Chapter Text
Making Trouble
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Chapter 4
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The Jirkan guards weren’t really going to knock him out the window, McCoy assured himself again.
No one was even threatening to throw anyone out any windows.
Any more.
The best McCoy could tell.
It was impossible not to look, though. The view out the light slits of the small room was mind-numbingly impressive, fractionally more-so even than the first cell the doctor had occupied in the last hour.
Both were in the tall tower at the top of a tall fortress at the top of a tall cliff where the landing party had beamed in. The glimmers off the fuschia sea far below were weakening McCoy’s legs and stomach in a way that usually took a rough ride in the transporter; every time he was pushed up against the wall he lost a month off his life. A Jirka might not bend right to just fall out of one of the light slits, but a human certainly could.
Caught between protecting his throbbing arm and moving closer to the wall again, McCoy almost bared his teeth at the nearest Jirka. His temper was fraying, and he wondered for an instant what they'd do if he did just start shoving back. Probably a lot off nothing, at best. Yelling probably wouldn't do any good, either. They were completely ignoring him.
In the aftermath of the sudden attack at their beam-in, the doctor hadn’t had time to register how much a broken wrist hurt until now, when he was having to just stand and wait. He wasn't enjoying the pain intensifying with every pulse beat in his shattered wrist as he stood there without distraction, but he didn’t dare do anything else with this mob in the room.
McCoy hadn’t had even a second to think about consequences when he’d thrown his arm up over the paralyzed Spock’s bare head. He'd just managed to partially deflect the on-coming rifle butt the Jirkan guard had raised when the half-Vulcan proved too resistant to their stunning weapons. McCoy might have just let the thick-skulled son of a Vulcan take the full brunt of it if he'd remembered it hurt this much.
... The worst thing about the immediate impact had been the sound, the unmistakable crunch of bone. If that really had been Spock’s skull…
With the company he kept, McCoy knew enough to be braced for a white-out ahead of the pain after such a blow. He’d managed to shake off the shock in time, and with teeth gritted and arm carefully cradled to his chest, had gone trotting after the group of irate Jirka when they gathered up the limp bodies of the stunned landing party and abandoned the wind-swept beam-in point.
They went hopping along at a good clip down the winding passageway of the tower, still with so much crosstalk the universal translator was providing McCoy with word salad, unfortunately. It would have helped to know what the rowdy group was planning to do with the helpless crewmen. Not the light slits, at least not then.
The liaison, Gh'o'u'y'son, kept looking back at McCoy with damp, presumably frightened eyes, but it was hustled along at the front of the pack, and the guards were scrupulously ignoring the doctor trailing along behind them.
The mob had paused just long enough, once, for the Jirka carrying Spock’s limp body to open a round door and hop through. There was the click of a lock before McCoy had time to decide whether to try to stay with the injured officer. In any case, his duty was obvious, and he went with the main body of crewmen as they were carried down several more levels. Eventually the plume-yest guard indicated they be carried into a semicircular room where McCoy was first introduced to the broad light slits.
Where the crew were shackled. Actually shackled. To the floor, with manacles and chains on their ankles and how the hell had the previous Starfleet missions not known at least this much about this society? What the hell they were doing assigned a diplomatic mission on this barbaric planet with religious death squads and –
One of the Enterprise security guards woke up enough from the stun to struggle slightly, and got carried to the window, held out it by her belt, and shaken for her trouble. Knowing she must still be dizzy and sick, McCoy couldn’t imagine what it was like to be dangled over that distant sea.
The view or the rough handling caused her to pass out again, thankfully. Communications and Security, all of them ended up dropped carelessly on the relatively clean floor in the end, on some straw-like material, cuffed but otherwise unmolested. None of the Jirka reached for McCoy, or even looked his way as they finished up.
McCoy stayed carefully out of their way, and they never acknowledged him at all, other than seeming to absently make sure not to touch him. No one tried to manacle him but no one responded to his questions, either. McCoy knew he couldn’t be too persistent – if he provoked another injury he wouldn’t be any good to anyone.
There was some kind of an argument about locking the round entrance when they left. The babble had stilled enough for the universal translator to give McCoy a few key facts. Apparently there was a taboo against molesting or interfering with anyone of McCoy’s “caste”.
