperate measures, but this was untried and untested technology, cobbled together by a man notorious for failed experiments.
“We use nanites all the time, doctor. They fix the delicate circuitry deep in the Enterprise’s systems on a molecular level. They’re completely harmless; once they’ve fixed their programmed problem they shut down and become inert. The human body is a very complicated machine but a machine none the less. I’m willing to wager that they could separate the infection from the captain’s blood cells and destroy it.” Scotty was tense, well aware of the stakes at hand.
“You want me to inject my,” there was the barest pause as McCoy struggled for the correct word, “captain with tiny machines? What if they go wrong? What if they do more damage?”
“If you persist with your current medical intervention, doctor, the captain will die in the next forty eight hours,” interjected Spock.
For the briefest of seconds McCoy felt nothing but unadulterated rage for the green blooded bastard. Would he be so calm, so logical if it was Uhura lying there, dying by degrees? Didn’t he know that McCoy was living through his worst nightmare?
“Mr Scott’s idea is unconventional. However, I do not believe there is any other option available to us at this time.”
McCoy turned away from the men in his room, and walked over to the shelves where he kept his photographs. Nestled amidst the pictures of Joanna was one of Jim and himself at the Enterprise’s first wedding party. Jim’s smile shone out of the snap, a moment of joy suspended forever.
Spock spoke again, almost apologetically.
“You have known the captain longer, Doctor, but from our acquaintance over last few years i have discerned an adequate appraisal of his character. I believe that this is a course of action of which he would approve.”
McCoy closed his eyes, his head dropping to his chest in defeat. Spock was right. Jim Kirk did not accept no-win scenarios. He was a fly by the seat of his pants, survive by the skin of his teeth sort of man. He believed million to one chances worked out nine times out of ten. Why would now be any different? And who was he to deny him this chance?
“It’s going to take some time to reprogram those nanites, Scotty,” McCoy managed. “Jim’s a human being, not a warp core. I’m going to need to oversee every aspect of their instruction.”
Relief flooded Scotty’s face. “I got Chekov working on it before I came to see you,” he confessed, “and Nurse Chapel has been assisting so far. She said you’d want to take over, though, when you came round to the idea.”
A very tiny part of the mass of fear that had grown in his chest like a cancerous tumour slowly broke off. Chekov at twenty was even more brilliant than Chekov at seventeen; there was no biochemist he trusted more than Chapel. The day she woke up and realised that she was wasted as his head nurse was going to be a sad day for his sickbay.
“Go and tell them I’ve agreed to the nanite treatment,” he said shortly, “I’ll catch up with them as soon as I’ve checked in on Jim again.”
Scotty and Spock nodded and left, leaving McCoy alone to be with the captain. The nurse updating Jim’s chart handed it to him silently and left, giving him the privacy he wanted but daren’t ask for. Jim’s face was at rest, but it was clear that the fever inside him still burned. It made each of his features more delineated and prominent; his masculine beauty shone through the fever’s corrupting influence. Standing there, holding his hand, kissing his palm, McCoy felt stupid. Utterly, utterly stupid. If Jim were to die, then there would be no official record of their love, no one to remember that once Jim Kirk and Len McCoy were anything more than dorm mates, colleagues on the same ship. Once McCoy himself died, the fact of them as a single entity would dissolve away, never to be traced and recorded. It was his fault. If only he hadn’t been so damn worried about what people thought, as if it was anyone’s business who shared his heart and his bed. ”When you get better,” McCoy thought fiercely, “I’ll change. I promise, I’ll change.”
The only response was the beep of the diagnostic screen as it registered no change in Kirk’s life signs. McCoy sighed, kissed Jim again, and left to track down the nanite team in Chapel’s lab.
