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It starts when Jim gets drunk at a bar during their shore leave, and Leonard has to drag his sorry ass back to his apartment.
“Bones,” says Jim, dragging out the second syllable and inflicting it up and down a few octaves.
“What?” snaps McCoy, trying to keep his tipsy captain from face-planting on the floor while digging through his pockets to find the door’s key at the same time.
Jim blinks at him, as if just now noticing that he was there. “Are you mad?”
Leonard sighs heavily, because if he says yes Jim will probably start crying ,and if he says no Jim will call him a liar and probably cry anyway. So, he doesn’t answer. Instead, he finally gets the key out of his pocket and starts fumbling with the door.
“Booooooneeesssss.”
The doctor shushes him as the door swings open, and promptly shoves the blonde through it. Jim stumbles through the doorway and lands haphazardly into an armchair.
“You’re mad.”
“I’m not mad, Jim,” Leonard tells him firmly, ushering him up out of the chair and over to the bed. The captain lands face-first onto the mattress. McCoy doesn’t try to roll him over.
“Yessss, you arrreee,” drawls Jim, turning his head to look at his friend. “You did the bouncy thing.”
“Bouncy thing?” repeats Leonard, frowning as he tugs Kirk’s boots off. “What the hell does that mean?”
“The…The bouncy thing. Your bouncy thing,” Jim says, rolling over onto his back and nearly kicking the doctor in the face. “You do it when you’re mad.”
“Jim,” sighs Leonard, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but you need to sleep this off. I outta keep you away from hypos for a while to teach you what a true hangover feels like.”
Jim sticks out his bottom lip and attempts to use his puppy eyes, only he’s drunk and disorientated and it doesn’t work. Leonard caves anyway.
“Fine. I’ll leave you one this time.”
Kirk smiles and rolls back over onto his stomach. “Love you,” he mumbles into the mattress, and promptly falls asleep.
McCoy shakes his head. “Unbelievable.”
~*~
It doesn’t come up again until an outbreak of Orion flu hits the Enterprise at full force, and the sickbay is overflowing with patients. McCoy, Nurse Chapel, and M’Benga are all running in circles between giving vaccines, treating patients, and administering hypos that Leonard actually starts to feel dizzy. It isn’t until his tricorder starts malfunctioning that he really looses it.
“Of course,” he grumbles to himself, fumbling with the machine. The ensign sitting on the med table in front of him looks roughly a couple years older than Chekov, so he bites his lip to hold back the stream of curse words that are ready on his lips.
He presses the wrong button and the machine actually shocks him. Hissing, Leonard drops the tricorder and shouts over his shoulder, “Christine!”
“I got it,” says Chapel, seemingly coming out of nowhere and administering a hypo to the sick ensign’s arm. “Why don’t you take a lap, Doctor.”
Leonard shifts his weight and rolls back onto the balls of his feet. “I’m fine,” he answers.
Chapel raises an eyebrow and releases the ensign, who scurries away as quickly as possible.
“You did the thing,” Christine says simply.
“What?” McCoy blinks at her.
“You did the thing you do when you’re frustrated,” Christine says again, walking over to a table and preparing another hypo. Leonard follows her.
“I don’t do a thing,” protests the doctor. “Nurse, you’re starting to sound like Jim.”
Chapel raises her eyebrows and gives him a pointed look, but doesn’t say anything more. Leonard wants to ask her what his thing is, but a new wave of patients file into the medbay and they both drop the topic.
~*~
The third time it happens, Leonard has had enough.
It’s Jim’s birthday, and somehow Uhura got her hands on the ingredients to make an authentic cake, not some crappy off-tasting food that normally comes out of the replicator. McCoy had been just as ecstatic as everyone else, and apparently he did “the thing” because Jim had started to laugh and Uhura and Sulu shared a knowing smile.
He didn’t have a thing. He didn’t. Plus it was annoying as hell with everyone else knowing what his ‘thing’ was, and he had no idea he was even doing it.
Leonard had retreated into the lift and was heading back to the medbay away from all those idiots who thought his ‘thing’ was funny when it stops, opens, and Spock gets on.
Nodding in acknowledgement at the doctor, Spock seems engrossed in the PADD in his hands, probably re-reading some poor scientist’s report and going over each and every little detail for the thousandth time before clearing it.
Suddenly, Leonard is struck with an idea so obvious that he wonders why he didn’t think of it before.
“Hey, Spock,” says McCoy, “do I have a thing?”
The Vulcan slowly looks up from his PADD and tilts his head slightly in confusion. “A ‘thing’, Doctor?”
“Yeah, you know,” Leonard rubs the back of his neck. “A thing. Something that I do a lot. Everybody keeps telling me that I have this ‘thing’ that I do whenever I’m mad or frustrated or happy and I don’t know what it is. It’s drivin’ me crazy.”
“You mean a repetitive habit,” Spock clarifies, and McCoy waves his hand in the air to dismiss the thought.
“Yeah, yeah, a thing, a habit, same basic principle.” He pauses, then frowns. “Jim keeps tellin’ me it’s my ‘bouncy thing’, but I don’t go around jumpin’ all over the place like a rabbit.”
Spock looks back down at his PADD. “I believe the Captain is referring to your tendency to shift your weight,” he says, touching something on the screen that is now consuming his attention.
“My tendency to what?”
Spock looks up. “To shift your weight. You show a habit in transferring your weight from your heels to the balls of your feet, an action which appears very much like jumping, or standing on ones toes. You do so when you are angry because you are attempting to show dominance, likewise when you are frustrated. When you are confused or indecisive, you do so to think on a decision. When you are happy, the action seems to take on a more childlike gesture, like one of joy or elation.”
Leonard stares at him, open mouthed and in awe. After a moment, he regains his ability to speak and says, “How the hell did you figure that out?”
“You shift your weight a lot,” Spock points out. “Roughly about twelve point three times per day. I have merely been standing by to witness such tendencies.”
The lift slows and stops; this must be where Spock wants out, because there are at least two more stops until the medbay.
“Also,” Spock adds as an afterthought, “I find the action quite…endearing.” The corners of his mouth lift into a barely there smile and then steps out of the turbolift’s doors.
“Endearing?” repeats Leonard. He raises his voice and calls out to the quickly retreating Vulcan. “Spock! Did you just call me cute?”
The turbolift doors close, and he exhales heavily. “Damn Hobgoblin.”