he’d been through it before— knew the condition by name, tracked his symptoms by the hour in the list he’d saved on his padd, for those moments his body screamed out, i’m dying. look what you did to yourself. they’ll know what happened, the lie of what you are. how jim kirk finally did himself in this time, and no one, not even his mother would be surprised.
he thought he’d pushed through the worst of it yesterday, when the anxiety got so bad he convinced himself just half way through a sixth period astrogation lecture that his heart was beating too hard and he couldn’t _breathe_ right. he wasn’t taking in enough air and had to keep yawning, leg bouncing. really, he took too much. left himself sitting there sweating in a state of self-induced hyperventilation. he’d tried to concentrate but his hand was weak and tingling around the stylus, so he set it down. bloodshot blue eyes strained for words in blurred lines of text. lieutenant seger’s voice drowned on, but he couldn’t understand him. he couldn’t concentrate, could be starring into someone’s eyes, his lab partner’s, as they talked to him, and barely scrap out enough content to make it seem like he was there at all. ( what’s wrong with you? you look sick , just a cold ). he even made it through the day, a few threads short of snapping and crashed hard when he finally hit the bed.
but now it was morning. he had roused with every intention of going to class, he’d even dragged his sweat slicked self into the shower. bones was already gone. he tried to wash his aches down the drain— one step splash of water over his face at a time, one step, one day at a time, but it was worse today. his prickling hands shook when they supported his weight against the wall of the shower cubicle. water rained over him, but his skin was too numb to feel it, even while his insides burned. today, he really was dying.
what’s bones gonna think? when he finds you dead in the shower, or in your bed? some memory you’re gonna leave behind, jim. just another sad story, another kid too smart for his own good, still dumb enough to get lost to drugs.
his heart was hammering. the shower wasn’t working. he grabbed up a towel and wrapped it around him. the fabric dropped from his hands almost as soon as the door to his bleak, messy room swished open, therein, he resigned himself to his bed again without so much as drying off,
his chest heaved, limbs coiled under a mound of blanket, too hot, too cold, and there he laid in a shivering stupor, this is it, and the many voices of his anxiety and remorse, all the while, all the day, the only company of his mind.
he drifted in and out until the door swished open again to end his solitude. it was night. jim started, curling himself upright just as leonard’s shadow blocked out the streetlights of his window in his cross of the room.
“ what—time is it ”, he asked, dismissive of the question, and disgruntled to feel fingers prodding his face. he knocked them away with a few swipes of his trembling hand. a snap, because he panicked, “ i’m — fine, bones, christ, just — let me — wake up, alright? i overslept. ”
the lies come so easy, he doesn’t even stop to think who he’s talking to.
bones’ heart pounded in his chest, rivaling even that of jim’s obviously overworked heart. the look of jim alone was enough to make the medical student worried --- but the friend was the one who was sick to his stomach. oh, sure, the student in him ( and even the doctor, who he’d been before coming to this god-forsaken place ) was quick to diagnose the blond laying in front of him, tick off the exam boxes that described withdrawal in perfect harmony.
oh, how easy it was to recall his professor’s lecture on the subject, how she’d been sure to mention how dangerous it was and the steps and precautions to take --- and how she never once mentioned how impossible any of it would be if you’re sitting in front of the one man who meant anything at all to you, watching him waste away in front of your eyes. that shit wasn’t in the goddamned textbook.
“ s’late. now just lie back, ‘fore you make yourself sick, ” was bones’ quiet reply, his voice lacking any sort of its usual sarcasm or dryness. it dripped with honey-dipped kindness, and a softness that only a handful of people ever had --- or ever would --- hear from him. a gentle, calloused hand made its way to jim’s shoulder and softly pressed, attempting to ease him back onto the mattress.
the words, the lies that fall from jim’s mouth then send a tightness to bones’ face. while hazel eyes remain soft in the glare from the streetlights outside, bones thins his lips in both anger and resentment that jim thought any of that would actually work on him.
“ i’m callin’ bullshit, jim, ” he said, pressing harder onto jim’s shoulder to try and make his point. he inhales, but the air gets stuck somewhere between words he wants to say and the words that actually come out --- which was far from the same. “ just --- just lemme help you, alright ?? jesus, jim, you gotta let me. you’re flirtin’ with goddamn death, here. ”