Fic: "Crossfire" (2/19)
Nov. 5th, 2010 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mijanTitle: “Crossfire”, Part 2
Author: Mijan
Series: ST: XI
Character/Pairing(s): Kirk&McCoy, Pike, Scotty
Warnings: Graphic descriptions of medical trauma.
Rating: PG-13
Author’s Notes: This story is part of the Academy-era story arc, which includes “Convergence” and “And All the King’s Men.” “Crossfire” is a direct sequel. Several things in this story will not make sense unless you’ve read AAtKM first.
Summary: Jim Kirk and Leonard McCoy are on top of the world at the academy until it all comes crashing down around them. Trapped in their own mystery of politics, sabotage, and possible murder, it quickly becomes impossible to know who to trust. Worse, Jim might still be a target. With a dangerous criminal on the loose and Academy leadership not doing enough, Jim and Bones have to get their lives back together and find out what happened... before it happens again.
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CROSSFIRE, Part Two
Coffee.
All Leonard needed was one more cup of coffee to properly wake up. Leave it to Jim to wake him up in the middle of the night after a long day of lab work and before an ER shift. He'd drained his first canteen of coffee already, and he was actually disappointed that the emergency ward had been dead quiet this morning. A bit more activity might have helped keep him awake. After reviewing the Gamma Shift logs and treating a minor plasma burn – how exciting… idiot engineers always trying to get too cozy with their equipment – he grabbed his canteen and made his way to the doctors’ lounge for a refill.
The lead physician on the ward, Dr. Paduga, caught him just before he stepped through the lounge door. "Hey McCoy, are you taking a break?"
Leonard held up his canteen. "Just need a refill. Didn't quite get enough sleep last night."
Paduga frowned. "Did you go to bed too late, or are you having sleeping problems because of the research project?" she asked.
"Neither," he grumbled. "I've got a sleeping problem, and its clinical name is Jim Kirk."
She laughed. "That friend of yours who stops by here sometimes, right? If you find a cure for that kind of problem, let me know, but I think there are worse types of afflictions."
Leonard smiled and shrugged. "I suppose it could be worse. Andorian shingles comes to mind."
"Uh-huh." She gestured back towards the ER doorway with a tilt of her head. "It's pretty quiet on the floor today, and I just got paged by the surgical team up in pulmonology. They need some backup."
"Oh great angels of mercy, you need me to cover the ER floor on a Wednesday morning." He sighed dramatically. "However shall I handle the slow trickle of skinned knees and twisted ankles alone?"
"I'll let the head nurse know you've got it covered."
"You're welcome," he said with a wry grin.
Paduga gave a nod of thanks, then hurried down the hall to the turbolift.
Chuckling lightly, Leonard let himself the rest of the way into the break room. The aroma of fresh brewed coffee greeted him. Once he’d refilled his canteen, he settled down into an armchair, relishing the quiet for a few moments.
This semester, Starfleet Medical had accepted his proposal for a research project. His own experience with a brutal head injury the year before had led to his proposal for a new technique in emergency neural medicine - using blood vessel stabilization and reconstruction a first-aid measure. His goal was to create a portable device that could start to repair that sort of head trauma automatically. Why should a first responder have to wait until a patient with a head injury was transported back to a hospital to begin treatment? Neurology wasn't his primary specialty, and neither was medical equipment engineering, but the principles of blood vessel repair should, in theory, work the same way in the brain as in any other part of the body. He had a resident neurologist on his team, and had recruited two biomedical engineers.
If this worked, if the equipment could be made small enough, convenient enough, and simple enough, then every emergency med kit could be equipped with these devices. It would drastically reduce the risk of permanent brain injury due to internal hemorrhaging for all but the very worst injuries. It would revolutionize emergency medicine for head trauma.
Leonard sat back and relaxed into the cushions of the chair, sipping his coffee. If the floor needed him, they'd page him. The Emergency Department at Starfleet Medical was actually fairly small, and usually pretty quiet. Sure, the facility had the best doctors in Starfleet, but the facility and its mission were structured around research and advanced medicine; it only handled the emergency medical needs of staff and visiting diplomats at Starfleet Headquarters, and the occasional cadet with injuries beyond the capabilities of the Academy infirmary. Trauma and emergency medical facilities aboard a starship were actually more extensive. This morning, the ER had been almost completely devoid of patients, and after his night of interrupted sleep, he could sure use a few quiet minutes to absorb some quality caffeine and not think too hard.
For a moment, instead of reviving him, the soft cushions and the warm coffee almost lulled him into a doze. He had to admit, even though working at the Starfleet Medical ER was more prestigious, there was always more to do in the Academy Infirmary, and the work was generally more interesting. He blinked and turned his coffee canteen in his hand, staring at the shine of the metal exterior, knowing that he should be doing something useful with the absolute lull in activity.
Jim’s request. The flight recorder feed.
The thought had been percolating in the back of Leonard’s mind all morning, but with Dr. Paduga keeping him honest, he hadn’t seriously been able to consider Jim’s request for him to watch the training mission. He glanced across the room at his cubby. The flight recorder transmission was probably running in full swing on his PADD, just waiting for him to pay attention, and his pretense at apathy towards Jim’s life was the most pathetic farce he’d ever upheld. Really, he wanted to see it.
Lurching up from his chair with a creaky groan, he grabbed his bag from the cubby on the far wall and pulled out his PADD. A moment later, he was back in his armchair, activating the program which Jim had conveniently placed at the top of his data stream. He sipped his coffee, waiting for the flight recorder feed to start displaying data and visuals, but nothing came up. Dammit, Jim, he thought irritably. You want me to watch something, but don’t actually set up the data feed correctly. Still, the lack of content in the datastream made some nerve in his stomach twist oddly.
Shoving the coffee canteen aside, he refreshed the data receiver cache, trying to get a new lock on the data transmission.
The transmission was blank. No signal at all.
Leonard frowned. That wasn't right. Was the training exercise over already? What time was it? According to the chronometer, the datastream had cut off five minutes ago, so maybe they were already done, but he couldn’t quite shake the odd sensation that something was wrong. It was too early.
The twisting in his stomach got tighter as Leonard tabbed back through the datastream records. There certainly had been data received on this frequency, but it had stopped… just moments ago. Frowning even more deeply, Leonard went through the playback of the flight recorder transmission, not to the beginning, but to five minutes before the signal was lost.
Two screens activated - one with numerical and graphical representations of the shuttle's telemetry, and another with a video feed from within the shuttlecraft. The transmission began to play, and Leonard couldn't pull his eyes from the video feed.
This wasn't right. It was a training mission, but there was panic in Jim's voice. Real panic. Lost power... power fluctuation... and a cadet he didn't know was trying to fix something. A lurch and a shout - Jim's voice shouting - and the other cadet slamming into the control console. The audio became a garbled mess of words and panic to Leonard's ears - lost impulse engines... emergency thrusters have failed... emergency beam-out...
This was something like his worst nightmare playing out in front of him. Leonard gripped the frame of the PADD tighter, as though he could reach through it and grab Jim and pull him out of there.
It couldn't be real. It had to be a joke. But there was Jim, scrambling to get the other cadet's limp body into the safety harness, a smear of blood on her face. Jim disappeared from view as the transmission from the Mars Orbiter continued to repeat the same damning statement: "We can't get a lock on you." There was the thud of a body slamming into metal and a grunt of pain. Jim was back in the pilot's seat, yelling for the emergency beam out... velocity erratic... can't get a lock... and the rusty red dirt that could only be the surface of Mars was rushing towards the viewport. There a sound like a laugh that was choked by a hysterical sob.
Leonard shook his head to himself, not quite breathing. No... no no nonono...
Shit.
The flight recorder feed went dead, and Leonard stared at the blank PADD in his hands, numb, hearing only the sudden wail of the emergency alarm. Starfleet Medical's emergency alarm.
"Attention! Code yellow. Shuttlecraft accident, one survivor. Emergency ward prepare for one patient - critical condition. Emergency staff prepare for incoming casualty."
Leonard could barely breathe as he bolted from the armchair, sending his PADD and coffee clattering across the floor. He grabbed his own emergency kit from his cubby, more out of reflex than anything else, and ran out the door.
He'd liked old movies when he was younger, but he'd never quite understood why the film makers would slow down the speed of the action and dull the sound during extremely tense scenes. Wouldn't it feel like everything was moving faster, not slower? Wouldn't it be a cacophony of sirens and voices? But his frantic dash towards the ER floor felt like he was moving in slow motion. The air seemed thick and it was holding him back, muffling sounds, leaving him with the too-fast thud of his heart in his chest and the rush of blood in his ears as the world oozed by around him. The movies were right - it was terrifying and disconnected, like a dream out of control.
His voice sounded distant as he started barking commands through the emergency room. The words were correct, and the authority was solid, but there was a surrealism to the whole thing that made his skin crawl.
He dropped his kit on the countertop at the central desk in the middle of the ER and grabbed the first nurse he saw - Nurse Aldrich, a tall, middle-aged, dark-skinned woman with a sharp eye and an air of competence that had impressed him since the day he met her. "Nurse Aldrich, follow me. Do we have a report on the patient? Status?" he called out as he hurried into the scrub bay, grabbing his surgical gown and gloves.
Aldrich was right at his heels, reading off a PADD. "One cadet, human male, age twenty-three -"
Leonard stopped short of the sterilization field, almost stumbling. He realized that for a few moments, he'd automatically assumed the survivor was Jim. Hadn't even considered that it might not have been. The other cadet had been a human female. Until now, there was no reason for him to believe that Jim had been the one to survive, but that's exactly what he'd assumed. He didn't want to think about what that might mean. Couldn't think about that right now. He forced himself to breathe again.
"Doctor McCoy? Are you okay?"
Leonard realized that he must look like someone had slapped him, and he couldn't let himself falter in front of the rest of the staff. He shook his head to clear it. "Fine. Just fine.” He hoped she hadn’t noticed how tight his voice was. “The patient - what do we know? Injuries?"
"I'm sorry," she said softly, and Leonard got a fleeting impression that she meant more than one thing, before she looked back down at her PADD and began rattling off information. "Multiple fractures, internal bleeding, rib fractures with left pneumothorax, head trauma, spinal trauma, brief exposure to zero-atmosphere, signs of radiation exposure -"
"Okay," he cut her off. He'd heard enough to know it was ten kinds of horrible, and he'd get the details when Jim - when the patient arrived. He shut off that line of thinking as he hurried towards trauma room one - a room directly off the main emergency ward equipped to handle the worst emergencies. It was a primary treatment room and operating theater in one with a permanent sterile field, and the less often the room was needed, the better. "Who else is still on the ER floor here?"
"We’ve got... Nurses Hodgkins, Ming, Patel... medical assistant Zhan... oh, and Doctor Hixon."
Leonard spun around in place as the door to the trauma ward slid open for him. "Hixon is the only other doctor on the floor?"
Aldrich nodded.
"Hixon?" he repeated in furious disbelief. Here he was in the finest medical facility in Starfleet, and the only backup he had was a goddamned first-year obstetrician-wannabe. "Get an anesthesiologist down here, and another trauma surgeon. I don't care what they're doing. Find them and haul their asses into this ward immediately." Leonard clenched his teeth together hard enough to hurt and growled, "And get Hixon in here, stat - at least he knows how to staunch bleeding."
"Yes, doctor," she said and hurried away.
Leonard gritted his teeth and moved into the trauma room, setting up the space for the impending disaster that was about to land in the ER. The nurses could do this work on their own, but he needed to do something. His hands worked automatically to activate and prep standard equipment, and the two nurses who were already there moved around the room with him like a well-rehearsed dance, laying out medications and support equipment, testing the sterile field. The frantic edge of the activity was muted by the strange buzzing in his ears, and the heavy thud of his own heart in his chest. Seconds stretched immeasurably between heartbeats. When there was nothing left to do, Leonard stood at the door of the trauma room, watching the turbolift door across the ER floor.
The intercom system chimed - the emergency medical shuttlecraft was arriving, landing on the roof. Dr. Hixon was running across the floor with Nurse Ming in tow, rounding out the pitiful trauma team. Three nurses, a medical assistant, one resident obstetrician, and Leonard. Bones. Jim's Bones. And Bones' Jim... who was now arriving on the ER floor on a stretcher being pushed by two medics, and all hell broke loose.
"Get him into the trauma ward!" Leonard barked, even though it wasn't necessary. "Vitals, now!"
One of the medics began rattling off blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, consciousness level and a whole slew of information even as they pushed the stretcher across the floor to the trauma room. Leonard automatically filed the information into his mental chart as he made a visual check.
