PROMPT:

McCoy and Kirk are interns.

McCoy works his butt off, angsts over every patient he loses, is stressed and missing out on sleep/time with his kid.

And then there's Jim. Who has worked his way through all the nurses and most of the hospital board, is disgustingly cheerful, never seems to need to study, and manages to look sexy as hell on no sleep and wearing puke stained scrubs (not that McCoy is attracted to him or anything.)

McCoy loathes Kirk. MCoy is convinced that it's only a matter of time before the smug little bastard screws up big and he's going to be there when it happens, possibly pointing and laughing. And then it does and McCoy ends up comforting him instead.

"C'mon!" Kirk's voice is ragged by this point and the few nurses standing around to help have drawn back, expressions pinched. Jim ignores them completely and presses his fingers into the man's wrist even as he watches the heart monitor screech in denial.

"Jim—" Chapel opens her mouth, the two pads of the defibrillator still in her hands.

Jim doesn't seem to hear her as he drops the man's wrist and steps away from the bed. "George Winston, time of death 2:40 am," he says and then is gone, out of the ER and away from sight.

*

Under normal circumstances, McCoy tries not to hate his fellow intern. It's hard to be in residency at an ER as active as the San Francisco city hospital and he gets that, he really understands. He should know, seeing as he is one, too. Hating Jim Kirk is too easy, though, for McCoy not to.

Everything about the man screamed 'I get through life with my dick.' Not only was Kirk pretty but he was charming and he made the nurses swoon and the doctors' heads turn to watch him walk down the hall. It was beyond humiliating to McCoy that anyone so blatantly shameless (and while McCoy wished stupid fell into that list, it wasn't true because even if he was cheating on the tests he always passed, Jim was still smart enough to get away with it) had gotten this far in med school.

So, McCoy hated him because it was easy. Every time a nearby nurse would stop and stare at Jim, McCoy would take it upon himself to help them refocus. It made him everything but popular around the hospital but he could careless because his efforts did get Jim less and less attention.

Janice, a fellow intern, had been in the process of giving McCoy a patient's chart when her eyes drifted over his shoulder. An unmistakable throaty laugh echoed down the hall and Leonard's expression turned sour.

"Ms. Rand," McCoy snapped as he took the chart from Janice's hands with a bit more force than was strictly necessary. The blonde woman blinked in surprise, her cheeks reddening.

"Sorry, McCoy," she breathed before fleeing down the hall.

"I don't think you have any right to behave this way, Len," Chapel commented as they watched Janice walk away. She was the only nurse in the entire hospital who had put it upon herself to be friends with McCoy. He had stopped wondering why a while ago and had just accepted it as a fact of life. She was the only nurse he held any real respect for because she, while admitting to finding Kirk attractive, also did not approve of gawking at him (blatantly, anyway). "Have you ever even spoken to him?" It didn't stop her from disapproving of his methods, though.

"Don't need to, Chris," he mumbled as he looked over the chart and tried to read through Rand's notes. Some people took the whole doctor's handwriting thing too literally. McCoy always made sure that no matter how quickly he had to write out his orders that they were always readable. "This hospital is already enough like a damn episode of Grey's Anatomy." He wrote down something beside Rand's comments before handing the chart off to Chapel. "Did I ever mention how much I hate that show?"

"Explicitly."

It was true, though, what Chapel said. He really hadn't ever had two words spoken between him and Kirk. The first was "Hi" which had come from Kirk on his first day of residency during lunch, when he had tried to sit at his table, and McCoy's reply of "No" made two. Sometimes, they shared looks. Kirk would stare down the hall and meet McCoy's eyes with an expression of defiance but it never went beyond that. McCoy was sure that if not for the multiple narrow escapes he had managed, Kirk would have cornered him long ago and tried to have "words" with him.

Their utter lack of communication could also be put to circumstances beyond the fact that McCoy just didn't want to speak to Kirk. Where they were assigned for residency played a big role, too. Kirk was in the pediatrics department and McCoy, as always, was in ER. This fact only served to further fuel McCoy's hate.

Normal first time interns were always placed in the ER, without exception. Jim was somehow an exception. Instead of being placed immediately into ER like McCoy, Rand, M'Benga and other fellow interns who had dreams of being elsewhere but were firmly stuck in the reality of medschool residency, Kirk had asked to be placed elsewhere. He had literally gone to the head of pediatrics and asked the man. And somehow, the little prick had gotten it. He had been given special treatment to go outside the normal curriculum and get what he wanted. McCoy hated him all the more. Then, even after their rotations had switched, Jim still managed to avoid the ER entirely.

McCoy was in his senior year of medschool and thusly could choose to stay in the ER strictly. He had already gone through the first years of internship just as Kirk and Rand were but, despite his own aptitude towards medicine, still didn't get to choose where he interned. How M'Benga and Rand could just smile and accept this because Kirk looked pretty while he got special treatment completely baffled McCoy.

The way that their vow of silence was broken happened in a way McCoy had never seen coming. As far as hours went, he was one of those crazies you heard rumors about who worked ninety hours a week. After a forced break, Dr. Puri had used the word "vacay" and that was all the excuse McCoy needed to get away for a few days, he returned to find Kirk had finally made it to the ER rotation. Half of McCoy was vindictively glad and the other half was pissed because now he actually had to work with Kirk. Being resentful from a distance and three wards is easy but now that his relationship with the man will be under scrutiny he would forced to be civil.