A/N: This is the last of the completed and fully-edited chapters. Updates will proceed more slowly from now on.
The good doctor was right, as it turned out. Two hundred and thirty-five years after her last doctor visit, and not much had changed. There were still medical histories to take and forms to fill out, and the doctor still hunkered on his stool and examined her as though she were a priceless artifact. He held her soft-skinned, eggshell feet in his hands and scowled at the faint blue tinge to her flesh, and he poked the soles of her feet with needles to determine sensation and reflexes. He pursed his lips and rolled her ankles and her wrists, and he ordered her to lie back on the bed while he palmed her feet and pushed her knees toward her chest to determine range of motion. And like his predecessors, he stopped when she yelped at the pain of a ligament pushed past its limit.
"I take it that hurt?" he said. He held her sole in his warm, dry hand as it twitched in response to the pain in her knee, which was bent at an acute angle.
She nodded and bit her lip against the lingering throb in her ACL. "Just a bit."
"Describe it for me."
"About a second of red-hot sonofabitch." When he greeted that with blank incomprehension, she added. "It's like being stabbed with a hot fork."
He hummed and slowly lowered her leg to the bed. "I'd venture to guess they're not used to deep motion-squats, lunges, things like that." He picked up her other leg and repeated the process. "The right's better than the left, but that's not saying much." He pressed until he met resistance, and heat prickled beneath her skin as she braced for the sharp, serrated-glass sizzle. "Relax," he urged. "Tensing up will only make it hurt more."
"I know that, and you know that, but-" she began.
"But your nervous system doesn't give a damn, I know," he finished for her with the irascibility of habit, but there was no real heat in it. "Still, it would be in your best interest to take a deep breath and relax. "Can you feel your toes?"
"Of course."
"Concentrate on uncurling them for me. If you can get the piggies to stick their heads out of the poke, the rest of your muscles will follow."
She giggled, amused at his homespun turn of phrase. "You have a way with words, Doctor."
"I'm glad you appreciate it," he grunted. "Now, piggies in a poke."
She tittered again, and then she took a deep breath and willed herself to relax. She surveyed the doctor from behind long eyelashes as he loomed over her in his blue tunic.
That's a handsome one, isn't he? Grandma Lavinia noted slyly as the doctor braced her knee with his free hand and coaxed it upward another degree. Lord, those cheekbones could give a woman the vapors. Probably cut paper, too.
She stifled a lecherous chortle at that, but she had to admit that her grandmother had a point. Dr. McCoy was handsome, his face unlined by the years of stress and long hours that came with his profession. There were no pouches beneath his eyes, no burst capillaries across the bridge of his nose that spoke of an uncomfortably intimate relationship with the bottle. No bloodshot eyes to hint at sleepless nights, no thinning hair or wattled skin. He was young and keen-eyed and lean beneath his tunic, and his hair was a rich, glossy brown beneath the lights.
Either he hasn't been at this long, or doctoring is a lot less stressful in this crazy Buck Rogers future. Maybe there's not that much to worry about when you've cured cancer and have no reason to obsess over your IRA and your 401K and your malpractice insurance premiums.
"Do you have malpractice insurance?" she blurted, and was instantly mortified. Smooth, Rosalie, real smooth, she berated herself as Dr. McCoy stiffened in surprise. I'm sure he'll just love having his competence called into question again. While he's got your matchstick leg in his hands, no less.
As she expected, his eyes flashed with indignation. "Why?" he growled.
"It's just-" She shrugged helplessly. "You look young for a doctor. You don't have alcohol bloat or burst capillaries in your nose or wattles on your neck or the hangdog look of somebody who's been in surgery for seventeen hours and on call for seventy-two and like you're contemplating driving into a bridge abutment at sixty miles an hour to shut your nagging wife up," she gabbled. "And oh, my God, I'm going to shut up now," she muttered miserably, and lapsed into horrified silence.
Rosalie, honey, I think you've blown your chance to see if you could get those uncooperative knees of yours over his shoulders, her grandmother said dolefully, and she bit the inside of her cheek to quell an inappropriate bray of laughter.
McCoy blinked at her in gelid, inscrutable silence for so long that she fought the urge to squirm on the bed. "I'll take that as a compliment," he said at last. He incrementally increased the bend of her knee. "I studied at the University of Missouri," he went on. "First in my class in anatomical and forensic pathology. I joined on at various clinics after I graduated, but the old folks didn't trust a kid wet behind the ears. So I set out my own shingle near the farming community where I grew up. Tended to farm accidents and delivered babies, mostly, though I did assist on a few shuttle crashes. I don't know what qualifications you're looking for, ma'am, but I promise I know my way around a human body." He gently flexed her heel cord and hummed at the result. "And a few non-human ones, if that makes any difference."
