A/N: Beta, SpockLovesCats. I thank her, for her tolerance of my tweaking after the event. I own no part of Star Trek, and I profit not.
3/3 - I am surfing, streaming, light trailing my heels
He almost never does this. It's illegal, but the subterfuge, scummy clothing and fake identity he used to procure his stash make the act all the more seductive. Sitting among rocks on the shore, he lays out instruments with a surgeon's precision. He could be caught. Up all night, signing release forms and preparing bodies – a pitiful few recoveries, considering the mass death – he doesn't care. Now he needs a shave – and a wash. Exhaustion like this hasn't lain on him since he was a junior doctor working nights.
He needs to get laid, to feel live, warm flesh beneath his hands, plump with the beat of blood, slick with sweat. He needs it to blot out the feel of dead, cold flesh, limp with loss of fluids. His hands have been under the steri-light so often in the last few days he swears they are getting tanned. Pathology never appealed to him; he likes his patients breathing.
Almost ten years older than most of his classmates, and a qualified doctor before he even joined Starfleet, this status earned him 'the ducks', a bunch of starstruck girls who followed him around like a trail of ducklings. Uhura christened them, and his frequent, sly escape from his posse was always greeted by, 'No ducks today, Len?' He is sure one of the ducks would oblige him, if they are still here. In this aftermath of conflict, survivors rut in frantic, life-affirming relief.
His hand slides into his jacket, no longer cadet red but the charcoal of an officer, and draws out a slim flask of bourbon. Half the contents are swallowed in one shot. Out in the Golden Gate there is no trace left of Nero's drill, it is long dismantled and taken to Starfleet labs to be poked and prodded by geeks. Not that it'll make a damned bit of difference; what's done is done, what is lost will never be retrieved and what is broken will never be repaired. When this block of shifts are over, he will go to Joanna, hug her 'till she almost breaks, and promise to send her a message every single day when he goes back up in that God-forsaken tin can. And he will keep his promise.
From the rock, he plucks a small brass instrument, an antique from the nineteenth century, and fits the end of a fat Cuban cigar – his contraband – into it. With a click, the tip is snipped and he sparks up a less aged, twenty-first century implement to light it, taking cool vanilla smoke into the back of his mouth, its flavours mingling with the bourbon. Back to being a child, he is with his father and uncle, who sit furtively on the stoop, having a sly, shady smoke and a chinwag, away from the disapproving eye of his mother – That'll kill you, David. Yeah, well a lot of things'll do that.
Ash falls on his pants; carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen. As he brushes it away he thinks of each one of the atoms in a living body; every single one forged in the furnace of deep space. How many were returned there by Nero, to be re-made? Too many to comprehend. In a few million years those atoms could be in a diamond.
Or an emerald.
On the day he decided to enlist, the day he met Jim, McCoy made a sarcastic comment about his wife 'taking the whole planet' in the divorce. Now he cringes at the joke and hears Spock's voice, speaking as a member of an endangered species. "I've noticed that about your people, Doctor. You find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million. You speak about the objective hardness of the Vulcan heart, yet how little room there seems to be in yours."
And yet, here he sits, mourning the death of one.
Gaila has made Jim Kirk a man, only he doesn't know it yet. It isn't the first time McCoy's friend has used a woman to get what he wanted and it isn't the first time he was less than honest with a girl, but it will be the last. Women who get the bum's rush from Jim frequently cry, make a bit of a scene then turn up a few times at the dorm where he always sweet-talks them into believing it's all for the best. Hey, they should stay friends, and everything will be just dandy. Sometimes they even wind up thinking they have broken up with him.
But he can't get around Gaila with his cheeky grin, wise-ass remarks and boyish charm. Gaila isn't here to apologise to, and the guilt will turn James Tiberius Kirk into a man worthy of his grandfathers' names.
In the end, she is Jim's Kobayashi Maru, his no-win situation, and he can't re-program the outcome. McCoy thinks of her beaming face, how she always smiled at him, and how he was pathetically grateful for her approbation. She didn't walk, she bounced, like a puppy. Each day brought her new things to be excited about and she summoned up enthusiasm for classes he would gladly have slept through.
Here, In this universe, a happy girl must die. She must die in order to turn the only genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest into a man worthy of a Starship Captaincy. It would have happened eventually, but in this time-line of enforced promotion, disability and death, it has to happen fast.
McCoy gathers his gear and flicks the butt of his cigar into a rock-pool.
He just hopes it is all worth it.
.
What could matter
if these boys,
if all men,
were not just memories like emeralds,
or pungent basil,
new snow,
throwing their scuffed leather jackets carelessly
over my empty bed,
while I am surfing,
streaming,
light trailing my heels,
from galaxy to galaxy,
trying to escape death? *
.
– The End –
*Verse from poem Emerald Ice. © Diane Wakoski, 1987, quoted under non-profit, fair use terms.
Title of trio taken from poem They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), out of copyright.