Apparently Spock’s designation of him as a “Senior Healer” was paying off in unexpected ways.
The Jirka didn’t end up throwing the lock. McCoy immediately decided to make them regret that as soon as possible.
He couldn’t try to leave until he’d made sure all of the crew were coming out of the stun all right, of course, back to alert if angry consciousness. They all came to groggy but breathing without any trouble and with stable heartbeats, at least. As soon as the doctor confirmed that, he quieted Uhura’s muzzy, insistent demands by slipping out the opening to go back for Spock.
There wasn’t a guard outside, and no one stopped him. McCoy had thought he might be confused by the identical circular apertures on either side of the winding hall, but all he actually had to do to locate Spock's cell was follow the noise.
He eased back up the tower and found another group of Jirka, all of them looking like the plume-yest one from the original bunch in dress and feather fluff, half in and half out of the small room they’d put Spock in, talking rapidly to one another.
The universal translator made more of their words than it had of the outright rowdy bunch of guards. Their speech was more measured, if equally loud, and poor Gh'o'u'y'son was nowhere to be seen.
Whoever these were – Officers? Officials? – apparently they were discussing censure for whoever made "the Vulcan" stay unconscious, and how to soothe someone’s displeasure at the delay. They were servants of the closest high religious crackpot, he got that much, whoever they were. Great.
They never once looked at McCoy, none of them, so he guessed word about him had gotten around. He needed to see what they were doing to Spock. Maybe he could interfere with anything terrible, with his special status, just by getting in the way if nothing else. He decided to go for it, and found that a path cleared for him when he walked steadily for the cell opening.
Once he was inside he was jostled against the wall (and thus the terrifying light slits) by sheer volume of beings and lack of space, but no one acknowledged him even as they bumped into him. He let it happen when he saw that the room's prisoners were lying untouched on the soft hay-stuff. They weren't being tortured, just argued over.
The group did come rapidly to an agreement at that point, before McCoy could have an aneurysm about falling out the windows. Possibly his arrival had hurried them along, given the not-quite side-eyes he was getting from the ones doing most of the talking.
Two of them picked up Spock’s still-limp body and secured it to the wall by his upper arms, making the best use they could of manacles designed for their own species.
McCoy held back a protest, gritting his teeth and making himself stand still. The Jirka were surprisingly strong to look so delicate, and he couldn’t afford to be hurt in a doomed scuffle that would probably just get him manacled somewhere, too. He doubted his hands-off status would stretch to him actively interfering with their prisoners, and this wasn't the moment to choose to find out.
Then they left, all of them, and didn't even leave a guard. The round opening was left unlocked as well, and McCoy found himself abruptly alone with the two people he’d most wanted to see.
He only took a moment to step away from the light slits and breathe before going, careful of his wrist, to kneel beside the crumpled figure in black pants and dress greens shackled by one ankle to the floor.
Kirk was lying in a pile of the straw-stuff, his face lightly bruised and somewhat flushed. The Jirkan guards had taken McCoy's phaser, communicator and tricorder off him while he was still doubled over in shock over his wrist, but they’d missed his hand scanner. It was very limited when used alone, but capable of a basic assessment that at least got the doctor’s heart out of his throat.
Kirk's vital signs were all acceptable, stable, and he didn't have a concussion. He’d been roughed up and mildly sedated, had a lot of bruises and a slightly elevated temperature, but that was all. It was enough to sit the doctor back on his heels with relief.
All this talk about summary executions had gotten to him. He hadn't known what kind of condition he'd find Jim in. Religious zealots were always the most creative when it came to torture, and the liaison had been so frantic.
Trying not to think about the radiating pain in his own arm, McCoy rose to check on Spock, too, and was almost as relieved. He’d succeeded in making the blow a glancing one with the sacrifice of his wrist – the half-Vulcan’s head wound was a bloody bruise and would probably hurt like hell, but there was no skull fracture and no concussion. Even Spock's fever was still down, and he was already throwing off the effects of the multiple stuns, ever-fortunate in the gift of durability from his Vulcan anatomy.
They’d both be coming around soon, so McCoy found himself a seat on his own pile of the straw-stuff and started working on his wrist with the small protoplaser he had in his kit. It wasn’t the right tool for the job, but it was all he had on him that could help at the moment. All he had was what he wore in the pouch on his belt – his proper kit had been confiscated with the rest of their gear in the beam-in room.