It was bad. Really bad. And Jim was - unrecognizable. His clothes were gone, but above where the edge of his collar and cuffs of his sleeves had been, his skin was angry red like a sunburn. His face, neck, chest... his whole body was covered with splotchy blood blisters and purpura where his capillaries had burst. A shoulder obviously separated. Clavicle broken - no, shattered. Thicker welts and bruises across his chest and upper abdomen, probably from his harness. A trickle of blood leaking from his left ear - intracranial hemorrhage. And that was just what Leonard could diagnose at a glance.
The medics disengaged the stabilization force fields securing Jim to the stretcher and transferred him to the biobed. The biobed’s ventilation field engaged, and one medic removed the emergency respirator mask while the other moved the bags of saline off the stretcher and hung them from the bedside stand. Leonard activated the biobed scanners, and the sensor display painted an uglier picture.
"Where did the flash burns come from?" Leonard asked as he manually checked the vascular stabilizers already attached to Jim’s abdomen. Those would have to be removed before each blood vessel could be repaired, letting the bleeding start again before it could be properly stopped.
"The shuttle exploded three seconds after impact," one of the medics said tightly. "The transporter cycle wasn't complete. They lost the other cadet."
Leonard's stomach clenched at the knowledge that it had been that close, but he pressed on, looking quickly between his patient and the tricorder, confirming sensor readouts with a visual inspection. "Has he shown signs of consciousness during transport?"
"He was wide awake when we got him," the other medic said, slightly awed. "Had to sedate him. He kept yelling for the other cadet and something about sabotage."
Leonard felt the blood drain from his face. He'd assumed that a crash like that would have knocked Jim out immediately. To be awake with all this damage... he couldn't even imagine what it was like. Without thinking, he reached down to touch Jim's face, but pulled back his hand almost as if he'd been burned himself.
It wasn't Jim. This was a trauma patient, just like the hundreds of others Leonard had seen, and that was all he could be right now.
"Hixon, start on the internal bleeding,” Leonard snapped. “His spleen is ruptured - that’s your first priority. Drain the abdominal cavity, isolate the other bleeds, and shut them down. Nurse Patel, cross-match his blood and get him started on a transfusion, two units to start - he's type A-positive. Yes, I'm sure! And increase the fluids. Ming, is he already on one-hundred percent oxygen? Good - we need his right lung supporting him while I put in the chest tube. Set up the pulmonary isolation field." He didn’t need to say half of what he was saying - the nurses knew their jobs. But barking the orders helped him feel like he had control over something when everything seemed to be slipping between his fingers.
Growling, he grabbed a scanner and was about to double-check his readings on Jim’s lung, but he held back. Reconsidering, he turned the scanner towards Jim’s head to reassess the severity of the head injury with a closer scan. And he almost balked. It was worse than he’d initially thought. Extradural bleed, and the pressure was increasing rapidly. Ming was almost done setting up the stabilization field for the chest tube, but the brain bleed couldn’t wait. He needed at least one more person, one more doctor. Where's the goddamned anesthesiologist? Paduga, why the hell did you have to leave now? He shook his head in frustration. "Ming... maintain the pulmonary field around right lung- that will have to support him for now. We need to do something about the intracranial pressure first."
He'd placed over a hundred drainage shunts during his residency and even more during his practice as a trauma surgeon, but if he let himself recognize the fact that he was literally putting a hole in his best friend's head, he'd falter. It was archaic, and barbaric, but it was the best that medical science had found, and he had to relieve the pressure before he could begin repairs.
His hands threatened to shake, but experience held them steady enough. Not enough hands, not enough doctors. Blood pressure was dropping, cardiac rhythm was weak, and goddammit this can't be Jim. But it was, and he couldn't do it all himself. The drainage shunt was in, and he needed to start the work on Jim’s lung, but brain activity was destabilizing as the bleed continued. The right lung was holding up, and it would have to be enough for now. He reached for his vascular fusion tool and laser guide and was just about to begin when another alarm sounded.
“Why is he losing so much blood volume?” Leonard snapped over the chaos. “Hixon! What the hell is going on down there?”
“I don’t know, Doctor McCoy - I’ve almost stopped the bleeding from his spleen, but there’s got to be something else. I can’t find a source of this much blood.”
“Scan him again!”
“We did!” Hixon looked up and made eye contact for a brief moment - the young doctor looked terrified. “The hepatic laceration is bad, but we’ve got that under vascular stabilizers. None of the other organs could be producing this much bleeding.”
Leonard felt his jaw clench. He needed another goddamned trauma surgeon in the room now. There were too many separate injuries, and everything needed immediate attention. He had to start repairing the head injury, but he couldn’t wait for Jim to bleed out either. Something had to wait. Or... something had to be done with automation.
Leonard's breath caught as he glanced out the trauma room door at his own equipment kit sitting on the countertop at the central station. The kit contained his regular emergency equipment, but also the new devices he was using for his research study. No, his devices weren't field-tested yet. Not on a real trauma victim. They weren't even approved for use on a live patient... but it was all he had until backup arrived.
Once the decision was made, it was the only course of action he could imagine. "Zahn! Go grab my kit from the desk in the middle of the ER. Just do it."
Zahn nodded and hurried through the sterilization barrier.
"Hixon, you need to hold it together for another couple of minutes. Patel - add two more units of blood, and increase the rate of flow on the blood transfusion and fluids.”
“We’ve got it at the maximum flow rate, doctor.”
“Then start another line if you have to! Hodgkins, help her out.”
Zahn was already back with his kit, and Leonard snapped it open and pulled out the neurovascular regen units. Equipped with sensors that pinpointed the ruptured blood vessels, regenerator beams, and precision force-field emitters, the tiny units could simply be attached to a patient's head and would actually begin to repair the major trauma automatically. Theoretically, they would keep the patient stable until more detailed therapy could be applied. It had seemed like a brilliant idea. Too bad he had no idea if it would work.
But there wasn't time to second-guess. "Patel, get over here."
She finished setting up the blood transfusion equipment and rushed to the head of the biobed. "Doctor McCoy?"
He squared his shoulders and took a tight breath - When the hell did my hands start shaking? - before he fixed the first neuro-repair unit on Jim's forehead. "These are experimental, but until we get some backup down here, it's the best we can do." He stuck the second unit in place and activated it, hoping that nobody noticed the way he hesitated. "The devices will start the repair process on his cerebral blood vessels automatically. Monitor the progress to make sure they're actually working, and let me know if anything goes wrong, got it? If the bleeding doesn't stop, if we get any signs of irregular neural activity, anything."
"Yes, doctor."
He nodded tightly, then hurried to see what Hixon was doing. “Move over kid - I’ve got this.” He gritted his teeth. Didn’t want to let some damned kid do this to Jim, but nobody else seemed to be coming, and it couldn’t wait much longer. “Do you know how to place a chest tube, Hixon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get up there. And be careful.”
Leonard spared Hixon one more glance before focusing again on the bleeding mess of an abdominal cavity in front of him. He started scanning, and saw that Hixon was right - the spleen was almost fully patched, at least, for an initial repair. The vascular integrity in the liver was being maintained well with stabilizers. None of the organs were... “Oh hell no.” Leonard re-set the scanners, and he knew before the results came back that the pelvic fracture was pouring blood. It was one of the few types of bleeds that couldn’t temporarily staunched with vascular stabilizers. Jim could actually bleed out. Leonard was about to race the clock, and it was a race he wasn’t about to lose.
Modern medicine was such a far sight removed from the butchery of previous centuries, a fact for which Leonard had always been grateful... but trauma medicine was still messy. There was no way to get around it. If a patient was bleeding, that blood was going to soak your hands, your coat, and your shoes. It was going to spatter your face and drip on the floor. The sterilizing field used in all trauma and surgical wards rendered it non-infectious as soon as it left a patient's body, eliminating the risk to medical personnel, but there was something primal and raw about all that blood.
Still, it was all just parts. Flesh and blood alone weren't a person, and as long as Leonard was working on the parts, just the parts, he could focus. As long as he could forget it was Jim, he could do this. Inject osteoplast, set a bone immobilizer, try not to damage anything else in the process. Easy.
Not easy.
And when the alarm signaling a catastrophic drop in blood pressure sounded, that was just another signal, except that it wasn't. Another prompt, initiating another set of actions to fix yet another problem on another part of the nameless, faceless patient on the biobed... except he had a name, and it was Jim, and he had a face that was too familiar under all that blood. Force fields activated, an elegant technology stimulating the walls of blood vessels, constricting capillaries in the patient’s extremities and raising blood pressure again, and the blood pressure alarm went silent only moments before another alarm told him that the rate of bleeding had increased. It was just another noise in the chaos of the trauma ward, battering dully against Leonard's ears as his hands somehow kept moving. It was just another message screaming through his consciousness that this was Jim, and it was not okay.
"Hixon, is that chest tube in? Then get back down here and start working on the hepatic laceration." Leonard spared only seconds to ensure that Hixon had indeed moved on to the next major bleeding source, and noted with both relief and fury that the other trauma surgeon had finally arrived. "Doctor Randall, we've got a hemorrhaging pelvic fracture. I need you to take over so I can work on the brain bleed."
Randall was at his side, nodding and surveying the damage. "Was it really a shuttle crash?" he asked as he gently took the tools from Leonard's hands and smoothly took over the procedure.
"Yeah," Leonard said, surprised at how rough his voice suddenly sounded. "Yeah, he crashed. Training mission. The shuttlecraft lost power and crashed into the surface of Mars."
For a split second, every voice in the trauma ward went dead silent even though the frantic rush of hands on Jim’s—the patient’s—body didn’t stop. Then Randall asked, "How did you get the report so fast?"
Leonard swallowed tightly. "I didn't. I watched it happen." The nurses looked up at him. The doctors seemed to pause or hold their breaths for a second, even as they continued to work. He thought he saw sympathy on some of the nurses' faces. He couldn't stand the eyes on him, and he fixed his face with a glare. "What are you waiting for?"
The noise resumed as Leonard stepped around to the top of the biobed and grabbed the tricorder from nurse Patel for a close scan. His fingers smeared the machine with blood as the screen spit back information. "It's holding," he breathed, and it was. Not perfectly, and the repairs weren't as good as he'd hoped they'd be, but the damage hadn't gotten any worse, the shunt was draining well now, and the two worst blood vessel breaks had already been mended. He took a slow breath to steady himself, then shoved the tricorder at Nurse Patel. "Keep a constant monitor on him. I've got to start doing this manually."
Leonard grabbed a vascular regenerator and laser guide, and was turning back to begin work when he saw movement. Movement he didn't expect. Jim's mouth was moving. Leonard shook his head. "Patel, what's his brain activity level? He can't be conscious. We've got him under general anesthetic..."
"He's out cold," she said, glancing up at the biobed monitor, then over to Nurse Hodgkins who was monitoring the anesthetic. Then she looked at the biomonitors again. "He should be out cold - anesthetic levels in his blood are adequate..." She trailed off and her face went pale. "He's coming out of it. I don't understand -
It was all Leonard could do not to curse up one wall and down the other for the anesthesiologist, but that wouldn't help. "Hodgkins, how did you calculate the dose?"
"We used ten percent above the minimum dose rate for his mass," she said nervously. "I need approval from an anesthesiologist for more. In normal trauma causes -"
"Does this look normal to you?" Leonard snapped, feeling his stomach drop to his knees. Jim had an irrepressible will, and if some part of his psyche was determined to be awake, it would take more than a minimum dose to keep him out cold. "Goddammit - readjust the dosage on the IV to ninety percent of the maximum for his mass, and fix a hypospray with thirty milligrams of etomidate, now." He looked down at Jim's face, and for the first time since he'd started working, he couldn't avoid seeing Jim. Not just a patient - not just blood and flesh and parts - but Jim. His face was red and blotchy, but under the smears of blood and bruising, there was Jim. His mouth and eyes were beginning to tighten with pain. "Hang in there, Jim. Just hold on," he whispered, praying that Jim couldn't actually hear him.
Then Jim's eyes fluttered, and the thinnest sliver of blue peeked out from between blood-encrusted eyelashes. He looked dazed and confused, obviously in pain, but he was there. "Bones?" His voice was so weak it was almost inaudible, but unmistakable. Jim was always unmistakable.
"I'm here, Jim," Leonard whispered roughly. He didn't want Jim to know he was there. He didn't want Jim to know any of this, but as Jim's eyes darted from his face to the frantic surroundings of the trauma ward, the confusion began to shift into awareness.
"I... Tambe... is Tambe... she didn't... Bones?" His eyes widened, just a bit, and his voice was rough and broken by the pressure of the ventilation field on his his lungs. "It was sabotage... Bones... something in the engine..." His words broke off into a grunt of pain. "Bones..."
