leftwithmybones | [Timeloop]

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[Timeloop]

In his life, McCoy is never going to forget. His wedding day, for one. The way that band of gold slid onto his finger and felt right. The first day of his internship and the damn IV that just wouldn't go in. The day Joanna was born and the way he'd prayed over that little bed for her to just cry. And a chair. A hard-backed blue chair with frayed padding on the seat digging into his lower back.

The same chair that he's just started awake in. The same chair he hasn't sat in for over four years. The same goddamn chair he slept in for weeks while his marriage started to dwindle around a drain.

At first, he swears it's just a nightmare. There's no way any of this is possible or real. He'd gone to sleep with Plum purring away, tail idly whacking at his shoulder and he's woken up to a nightmare, the sound of a heartbeat constant at his side. Shit, is all he can think as he wakes and sees the body in the hospital bed, sees all the medical equipment, sees the time, and (worst of all), sees the date.

"Fuck," he says, scrubbing his hands over his face. Going home had always been a low-lying hope, but traveling back in time...well, he's no goddamn physicist and while it might be possible, he really hadn't been keeping red matter lying around his bedroom. He slides out of the chair, trying to prevent it from creaking and waking his father up, trying to just get out.

He knows the events of the day. He knows it like it's been burned into his brain. He'll be begged three times -- come morning, noon, and evening. Joce stops by at lunch with Jo and berates him for not coming home and he takes one quick respite in Joanna's presence before he returns to his father and finally, finally caves.

Gives in only for a cure to show up three months later. He stands and inches to the edge of the bed to check the chart, as if something will be different and it'll prove that it's all just a nightmare after all.

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For a horrible moment, all Jim can think is that it's happened - he's reset back to where he came from and left a husband behind, but then he realises that he's never been here before, and he realises that he's not here alone.

"Bones?" he asks, voice hoarse and straightens in the chair. "What the hell's going on?"

It never occurs to him that Bones won't know.

She had not been sleeping. With the sky so clear and the view so unobstructed, the island was the perfect place for stargazing. The stars changed, but that was fine with Uhura. Any night could bring something familiar or something strange; either way the starts comforted her.

Night dreaming of space, of places and of people far away, she only blinked her eyes for a moment and found herself in the simple little room, soft sunlight streaming through a window. Nothing could do that, not transporters or any technology well-known in the Federation. Only questionable forces: the Providers, Trelane, the island. Uhura didn't have to wonder long about which was at work now.

"Where are we?" she asked, pushing up from her chair.

"It would appear to be a hospital room, quite possibly on Earth," speaks Spock from his place behind them, one moment standing before the bookcase in the Compound's recreation area, the next standing on the peripheral of a sickbed. Sharp eyes slide from the glimpse of blue sky visible through the crack in the window curtains to the graying body upon the bed.

"Fascinating."

"Of course it's a goddamn party in here," McCoy mutters to himself, flipping through the electronic chart with his fingers deftly scrolling through and monitoring the time carefully, knowing that soon enough, this is all going to go downhill and he doesn't have the brakes set to stop it. He slides the chart back into its place, turning and looking carefully at each of them.

They need to be gone. He can't exactly keep them here considering what they might overhear. "We're on Earth," he agrees with Spock, taking a deep breath as he rounds the bed and sinks down into the chair once more. "2255," he responds, turning to look at Jim, feeling like he might put the pieces together. Hell, one of them will. They're all geniuses. "About five weeks before you and I meet on that shuttle."

"Leonard..."

McCoy shifts quickly and is on his feet in a flash, checking the IV and leaning down to pry open his father's eyelids and check them. "Dad, just close your eyes, okay, go back to sleep. You need the rest." He knows that his father is going through agony right now and all the palliative care in the world is doing little to nothing for the pyrrhoneuritis. He rubs at his face and tries to figure out how to get Jim and the others to leave.

"Leonard," it comes again, tired and almost bemused. "Who are these people?"

"I didn't bring an observation party, don't worry. They were just leaving," McCoy says pointedly.

Jim's heard this story before. It took a long time and a lot of liquor but he does know that Bones' father passed and that's at least part of the reason that he was on the shuttle that day. Jim steps up beside his friend and rests one hand on Bones' shoulder.

"My name's Jim, Sir. I'm friends with B-...with Leonard."

He'd asked what she knew about his father, but Uhura hadn't known anything and therefore hadn't even imagined that it would be this. Still, looking at the frail old man, she felt for him and his pain, the pain of his family no doubt in agony watching him decay, but knew that people died, parents died. It was the way of life.

She would have scurried out obediently, not one to risk the good doctor's wrath on something so personal and close to the heart, but Jim's response to the senior McCoy's question made her reconsider. If anything, Jim knew his Bones better, knew where to push and where to back off, and if the old man asked, then he had the right to know.

"And I'm Uhura, sir. Also a friend of your fine son."

