Title: Stained Glass and Broken Windows
Author: Yami no Kaiba
Beta: Sodamyplatypus9
Fandom: Star Trek MU!TOS
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Characters: Spock/McCoy, Kirk, Jocelyn, Joanna
Length: 1,882 words

Summary: Mirror Universe. McCoy’s disjointed thoughts of his life and what brought him to now.
Disclaimers: I do not own the characters or the concepts of Star Trek in any of its forms.
Warning: There’s no dialogue until the middle, and then none after that. Also, it’s a pseudo-graphic death!fic. But it’s the MU, so is that really unexpected?

*---*---*---*---*

They’re perfect, the three of them: homicidal maniacs with no regrets, living in a universe that appreciates and rewards cold-blooded murder.

Kirk has his predatory ruthlessness, greedy ambition, and irresistible looks. The moment he walks into a room, you knew it because his presence was just that damn heavy. If science ever created a way to measure emotional tension, Leonard thinks idly, the machine would die a squawking death whenever Kirk stepped into its field of sensitivity. With his grand standing, natural charm, impulsive cruelty, and mad genius, he was a cut above the perfect Empire Captain, the best figure head of the fleet. And while they go through the motions of cut-throat friendship, they both know it’s just something to pass the time. If it ever becomes opportune for either of them, they’ll slide the knife right to the hilt and smile the entire time it’ll take for the other to bleed out like a stuck pig.

Spock is the dangerous one though; cold, efficient, calculating and recalculating at every turn. It’s always the quiet, studious ones you need to watch out for. Leonard knows exactly where he stands with the pointy-eared devil; a valued commodity worthy of being saved, as long as he is useful to the mission and keeps his ‘trite, emotional opinions’ to himself. He respects that sort of professionalism in a world where opportunity is seized with a dagger in the back, and appreciates the lack of farce friendship more than he can say.

Then there’s Leonard himself. He’s a doctor that’s more of a torture specialist, interrogator, and silent assassin than a miracle worker or a guardian angel. He had killed more sentient beings from the products of one year of graduate studies at the Academy than Kirk and Spock could hope to phaser into oblivion during their collective five years of galactic subjugation. He’s a master manipulator, though no one seems to notice. A façade of caring in a world were there is none.

They’re the shining stars of the Empire, blazing their trail among the stars in literal flame. And while he pretends to love every minute of it, Leonard really doesn’t care in the least who lives or dies, who’s happy or sad.

Doesn’t care what happens to any of them, really. Not even himself.

He’s already one of the walking dead.

*---*---*

He often pictures the three of them as beautiful, deadly pieces of a stain glass artwork: cool blue glass with murky swirls of black and deeper blue, only held apart by the thin gold painted iron line that separates them from melding together fully, but keeps their individuality. Both pieces of glass beautiful and silent, but sharp enough to nick an artery and spill the warm, vivid blood of any species that dares to touch their edges, while the loud gold infiltrates your system slowly as you brush against it, leaching through your pores and circulating in your blood. It slowly poisons you with its heavy metal toxicity.

He’d killed Jocelyn that way: acid etched the protective coating of her wedding ring during the night, and watched her slow decline into death with a seething glee of vengeance while insisting to her relatives and Joanna that he was doing everything he could to find out what was killing her.

Had served her right, too, thinking she could flagrantly cheat on him and get away with it.

Of course, civilian life and its authorities on Earth weren’t as ruthless as the Empire’s military – civilians actually cared about their neighbors murdering each other. He hadn’t one month after Jocelyn’s death before the police were knocking on his door.

He’d lost Joanna to the system, along with his practice and the rest of his life. He’d had a one-way ticket to the Tantalus Penal Colony, where, if the rumors whispered in the holding pens were true, he’d have been brain washed to become the perfect citizen.

He’d flared back at the drunken sod who’d mentioned it. He’d yelled that if the Empire wanted that kind of thinking, they’d have lobotomized the general population at birth just like the fucking Romulans had been planning before the uprising.

Mention of the Roms had hushed the pens faster than knock-out gas. The guards had marched him out into an interview room and cuffed him to a table, and not an hour later some fancy dressed recruiter had been across the table from him, giving him another option entirely.

There’d been word in the news casts that the Fleet had been in short supply of medical staff for awhile, but he hadn’t known before then that it was bad enough to blackmail an incarcerated man into service.

He’d signed his name on the PADD, a crooked smile on his face. Either option was fine for him. At least this way, he’d be doing something useful.

Maybe if he lived long enough, when the Empire was done with him, he could try and find his little girl once more.

And she could kill him like he had her mother, just like she’d promised when they’d dragged her away.

*---*---*

The thing about stain glass, though, is that even after it solidifies at room temperature it never fully stops being a liquid. As the years march on, the glass runs and the patterns change minutely. The glass runs over that dulled rust-spotted gold line and slowly buries it below; still a part of the piece, but obsolete in its purpose.

