ad astra per aspera

Jim’s watched enough Hallmark movies to know that seeing his former childhood best friend and love of his life at the car rental kiosk four days before Christmas is a jacked up joke the universe is playing on him. 

“I’m a doctor not a psychic! How was I supposed to know there wouldn’t be any rental cars left?” Former best friend, Dr. Leonard McCoy exclaims at the counter. 

The bored desk clerk blinks at him and then looks down at her screen. “I’m sorry, sir--we’re all booked up due to the snow storm. I can put you on standby but the wait time is 48 hours.” 

As Bones blows out his breath in frustration and Jim tries not to stare at this grownup version of the boy he shared his first kiss with. Said grownup Leonard McCoy is in a red and black plaid shirt, dark jeans and boots that remind him of the days they stomped around the fields behind his parents old farmhouse.

He makes an impulsive decision. 

“Hey, Bones?” The masochistic side of him is pleased at how raspy his voice is and the way Bones whips around like, well--like his former childhood best friend surprised him. 

“You wanna ride with me?”

Just when Len thought he’d gotten over Jim Kirk--his heart no longer squeezes uncomfortably when his mama mentions his name, for one--the damn fool shows up as if conjured out of thin air. 

Impossibly handsome, scruff and the same blue eyes Len thought he dreamed up. Using the nickname from when they were kids. Jesus Christ. 

And before he knows it, his damn fool agrees to carpool with him. 

A horrible idea. Just being in Jim’s orbit again is enough to make him feel untethered. Didn’t he just say he was over Jim? The kid moved away years ago--broke his heart years ago, surely the feelings were gone?

But as he catches Jim’s gaze, where he grins that wicked shit stirring grin as he signs the paperwork for the only rental car left in Iowa--he feels warm, a happy tingle causing him to shiver. 

This is going to be a long trip. 

“Didn’t realize you never learned how to drive.” Bones says gruffly, surveying the damage of their very flat tire and broken axel.  

“You distracted me!” Jim says, blowing out cold air. 

“Not my fault you’re so squirmier than a baby goat.” 

Jim tries not to think about the way his hand is warm from where Bones brushed up against him. How it tickled, causing Jim to jerk his hand away as if burnt and lose focus of road, not noticing the pothole or that he was heading right for it.

Of all the times Jim imagined Bones touching him again--the aftermath leading them to get stuck in a ditch wasn’t it. 

The squeal of breaks and a loud rumbling causes Jim to yelp as Bones tugs him back, forcing Jim behind him. A bus skids to a stop in front of them, kicking up snow and wet mud, the door squeaking open and a grey mustachioed man in a train conductor’s hat grins down at them. “Y’all need a lift?”

Jim catches Bones eyes as he looks over his shoulder, still in front of Jim, shielding him like he did when they were kids, as if he could protect him from a bus barreling toward them. He shrugs. 

Bones sighs. 

“Why the hell not?”

“Well, newlyweds, thanks for being patient on this detour as we pick up our stowaways!” The driver booms over the speaker system. 

Bones chokes besides him. The only seats left on the bus was the cozy two seater aisle seat near the front and put their duffles between them as a barrier. 

“Newlyweds?”

“Why yes!” The driver says, grinning at them in the mirror. “I’m Roger and this is my newlyweds Christmas tour bus!”

“This was a mistake.” Jim stage whispers. 

“You think?” Bones seems to be hyperventilating. 

“Tell us about yourselves!”

Bones elbows Jim. “Um.”

“Go ahead! We’ve all gotten nice and acquainted since leaving Des Moines. Your turn!”

“I’m Jim and this is Bon--” Bones kicks at his leg. “Leonard. This is actually the first time we’ve seen each other since we were eighteen.”

“An arranged marriage?” An older woman at the back gasps.

“Lord no!” Bones guffaws. “We’re just...” He trails off and Jim understands. How do you explain what they are or aren’t? To a bus of strangers?

Roger chuckles. “This’ll be fun.”

“My June and I...it took us ages to admit feelings. She was a nurse in the war and I was stuck here in Iowa.” Liddy, the woman who insists on knitting hats for Jim and Bones as soon as they introduce themselves at their first rest stop. “Took us forty-eight years, three failed marriages and nearly dying to just stop being babies. We got married two months ago. We’re going to visit my granddaughter in Georgia and her partner.”

Bones hears a similar story from Lewis and Eloise, who were best friends for years before they got together. 

“I told him I loved him and he left.” Jim explained to Marty and Jack, they were the youngest and closest in age to Jim. 

“Jim was a kid. I was a kid. I thought he wasn’t serious. I was worried he’d leave me.” Bones says after drinking way to much spiked hot chocolate from Lewis and Eloise’s stash. 