Twenty four hours passed before the nanites were ready, and Jim had slowly worsened. The whole ship felt fearful and tense, and the crowd of off-duty crew members gathered outside sickbay had increased. McCoy hadn’t left Sickbay since Jim had first been brought in. He ate when someone pushed food into his hands. He sat next to Jim’s bed, holding his warm hand, past the point of caring who saw and who knew. His staff tried to coax him into sleep, but it did not come. He bullied M’Benga into giving him stimulant injections instead. Every so often Chekov or Chapel would bring a PADD with progress they had made so far; McCoy would read it, correct it or approve it and send it back. He didn’t leave Jim’s side.
Considering the groundbreaking advancement they were making, the actual introduction of the nanites was anticlimactic. They had been loaded into a modified hypospray and injected into the unconscious captain. McCoy, Scott, Spock and the rest of the nursing staff watched the readouts on the bio bed as they tracked the microscopic machines as they spread through the captain’s system.
For fifteen agonising minutes, nothing happened. The only noise came from the bio bed’s diagnostic panel and the hum of the plasma cleanser. Nobody dared to speak. Then, all hell broke loose. All the diagnostic sirens wailed as they reported a complete flat line of all of Jim’s major systems. His body convulsed in three backbreaking spasms, then stopped moving abruptly.
Jim was dead.
Scotty’s control panel went wild, its own sirens fighting with the bio bed’s noises. As McCoy leapt towards the bio bed in an attempt to restart Kirk’s heart, Scotty let out a yell.
“Stop, Doctor! Don’t touch him!”
McCoy found himself restrained by Spock’s iron grip. He fought viciously, kicking, pulling and even biting at any part of Spock he could reach. Scotty was frantically punching the controls of his board, then all the klaxons stopped as Jim suddenly pulled in a huge breath.
Spock released McCoy, and he was at the bed in seconds. The diagnostic was reporting normal temperature, pulse and blood oxygen levels. The plasma cleanser showed that Jim’s blood contained only the medication McCoy had pumped him with, not infected cells. Scans of Jim’s liver showed it clean of parasites. The surgical incision scar was healing in front of McCoy’s eyes; within seconds there was no proof that Jim had been operated on at all. McCoy grabbed Jim’s unresponsive hand, and was relieved to discover it had its natural warmth, not a fever-induced clamminess.
“What the fuck happened?” he demanded.
Scotty, who was grinning the grin of man who had saved his captain’s life and made scientific history twice in his own lifetime, paled slightly.
“We, er, we were recoding the wee buggers on the fly, you see, and in our hurry we may have left one or two lines of code in their programming that shouldn’t have been there.”
“Such as?” McCoy growled. Scotty looked even more nervous.
“When you have a computer that isn’t functioning properly, one option to correct the malfunction is to reset the system.”
McCoy looked at Scotty, aghast.
“You mean to say that the nanites switched Jim off and started him up again?”
Scotty swallowed fearfully.
“Aye, in a manner of speaking. When the nanites rebooted the captain they were able to over-write the changes to his red blood cells. They destroyed the virus. I mean, the parasites.”
There was a pause as the room full of people waited to see how McCoy would react. They weren’t expecting him to pull the Chief Engineer into a full body hug, or to say “Thank you,” in such ragged tones. Scotty, who had been bracing himself for a punch in the face, was helpless to resist the embrace and tentatively patted McCoy on the shoulder a few times.
Spock glanced purposefully at Dr M’Benga, who nodded at Nurse Chapel who knocked McCoy clean out with a sneaky hypospray full of a strong sedative. McCoy was aware of Scotty and Chapel wrestling him onto a neighbouring bio bed, then blackness took over.
These burning fits but meteors be,
Whose matter in thee is soon spent.
Thy beauty, and all parts, which are thee,
Are unchangeable firmament.
Yet ‘twas my mind, seizing thee,
Though it in thee cannot persever.
For I had rather owner be
Of thee for one hour, than all else ever.
He slept for twenty four hours and woke to find himself being watched by a familiar pair of blue eyes.
“You snore,” Kirk told him cheerfully.
“Do not,” McCoy grumbled automatically. “Besides, you hog the covers.”
