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Jim dreams of Iowa - of golden fields ringed by clear blue sky and bathed in yellow sunlight and dust kicking up from dry roads and shipyards rising out of plains with gleaming silver and metal and stars on summer nights shine on as hot wind picks up and rustles corn stalks - of San Francisco in summer, white and glowing in morning sun with green grass and jogging along the shining bay and Earth and the Enterprise and the stars and the warm blankets Bones keeps in sickbay and the way Spock’s rooms are red and hot and the chess board sits in the corner and the incense burner glows and dims and shapes rise up in shadow and danger that drips with red and sucks him down and down
He wakes up and the world is quiet and large and white. Bones sits next to him - face creased and smudged with dark weariness that makes Jim’s fingers ache and his heart twist. Bones clears his throat like he did in the Academy when the mornings were too bright and the whiskey was still sitting too heavy in his gut.
“Hey, Jim.”
His voice is too soft like Jim is wild, backed into a corner, shaking and injured and ready to bite and snarl at any hand trying to help. Jim hates it. He wants Bones to bark at him, to smack the back of his head and tell him he’s an idiot. Dammit Jim I’m a doctor not a babysitter stop being an infant.
Bones bites his lip and stares back at Jim. When his breath goes out of him in a huff, Jim thinks of long nights studying and the smudge of lead when Bones clutches his pencil too hard.
“I know you’re in there, kid. I’ll be here til you’re ready.”
What happened Jim wants to ask. Why does he feel like he can’t move or speak. There’s a strangeness in his limbs like someone tore him apart and remade him out of clay and scrap parts until he was functional but not him, just limp and broken and making Bones look like his whiskey was gone and he failed his test and those weeks where he worked 84 hours in a row and people died and Jim made him tea and macaroni and cheese and curled against him on the couch until he was breathing right again.
They’re at the Academy again right? They’re in their dorm and it’s summer outside with the ocean blue and large like the cornfields in Iowa were yellow and large. He turns his head, flops really, sagging on the pillow toward Bones like he’s a doll or a mannequin or dead.
But this isn’t dead... he’s been dead, hasn’t he? and it didn’t feel like this. Maybe he’s still dead. Maybe he’s a corpse and Bones is keeping watch in the morgue until they come to burn him.
Bones reaches out, a fine tremble in his hands, and grips Jim’s wrist. The fingers are firm and Jim can feel his pulse throbbing through his thin skin, beating beating marching and alive alive.
“Jim?”
He opens his mouth or was it already open? His face is slack like a tugged out rubber band, ready for the trash receptacle, never to be tightened. He manages a moan, barely vibrating his vocal chords and getting half blocked by the heaviness of his tongue.
Bones cries. It’s quiet and steady and Jim watches him and wants to lift his hand and touch and comfort and bring whiskey from the cabinet and heavy bottom glasses that Bones prefers from the shelf and sit next to him til the sun is coming up or going down and nothing can touch them.
Jim falls asleep and dreams of thin dorm room walls and cafeteria food and stars that beckon him up and corridors that never end, dark red, and shapes rising out of darkness.
They rescue Jim in the dead of night.
The society was just pre-warp and they had been sent to observe their progress. Natives had come upon Jim just as he was beaming down with a small security team. Their scientists may have been getting ready to go playing off in the stars, but their culture was still full of voodoo and magic and devils.
They killed the security team and took Jim. Took him. Just... dragged him below ground to their odd network of cave and subjected him to the worst their voodoo judicial system had to offer. Witch trials and god knows what.
While they wait for beam up, Leonard vomits on the floor of the dark prison and Jim lies insensate on the stretcher next to him. There’s blood beneath his fingernails and soaking in the knees of his pants and the stench in the air is making it hard to breathe.
Spock looks faint beside him, white with lips pressed together. Two members of the security team had to leave the room before they carried Jim out.
“It came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace...”
If Vulcans have fairytales, this is not it. Jim thinks of hot jungles and rivers, candles flickering in and out.
He opens his eyes and Spock is seated in that straight back way of his that always makes Jim think of military and schools and hawk nose teachers and grim instructors - but Spock is at ease like Jim would be slouching sprawling at a bar.
Spock’s voice is not hoarse or faltering but Jim somehow knows he’s been reading for awhile - that he started at the coast looking into the darkness and now they’re traveling through jungle, passing through undiscovered pieces of the world.
Dark eyes look up and hold his. “Jim, I am pleased to see...” There is a strange hitch in his speech that Spock does not correct. “It has been two weeks, three days, 18 hours and 23 minutes since we beamed back aboard. Doctor McCoy said you may be plagued by disorientation and the most logical treatment is making all the facts available to you.” He pauses and closes the book, setting it on his lap.