Roger tells Bones at the gas station outside the Georgia state lines. “My wife Kate and I--we ran this tour for twenty-years before she passed. It was the greatest joy to spend Christmas together surrounded by love. We found each other later in life, far later than we should have. There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t wish I had found her sooner. That we had more time. Don’t regret life, kid.”

Outside a Georgia farmhouse, the inside lights a warm glow illuminating them, Jim takes Bones hand. Bones nuzzles Jim’s cold nose. Their lips meet as if they never forgot how. 

Bones knows he owes Roger a huge thank you. 

“Merry Christmas, Bones.” 

“Merry Christmas, Jim.”

It seems that wherever Leonard McCoy turns, Jim Kirk is there. 

He’s doing a short temp shift at the library--he needs the extra credits stat--when Jim shows up at the reference desk, a pile of actual books nearly blocking his face. 

He ignores the books--that’s the rare item librarian’s job and goes back to checking in the holo texts. “Don’t you have class or admirals to annoy?”

“I already stopped by Archer’s. Did you know his beagle had puppies?”

“You need to talk to L’tan if you want to check those out.” Leonard tells him. 

“These are mine.” Jim’s almost constant open expression morphs into one of mock offense. 

“Huh.” McCoy submits a few late charges for holos not turned in on time and sits back, happy to have finished before the end of his shift. “Let me guess? The karma sutra and Vulcan mating ritual guide?”

“No, smartass.” 

Jim slides a book across the desk. It’s in good condition, with a protective wrapping around the hardcover, another surprise, and not a book on sex or eroticism. 

“The House In The Cerulean Sea?” 

“Seriously, one of the best books to come out of 21st century Terran literature. Followed closely--and by the same publisher!--” Jim slides another book. 

“Gideon the Ninth?”

“Really fucking incredible. I’m writing a whole paper on it for a class right now on 21st Century Terran literature with a focus set in space.” At Leonard’s eyebrow lift, Jim shrugs. “It’s an elective.”

“And you’re showing them to me why?”

Jim makes a face at him, like a puppy denied a treat. 

“Thought you might be interested. Never mind!”

Before he can say anything, he swipes the books, nearly dropping a few in the process and walks off. He leaves Gideon the Ninth. McCoy curses. 

Two days later and he’s accosted by Gaila as he’s drinking shitty replicator coffee and the saddest cinnamon roll he’s ever tried to digest. 

“Hello Leonard.” She says, stealing a chair across for him like they have a standing lunch.

“Hello, Gaila.”

He picks at the cinnamon roll before giving up entirely. 

“You hurt his feelings.”

Leonard isn’t dumb, so of course he knows who she’s talking about. “Jim Kirk has more feelings than a Vulcan on opposite day.”

“He likes you.”

Leonard sputters on his tepid coffee. “We’re not in second grade, Gaila!”

“James is an awkward bean, Leonard. He is used to waggling his eyebrows for sex and if you’re well--you, that doesn’t seem to work.”

He considers this. “I thought he was having a fit.”

“And, he doesn’t just want sex from you. He wants friendship. More than that. You’re the first person--besides me and Captain Pike, of course, who doesn’t look at him and see his father, for better or worse.”

“The kid’s never around for me to really get to know. And when he does show up--I’m kind of busy.” Leonard admits. He shows up at all of Leonard’s shifts--the clinic with a broken nose, Admiral Archer’s office with random questions, the cafeteria when he doesn’t eat anything, his library shift--

“The books?”

“Do you know we met when he gave me a book--an Orion book of poetry, one of his favorites. It was the first physical thing I had of home since leaving.”

She looks over his shoulder for a moment, eyes tracking a memory but then she blinks, focusing back on Leonard. 

“His Orion is a little rusty but we spent hours talking about it. It was lovely.” She smiles, content at this new memory, rewriting the one from before.\

He drums his hands on the table, thinking. “Okay.”

“You know what you need to do, yes?” Gaila says. 

He does.

****

It takes him five hours, six bookstores and antique shops and one shady, alley dealing to find what he’s looking for. 

And then another two hours, one embarrassing conversation with Archer’s assistant and getting lost in the Academy’s underground tunnels before he finds Jim. 

“Sit! Sit. No, thank you for the kisses but no. Sit!”

The small basement space that was once a bunker for admirals in early Starfleet days now looks like a puppy daycare. 

A long blue plastic tunnel bisects the space, with small hoops and a slide. In a pen sits Jim and around Jim are squirmy, tiny beagle puppies. 

“Is this your repayment to Archer for making his last assistant quit?” Leonard asks. 

