The bar on Starbase 11 was called the Fleet, which was less a name than a failure of imagination, and Leonard McCoy had been in it for five hours.
Spock found him at a table in the back. "Doctor."
"Go away."
"I would prefer not to."
"That's a hell of a thing for a Vulcan to say. Prefer." McCoy did not look up. "You want to sit down and drink with me. Have a conversation about our feelings."
"No. I want to take you back to the ship, because you are due on duty in nine hours, and because you have been in this establishment since fourteen hundred, and because I have been in the doorway for six minutes watching you not drink that."
McCoy looked at the glass in front of him. It was full.
"Yeah," he said.
Spock sat down. They sat. The bar was loud, forty officers and a band that was not good, and behind them a table of engineering ratings was singing something obscene about a Klingon.
"I can't do it," McCoy said at last. "Five hours trying and I can't do it. And I have been drinking for thirty years, Spock, and I have never once had trouble picking up a glass."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't get to." He pushed it away. "Because I did this."
"Doctor."
"No. You've been letting me off the hook for eight months. You and Scotty and that poor girl. And you do it very smooth and I want you to stop." He looked up, and his eyes were red and entirely sober. "I put that hypo in my own stomach. Nobody made me. There was a wave and a console and I went over sideways with the thing in my hand, and I had it in my hand because I hadn't racked it, because I was in a hurry, because I'd been in a hurry for six weeks and I hadn't slept.
"And a man is in 1931 tonight because of it. He is in 1931 tonight, Spock. Not dead. Not a memory. He is out there right now, in a room, in a city, and it's the middle of the night for him too, and he's lying awake, and he's thinking about us.
"So don't tell me about console overloads. And don't tell me it was a chain of causation with no author. Because I am the author. And if you take that away from me, then there is nobody left who is sorry."
The bar hummed.
"You are wrong," Spock said.
"Don't."
"You are wrong, and I am going to say why, and then I am going to take you back to the ship." He folded his hands on the table. "You believe that if you accept the blame, something is being paid. It is not. Nothing is being paid, Doctor. He is in 1931 whether you flagellate yourself or not. And you have discovered what a great many men discover, which is that guilt is a comfort. Because guilt has the shape of an action. And there is no action available to us. And so we would rather have the shape."
McCoy stared at him. "That is a hell of a thing to say to a man."
"Yes. And you have been waiting eight months for somebody to say something to you that was not kind, because you cannot stand any more kindness. And I am your friend. And so I have said it."
Leonard McCoy sat in a bar on Starbase 11 and looked at a Vulcan across a table for a long moment.
Then he picked up the glass and poured it out on the floor.
"All right," he said. "Take me back to the ship."
* * *
They walked back through the docking level at 0200, past the great windows, the Enterprise hanging outside in the light, and neither of them said anything for a long way.
"Spock."
"Doctor."
"When you say 'my friend.' Do you mean me?"
Spock did not break stride. "Do not be tiresome," he said.
And Leonard McCoy, for the first time in eight months, laughed out loud.