Title: Outside 1/?
Author: Yami no Kaiba
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Rating: G
Chracter/Pairing: McCoy, Kirk/Spock
Length: 740 words

Summary: McCoy notices, even if they don't.
Disclaimers: I do not own the characters or the concepts of Star Trek in any of its forms.
Warning: I have no clue where this is going, besides vague hopes of an OT3, and thus I’m going to try to end each chapter in a way that you’ll be vaguely satisfied if it ends there.

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Leonard hates this ship, and all the empty space around it. While he might have told Jim when they met that it was because all space is death and disease, it's not that at all.

Jim thinks he went into space because the divorce with his wife drove him to it, but Leonard knows that's only a small part. Only someone completely out of their mind would be stupid enough – or desperate enough, but he seriously doesn't want to wallow in those feelings again – that, despite having a known case of aviophobia, would sign their name on a doted line that guaranteed they would be on a shuttle craft for at least twice a month for the next ten years – if he survived that long, and he's starting to have serious doubts about that.

Leonard had signed up for the 'Fleet because he'd wanted to get as far away as physically and mentally possible from the shattered remains of his life. He'd looked up one night to a clear moonlit sky, drunk off his ass on mixed whisky shots in some back alley, where the hole-in-the-wall pub he'd been patroning had tossed him when they'd closed down for the night.

He'd looked up, seen all that infinite darkness and emptiness. He'd taken a shot from his hip-flask, and thought, That's where I belong. Where everything that happens up there doesn't fucking matter to the average Joe or Bob down here. Where when love happens to a man, it doesn't God damn matter because it'll happen between two individuals of differing species that aren't even fucking compatible – literally – and it would be such a new and tentative connection that it wouldn't even hurt much when the two stopped trying and went their separate ways.

So Leonard had signed the dotted line, got on a shuttle craft, and years later here he was, on this blasted ship getting a front row seat to the greatest love drama since Romeo and Juliet – only better because it didn't have that ironically tragic ending as of yet.

There were days when he just wanted to take Jim by the shoulders and shake some God damned realization into the cocky little pup. Days he just wanted to deck that smug hobgoblin for daring to give those speculative looks, and that relieved relaxing of his shoulders whenever it was announced that Jim was going to be okay.

Just like Spock's doing right now as Leonard gives the news, Jim unconscious on the bio-bed between them.

Leonard had come up to space to get away from love, and somehow managed to land himself the position of third wheel. He hates it more than he hates the damned ship, the empty darkness outside the hull that a part of him is scared silly about.

And while he's a bit ashamed to say he hates what's between them, he's not the least bit ashamed to say why he hates it.

Seeing it between them makes him ache for the time before that back alley, long before the divorce, when he'd had love like that. Where every smile on Jocelyn's face had made him content, when fingers would card through his hair and against his scalp as those honey-brown eyes would just look at him as if he was the center of the world.

So in essence he hates the pull between Jim and Spock because he's a jealous, broken old man. And that realization, right there, is why he's so determined to get the fuck out of their way when the chips go down. Because if there's one thing he never wanted to be, it was his Grandpa.

So he politely ignores how Spock sits down in the chair beside the bed in lieu of chasing the pointy eared bastard out the door. Instead he goes about checking Jim's chart on a PADD before putting it back in its slot. He gives a nod of his head to his replacement on the next shift, and walks out the door without a backwards glance.

He knows he can trust them to keep each other alive. They'll need his help every now and then to patch them back up, but other than that he's not needed here.

At one point years ago, that's exactly the way he wanted it.

And if he's pissed at them for making him want something more... Well. That's something he knows damn well to keep to himself.

--TBC.