Chapter Text
They called him ‘Pup’ and that was clearly indicative of his age, appearance and maturity. It was, as far as Spock was concerned, the most ridiculous name of the whole gang. The other names among the band of outlaws at least commanded the vague air of respect: The Engineer, Captain, and Snake. This one seemed content with nothing more than a ridiculous, childish name. In fact, rather than be offended, he seemed to revel in it.
“I need some more salt,” Pup called from behind the bars. He was slurping his beer out of the tin mug and slamming it down on the wooden table the deputies had dragged into the cell for him. “Hey,” he whistled. “You.” Pup was moving now; Spock did not turn around. “You can hear me. I know you can hear me—” He must have been wrapping his dust-filthy hands around the bars now. He might have been tilting his head to the side just like the disobedient little creature he was named for, tongue catching the last taste of his last meal around the corner of his lips. “I’ve heard stories about you. You know that?”
“Shut up and sit down,” a deputy shouted.
Spock glanced at the deputy. “Perhaps you should excuse yourself,” he said calmly, “It is Mr. Chekov’s last meal. The least we can do is allow him to spend it how he chooses.”
Pup giggled. “Last meal,” he repeated. “Your last meal isn’t worth a damn. Where’s the salt? A man should have salt before he dies is what I think.”
When Spock did turn to look at him he found Pup with his forehead pressed against the bars. His grin pulled up high on the right side of his face and cracked toward the left, his lips were dark pink from biting them and his hair was crusty curls still full of the beer and ash from the scene he’d caused before they captured him. “If you were a man I would then be obligated to provide it. You’re a child.”
The deputy was leaving now, grumbling things under his breath as he pushed his way out into the bright heat of the day.
“You really okay with that?” Pup asked. He loosened his hands from around the bars and let them slide down in some attempt to affect himself as a hapless victim. Perhaps a child that had not had the benefit of a good home; he only needed guidance and he could be a decent member of society. It was not this child’s fault that his first, best and most lasting influence had been that of the so called Captain. It was an excellent image and it had time and time before this allowed Pup to escape. This time, however, Spock needed him to serve a more noble purpose. “Hanging a kid? They say you’re heartless, you know. I heard you’re so inhuman you bleed green.” Pup’s innocent child’s eyes glanced over, stared at where his poncho and gun belt were hanging on the coat tree by the door. The slip of his tongue across his lips was anything but the innocence of a child. It was the hungry stare of a trapped animal that would stop at nothing to be free.
Spock picked up the salt shaker off his desk and carried it over to set it on the crossbar of the cell. “Under state law, you are, technically, an adult. Also, I intend to execute you with a firing squad. Our gallows are well below standard.” Pup took the salt; he did not say that he had done nothing to deserve this punishment. They both knew that was the truth so stating it would redundant. “If you need anything further for your last meal, please feel free to say as much.”
“More beer.”
--
McCoy tugged at the sleeves of his coat, ran his hand down the front of his vest and tried to find a way to look casual and official and at ease at a God-damn public execution. Why the hell they needed a doctor to say that a man with a hole in his head was dead he’d never damn well know. But the Marshal insisted.
Nobody said no to the Marshal. That was, of course, except the outlaws. McCoy figured that they didn’t say no to him for too damn long because he’d been systematically rounding them up and shipping them off to jail one by one. Except this one—there was no reason to ship this one off when it was just easier and more efficient to kill him off right here and now. This kid, this scrawny little boy wearing a bigger man’s shirt and a pair of pants an inch and a half too short for him, was a repeat offender. There had been a trial but in Enterprise that didn’t mean much more than the Marshal had decided that this one deserved to die, had explained it to Judge Komack and had easily secured the sentence.
“I hear,” one whisper said to the next in the crowd, “this is just a trap.”
“Has to be.”
“Captain isn’t going to let this happen.”
The spectacle had drawn the whole town to the dusty lot. Everyone was standing there, milling around, there were children hanging onto their mother’s skirts, there were boys climbing fences, there were grown men hanging out of the windows of the boarding house next door.
McCoy crossed his arms again. The last thing they needed now was Captain.
“Doctor,” the Marshal said, “I am pleased you found time in your busy schedule to attend.”
The only answer he could give to that was a scowl. “I was under the impression it was more of an order than a request.”
“It was.”