Spock, however, has absolutely no compunction about doing precisely as McCoy has implied; after a brief tip of his head in acknowledgment, he turns crisply on his heel and proceeds out of the door. McCoy is only a friend in the most loose sense of the word, the two of them existing within the same space because of a mutual agreement rather than affection. However strange it is that they find themselves in their present circumstances, Spock certainly does not consider it his place to intrude upon something so innately personal.

McCoy's fingers tense and for once, he's so damn grateful to Spock for listening that he's his favorite person in the whole room as he levels a glare on Uhura and Jim for sticking around. When he turns to look at David McCoy, his father looks pained and bemused, like this little interruption has only done a scant job of dulling the pain. "Leonard," David insists, gravely. "We need to talk."

"I already know what you're gonna say, Dad, and the answer is no," McCoy sharply replies. More now than ever, knowing what happens in the months to come, knowing how this is going to ruin everything. It has to be no. "I'm not doing it."

"There's no cure, Leonard and..." A wince before he intends to go on, long enough for McCoy to turn on Jim and Uhura, dislodging personal touches to his shoulder.

Goddammit, something is going to be said and then there'll be no recovering. "I told you to get out," he snaps at them. "How the hell is the Vulcan the only one with sense between his ears when I know the two of you have got at least half a genius' brain cell between you!"

Jim's face stays impassive, but there's a flinch in his eyes for a moment before he looks back up at Bones.

"Clearly, this is the kind of thing that you need someone," says Jim, quietly. "And I'm here, Bones. And I know how good you'd be at leaving me if this was the other way around. Now...we'll step out, but we're not going further than that."

He reaches out and gently touches Uhura's arm.

"C'mon."

For all McCoy's bluster, Uhura noted keenly that his father seemed no more ill at ease than he had been just laying in his bed undisturbed. Whatever pained him was doing the real damage, not their presence.

When she lost her father, Uhura had tried to ease the pain of loss with a hundred different, tiny rationales. He died doing what he loved. He was in a better place. And at least, she told herself, at least it hadn't been drawn out and slow, painful to him and those that loved him. At least the cut was fast and sure. (Sure as one can ever be with deep space disappearances. Sure that, whatever the truth of it was, he wasn't coming back.) Still, despite all that, all those little reasonable digs at the big hurt, she would have given anything to spend some time with her father now, even knowing what was coming.

And here McCoy was, ignoring his father's words and turning his hurt on them. If she hadn't thought the resulting explosion would have only upset the old man, Uhura would have stepped forward and said something more, to the senior McCoy, but instead she took half a step back at the touch of Jim. "A pleasure meeting you, sir," she said with a smile before turning and leaving to join Spock in the hallway.

When they go, McCoy collapses back into the chair, both hands pushed through ragged hair. He knows he just showered the night before, but he imagines it's as greasy as it got in these last days. He touches his face and expects the scrape of stubble that's built up because he's had no inclination to leave the room. When they're gone and he hears silence, only then does he turn to his father. "I'm not doing it," he insists. "Damn it, Dad, there's going to be a cure!"

"Which is what you've been saying for how many months?" David almost sounds amused, god damn him, and McCoy wants to cry at how frustrating this is, knowing what happens.

He takes a deep breath to steady himself. "I've been working on the variations and I've been getting closer," he says, stubborn and mad for it, tugging on his hair as he grips the bedding with his other hand. "You have to give me more time," he barks. "We'll find it and then we'll reverse it. It's not too late, Dad. You have to hang on."

"Stop the pain, Leonard," his father pleads with him, sounding weak, sounding like he always does in his memory. "Release me."

"No, damn it," he says, trying to resist. His eyes sting with the warmth of frustrated tears and he pushes to his feet. "I'll be back. Do not do anything rash. I will be right back," he snaps, heading out into the hall and pushing both hands into his hair once more, letting out a shaky breath as he ignores the presence of anyone else. "Don't do this to me," he begs of something, of anything.

True to his word, Jim's standing just outside the door, arms folded across his chest, head down. Bones come out into the corridor and Jim doesn't look at him. or a moment, they're just altogether in the moment. Finally, he looks over and raises both eyebrows.

"What do you need?" he asks, quietly, because that's how Jim deals with things. That's the only way that he knows how to deal with things.

Some rational part of her brain told her that this was just an illusion, surely. Some trick of the island that would disappear in time. Which was more likely? That the island was playing with McCoy, or that some other force had, accidentally or purposefully, pulled the three men back in time and her through time and yet another dimension to end up here, seemingly not trampling any time lines.

But knowing this would end gave no comfort as she watched this man she'd grown to care about in his own right beg to empty air. She waited, having already raised his anger once, and did not step forward to offer a comforting touch she knew would be pushed away.

