Disclaimer: Characters contained within do not belong to me.
Author's Notes: Another little drabble that popped into my head. Hope it makes you smile! Big, huge thanks to Lisa for all of her help!
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Physician, Heal Thyself
by Kristen Elizabeth
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Whenever there was a woman waiting in the hallway outside the dorm room he shared with Jim Kirk, Leonard McCoy could be fairly certain that one of two things had happened. Either his very young (and, consequently, often very stupid) friend had overbooked his Friday night or the opposite had happened and Jim had forgotten that he had a date at all.
But upon seeing that the woman pacing in front of his door was Nyota Uhura, McCoy had to rethink this entirely. There was no way that he would believe, even after almost three years of pestering her practically to the point of a restraining order, that Uhura had finally given in and agreed to go out with Jim.
And if she had, McCoy wasn't sure he was going to be able to respect her as much in the morning.
"Uhura," he greeted her. "Did you get lost?"
She was nervous. She might have been the best linguist at the Academy, but as a doctor, he was was fluent in the body's language. And from the way she was wringing her hands and shifting from one foot to the other and back again, something was weighing heavily on Uhura's mind.
"No. Are you busy?" she asked, pointing to the PADDs under his arm.
"Just catching up on medical journals," McCoy said. "I get behind on them when I have to waste my time in classes like Interspecies Protocol. Where I come from, you smile at everyone and you don't put your hands where they don't belong and that's all the protocol you need to know!"
Uhura forced a smile of her own. "So, you're not busy then?"
"What's on your mind, Uhura?" he asked her after a second. "This isn't a social call, is it?" She hesitated before shaking her head. McCoy shifted the PADDs to his other arm and punched in his entry code. "Come on in."
As soon as they walked into the room, McCoy cursed under his breath. How many times had he asked Jim not to leave his dirty uniforms and training clothes lying on the floor? Why was he incapable of making his bed in the morning? And was he saving all of his empty Bud classic bottles for some kind of craft project from hell?
"I would apologize for the way half of the room looks, but you've already met my roommate," he frowned.
Uhura took a tentative seat on the only chair in the room that wasn't draped with one of Kirk's shirts. "Are you expecting him back any time soon?"
"It's Friday night," he reminded her. "I'm not expecting him back until Monday morning."
She nodded slowly, without stopping for several seconds. Her eyes were fixed on a spot on the floor, but he was fairly certain she wasn't actually looking at anything. Finally, when he was just about to offer her something to drink to break the silence, Uhura looked up at him. "I think I might be pregnant."
Getting kicked in the groin by a prize-winning stallion wouldn't have knocked as much wind out of him as hearing that did.
When the shock wore off enough for him to think, the only thing McCoy could do was point to Kirk's half of the room. "Please tell me it's not..."
"Oh my god!" Leaping to her feet, Uhura glared at him. "Do you even have to ask that?!"
"Hey, I'm sorry!" He held up his hands in self-defense. "I'm sorry...I should have known better. It's just...well...let's just say there's a history of..." McCoy stopped. "Why did you come here?"
She was still frowning, but her shoulders relaxed a bit. "You're a doctor."
"Yes. And there's a whole clinic of them on the other side of campus who don't know you and don't see you every day."
"I trust you," Uhura said with a simple shrug. After a second she added, "And I don't want this on my medical records."
McCoy folded his arms. "What's 'this'?"
"What I'm about to ask you to do." She took a deep breath. "I need to know for sure. If I am or if I'm not. Tonight."
"You want me to test you?" When Uhura nodded, he asked, "How late are you?"
"It should have come today."
McCoy sighed. "Uhura, I shouldn't have to tell you that it's too early to tell if..."
"According to those medical journals of yours, it's possible to tell through a blood test as early as a week after conception." She held out her arm. "Take however much you need. I've got good veins."