Then the Marshal moved on. He parted the crowd easily—nobody wanted to touch him. There was order and logic and then there was tyranny and the Marshal skirted the line between the two. Too much order and everyone got itchy, everyone got to thinking that maybe Captain crawling through the hills and ripping off stagecoaches had the right idea. Nobody liked the Marshal.
“Doctor?” another voice said to his left.
McCoy didn’t bother to look over. “That’s right.”
It earned him a curious little hum and then the man was moving away from him. All McCoy saw was the dirty blond of the back of his head, the filth on his old cavalry coat that was stretched too tight across his shoulders as he wiggled his way up through the crowd to get a prime seat for the show. Everyone wanted to see this. Nobody really thought Captain was going to let one of his men get himself executed.
The little boy outlaw they called Pup was being escorted to the post. He was laughing at the men shoving him, dancing in their grip while he called back instructions about how he wanted to be buried. “And spell my name right! That’s C-H-E-K-O-V. For God’s sake there’s no second C.”
One of the men bashed Pup’s head against the post and that cut off the merry little rant in the middle, the kid pulled back with a busted nose and blood flowing over his lips. He just giggled and said something real quiet and not at all nice to the bigger men tying him to the post.
The crowd shivered now. Everyone was shifting on their feet and craning their necks as the firing squad filed out. The Marshal was watching with his hands behind his back and his face perfectly pleased and placid. (Inhuman son of a bitch.)
There was a man with a cigar in the front of the crowd that glanced up at the boarding house windows before he struck his match across the thigh of his pants and lifted it up to his face. “Real fine day!” he shouted to everyone that didn’t care to listen.
“Not a cloud in the sky!” came a shout back.
The Marshal was moving forward now. The deputies that flanked him were staring one at the other.
“Bring the rain, boys!” was a yelp from somewhere in the middle of that crowd. The man with the muttonchops smirked around his cigar and saluted at nobody before he flicked his match to the ground and ducked out of view.
Something sizzled, something popped, someone screamed and then everyone was running. There was fire licking its way across the ground, rising up out of the dirt like it had any right to be there. McCoy jumped back, shoved hard against the building and dragged back by the stampede of bodies moving away from the danger. He could see though, the tall man with the sword that swiped at the post they’d tied Pup too.
The smirking man was pointing two guns at two deputies and grinning around his no longer lit cigar. They were saying something but McCoy couldn’t hear it—couldn’t hear a damn thing. The last thing he saw before the momentum of the crowd dragged him around the corner was a man in a dirty cavalry coat pointing a gun at the Marshal.
--
Scotty liked his art. Kirk thought that maybe he indulged the man’s passion a little too much at times. Then again, you only lived once and there was no reason that Scotty couldn’t have a little fun so long as he did what he was told. Maybe he was just making up for all the years of his life he’d spent in the back of a sweaty shop beating out horseshoes for a living. Starting fires was so much more appealing, surely.
Sulu had Chekov; that was all that mattered. Kirk could see them out of the corner of his eyes. How Sulu thrust the black and white poncho at Chekov and handed him his guns before he turned to pull his own gun.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a little bit of a standoff, Captain,” Scotty announced.
Standoff was one word for it. What they had here was a man that was God-damn not afraid to die. The Marshal, what’s his name—Spock stared at him without blinking. His eyes were black as the devil’s himself and his arm was straight and steady as he pointed his gun at Kirk’s head. His finger didn’t twitch and the lone bead of sweat that slid down out of his hair was just from the heat of the day.
Kirk had heard the man was emotionless but he hadn’t believed it until this moment. This man could put a hole in you without blinking an eye. “Pup,” Kirk shouted and held his own gun steady.
“Yes, Captain?” Pup shouted back.
“Did they feed you well?” Kirk asked.
Spock didn’t flinch. He didn’t comment. He barely moved.
“Marshal?” his men were saying.
“Yes, Captain.”
Well, that was something. Kirk tilted his head at the man in front of him. He studied his face from one angle and then the other. “This was a pretty good trap,” Kirk said, “for a minute; I really thought you were going to execute Pup.”
“It would not have been an erroneous belief.” Spock’s lips barely moved when he spoke. His pretty badge glistened in the sun from where it was pinned to his duster and they were still stuck there. Right there. Lawman and outlaw, Kirk was about tired of this story.