Jim leans his head back to look at him upside down. A puppy takes this opportunity to bounce and Jim finds himself attacked by the cutest beagle army Starfleet has ever seen. Leonard is not as coldhearted as he thinks and reaches down to take one adorable puppy who yawns in Leonard’s face and then licks his chin.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” McCoy gestures to a bag he abandoned on the floor. “You forgot Gideon the Ninth.”

“Nah, you can keep it.” Jim tosses a training toy to the corner of the pen and the puppies fall over themselves to get to it. 

“I can keep a 300 year old Terran book in pristine condition?”

“Just thought you might like it.”

Leonard rolls his eyes but can’t help but grinning. “Sorry bud.” He tells the puppy and puts him down among his litter-mates before reaching into the bag to pull out his offering. 

He hands it to Jim. 

“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in Vulcan. Bones, are you shitting me right now?”

“I am not.” Leonard doesn’t even try to hide his grin. He needs to send Gaila a thank you as soon as possible. 

“And, holllllly shit, it’s signed by the translator.” 

Jim is up and out of the pen, crashing him with a hug. 

“My dad used to read me this book when I was a kid. Figured you could use a challenge.”

“Thank you.” Jim says, clutching the book to his chest like it was a missing piece of himself he didn’t know he had forgotten. 

It doesn’t take them long after to become inseparable. They spend time down in the agility room with the puppies, reading to each other from their favorite books, spending free weekends tracking down obscure copies in bookstores along the coast. And it becomes a tradition on their anniversary. Bones--he becomes Bones pretty quickly--even proposes to Jim with a book, their love language becoming the physical print of words, the musky pages preserved over generations, a reminder of their beginning.

                                                         ***

For @brevityis, who asked for fluff. 

The emptiness of the other side of the bed unsettles Bones more than he likes, unwilling to give any reminder of its former occupants warmth. He screws his eyes shut and counts to ten but the eeriness of waking up alone remains. Brings back the awful choking echo of the nightmares he’s been having since they got back--the slide of the body bag’s zipper, Jim’s radiation burnt face and blue lips, the silence of the monitor as Khan’s blood serum was rejected, Jim flatlining as he rejected the new blood--all images cycled and distorted on a nightly basis. Swinging his legs over the bed, catching sight of their discarded clothes from the night before he pads through the hallway of his childhood home, searching for his husband. 

He finds him, as he figured he would, hunched over the cake keeper, stuffing an oversized piece of yellow cake with chocolate frosting into his mouth, lips already smeared with his last bites. 

“My mama finds you like that and she’ll have a conniption.” He rasps, pouring himself some coffee from the ancient pot. 

“Morning, Bones.” Jim says with a full mouth and Bones leans forward, touching his nose and then lips to the side of Jim’s head. He can’t help these moments, reaching for Jim’s hand while grocery shopping, nudging his knee under the table, brushing shoulders while they sit on the porch and watch his cousin’s try to impress Jim with cornhole. 

“You might want to slow down on that. Uncle Tanner’ll be up in a few to cook his infamous biscuits and gravy.”

“Infamous?” Jim grins. 

“There’s a reason Mama installed another bathroom a few years back.”

Jim laughed and finished chewing thoughtfully. 

Sometime in the last few years the McCoys moved closer to one another. Maybe to close ranks around each other. Maybe because his daddy’s brother felt Eleanora was the only connection to his brother he had left. He moved his brood--five sons and their families--into the old McCoy farmstead just 20 minutes away. Eleanora had never fussed with the old house much. She much preferred the house David McCoy had built her early on in their marriage. But everyone, even Bones, hated the idea of the land going to waste. 

It was the perfect reason to come back. Perfect excuse to coax Jim into warmer weather, where they could breathe without the construction of downtown San Francisco and the brass breathing down their necks. 

“Thanks, Bones.” Jim said finally, wiping a hand across his mouth, icing and all. 

“For what?”

“Bringing me here. I know you needed it. I know you know I needed it.”

Bones looked away, toward the window that gave a view of the land around them, the trees and flowers that his Mama fessed over. This place that knew him so well and that he’d taken for granted until now.

“You know you always have a home here, right?” Bones said after a minute.

Jim blinked. “I guess?”

“Just. If you ever feel like coming home. We can. Come here. We can build something out on the property. Mama and I’ve been talking. A small cabin? With space for your books, my God. But my cousin Joan’s a hell of a carpenter and whenever you need to get away from it all, from me--”

Jim cut him off by pulling Bones to him, palms coming up to bookend his face. 

“I would never need to get away from you. Home is you. Remember?”

When Jim found out that his mother had sold the house he’d grown up in--he first said, “Good fucking riddance. Hope they tear it down.”

Then he’d gotten quiet. “Besides the Enterprise, that was the only placeI could call home.”

And Bones, feeling soft and sentimental like he always did in quiet moments with Jim, pulled him close and said in the most serious voice he could manage, “You’ll always have a home with me, kid.”