“The medical displays register that your pain level is tolerable - but if you feel any discomfort, it would be most logical to inform Doctor McCoy or myself so that we may see to your well being.”
Spock, Jim says or thinks because he still doesn’t know whether his mouth is open or closed. You only use logical multiple times if you’re dealing with those pesky emotions. I wish you would let me see because emotions are good and freeing and the world is so many colors and flavors like salt and engine fuel and cotton candy and the way a roller coaster smells or the way the glass of the observation deck feels beneath my hand...
And when you furrow your forehead like that you’ll get wrinkles that’s what my mother told me...
Jim sleeps again.
Medicine in the 23rd Century is a marvel. it can make hearts beat, lungs in inflate, organs function long after 22nd Century medicine would’ve failed. All the autonomic functions of the body can be performed by machines.
But Leonard thinks they’re no better at preserving life than they were in the 19th century. When that spark is gone, nothing can bring it back.
They can simulate all the trappings of life - but the soul brain spirit will of a person is still as delicate as ever. And once it’s gone, the body can keep churning - but the person is never coming back.
Jim breathes, his heart pumps, calories are pushed to his stomach and the bio bed works his muscles every day to prevent atrophy.
When Jim looks at Leonard, he sees empty blue sky and thinks I didn’t save you.
“He was thinking about cotton candy, Doctor. Research tells me that this a Terran ‘treat’ enjoyed mostly by children at festivals consisting of pink spun sugar and air.” A pause. “This does not seem like a nutritious way of gaining calories and I would highly discourage you allowing Jim to consume such a food.”
“Spock, we haven’t gotten him to even take liquid by mouth. If he’d eat cotton candy, I’d feed it to him.” There is a hand on his forehead, brushing over his hair, down his ear, tugging a little at the tube taped to his face. “We’ll try the protein supplement again tomorrow.”
Jim can’t open his eyes.
He registers change in light and dark in the area around him by the colors on his eyelids. Sometimes, when the light around him change abruptly, he sees stars speeding passed his brain and he follows them until there is quiet for awhile.
He hears Spock. He hears Bones. Nurses come and go, sweet and whispery and so gentle. Sometimes other members of his command team come. Uhura touches his hand and speaks to him in Swahili. Scotty and Chekov spell out formulas and theories and bits of science and math that Jim thinks he knew once but are now just comforting numbers that flow around him. Sulu doesn’t say much at all.
Bones sits down one night, on the bed next to him and not an arm’s length away like everyone else. His hands are warm and dry and steady and everything that makes Jim think of safe. They touch his jaw and his neck, rest on his pulse and then skate down his chest, feeling his heartbeat, and then down further to palpitate the abdomen. In the Academy, Bones would study out loud, naming bones and muscles and diseases and medicines until Jim could parrot them too.
“You’re all better, Jim,” he says, quiet so his breath is barely a gust over Jim’s cheeks. “Fixed you all up. Now you just need to come back into that stupid brain of yours.” His hands come back up and cup his face, their foreheads touch. “Don’t go where none of us can follow.”
Bones falls asleep there, head pushed between Jim’s jaw and his shoulder and fingers pressed to the pulse in his wrist.
During a training in the middle of the second year, Bones got so sick that he’d shaken in Jim’s arms, fevered and scared and clinging so hard to Jim that his arms were bruised. They were on a team sent to Antarctica - the least inhabitable of all the Terran continents with ice and snow and polar bears that evolved over the years to large beasts of prey that could swallow a man whole. They set up their climate insulating tent but Bones had still been trembling, hands icy when Jim held them. He’d gotten sick on the third day, a raspy cough that made Jim think of hospitals and the click and hiss of machines. They’d slept in the same bed until the training was over - for warmth, for comfort, for Jim to feel the chest rising against his, and the breath against his cheek and the pulse beneath his fingers.
The wind had thrashed outside and the fire had flickered and Bones had breathed like there was water in his lungs - but somehow things were better when Bones was wrapped up with him.
Jim rests that night, with Bones breathing against his neck. For once, those dreams of Iowa and corridors that never end, with dark red bubbling up from the floor, and feeling of something in the shadows of his eyes - for once, those dreams are quiet and Jim rests in silence.
When Jim doesn’t open his eyes the next morning and the days tick on, Leonard thinks this is it and barely leaves the tiny room Jim rests in. He tends to him, talks to him, touches him, says, “I’m here” and “don’t leave” and “you’re safe” and “I promise.”