“See,” Kirk said, “I was willing to believe you were an alright guy. Now you’ve changed my opinion of you.”
“You opinion is of limited importance to me,” Spock stated. Then another minute to stare at one another before: “I would advise you to come quietly without a scene. It would allow me to offer some leniency in your sentencing.”
Kirk chuckled. Scotty was laughing behind him and Chekov was giggling.
“Least he’s got a sense of humor,” Scotty shouted around his cigar.
“Captain,” Sulu said. Everyone was shuffling in close behind him now. If he looked over his shoulder he would have seen them pulling their bandana over their mouths. Kirk tugged his up over his nose and smirked behind it.
“You’ve got to catch me first, Spock.”
Sulu threw the packet into the air and Spock didn’t even glance at it. He must have known, must have heard the stories about the Snake’s magic dust that knocked a man flat on his ass for a good day afterward. He must have known all that but he still did not move.
“You are making this unnecessarily difficult,” Spock said.
“You’ll come to like that about me.”
Then the packet hit the ground, burst open and the dust flew into the air.
--
At first, McCoy had thought they were dead. There were three deputies, one poor idiot that hadn’t run and the Marshal laying on the ground in heaps over blackened scorch marks. McCoy had gone to the Marshal first, turned him over so he was face up in the sun and pushed a hand against his chest to feel his heart beating.
His office only had one bed so he left the deputies in care of the widower that owned the boarding house. With the help of another man he dragged the Marshal back to his office and dropped him onto the only bed.
“Thanks,” he said to the tall man that helped him carry the Marshal and he got a nod and then he was by himself. Mostly, he was there with an unconscious man that had some kind of weird dust on his clothes. McCoy stripped his long duster off and loosened his tie and tucked the pretty gold pocket watch back into his vest before he left him there.
It was hours before the Marshal woke up—as sudden as a man rising from the dead, he sucked in a breath and jerked upright, hands clamping around a gun that he wasn’t holding. He jerked his head around, staring at the unfamiliar walls and blinking fast while he put the events into whatever logical order.
“He escaped,” were the Marshal’s first words.
McCoy shrugged, “That can’t really surprise you.”
Then the Marshal was on his feet and pulling his coat off the hook. “On the contrary, the town’s continuous and disturbing lack of assistance in apprehending this criminal constantly surprises me. He has repeatedly robbed the citizens of this and several surrounding counties.”
“He never robbed me,” McCoy said.
“Fascinating,” the Marshal said as he straightened the collar of his shirt and smoothed his hand down his vest. “By this logic, so long as a common murderer does not, in fact, kill you I should not concern myself with him?”
“That’s not what I said,” McCoy said. It wasn’t even what he meant. It was only that, of all the things he’d heard Captain and his gang accused of, McCoy had yet to find any person in the town that had actually been done wrong by him.
“Is it not?”
“No,” McCoy said again, “It’s not.”
The Marshal twitched an eyebrow at him. “Thank you for your medical attention, Doctor. You will have to excuse me.”
McCoy rolled his eyes as he turned on his heels. “You’re never going to catch him.” He tugged the garter on his left arm a bit higher just so he wouldn’t have to look at the Marshal’s face. They didn’t know one another so well but everyone knew that the Marshal had no interest in legend—only in fact.
The Captain had shown his face. He was a real life person to the Marshal now. He was something that could be caught, contained and prosecuted.
“I assure you,” the Marshal said, “I will.”
--
“Farragut, I love you!” Chekov was shouting. He was standing on the railing of the porch with one hand wrapped around the support beam and leaning out from under the eaves holding up his bottle of whiskey in salute.
Scotty was slapping his knee, rocking back in his seat, kicking his knee against the old table and spilling beer all over the cards. The cigar was clamped, unlit, in the corner of his mouth while he wheezed another giggle. “You cannot hold your liquor, Pup. Not a damn drop.”
Chekov was singing a lewd love song at the moon and stopped abruptly to spin on the railing. He pitched to the side and it was only Sulu walking past that saved him from landing flat on his face. “Thanks,” he shouted at Sulu and kissed him full on the neck with his tongue darting out to lap at him. Sulu shoved him away.
“I’m not one of your prostitutes, Pup.”