“Not in this bed,” Kirk said ruefully, “it’s not big enough to hog anything in.” He batted his eyelashes a few time for effect. McCoy took the hint and left his bed to sit gingerly on the side of Jim’s. He checked Jim’s charts as his lover took the opportunity to attach himself like a leech to his side.
“What happened, Bones?” asked Jim quietly. “I remember getting really sick on the bridge, then nothing until I woke up.”
“You died.” McCoy’s voice was laced with pain. “You were bitten by some kind of bug three weeks ago, and your body couldn’t fight off the parasitic infection. I tried to save you, and I couldn’t, and you died, Jim.” McCoy’s arms, already tight around Jim’s body, tightened even further.
“I got better,” Jim said quietly.
McCoy snorted out a laugh and was horrified to discover tears falling down his face.
“Don’t you get it, moron? It’s my worst fear come true. Worse than shuttles and goddamn transporters. You were broken and I couldn’t fix you.”
“You did fix me,” Jim objected, “because I’m not dead. Well, I think I’m not.” Jim mock-frowned. “If this is heaven there’s a distinct lack of sandy beaches and drinks with the little umbrellas in them.”
McCoy smiled through the tears. He didn’t want to, but he did anyway. That was the effect that Jim Kirk always had on him.
“It was Scotty that saved you really,” he said. “Scotty, and Chapel and Chekov.”
He went on to explain about the nanites, the reprogramming and the dramatic reboot that saved Kirk’s life. He left out the part where he had hugged Scotty. That was something he didn’t really want to remember.
“So there you go. You’re alive, but it was nothing to do with me.” He knew he sounded bitter, but it wasn’t just professional jealousy. “My worst fear had come true, Jim. You died and I couldn’t save you.
“Bullshit,” Jim’s scornful tone jerked him from his misery. “You should be glad I died, Bones, because now you don’t have to worry about me dying again. If the day ever comes when you can’t save me by yourself, then everyone else will. You don’t have to carry that burden by yourself anymore, “ he continued gently, “because everyone else can take their share too.”
Neither man spoke for some time. McCoy’s tears continued, but he just let them fall. Jim stayed propped up against his side, his eyes drooping. A question burned at the back of McCoy’s mind. It had been knocking around in there for a while now, but there had been so many reasons not to ask it, his own fucked up track record the very least of them.
Still, if today had taught him anything it was that there was no second guessing life. Sometimes you just had to take that million to one shot and hope.
“Jim,” he said quietly, “Will you marry me?”
fringedwellerficTitle: A Fever
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: NC-17 for safety; a little swearing and some off-page sex.
Summary: The inevitable happens, and McCoy can't fix a broken Kirk
Warnings: A character dies, but they get better, I promise.
Author's Notes: This is the eighth in a series charting the Kirk/McCoy relationship through the poetry of John Donne. All the medical stuff in here is nonsense cribbed from Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure that nanites were a TNG invention. However, as TOS had McCoy reattach Spock's brain, I'm pretty sure that I'm allowed to have a few nanites.
Oh do not die, for I shall hate
All women so, when thou art gone,
That I thee I shall not celebrate,
When I remember, thou wast one.
But yet thou canst die, I know;
To leave this world behind, is death,
But when thou from this world wilt go,
The whole world vapors with thy breath.
When he had a spare minute in his busy working day, Leonard McCoy wondered if other Chief Medical Officers had his particular problems, or if he was just being crapped on from above because the Great Bird of the Galaxy had a particularly perverse sense of humour.
The Enterprise was a Constitution class heavy cruiser, with a complement of one thousand, one hundred crew. Of that one thousand, one hundred, approximately one hundred were model patients. They appeared for their six month check-ups on time, they took their inoculations without grumbling and then disappeared to never bother McCoy until he called for them. McCoy liked those one hundred souls and deliberately tried not to betoo brusque with them.
The other thousand...well. Was it possible that the crew on the Enterprise were selected for their clumsiness? He was positive that the Engineering Department had the worst safety record of any ship in the fleet. It didn’t help that its chief had a gung-ho attitude towards experimentation. McCoy had a deep suspicion that if Scotty saw a big red button marked “Danger! Do not push!” he would do exactly that. Or, at least, send a minion to do it for him .Which is why so many of them ended up in Sickbay.