He stared at Spock as he tried not to think about what he was doing to himself even as he did it. There were reasons doctors didn’t mend their own broken bones. At least, non-masochistic doctors didn't.
The Jirka hadn’t settled for cuffing and chaining Spock by the ankle as they had the Humans and Altarean of the security team. He hung from the wall like a poorly-strung scarecrow, head lowered almost to his chest. They knew Spock was different, all right. McCoy had gotten that much from the translator, too, even if how carefully the half-Vulcan was bound didn’t make it obvious.
Despite never having met, to the Federation’s knowledge, any species besides Human, Andorian, and Altarean, the Jirka knew Spock was different.
Different as in capable of pulling an ankle chain from the mortar. Different as in Vulcan. Different as in the one they had asked for because even “they” admitted he wouldn’t lie. Like “they” said Terrans did. Whoever the hell “they” would turn out to be.
This cell was much smaller but shaped like the first, a flat wall housing the round door and a semicircular arch out where the prisoners were chained. McCoy, sweating, finished what might be done for his wrist under current conditions and sat back beside the door to watch and wait for one of his companions to come to consciousness.
The cool stone felt good through his uniform at the moment, although with the brisk wind coming in through the light slits it had been unpleasantly chill before the pain made him overheat. Not a good place for either of his friends, especially now, but definitely the least of their worries at the moment.
A dark sort of security helped calm McCoy as he was finally able to stop and regroup after his non-stop, adrenaline-fueled response to their unexpected "welcome". It was the first chance he'd had to breathe, and he found he wasn't as worried as he probably should be, under the circumstances.
The Jirka had made the fatal mistake of putting James Kirk and Spock together in a jail cell, and to date that had never ended well for anyone not from the Enterprise.
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“-oup of flashier ones hasn’t been gone ten minutes, so I’m not sure, Jim.”
The words were empty sounds. Then there was a quiet response he might have found more meaning in, if it weren't for the intense relief at the voice that produced it.
Jim. Jim, alive and speaking. Something in him registered this as a matter for pleasure and surprise. Spock gathered the tendrils of his consciousness around the important knowledge with difficulty, hampered by the very emotions that were guiding him to make the effort.
Still mostly drifting, he began to remember. The Jirka, operating on bad faith. The bright, wind-swept beam-in location that held only enemies. He’d been stunned repeatedly, that was why his whole body throbbed. Spock focused, and was able to control that pain, to tuck his brain's recognition of the nerve impulses beneath his consciousness.The spike of pain in his head was more resistant to control – there had been one guard, approaching him with his rifle upraised -- wait, had McCoy…
But Spock locked away any emotionalism that came with returning surface thoughts and fought his disciplines into place. First, he must control himself, then he could think of other things.
External awareness started phasing in as Spock succeeded in gaining control of all his pain receptors. Cataloguing the usefulness of his physical state was his next priority. He was mostly upright, his arms bound behind him quite effectively and rendering both uselessly numb. He was chilled through, and it was a struggle to lift his head through the persisting bodily weaknesses, but his limbs and neck seemed without further injury.
He took a careful breath, testing his chest, then blinked his eyes to slits, starting to gather himself. The light was fiercely white, and he was just remembering why his face and throat felt odd when a gasp startled him, then, with no further warning, “Ehhtchuu!!”
“Well. He’s awake,” Dr. McCoy said dryly, even as Spock sniffled and managed to fully open his eyes.
The Jirkan sun’s light spectrum would be harsh to both Human and Vulcan eyes, Spock thought absently. The nictitating membrane of his third eyelid swept across his irises as he struggled in the moment to adjust, but he sneezed again before the piercing quality of the light seemed to subside. He was still left sniffling and irritated, but at least he wasn’t.. going… to– “Ehtchuu!!"
In his current position, all Spock could do was sniffle and turn to rub his nose on his shoulder. That it gave him several moments to look away and fully collect himself was coincidental.
He felt more than saw McCoy come to stand in front of him, and had sensed as much as heard the captain on the floor to his left. He forced himself to straighten as much as he could in his bonds and reached for enough control to face them. Anything so adolescent as embarrassment at this time would be self-indulgence and weakness.