"This isn't 2000," McCoy scowled. "I don't need to stick you with any damn needles." He ran a hand through his hair. "Look, if you wait a week or so, there will still be time for...you know..." He paused. "You'd still have choices."
Uhura shook her head. "No, I need to know now. Before he figures it out."
"He?"
She averted her eyes. "He's very...observant. He'll know that I'm late."
"And you don't want him to know?" Uhura said nothing, an affirmative answer as far as McCoy was concerned. "Why not?"
It took her a moment to reply. "He's come a long way, but I don't think he's anywhere near ready for this."
"Uhura..." He cleared his throat awkwardly. "You and I aren't what I'd call close or anything, but if I'm going to be your physician for the moment, I just want to say...you deserve better than some post-adolescent kid who can't keep his fly zipped when he's around a pretty girl."
The corners of her lips turned up. "I really appreciate that," she murmured. "But it's not like that. He's not like that."
"I suppose you jumped him, then, and he was powerless to stop you?" McCoy rolled his eyes.
"Actually..." She looked back a second later; her stare was steady, but misty. "I need to know. If I am, it's going to...everything's going to change. And not for the better."
He gave in with a nod. "All right. Let me get my tricorder."
******
Ten minutes later, she had her answer.
"And...that's a hundred percent accurate?"
McCoy nodded. "Tricorder readings don't lie." He offered her a rusty grin. "You are not pregnant."
The last time he'd told a woman that she hadn't been able to stop thanking god. She'd even promised that she'd never sleep with another command cadet ever again.
So it shocked the hell out of McCoy (again) when a tear suddenly slipped down Uhura's cheek.
"Um...this is what you wanted to hear...wasn't it?" Dragging her lower lip through her teeth, a second tear slid down her flawless face as she nodded. "So...what's wrong?" McCoy asked.
She brushed the tears away with her manicured hands. "I'd started imagining what the baby would look like," she whispered.
"Ah." At a loss as to how to respond to that, McCoy cleared his throat again. "Well."
"Sorry." Uhura shook her head, her ponytail swinging back and forth. "I never imagined I'd get this..." She chuckled like something was funny. "...emotional. This is good." She nodded firmly. "This is...what's best."
Turning his back on her, McCoy took a few seconds to carefully replace his tricorder in his medical kit. "You know," he began. "I almost had a kid."
Uhura's smile faded. "Oh...I didn't..."
"It's all right." He waved away her sympathy. "It was years ago. Just wasn't meant to be." He closed the lid on his kit with a firm snap. "Didn't help my marriage any, though. I wanted to try again." A moment passed. "She didn't."
"Then she wasn't supposed to be the mother of your children."
McCoy snorted softly. "Guess not."
Uhura folded her arms around her stomach. "I really want to thank you for your help with this." She hesitated. "And your discretion."
He acknowledged this with a gruff, "Can I give you another piece of advice while I'm still your doctor?" Taking her silence for permission, he continued, "Condoms are ancient, but they still make 'em for a reason." McCoy finally glanced back at her. "You've got a brilliant career ahead of you. A baby wouldn't ruin that, but it would sure slow it down."
"Yeah," she agreed. Another moment passed. "Well, I should go. I have a..." Uhura stopped.
"A date?" he supplied. At the decidedly guilty look on her face, McCoy crossed the room, stepping over grey sweatpants and crumpled boxer shorts until he reached Kirk's nightstand. From the top drawer, he withdrew a whole strip of foil packets. "He won't even miss 'em," McCoy said, offering them to her.
Uhura took the condoms like they were alien technology. With a nod of thanks, she folded them up and stuffed them in the top of her boot. When she reached the door, she glanced back at him as he settled down on his neatly made bed with his journals. "You know," Uhura began. "There's a violin concert downtown tonight. The drama club is putting on 'Much Ado About Nothing' in Klingon, which should be...interesting. I also heard that they're screening some old monster movies in the quad."
"I assume you're telling me all of this for a reason?"
