I don't own Star Trek.
April
"Who the hell are you?" she stood before him, soft face a bewildered mask and arms full of heavily annotated pages that he strongly suspected were for him. She thrust a thin sheaf of paper at him as though it were alight-one crowded with the familiar penmanship of First Officer Spock. McCoy felt his lips turn into a deep and serious frown.
"Doctor Kincaid," she said. "They told me that...well they said you knew I was coming today."
"I do. I did," he rubbed his eyes. "It's just damn early in the morning for someone to waltz up to my room and-"
"After they picked me up from the shipyard at Beta Antares, I was told to report to the CMO immediately. I'm sorry."
"Well, I-"
"It's only five, besides. Not so bad."
He quirked an eyebrow at her. She blushed.
"Maybe I'm used to the graveyard shift."
"I was too, when I first came aboard. Midnight to eight in the morning always saw the crazy stuff."
"Back in New York, I once had a guy come in with a singed face and two bullet wounds who was trying to call his wife to remind her to feed the dog," she said. "Overnight in the ER is no kind of a life."
He nodded, perusing Spock's record of her qualifications and leaning heavily on the doorjamb, stopping every few moments to look her over. She was pretty enough-compactly built, with light brown hair, freckles, and bright grey eyes that, with a stomach full of coffee and breakfast, McCoy could have paid far better attention to.
"Four and a half years experience in Sloan Kettering ER; recommendations from the research and development department, primary care department, pediatric department-"
"I wasn't there long," she said quickly. "When I first got into medicine, helping kids seemed like a good idea. When I graduated and went back to New York, I asked to be put in pediatrics for my residency."
"What happened?"
"I got tired of giving my patients toys, and delivering bad news to parents," she said. He snorted. "Plus, the ER was understaffed and underfunded-"
"Same old story."
"Seemed like they needed the extra pair of hands." she said, jerking her shoulder. For a moment, there a was strangely charged silence between them, and he felt as abruptly (and entirely spontaneously) as though he were ill.
"Well, you can head to sickbay and sterilize the examining table and the rolling equipment caddies, and recalibrate the bio-scanners. Set three standard, portable med-pacs for yourself, Nurse Chapel and I, and start taking an inventory of our utility closet. We've got a full day ahead of us-a dozen standard physicals and two minor procedures," he said, trying to mask sudden wooziness and admitted sleep-deprivation with a businesslike tone. "Welcome to the Enterprise, Doctor Kincaid."