He lowered her leg and slid his hands beneath her hips. "I'm going to rotate your hips. Tell me if and when it hurts, and do us both a favor and don't try to gut it out until the pain gets intense." He raised a hip and rolled it to the side, watching her face for a reaction. "Anything?"
She shook her head. "If it hurts, it's when I sit. My hips ache."
He held the position a moment longer and then returned her to center and rolled the other hip. "Mmm. Could be spasticity or contracture from sitting for prolonged periods, or it could be arthritis. Either way, we'll get it sorted out." He released her hips. "I'm going to check your spine. Just breathe and relax."
His hands slid along the knobs of her spine in a smooth stroke, and she nearly purred with the pleasure of it. Touch had been a rarity for her even before she had been relegated to the loveless cradle of the cryotube and even rarer without the barrier of latex gloves. Her family had touched her, of course, had smoothed her hair and patted her arms and legs in absent affection as they passed from one room to the next with dreams of freedom in their head and tugged her recalcitrant limbs into more photogenic positions and delivered careful, one-armed hugs. Once a week, a physical therapist had rubbed and chafed her legs with hands that smelled of baby powder and Jergens, but there had been precious little incidental contact. A nurse had routinely seized her arm to apply a blood pressure cuff with bored efficiency, but no cashier's fingers had brushed her palm as she passed the change, and no usher had ever pressed his fingers to her elbow to guide her to her seat. No one had brushed up against her on a tram or a city bus as it waddled across the city, though she had been awarded a spectacular and wholly unwanted panoramic view of her fellow passengers' asses as they swayed along with the bus as it rounded a curve. It had been surreal and queerly balletic, the opening steps to a synchronized dance of which she could never be a part, and she had experienced a stab of sullen envy as her chair had lunged and bucked against the grimy restraints and her head had tapped the window.
No entanglement of toddler's fingers as they played patty cake, no butterfly tap atop her head for duck-duck goose, no linked arms in a game of Red Rover. No sweaty, competitive jostle of basketball or volleyball at P.E., no giggling, slaloming tangle of girl and too much lipstick and perfume as she headed out to the mall with her best friends alone for the first time, no coy exchange of handshakes and hugs and clandestine skin with a boy she had sneaked out to meet. No clumsy fumbling over a game of Spin the Blottle or Truth or Dare. No brush of bodies as she crowded into the backseat meant for four with five friends and a cooler stuffed with purloined booze for a freshman year roadtrip to Myrtle Beach, and no slap-and-tickle with the suntanned boys splashing in the shallows.
She had lived life on the sidelines and in the shadows, a spectator to the grand ebb and flow of life as it whirled around her. So often, she had longed to reach out and touch it, to feel the cool, goading rush of it beneath her fingers, tugging her onward and inviting her to join it. But the bracing hands of her therapists and the biting support of the parallel bars were as close as she could come, and so she had retreated into her history books, where with a little imagination, she could become anyone she chose and feel the solidity of the earth between her steady feet and the seductive rustle of linen and lace against her perfumed thigh.
Only Grandma Lavinia had been freely and unrepentantly affectionate. When Rosalie was small and scuttling across the hardwood like a shucked crab, all pink flesh and warped bones and insatiable, four-year-old curiosity, she had swept in with a flourish and a happy, twittering cry and swept her up as she pawed at her knees like an exuberant pup.
There's my favorite little rose, she would cry as she cradled twitching limbs gone akimbo and held her close. She had smelled of cold cream and silk scarf and grandma, and she had wiggled in delight as she had swayed to and fro and spun her in a wide circle, suspending her for an instant in defiance of gravity. It was the closest she would ever come to flying, and she had thrown her head back and loosed an exultant shriek to the high-vaulted heavens, much to the chagrin of her mother, who would grimace around her sip of sweet tea.
You shouldn't get her wound up, Mama, she would say. I'll never get her settled down later.
Oh, now, everybody needs a little fun, don't they? Grandma would say, and give her a conspiratorial wink, and they would giggle at their shared hubris.