His gag reflex is deteriorating and Leonard knows what that means, fights it hates it rails against it, refuses to stick a tube down Jim’s throat. Just keeps him turned on his side, makes sure to suction his throat once an hour, uses the settings on the biobed to force breaths. Jim won’t die with a medieval tube down his throat.
The goddamn miracle medical technology of the fucking 23rd century tells him every day that Jim is getting weaker, drifting farther - try this medicine, we recommend this treatment machine medication therapy.
Leonard is a doctor (not a miracle worker priest magician). He knows what giving up looks like. He feels Jim with his hands. The scars from... that place are gone, muscles mended and skin unblemished. Jim is well.
Jim is leaving.
Leonard sleeps there that night like he used to do back at the Academy.
His eyes feel like flames so he opens them and stares at the white wall, hoping the lack of color and the coolness of the ship will stop the burning. If he moves his eyes, his head feels like inside of a hot helium balloon, drifting up and exploding in the sun and never reaching the stars. On Terra, years ago before the wars and the aliens and a universe of possibilities and planets, people told stories legends cartoons myths about Terrans using balloons to float into the sky and go on adventures and find the meaning purpose sense of life love excitement.
Jim imagines floating and never ending blue sky of Terra. He can’t feel the rest of him - imagines he is just a balloon of a head, drifting on a weakening string: almost almost almost free.
Sometimes Bones is there, blurry and indistinct, passing through his vision like an angel ghost, and Spock is there too, drifting in and out and leaning close, hands on Jim’s face even though Jim can’t look at them.
He thinks of blue.
Not the darkness.
If he stays in blue space silence emptiness quiet blankness, the dark shapes blood anger pain does not come.
Bones and Spock talk argue?, voices rising and falling like wind or water or the hum of his ship beneath him in those quiet times everything else around is still. Sometimes Jim can understand the words, but most of the time they drift over and around him like he is the tree in the plain, the rock in the stream, the warp core in the center of it all.
“He recognizes us still.”
“So there’s hope.”
“Hope is illogical.”
“Hope is all we have.”
One night, the lights are dim and Bones is massaging his dead arms, fingers working over his forearms and wrists and biceps, Bones leans close and speaks in a sharp whisper that breaks through the blur. “Spock says your brain is all confused and not thinking straight. He doesn’t... Spock says you recognize us... me and him. When we’re with you, he thinks you know and he says you’re calmer.”
Bones lays his hand down on top of the covers and brushes his hand over his face, through his hair, down to rest where his neck meets his shoulder. “I don’t know what I think about Vulcan voodoo. Your brain scans still aren’t looking good.” His voice catches. “But I’m here. I’ll be here. Even if all I do is make you a little calmer or a little happier wherever they trapped you inside that head of yours. I’ll do that.” He sighs, long and hard like it’s coming up from dust. “I’ll be here.”
Jim’s eyes open sometimes now. But it’s somehow worse. Seeing those blue eyes so flat like glass or marble just staring staring.
Spock does another meld and his face twitching at the end of it, like it wants to shatter like it did when Jim died. “He recognizes us,” is the only comfort he can give. His hand skates down Jim’s arm, not touching, like he’s just feeling the heat of life.
There’s quiet grief in his mouth that says we were too late and there’s nothing left of Jim except this small bit of recognition.
Leonard changes the the bag that feeds Jim, checks the catheter, turns him on his side and swipes a thumb over his jaw.
They’re almost back to Terra. Spock delayed as long as possible, dragging it out to give Jim a chance to wake up, to be Jim.
Leonard knows that when they dock, they’ll take Jim, enfold him into their cold arms and try to cure him like they don’t believe Leonard knows what he’s doing.
They can try, he thinks viciously. But Leonard won’t be giving him up. And when they’ve done their tests and needled and if Jim is still then quiet and gone, Leonard will take him.
Swimming in the ocean in a lake in space, drifting up and pushing down and riding wave sand floating in shallows, Jim rests. Sometimes he drifts through the Bridge, pressed against the viewing window and marveling at the brightness of the stars that stretch so endless in front of him.
Sometimes, now, he can feels his legs and fingers - feel that they are a part of him and he can move them. It’s hard.
One day, there’s sun on his face and he opens his eyes. It’s too bright and tears spring up involuntarily. He’s moving, can feel shadows passing over his chin. Bones wafts through his vision.
“Hey, Jim, you’re back on Terra. Sun feels good, huh?” His hand grips Jim’s shoulder, pats his forehead. “We’ll get you settled in a hot second. Getting jostled so much can’t be fun? Except maybe it feels like those roller coasters you dragged me to - death traps. Can’t believe they’re still allowed in this day and age.”
