Chapter Text
Timeline: The day Enterprise returns to Earth after the Narada incident.
The shock is like falling into cold water. When the media fanfare and the day's debriefings are finally done and Jim whooshes into their dorm for the first time since they left for Vulcan an epoch ago, Bones' half of the room is already empty. He must have come and packed up while the command team was stuck in meetings, carted his stuff to Pike's house to continue the project of forgetting about Jim.
Jim unfreezes himself and retreats like he's seen a real ghost. He knew Pike was cleared to return to his fancypants long-term officer housing rather than go to Starfleet Medical. But as for the question of where Bones would live, he'd blocked it out a little too successfully, apparently, because he was blindsided by it now. Like, of course Bones would move out of their dorm. Of course he would. But did he have to... y'know... actually do it?
In the hallway, Jim leans against a wall, gathering his strength. He tilts his head back against the wall with a quiet thunk. It feels good, so he does it again, and then again. How to piss off a neurosurgeon, he thinks.
He can't face what's inside. The grief and dread prickle on his skin, tangible and sickening. He'll leave the dorm to fester until Bones isn't gone. He needs to find somewhere else to be. He propels himself outside and camps out in a dark corner booth at the bar, visited only by the server with a steady supply of tap beer. When it gets too late, he continues his pilgrimage to nowhere. He'll need to sleep eventually, and even an interim captain can't get dispensation to fly up and sleep on the under-repairs Enterprise on a lark. He thinks of the soft grassy spot on the quad where he liked to pass out drunk, but captains probably aren't supposed to do stuff like that anymore. Then he remembers the couches at the library—eerily empty, but at least those ghosts are anonymous ones—and curls up to sleep.
But when his padd pings a groggy alarm in the morning, there's no more avoiding it. A captain can't show up to an admiral-packed debriefing with a day-old beard, and besides, he can still smell the puddle of beer he dragged his sleeve through yesterday.
In the dorm, he keeps his eyes straight ahead like Orpheus. No, not like Orpheus; he failed. Like a badass guy walking away from an exploding car or something in an ancient holovid. He crosses to the bathroom without glancing at the empty impersonality of Bones' stripped bed or the missing jumble of laundry that should be adorning the floor. But the bathroom isn't exactly a safe haven, either. He remembers pressing against the shower wall, watching Bones' face break with pleasure, so open for him, and he remembers the words Bones whispered to him over the spray of the water when it was Jim's turn to fall apart.
Bones has left his comb, the thoughtful bastard, because Jim borrowed it so often he'd basically claimed it and because he can use Pike's, Jim accidentally thinks.
"You look like hell," Pike tells him as he rolls into the conference room.
"Thank you, sir."
He accepts Pike's lunch invitation in the cafeteria and then sulks through it. After all those weeks of seeing them together on the Enterprise—even finding, to his surprise and his intense pride, little flickering moments where he could honestly root for Bones to give Pike a chance to make him happy—he thought he'd set aside his anger and betrayal. But now they were back. Revived, probably, by this new normal. The battle is over, the journey home is complete, but Bones is still gone. Gone farther, in fact, than he had ever been on a ship measured in meters, where duty shifts brought that once open face into Jim's view nearly every day. But Pike moves between them still, he thinks. Pike travels from bedroom to conference room, connects Bones and Jim like a disease vector.
"I have to go to the housing office," Jim says abruptly, picking up his tray.
But the housing office turns out to be closed due to staffing issues (ie, half of Starfleet is dead, Jim thinks, and I'm complaining because someone is happy and healthy without me, and adds it to the list of reasons to hate himself.)
When the session resumes after lunch, he avoids Pike's gaze out of embarrassment this time, not anger.
"You okay, son?" Pike asks softly as the brass file out.
Jim sleeps on the library couch again.