Author's Note: Several reviews for "The Days After" requested a sequel showing Bones' POV- ask, and you shall receive. (Please read that one first; this might be able to stand alone, but it definitely makes a lot more sense with the other story.) See AN at the top of the first fic for information about Christine Chapel and why her exclusion from the AOS universe is bullshit. Thanks for reading!

On his twenty-third birthday, Leonard McCoy took a shuttle from Atlanta to New York with a couple of his med school buddies. They'd planned to get drunk and stupid in the city; maybe get laid, end up hung-over and married in the middle of Chinatown. Stupid shit like that.

The shuttle crashed on the way, a system failure that the captain could never have predicted. They went down in flames, and Len was sure he was going to die. He thought in that moment about Jocelyn, how he wanted to marry her, maybe have a kid-Jesus, he was too fucking young to-

He didn't die, but he did break his arm in two places. He crawled out over the bodies of the two med school buddies that would never be doctors, beat down the flames covering the emergency exit doors, and tried to get the other survivors outside. There was an old wealthy man, shaken but secure in his first class seating, who'd scrambled over him to get to safety; a teenage girl with a backpack swung over her shoulder and a dead baby in her arms, looking like she'd died herself; a young couple that clung to each other and whispered reassurances in each other's ears; and a father with a little girl.

The little girl was dying, and Len was (almost) a doctor. So he tried.

It was his first field surgery, crouched down low in the smoke with nothing but his hands and a pocket knife to work with, one arm broken and aching and blood spewing over his hands in rivers. He worked by the light of the father's portable phone, held with one shaking hand as the man whispered reassurances to the little girl who screamed and screamed until she passed out, because there was no anesthetic and no equipment and no anything and Len worked calmly, methodically, picking out metal and binding up the gashes in her skin-

That was what it felt like, bringing Jim Kirk back to life.

He'd gone in blind and armed only with the knowledge that a tribble, one of the most simplistic animals in the galaxy, had miraculously started breathing when he'd pumped it full of that bastard's blood. He had nothing, nothing at all, to suggest that he could bring Jim back; there was no precedent, no research except his own scribbled findings. He was working again in the dark with one arm broken, fighting against every rule and statistic in the book for the life of someone who should never have died.

But that little girl had lived. And so Jim would live too.

And when Jim had taken his first breath, some four hours after taking his last, Len had fallen to his knees and wept like a child.

He'd watched the security vid of Jim dying probably a hundred times. In those awful weeks before the kid opened his eyes again, it was all he could do to keep himself sane. It was morbid and horrible and probably spoke volumes about his psychological condition, but watching the light leave Jim's eyes reminded him just how close they had come- and how thankful he should be that Jim was even breathing.

Breathing wasn't living though, and as Jim struggled back to consciousness Len feared brain damage with every fiber of his being. Spock was breathing down his neck, but Len couldn't bring himself to snap at him. Anyone with two eyes could tell that Spock was in no fucking shape to deal with all the shit he was already being handed by the admiralty. He kept the XO informed and things between them stayed remarkably civil; they were both worried, and both too tired to argue.

When Jim woke up, cracking bad jokes and rolling his eyes when Spock took them literally, Len did all the proper tests and took blood and glared at his charts and made a general fuss. But he knew that his best friend was going to be okay. And when Jim fell asleep again that first day, snoring blissfully under the bright Sickbay lights, Len had put a hand on Spock's shoulder and leaned on him, letting the exhaustion finally take over. It only surprised him a little when Spock leaned back.

"It feels like a miracle," he'd said, and Spock had looked at him with unreadable dark eyes.

"There are no such things," he'd replied, with just the trace of a smile. "You brought him back, Doctor. Thank you."

Things had sort of…settled, after that. The horror of Jim's death stayed confined to the few hours that Len slept in the dreams that haunted him at night. He kept a tight watch over Jim during daylight, tight enough that he knew Jim was chafing. But he couldn't bring himself to back off.

So when Jim flatlined in the middle of his shift nearly two weeks after he'd woken up, Len thought for a moment that it was a product of his mind-that he'd finally cracked and was blending his nightmares into reality. And then everything around him erupted into chaos, and he realized:

Jim was dead. Again.

His vision went white and he was back on that shuttle, watching the little girl bleed out over his fucking useless hands, stuck in the dark and listening to the father sob while his child died because Len was failing-

The alarms brought him back, and he ran.

He burst into Jim's room on the warpath, screaming orders and shoving through the crowd at Jim's bedside to get to the front. There was fucking blood all over the kid's face, of all fucking things, and he had no idea what that meant but Jim's heart had stopped so something was wrong and he needed to fix it because he was his doctor and he had to fix it-

"Bones!"

He looked.

Jim's eyes were wide and clear, perfectly focused on his face; there was none of the glassy, lifeless look from the radiation chamber. He was alive. He was…

"…I'm okay," the kid was saying. Len stared.