A hypospray was placed in Leonard's hand. He was trying to wrap his head around what Jim as saying, but he couldn't stop to think about that. As quickly as he could without startling Jim - oh God, don't let him remember any of this - he pressed the hypospray against Jim's neck. Delivered directly to the common carotid artery, the additional boost of anesthetic would reach his brain before the IV anesthetic could catch up. Seconds mattered. "Go back to sleep, kid. I'll take care of you."
Jim blinked. Then frowned. "You said not to... come crying to you when... when... the shuttle..." His eyes drooped and fell shut.
Leonard dropped the hypospray, which clattered to the floor. He blinked a couple of times, trying to ignore the way the blood was rushing so loudly in his ears, the way his chest suddenly felt too tight, how the air was too thick, and... and...
He shook his head sharply to clear it. He couldn't let himself falter, not now. He turned to reach for his tools again, only to find himself face to face with Doctor Paduga. He was relieved that she was finally there, because he could sure use another set of hands, but she was in his way. "I need my regen tools," he said, then called over her shoulder, "Nurse Patel, hand me the laser guide and -"
"Belay that, Patel," Doctor Paduga interrupted him, then put a firm hand on his arm. "You need to stop."
"No! He's my patient, and I'm not quitting on him! We're short-handed as it is. Now let me get back to work." He tried to step around her again, but she held him fast.
"Leonard," she said, in a tone of voice he'd not heard her use before, forceful but oddly sympathetic, "we've got him. We're not quitting on him. But you're his friend, and you shouldn't be treating him."
Shaking his head defiantly, he reached past her to grab the regen tool, only to drop it immediately. He stared at his empty hand and finally noticed how badly his hands were shaking, and that he could barely grip anything. "I... I'm not -"
Paduga shook her head and glanced over her shoulder. "Nurse Aldrich, we've got enough backup now. Take McCoy to the doctors’ lounge and sit with him." She looked back at Leonard. "And as for you... you're shaking, and your face is gray. We don't need another patient. Now go."
"But..."
"We'll take care of him, Leonard. I promise."
Feeling oddly numb, he could only nod in reply as Nurse Aldrich led him from the trauma ward and the chaos and the beeping monitors and Jim. One last glance backwards gave him a glimpse of Paduga leaning in close and getting right to work. Jim was in good hands. He really was. But... it was just...
"Come on, Doctor McCoy," came Nurse Aldrich's voice, as if from far away. "Let's get you cleaned up."
Leonard was in a fog as she led him to the scrub room. Gloves, coat, shoe covers... all soaked in blood, all dropped into the biohazard bin. Jim's blood in the biohazard bin. It was still on his scrub top, his pants, his arms where the blood had actually seeped between his sleeves and his gloves. Aldrich had to lead him to the scrub basin. While sonic cleaning was good for sanitizing, hot water was still the standard for helping a doctor to feel human again after dealing with any surgery, especially a massive trauma case. It wasn't helping so much this time. As he watched Jim's blood slowly rinse off his wrists and mix with the water flowing down the metal basin and into the drain, he felt something just as hot and just as unnerving welling up in his eyes.
"He'll be okay," the nurse said suddenly. "You got him through the worst of it. He was starting to stabilize when you left."
Leonard shook his head. "We were only handling the most vital functions. Haven't assessed the burns, spinal damage, peripheral nerve function... anything could happen. He could still flatline," he said, feeling numb and stupid.
"Do you believe he will?" For a moment, however brief, Nurse Aldrich reminded Leonard of his own mother, putting things into perspective with indisputable arguments and a firm gaze.
A painful smile twisted Leonard's face. "Jim always beats the odds." Then his face fell again.
"Then what is it?"
Looking back down at his hands, which were mostly free of Jim's blood now, Leonard said, "He stopped by my room last night and asked me to watch his shuttle training exercise this morning. Flight recorder data feed."
She nodded slowly. "That's why you said you saw it happen."
He started to nod, then shook his head. "Yes, but that's not it. I told him what would happen."
She frowned in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"I... don't like space flight." It felt like a horrible confession. "Shuttlecrafts. Atmospheric crafts. Any flight, really. I met the kid on a shuttlecraft. Told him then and there all the horrible things that could happen to a human body if space flight went wrong." He swallowed. "It became a running joke for us." Then he coughed, choking on his words. The room was too hot and too cold at once. Was he shaking or shivering?
Somehow, she managed to look both sympathetic and mortified. "You didn't, did you?"
"Yeah. That. And last night, when he woke me up at stupid o'clock, I told him that when he crashes today in his training flight -" The room was really much too hot now, the air too thick. "- not to come crying to me."
"Oh dear..."
Leonard nodded, a halting, jerky movement that shook through him. "He remembered. When he started to come out of sedation in there... he was lucid. Good God, he was actually lucid... and he said that." Leonard felt himself falter, and Aldrich caught him by the elbow.
"Let's get you to a seat. Okay?"
"Okay."
She led him quickly through the sonic shower before guiding him out of the emergency ward and down the hall. His whole body was shaking by the time they got to the doctor's lounge. His hands itched for something to do, something to hold, and insanely, he thought of the small flask he'd carried onto the shuttle where he'd met Jim. However, he couldn't drown himself in the familiar burn of bourbon here, not around his colleagues at Starfleet Medical, so he automatically moved towards the coffee pot. Nurse Aldrich's firm grip on his arm steered him clear away.
"Sorry, Doctor McCoy, but the last thing you need right now is coffee," she said as she led him straight to the couch.
"You want me to sit here with nothing to do while my friend is in the trauma ward with his body practically turned inside out, and I can't even have a cup of coffee?"
She glared at him. "You're shaking like a chihuahua and you want to drink a stimulant? Sorry, doctor, but that's not going to happen."
"I've got to have some something to do." He wrenched his arm out of her grasp, spinning away from her.
He began to pace, ready to launch into a pointless rant that wouldn't even help him feel better... when he saw his PADD on the floor where he'd dropped it. He forgot all about the coffee. Still shaking, possibly more than he'd been before, he reached down and picked it up. On unsteady legs, he shuffled to the couch, sat down stiffly, and activated the screen. The flight recorder feed was still there.
Nurse Aldrich stood next to Leonard, looking down at the PADD. "What's that?"
Leonard barely spared her a glance. "Answers. I hope."
Mouth dry, heart beating just a bit too fast, he brought the flight recorder datastream to the beginning of the training run and let it run.
From the moment they left Earth's orbit to the last anguished seconds of the shuttle's descent to the Mars surface, Leonard watched every second of Jim's flight with rapt attention. The rest of the room faded away as he scoured every sound, every movement. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but there had to be something... something important. Jim had said sabotage. Even drugged, dazed, and in what had to be excruciating pain despite the analgesics, he was sure that Jim had meant what he'd said, and had a real reason to say it. If there was some way to start gathering evidence, it would be here, in this recording. Leonard couldn't fix Jim's body, but maybe could start hunting for answers.
He sat there, fully immersed in the holovid, until the last seconds of the recording ran out, leaving him staring at the blank screen in his hands. The screen was shaking. No, his hands were still shaking, just like the rest of his body. There were a couple of parts of the recording when he remembered thinking that something seemed odd - a phrase he should remember, something they said that might be important, but Leonard couldn't even think straight anymore.
He felt sick. He felt frantically worried. He felt lost and useless.
He felt a hypospray against the side of his neck.
Leonard yelped reflexively as he slapped his hand against his neck like swatting a mosquito. He spun sideways in his seat to see Nurse Aldrich standing there, looking down at him with something resembling pity.
"What the hell was that?" he demanded, rubbing his neck.
She waved the hypospray lightly. "Anxiolytic," she said gently. "I contacted the director of Internal Medicine and she approved it."
Leonard stood up and faced her, only now realizing that she was slightly taller than him. Unnerving. "Why the hell did you contact her? And of course I'm anxious! You would be too, but goddammit, you can't just medicate away every little problem. If I want to worry over my friend, then -"
"You're not just anxious, Doctor McCoy," she said, taking the PADD out of his hands and putting it on the table in front of him. "You're shaking, you're sweating, your skin is clammy, and I might not be a doctor, but I have worked in this profession long enough to know when someone has reached an unhealthy limit." Her voice wasn't unkind, but it left no room for argument.
Frowning, he made a move to reach for his PADD, but she put a hand on his elbow and held him back. "You can leave it for now. It will still be there ...after you've rested a little."
Leonard blinked, starting to feel drowsy. "But Jim needs me. I need to -"
"Rest. You need to rest." She moved in front of him, completely blocking his view of his PADD. "There are excellent doctors working on your friend, and they're not going to quit on him. You got him through the worst of it. Now you owe it to him to take care of yourself so you can be there to help him when he wakes up."
In the small fraction of Leonard's mind that was still rational, he knew that Doctor Paduga was one of the best surgeons in Starfleet. He knew that a good anesthesiologist had just arrived. Knew that Doctor Randall's hands were far steadier than his own were by the time he'd left. He knew that he could hunt for answers later. He blinked again. Opened his eyes as wide as possible, but his eyelids felt heavy. And he knew that anxiolytics weren't supposed to make you that sleepy. "How much of that did you give me?" he asked, just as he stumbled slightly, surprised to feel Nurse Aldrich's hand steadying him.
She gave him a sympathetic look. "Only what you needed. Now lie down and rest," she said, lowering him to the couch and guiding him to lie down.
"But I need to know when -"
"I'll wake you up when he's out of surgery.”
"But Jim..."
His protests died on his tongue as sleep crept up around his brain and swept him away.
*********
"... was working himself into a state... planned to wait until Kirk was out of surgery..."
A woman's voice pierced the sleep-induced fog around Leonard's brain. There was rough fabric rubbing against his cheek, and voices just a few feet away.
"I can wait to talk to him, if you think that would be better," came a second voice, this one male. They were both speaking in hushed tones, something that reminded him of the way doctors and nurses would speak in the room of an unconscious patient. It made him uneasy. He cracked his eyes open and and was met by a fuzzy view.
"Well," the first voice answered slowly, "he was actually in a state of shock when I dosed him, and I can't say I'm surprised. He's generally in excellent health, but he was starting to overstress his heart at that point. But he's been out long enough to have recovered... physically." Leonard didn’t miss that pause.
"I'm sure it was hell for him. Those two are close. They've been through a lot together."
"I know," said the woman. "I was here last year when... yeah, I was here."
"I guess it's up to you," the man said neutrally. "I would have come sooner, but things were a bit hectic."
Leonard blinked a couple of times and the world started to swim into focus. He was lying sideways on the couch in the doctor's lounge, and that was Nurse Aldrich talking to...
"Captain Pike," Leonard croaked as he tried to get up. However, instead of sitting up smoothly, his hand missed the edge of the couch. He rolled off the side and hit the floor with a thud. "Ow... dammit." Hands grabbed him under the arms from either side and hauled him gently back onto the couch, sitting upright this time. "Thanks, sir," he said, barely stifling a groan. He rubbed his face, trying to get the drug-induced drowsiness to go away. "That's what we get when they decide to dose me with a sedative-level of anxiolytics instead of letting me have my coffee."
Pike reached over to the table and picked up Leonard's canteen. "I figured you might need this." He held it in front of Leonard as he sat down heavily on the couch next to him.
Leonard gratefully accepted the canteen - the weight told him it was full - and the aroma of hot, fresh coffee greeted him. "Oh, sweet nectar of the gods," he mumbled, taking a sip.
Pike laughed dryly. "Nurse, just to let you know, you should never come between this man and his coffee."
Leonard glanced up above the rim of his canteen to see her shaking her head in exasperation, arms folded across her chest.
"I won't argue with that, Captain, but you try dealing with that man frantic and caffeinated." She sighed and let her arms drop, looking squarely at Leonard. "Just don't give me a reason to dose you again, doctor. There's only so much adrenaline the body can take, got it?"
Instantly, Leonard felt himself stiffen, and he sat up straighter. "I'll stay calm if you give me an update. How's Jim? How long has be been in surgery?"
Nurse Aldrich pressed her lips together grimly, and for the second time in his life, Leonard knew what the families of his most serious patients must have felt when he was about to give them the news. He slid an inch closer to the edge of the couch. "I need to know."
She sat down on the coffee table to face him. "It's 1645 hours now, so it's been almost eight hours since he got here."
"You let me sleep that long?" Leonard all but snarled, and the anger in his voice surprised him.
"He's been in surgery this entire time. There was nothing you could have done. So what would you have done in my shoes? Let you go stir-crazy the entire time? I've met you, Leonard, in case you've forgotten, and you can't tell me you would have kept calm. Besides, I know how little sleep you've been getting this semester with that research project of yours. You needed that rest, and you know it."