“I bet I could still get a hand up your skirt,” Chekov said but he backed off and stomped over to drop back into his chair next to Scotty. “I can hold my liquor, I’ve got right here—” He held up his empty fist. “Damn, where’d it go?”
Sulu turned his chair around backward before he sat in it and shook the bottle. “This one?”
Scotty pulled the cigar out of his mouth so he could laugh like a bawdy cow. Kirk just grinned and picked up his own glass to take a sip. Just a little, just enough to slide over his tongue and down the back of his throat so it burned and tingled and made everything sweet and warm. “Ante up,” Scotty said.
“I don’t have no money,” Chekov said.
“A cheat with no pennies,” Sulu muttered. “Who took your money this time?”
“Her name was Ana Marie and she was beautiful,” Chekov said.
Scotty whistled and tossed a match into the pot. Kirk bent forward far enough to throw a button and Sulu dropped a pebble. Chekov patted his pockets until he came up with some spare lint that he flicked into the pan. They played a few rounds before Chekov was distracted by a pretty girl in a pretty dress with high blonde curls. Sulu found himself someone saucy to spend a few hours with and that left just him and Scotty.
That was fine, the night was dark around them, the cards were scattered and beer soggy. Scotty leaned back, put his feet up on Sulu’s empty seat and lit his cigar.
“I guess she’s not working tonight,” Kirk said.
Scotty puffed a breath of smoke. “Oh, she’s here. I can smell her sweet perfume from here.” He pulled a stick of dynamite out of his pocket and regarded it with the air of a lover. He stroked his fingers down the side of it. “You need to find yourself a lady.”
“I’ve got a few,” Kirk said.
“Not a good enough one,” Scotty said, “You’ve got to find yourself a real feisty mistress, I think. Someone to keep you from getting bored.”
Kirk snorted. He didn’t even have to tell Scotty that the first thing he thought of was the man with the devil’s black eyes that wanted to see him dead. Feisty—well, that wasn’t exactly the right word for it. But Marshal Spock seemed like the sort of man that wasn’t going to stop.
“I meant the sort that didn’t want you dead.” Scotty turned his face toward the doors behind Kirk and smiled into the dim candle light. “Doesn’t she smell sweet?”
Kirk cocked his head back to look through the doors and squinted to see if he could find Scotty’s lady among the other bodies crowded into the loud saloon. There were plenty of pretty skirts but he couldn’t make one out from the other. “Sure,” he agreed.
--
The bar mistress called herself Uhura and offered no first name to accompany it. Spock held his gun in one hand and followed her up the cramped staircase to the rooms at the back of the saloon. The hallways were dingy and foul with the smell of sweat and sex. Everything was filthy with streaks and marks leftover from dirty men.
“You will not warn him,” Spock said.
Uhura glanced back at him over her shoulder without a comment. The glance was as much a promise of disobedience as it was to check if he were truly serious. Farragut was an older town than Enterprise. The people here seemed to have developed some illogical loyalty to Captain and his men. They harbored and cared for him when he was finished causing chaos in the surrounding towns; Spock had only discovered Captain’s exact whereabouts by chance.
“Marshal,” Uhura said as she swung the key tied to the long ribbon around her wrist, “He isn’t going to need me to warn him. He’ll hear you coming a mile away.” She stepped lightly down the hall to the last room on the left. There was a sachet tied to the door that smelled like a flower Spock could not immediately name. She touched the doorknob with the barest of touch.
Glass shattered from within the room. A woman was shouting obscenities. “Move,” Spock said to Uhura and she stepped back to allow him room to force the door open with the weight of his body. Inside, the room was all pink right down to the fluttering curtains framing the now shattered window. A woman wrapped in a sheet was waving her fist out the window.
“You forgot your boot!” She bent down and threw the boot at the ground.
Spock moved her out of the window to see Kirk picking himself up off the ground, one hand clamped around his arm that looked as if it were bleeding while he clutched his clothes with the other and whistled shrilly.
Uhura stepped up to look out the window, to watch the man they called Snake ride up, hand out and pull Kirk naked up onto the horse with him.
“Get my boots!” Kirk shouted.
The Engineer rode past with what must have been Kirk’s horse and the last one, Pup pulled his own horse to a stop and jumped down to grab the boots, clutched them against his chest as he pulled himself back up into the saddle and they were gone.
