Work Text:
Jim goes with him to L.A. for the memorial.
He meets Rian’s sister, Bevin, who shared Rian’s height and beautiful brown eyes, but who is gently curved where Rian was lean, and whose curls are cropped short. Bevin manages a smile and says, “You’re the other doctor. She told me so much about you.”
Their mother is tiny, but has the eyes; their father is tall and angular, with a carpenter’s callused hands.
Rian’s ex-husband makes the mistake of approaching McCoy after the service. “I’m Charles,” he says. “God, I’ll miss her.”
McCoy breaks his nose with the first punch.
He forgot that the douchebag was a lawyer.
In a dramatic reversal of the usual scenario, Jim comes to bail McCoy out. Bevin’s waiting in the lobby: It turns out she drove Jim over.
“Well,” she says, not sounding especially perturbed, “my mother’s horrified.”
“Oh God,” McCoy says, “I’m so sorry. That was just…Christ, I can’t believe I did that.”
Bevin continues, “But my dad just wishes he’d done it himself. Besides, we’re Irish. This is nothing. Did Rian ever tell you about the Thanksgiving when Uncle Timmy and Uncle Richie got in a knife fight on the front lawn?”
McCoy and Jim take a shuttle back that night.
The empty rooms are like missing teeth, and McCoy keeps his gaze straight ahead as he and Jim walk. At their suite, McCoy doesn’t even bother taking his jacket off before unlocking his desk drawer and finding the bourbon. He makes himself comfortable on the beat-to-hell couch, uncaps the bottle, and drinks straight from it.
Jim settles at the other end, his feet brushing McCoy’s knees. McCoy hands him the bourbon. Jim drinks, returns the bottle, and says, “You loved her.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” McCoy says.
For once, Jim’s quiet.
No time for finesse: There’s little more she can do besides pump them full of sedatives, throw them into escape pods, and pray they survive. God, engineers—the captain may go down with the ship, but the engineering crew will be right there with him.
There’s a body pinned beneath what look like kilos upon kilos of metal, sharp edges—whoever it is can’t be alive, and yet the tricorder says that she is. Rian doesn’t think she’s strong enough to move all that metal—it turns out she is.
Green skin, red hair—Jim’s friend. She knows this girl.
Another hit. She’s thrown into a bulkhead—she covers her head with her arms before the ceiling panel falls. It’s burning; she screams and pushes it off. Ah, shit, femur fractured or broken—well, that’s why she has the hypos. She injects herself. The burns on her hands are bad—electrical.
She’s almost to the bridge when they’re hit again. The ship is disintegrating; more panels come down—burning too, and the anesthetic isn’t enough anymore.
Foam. Cool, light.
It’s her CMO, with a fire extinguisher. He picks her up like she’s a child and carries her to the transporter.
Nothing hurts, though she’s sure everything should. She’s alive, though she shouldn’t be.
“You are welcome on Nuufesot,” a voice says inside her head, and Rian wants to sit up and shout for somebody—anybody—but she can’t move. “Do not fear. You arrived at the next world’s threshold, and you have not recovered. When you are stronger, we will attempt to contact your people.”
She wants to open her eyes and see who’s speaking—thinking—whatever, but she can’t. An image appears in her mind: a gaseous…being.
She decides to trust it. She has no other choice. She sleeps.
McCoy wants nothing but to sit on his mother’s porch and play cat’s cradle with Joanna for the next ten years or so, but she glares at him when he doesn’t immediately come inside and answer the comm.
“Alright, Mama, alright,” he sighs. Joanna follows him into the living room, because her feelings on letting him out of her sight seem to match his about her.
It’s Bevin Forestal. Her eyes are red, her face drawn with exhaustion. He’s about to ask whether she’s OK, but she cuts him off. “You need to come to San Francisco,” she says. “Now.”
He’s able to talk Joanna into staying with Christine, which is a damn good thing, because once he’s checked Rian over and read her chart and interrogated her treatment team, he sits down beside her biobed and sobs. He can’t stop.
The person who gets past the locked door and puts a hand on his shoulder is, of course, Jim. McCoy tries to shove him away, but that’s as successful as it ever is.
Jim rubs circles into his back until McCoy is able to get himself together. Then they stay there, silent, and McCoy takes Rian’s warm, living hand.
Bevin fills her in on everything she missed.
Though she's much recovered, it still hurts to laugh. Rian reins it in and looks at Leonard, who’s red-faced and staring at the opposite wall. “You punched my ex-husband at my funeral?”
“After what he did…” Leonard mutters.
“I guess that’s not really so bad,” Rian concedes. “Did I ever tell you about the Thanksgiving when Uncle Timmy and Uncle Richie got in a knife fight?”
From the doorway, Jim laughs, bright and clear. It’s the kind of laugh you can’t help joining—it’s worth it, even if it hurts a little.
Somebody has tidied and watered the plants, but otherwise Rian’s apartment is as she left it. She moves through it slowly, but speed will return.
On the weekend, Leonard visits. In bed Sunday night, hours before his shuttle back to Georgia, he whispers into her hair in the quiet dark, “Don’t scare me like that again. I— I can’t— I thought you were dead, Rian. Please.”
Rian remembers what Bevin said about when he came to the hospital the first time, before she was awake. She turns in his arms, kisses his eyelids, and tells him, “I love you, too.”