Engineering staff came in with burns, mostly. There were a few nasty cuts from laser cutting tools, and the occasional fracture or break from limbs being trapped in places they shouldn’t be. Communications staff came in with headaches and eyestrain. They’d come in, get fixed up and immediately head straight back to their stations again, to reappear in eight hours. No sense, any of them. Security staff, by the nature of their role on board ship, had the highest mortality rate. McCoy could never understand their motivation; “Join Starfleet and die in new, horrible ways!” wasn’t much of a recruitment line. Security was the first down to new planets, the first to beam across to new ships of unidentified origin. They were shot, stabbed, gassed, strangled, poisoned and sometimes had the salt sucked out of them. They were the first to house new parasites, and the first to die in bleeding, puking agony. Botanists got attacked by seemingly innocuous plants, bridge staff got bruises and sprains from tumbling off their chairs when the inertial dampeners inevitably failed, the mess staff sliced off their fingertips with depressing regularity.
The whole damn ship got ill just to spite him, and nothing would convince him otherwise.
Then, of course, there was the captain. Jim was young for such a command. Too young, was the opinion of a lot of the admiralty, which spurred him on to prove to the whole damn galaxy just how good he could be. He led away teams he should have left to Spock, putting himself in mortal danger at least three times a week. Spock was annoyed about it too, in the calmly logical way that Vulcans got annoyed about things. They had spent an uncomfortable twenty minutes discussing it once, with Spock trying to hint that as CMO and Kirk’s lover, McCoy was in an ideal position to influence Kirk’s behaviour. However, as their relationship was supposed to be a secret, neither man could reference it outright. The conversation had ended as awkwardly as it began, and McCoy was left worrying, again, about the day that Jim was beamed up broken and bleeding and he couldn’t save him. Or the day he didn’t come back at all.
If the crew found him grumpy, his bedside manner brusque, he couldn’t blame them. The worry, the panic, was so much that it was in danger of leaking out of him sometimes. He knew that one day one of them was going to give the game away and he had the awful feeling that it would be him. Jim, for all his youth and energy, was better at hiding his feelings about McCoy than McCoy was about him. Calling McCoy to the bridge every day to hear his report when it could have been submitted via PADD was the limit of Jim’s indulgence. To McCoy’s eternal surprise and surprising regret, no turbolift ever ‘jammed’ when they were alone in it. Jim refrained from playing footsie under the lunch table and there were no hour long ‘conferences’ in his ready room.
Jim had explained one night, as he traced meaningless shapes over McCoy’s body, fingers ghosting over sweaty, exposed skin.
“As long as I know I have your love, Bones, I can play the captain all say.” His dangerous blue eyes had glowed as he mouthed his way down Bones’ body. “I won’t touch in public if I can touch you privately.” That had sparked round two for that evening, and the conversation had drifted away. Words weren’t necessary in their bed.
The day that James T Kirk died had started the same as any other. McCoy kissed his sleeping forehead (warm, he noted idly, but not unusually so given that Jim liked to roll himself up in the blankets), dressed and left to head back to his own quarters. He had showered, shaved, dressed and sent his daily message to Jo before heading down to check who was on mess duty. Seeing as some of the more competent staff were on duty he had enjoyed a leisurely breakfast before heading off to Sickbay to relieve M’Benga and find out how many morons had managed to harm themselves in the emptiest, most boring stretch of deep space he had the misfortune of warping through.
His day went to hell around lunch time, as an even toned Spock called him to the bridge to treat the captain. Grabbing a med kit and his best nurse, he ran to the turbolift and barked his destination at the computer. On arriving at the bridge, he had eyes for no one but Jim. He was slumped over in his seat, glassy eyed and with sweat pouring from his brow and staining his gold uniform top. Spock was kneeling at his side, monitoring his pulse rate the old fashioned way. As soon as McCoy and Chapel arrived, he stepped back.