Spock knew he couldn’t afford to be less than absolutely honest with himself or his companions under these circumstances, or he might become a liability. There were so many aspects of his Vulcan nature his duty required him to sometimes simply fold away.
“Just be still, if you can,” McCoy said quietly, with an almost simultaneous whir from his scanner. “These cuffs around your arms are tighter than I would like.”
Spock used the brief interval of the exam to finish collecting himself as well as he could. At least by the time McCoy looked up again he was able to meet the blue eyes and say evenly, “How badly were you damaged trying to shield me from the blow of the rifle butt, Doctor?”
McCoy instantly bristled at the censure in the tone, but then Spock sneezed again almost immediately, quietly, twice, then after a hazy moment, again, looking so out of sorts with himself that McCoy bit back his own almost-reflexive reply. Spock was still flushed, and even though he only had a slight temperature, clearly his emotional control was still compromised. That was embarrassment staining his cheeks more than fever.
McCoy tried not to kick even Spock when he was down, so he said only, "If I'd known it would hit that thick skull of yours I wouldn't have bothered," and gave a quick summary to his patient on his systemic health, head wound, and fever. Spock, as usual, received this with an air of tested patience, the arrogant son of-- But just this once, since McCoy registered that the brown eyes had started drifting left and down at about the same moment they showed full lucidity, again McCoy decided to give him a break. So he kept his remarks to himself and just chose the better part of valor, and stepped out of the firing line.
The moment their eyes met, Spock's flush deepened. He cleared his throat carefully and said, “Captain. It is good to find you relatively undamaged,” in as un-inflected a tone as if they’d met on a shore leave sidewalk.
Kirk’s tone was just as calm, but significantly cooler. “It’s not good to see you at all, Commander.” His eyes narrowed for an instant as the glare included McCoy. “I’m certain my orders were that no one was to beam down without my permission. Which I’m certain I couldn’t give while an unconscious guest of the priests.”
Kirk’s color was high, too, but the captain went cold when he was really angry, and he was definitely that. It looked incongruous with the soft voice and calm expression.
“Jim–”
“Captain–”
“Be quiet, Doctor.”
McCoy put both hands up in surrender, but his scowl as he crossed his arms made his views on the current discussion plain.
“Captain.” Spock turned quickly to sneeze, and start again. He looked mortified for only a moment when he froze and turned to sneeze twice more, then had to clear his throat rather extensively before he could continue. “I acknowledge that I am in violation of your orders.”
Kirk rose to his knees, arms crossing over his chest in what was not a defensive posture. McCoy knew if the captain weren’t still dizzy he’d be up and at the end of his chain, and as up into Spock’s space as he could get. He was still partly fuzzy from the sedative he’d been given, that was keeping him off his feet, but Kirk did not like this situation and he had not liked hearing McCoy say that their hosts had a special interest in Spock.
Even when partially smothered, James Kirk's will was an almost physical force when he chose to concentrate it, and even Spock had been known to stammer under its force.
“However.” Spock looked like he was gratefully gauging the distance between them. “There have been developments of which you were unaware when you gave those orders.” He hurriedly made as short a story as possible out of the day’s events.
Kirk did not like this briefing any more than he had McCoy's, concise and much more informative as it was, and said so. “Who is this ‘they’? This fan of Vulcans may have gotten every human on this planet executed! Someone from off-planet is obviously playing games here.”
“Made sense for us to come after you, then, didn’t it?” McCoy squeezed in. “If these religious caste powers will only listen to him–”
“Doctor.” Kirk said quietly. “Beyond my standing orders that should have kept you all on the ship, you do recall my current orders – and more specifically, yours – regarding–”
“Damn it.” McCoy had not had a good day, he'd spent too much of it in enemy territory worried for his various crewmates, and his last bit of patience suddenly fled. “As CMO I judged him competent to go into the field with medical support, which is why I’m here. And I know you’re worried, but don’t you think you’re being a bit of a hypocrite, Captain?”