"You're right," he grumbled. And really, it had been the most merciful thing she could have done, even though he still wasn't happy about it. "So... Jim?"
She tipped her head to the side and gave him a gentle look. "They've got him stabilized. They're working on less critical repairs now - more osteoplast work, fixing the smaller points of damage to his organs, spinal stabilization, preliminary dermal treatment. He should be done within the next hour based on the last report I got."
Leonard felt something snap, like a string that had been stretched too tight through his spine. "Thank God," he breathed, slumping just a bit, but then noticed that Aldrich still looked dead serious, and his own stomach knotted again. "What? What else?"
"The damage was bad, Leonard. They're going to keep him sedated for the next twenty-four hours... and then we'll see."
His fingers wrapped tighter around his coffee canteen, white-knuckled. A warm hand settled on his shoulder, and he was grateful for the support from Pike, but he didn't take his eyes off of Nurse Aldrich. "See what?"
"Whether he has any memory loss or mobility issues from the trauma to his central nervous system," she said flatly, clinically.
Pike shifted in his seat, and Leonard looked sideways at him.
"We got a preliminary report from the shuttle's on-board sensors from the Mars Orbiter," Pike started. "The shuttle was traveling at approximately six-hundred and eighty kilometers per hour when it made contact with the Martian surface." A vague hint of a smile, something like pride, barely broke through the grim mask he wore. "Kirk managed to feed the last remnants of the shuttle’s power to the inertial dampeners just before impact. Eighty-one percent power. It's likely the only reason he's still alive. But the shuttle had a secondary impact, and it snapped his harness."
Leonard felt his eyes widen. "They told me that those things test to over two tons per strap!"
Pike nodded slowly. "They do."
Sinking slowly back against the couch cushions, Leonard shivered. "Jim..." He shook his head. "I... oh God, Jim."
Nurse Aldrich leaned closer to him, looking him over critically. "Doctor McCoy, are you going to be okay?"
"I have to be," he said, not quite making eye contact. "And I need to talk to Captain Pike alone now."
She stood, looking down at him with a disconcerting mix of firmness and sympathy. "You do what you need to do, but..." She gave Pike a level stare. "If you upset him, Captain, I will find out who's conducting your next physical. You read me?"
"Loud and clear." Pike smiled thinly and tossed a meek salute. She gave him a firm nod, then patted Leonard lightly on the shoulder before she turned and walked out of the doctor's lounge. As soon as the door clicked shut, Pike let out a tight breath. "That is one lady you should never cross, Doctor McCoy. Trust me - she would make good on that threat."
"I don’t doubt it. She's a good nurse and trusted colleague," Leonard said, his voice thick in his throat. "And I hate to say it, but if I'd been in her shoes, I would have sedated me, too. It was probably the kindest thing she could have done." He sighed heavily, took another sip of coffee, then turned to look at Pike directly. "You said you needed to talk to me. I knew you'd be here anyway to check on Jim, but that's not the only reason you're here. What's going on, Captain?"
"You don't beat around the bush, do you? I respect that," Pike said evenly, before leaning forward heavily on his knees, hands clasped together. He gave Leonard a look that made his blood run like ice water. "The investigation into the crash started almost immediately. They've already retrieved most of the wreckage – what was left of it – and salvage teams are picking up the last pieces of the shuttle now."
"What are they saying caused the crash?" Leonard asked, his mouth feeling dry. He took another quick sip of coffee to wet his throat, but it only made him feel like he was going to choke on it. "Do they have any theories?"
"Nothing yet, McCoy. However..." His voice lowered a bit. "When I called the hospital, the report said that Kirk woke up briefly. I asked into it, and they said he spoke to you. Nobody else in the trauma room heard what he said, but I need to know if you caught anything significant. Anything at all."
Stomach doing somersaults, Leonard closed his eyes and leaned back against the couch cushions. "Yeah," he said roughly. "I did." In Leonard's mind, there were many important things he heard in those few mumbled, dazed words that Jim had managed to get out before the anesthetic kicked in again, but only one that Pike needed to hear. "Sabotage. He said it was sabotage, and said there was something in the engine. Jim was dazed, yes, but he seemed absolutely set on that."
Pike nodded. "That's what the Mars Orbiter medics said, too - that Kirk said sabotage."
Leonard frowned, finally realizing the depth of what that must really imply. "But... who could have done it? The hangar is secure, right?"
"It's supposed to be secure." His voice was measured, cautious. Too cautious.
"Then who had access?" Leonard demanded, turning sideways in his seat. "There have to be access records. And there are holovid cameras throughout the facility."
Pike's face was carefully schooled into a neutral expression, but his eyes were burning. "There are."
"Then review the records!" The surge of adrenaline Leonard felt broke through the remaining haze of the anxiolytic in his bloodstream. "Check the holovid feed. It's got to be -"
"We will, McCoy. I guarantee, we will." His voice was level, low, and controlled. "But I needed to know what Kirk said, and I needed to hear it myself from someone I trust... before the investigation went any further." The pause in his words and the emphasis were blatant. "Can you guarantee me that he said it was sabotage while he was drugged and delirious?"
"Yes... why?"
"And Doctor," he stressed the title, "when a person is under the influence of that much pain and anesthesia drugs, what are the odds that he'd be able to consciously lie?"
"I'd call it impossible. Lying is a higher brain function, requiring complex thought and intent. With the drugs in Jim's system, and the amount of pain he must have been feeling, there's no way he could..." Leonard's voice trailed off, and his jaw went slack. A sick feeling twisted through his gut. Good God, they might suspect Jim caused the crash.
"Are you sure about that, McCoy?" Pike's eyes were like steel, but underneath it, there was a plea.
"Absolutely sure," Leonard said, putting every scrap of conviction he had into those two words.
Pike nodded slowly. "Would you be willing to state that before a board of inquiry if it comes down to that?"
"Of course." He forced himself to take a slow breath. "Captain... if it was sabotage... who might have done it?"
In a shift so subtle it might have been a trick of the imagination, some essential part of Pike’s usual, unshakable certainty and confidence cracked and fell away. The lauded Starfleet officer was suddenly replaced by a man who looked just as lost as Leonard felt. “I only wish I knew, McCoy. I wish I knew.”
Leonard tried to nod, opened his mouth to speak, but there was nothing. He wished he knew as well. But for now, there were no answers. There was no brilliant doctor, no bold captain. There were only two men, sitting silently in an otherwise empty room, with nothing to do for the moment except to wait for the word that Jim had been snatched away from death’s door, and would come out of this with his usual talent for beating impossible odds.
In the background, Leonard heard the coffee maker hiss with a puff of steam.
With a tight breath to match, he grabbed his coffee canteen and held it. He didn’t want to drink it - his stomach was clenching nervously - but the warmth between his hands helped. Not much, but a little bit. He stared at it, not reacting at all as Pike shifted next to him, settling in for the wait. Pike could leave anytime, but Leonard knew he was going to stay until they heard… something. Amiable silence – he could handle that. And in the silence, Leonard’s traitorous thoughts swirled around painfully.
What if Jim didn’t make it? What if there was permanent damage? And how had everything changed so fast?
Leonard's thoughts were finally broken as the door to the doctor's lounge slid open, and Nurse Aldrich stuck her head into the room. "Doctor McCoy, I figured you'd want to know immediately - Kirk is out of surgery, and he's in the ICU now." Her face was solemn. "He's still unconscious, but you've got permission to go see him."
Leonard jumped out of the seat, barely remembering to set his coffee down on the table as he hurried towards the door. "Do you have his charts? Download them to my PADD. I want to see what -"
Aldrich stopped him at the door with one hand on his shoulder, blocking his exit. "You've got permission to see him, but not as his doctor."
"Then why the hell... ICU visitation is restricted. Doctors and family."
Her expression was pinched. "Leonard, you're the only person he listed as his next-of-kin."
Leonard stared at her, suddenly feeling like he'd hit a brick wall. "I... he listed me as his next-of-kin?"
She nodded, then looked at him with surprise. "You didn't know?"
He could only shake his head numbly. He knew the kid wasn't close to the scant biological family he had left, but he hadn't expected... couldn't really have known... could he? Maybe he should have known.
"You really shouldn't have been operating on him," she said softly. "You didn't have a choice, and you saved his life, Leonard, but for now... go and be his family."
Another hand settled on the back of Leonard's shoulder, and he turned to see Pike standing behind him.
"I need to go back to campus, McCoy, but you comm me if you need anything. You've been waived from your afternoon seminar, and I can get you a pass for your classes tomorrow. Got it?" He squeezed Leonard's shoulder once.
"Okay."
The halls of Starfleet Medical seemed foreign to Leonard, even though he'd been working there regularly for almost two months, and had even worked the occasional shift last spring. Cold floors and echoing footsteps and ergonomically designed walls meant to make the environment more peaceful only made it seem painfully false in the comfort it was supposed to provide. He walked just behind Nurse Aldrich, following her lead, unable to think beyond matching his footsteps to hers. Footsteps clacked against cold floors, in rhythm, like a heartbeat.
The footsteps finally stopped in front of a door. The privacy filter had been activated on the windows into the room, so he couldn't see Jim yet. Unable to wait, he started for the door, but Aldrich held him back. He raised an eyebrow, questioning her.
"Do you need some support, or do you want to go in alone?"
"Alone," he said automatically, even though he wasn't sure why he felt so certain.
"Okay then... page me if you need me."
And then the door was open, and Leonard was standing inside the room as the door slid shut, and there was Jim.
Or maybe, there was some shell of Jim, because if this was Jim, he'd be awake and alert and complaining about being stuck in a hospital and asking about sponge baths from pretty nurses. He'd point to the immobilization field generator on his left arm where the bones had been shattered and wonder aloud if this would get him some sympathy points with the instructors if his homework was late. He'd smirk and ask if he was allowed to have conjugal visits, seeing as at least that hadn't been broken, all while making suggestive expressions with eyebrows. He'd suggest wheelchair races through the main corridor, just to see if he could get away with it. He'd grumble about the crash ruining his perfect record at the Academy, and would throw his pillow at Leonard and call it payback for the one Leonard had thrown at him last night and - Goddammit, was that just last night?
It was just last night. Barely more than twelve hours ago that Jim was hale and whole, all swaggering steps and sharp wit. Just last night, or maybe it was the wee hours of the morning, that Jim had woken Leonard up with his careless manner and casual assumption that Leonard wouldn't mind. At least, wouldn't mind much. And he hadn't minded. Not really.
And now Leonard knew he'd give anything for Jim to wake up and pester him. Any stupid thing, and it would be enough.
But Jim was fully sedated, and would be for at least another day, and after that... who knew how long it would take him to wake up? His breathing was being regulated by a respirator field, and Leonard was once again grateful for modern medicine - fifty years ago, the poor kid would have a tube down his throat. The skin on his face and hands was a vivid pink - the flash burns would need a couple more courses with a dermal regen field, but not the weeks of treatment it would have taken in centuries past. And the full-body field produced by the biobed was designed to stimulate cellular division and promote rapid recovery - an immensely effective tool for every organ and tissue that relied on cell division for healing.
That left, of course, the brain. Locked up in that box of bone and flesh was the one organ that still couldn't be regenerated or replaced, the one organ for which cell division was not the primary course of healing. That's where Jim was - trapped in those few pounds of brain tissue. Treatment for catastrophic brain injuries was far better, more detailed, cleaner, and more effective than it once was, but the simple fact remained that when the brain was involved, you really had no idea how bad it would be until the patient woke up. Even with all their advances, the greatest healer of all was the same as it had been for centuries: time.
And waiting was hell.
Somehow, Leonard's feet had taken him across the room to Jim's side. This is why he'd wanted to go in alone, he realized - because this was private. He hesitated for a moment, almost afraid to cross the imaginary barrier between them – what would make it real. Afraid to touch Jim, as if anything would cause him to break, like a soap bubble. But finally, he reached down and gently wrapped Jim's right hand in his. Absolutely limp - no squeeze, no simple twitch, no response. No Jim. And yet, as Leonard sat down in the chair by the biobed and felt the flood of silent tears finally spill over, he didn't let go.
*********
(To Part Three...)
Author: Mijan
Series: ST: XI
Character/Pairing(s): Kirk&McCoy, Pike, Scotty
Warnings: Graphic descriptions of medical trauma.
Rating: PG-13
Author’s Notes: This story is part of the Academy-era story arc, which includes “Convergence” and “And All the King’s Men.” “Crossfire” is a direct sequel. Several things in this story will not make sense unless you’ve read AAtKM first.
