Work Text:
McCoy shifted uncomfortably in the giant stuffed bean-bag “chair” the psychology department exam rooms were so famous for when crew members wanted to nap undisturbed. It wasn’t so much that the so-called chair was jarring or in some way lumpy, though the thought of the thing’s horrible effects on posture and back care made him inwardly weep. It was the heavy damp-breathed pointiness of having a sobbing seventeen-year-old track runner clutched around his torso and curled into a ridiculous box on his lap that jabbed too-young hip-bones and elbows and heels in all the wrong joints of the CMO’s overworked skeletal structure.
Leonard whuffed out deep sigh, and cradled the child close.
“It’s so-so-so wery dark, so quiet, doktor! And aliens! Dey try to steal us away into the dark and dey…” the words were only half-coherent, really, through several disorienting filters of Pavel Chekov’s accent, drunkenness, and Lieutenant Sulu’s ‘pot joints’.
What the hell was ‘pot’, anyway? Or ‘joints’?
Sulu had half-carried, half-dragged Chekov into the Med Bay forty five minutes previously, swearing up and down he hadn’t meant for the Ensign to get so upset, while another botanist had to be brought in piggy-backing off of a security officer who couldn’t seem to stop smiling. All of them had been red-eyed with their pupils dilated, higher than clouds. While several nurses walked the motley crew to bio beds, McCoy had tried to keep Chekov’s clingy hold from choking him as the ship’s token jailbait did his level best to climb the doctor’s body like a tree, while simultaneously attempting to get a linear story out of Sulu.
“He just got so freaked out, you know? I mean, he was just fine! We were all having a blast, it was just an experience experiment. But Matthews dropped off and Simpson started hitting stuff. Chekov was trying to get his hand down my pants! But he freaked out and started crying! We were in the mess eating fries and salt and he started, like, weeping, right there on the floor! And WOAH! Hell-o, nurse!”
Sulu had to be restrained at the wrists to keep from pinching at the nurses’ rear ends, and McCoy, still with a persistently stuck sobbing Ensign necklace, did a little research into what he could figure out of the pilot’s story. Pot. A Pre-warp psychoactive recreational drug. Most serious medical problem he’d have to watch was Matthew’s heart murmur –aggressive accelerated heart rate might lead to minor internal bleeding or muscle damage…nothing too serious if he kept on top of it. Otherwise, Sulu and the others could sleep it off.
Of course, at that moment he hadn’t known that Chekov would continue to cling to him like some space barnacle. Mentioning this to the jittery boy hadn’t been a great idea, either.
Almost an hour, now, McCoy had been listening to the Ensign’s choked, wet voice mumbling and shouting and whispering about all the nastiness space had to offer as it was rasped against his jugular, Chapel finally taking pity on Leonard’s wilted aggressive expression and escorting them to the psyche ward’s private rooms and giving Pavel ample opportunity to crawl into his doctor’s lap. He should have sedated him like the other morons…
But he was just a kid, and acted more Joanna’s age than Joanna did, acting out against her absentee father as she so often did when Leonard came to visit her. Josslyn was a good mother to her. He got reports, stiffly formal words from his ex-wife every other month about his daughter’s grades and health, all good. The only time cops had been called on his fifteen year old princess was the time she was at a party with alcohol Leonard had let her go to. He’d been trying to be giving and free with her, and she’d said nothing about how her mother had already denied her permission to go, or how older kids were bringing kegs of beer and other, more exotic liquors. Josslyn had been pissed at him, but no more so than he’d been at himself.
Absently, McCoy noticed that the Ensign had trailed off into terrified hiccups, words finally chattered out, leaving the teen smacking at his lips and tongue as if to work saliva back into his mouth after it had all drooled hotly down the side of Leonard’s neck to soak into his medical-blues. The Doctor’s arms were wrapped protectively around skinny, bony shoulders.
Paternal heat coiled in his belly, and set him into a gentle side-to-side rocking. “I’m scared of space, too, darlin’.”
The room seemed infinitely more quiet once Pavel’s incoherent blather had stopped, not reverent silence, but the same sort of quiet that used to be, at night when he put his still innocent little girl to bed and sang her lullabies that were old even before his granny was born. He pulled the barest of hints away from the Ensign, who whimpered pathetically. Leonard only reached into his back pocket for a hankie.
Again, hankies were things so old fashioned that they hurt to bear thinking about, but Leonard appreciated their charm and usefulness in a way that his ex fundamentally disapproved of, which should have warned him off of her from the start, alas. He rubbed at the ensign’s gummy eyes and runny nose he way he used to do for his JoJo, grabbing the younger’s nose through thick, age-softened linen and making a simple, deep-voiced command, “Blow.”
The ensign honked into the handkerchief once, twice, a third time, not making even the slightest of token resistances as McCoy cleaned him up, and the familial warmth in Leonard’s intestines burned up to his lungs and squeezed. He mopped up the mess on one side of his own neck and tossed the fabric in the direction of the door, then gently manhandled Chekov into a more suitable position across the doctor’s body.
Once Pavel’s knees were tucked away from Leonard’s chin. but under his arm, with the younger’s feet pulled tight into his outer thigh and his arms tucked into Leonard’s chest, the doctor put his arms back around the wiry frame to rock the other once more as the other settled into a half-intoxicated stupor.
The lullaby came unexpectedly, and rumbled up through his chest to roll across his teeth, but once he’d started the kid let out such a comforted sigh that stopping seemed cruel.
“Hush little baby, don’ say a word,
“Papa’s gonna buy you a mocking bird…”
Leonard rocked and sang to Chekov long past the point that Chekov fell asleep, seldom stirring from his rest, and only to be gentled again with careful cooing and another long-dead lullaby.
Sometime later, when Chekov had fallen through drugged stupor and attained what could pass for true sleep, McCoy tucked his head down onto a bird-like chest and cried as his heart fell to pieces.