Disclaimer. Paramount owns it. I am playing with it. Hopefully in a meaningful fair use sort of way. One can but try.
Emotionally Compromised
Ch. 1
When McCoy first saw her two thoughts collided in his brain, leaving steaming, hissing wreckage in their wake.
Thought one? Oh, shit, there's another Vulcan on board my ship.
Thought two? There are only a few left. So why is there another Vulcan on board my ship?
Jimmy-boy would not have liked knowing McCoy considered Enterprise his own ship. It was bad enough that Scotty thought that the damned ship only flirted with Kirk but really slept with the Chief Engineer. Jimbo did not need to know that McCoy considered the ship his own because he goddamned owned every last organic molecule aboard her…signed for them, and was held accountable for them, and if that did not make the ship his very own baby he did not know what did. And there, in the middle of his ship, big as life and twice as natural, was a pointy-eared Vulcan sitting in the rec room eating a sandwich and sharing the pieces with a tiny little dog.
He blinked, and looked again.
Vulcan? Check.
Sandwich? Check on that, too.
Tiny little dog? Yup. Probably named Toto, too. Judging by the action in front of him the lady Vulcan did not like crusts, and kept the dog to scarf them up for her. Yeah. Ok. Lady Vulcan…only she looked like she might once have been named Dorothy, long, long ago, and come from Kansas on a tornado-ride. She had a soft, wholesome look: middle-aged, a bit weary, but the sort who kept her chin up and her wits about her and told any cracked blonde in a gauzy bubble that she was not a witch at all. There was something a bit wistful about her, too, like if she could she would click her ruby slippers and go home.
Which brought McCoy back to the second question. Vulcan was dead a year, now. Even after rounding up every stray Vulcan merchant, diplomat, and space jockey there had proven to be less than twenty thousand living Vulcans total in all known Federation space, and most of them were on Kaiidth, the new colony. So what the hell was a tired, travel-worn female Vulcan (and her little dog, too) doing on board his ship?
Damned if he was going to let that question hang there unanswered.
"Hello, mind if I join you," he said, slipping into the seat opposite her without waiting for an answer. "M' name's McCoy. Leonard McCoy. Chief Medical Officer. Glad to meet you. And you are…?" He waited, intentionally radiating the expectation of a response. Solid alpha eye-contact, the kind he used to chivvy Kirk or Spock down to sickbay for a check-up after an away mission.
She raised her brows -- both, he noted, thinking that it was an improvement on Spock's sardonic asymmetric brow-lift. Something seemed to lurk in her dark eyes. Amusement? Impossible, but there it was, as unlikely as that damned little dog pawing her hand for the remainder of her bread. She handed it off to the mutt, while giving a slight though gracious nod.
"Shahtau."
Ooooo-kay. Typical Vulcan: verbally anemic. It was that green blood, it had to be. Time for the next conversational lure… "If you've just been stationed here you need to be sure to set up an appointment for your physical right away. Don't like to let the paperwork get ahead of me." Not that she was dressed in Starfleet regulation anything: Vulcan pants and tunic and head veil all the way.
"I'm afraid I am just a visitor," she said, "but thank you." Her eyes still showed that impossible amusement. He accepted the occasional flash from Spock: the man was half human, after all, and he, Jim and Uhura had all been working to improve his socialization. But this one he would bet was pure Vulcan, so what was she doing looking like somewhere inside she knew damn well he was fishing for information and having a bitchin' good time making him waste bait on her?
"Visitor, huh?" She merely nodded, reaching idly over to rub the scruffy little black terrier behind the ears. "Uh, yeah. Well. ..welcome to the ship? Can I show you around? Help you find anyone in particular?"
Her eyes flicked down to the table. "Thank you. No. I have already found the person I came to see." She picked up her empty plate and glass and stood, wobbling slightly as she tried to deal with the unfamiliar contours of the chair. The dog jumped off the neighboring chair and pranced by her feet. She looked up and met his eyes with a clear, steady gaze. "I am afraid I can't say if I will be here much longer or not. If not, it was good to meet you, Leonard McCoy. If otherwise…I look forward to meeting you again." She turned and moved towards the recycling receptacle, her dog dancing beside her. Then she was walking away, moving with stately dignity across the room, her shoulders straight and her head up…
McCoy could not for the life of him say why the healer's red alert lodged somewhere inside his gut was wailing and whooping and telling him someone was bleeding to death before his very eyes. But he did know this was his ship -- and so long as Shahtau-whoever-the-hell-she-was existed on his ship she was his goddamned Vulcan and he was going to find out what was wrong and why she was in pain, and he was goddamned well going to do something about it. What, however, was another question entirely.
Fortunately he was smarter than a whip and twice as fast, and he could add one and one together and get a respectable total. She had hardly been gone long enough for the door to hiss shut behind her than he was on the horn to Spock demanding a few answers. After all, the coincidence of two Vulcans on one ship had become improbable enough to ensure that there damned near had to be some connection between the two. The first answer he got was a brush-off. But he knew the right buttons to push. When the ship's first officer came off duty an hour later he was met in the turbolift by the ship's Chief Medical Officer, who had no intention of being stonewalled.