Jim closes his eyes against the brightness.
He’s on the pier with Bones in Santa Monica. They came down one weekend to celebrate passing exams and surviving their first year and just being alive and in the sun. Bones hates the ferris wheel, roller coaster, rickety wooden beams, waves cracking against pillars, crowds of tourists leaning over to peer at the islands and up the coast at the hills rising green out of the earth, and the cotton candy that Jim eats in mouthfuls (when Bones eats a bite, it sticks to his lips fingers cheek, making them shiny with spun glittering pink sugar). Everything is glossy and bright, rubbed over with oil from children’s fingers, sweat from surfers and sea foam bursting up from the currents.
Jim took off his shoes and shirt and went body surfing while Bones grumped beneath an umbrella. A kid got stung by a stingray and Bones had peed on his foot and gave him a hypo to numb the pain until the paramedics got there.
“The beach will kill you, Jim,” he’d muttered when they finally left, eating dinner at some diner decorated to look like the 2050’s, all geometric shapes and splashes of color and whirling architecture. Jim had eaten funnel cake and grilled cheese and laughed and laughed. And Bones had smiled in that soft way he does when he’s truly happy but he’s still trying to be a grumpy old man.
That was a good day. Jim drifts in that day.
He opens his eyes again and he’s in another hospital but it’s not on his ship and it’s too cold on his feet like someone doesn’t know his feet are always cold and didn’t lay an extra folded blanket over them like Bones always does and where is Bones where is Spock and he doesn’t like this and wants to go back to the ship because his ship is where he belongs with Bones and where is Bones.
Loud noises, sweep over his head. Some beeping some voices but none of them are Bones or Spock and he panics and chokes, arching back and spreading his fingers because it’s unacceptable to be laying here helpless when Bones could be anywhere and trapped and he remembers the dark figures coming out of the dark with their fingers and pain and needles. He needs Spock. He needs he needs needs
Something stings against his neck and he can’t move his legs or arms anymore, he tosses his head, trying to see passed all the indistinct shapes blocking him and then, finally finally Spock is there, reaching over the blur and grabbing his face.
You’re safe be still be calm you’re safe safe safe warm.
Bones?
Leonard will be here. He is safe you are safe warmth be calm.
Glowing fires and chessboards and blankets laid over his feet and and and corridors that smell of blood and dark shapes coming up and smothering drowning aching.
His back arches. He wants to go back to the floating and the beach and the cotton candy and the sweet slow emptiness of those beautiful drifting days and not this not this.
You are safe. Stay though. Stay, Jim. Safe. Stay. Warm. I am here.
We are here.
His teeth grit and he tastes blood, hands hold him down and his throat hurts so that all he can do is shriek silently.
This was all a lie illusion trick mind game. He was never rescued. He’s back there and they’re they are he is. Pain.
“Jim!” He thinks it sounds like Bones. Maybe?
But he scrabbles away, reaching for the blue space, chokes and squeezes until all he can do is float again. Float...
Bones flickers in and out before his eyes. Spock wavers at the foot of the bed. If Jim could move his face, he’d smile (it’s good to see them, even if they’re not real) - but he’s subsumed again and all he can do is stare until at last, he sleeps again.
Of course the one time Jim starts freaking out like the spoiled child he is, Leonard is across the medical complex, arguing with a board of doctors for Jim’s release. It’s been six weeks since they arrived at SFM in Geneva and Jim is no better.
He opens his eyes. He closes his eyes. He’ll track movement if it’s right in front of him. All his reflexes are returning to normal - even his gag reflex seems to be functioning again.
Leonard gets to the room at a dead run - even then, most of the personnel is cleared out and it’s just Spock and one doctor leaning over Jim. “Jim?” he says first. Jim is quiet and blank, like always, blue eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then to Spock, “what happened?”
Spock turns and his lips quirk just a little. “Jim became very distressed - I attempted a meld to calm him and he asked for you.”
His chest feels tight, heart wrung out and twisted and flayed in pieces. “Me?”
“For Bones.”
Leonard does not cry. He moves to the bed, slips his hand in Jim’s and touches his face. “I’m here.”
Jim comes back and smells pine trees. His back is tight like he laid on it wrong all night long, burning low and tugging when he tries to shift. He doesn’t recognize the room, bright and airy with an open window and real blue fabric curtains bustling in a breeze.
A white blanket is tucked over him, up to the chest, and a knit throw is over his feet. Something is scratchy on his face and when he tries to sit up, his arms give out before he’s even gotten his head off the pillow.