"Consider it my own brand of medical advice," Uhura said. "People weren't meant to stay cooped up every weekend with medical journals." She paused. "There could be some woman out there who's supposed to be the mother of your children, but you're not going to find her in here."
McCoy lowered his PADD. "You never know. A lot of women come through this room."
"Not the kind of women you deserve."
With a jerk of his head, McCoy dismissed the sentiment. "Go on, would you?" Just before Uhura disappeared into the hallway, he added a quick, "Be safe. Doctor's orders."
It wasn't until she'd been gone for almost half an hour that McCoy realized he'd been re-reading the same sentence over and over and still had no idea what it was saying about the Thelisian flu virus. He tossed the journal aside and reached into his own nightstand drawer for the flask of whiskey that only Kirk knew about.
He took a swig and let it burn its way down his throat as he considered whether he'd have a worse time watching Godzilla destroy Tokyo or the drama club destroy Shakespeare.
******
"Uhura, you are pregnant."
Eight years later, with an entirely different answer, her reaction was still the same as it had been on that day in his dorm room. Tears. Only this time, they were accompanied by a broad smile.
"Really?" she whispered, her eyes shining.
McCoy tapped the side of his tricorder. "A hundred percent accurate." He didn't add the word "remember?" out deference to the man who was standing next to Uhura, but the memory hung in the air between them.
Spock, fortunately, was unaware of this. "Doctor, the margin for error in medical tricorders is..." He was cut off by his wife throwing her arms around his neck.
Had McCoy not seen it himself, he wouldn't have believed that Spock's expression could soften at such a simple gesture, but just like ice cream under the heat of the sun, the Vulcan's face relaxed as he folded his own arms around her slender body.
"Spock." Uhura drew back, her cheeks still glistening with happy tears. "We're having a baby."
He lowered his forehead to hers. "Yes." He closed his eyes. "And I am glad."
McCoy valiantly held back a snort. A year or two earlier, he might not have bothered, but working side-by-side through life and death situations with the Enterprise's first officer had given McCoy a much better insight into his Vulcan mind.
For a Vulcan, even a half-Vulcan, a phrase like "I am glad," which sounded so sterile to the human ear, was actually a shocking declaration of emotion. And McCoy wasn't about to call attention to it. Uhura deserved every single one of her husband's emotional declarations. Lord knew they were few and far between.
As the expectant parents continued to marvel over the adventure that lay in front of them, McCoy moved to the other side of the medical bay and busied himself with replicating the pre-natal vitamins he intended to prescribe to Uhura.
It took him several seconds to acknowledge the nurse who came up beside him as he measured out iron supplements.
Christine Chapel sighed softly. "They look so happy, don't they?"
"One of 'em, anyway," McCoy muttered.
"I wonder if they'll stay on the Enterprise or go back to Earth," his senior nurse mused. "Personally, I think it would be wonderful to have a baby on board."
"Kids and starships don't mix."
He felt her blue eyes on him...like they often were, although he'd never admit that he'd noticed her staring at him more and more lately. "I suppose an argument could be made either way," Christine said.
A few moments passed. "Would you like to...I don't know...debate it over dinner sometime?" McCoy ventured. "Maybe tonight?"
When he dared to look at her, she was smiling; she wasn't horrified or offended or disgusted. A great tidal wave of relief washed over him.
"Are you asking me out, Doctor McCoy?" She leaned in close enough that he caught a delicious whiff of her floral perfume. "Doesn't that go against Starfleet protocol?"
He didn't mean to glance over at Spock and Uhura, but his head rotated itself and he found himself staring at Uhura as she clung to her husband, her chin resting on his shoulder. Their eyes met before she smiled and turned her face into Spock's neck.
"Probably," McCoy heard himself say. When he looked back at Christine, her mischievous eyes were still fixed on him. "But hell...I've never been a fan of protocol, anyway."
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Fin