Summary: Jim Kirk and Leonard McCoy are on top of the world at the academy until it all comes crashing down around them. Trapped in their own mystery of politics, sabotage, and possible murder, it quickly becomes impossible to know who to trust. Worse, Jim might still be a target. With a dangerous criminal on the loose and Academy leadership not doing enough, Jim and Bones have to get their lives back together and find out what happened... before it happens again.
Coffee.
All Leonard needed was one more cup of coffee to properly wake up. Leave it to Jim to wake him up in the middle of the night after a long day of lab work and before an ER shift. He'd drained his first canteen of coffee already, and he was actually disappointed that the emergency ward had been dead quiet this morning. A bit more activity might have helped keep him awake. After reviewing the Gamma Shift logs and treating a minor plasma burn – how exciting… idiot engineers always trying to get too cozy with their equipment – he grabbed his canteen and made his way to the doctors’ lounge for a refill.
The lead physician on the ward, Dr. Paduga, caught him just before he stepped through the lounge door. "Hey McCoy, are you taking a break?"
Leonard held up his canteen. "Just need a refill. Didn't quite get enough sleep last night."
Paduga frowned. "Did you go to bed too late, or are you having sleeping problems because of the research project?" she asked.
"Neither," he grumbled. "I've got a sleeping problem, and its clinical name is Jim Kirk."
She laughed. "That friend of yours who stops by here sometimes, right? If you find a cure for that kind of problem, let me know, but I think there are worse types of afflictions."
Leonard smiled and shrugged. "I suppose it could be worse. Andorian shingles comes to mind."
"Uh-huh." She gestured back towards the ER doorway with a tilt of her head. "It's pretty quiet on the floor today, and I just got paged by the surgical team up in pulmonology. They need some backup."
"Oh great angels of mercy, you need me to cover the ER floor on a Wednesday morning." He sighed dramatically. "However shall I handle the slow trickle of skinned knees and twisted ankles alone?"
"I'll let the head nurse know you've got it covered."
"You're welcome," he said with a wry grin.
Paduga gave a nod of thanks, then hurried down the hall to the turbolift.
Chuckling lightly, Leonard let himself the rest of the way into the break room. The aroma of fresh brewed coffee greeted him. Once he’d refilled his canteen, he settled down into an armchair, relishing the quiet for a few moments.
This semester, Starfleet Medical had accepted his proposal for a research project. His own experience with a brutal head injury the year before had led to his proposal for a new technique in emergency neural medicine - using blood vessel stabilization and reconstruction a first-aid measure. His goal was to create a portable device that could start to repair that sort of head trauma automatically. Why should a first responder have to wait until a patient with a head injury was transported back to a hospital to begin treatment? Neurology wasn't his primary specialty, and neither was medical equipment engineering, but the principles of blood vessel repair should, in theory, work the same way in the brain as in any other part of the body. He had a resident neurologist on his team, and had recruited two biomedical engineers.
If this worked, if the equipment could be made small enough, convenient enough, and simple enough, then every emergency med kit could be equipped with these devices. It would drastically reduce the risk of permanent brain injury due to internal hemorrhaging for all but the very worst injuries. It would revolutionize emergency medicine for head trauma.
Leonard sat back and relaxed into the cushions of the chair, sipping his coffee. If the floor needed him, they'd page him. The Emergency Department at Starfleet Medical was actually fairly small, and usually pretty quiet. Sure, the facility had the best doctors in Starfleet, but the facility and its mission were structured around research and advanced medicine; it only handled the emergency medical needs of staff and visiting diplomats at Starfleet Headquarters, and the occasional cadet with injuries beyond the capabilities of the Academy infirmary. Trauma and emergency medical facilities aboard a starship were actually more extensive. This morning, the ER had been almost completely devoid of patients, and after his night of interrupted sleep, he could sure use a few quiet minutes to absorb some quality caffeine and not think too hard.
For a moment, instead of reviving him, the soft cushions and the warm coffee almost lulled him into a doze. He had to admit, even though working at the Starfleet Medical ER was more prestigious, there was always more to do in the Academy Infirmary, and the work was generally more interesting. He blinked and turned his coffee canteen in his hand, staring at the shine of the metal exterior, knowing that he should be doing something useful with the absolute lull in activity.
Jim’s request. The flight recorder feed.
The thought had been percolating in the back of Leonard’s mind all morning, but with Dr. Paduga keeping him honest, he hadn’t seriously been able to consider Jim’s request for him to watch the training mission. He glanced across the room at his cubby. The flight recorder transmission was probably running in full swing on his PADD, just waiting for him to pay attention, and his pretense at apathy towards Jim’s life was the most pathetic farce he’d ever upheld. Really, he wanted to see it.
Lurching up from his chair with a creaky groan, he grabbed his bag from the cubby on the far wall and pulled out his PADD. A moment later, he was back in his armchair, activating the program which Jim had conveniently placed at the top of his data stream. He sipped his coffee, waiting for the flight recorder feed to start displaying data and visuals, but nothing came up. Dammit, Jim, he thought irritably. You want me to watch something, but don’t actually set up the data feed correctly. Still, the lack of content in the datastream made some nerve in his stomach twist oddly.
Shoving the coffee canteen aside, he refreshed the data receiver cache, trying to get a new lock on the data transmission.
The transmission was blank. No signal at all.
Leonard frowned. That wasn't right. Was the training exercise over already? What time was it? According to the chronometer, the datastream had cut off five minutes ago, so maybe they were already done, but he couldn’t quite shake the odd sensation that something was wrong. It was too early.
The twisting in his stomach got tighter as Leonard tabbed back through the datastream records. There certainly had been data received on this frequency, but it had stopped… just moments ago. Frowning even more deeply, Leonard went through the playback of the flight recorder transmission, not to the beginning, but to five minutes before the signal was lost.
Two screens activated - one with numerical and graphical representations of the shuttle's telemetry, and another with a video feed from within the shuttlecraft. The transmission began to play, and Leonard couldn't pull his eyes from the video feed.
This wasn't right. It was a training mission, but there was panic in Jim's voice. Real panic. Lost power... power fluctuation... and a cadet he didn't know was trying to fix something. A lurch and a shout - Jim's voice shouting - and the other cadet slamming into the control console. The audio became a garbled mess of words and panic to Leonard's ears - lost impulse engines... emergency thrusters have failed... emergency beam-out...
This was something like his worst nightmare playing out in front of him. Leonard gripped the frame of the PADD tighter, as though he could reach through it and grab Jim and pull him out of there.
It couldn't be real. It had to be a joke. But there was Jim, scrambling to get the other cadet's limp body into the safety harness, a smear of blood on her face. Jim disappeared from view as the transmission from the Mars Orbiter continued to repeat the same damning statement: "We can't get a lock on you." There was the thud of a body slamming into metal and a grunt of pain. Jim was back in the pilot's seat, yelling for the emergency beam out... velocity erratic... can't get a lock... and the rusty red dirt that could only be the surface of Mars was rushing towards the viewport. There a sound like a laugh that was choked by a hysterical sob.
Leonard shook his head to himself, not quite breathing. No... no no nonono...
Shit.
The flight recorder feed went dead, and Leonard stared at the blank PADD in his hands, numb, hearing only the sudden wail of the emergency alarm. Starfleet Medical's emergency alarm.
"Attention! Code yellow. Shuttlecraft accident, one survivor. Emergency ward prepare for one patient - critical condition. Emergency staff prepare for incoming casualty."
Leonard could barely breathe as he bolted from the armchair, sending his PADD and coffee clattering across the floor. He grabbed his own emergency kit from his cubby, more out of reflex than anything else, and ran out the door.
He'd liked old movies when he was younger, but he'd never quite understood why the film makers would slow down the speed of the action and dull the sound during extremely tense scenes. Wouldn't it feel like everything was moving faster, not slower? Wouldn't it be a cacophony of sirens and voices? But his frantic dash towards the ER floor felt like he was moving in slow motion. The air seemed thick and it was holding him back, muffling sounds, leaving him with the too-fast thud of his heart in his chest and the rush of blood in his ears as the world oozed by around him. The movies were right - it was terrifying and disconnected, like a dream out of control.
His voice sounded distant as he started barking commands through the emergency room. The words were correct, and the authority was solid, but there was a surrealism to the whole thing that made his skin crawl.
He dropped his kit on the countertop at the central desk in the middle of the ER and grabbed the first nurse he saw - Nurse Aldrich, a tall, middle-aged, dark-skinned woman with a sharp eye and an air of competence that had impressed him since the day he met her. "Nurse Aldrich, follow me. Do we have a report on the patient? Status?" he called out as he hurried into the scrub bay, grabbing his surgical gown and gloves.
Aldrich was right at his heels, reading off a PADD. "One cadet, human male, age twenty-three -"
Leonard stopped short of the sterilization field, almost stumbling. He realized that for a few moments, he'd automatically assumed the survivor was Jim. Hadn't even considered that it might not have been. The other cadet had been a human female. Until now, there was no reason for him to believe that Jim had been the one to survive, but that's exactly what he'd assumed. He didn't want to think about what that might mean. Couldn't think about that right now. He forced himself to breathe again.
"Doctor McCoy? Are you okay?"
Leonard realized that he must look like someone had slapped him, and he couldn't let himself falter in front of the rest of the staff. He shook his head to clear it. "Fine. Just fine.” He hoped she hadn’t noticed how tight his voice was. “The patient - what do we know? Injuries?"
"I'm sorry," she said softly, and Leonard got a fleeting impression that she meant more than one thing, before she looked back down at her PADD and began rattling off information. "Multiple fractures, internal bleeding, rib fractures with left pneumothorax, head trauma, spinal trauma, brief exposure to zero-atmosphere, signs of radiation exposure -"
"Okay," he cut her off. He'd heard enough to know it was ten kinds of horrible, and he'd get the details when Jim - when the patient arrived. He shut off that line of thinking as he hurried towards trauma room one - a room directly off the main emergency ward equipped to handle the worst emergencies. It was a primary treatment room and operating theater in one with a permanent sterile field, and the less often the room was needed, the better. "Who else is still on the ER floor here?"
"We’ve got... Nurses Hodgkins, Ming, Patel... medical assistant Zhan... oh, and Doctor Hixon."
Leonard spun around in place as the door to the trauma ward slid open for him. "Hixon is the only other doctor on the floor?"
Aldrich nodded.
"Hixon?" he repeated in furious disbelief. Here he was in the finest medical facility in Starfleet, and the only backup he had was a goddamned first-year obstetrician-wannabe. "Get an anesthesiologist down here, and another trauma surgeon. I don't care what they're doing. Find them and haul their asses into this ward immediately." Leonard clenched his teeth together hard enough to hurt and growled, "And get Hixon in here, stat - at least he knows how to staunch bleeding."
"Yes, doctor," she said and hurried away.
Leonard gritted his teeth and moved into the trauma room, setting up the space for the impending disaster that was about to land in the ER. The nurses could do this work on their own, but he needed to do something. His hands worked automatically to activate and prep standard equipment, and the two nurses who were already there moved around the room with him like a well-rehearsed dance, laying out medications and support equipment, testing the sterile field. The frantic edge of the activity was muted by the strange buzzing in his ears, and the heavy thud of his own heart in his chest. Seconds stretched immeasurably between heartbeats. When there was nothing left to do, Leonard stood at the door of the trauma room, watching the turbolift door across the ER floor.
The intercom system chimed - the emergency medical shuttlecraft was arriving, landing on the roof. Dr. Hixon was running across the floor with Nurse Ming in tow, rounding out the pitiful trauma team. Three nurses, a medical assistant, one resident obstetrician, and Leonard. Bones. Jim's Bones. And Bones' Jim... who was now arriving on the ER floor on a stretcher being pushed by two medics, and all hell broke loose.
"Get him into the trauma ward!" Leonard barked, even though it wasn't necessary. "Vitals, now!"
One of the medics began rattling off blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, consciousness level and a whole slew of information even as they pushed the stretcher across the floor to the trauma room. Leonard automatically filed the information into his mental chart as he made a visual check.
It was bad. Really bad. And Jim was - unrecognizable. His clothes were gone, but above where the edge of his collar and cuffs of his sleeves had been, his skin was angry red like a sunburn. His face, neck, chest... his whole body was covered with splotchy blood blisters and purpura where his capillaries had burst. A shoulder obviously separated. Clavicle broken - no, shattered. Thicker welts and bruises across his chest and upper abdomen, probably from his harness. A trickle of blood leaking from his left ear - intracranial hemorrhage. And that was just what Leonard could diagnose at a glance.
The medics disengaged the stabilization force fields securing Jim to the stretcher and transferred him to the biobed. The biobed’s ventilation field engaged, and one medic removed the emergency respirator mask while the other moved the bags of saline off the stretcher and hung them from the bedside stand. Leonard activated the biobed scanners, and the sensor display painted an uglier picture.
