Looking down through a tide of no return

[oldfashionedfutureboy]

CODE

This isn't how he'd wanted to handle things. This isn't something Leonard's particularly proud of, isn't something he rightly knows how to handle. By all rights he should do what they all do in times of trouble- talk to Jim, talk to Spock, talk to the command crew that's become a second family to him but- he's older than the lot. Settled in with enough dignity and pride to want to handle this his own way, even if it ain't rightly all that fair. So when the tests come in and he gets a proper read on what's happening? The only person with any idea at all is Chris Chapel. Saint that she is- she keeps mum. Lets Leonard get his recommendations and arrangements all typed up for when they finish the trip to earth.

At least he caught it early.

At least he caught it close to home.

At least there are enough regulations, expectations, interviews and social obligations keeping crew and Jim Kirk busy while Leonard quietly packs a bag and sends everything he'd typed up and prepared in that one agonizingly long week back to their pretty blue marble. The Enterprise will ship out- with a new CMO. The message to Jim cites age, joints, and a desire to retire comfortably- nothing alarming, nothing that should have the man running to haul him back out to the stars again- promises to keep in touch. That he's welcome to visit when the next five year trip's come and gone.

Nevermind that he'll be gone. That he's on the first Shuttle to the ranch as soon as he's turned in all his notes and data, tendered his resignation, and sent time delayed messages of condolence and farewell to the crew that's kept him crazy and kept him alive over the past short while.

The last thing they need to do is watch him hammer away at a wasting disease and hope for a miracle.

Better to head to a house he hasn't lived in for years, better to tell his flesh and blood family what's happening, what to expect. A little more than a year is what he's got. Less, maybe, with all the running around he used to do. Is it any wonder he wants to spend that last year with his boots on the ground, familiar stars overhead, home? Comfortable. There's not much that can be done for him other than to be...comfortable.

Content.

He'll get more writing done than he's ever managed before, having to jump from patient to patient, crisis to crisis. Got a lifetime of messages to record and leave behind for the crew, for Jim. Decades of messages for Jim because he knows- he knows Jim will need it. That it won't be as good as having him there to help but he can't be there if he's going to be six feet under. Maybe he'll feel cowardly when they ship out. Maybe he'll feel like just another asshole that's abandoned him-

Maybe Jim'll hold it against him. Get angry. He'd have a right to it.

God knows what he wrote before heading home wasn't near good enough an excuse for simply vanishing from Starfleet Headquarters during what was meant to be a brief 72 hour report and restock before they head out again. Everyone got messages and only M'Benga and Chapel checked in with him while he was enroute, just. Offering condolences. Notes of studies they looked up. Medications that can ease symptoms. They understand what it is Leonard's doing, wandering back to his own graveyard of a cottage, empty of the wife that left him and the bones of a life he'd abandoned in favor of the stars. It aches, a little, pulling the dustcloths off the old sofa and bed, airing out the place. To think of everything he'd wanted to build, everything he'd never see.

Maybe it hadn't kicked in just yet, what that ticking clock in the back of his mind meant. Maybe this was just another way of running. But he doesn't burst out the bourbon just yet. Gets his kitchen sorted, the firewood for the actual hearth chopped for when the nights get cold, settles up on the porch to watch the sunset. Let his body finally sink in to the gravity of the situation and rest. He'll have to leave Jim a handwritten apology, he figures. The entirety of his journal will go to Jim, every bit of research, every thought and memory, every emotion save one.

You don't really tell someone you love them when you've discovered you've got a terminal illness.

On the one hand some might say it didn't need say'n, that Jim knew every gesture and worried snipe and sharp hand to the shoulder to haul him back from the edge were those three little words carving away at the spaces they didn't touch, stitching them together like cloth. Pulling away felt a little like unraveling and now? Now he's entirely unspooled, that last secret held bittersweet on his tongue like honeywarm whiskey, watching the horizon.