Spock comes to him late one night after Kirk and Leonard have stumbled into a wonderland of stomach wrenching purity and light. There are words of betrayal on the Vulcan’s lips and a vision of a better world bright in his eyes.

Leonard just smiles, eyes devoid of any shred of caring as he looks the First Officer over from the tip of those pointy ears to the shiny polished boots planted firmly on the floor. He cocks his head to the side, considering only momentarily before he names terms for his allegiance.

“You ever screw around on me I’ll kill you and every last Vulcan in the galaxy.”

Cold black eyes spark with intrigue, as the slim man steps forward. He’s close enough now that Leonard can feel the heat radiating through the tight uniform. “If memory serves, you were not as thorough with your late wife.”

“Yeah, well, she’s the same species as me. In terms you might understand, victory is worthless if you’re not around to take advantage of it,” he says blithely, eyes narrowing as he stands his ground when Spock steps even closer. Their chests are nearly touching, and Leonard can feel a tell-tale shiver of anticipation for the first time in decades that doesn’t have to do with a medical experiment.

“I wish to state for the record, that this plan of mine gives us advantages before the victory is assured,” Spock says, his strong hands circling firmly around Leonard’s hips.

“Then you’d better start fucking me, shouldn’t you?” he goads, and Spock takes the bait, yanking him forward into the most aggressive and hungry kiss Leonard has ever experienced in his life.

He can already tell he’s going to have beard burn in the oddest places in the morning, but that’s what anti-inflammation creams were made for.

*---*---*

Of course, when the glass runs like this, it becomes strong near the overlap, and brittle near the edges. Without warning, the entire piece has shrunken out of its frame and falls to shatter on the floor.

It’s easy enough, with Leonard’s knowledge and chemical access and Spock’s way with computers and programming language, to do what Spock wants.

When Leonard had dreamed of this in the silent hours of the morning, he’d always wanted it to be slow and agonizing; a gradual decline into dementia so that he could watch Kirk crack like an egg under the realization that he was losing control not only of his ship but of himself. To watch the bastard be shuttled off to one of the horribly inept assistant living complexes owned by the Fleet for their retired and crippled. Fantasizes, even, that he might bother to check up on him one day, and be informed that Kirk had killed himself while in a fit of despair.

It was Spock who’d pointed out that such a progression was too much like that of his poisoning of Jocelyn. While the Admiralty couldn’t give a rat’s ass to care about such blatant murder of civilians and canon-fodder drones, murdering one of his direct superior-officers would place him right back where he’d started, if not worse.

So Leonard takes the compounds he needs from the ship’s stores. Spock covers their tracks by erasing the surveillance, access logs, and changing the quantities in the quartermaster’s logs to match the lesser amount. It takes a couple days to gather the required glassware and equipment, but the medical labs are more of a mess than the actual Sick Bay. No one notices the loss or subsequent return of the items, and the excess of the starting compounds are spaced with the trash.

It is a few weeks later that their chance arrives: an away mission to some backwater world no one is really interested in beyond obliterating for its mining potential.

He slips the prepared hypo into Spock’s hand while walking side by side in the corridors to the transporter room. Spock’s going to beam down with the Captain and Leonard’s on his way for his and Kirk’s regular loaded farewells.

If he’s walking with a bit more bounce in his step then usual at the thought that only one of the two-man team is going to be returning alive, no one’s going to notice.

*---*---*

Sometimes though, it’s more satisfying to throw a brick at the stained glass window. To watch the thousands of shards glitter in midair for a moment before the integral beauty of the design is extinguished in the jangled musical mess that follows.

When the shower of glass stops, Leonard shoves his not-really-best-friend onto the jagged pieces left standing in the frame. He steps back, watching the scene with a crooked smile as he leans into the welcoming embrace of his lover. He sees Kirk’s negated attempts to get up, which merely slices open more blood vessels and organs, leaving an unpleasant yet familiar scent in the air.

He feels Spock’s strong hands settle around his hips, fingers digging in and leaving delightful bruises behind. Leonard tilts his head back and brings an arm up, hooking behind Spock’s neck to pull the Vulcan’s head down to meet his hungry kiss, as they listen to Kirk’s snarled words of empty vengeance.

As the sun sets, the last of the sunlight refracts off the remaining glass until the gurgling, choked breathing stops with its loss. The spread of blood ends and all that’s left is red stained glass, a quickly cooling corpse, and the two of them – Leonard and Spock – sharing in their victory.

Surprisingly, standing in the Transporter Room with the dancing lights fading away, Leonard finds for the first time since his wife that he actually cares who lives and dies.

It better be that blasted Vulcan who comes back.

--Fin.