Chapel scanned Jim quickly with the medical tricorder, as McCoy did his own analysis. Jim was shivering, and clutching his arms into his body while the sweat continued to pour off him. McCoy forced himself to keep his voice as light as he could manage.
“Feeling bored, Jim? Not enough going on?”
Kirk snorted in response, looking at McCoy for the first time since he had arrived on the bridge.
“You know me, doc, I’m always looking for new reasons to get a hypospray in the neck.”
Chapel silently passed him the tricorder and started to assemble a hypospray from the drug kit she had brought with her. McCoy’s face tightened as he saw the readout. Kirk’s body temperature was high-grade, pushing on hyperpyrexia. Internal scans of his organs showed evidence of liver trauma, and his red blood cells were infected by merozoites. Just fantastic. Somehow, in the middle of deep space, Jim had found time to be bitten by a parasite and now his body was beginning to shut down.
“What’s wrong with me, Bones?” Jim’s hand shot out to grab McCoy’s wrist, a strong hint of panic in his voice.
“You’ve been bitten by a parasite Jim. It’s given you a disease your body is trying to fight off. We’re going to get you to Sickbay and help you out.“ McCoy injected him with the prepared hypo as Chapel spoke to Sickbay to relay news of the incoming patient. To Jim’s obvious disgust he couldn’t walk unaided, and McCoy and Spock half walked, half dragged him to the turbolift and then into Sickbay itself.
As soon as the CMO entered the door, his staff took over. They took Jim, laid him on a bio bed and engaged the privacy screen. He was stripped from his uniform and put in the standard patient gown. McCoy took the time to formally relieve Kirk of duty and promote Spock to Acting Captain. As soon as he turned to check Kirk’s vitals on the diagnostic board it started to flash and wail alarmingly.
“He’s haemorrhaging,” reported Chapel calmly as she selected the surgical tools McCoy would need to open his lover up, find the internal bleed and seal it. Spock retreated as other nurses swarmed around to create a sterile field around McCoy and dress him in the sterile over garments he needed to operate.
McCoy refused to panic as he saw Jim stretched out unconscious on the table on front of him. He took his fear, his worry, his panic and put them all away in a far corner of his mind with his love and his passion. As soon as he made the first incision into his lover’s golden skin, he thought about nothing other than saving his life.
Hours passed. The internal bleeding had stopped thanks to the hasty surgery, but the initial problem remained. Somehow Jim had been bitten by a parasitic life form that had infected his hepatic system. This had spread to his red blood cells and despite his spleen working overtime to filter out the diseased cells, the infection had spread. McCoy was keeping him sedated in an effort to halt the progress of the infection to his brain. Scans of Jim’s body had found a mostly-healed bite bark under one of his arms; Spock had investigated the recent ship’s logs and found that Jim had insisted on going with one of the landing parties to explore a jungle planet three weeks ago. McCoy would bet his collection of antique medical textbooks that the idiot had complained of being hot, took off his uniform shirts in the hope of catching a tan and had got bitten. Chapel had screened the other landing team members. They had showed similar bite marks but no fever or infection. It took her an hour sequestered away in her lab to determine that the captain had an allergy to the vaccination he had been given prior to leaving the ship, rendering it useless.
Once again, it came down to his goddamned allergies. If McCoy could have predicted his life path when back in medical school, he would have specialised in allergens, not surgery. It would have been of far more use.
Jim was currently sedated, on fever-minimising medication, on anti-parasitic medication, on standard post-surgery antibacterial medication and was having his blood screened in the plasma cleansing unit the staff reserved for his own personal use. The machine left the medication in his system but was supposed to cleanse it of parasitic infection. It wasn’t working, though. Something about this particular little bug was insidious. Biological sciences were dissecting and analysing samples they had collected from the surface, but it was slow work. They were four days away from any sophisticated medical services at maximum warp, and McCoy was desperate for any help he could find. He had been searching the medical database for hours, but nothing was of any use. There had been no reported cases of allergy to vaccinations of this kind. Once again, Jim was making the record books. He was pulled from his search by a knock at his office door.
