Anonymous asked: You did Nyota for the headcanon ask meme, can you do Bones?
Headcanon meme. Bones is my one true saltmate, okay, it’s like a soulmate but with bitterness about the world. Also, this is a little bit gonna be the Jim & Bones Friendship Hour.
A: what I think realistically
Bones actually has a very real phobia of space. Like, he manages it. He does a good job managing it. But.
Listen.
In order to successfully graduate Starfleet Academy, every student must take and pass a shuttle piloting class. In case of emergency. Pass proficiently, not just scrape by on a wing and a prayer. Bones fails twice and scrapes that pass the third time and honestly he’s thinking about just giving up. He knows all the settings and controls—Jim drilled him silly after that first fail—but getting into the simulator and seeing all that black, and the pressure, he just. He locks up. It’s all he can do to control his breathing, never mind controlling the shuttle. He can’t go back to Georgia and he can’t do this and where does that leave him?
Jim finds Bones in a tiny-ass little bar the day before his fourth retest date and drags him protesting out the door, about eight whiskeys down, and bundles him into bed and listens to him mumble about how he’s never going to pass and he’s never going to graduate and honestly fucking good because space is the worst and Jim’s crazy for wanting to go there but also Jim’s going to go into space without him and Bones doesn’t have anywhere else to go and it’s all just really awful, you know what I mean, Jimmy?
“Sure, buddy,” Jim says, propping Bones up and pushing a glass of water into his hands. “Drink something, okay?”
The next day, at 1500 hours, Bones stumbles into the simulator room with—well, not the worst hangover of his life, but probably top ten. And lo and fucking behold, instead of the usual gaggle of students looking to (re)test, there’s James Goddamn Kirk, hands stuffed in his pockets and a sunny-ass smile on his smart-ass face. James Goddamn Kirk, who passed his pilot’s test with glowing scores on the first try.
James Goddamn Kirk, who somehow lied and cheated his way in here so that he could sit in the simulator while Bones sweats his way through a passing grade.
It doesn’t cure his phobia, obviously, but the first time Bones does actually have to pilot a shuttle, it’s James Goddamn Kirk bleeding out in the copilot’s seat and Bones barely even notices his heart race.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Leonard McCoy, day one of his term at the Academy as he stumbles, shaking and panting, off the shuttle, swears to himself that he’s going to pry this blue-eyed limpet off him on the spot and also sedate anyone who addresses him as Bones.
Day one of his second year at the Academy, Bones McCoy gets half-tackled by Jim, who’s already talking about this badass new Tactics class they’re offering, I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna destroy everyone, it’s gonna be awesome and he has no idea how this happened.
What would have been day one of his fourth year, Bones is fuck knows how far into the black of space, listening to his crew tattle on Jim’s delinquent ass.
“Doc, I don’t think he’s taken an off shift in, like, a couple days maybe,” Sulu says as he passes through for an antihistamine.
“I’ll work on it,” Bones says, and jabs Sulu with a hypo. “Stop poking plants you don’t recognize.”
“Doctor McCoy, Alpha shift told me to tell you that the captain forgot to eat today,” Chekov reports, sticking his head inside. “Can I get another screen?”
“I’ll deal with that,” Bones says, and waves the kid in. “Stop sleeping with people you don’t know.”
“Doctor, I would appreciate it if you intervened in the Captain’s opinion that holodeck safety protocols are optional,” Spock says evenly as Chapel checks him for broken ribs.
“I’ll do my best,” Bones says, and gives Spock a bitter wave with the medical tricorder. “Stop getting in fistfights, you have a damn phaser.”
“Doctor,” Uhura starts as Bones sprints past her. “I think the Captain might be allergic–”
“I’m on my way!” he yells back over his shoulder. “Stop Spock from causing a diplomatic incident!”
“Doc,” Scotty starts, leaning into the medbay and squinting painfully.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Bones snarls, and gives Scotty a vengeful jab with a hangover hypo (actually a calibrated mix of thiamine, folic acid, and magnesium sulfate, but listen, it’s a hangover hypo) as he marches past toward the bridge.
Bones has Regrets.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Bones keeps expecting to get to a point where he’s…like…past being horrified and shocked when one of the crew rolls in, near death or already dead.
It wears on his soul like acid, every time. He decides very early that he’s going to leave Starfleet when Jim dies. The longer he spends on the Enterprise, the more names he adds to that list (when Spock dies, when Uhura dies, when Chekov-Sulu-Scotty dies).
Bones is a doctor, not an adventurer. He’s not built to outlive these people. When they are gone, he will never leave orbit again.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Read an AU once where Bones was a humanitarian aid volunteer at like 21/22 who went to Tarsus IV and met furious, half-starved, 13-year-old, fresh-off-a-genocide JT Kirk and it was my favorite thing. It was also abandoned after like two chapters. But like. Any intersection of my infinite feelings about Tarsus IV and my infinite feelings about Bones & Jim (& Spock) friendship is My Favorite Thing and I believe in my heart that this is true. Bones didn’t recognize him at the time and it takes him years to connect the emaciated murderous kid with the electric blue eyes to his buoyantly brilliant best friend, but he does, eventually. He asks Jim straight up, very late one night, and they have one single conversation about it before they vow to never discuss it again.
#I don’t go here but I WILL and all of this is fabulous #‘he’s not built to outlive these people’ but it’s all when #WHEN jim dies #when one of them dies#there’s no real question of if #just how long before he quietly retires to some small medical practice in the middle of nowhere #he told himself he’d find a starless planet - something with pollution or weird atmosphere stuff that kept the void from staring you down #but he goes somewhere rural on a planet with a thousand thousand constellations in the night sky #and he looks up far more often than he thought he would #he never goes back #but he never stops looking up
@aethersea gets me.
