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transgayhawkeyepierce:

Okay but through a time traveling mishap, Leonard McCoy gets stranded in 50s Korea. He gets mistaken for a draftee, and not wanting to stray too far so the Enterprise can find him, and not wanting to be shot for deserting, and not really having anywhere to go, he stays. But if Bones has to be apart of the 20th century American army he’s going to do it as a doctor damn it! And after forging some credentials (bafflingly easy) he ends up in the good ol’ 4077th.

It’s tremendously hard for McCoy at first. He’s a man out of time in a terrible place. He has to completely relearn surgery with tools that look more to him like instruments of torture rather than tools of healing. The medicine is medieval and the conditions are abyssal even for the time. The day-in-day-out carnage beats even the Enterprise’s worst missions. But it’s the helplessness of patching these kids up only so they can kill or get themselves killed, that wears on Bones more than anything else. But Leonard McCoy isn’t a genius for nothing. He learns meatball surgery and he gets damned good at it too. He learns how to open people up with steel and sew them back together with silk so he can get the next body on the table and do it all over again. But most of all he learns how to cope.

Hawkeye and him get along right off the bat. McCoy hates the army, the war, authority in general, and Hawkeye appreciates anyone who hates the army as much as he does. But McCoy is a good doctor, a good man, and loves a drink, so Hawkeye decides he likes him.

Despite his edges Leonard slots well into the dynamic of the 4077th. While the man can be reclusive and puts on airs that he’s above all the tomfoolery, he has a mischievous streak a mile wide and a vindictive streak double that. He has a way of approaching problems that is so deranged that it gives Hawkeye’s antics a run for the money. The worst part is that McCoy always acts like his course of action was the most reasonable one. At least Hawkeye knows he’s crazy! Leonard soon becomes an important part of camp moral. If Hawkeye is the beating heart of the 4077th, then Leonard is the hands, to sooth away pains or to ‘shake some sense into these idiots!’  He gruffly motherhens everyone, earning respect through sheer human decency. And while McCoy is never a close friend to Hawkeye in the same way Trapper was or BJ is, he is a support that Hawkeye needs. McCoy has an uncanny way of seeing through his jokes, through him, something which Hawkeye is simultaneously grateful for and extremely uncomfortable with. The only person that doesn’t like McCoy and that McCoy seems to hate is Frank, the two devolving into a screaming match as soon as they’re so much as in the same room.

Hawkeye’s new friend is more than a little strange though. Leonard won’t know extremely basic things one minute (much to his embarrassment) but then will turn around and pull absolute miracles out of his ass. He says strange things and clams up when asked to elaborate. He has an almost suicidal disregard for social conventions that Hawkeye can’t help but admire if not pity. He remembers when Leonard mentioned that he was in a relationship two other men with a casualness that made even Hawkeye’s jaw drop. Eventually it becomes a running joke between them; Hawkeye will ask after McCoy’s two big strong sweethearts and he always responds that he’ll ask them as soon as they pick him up from the war. Even so, everyone notices Leonard doesn’t get letters from home.

The war eventually warps Bones just like everyone else. The terror, the gore, the cold, the boredom, the endlessness of it all. The longer he’s there, the more he becomes convinced he’ll never make it home, that the Enterprise is never coming for him or that he’ll be dead by the time they get there. The more it sinks in, the more he starts having trouble doing things, doing anything except lying in bed. This is nothing new to Bones, but he hasn’t had it this bad in a long time. The more times they’re shelled, the more times they’re shot at, each time someone dies on his table, he gets worse. He goes from helping patients and the members of 4077th through episodes to having them himself. He’s a doctor, he knows PTSD and depression when he sees it; has been seeing in the 4077th for a long time, but he’s never been good at helping himself. Despair becomes a close acquaintance and pain works itself under his skin. Luckily he has friends. People to lead him out of bed with a joke and something outrageous to show him, to forgive him when he acts irrationally and lashes out, to talk some sense into him, to hold him as he cries. Sometimes it stirs memories of the Enterprise crew, of JimandSpock, and it makes him ache.

In the end McCoy is there for all three years. He’s there for the goodbyes and for Hawkeye’s earth shattering breakdown. He remembers in the beginning he tried to keep himself at a distance, something that proved impossible right away, through sheer proximity if nothing else. But even if Bones hated the war, he grew to truly love these people and he knows he’ll miss them for the rest of his life.

The Enterprise comes then. According to Spock, this should be the time and place that Doctor McCoy was lost, but Jim grows more nervous the longer the landing party takes to locate him. When they finally find him, they glance right past him, not even recognizing him for a few horrifying moments. When Jim’s eyes snap back onto his partner’s face, it’s immediately obvious that Bones has been here for much longer than they had theorized, and his time here has not been kind to him. The man in front of him is hunched in on himself like the whole world is baring down on him, his face washed out, and his hair greying around his temples. But Bones gaps out a breathy, JimandSpock!and rushes at them, until he’s hugging both of them with desperate manic elation, crying and laughing. Jim can tell this isn’t going to be a simple mend, but no matter what they’ll always have each other.

Hawkeye never figures out what happened to Leonard after the war. Radar and some of the members of the 4077th try to find anyone by the name of Leonard McCoy in Georgia, turning up nothing, making Hawkeye wonder if that was his real name or if he even existed at all. Either way, Hawkeye hopes he’s surviving. He remembers how lovingly Leonard described his partners, always shooting a crooked smile and saying ‘they sure are outta this world,’ and think’s he might be alright.

Sometimes when the wind blows Leonard’s southern drawl through the trees, or he catches the smell of peach cobbler, or he simply misses is old friend, Hawkeye looks up. Whenever Leonard used to reminisce about home he’d look up to the sky, and somewhere along the way Hawkeye too started associating him with the stars.

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