"Where did the flash burns come from?" Leonard asked as he manually checked the vascular stabilizers already attached to Jim’s abdomen. Those would have to be removed before each blood vessel could be repaired, letting the bleeding start again before it could be properly stopped.
"The shuttle exploded three seconds after impact," one of the medics said tightly. "The transporter cycle wasn't complete. They lost the other cadet."
Leonard's stomach clenched at the knowledge that it had been that close, but he pressed on, looking quickly between his patient and the tricorder, confirming sensor readouts with a visual inspection. "Has he shown signs of consciousness during transport?"
"He was wide awake when we got him," the other medic said, slightly awed. "Had to sedate him. He kept yelling for the other cadet and something about sabotage."
Leonard felt the blood drain from his face. He'd assumed that a crash like that would have knocked Jim out immediately. To be awake with all this damage... he couldn't even imagine what it was like. Without thinking, he reached down to touch Jim's face, but pulled back his hand almost as if he'd been burned himself.
It wasn't Jim. This was a trauma patient, just like the hundreds of others Leonard had seen, and that was all he could be right now.
"Hixon, start on the internal bleeding,” Leonard snapped. “His spleen is ruptured - that’s your first priority. Drain the abdominal cavity, isolate the other bleeds, and shut them down. Nurse Patel, cross-match his blood and get him started on a transfusion, two units to start - he's type A-positive. Yes, I'm sure! And increase the fluids. Ming, is he already on one-hundred percent oxygen? Good - we need his right lung supporting him while I put in the chest tube. Set up the pulmonary isolation field." He didn’t need to say half of what he was saying - the nurses knew their jobs. But barking the orders helped him feel like he had control over something when everything seemed to be slipping between his fingers.
Growling, he grabbed a scanner and was about to double-check his readings on Jim’s lung, but he held back. Reconsidering, he turned the scanner towards Jim’s head to reassess the severity of the head injury with a closer scan. And he almost balked. It was worse than he’d initially thought. Extradural bleed, and the pressure was increasing rapidly. Ming was almost done setting up the stabilization field for the chest tube, but the brain bleed couldn’t wait. He needed at least one more person, one more doctor. Where's the goddamned anesthesiologist? Paduga, why the hell did you have to leave now? He shook his head in frustration. "Ming... maintain the pulmonary field around right lung- that will have to support him for now. We need to do something about the intracranial pressure first."
He'd placed over a hundred drainage shunts during his residency and even more during his practice as a trauma surgeon, but if he let himself recognize the fact that he was literally putting a hole in his best friend's head, he'd falter. It was archaic, and barbaric, but it was the best that medical science had found, and he had to relieve the pressure before he could begin repairs.
His hands threatened to shake, but experience held them steady enough. Not enough hands, not enough doctors. Blood pressure was dropping, cardiac rhythm was weak, and goddammit this can't be Jim. But it was, and he couldn't do it all himself. The drainage shunt was in, and he needed to start the work on Jim’s lung, but brain activity was destabilizing as the bleed continued. The right lung was holding up, and it would have to be enough for now. He reached for his vascular fusion tool and laser guide and was just about to begin when another alarm sounded.
“Why is he losing so much blood volume?” Leonard snapped over the chaos. “Hixon! What the hell is going on down there?”
“I don’t know, Doctor McCoy - I’ve almost stopped the bleeding from his spleen, but there’s got to be something else. I can’t find a source of this much blood.”
“Scan him again!”
“We did!” Hixon looked up and made eye contact for a brief moment - the young doctor looked terrified. “The hepatic laceration is bad, but we’ve got that under vascular stabilizers. None of the other organs could be producing this much bleeding.”
Leonard felt his jaw clench. He needed another goddamned trauma surgeon in the room now. There were too many separate injuries, and everything needed immediate attention. He had to start repairing the head injury, but he couldn’t wait for Jim to bleed out either. Something had to wait. Or... something had to be done with automation.
Leonard's breath caught as he glanced out the trauma room door at his own equipment kit sitting on the countertop at the central station. The kit contained his regular emergency equipment, but also the new devices he was using for his research study. No, his devices weren't field-tested yet. Not on a real trauma victim. They weren't even approved for use on a live patient... but it was all he had until backup arrived.
Once the decision was made, it was the only course of action he could imagine. "Zahn! Go grab my kit from the desk in the middle of the ER. Just do it."
Zahn nodded and hurried through the sterilization barrier.
"Hixon, you need to hold it together for another couple of minutes. Patel - add two more units of blood, and increase the rate of flow on the blood transfusion and fluids.”
“We’ve got it at the maximum flow rate, doctor.”
“Then start another line if you have to! Hodgkins, help her out.”
Zahn was already back with his kit, and Leonard snapped it open and pulled out the neurovascular regen units. Equipped with sensors that pinpointed the ruptured blood vessels, regenerator beams, and precision force-field emitters, the tiny units could simply be attached to a patient's head and would actually begin to repair the major trauma automatically. Theoretically, they would keep the patient stable until more detailed therapy could be applied. It had seemed like a brilliant idea. Too bad he had no idea if it would work.
But there wasn't time to second-guess. "Patel, get over here."
She finished setting up the blood transfusion equipment and rushed to the head of the biobed. "Doctor McCoy?"
He squared his shoulders and took a tight breath - When the hell did my hands start shaking? - before he fixed the first neuro-repair unit on Jim's forehead. "These are experimental, but until we get some backup down here, it's the best we can do." He stuck the second unit in place and activated it, hoping that nobody noticed the way he hesitated. "The devices will start the repair process on his cerebral blood vessels automatically. Monitor the progress to make sure they're actually working, and let me know if anything goes wrong, got it? If the bleeding doesn't stop, if we get any signs of irregular neural activity, anything."
"Yes, doctor."
He nodded tightly, then hurried to see what Hixon was doing. “Move over kid - I’ve got this.” He gritted his teeth. Didn’t want to let some damned kid do this to Jim, but nobody else seemed to be coming, and it couldn’t wait much longer. “Do you know how to place a chest tube, Hixon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get up there. And be careful.”
Leonard spared Hixon one more glance before focusing again on the bleeding mess of an abdominal cavity in front of him. He started scanning, and saw that Hixon was right - the spleen was almost fully patched, at least, for an initial repair. The vascular integrity in the liver was being maintained well with stabilizers. None of the organs were... “Oh hell no.” Leonard re-set the scanners, and he knew before the results came back that the pelvic fracture was pouring blood. It was one of the few types of bleeds that couldn’t temporarily staunched with vascular stabilizers. Jim could actually bleed out. Leonard was about to race the clock, and it was a race he wasn’t about to lose.
Modern medicine was such a far sight removed from the butchery of previous centuries, a fact for which Leonard had always been grateful... but trauma medicine was still messy. There was no way to get around it. If a patient was bleeding, that blood was going to soak your hands, your coat, and your shoes. It was going to spatter your face and drip on the floor. The sterilizing field used in all trauma and surgical wards rendered it non-infectious as soon as it left a patient's body, eliminating the risk to medical personnel, but there was something primal and raw about all that blood.
Still, it was all just parts. Flesh and blood alone weren't a person, and as long as Leonard was working on the parts, just the parts, he could focus. As long as he could forget it was Jim, he could do this. Inject osteoplast, set a bone immobilizer, try not to damage anything else in the process. Easy.
Not easy.
And when the alarm signaling a catastrophic drop in blood pressure sounded, that was just another signal, except that it wasn't. Another prompt, initiating another set of actions to fix yet another problem on another part of the nameless, faceless patient on the biobed... except he had a name, and it was Jim, and he had a face that was too familiar under all that blood. Force fields activated, an elegant technology stimulating the walls of blood vessels, constricting capillaries in the patient’s extremities and raising blood pressure again, and the blood pressure alarm went silent only moments before another alarm told him that the rate of bleeding had increased. It was just another noise in the chaos of the trauma ward, battering dully against Leonard's ears as his hands somehow kept moving. It was just another message screaming through his consciousness that this was Jim, and it was not okay.
"Hixon, is that chest tube in? Then get back down here and start working on the hepatic laceration." Leonard spared only seconds to ensure that Hixon had indeed moved on to the next major bleeding source, and noted with both relief and fury that the other trauma surgeon had finally arrived. "Doctor Randall, we've got a hemorrhaging pelvic fracture. I need you to take over so I can work on the brain bleed."
Randall was at his side, nodding and surveying the damage. "Was it really a shuttle crash?" he asked as he gently took the tools from Leonard's hands and smoothly took over the procedure.
"Yeah," Leonard said, surprised at how rough his voice suddenly sounded. "Yeah, he crashed. Training mission. The shuttlecraft lost power and crashed into the surface of Mars."
For a split second, every voice in the trauma ward went dead silent even though the frantic rush of hands on Jim’s—the patient’s—body didn’t stop. Then Randall asked, "How did you get the report so fast?"
Leonard swallowed tightly. "I didn't. I watched it happen." The nurses looked up at him. The doctors seemed to pause or hold their breaths for a second, even as they continued to work. He thought he saw sympathy on some of the nurses' faces. He couldn't stand the eyes on him, and he fixed his face with a glare. "What are you waiting for?"
The noise resumed as Leonard stepped around to the top of the biobed and grabbed the tricorder from nurse Patel for a close scan. His fingers smeared the machine with blood as the screen spit back information. "It's holding," he breathed, and it was. Not perfectly, and the repairs weren't as good as he'd hoped they'd be, but the damage hadn't gotten any worse, the shunt was draining well now, and the two worst blood vessel breaks had already been mended. He took a slow breath to steady himself, then shoved the tricorder at Nurse Patel. "Keep a constant monitor on him. I've got to start doing this manually."
Leonard grabbed a vascular regenerator and laser guide, and was turning back to begin work when he saw movement. Movement he didn't expect. Jim's mouth was moving. Leonard shook his head. "Patel, what's his brain activity level? He can't be conscious. We've got him under general anesthetic..."
"He's out cold," she said, glancing up at the biobed monitor, then over to Nurse Hodgkins who was monitoring the anesthetic. Then she looked at the biomonitors again. "He should be out cold - anesthetic levels in his blood are adequate..." She trailed off and her face went pale. "He's coming out of it. I don't understand -
It was all Leonard could do not to curse up one wall and down the other for the anesthesiologist, but that wouldn't help. "Hodgkins, how did you calculate the dose?"
"We used ten percent above the minimum dose rate for his mass," she said nervously. "I need approval from an anesthesiologist for more. In normal trauma causes -"
"Does this look normal to you?" Leonard snapped, feeling his stomach drop to his knees. Jim had an irrepressible will, and if some part of his psyche was determined to be awake, it would take more than a minimum dose to keep him out cold. "Goddammit - readjust the dosage on the IV to ninety percent of the maximum for his mass, and fix a hypospray with thirty milligrams of etomidate, now." He looked down at Jim's face, and for the first time since he'd started working, he couldn't avoid seeing Jim. Not just a patient - not just blood and flesh and parts - but Jim. His face was red and blotchy, but under the smears of blood and bruising, there was Jim. His mouth and eyes were beginning to tighten with pain. "Hang in there, Jim. Just hold on," he whispered, praying that Jim couldn't actually hear him.
Then Jim's eyes fluttered, and the thinnest sliver of blue peeked out from between blood-encrusted eyelashes. He looked dazed and confused, obviously in pain, but he was there. "Bones?" His voice was so weak it was almost inaudible, but unmistakable. Jim was always unmistakable.
"I'm here, Jim," Leonard whispered roughly. He didn't want Jim to know he was there. He didn't want Jim to know any of this, but as Jim's eyes darted from his face to the frantic surroundings of the trauma ward, the confusion began to shift into awareness.
"I... Tambe... is Tambe... she didn't... Bones?" His eyes widened, just a bit, and his voice was rough and broken by the pressure of the ventilation field on his his lungs. "It was sabotage... Bones... something in the engine..." His words broke off into a grunt of pain. "Bones..."
A hypospray was placed in Leonard's hand. He was trying to wrap his head around what Jim as saying, but he couldn't stop to think about that. As quickly as he could without startling Jim - oh God, don't let him remember any of this - he pressed the hypospray against Jim's neck. Delivered directly to the common carotid artery, the additional boost of anesthetic would reach his brain before the IV anesthetic could catch up. Seconds mattered. "Go back to sleep, kid. I'll take care of you."
Jim blinked. Then frowned. "You said not to... come crying to you when... when... the shuttle..." His eyes drooped and fell shut.
Leonard dropped the hypospray, which clattered to the floor. He blinked a couple of times, trying to ignore the way the blood was rushing so loudly in his ears, the way his chest suddenly felt too tight, how the air was too thick, and... and...