And then they’d laughed until they couldn’t breathe and Bones almost had the nurse at Starfleet medical throw him out. 

“I swear Chekov mentioned an exit on comms before they crapped out.” Jim said, whirling around the dead-end of the cave they found themselves in. Half for shelter from a acid rain storm and half because it offered a quick cut through the mountain to the best beam out point. 

Jim really fucking hated caves. Nothing good happened to him when he was in them. He was half tempted to pull Bones back the way they came, traveling another route down another tunnel if it meant avoiding staying put for now. 

“Let me look at that cut first.” Bones said, setting down his away kit on one of the rocks. 

“Can’t. Gotta get this fixed.” Jim pried open the comm unit’s interface, using his teeth to rip it apart from his away suit. 

“Hold still.” Bones said, waving his tri-corder before Jim could make a grab for it. It was the next thing to get tampered with if Jim couldn’t get this comm online. 

“Will I live Bones?” Jim asked as he stared at the reading, too focused on the display. 

“Apparently.” Bones huffed and slid it back into his pack. 

“Chekov?” Jim tried the comm again. There wasn’t even static.

“Look, the storm’ll pass eventually. We’ll just wait it out.” Bones tugged off his away suit jacket and spread it on the rocky ground, a collection of rock dust mushrooming at the movement. 

“You’re kinda calm for a guy stuck in a cave with, as you once put it, the number one enemy of all caves.”

“They’ve definitely got something against you.” Bones said frown creasing his face as he stared at the darkening walls, the fading light retreating as Bones tensed. He was probably remembering Jim’s last run in with a cave, when a  technologically unhelpful delegation on a newly minted Federation planet had accidentally beamed him into a cave for three days. He’d nearly bled out after he fell into a crevasse, impaled in his shoulder. Bones had spent a week following Jim around with the tri-corder hovering inches from his back, monitoring for infection and parasites. 

Jim sat down beside Bones, shoulder to shoulder. It was still too early to talk about their kiss from two weeks ago. When Jim finally got up the nerve to talk about what he overhead when he was waking up from the medically induced coma the med-team had put him in after the cave incident. 

“Can’t keep doing this to me, kid. You’re all I’ve got left.”

And the softest touch of dry lips on his forehead, a lighter touch of a palm over his hair. 

And so he cornered him after a round of rummy and a shared bottle of Romulan Ale. “You ever think we’d be good together?”

Bones sobered up too quick. “The hell you talking about?”

“I won’t insult your intelligence if you don’t insult mine. You have to know how i feel about you.”

“Jim...” Bones scrubbed a hand over his face. 

“Come on, Bones.” Jim leaned over the table, his hands crushing the cards he spread out after he went down in the last round. 

And as Bones searched his face, eyes flicking to his lips, Jim came closer and captured Bones mouth. 

It was sloppy, sticky, perfect. 

But they hadn’t talked about it since. Maybe now was the time. 

“Well, shit.”

Jim looked up at the sparkling blue lights of the cave, bioluminescent and vibrant, even the shadows glowed at the edges. When Jim stood up, turning around to get a full look around him, he saw that there were ribbon fish-like creatures traveling up and down the cave walls. 

“See, Bones.” Jim began to say, ready to comment on the beauty of the creatures (hopefully he wasn’t allergic to them). But then his best friend sucked in his breath and grabbed at his chin. 

“Jesus, what?” Jim jerked back, prepared for a flesh eating bacteria or maybe one of the fish had flopped onto his head. 

Bones sucked in a breath. “Your eyes.” 

“My eyes?”

“They’re so fucking blue.”

And as Bones stared into Jim’s eyes, he blinked. But Bones put both palms on his cheeks, fingertips cool against his skin. Gooseflesh eruped down his neck and arms. 

He shivered. “Bones....”

“I wish you could see how beautiful you are.”

Jim laughed, shrugging out of Bones grip. “Seriously?”

Bones tugged him closer, hand gripping his fingers. His eyes were wide as he took in Jim’s face, licking his lips in the same way that Jim imagined would lead to a night of gloriousness for both of them. 

“Maybe the fish are doing something to you?”

Bones shook his head, made a small noise between a sigh and a mhhmm. 

Jim instantly closed his eyes and Bones chuckled. “I’m not under the fish’s influence, you dumbass. The lights...they just remind me how brilliant you are.”

And in a cave, surrounded by bioluminescent fish, Jim and Bones shared their second kiss. It led to their fourth, fifth, sixth and eventually, around their fifteenth or so, they were rescued, beamed out in a swirl of light. Only a very relieved Scotty could attest to how they landed on the transporter padd and he’s not telling. 

DM for details.