#i can't believe a stupid joke about a tattoo led me to this angst pile

[trek-tracks]

Once, during med school, after passing a tough exam, Bones wandered drunkenly out of the party his classmates were throwing at the bar, and into the nearby tattoo parlor. Now, he’d asked the tattoo artist to tattoo "Hippocrates" on his back, but Leonard’s accent gets thicker and less intelligible when he drinks. Moreover, the tattoo artist had never heard of Hippocrates, so he wound up tattooing the word "HYPOCRITE" instead, thinking, "Weird but ok; some people lose bets, I guess."

One day early into their time rooming together at the Academy, Jim discovers Bones’ tattoo, and thinks it’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen. He asks why Bones never had it removed, and Bones says it’s because at first, he couldn’t find the time, and later on, he just kept it as a reminder not to do stupid shit, and also to remind himself not to rest on the laurels of good intentions, because even the best intentions sometimes have unintended consequences. Besides, he’d at least had the good sense to put it in a place where it would never be seen in a professional setting.

A year into their friendship, Bones tells Jim why he really still has the tattoo. Or, rather, after Jim makes another stupid joke about it on what turns out to be too close to the anniversary date, Bones takes a deep breath, gets a resolute look in his eye, and for the first time begins to talk about his father’s death. How it happened a few years after med school. How sick and desperate his father had become, and how he had begged him to end his suffering. How he had agonized over his own personal no-win scenario. How he hadn’t lost his medical license, but he sometimes wished he had. 

How he’d actually always meant to remove the tattoo, but after violating his most sacred oath at his father’s request, seeing the cure discovered (not by him, of course) three months later, and fleeing a marriage in shambles, he decided to keep it permanently. As a reminder of who he really was. HYPOCRITE.

It’s not funny anymore, and Jim decides then and there that it’s his mission to eventually convince Bones to remove the word from his body. 

Jim doesn’t have a lot of luck. Not with casual insinuations about starting fresh, or even a full-on prepared speech. Not after going through every possible Starfleet regulation on appearance or cultural sensitivity that would require Bones to remove it, and writing (and deleting) three times an email to Pike asking him to somehow create one.

Not even when he deliberately gets his own small, deeply stupid tattoo on Risa, just so he can ask Bones to accompany him to a tattoo removal service, and “Hey, Bones, as long as you’re already here-”

“No,” Bones says. I know what you’re doing, his eyebrow says. “Thanks, but no. Just get that thing off of yourself so I don’t have to look at it the next time you land yourself on a biobed.”

Jim fucking hates Bones’ tattoo. 

When he catches himself seriously contemplating sneaking in and somehow lasering it off while Bones is asleep, he realizes that he needs to let it go. At least, for a little while. Bones is going to do what he’s going to do.

Jim thinks that being responsible for saving the entire Earth should have been enough to convince Bones to let the tattoo go, but apparently not. Upon reflection, Jim realizes that the reason Bones saved the world in the first place is because he has an impossible time letting certain things...or people...go. Not every attachment is created equal, though, and Jim resolves to renew his campaign. At some point.

A month after Jim wakes up in the hospital in the aftermath of Khan -- after the initial shock, the deposition, and the first round of physical therapy that allows him to move into a shared apartment under the watchful eye of his physician -- Bones sits him down and tells him what really happened. That he wasn’t mostly dead, he was really dead. That Bones had stuffed him into a cryotube after a single purr from a zombie tribble and had told Hippocrates to kindly fuck off just one more time as he brought Jim back from the dead. That he wasn’t even sure if it would work, because nobody had ever done anything like it before. That he’d almost lost his license again.

“Third time’s a charm,” he says.

Then he looks at Jim like he’s expecting the postmortem existential crisis train to pull into the station right on time.

Jim, of course, misses his stop and fixates on another location. His eyes wander to Bones’ back.

“I made you violate your oath again,” Jim says, miserably. “I guess at this rate you’re never going to get rid of that tattoo. You saved me, you know. That word doesn’t belong there.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Bones, with a bit of a smile. “This time...” He clears his throat. “...In this particular case, I think it’s growing on me.”

“...No, not literally. Shut up, kid.”

#star trek #star trek aos #leonard mccoy #jim kirk #mckirk #bones mccoy #captain kirk #star trek 2009 #star trek into darkness #long post #i too swore an oath and that was not to write fanfic #let's call this a headcanon but it's on thin fucking ice #i can't believe a stupid joke about a tattoo led me to this angst pile #anyway hope you enjoy it #i should be grading #or sleeping #mckirk discord #@fireinmywoods thought you might like this one #sentence fragment party #cw death mention #cw euthanasia #cw swearing #cw tattoos