He shook his head sharply to clear it. He couldn't let himself falter, not now. He turned to reach for his tools again, only to find himself face to face with Doctor Paduga. He was relieved that she was finally there, because he could sure use another set of hands, but she was in his way. "I need my regen tools," he said, then called over her shoulder, "Nurse Patel, hand me the laser guide and -"
"Belay that, Patel," Doctor Paduga interrupted him, then put a firm hand on his arm. "You need to stop."
"No! He's my patient, and I'm not quitting on him! We're short-handed as it is. Now let me get back to work." He tried to step around her again, but she held him fast.
"Leonard," she said, in a tone of voice he'd not heard her use before, forceful but oddly sympathetic, "we've got him. We're not quitting on him. But you're his friend, and you shouldn't be treating him."
Shaking his head defiantly, he reached past her to grab the regen tool, only to drop it immediately. He stared at his empty hand and finally noticed how badly his hands were shaking, and that he could barely grip anything. "I... I'm not -"
Paduga shook her head and glanced over her shoulder. "Nurse Aldrich, we've got enough backup now. Take McCoy to the doctors’ lounge and sit with him." She looked back at Leonard. "And as for you... you're shaking, and your face is gray. We don't need another patient. Now go."
"But..."
"We'll take care of him, Leonard. I promise."
Feeling oddly numb, he could only nod in reply as Nurse Aldrich led him from the trauma ward and the chaos and the beeping monitors and Jim. One last glance backwards gave him a glimpse of Paduga leaning in close and getting right to work. Jim was in good hands. He really was. But... it was just...
"Come on, Doctor McCoy," came Nurse Aldrich's voice, as if from far away. "Let's get you cleaned up."
Leonard was in a fog as she led him to the scrub room. Gloves, coat, shoe covers... all soaked in blood, all dropped into the biohazard bin. Jim's blood in the biohazard bin. It was still on his scrub top, his pants, his arms where the blood had actually seeped between his sleeves and his gloves. Aldrich had to lead him to the scrub basin. While sonic cleaning was good for sanitizing, hot water was still the standard for helping a doctor to feel human again after dealing with any surgery, especially a massive trauma case. It wasn't helping so much this time. As he watched Jim's blood slowly rinse off his wrists and mix with the water flowing down the metal basin and into the drain, he felt something just as hot and just as unnerving welling up in his eyes.
"He'll be okay," the nurse said suddenly. "You got him through the worst of it. He was starting to stabilize when you left."
Leonard shook his head. "We were only handling the most vital functions. Haven't assessed the burns, spinal damage, peripheral nerve function... anything could happen. He could still flatline," he said, feeling numb and stupid.
"Do you believe he will?" For a moment, however brief, Nurse Aldrich reminded Leonard of his own mother, putting things into perspective with indisputable arguments and a firm gaze.
A painful smile twisted Leonard's face. "Jim always beats the odds." Then his face fell again.
"Then what is it?"
Looking back down at his hands, which were mostly free of Jim's blood now, Leonard said, "He stopped by my room last night and asked me to watch his shuttle training exercise this morning. Flight recorder data feed."
She nodded slowly. "That's why you said you saw it happen."
He started to nod, then shook his head. "Yes, but that's not it. I told him what would happen."
She frowned in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"I... don't like space flight." It felt like a horrible confession. "Shuttlecrafts. Atmospheric crafts. Any flight, really. I met the kid on a shuttlecraft. Told him then and there all the horrible things that could happen to a human body if space flight went wrong." He swallowed. "It became a running joke for us." Then he coughed, choking on his words. The room was too hot and too cold at once. Was he shaking or shivering?
Somehow, she managed to look both sympathetic and mortified. "You didn't, did you?"
"Yeah. That. And last night, when he woke me up at stupid o'clock, I told him that when he crashes today in his training flight -" The room was really much too hot now, the air too thick. "- not to come crying to me."
"Oh dear..."
Leonard nodded, a halting, jerky movement that shook through him. "He remembered. When he started to come out of sedation in there... he was lucid. Good God, he was actually lucid... and he said that." Leonard felt himself falter, and Aldrich caught him by the elbow.
"Let's get you to a seat. Okay?"
"Okay."
She led him quickly through the sonic shower before guiding him out of the emergency ward and down the hall. His whole body was shaking by the time they got to the doctor's lounge. His hands itched for something to do, something to hold, and insanely, he thought of the small flask he'd carried onto the shuttle where he'd met Jim. However, he couldn't drown himself in the familiar burn of bourbon here, not around his colleagues at Starfleet Medical, so he automatically moved towards the coffee pot. Nurse Aldrich's firm grip on his arm steered him clear away.
"Sorry, Doctor McCoy, but the last thing you need right now is coffee," she said as she led him straight to the couch.
"You want me to sit here with nothing to do while my friend is in the trauma ward with his body practically turned inside out, and I can't even have a cup of coffee?"
She glared at him. "You're shaking like a chihuahua and you want to drink a stimulant? Sorry, doctor, but that's not going to happen."
"I've got to have some something to do." He wrenched his arm out of her grasp, spinning away from her.
He began to pace, ready to launch into a pointless rant that wouldn't even help him feel better... when he saw his PADD on the floor where he'd dropped it. He forgot all about the coffee. Still shaking, possibly more than he'd been before, he reached down and picked it up. On unsteady legs, he shuffled to the couch, sat down stiffly, and activated the screen. The flight recorder feed was still there.
Nurse Aldrich stood next to Leonard, looking down at the PADD. "What's that?"
Leonard barely spared her a glance. "Answers. I hope."
Mouth dry, heart beating just a bit too fast, he brought the flight recorder datastream to the beginning of the training run and let it run.
From the moment they left Earth's orbit to the last anguished seconds of the shuttle's descent to the Mars surface, Leonard watched every second of Jim's flight with rapt attention. The rest of the room faded away as he scoured every sound, every movement. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but there had to be something... something important. Jim had said sabotage. Even drugged, dazed, and in what had to be excruciating pain despite the analgesics, he was sure that Jim had meant what he'd said, and had a real reason to say it. If there was some way to start gathering evidence, it would be here, in this recording. Leonard couldn't fix Jim's body, but maybe could start hunting for answers.
He sat there, fully immersed in the holovid, until the last seconds of the recording ran out, leaving him staring at the blank screen in his hands. The screen was shaking. No, his hands were still shaking, just like the rest of his body. There were a couple of parts of the recording when he remembered thinking that something seemed odd - a phrase he should remember, something they said that might be important, but Leonard couldn't even think straight anymore.
He felt sick. He felt frantically worried. He felt lost and useless.
He felt a hypospray against the side of his neck.
Leonard yelped reflexively as he slapped his hand against his neck like swatting a mosquito. He spun sideways in his seat to see Nurse Aldrich standing there, looking down at him with something resembling pity.
"What the hell was that?" he demanded, rubbing his neck.
She waved the hypospray lightly. "Anxiolytic," she said gently. "I contacted the director of Internal Medicine and she approved it."
Leonard stood up and faced her, only now realizing that she was slightly taller than him. Unnerving. "Why the hell did you contact her? And of course I'm anxious! You would be too, but goddammit, you can't just medicate away every little problem. If I want to worry over my friend, then -"
"You're not just anxious, Doctor McCoy," she said, taking the PADD out of his hands and putting it on the table in front of him. "You're shaking, you're sweating, your skin is clammy, and I might not be a doctor, but I have worked in this profession long enough to know when someone has reached an unhealthy limit." Her voice wasn't unkind, but it left no room for argument.
Frowning, he made a move to reach for his PADD, but she put a hand on his elbow and held him back. "You can leave it for now. It will still be there ...after you've rested a little."
Leonard blinked, starting to feel drowsy. "But Jim needs me. I need to -"
"Rest. You need to rest." She moved in front of him, completely blocking his view of his PADD. "There are excellent doctors working on your friend, and they're not going to quit on him. You got him through the worst of it. Now you owe it to him to take care of yourself so you can be there to help him when he wakes up."
In the small fraction of Leonard's mind that was still rational, he knew that Doctor Paduga was one of the best surgeons in Starfleet. He knew that a good anesthesiologist had just arrived. Knew that Doctor Randall's hands were far steadier than his own were by the time he'd left. He knew that he could hunt for answers later. He blinked again. Opened his eyes as wide as possible, but his eyelids felt heavy. And he knew that anxiolytics weren't supposed to make you that sleepy. "How much of that did you give me?" he asked, just as he stumbled slightly, surprised to feel Nurse Aldrich's hand steadying him.
She gave him a sympathetic look. "Only what you needed. Now lie down and rest," she said, lowering him to the couch and guiding him to lie down.
"But I need to know when -"
"I'll wake you up when he's out of surgery.”
"But Jim..."
His protests died on his tongue as sleep crept up around his brain and swept him away.
"... was working himself into a state... planned to wait until Kirk was out of surgery..."
A woman's voice pierced the sleep-induced fog around Leonard's brain. There was rough fabric rubbing against his cheek, and voices just a few feet away.
"I can wait to talk to him, if you think that would be better," came a second voice, this one male. They were both speaking in hushed tones, something that reminded him of the way doctors and nurses would speak in the room of an unconscious patient. It made him uneasy. He cracked his eyes open and and was met by a fuzzy view.
"Well," the first voice answered slowly, "he was actually in a state of shock when I dosed him, and I can't say I'm surprised. He's generally in excellent health, but he was starting to overstress his heart at that point. But he's been out long enough to have recovered... physically." Leonard didn’t miss that pause.
"I'm sure it was hell for him. Those two are close. They've been through a lot together."
"I know," said the woman. "I was here last year when... yeah, I was here."
"I guess it's up to you," the man said neutrally. "I would have come sooner, but things were a bit hectic."
Leonard blinked a couple of times and the world started to swim into focus. He was lying sideways on the couch in the doctor's lounge, and that was Nurse Aldrich talking to...
"Captain Pike," Leonard croaked as he tried to get up. However, instead of sitting up smoothly, his hand missed the edge of the couch. He rolled off the side and hit the floor with a thud. "Ow... dammit." Hands grabbed him under the arms from either side and hauled him gently back onto the couch, sitting upright this time. "Thanks, sir," he said, barely stifling a groan. He rubbed his face, trying to get the drug-induced drowsiness to go away. "That's what we get when they decide to dose me with a sedative-level of anxiolytics instead of letting me have my coffee."
Pike reached over to the table and picked up Leonard's canteen. "I figured you might need this." He held it in front of Leonard as he sat down heavily on the couch next to him.
Leonard gratefully accepted the canteen - the weight told him it was full - and the aroma of hot, fresh coffee greeted him. "Oh, sweet nectar of the gods," he mumbled, taking a sip.
Pike laughed dryly. "Nurse, just to let you know, you should never come between this man and his coffee."
Leonard glanced up above the rim of his canteen to see her shaking her head in exasperation, arms folded across her chest.
"I won't argue with that, Captain, but you try dealing with that man frantic and caffeinated." She sighed and let her arms drop, looking squarely at Leonard. "Just don't give me a reason to dose you again, doctor. There's only so much adrenaline the body can take, got it?"
Instantly, Leonard felt himself stiffen, and he sat up straighter. "I'll stay calm if you give me an update. How's Jim? How long has be been in surgery?"
Nurse Aldrich pressed her lips together grimly, and for the second time in his life, Leonard knew what the families of his most serious patients must have felt when he was about to give them the news. He slid an inch closer to the edge of the couch. "I need to know."
She sat down on the coffee table to face him. "It's 1645 hours now, so it's been almost eight hours since he got here."
"You let me sleep that long?" Leonard all but snarled, and the anger in his voice surprised him.
"He's been in surgery this entire time. There was nothing you could have done. So what would you have done in my shoes? Let you go stir-crazy the entire time? I've met you, Leonard, in case you've forgotten, and you can't tell me you would have kept calm. Besides, I know how little sleep you've been getting this semester with that research project of yours. You needed that rest, and you know it."
"You're right," he grumbled. And really, it had been the most merciful thing she could have done, even though he still wasn't happy about it. "So... Jim?"
She tipped her head to the side and gave him a gentle look. "They've got him stabilized. They're working on less critical repairs now - more osteoplast work, fixing the smaller points of damage to his organs, spinal stabilization, preliminary dermal treatment. He should be done within the next hour based on the last report I got."
Leonard felt something snap, like a string that had been stretched too tight through his spine. "Thank God," he breathed, slumping just a bit, but then noticed that Aldrich still looked dead serious, and his own stomach knotted again. "What? What else?"
"The damage was bad, Leonard. They're going to keep him sedated for the next twenty-four hours... and then we'll see."