“Go away!” he bellowed, not taking his eyes from the screen. The doors opened anyway.
“Do you have a minute, doctor?” Mr Scott was the last person McCoy expected to find in Sickbay at the moment. After Spock’s grave ship-wide transmission of the captain’s status many crew had formed an unofficial vigil outside the Sickbay doors. Scott should have been busy in Engineering, keeping the ship going at maximum warp.
“What is it?” McCoy replied brusquely. He didn’t have the time for this, whatever this was. Jim was dying.
“It’s more of a question of what I can do for you, really.” Scott’s voice trailed away as McCoy caught him with a piercing look. Scott put down the metal case he was carrying on McCoy’s desk.
“Have you ever heard of nanites, doctor?”
Or if, when thou, thy world’s soul, goest,
It stay, ‘tis but thy carcass then,
The fairest woman, but thy ghost,
But corrupt worms, the worthiest men.
O wrangling schools, that search what fire
Shall burn this world, had none the wit
Unto this knowledge to aspire,
That this her fever might be it?”
And yet she cannot waste by this,
Nor long bear this torturing wrong,
For such corruption needful is
To fuel such a fever long.
An hour later, McCoy was still not totally convinced, although Spock was obviously interested. Jim’s temperature had spiked into hyperpyrexia, and he had fallen into a coma. Starbase Twelve was still three days away and the longer Jim remained unconscious the more damage was being done by the parasites. McCoy knew that it was time for desperate measures, but this was untried and untested technology, cobbled together by a man notorious for failed experiments.
“We use nanites all the time, doctor. They fix the delicate circuitry deep in the Enterprise’s systems on a molecular level. They’re completely harmless; once they’ve fixed their programmed problem they shut down and become inert. The human body is a very complicated machine but a machine none the less. I’m willing to wager that they could separate the infection from the captain’s blood cells and destroy it.” Scotty was tense, well aware of the stakes at hand.
“You want me to inject my,” there was the barest pause as McCoy struggled for the correct word, “captain with tiny machines? What if they go wrong? What if they do more damage?”
“If you persist with your current medical intervention, doctor, the captain will die in the next forty eight hours,” interjected Spock.
For the briefest of seconds McCoy felt nothing but unadulterated rage for the green blooded bastard. Would he be so calm, so logical if it was Uhura lying there, dying by degrees? Didn’t he know that McCoy was living through his worst nightmare?
“Mr Scott’s idea is unconventional. However, I do not believe there is any other option available to us at this time.”
McCoy turned away from the men in his room, and walked over to the shelves where he kept his photographs. Nestled amidst the pictures of Joanna was one of Jim and himself at the Enterprise’s first wedding party. Jim’s smile shone out of the snap, a moment of joy suspended forever.
Spock spoke again, almost apologetically.
“You have known the captain longer, Doctor, but from our acquaintance over last few years i have discerned an adequate appraisal of his character. I believe that this is a course of action of which he would approve.”
McCoy closed his eyes, his head dropping to his chest in defeat. Spock was right. Jim Kirk did not accept no-win scenarios. He was a fly by the seat of his pants, survive by the skin of his teeth sort of man. He believed million to one chances worked out nine times out of ten. Why would now be any different? And who was he to deny him this chance?
“It’s going to take some time to reprogram those nanites, Scotty,” McCoy managed. “Jim’s a human being, not a warp core. I’m going to need to oversee every aspect of their instruction.”
Relief flooded Scotty’s face. “I got Chekov working on it before I came to see you,” he confessed, “and Nurse Chapel has been assisting so far. She said you’d want to take over, though, when you came round to the idea.”
A very tiny part of the mass of fear that had grown in his chest like a cancerous tumour slowly broke off. Chekov at twenty was even more brilliant than Chekov at seventeen; there was no biochemist he trusted more than Chapel. The day she woke up and realised that she was wasted as his head nurse was going to be a sad day for his sickbay.