While he would be loathe to admit such a thing, the entire situation is discomfiting to Spock. The wildly rampant emotion, a dying parent; perhaps more than ever before he is acutely aware at his inability to empathize with the human condition or offer more than quiet, stoic support in simply remaining there. He briefly wonders what his own mother would think of him standing aside so stone-faced while McCoy struggles with the reality of his situation.

"It is curious that of all possible points on the time line, whatever force brought us here chose this particular time and locale," he points out, only truly capable of approaching the situation from a pragmatic perspective. "Such a deliberate placement suggests a deeper purpose."

McCoy uses their voices like a tether to keep himself afloat in some kind of sanity. He looks to the clock, hearing every second pass like a nail being hammered into a coffin and knows what's going to happen, even if they don't. "Jim, might need you to play interference come noon when the ex...when the wife gets here," he corrects, because at this point in time, there is no divorce. Just the shambles of what's about to be.

And then he needs to get them all out before they hear David McCoy begging to be shuttled off the mortal coil by his own son's hands. "Well, I don't give a damn why I'm here, but things aren't going to be the same this time." He meets Spock's gaze for just a minute, just long enough to silently agree that this has purpose. This is the most important thing in the world right now.

He is not letting his father die. Not today. Not with the cure so close.

"And how are they going to be?" Uhura pressed. This wouldn't be the way she would choose to unearth old issues, but if the plan was to change things, they needed to know what the change was. Otherwise, how could they help?

"And what should Spock and I do, if you've got Jim on distraction detail?" She didn't like the feel of this, any of it, but she would go along with it for McCoy's sake, for now.

Fascinating, but not altogether surprising, that McCoy would so stubbornly cling to his position when given an opportunity to rewrite history. From his place in the doorway, Spock arches a critical brow, although he cannot confess to thinking much differently should the chance to save his own mother arise.

"Changing history to a more personally satisfactory outcome would be a natural inclination for anyone," he remarks. "The difficulty lies in achieving the change."

"Won't be hard this time," McCoy says with great surety. "The machine's doing the heavy lifting." He neglects to add how much pain his father is in. He just has to hold the hell on while the cure gets there a bit faster, that's all. He glances to Jim, grateful that he's there, because he can see Jocelyn entering the hall and he ducks inside the room, gesturing for Uhura and Spock to join so that he doesn't spend the next hour in a bickering match about who's failing who.

He glances over his shoulder at his father in that bed, taking a deep breath to try and settle his nerves. "He just needs to be alive come tomorrow morning. That's it. I just have to keep him alive." Ignore his wishes, ignore his pleading demands, ignore what he did.

Being back in the room hardly seemed an improvement to Uhura. Although out of sight of McCoy's wife, who she had no particular urge to meet at the moment, the situation and his talk of her driving all curiosity from her in that respect, this brought them within range of McCoy's father again and the urge to comfort him was strong. Pursing her lips, she listened to McCoy, but found herself shaking her head.

"What happens tomorrow morning?" she asked, keeping her voice hushed. "If your father's dying, delaying one day can't change that much, can it?"

"Presumably you have acquired skills to apply to this situation since you were last in it," Spock says, a sort of half-answer for McCoy. "You're certain that you might accomplish a significant change in less than 24 hours?"

Certainly it's possible, but with illness this far progressed, such an easy solution seems highly unlikely.

"Yeah," McCoy agrees, though he refuses to meet Spock's gaze, refuses to act like a crap liar when he knows that he just needs to not kill his own damn father. "Yeah, I figured out a couple of new skills." He shifts uncomfortably, trying to keep away from the hall, avoiding his sleeping father and feeling like he's stuck between a rock and a hard place. "I just need the two of you out of this room come around this evening. That's all."

She raised a disbelieving brow at Spock which remained raised through McCoy's confirmation of the half-Vulcan's presumption. Uhura didn't buy that shit for a second. New skills, maybe. But unless there was a surgery planned in the next 24 hours, she didn't see that assurance being anything but a load of hot air.

Her hands settled on her hips as she glanced between the two men, annoyed by this secret masculine agreement not to talk about the real issue and just a little too out of her depth to fight it. This wasn't her dimension. She didn't know McCoy's father from Adam, or McCoy all that well either.

"Fine," she said finally, her hands dropping from her hips, nearly spitting the word out but restraining herself. "Fine. I'll go along with whatever game you're playing."

That Uhura is displeased is easy enough determined; that McCoy is not being entirely truthful not so much. Spock takes the assessment at face value, although he remains concerned over the limited time line. McCoy, however, seems confident, and ultimately there is little to be done but defer—It is a private matter, after all.

McCoy holds both their gazes for a singular moment, almost like he's about to challenge them on this, but he just gives a nod. "The cafeteria isn't half bad. And there's a couple shops. Just give me until morning. That's all I need." Maybe he's back here for good, ready to start his life over, ready to do it right. Hell, maybe he can even patch things up with Joce, be a proper father and husband.

Maybe he can make this better.

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[Timeloop]

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