His fingers wrapped tighter around his coffee canteen, white-knuckled. A warm hand settled on his shoulder, and he was grateful for the support from Pike, but he didn't take his eyes off of Nurse Aldrich. "See what?"
"Whether he has any memory loss or mobility issues from the trauma to his central nervous system," she said flatly, clinically.
Pike shifted in his seat, and Leonard looked sideways at him.
"We got a preliminary report from the shuttle's on-board sensors from the Mars Orbiter," Pike started. "The shuttle was traveling at approximately six-hundred and eighty kilometers per hour when it made contact with the Martian surface." A vague hint of a smile, something like pride, barely broke through the grim mask he wore. "Kirk managed to feed the last remnants of the shuttle’s power to the inertial dampeners just before impact. Eighty-one percent power. It's likely the only reason he's still alive. But the shuttle had a secondary impact, and it snapped his harness."
Leonard felt his eyes widen. "They told me that those things test to over two tons per strap!"
Pike nodded slowly. "They do."
Sinking slowly back against the couch cushions, Leonard shivered. "Jim..." He shook his head. "I... oh God, Jim."
Nurse Aldrich leaned closer to him, looking him over critically. "Doctor McCoy, are you going to be okay?"
"I have to be," he said, not quite making eye contact. "And I need to talk to Captain Pike alone now."
She stood, looking down at him with a disconcerting mix of firmness and sympathy. "You do what you need to do, but..." She gave Pike a level stare. "If you upset him, Captain, I will find out who's conducting your next physical. You read me?"
"Loud and clear." Pike smiled thinly and tossed a meek salute. She gave him a firm nod, then patted Leonard lightly on the shoulder before she turned and walked out of the doctor's lounge. As soon as the door clicked shut, Pike let out a tight breath. "That is one lady you should never cross, Doctor McCoy. Trust me - she would make good on that threat."
"I don’t doubt it. She's a good nurse and trusted colleague," Leonard said, his voice thick in his throat. "And I hate to say it, but if I'd been in her shoes, I would have sedated me, too. It was probably the kindest thing she could have done." He sighed heavily, took another sip of coffee, then turned to look at Pike directly. "You said you needed to talk to me. I knew you'd be here anyway to check on Jim, but that's not the only reason you're here. What's going on, Captain?"
"You don't beat around the bush, do you? I respect that," Pike said evenly, before leaning forward heavily on his knees, hands clasped together. He gave Leonard a look that made his blood run like ice water. "The investigation into the crash started almost immediately. They've already retrieved most of the wreckage – what was left of it – and salvage teams are picking up the last pieces of the shuttle now."
"What are they saying caused the crash?" Leonard asked, his mouth feeling dry. He took another quick sip of coffee to wet his throat, but it only made him feel like he was going to choke on it. "Do they have any theories?"
"Nothing yet, McCoy. However..." His voice lowered a bit. "When I called the hospital, the report said that Kirk woke up briefly. I asked into it, and they said he spoke to you. Nobody else in the trauma room heard what he said, but I need to know if you caught anything significant. Anything at all."
Stomach doing somersaults, Leonard closed his eyes and leaned back against the couch cushions. "Yeah," he said roughly. "I did." In Leonard's mind, there were many important things he heard in those few mumbled, dazed words that Jim had managed to get out before the anesthetic kicked in again, but only one that Pike needed to hear. "Sabotage. He said it was sabotage, and said there was something in the engine. Jim was dazed, yes, but he seemed absolutely set on that."
Pike nodded. "That's what the Mars Orbiter medics said, too - that Kirk said sabotage."
Leonard frowned, finally realizing the depth of what that must really imply. "But... who could have done it? The hangar is secure, right?"
"It's supposed to be secure." His voice was measured, cautious. Too cautious.
"Then who had access?" Leonard demanded, turning sideways in his seat. "There have to be access records. And there are holovid cameras throughout the facility."
Pike's face was carefully schooled into a neutral expression, but his eyes were burning. "There are."
"Then review the records!" The surge of adrenaline Leonard felt broke through the remaining haze of the anxiolytic in his bloodstream. "Check the holovid feed. It's got to be -"
"We will, McCoy. I guarantee, we will." His voice was level, low, and controlled. "But I needed to know what Kirk said, and I needed to hear it myself from someone I trust... before the investigation went any further." The pause in his words and the emphasis were blatant. "Can you guarantee me that he said it was sabotage while he was drugged and delirious?"
"Yes... why?"
"And Doctor," he stressed the title, "when a person is under the influence of that much pain and anesthesia drugs, what are the odds that he'd be able to consciously lie?"
"I'd call it impossible. Lying is a higher brain function, requiring complex thought and intent. With the drugs in Jim's system, and the amount of pain he must have been feeling, there's no way he could..." Leonard's voice trailed off, and his jaw went slack. A sick feeling twisted through his gut. Good God, they might suspect Jim caused the crash.
"Are you sure about that, McCoy?" Pike's eyes were like steel, but underneath it, there was a plea.
"Absolutely sure," Leonard said, putting every scrap of conviction he had into those two words.
Pike nodded slowly. "Would you be willing to state that before a board of inquiry if it comes down to that?"
"Of course." He forced himself to take a slow breath. "Captain... if it was sabotage... who might have done it?"
In a shift so subtle it might have been a trick of the imagination, some essential part of Pike’s usual, unshakable certainty and confidence cracked and fell away. The lauded Starfleet officer was suddenly replaced by a man who looked just as lost as Leonard felt. “I only wish I knew, McCoy. I wish I knew.”
Leonard tried to nod, opened his mouth to speak, but there was nothing. He wished he knew as well. But for now, there were no answers. There was no brilliant doctor, no bold captain. There were only two men, sitting silently in an otherwise empty room, with nothing to do for the moment except to wait for the word that Jim had been snatched away from death’s door, and would come out of this with his usual talent for beating impossible odds.
In the background, Leonard heard the coffee maker hiss with a puff of steam.
With a tight breath to match, he grabbed his coffee canteen and held it. He didn’t want to drink it - his stomach was clenching nervously - but the warmth between his hands helped. Not much, but a little bit. He stared at it, not reacting at all as Pike shifted next to him, settling in for the wait. Pike could leave anytime, but Leonard knew he was going to stay until they heard… something. Amiable silence – he could handle that. And in the silence, Leonard’s traitorous thoughts swirled around painfully.
What if Jim didn’t make it? What if there was permanent damage? And how had everything changed so fast?
Leonard's thoughts were finally broken as the door to the doctor's lounge slid open, and Nurse Aldrich stuck her head into the room. "Doctor McCoy, I figured you'd want to know immediately - Kirk is out of surgery, and he's in the ICU now." Her face was solemn. "He's still unconscious, but you've got permission to go see him."
Leonard jumped out of the seat, barely remembering to set his coffee down on the table as he hurried towards the door. "Do you have his charts? Download them to my PADD. I want to see what -"
Aldrich stopped him at the door with one hand on his shoulder, blocking his exit. "You've got permission to see him, but not as his doctor."
"Then why the hell... ICU visitation is restricted. Doctors and family."
Her expression was pinched. "Leonard, you're the only person he listed as his next-of-kin."
Leonard stared at her, suddenly feeling like he'd hit a brick wall. "I... he listed me as his next-of-kin?"
She nodded, then looked at him with surprise. "You didn't know?"
He could only shake his head numbly. He knew the kid wasn't close to the scant biological family he had left, but he hadn't expected... couldn't really have known... could he? Maybe he should have known.
"You really shouldn't have been operating on him," she said softly. "You didn't have a choice, and you saved his life, Leonard, but for now... go and be his family."
Another hand settled on the back of Leonard's shoulder, and he turned to see Pike standing behind him.
"I need to go back to campus, McCoy, but you comm me if you need anything. You've been waived from your afternoon seminar, and I can get you a pass for your classes tomorrow. Got it?" He squeezed Leonard's shoulder once.
"Okay."
The halls of Starfleet Medical seemed foreign to Leonard, even though he'd been working there regularly for almost two months, and had even worked the occasional shift last spring. Cold floors and echoing footsteps and ergonomically designed walls meant to make the environment more peaceful only made it seem painfully false in the comfort it was supposed to provide. He walked just behind Nurse Aldrich, following her lead, unable to think beyond matching his footsteps to hers. Footsteps clacked against cold floors, in rhythm, like a heartbeat.
The footsteps finally stopped in front of a door. The privacy filter had been activated on the windows into the room, so he couldn't see Jim yet. Unable to wait, he started for the door, but Aldrich held him back. He raised an eyebrow, questioning her.
"Do you need some support, or do you want to go in alone?"
"Alone," he said automatically, even though he wasn't sure why he felt so certain.
"Okay then... page me if you need me."
And then the door was open, and Leonard was standing inside the room as the door slid shut, and there was Jim.
Or maybe, there was some shell of Jim, because if this was Jim, he'd be awake and alert and complaining about being stuck in a hospital and asking about sponge baths from pretty nurses. He'd point to the immobilization field generator on his left arm where the bones had been shattered and wonder aloud if this would get him some sympathy points with the instructors if his homework was late. He'd smirk and ask if he was allowed to have conjugal visits, seeing as at least that hadn't been broken, all while making suggestive expressions with eyebrows. He'd suggest wheelchair races through the main corridor, just to see if he could get away with it. He'd grumble about the crash ruining his perfect record at the Academy, and would throw his pillow at Leonard and call it payback for the one Leonard had thrown at him last night and - Goddammit, was that just last night?
It was just last night. Barely more than twelve hours ago that Jim was hale and whole, all swaggering steps and sharp wit. Just last night, or maybe it was the wee hours of the morning, that Jim had woken Leonard up with his careless manner and casual assumption that Leonard wouldn't mind. At least, wouldn't mind much. And he hadn't minded. Not really.
And now Leonard knew he'd give anything for Jim to wake up and pester him. Any stupid thing, and it would be enough.
But Jim was fully sedated, and would be for at least another day, and after that... who knew how long it would take him to wake up? His breathing was being regulated by a respirator field, and Leonard was once again grateful for modern medicine - fifty years ago, the poor kid would have a tube down his throat. The skin on his face and hands was a vivid pink - the flash burns would need a couple more courses with a dermal regen field, but not the weeks of treatment it would have taken in centuries past. And the full-body field produced by the biobed was designed to stimulate cellular division and promote rapid recovery - an immensely effective tool for every organ and tissue that relied on cell division for healing.
That left, of course, the brain. Locked up in that box of bone and flesh was the one organ that still couldn't be regenerated or replaced, the one organ for which cell division was not the primary course of healing. That's where Jim was - trapped in those few pounds of brain tissue. Treatment for catastrophic brain injuries was far better, more detailed, cleaner, and more effective than it once was, but the simple fact remained that when the brain was involved, you really had no idea how bad it would be until the patient woke up. Even with all their advances, the greatest healer of all was the same as it had been for centuries: time.
And waiting was hell.
Somehow, Leonard's feet had taken him across the room to Jim's side. This is why he'd wanted to go in alone, he realized - because this was private. He hesitated for a moment, almost afraid to cross the imaginary barrier between them – what would make it real. Afraid to touch Jim, as if anything would cause him to break, like a soap bubble. But finally, he reached down and gently wrapped Jim's right hand in his. Absolutely limp - no squeeze, no simple twitch, no response. No Jim. And yet, as Leonard sat down in the chair by the biobed and felt the flood of silent tears finally spill over, he didn't let go.
(To Part Three...)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-11-06 05:54 pm (UTC)My god, you sure know how to keep the tension going. I've been sitting here on the edge of my seat for most of the first two chapters. O_o *takes a deep breath and goes off to take a bit of a break*
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Date: 2010-11-06 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-07 05:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-07 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-07 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-08 12:14 am (UTC)And yeah, it would have been nice to get to know Tambe. I liked her character, and felt horrible about what I did to her, but... that's how it goes.
Thanks for dropping a comment! :)
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Date: 2010-11-21 04:47 am (UTC)The sheer intensity of this one chapter alone is enough to declare this fic a masterpiece of angst/h/c/drama. The descriptions of Bones' state of mind and all aspects of the medical drama are simply superb.
This fic promises to be a roller coaster and I am sooo onboard for the ride! Damn...I'm never gonna get anything done now...
no subject
Date: 2010-12-05 04:23 am (UTC)(And so excited that there's so much more story to go! :D :D :D :D)
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Date: 2010-12-05 04:31 am (UTC)(And yes, lots more story!)
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Date: 2011-01-22 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 04:46 pm (UTC)I love world-building like that. When I read something, I feel like I want everything to be as real as possible... like I could reach out and touch it, and that the details are filled in enough for me to believe that such a place actually exists. So, I try to put that into my writing. I'm so glad it works!