"Who she is, Doctor, is none of your business."
"I would bet my bottom dollar on a three legged horse to win the Derby before I would accept that answer, you pig-headed, pointy-eared goon. That woman has some kind of trouble and is hurting bad, and on this ship that means she is my business."
Spock gave him a look so close to absolute zero McCoy figured he needed treatment for frostbite. "Am I to assume you inquire into every minor ailment and ill humor suffered by anyone on this ship, doctor? How do you ever find the time to practice real medicine?"
"Yeah, sure, fine, we established you had sarcasm down to a fine art form months ago…no need to keep proving it. Let's try again. There is a Vulcan woman wandering around this ship with a toxically cute black dog and the weight of the world on her shoulders, looking a little bewildered and a lot miserable. I am sure as hell she is not here to visit Chekov. So from the top: who is your Vulcan guest, Mr. Spock?" Spock's jaw set and he stared unwaveringly at the wall of the lift. McCoy slammed the stop button. Reflex-fast Spock smacked it back on. McCoy slammed it again, this time keeping his palm over the button to avoid getting the two of them caught in a completely childish game of on-off-on. "Come on, damn it. It's obviously a balls-up mess: you're as screwed up about it as she is. Or do I cheat and ask Uhura for a bit of behind the lines intelligence?"
The look Spock shot him then was a blend of supressed rage, pain, and pleading. "You will not speak to Lieutenant Uhura." A silence held between the two men for a moment, and then Spock did the unheard of -- he broke. "Please?" he asked, like a man expecting to be refused and sure it is going to destroy his world. "Please. Do not ask Uhura. She has already been hurt enough."
McCoy had a soft heart…but years of medical practice had taught him that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. "Maybe. If you tell me just what the hell is going on."
Spock drew a deep breath. "Shahtau has been sent by the Vulcan elders to negotiate certain…private matters."
"Private?"
"Private, Doctor. Is that not sufficient information?"
"Private like…um…ok, private like birds and bees private? Like making little Vulcans?"
"Exactly like 'making little Vulcans' as you so eloquently put it. Now, can we end this conversation?"
"Not hardly, son. Not hardly. So Uhura knows about this. Can I place a not-so-long-shot wager on the notion that you didn't tell her about this yourself?"
"Since I did not expect it -- at least not at this time and in this form -- I could hardly have done so. Shahtau, in good faith and with no ill intention, came directly to my quarters to discuss the issue with me, having simply presented her credentials from the elders to the on-duty transporter officer. She intended to respect my privacy and bring the subject up with me alone. Unfortunately the Lieutenant was present in my quarters at the time, and upon realizing our relationship Shahtau did as an honorable woman would -- and proceeded to attempt negotiations with my associate before discussing any further details with me."
McCoy wondered if he would ever, ever have a chance to tell this story to anyone. It was rich beyond compare. "You're telling me that poor woman stood there trying to bargain with Uhura for breeding rights to her prime stallion?"
"Were not the birds and the bees a sufficient biological metaphor, doctor?"
"So -- who won the bidding war?"
"There was no war. Lieutenant Uhura…lost her temper. Shahtau apologized and left. And if I am to have any hope of survival, much less hope of continuing my relationship with Uhura, she will go far away and never return."
"Spock, it's just a shot of sperm. You can come down to sickbay, spend a few minutes in a private room thinking of Uhura and the things you do for your species, I deliver it to Shahtau-from-Kaiidth, and the deed is done."
"No, doctor. It is not. The elders do not simply want to ensure the passing of the genes. They wish to ensure the survival of the culture. For that there must be…families."
"So you are supposed to get married and only then make little Vulcans?"
"Ideally, yes. However as I already have a chosen mate, the elders would accept my taking a Vulcan concubine. It is not optimal, but neither is it unprecedented. And it would provide any children, including any Uhura might have, with a stable Vulcan mother as well as a culturally Vulcan father. Even one-quarter Vulcan children are acceptable, now, and three-quarter are better still. The gene pool is that limited, and the elders that desperate."
"I see. I think. Uhura was not amused?"
"Uhura's reaction beggars my vocabulary."
"Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. So…who would the lucky concubine be?"
"Shahtau."
McCoy swore. "Sonofa….she's almost old enough to be your mother…pardon the comment, but…"
"She is intelligent, fertile, and will be for many years to come. And she is alive." The look of pain in his eyes expressed volumes of nuance. "The number of fertile women surviving and not occupied in…making little Vulcans… is rather limited. Shahtau has proven both fertile and a good parent."
McCoy leaned back against the wall of the turbolift, crossing his arms and frowning. "She has a family already, then?"
"No, doctor. She once had a family."
The final piece fell into place, and McCoy's mind called back the memory of a short, tired woman with a tiny little dog, widowed, childless, living in exile on a colony planet established to provide a home for a whole lot of baby Vulcans… and trying her hardest to do what was right, under conditions that allowed no "right" and which had to be costing her every bit of courage she had.
Yeah. Bleeding to death.
Sonofabitch.
End Ch.1