Chapter Text
Stardate 2265
He was dreaming again.
Leonard didn’t think that he would be the type to get smaller as he got older, but there he was, unmistakable in his usual spot next to Jim. He quite liked that short sleeved uniform. To his right, Spock looked like he had barely aged a day, and Jim's hair was dark and decidedly unfashionable. He looked healthy, though. Good.
“Back to the Sovanuim system, eh Bones?”
Jesus, he still calls me Bones twenty years from now, he thought with a surge of amusement.
His old self grinned. “Are you going to keep your hands to yourself this time, Jim? I hope for your sake that the Ambassador has retired.”
“I find it ironic that you chide the Captain’s behavior when you were too inebriated to find your way back to the ship,” Spock snarked. “I recall having to carry you part of the way.”
Jim barked out a laugh, and Leonard noticed that his hair was a little darker than it used to be. Than it is now, he corrected.
His older self glared. He recognized that glare. He saw it in the refection of the sickbay’s walls every time he felt like he wanted to stick a hypo in the other man just for the fun of it. He was rather gratified to see that he hadn’t lost his penchant for argumentation.
“Is that right, Spock? Was that before or after you got smashed on the chocolate bar?”
“Before the group of male dignitaries took an interest in you, I believe.”
“You make it sound like I was the only one they took an interest in, hobgoblin!”
“Boys,” Jim interrupted with a chuckle. “We will absolutely not be touching any of their fantastic alcohol this time, are we in agreement?”
Bones put a hand on the back of the Captain’s chair. “Or their chocolate,” he said.
“Or their chocolate.”
There was a period of silence before Jim ordered the bridge crew to approach at warp 3. Leonard took a look at Sulu, who wore a wide grin, and Chekov, who looked just as determined as he usually did. Uhura smiled at Scotty in the corner. Some people just got more beautiful as they aged, and she was one of them.
“Can we take some back with us, though? Just a bottle or two?” his counterpart asked, and Spock looked like he wanted to hit him.
The morning after the latest strange dream, he replicated a rather disappointing banana and sat next to Jim. It had been so strange. He'd never been much of lucid dreamer and usually he forgot everything minutes after he woke up. Not this time. Their whole conversation on that bridge was as clear as day. Leonard had a bad feeling about this. He looked at Jim who had replicated himself a second coffee.
“Have you heard of the Sovanium system, space child?” he asked through a bite of chalky fake fruit.
Young Jim stared at him with one of his perfect eyebrows quirked. “The what, Bones?”
“Termanus. In the Sovanium system.”
“I haven’t. In fact, I’ve never heard of the Sovanium system at all. Are you alright?” he asked, as if Leonard was a child.
He winced and cursed himself. It was a dream. He had just been having a disturbingly detailed reoccurring dream, none of it was real. Or maybe the Sovanium system isn’t a part of Starfleet yet, the less logical part of his brain supplied.
“Hey, Spock,” Jim shouted.
The Vulcan set down his spoon from across the cafeteria.
“Jim, don’t,” Leonard mumbled pitifully.
“Ever heard of the Sovanium system?” his voice boomed. An ensign frowned and scooted farther away.
Spock shook his head with the patented humans are ridiculous face. Leonard tried really hard not to flush red. He was unsuccessful.
Jim frowned at him, smelling like his aftershave and the brown sugar from his oatmeal. “Maybe you should get more sleep.”
“Probably,” he admitted.
Three nights and two psychic-dreams later, and he wasn’t sure he had gotten any sleep at all. It was getting ridiculous. He shut his eyes for thirty seconds and he was in the sickbay watching himself stand over Spock’s dad with tubes of green blood pumping from a box. Then it was gone, just like that. Life went on, though, and so did his work hours.
A Vulcan and a Swordsman walked into the sickbay for their physicals. It sounded like a bar joke, honestly, and he told Sulu so as he prodded him with a tricorder. This Sulu was shorter, he noted offhandedly.
“You're low on iron. If you're not going to eat a steak, you can have a pill instead. One a day,” he instructed and set a box of tiny capsules on the counter.
“Is that all, doctor? No parasites? No missing limbs?”
“This is plenty serious enough. I can’t send you home to Ben all dried up and withered away, now, can I?”
He and Sulu had recently been getting together over cards and talking about their kids. It was disgustingly embarrassing, but he liked to have someone around that he could worry loudly with. They planned to get their girls together one day when Sulu’s was a little bit older, just so they had someone who understood, too.
“You look beat,” Sulu said. “Are you sick?”
“Who’s giving who the examination, now? I’m fine. You get back to the bridge.”
He gave Sulu (who didn’t seem entirely convinced) a vaccination and patted him on the shoulder.
“Alright, the Impaler you’re up.”
Spock was playing on his Padd in the corner. He looked up incredulously. “Are you referring to me?”
“Who else?”
“I’m glad to see that your creative capacity has increased, Doctor, although I do not believe it is relevant or helpful to your current duties. Also, you will find that as a Vulcan’s internal temperature is higher than that of humans, I am the one who least resembles the entity portrayed in Dracula.”
“I wouldn't say that. You've got the ears.” He motioned to the sickbed. “And I’ll have you know that creativity is absolutely necessary to my profession. That’s way things get discovered, you know, by thinking outside the bounds of current accepted medical practice. Not that you would understand that. Open your mouth.” He peeked inside. Two less molars than humans, but nothing abnormal. “Say ‘ah’.”
Spock just glared.
“No? Fine.” The tricorder whirred about Spock’s person.
“Vulcans value creativity as well, Doctor,” Spock said.