Kirk looked genuinely taken aback by his tone for a moment, and McCoy plowed on, even if it was taking advantage of a man not at his best. That flush on Kirk’s cheeks was fever, even if it didn’t affect a human the way it did the Vulcan hybrid, and McCoy’d noticed Jim pulling off two of his little barely-noticeable fits of sneezing since he’d woken up. “You’ve got the same cold he’s got, and you’re making less sense! Since when do you stop for recriminations in the middle of a mess like this?”
Clearly about to go incandescent about the differences in his and Spock's contrasting states of health, that last simple observation stopped Kirk cold. He bit his lip, then closed his eyes and clenched his jaw and breathed, and seemed to bodily internalize the rebuke by pure force of will, on the spot. After a beat he sat back down between his ankles and put both hands over his face and scrubbed them away with an obvious mental reset.
This was one of the reasons why they let him command the starship, this instant ability to really, entirely reboot in a moment. “Thank you, Doctor.” His eyes when they reappeared were still on Spock, but not glaring. “Going forward, please inform me if I am falling into such a trap again.” He started to address Spock, again, then tightened his lips and dropped his eyes.
McCoy and Spock exchanged a look, and gave their captain time to think.
“We don’t know how many of my party or yours are going to be held complicit in my ‘crime’, or whether these Jirka, the priests, any Jirka, are going to start manufacturing charges – one execution may kick off a landslide if someone in enough power decides to simplify the situation. Bones, you’re our ace. Do you think you can find where they put our gear? If we could get in touch with Scotty–”
“I can try,” McCoy said without hesitation. “So far they just ignore me, whatever I do.”
“Have you given up the chance of solving this diplomatically, sir?” Spock asked.
“Our original mission has become secondary to the retrieval of my crew,” Kirk said sharply. “I’m now certain the Federation’s contacts here have not been negotiating in good faith. Right now, we get ours, we get out. We learn what we can along the way, that’s a… that’s a–."
His emphatic delivery was broken at the end when he didn’t quite manage to finish that last sentence before having to duck his face to the side, behind his forearm. The way the breeze whipped around the little chamber from the light slits, you couldn’t even hear him sneeze, but the jerks of his body told on him.
He barely sniffed before continuing, “-- a bonus. Even Gh'o'u'y'son lost my good faith when he lured you down here. It’s either in service to the ones believing this mysterious ‘they’ or it’s a puppet. Even without off-planet interference, we would need a roadmap to how the religious and civil castes overlap to even begin to sort this out, and we just don’t have it. We were sent with too little of the wrong information."
So they needed a beam out. And for that they needed communicators.
When it came to actually leaving the cell, McCoy remembered himself enough to protest that he was a doctor, not some kind of ninja, to go covertly skulking around the enemy’s fortress, before he left.
His superior officers knew that, more than resenting his task, it was the doctor in him not wanting to leave two sick, injured men bound and alone, but McCoy found enough to say about his own unfitness as a sneak-thief to make it convincing. Kirk and Spock just listened to the brief rant. The doctor sometimes had to make empty noise if for no other reason than to remind the universe that he was not quietly accepting his fate.
The fact was, if anyone could do this without losing their nerve, McCoy could, even with one busted arm. If anyone could walk through an enemy fortress and maintain his aplomb, it was him, their abrasive, steady-handed doctor. Under sudden threat even Spock took a beat longer to pull himself together. McCoy seemed set by nature to brazen out any abrupt attack by pure spinal reflex.
Whether it was a blade to his throat or a phaser to his head, McCoy met personal danger with instant defiance and a cool refusal to be intimidated. He wouldn’t give malice an ounce or second of respect, even when – especially when – it was holding his life in its hands.
It wasn’t the first time his command team had counted on him in such circumstances, but that didn’t mean that he had to like it, or let them think he did. They certainly didn't like it.
Finally he wound down and scanned his patients again, then gave Spock a shot of the slow-release drug he’d brought to keep the persistent fever down and Jim something for the full-body pain McCoy could see stiffening the captain’s movements -- the beating had been thorough if not brutal. He added an encouraging squeeze to the shoulder of each while he was doing it which, of course, seemed to bounce off both of them, in their very different ways.
At the very last, he asked, “Spock, that cold. What else do you need?”
“The cessation of solicitude. Time is passing, Doctor.”
Jim huffed a quiet laugh, which made him have to duck away to sneeze, and McCoy turned to point at him and say, “That’s what you get.”
And slipped out the door.
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Tbc