"You…" he said, trying to make sense of things. Jim was dead. His heart had stopped. Jim-

"Sorry. I, uh, was trying to get out of bed, and I guess I pulled something loose. No big deal, right? I'm okay."

Was perfectly fucking healthy.

Anger hit like a freight train. Len chucked his tricorder at the floor and staggered away, breathing like it was his lungs that had been irradiated. That stupid fucking-

He took a breath a opened his eyes, said something vague along the lines of "false alarm," but none of his staff moved. He snarled at them, and that got them going, but many cast worried glances back in his direction. He couldn't blame them; he yelled, sure, but he never really lost control on duty. Not like that.

He leaned against the wall and tried to breathe, to regain a little of his self-control. But then Jim said something stupid, accompanied by a little laugh, and it was that laugh that broke him. He clenched his fists and looked up, trying to resist the urge to punch the kid in his stupid fucking face.

Did he not get it? Did he not understand just how fucking close they had come? How Len had pulled back the cover of a body bag and looked into that too-young face and mourned, mourned Jim's laughter and genius and warmth and the way he'd shoved himself into Len's life without permission and given him something worth living for after he'd lost everything, and with losing Jim he was losing it all over again-

He tasted salt and realized he was crying.

"Bones…"

He fled.

Chris found him three hours later, curled up on the couch in his office and rewatching the vid. A bottle of whiskey was in his hand, and he took careless, sloppy gulps as he watched.

"You know the Captain worries about your drinking," she said quietly, shutting the door behind her and settling in the chair at his desk. "Hell, I worry about your drinking."

"Yeah? Well I worry about that fucking idiot dying from complications that we don't understand. So."

"Leonard-"

"Tell me, Chris. You ever watched a hero die?"

"I…" she stared at him, looking a little sick. "No. What are you…?"

"It's a funny thing to see," Len said, watching as the tiny Jim on his viewscreen raised a shaking hand to the glass. Spock mirrored him and then gasped as Jim's hand dropped, lifeless, to the floor. "Like watching a star get blown out, easy as a candle. Poof." He giggled and dropped the bottle. It cracked on the floor, whiskey spilling out in little rivers: like the blood of the girl who probably should have died.

Spock screamed and the vid cut out, fading to black before replaying from the beginning. He shut it off and squinted up at his Head Nurse. Christine was watching him with sad eyes.

"You're drunk, Len," she said gently.

"…Yeah."

"You should go off duty."

"Can't. Got a patient who likes to fall out of bed."

"Go to sleep."

"I fucking can't, Chris, okay?"

"I could order you to rest."

"I'm your boss."

"You're also pretty damn compromised right now, in more ways than one. Len…you do know he's okay?"

Len laughed bitterly, swirling his fingers through the whiskey on the floor. "He's not though, is he? Can't even stand up. Took everything out of him, and next time, who knows?"

Christine stayed silent. Len sliced his hand on one of the pieces of the bottle, and hissed when the alcohol burned the cut. He stared at the welling blood in fascination.

"There'll come a day when I won't be able to bring him back."

Christine disappeared from his sight for a moment, only to reappear with a soft cloth and a regenerator. She knelt in front of him and gently wiped his hand clean, squeezing to put pressure on the wound.

"Maybe," she agreed softly. "But that's the service, isn't it? That's what we signed up for."

"Jim didn't sign up to die," Len said. He watched as she started up the instrument and his skin knitted together, leaving behind nothing but a small white scar. "Jim didn't sign up like the rest of us; he wasn't broken and bitter because he had nowhere else to go, or young and bright-eyed, ready to see the stars. Jim signed up to prove something. And whatever it is he has to prove-to himself, to the admirals, to his fucking dead father- it's gonna get him killed."

"Then he'll die," she said simply. "And we'll mourn him. But until then, he's still here. And you need to be here, too."

She finished with his hand in silence, and he listened to the muffled sounds of medical staff on the floor beneath him. Besides that, it was quiet. It was weird-Len would have never thought, even after a year in space, that he would miss the sound of the Enterprise's engines humming through the walls.

"…I'll stop drinking," he said finally, and Chris squeezed his hand in silent thanks. "But I can't sleep. Not now."

"Okay," she said. "I'll take that. By the way, you are cleaning that up."

"Chris," he whined.

"Nope. I'm a nurse, not a maid," she quipped. He scowled at her.

"That's my line," he mumbled, and she grinned, standing up and setting the regenerator back on its shelf. Her hand rested on his arm for a moment in silent support, and he covered it with his own.

She smiled and began to walk towards the door. "Get that cleaned up, and get sober. There's a hangover remedy on your desk for when your brain's trying to crawl out of your ears later."

"I hate you."

"Night, boss." With that, she blew him a kiss and sauntered out the door. He groaned and buried his face in the cushion, already sensing the beginnings of a monster headache.