“Do they?” he asked, disinfecting the area for a blood sample.
“Before…Nero, many devoted their lives to the pursuit of art and music.” His voice didn’t change, but Leonard felt the muscles in his hand clench.
“They still will after everything is settled, you know,” he said.
“Indeed.”
He set the tube of green in a slot and plugged in the time. “It looks like you’re due for your annuals, so three hypos for you today, sorry.”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
“What, that I’m sorry? I’m wounded, Spock.”
He slipped the solution into the hypo administrator with a click.
“Here’s for the human shit that’s going to be going around in a couple of weeks, just in case,” hiss, “autoimmune booster,” hiss, “and your own personalized intergalactic vaccination cocktail. Healthy as a horse. Tu muhl hafau. Off you go.”
Spock gaped. Mouth open, eyes wide, and all.
“What?”
“When have you been studying Vulcan?”
“I didn’t…” Oh. Was that vulcan? He certainly hadn’t been studying it. In fact, he didn’t know any Vulcan at all. He had only heard it once in a…
In a dream.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
“Doctor, you—”
“Well, I’m pretty busy, got a couple other things to do, why don’t you go hound Jim for something or other? Great. Stop crowding the sickbay,” he called after Spock, who looked openly bewildered.
He sat down quickly. Was it mental illness? He didn’t think so. Was it some sort of weird psychic phenomenon? Probably. Damn. At least he could treat psychosis.
“Hi, Jim,” he said to the mirror. “I just wanted you to know, I’m having psychic flashes to an indeterminate point in time and space where we’re really chummy. And I’m a better doctor than I am now. And Spock sometimes smiles, and you’re just as in love with the enterprise as you always were. It’s really nice, but distressing, and I think I might be going crazy.”
As crazy as I felt when Spock’s evil twin invaded my head, he tried not to think.
There was a bottle of something obscenely green that he got from a local on shore leave once. It was still in his cabinet because even he had limits on what exactly kinds of alcohol he put into his body, but today was the day for risks, as it so happened. He grabbed it by the square neck and stalked out of his room, blushing furiously as he passed Spock’s door. The ship was about as far from quiet as it could get, being a Saturday night. The weekend crew was switching over, so the hallways were crowded. Their voices hurt his skull behind his right temple. He shoved at Jim’s door, pushing the button repeatedly.
“Jesus, hold on!”
There was a thump and Jim opened the door wearing his command shirt and very thin, tight black undershorts that McCoy was trying very hard not to look at.
“It’s eight at night, why do you look like you just woke up?” he asked, looking behind Jim.
“Oh, I wasn’t asleep,” the captain chuckled.
He let loose the Glare™.
“She just left,” Jim assured him.
Leonard rolled his eyes and pushed past, avoiding the bed at all costs. He slumped into a chair.
“Cups?” he asked.
Jim didn’t say anything as he grabbed a couple of glasses from a corner. His eyebrow was quirked in concern and the smile looked a little bit forced. If Jim wasn’t cracking jokes, he really must look bad.
“This isn't going to sound good, Jim.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve looked over the DSM 9 about twenty times and I don’t fit any of the criteria for schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders, not that I would be able to tell if I had one, but my diet is regular and I haven’t—okay.” He took a breath. “Jim? I think I’ve been transporting to another dimension.”
Jim’s eyebrows lifted towards the sky. He put down the glass of Green Stuff that he hadn’t really touched. Leonard hadn’t even tried a sip of his, as uncharacteristic as that was.
“I’ve noticed that you have been a little bit off,” he said.
Leonard knew that he was getting a mirror of his own therapist look, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
“It usually happens when I’m asleep. It feels like a serious anesthetic, like I’m starting to go blurry, and then it changes. I saw us, Jim.”
Something must have showed on his face, because Jim grasped his upper arm. “Tell me, Bones.”
He lifted the green to his lips and felt a burn travel down his chest. It was good. Citrusy. He twisted it in his hands and watched his fingerprints mar the dust of perspiration on the glass.
“I was on the bridge. Standing behind you, like...you know. My usual spot. It wasn’t me, though. I was standing in the doorway watching. Spock was looking through his little blue box, Uhura was smiling at Scotty, and damn, Jim. I could count the wrinkles on her face. I’ve never had a dream that detailed before. Then Spock walked over to us, and it was him, Jim. The old Spock. Younger, yeah, but it was definitely him. Definitely our Spock, too. And they just talked.”
“That’s it?” Jim asked, now fully attentive to his drink. “Just talked?”
He nodded. “The first time, yeah.”
“Wait, there were more times?”
Leonard blushed. “It gets worse.”
“Oh god, it gets worse?” Jim was smirking.
“I spoke to Spock in Vulcan today, Jim. Look me in the eye and tell me that I would ever willingly learn Vulcan.”
“He may have mentioned something of the sort,” Jim said, artistically punctuating his words with a sip of green.
“What did he say?”
“He said that you looked like shit and that he thought you might fall over at the exam table. And then you pulled some Vulcan out of your ass and sent him scrambling,” he said.
Leonard ran his hand over the table. He wished it was wood so he could pick at it. “Said all that, did he?”
“I may be paraphrasing.”
Leonard studied the cuticle of his thumb. “What do I do?” he asked quietly.
“What would you do? If it were me.”
“Monitor your vitals day and night after a thorough psych scan,” he said without hesitation.
Jim nodded approvingly. “Well, then. I could watch over you as you sleep, if you like.”
He glared.
“Alright, alright! Get to it if you don’t want my help!”