Uhura pressed her lips together and shook her head at him. “You walk like a lawman. How the hell do you ever figure to sneak up on him?”
“He forgot his Daddy’s knife,” the woman on the bed said.
“Please give it to me,” Spock said. She didn’t look like she was going to until Uhura shrugged her shoulders in a manner that betrayed her doubt that he would have possession of it for any length of time. “I will be sure to return it to him should I see him again. You have my word.”
“The word of a Marshal,” the woman on the bed said, “what good is that?” She held the knife out to him anyway.
--
McCoy woke up alone. He did that a lot now. That was the point in coming here to the middle of nowhere surrounded by nothing. To be alone, to be far away from people that knew anything about him, so that he could just be again. Just be a country doctor in a strange country. He got out of bed, stumbled through the morning, washed his face and hands and pulled his clothes on.
First, he put on the white shirt that was mostly clean except a persistent stain low near his waist, then his suspenders and then his dark vest with the pinstripes to hide the stain. It made him look taller and leaner than he was and that wasn’t so bad. His tie was blue, bright where the rest was dark. He pulled his pants on, tucked his shirt in, fixed his suspenders and buttoned both sides of the vest buttons. He didn’t look half bad with his hair brushed—grabbed his frock coat and his hat on his way toward the door.
There was a familiar looking oriental man standing on his doorstep with a long knife in one hand and a cheeky bastard with a cigar and a bowler hat standing next to him.
“Good day to you,” the cheeky man said. “Are you Dr. McCoy?”
The man with the knife grabbed him by the shoulder of his coat and yanked him forward, pressed the sharp edge of the knife to his throat so tight it almost split his skin.
“Well,” McCoy said, “If you’re here to kill I’m not sure—if you’ve got someone sick that needs a doctor, I might be. You won’t know if you keep pushing that knife to my throat.”
“Back in the house,” the man with the knife said. The three of them moved back inside his doorway and the cheeky one kicked the door shut. “He’s not sick. He’s injured.”
“Real sorry about this, Doc,” the cheeky one said as he pulled a rope from around his waist and caught his hands to wrap it around his wrists.
“What kind of injured?” McCoy asked. Since it didn’t look like he was going to get much of a choice in the matter. It’d be a real crying shame if these here boys wasted all their time and kidnapped McCoy only to find out too late that he didn’t have the supplies he needed to do any life saving. “You’re Captain’s men.”
“Call me Scotty,” the cheeky one said. “That’s Sulu.”
“He’s cut,” Sulu said.
“With what?” McCoy asked. He hissed at the ropes burning into his wrists and up his forearms as Scotty tied them off. He wasn’t paying much attention to how Scotty pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and sniffed it, shook it.
“Glass,” Sulu stated. “What are you going to need to fix him?”
“A damn big bottle of whiskey and my bag,” McCoy said.
“Where’s your bag?” Sulu asked as he rifled through the things on his table that were most definitely not a black medical bag. He knocked over a card and a picture and pushed a vase to the edge of the table before looking at him.
“At the office,” McCoy said.
“I’ll get it,” Sulu said, “You take him to Captain.”
“Real sorry,” Scotty said again as he crowded up close and stuffed the handkerchief half in McCoy’s mouth before he reached behind him to tie it tight. It tasted like dirt, sweat and some combination of tears, tobacco and snot. “It’s mostly clean.”
Then he was dragged out into the daylight again, off to the side and Sulu held his hands while Scotty swung up into a saddle and held his hand up. They shoved and pulled and pushed him until he was sitting behind Scotty, clutching the back of his slick vest in some vain hope of not being knocked backward off the horse.
--
Damn it.
“I told you,” Kirk said again, “not to do that. Look at that.” He motioned a hand toward the doctor that was half covered in dirt where he must have fallen off the horse before Scotty thought far enough ahead to have the man put his arms around him. There was nothing useful at all about a doctor with a head injury. Worse than that there was Scotty’s lucky kerchief in the man’s mouth and that thing wasn’t fit to wipe your nose on.
“Has he been going on about that the whole time I’ve been gone?” Scotty asked.
“More or less,” Chekov said.
Kirk rolled his eyes at them. The injury wasn’t that serious. It was nothing more than a fancy cut that bled longer than Sulu had been comfortable with. Jumping through a glass window naked left one with that sort of risk. He was happy enough that the worst wound had been to his arm and not to his ass.