The movement makes his heart race and his lungs tighten and an alarm blares somewhere above him.
He doesn’t hear a door open but suddenly Bones is there, just above him. He doesn’t speak, but his hand settles on Jim’s chest, just over his heart like he’s counting, while one hand taps at something over Jim’s head.
“Easy,” Bones murmurs, still not really looking at Jim. His face drawn and thin and lined but his hand is so gentle and careful. “You’re okay, just a nightmare probably. We’ll just get you some oxygen.” He speaks like Jim isn’t really there - like this is normal to touch and talk and Jim never ever answers him back.
“Bones,” Jim croaks, throat feeling raw and unused and broken.
Bones freezes. Actually just stops dead, one hand on Jim, one hand on a display screen, lips open like he was about to say something but all the air has just gone. He lowers his chin finally and his eyes fix on Jim’s, burning hot and bright and wet.
“Jim?” He says it like a prayer, a wish, the last breath of a request.
Jim awkwardly gets one hand up, curls his fingers around the long ones sitting on his chest. “Wha... wha...”
Bones startles, hand flipping over and squeezing Jim’s tightly. “Let me get you water. Your throat has got to be sore. Don’t try to move. We did our best to prevent atrophy but there’s only so much you can do.”
He doesn’t let go of Jim’s hand, reaching for a replicator near the bed - and a moment later, a glass of water and a straw is being held to Jim’s mouth.
“Slow, go slow. Let’s make sure you’re swallowing okay.”
Jim manages it, only spluttering a little. He feels flimsy and floppy and loose like a harsh breeze could blow him to pieces.
“Jim?” Bones asks when he’s taken the water away. He’s at Jim’s eye level now, one hand pressed to Jim’s neck. “Do you...” he trails off like he’s not even sure where to start.
“Bones,” Jim says again, just to erase that tentativeness from his eyes.
Bones closes his eyes and grips his hand tighter. “You’ve been out of it for a long while, Jim. But it’s okay now.” He strokes the side of his face. “It’ll be okay. We’ll get you back on your feet in no time.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing you need to worry about now.” His face clouds and his eyes duck away from Jim’s just for a second. “Just, shh, relax, you’re safe. I’ll call Spock and he’ll want to come see you as soon as he’s back. Just... just.” He stops and the noise he makes is wet and painful and nights where the whiskey was strong and the memory of his father was thick in the room. “Just, don’t got away again, okay? Don’t go away.”
Jim can feel a real dream coming on, the tug of sleep after a long day in space, on the bridge, running around his ship and learning every part of her. The good sleep. “Won’t go anywhere,” he mumbles, throat still hoarse. “‘m back.”
Jim sleeps eight hours and wakes up and smiles.
“I really want waffles,” he says, like it’s any Saturday morning and Leonard is his goddamn nurse maid and the whole fucking universe revolves around the tiniest of his whims.
Leonard makes him waffles.
(He eats two bites and vomits it back up. Stubborn fool.)
A Case Study on the Affects, Treatment and Aftermath of the Neurotoxic Weapons of the Indigenous Inhabitants of Luna XIII: Summary
Reference texts: CMO Logs and medical notes of Leonard McCoy (edited and adapted to remove classified and identifying detail)
The above case study examines and details the first hand observations and treatments undertaken by CMO Leonard McCoy of the Neurotoxic weapons of the Luna XIII, as the first medical professional to witness the use and the effects of these weapons on a humanoid subject. This neurotoxin has only been used on one humanoid on record.
The Luna XIII Neurotoxin is considered one of the most debilitating known neurotoxins in the Universe. The effects can be compared to the Klingon mindsifter or other such neuro-torture. It is important to note, though, that the administration of this toxin on Luna XIII is not technically considered a means of “torture” but an accepted state-sanctioned method of removing potential threats from Luna XIII society and punishing criminals. Luna XIII holds the preservation of life sacrosanct; therefore considering murder, and thereby the death penalty, abhorrent. (Note: In the above case study, the subject did undergo extensive torture before the Luna XIII Neurotoxin was administered).
In following case study, the Luna XIII Neurotoxin induced a persistent vegetative state in the subject. It is believed this period can be pre-determined by the judicial body administering the neurotoxin (Note: This is not confirmed but is an hypothesis put forth by Doctor McCoy based on the rapid recovery of the affected subject when exactly nine months from time of injection had passed). During this time, the subject appeared catatonic and had limited brain function and reflexes. It is unknown how cognizant the subject was during this period. There were indications of mild awareness of surroundings. However, upon recovery, the subject had lost all memory of anything post the arrival on Luna XIII.