“Go and tell them I’ve agreed to the nanite treatment,” he said shortly, “I’ll catch up with them as soon as I’ve checked in on Jim again.”
Scotty and Spock nodded and left, leaving McCoy alone to be with the captain. The nurse updating Jim’s chart handed it to him silently and left, giving him the privacy he wanted but daren’t ask for. Jim’s face was at rest, but it was clear that the fever inside him still burned. It made each of his features more delineated and prominent; his masculine beauty shone through the fever’s corrupting influence. Standing there, holding his hand, kissing his palm, McCoy felt stupid. Utterly, utterly stupid. If Jim were to die, then there would be no official record of their love, no one to remember that once Jim Kirk and Len McCoy were anything more than dorm mates, colleagues on the same ship. Once McCoy himself died, the fact of them as a single entity would dissolve away, never to be traced and recorded. It was his fault. If only he hadn’t been so damn worried about what people thought, as if it was anyone’s business who shared his heart and his bed. ”When you get better,” McCoy thought fiercely, “I’ll change. I promise, I’ll change.”
The only response was the beep of the diagnostic screen as it registered no change in Kirk’s life signs. McCoy sighed, kissed Jim again, and left to track down the nanite team in Chapel’s lab.
Twenty four hours passed before the nanites were ready, and Jim had slowly worsened. The whole ship felt fearful and tense, and the crowd of off-duty crew members gathered outside sickbay had increased. McCoy hadn’t left Sickbay since Jim had first been brought in. He ate when someone pushed food into his hands. He sat next to Jim’s bed, holding his warm hand, past the point of caring who saw and who knew. His staff tried to coax him into sleep, but it did not come. He bullied M’Benga into giving him stimulant injections instead. Every so often Chekov or Chapel would bring a PADD with progress they had made so far; McCoy would read it, correct it or approve it and send it back. He didn’t leave Jim’s side.
Considering the groundbreaking advancement they were making, the actual introduction of the nanites was anticlimactic. They had been loaded into a modified hypospray and injected into the unconscious captain. McCoy, Scott, Spock and the rest of the nursing staff watched the readouts on the bio bed as they tracked the microscopic machines as they spread through the captain’s system.
For fifteen agonising minutes, nothing happened. The only noise came from the bio bed’s diagnostic panel and the hum of the plasma cleanser. Nobody dared to speak. Then, all hell broke loose. All the diagnostic sirens wailed as they reported a complete flat line of all of Jim’s major systems. His body convulsed in three backbreaking spasms, then stopped moving abruptly.
Jim was dead.
Scotty’s control panel went wild, its own sirens fighting with the bio bed’s noises. As McCoy leapt towards the bio bed in an attempt to restart Kirk’s heart, Scotty let out a yell.
“Stop, Doctor! Don’t touch him!”
McCoy found himself restrained by Spock’s iron grip. He fought viciously, kicking, pulling and even biting at any part of Spock he could reach. Scotty was frantically punching the controls of his board, then all the klaxons stopped as Jim suddenly pulled in a huge breath.
Spock released McCoy, and he was at the bed in seconds. The diagnostic was reporting normal temperature, pulse and blood oxygen levels. The plasma cleanser showed that Jim’s blood contained only the medication McCoy had pumped him with, not infected cells. Scans of Jim’s liver showed it clean of parasites. The surgical incision scar was healing in front of McCoy’s eyes; within seconds there was no proof that Jim had been operated on at all. McCoy grabbed Jim’s unresponsive hand, and was relieved to discover it had its natural warmth, not a fever-induced clamminess.
“What the fuck happened?” he demanded.
Scotty, who was grinning the grin of man who had saved his captain’s life and made scientific history twice in his own lifetime, paled slightly.
“We, er, we were recoding the wee buggers on the fly, you see, and in our hurry we may have left one or two lines of code in their programming that shouldn’t have been there.”
“Such as?” McCoy growled. Scotty looked even more nervous.
“When you have a computer that isn’t functioning properly, one option to correct the malfunction is to reset the system.”