Scotty slid off his horse and dragged the doctor down with him, tugged at the ropes around his wrists so they could separate from one another. The doctor immediately clawed at the kerchief in his mouth, spitting and snarling curses as he threw it on the ground. “I said I was sorry,” Scotty said.
“Sorry? What do you do with that thing, wipe your ass?”
“Everything but,” Chekov said.
The doctor looked far too prissy to be standing there in the space between towns under the shade of a lone tree and a lot of rocks and dirt. Prissy and spoiled and aghast. He spit and spit and spit to the side until the taste must have gotten better. Kirk pushed himself up to standing with his good arm and limped over to the man. “Look, I hate to interrupt but I’ve got this problem.”
“You kidnapped me,” the doctor said.
Kirk shrugged. “If I figured I could have made it into town to see you at the office and out before my new good buddy found me—all of this wouldn’t be necessary.”
For a minute there was only staring. A supposedly righteous man staring hard at a common criminal with some attempt to discern if there was anything worth saving in this man’s soul. Not that the doctor had a real choice in the matter. Sure, Scotty would mostly only torment him and Chekov would mostly only annoy him but Sulu would really threaten him. Kirk shifted his weight to the stronger side, off his sore ankle and waited.
“Do you have a real name?” the doctor asked.
“Jim Kirk,” Kirk said, “Do you?”
“Leonard McCoy.” That was a nice enough start, Kirk figured. The doctor nodded at his arm and Kirk turned to let him get a better view of it. He grit his teeth as the wound was peeled apart and then pushed closed again. A fresh line of blood oozed down his arm and dripped off his elbow. “Looks clean. What’d you cut it on?”
“Glass,” Kirk said.
“Your ankle?” McCoy asked.
“Jumping,” Kirk said.
Sulu was there then, with the big black bag and he threw it at the doctor before he was even off his horse. “Spock’s back in Enterprise already. That son of a bitch doesn’t give up—he was waiting across the street from the doctor’s office.”
McCoy didn’t look surprised. “Whiskey?” he asked.
“Pup,” Kirk called, “Just him?”
“Just him.”
“Well, then, that’s unfortunate for you,” he said to McCoy. It might not be entirely wise to threaten the man that was going to be stabbing him with those ugly needles doctors did sutures with but he was going to do it anyway. “Looks like you’re going to be our guest for a while.”
“Why?” was an almost idle question as McCoy poured whiskey down his arm and that burned like fire. Hellfire.
“I can’t have you telling the Marshal what you know.”
McCoy glared at him like he hated him and then thrust the bottle at him spat: “Drink,” and dropped to a crouch to pull open his bag.
--
Despite the local legends constantly perpetuated by the townspeople, Captain had not risen from the ground as a full grown man and begun a life of crime and intrigue that filled their lonely Saturday afternoons with excitement. Captain had a name; each member of his gang had a real name. He was, in fact, a living, breathing, bleeding man.
It was only inevitable that he seek out the only doctor in the three closest counties to tend to his wounds. Spock doubted that the man would come himself when he was not in optimal condition but his gang would come for him. Spock waited outside of the doctor’s office until he was certain that the man was not coming before he went to McCoy’s house. It was empty as well.
Spock could acknowledge skill when he saw it. This band of mismatched and otherwise unremarkable criminals was smarter than they were commonly given credit for. All he needed was some small crack in the seemingly perfect exterior.
First, he needed a name and an identity to go with it. The knife was a fortunate accident in that effort. The woman had referred to it as belonging to the Captain’s father. Therefore, Spock felt correct in assuming that the name scratched into the handle of it was the family name.
Kirk.
The name seemed familiar to him but he could not immediately place it. Once he was sure that the doctor was already a lost cause, he returned to the Sheriff’s office and consulted with several of the deputies over their familiarity with the name.
One of them remembered a story about a man named George Kirk that had met an unfortunate end. They could not recall the exact details of the case but it was said—by this deputy’s father—that the man had saved his wife and child before he died and that neither the woman nor the boy were seen again. It was not much in the way of information.
It was, however, enough to exaggerate his knowledge in such a way to prompt the barmaid, Uhura, to offer more. People were always willing to expound on what you already knew. The fact that he knew nothing was hardly important.