centerFive Lives Leonard McCoy Has Led/center
1. Sam had connections that John didn't want to know about, even if he did need them. She was the one that thought of everything, that noticed her own hair greying in the mirror and looked sideways at him all morning, studying his smooth face, his thick hair.
He hadn't wanted to agree--leaving Sam had become too much of a pattern already. Everyone left her. But he was also terrified of the consequences, of being found out and becoming another experiment. Or, worse yet, of them synthesizing C24 and believing they could control it, destroying the whole fucking human race in the process.
2. John figured there were worse things than being a body guard. Sure, it was for some aging actor, focused on his days of beauty and fame, but it came with the perks of luxury travel and his own freaking suite. And John was used to ignoring the looks people gave him, so even if this guy added some groping into the mix, it wasn't hard to casually say "no."
A part of him felt bad, sometimes. He knew what it was like to lose a career, a way of life, for something you couldn't control. Staring into the photos of the young dark-blond haired man, at the blazing blue eyes that hadn't changed a bit, John regretted the fact he'd never change: no one would ever see the age on his face.
3. Science was his family's fall back. When John left his last life, he needed a change. Faking a college transcript with just enough credits to get him a "final" year at John Hopkins wasn't hard and he didn't feel guilty about it, they would have accepted him back when he was a Grimm. Then it was grad school, which revealed he'd forgotten how ifun/i science could be (and that he would have probably beat himself up a few lives ago). It made him think of his parents, of Sam, but in a good way.
In a research facility on the Asian continent he met a new enemy: disease. Soon he was doing all of the Level 4 Biohazard stuff he could get his hands on, his colleagues thinking him fearless because they had no way of knowing he was immune. But this was helping, more than he had since losing his humanity, and it made him feel better. If he didn't let his face go down in any of the books, if he didn't let any of the cures and vaccines be named after him, everyone just thought it was misplaced modesty and let it go.
4. His first try at medical school was the first time he changed his first name. "John" was so common that it had never mattered, but he wanted to take a step away from that. It wasn't who he was anymore, it hadn't been for a while. Classes were easy in the way they always were for him, making him feel guilty every time he passed his sleep deprived, last-minute-cramming classmates. He wasn't a genius like they thought, just augmented in ways they still couldn't fathom.
He had moved back to the Americas because he missed it, found himself winding his way down the states and settling in a backwater of what had once been the United State's Deep South. This should have happened sooner, it was easier to slip away and move on, to avoid the growing confusion and vapid women asking what his secret was to looking so youthful. He went from one town to another, staying a few years, then moved on, using his own resources to get him an updated degree when he needed the year of his graduation changed just a bit.
5. After awhile, he acknowledged that he needed to go through medical school again. There were too many other races to deal with, even in the tiny places he'd been staying one or two aliens would trickle in every decade. This time he didn't bother holding himself back. He let "Leonard McCoy" shine in such a way that he actually made one of his instructors faint when he announced he was going to be a country doctor. Everyone needed their fun and after the life he lived, he was entitled.
He never missed the work he used to do, because no one could measure if saving thousands of lives really meant more than saving that one, precious life that might otherwise have been left to some burned out country quack. It was too perfect a lifestyle to keep, though, and afterwards he had to acknowledge he'd settled in too comfortably. He should have known better.
The ex-wife didn't take everything in the divorce, because Leonard McCoy wasn't a name connected to everything. She took everything he would have had to part from, anyway, so he didn't mind, except for the bitter taste in the back of his mouth where he acknowledged he was looking forward to raising that daughter, even if he knew she wasn't his blood.
John hadn't gone into space in centuries, but Leonard had never been. It was time to change that, to face his fears and acknowledge where they really came from. And if a hauntingly familiar face talked him through the shuttle ride, pushed away the voices screaming for "Reaper" in the back of his head, he wouldn't let it feel a thing like fate.