Hell. These crazy kids were gonna kill him.

Six hours later, Len was sober(ish) and working at his desk when his door swished open. He recognized the light, precise footsteps instantly.

"I suppose Chris sent you in here to order me off duty?" he said, not looking up from his work.

"No," said Spock. He sat down in the chair across from Len's desk and turned on a PADD, silently beginning to work. Len waited.

After a few minutes, it seemed that Spock really didn't have anything to say.

"All right," he said, and turned back to his own PADD, starting on the piles of paperwork that came with hiding the death of your superior officer.

He and the rest of the crew had agreed to keep things quiet; those few that knew for sure that the Captain had been dead were too loyal to say anything against Spock's testimony.

The official story was this: Captain Kirk had acted heroically to save his crew in a crisis and been horribly weakened by his time in the warp core chamber. He'd been saved by their magnificent CMO, who'd pulled a mystery cure out of his ass and saved Kirk just in the nick of time. No magic blood. No fucking body bags.

Nobody knew about Khan's part in the process except the bridge crew and a select few of his medical staff. If Len had his way, no one would ever know. He didn't know how Jim was taking it- the kid had been pretty quiet about the accident, insisting he didn't remember and blowing it off, making jokes and generally being an ass. It was his coping method; Len knew that well enough. Didn't make it any less irritating.

But Jim wasn't the only one he was worried about. He hadn't forgotten the other side of that conversation through the glass, and Spock looked about ready to drop.

He hadn't seen hide or shiny hair of the Vulcan since that first day Jim had woken up, until now. He knew he'd visited- he'd seen the chessboard tucked in the corner of Jim's room, and only Spock could give Jim any kind of challenge at the game- but they'd never crossed paths. Spock was constantly busy, running between meetings with admirals and the press and generally doing damage control. He was acting the part of Captain and First Officer at once, trying to keep the pressure off Jim during his recovery, and as much as Len approved of keeping Jim out of the action for the time being he knew their XO was stretched past his breaking point.

Len set his PADD down, and waited for Spock to look up.

"Are you all right?" he asked bluntly. "And don't give me any bullshit."

Spock didn't say anything, but the stylus he was holding snapped in half. They both stared at it.

"Okay," said Len. "Okay."

They sat in an oddly comfortable silence for a while, not working, just staring at Len's desk and trying to breathe.

"He has no idea, does he?" Len asked finally. "How much he fucked us all up."

"…No," said Spock. "I do not believe he does."

"Sometimes I just wanna strangle the little prick," Len admitted, wondering if that amounted to mutiny. Hell, was Jim even their Captain anymore?

"I did," Spock offered. Len glanced up sharply. Spock's lips were twitching in amusement. "Once. It was not as satisfying as I had hoped."

Oh. He meant-

He started laughing.

He laughed for a solid thirty seconds, clutching his stomach with tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. And he wasn't the only one- he could've sworn Spock was smiling.

"We are such a fucking mess," he gasped when he was finished. "We are just all kinds of fucked up. Jesus. Jesus."

"I concur," said Spock sagely, and Len grinned.

"What the hell," he said, and reached under his desk, pulling out two glasses. He went to the replicator and called, "You want anything?"

"I do not drink on duty, Doctor," Spock said pointedly.

And that was probably a dig, but Len was too amused and too fucking tired to respond.

"Relax, hobgoblin. Just water for me."

"Water?" Spock asked, raising an eyebrow. Len grimaced.

"Yep. I'm too hungover to ever wanna get drunk again."

"Then I will take one as well."

Len filled them both up and collapsed back in his chair, sliding one glass across the table. Spock took it, and Len raised his in a toast.

"To Jim Kirk," he said, "and his fucking hero complex. May we two suckers always be around to pull his ass out of the fire."

They clinked glasses, and Len felt oddly at peace.

He checked up on Jim two days later, after he'd given the kid some time to sweat it out (because the idiot had fucking scared the shit out of him, so he was allowed to be pissed for a while.) He waited outside his room, definitely not stalling, just…preparing. After a while a nurse (Andrews? Andrews.) came out of Jim's room and gave him a wary look.

"He's awake," Andrews said. "Want me to take the readings?"

Len bristled. "What the hell do you think I am, a middle-school girl? I'm not avoidin' my own damn patient."

Andrews smiled tolerantly. "Of course not, sir. Good luck." He strolled away, casting a knowing glance over his shoulder. Len scowled.

Cheeky nurses. Chris had them all trained to torment him, he was sure.

Len took a breath, and unlocked the door. It swished open, revealing a very awake Jim Kirk who stared at him with guilty eyes. Len sighed, and stepped through the doorway, letting the door slide shut behind him.

Hopefully, between the two of them, they'd set things right.

AN: Sorry that was shorter- I had a lot of problems with this one. Let me know what you thought!