McCoy looked at Scotty, aghast.
“You mean to say that the nanites switched Jim off and started him up again?”
Scotty swallowed fearfully.
“Aye, in a manner of speaking. When the nanites rebooted the captain they were able to over-write the changes to his red blood cells. They destroyed the virus. I mean, the parasites.”
There was a pause as the room full of people waited to see how McCoy would react. They weren’t expecting him to pull the Chief Engineer into a full body hug, or to say “Thank you,” in such ragged tones. Scotty, who had been bracing himself for a punch in the face, was helpless to resist the embrace and tentatively patted McCoy on the shoulder a few times.
Spock glanced purposefully at Dr M’Benga, who nodded at Nurse Chapel who knocked McCoy clean out with a sneaky hypospray full of a strong sedative. McCoy was aware of Scotty and Chapel wrestling him onto a neighbouring bio bed, then blackness took over.
These burning fits but meteors be,
Whose matter in thee is soon spent.
Thy beauty, and all parts, which are thee,
Are unchangeable firmament.
Yet ‘twas my mind, seizing thee,
Though it in thee cannot persever.
For I had rather owner be
Of thee for one hour, than all else ever.
He slept for twenty four hours and woke to find himself being watched by a familiar pair of blue eyes.
“You snore,” Kirk told him cheerfully.
“Do not,” McCoy grumbled automatically. “Besides, you hog the covers.”
“Not in this bed,” Kirk said ruefully, “it’s not big enough to hog anything in.” He batted his eyelashes a few time for effect. McCoy took the hint and left his bed to sit gingerly on the side of Jim’s. He checked Jim’s charts as his lover took the opportunity to attach himself like a leech to his side.
“What happened, Bones?” asked Jim quietly. “I remember getting really sick on the bridge, then nothing until I woke up.”
“You died.” McCoy’s voice was laced with pain. “You were bitten by some kind of bug three weeks ago, and your body couldn’t fight off the parasitic infection. I tried to save you, and I couldn’t, and you died, Jim.” McCoy’s arms, already tight around Jim’s body, tightened even further.
“I got better,” Jim said quietly.
McCoy snorted out a laugh and was horrified to discover tears falling down his face.
“Don’t you get it, moron? It’s my worst fear come true. Worse than shuttles and goddamn transporters. You were broken and I couldn’t fix you.”
“You did fix me,” Jim objected, “because I’m not dead. Well, I think I’m not.” Jim mock-frowned. “If this is heaven there’s a distinct lack of sandy beaches and drinks with the little umbrellas in them.”
McCoy smiled through the tears. He didn’t want to, but he did anyway. That was the effect that Jim Kirk always had on him.
“It was Scotty that saved you really,” he said. “Scotty, and Chapel and Chekov.”
He went on to explain about the nanites, the reprogramming and the dramatic reboot that saved Kirk’s life. He left out the part where he had hugged Scotty. That was something he didn’t really want to remember.
“So there you go. You’re alive, but it was nothing to do with me.” He knew he sounded bitter, but it wasn’t just professional jealousy. “My worst fear had come true, Jim. You died and I couldn’t save you.
“Bullshit,” Jim’s scornful tone jerked him from his misery. “You should be glad I died, Bones, because now you don’t have to worry about me dying again. If the day ever comes when you can’t save me by yourself, then everyone else will. You don’t have to carry that burden by yourself anymore, “ he continued gently, “because everyone else can take their share too.”
Neither man spoke for some time. McCoy’s tears continued, but he just let them fall. Jim stayed propped up against his side, his eyes drooping. A question burned at the back of McCoy’s mind. It had been knocking around in there for a while now, but there had been so many reasons not to ask it, his own fucked up track record the very least of them.
Still, if today had taught him anything it was that there was no second guessing life. Sometimes you just had to take that million to one shot and hope.
“Jim,” he said quietly, “Will you marry me?”
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-06 12:38 am (UTC)Also, this line: the Great Bird of the Galaxy had a particularly perverse sense of humour is made of amazing and I love you just a little for it.