No hard wheelchair cushions on those visits, just the snug comfort of Grandma's lap as she settled them into her favorite wicker chair in the kitchen or onto the sofa in the parlor, where Mama entertained guests with a stream of polished chatter and slices of the best pecan pie in three counties. Grandmama's manicured nails scratching idly at her back and the dazzle of her fuschia blouses and wispy scarves in her eyes and the lulling rhythm of her breathing in her ears while sunlight streamed through the windows. Grandmama's lap was was home.
Time and age had stolen that from her, too, but not Grandma Lavinia. When she had grown too big and too old for her lap and too heavy to swing from her arms, Grandma Lavinia had made sure to pull her wheelchair parallel to her seat and rest a soft hand on her forearm. While her stronger, more rambunctious cousins roughhoused at her feet on the living room floor, playing army and scattering plastic soldiers over a make-believe battlefield, Grandma had hummed to herself and praised their antics, and then she had leaned over and whispered, You're still my favorite into her ear.
She had learned about the monthlies from her when she was twelve years old, wide-eyed and morbidly fascinated as she had learned the dirty little secrets of a woman's life, and when she was a few years older, as much of a woman as her obdurate, uncomely body would let her become, Grandma had taken her boy-watching down at Centennial Park. She would post herself on one of the wrought-iron benches that lined the lazily-looping brick path and pull her little rose up beside her, and they would pass the time by admiring the young men who passed in their suits and ties and gutterpunk t-shirts and worn Converse.
Frankly, honey, I don't know what you see in that one, she would say disdainfully as Rosalie surreptitiously ogled the slim, toned calves of a skater boy with hair blond as summer wheat. Oh, he's pretty enough, I suppose, but I'd wager he's got about as much ambition as your Uncle Beau's blue ticks. They aren't much good if they've got nothing to offer you outside of the sack. Trust me on that, sweetpea. I'm not saying those kind can't be fun for a spell, but sooner or later, backs give out and those firm backsides start looking like your great-aunt Tallie's jell-o molds. Then you're stuck with 'em, and you've got nothing to show it but their incessant whining and a down and dirty itch they can't scratch anymore. It's a miserable predicament to find yourself in.
When Rosalie would sputter at her in disbelieving incredulity, shocked to hear her ordinarily-proper grandmother speaking with such vulgar frankness, her grandmother would only laugh and pat her bony knee. Oh, don't be so scandalized, sugar. You'll find out for yourself soon enough. Now there, she would say, alert as a sparrow behind the blocky shades she wore to protect her eyes from the sun, you want a fellow like that. And she would point a discreet finger at some dark-haired lad with a suit and tie and a faux-leather briefcase swinging jauntily from his hand. Hair slicked and neatly parted and shoes on his tender feet shined to a spit polish.
But what if he's bad at it? In the sack, I mean? she had asked once as their quarry had passed with a flap of tie and a swing of his briefcase, and Grandma had nearly laughed herself sick, doubled over on the bench with her hand clapped to the top of her head to keep her wide-brimmed straw hat from tumbling off her head and cartwheeling down the path like a tumbleweed.
Oh, honey, she had said when she had regained her composure. She had uttered a watery cackle and swiped at her streaming eyes with the back of her hand. There are ways around that easy enough. I'll show you some when the time comes, she had promised, and they had held hands and watched the possibilities roll by in the shade of an old elm.
She had made good on that promise two years later, during spring break her freshman year at UGA. While most of her classmates had gone to drink and fuck and burn on the beaches of Panama City, Grandma Lavinia had turned up in the driveway in a rented conversion van with a temperamental lift and hauled her and an aide promised triple the normal rate to New Orleans. She could still remember the flutter of her grandmother's hair in the wind as they rolled down the interstate with the windows down and the burn of the vinyl upholstery against the backs of their legs. The attendant had hunkered in the backseat, flanked by the electric wheelchair as it rattled restively in its aging restraints, and she had smelled of Big Red and old cheese, a sullen, brooding inmate bound for Angola and not one of the liveliest cities and bawdiest streets in the world.
But the joyless attendant was irrelevant now, insignificant white noise in her vivid memory. What mattered was the city, rising slowly from the mud and debris of Hurricane Katrina, proud despite her bruises and scars, and the time spent with a grandmother that was now long gone. What mattered was the laughter and the torpid heat that had sucked the air from her lungs and settled in them like warm reservoir water, the hedonistic laughter of shitfaced tourists as they reeled and slalomed down Bourbon Street, and the jazz that wafted from the clubs and rose from the streetcorners like sweet hash smoke.
They said thank you with their eyes, she thought idly as the doctor's probing fingers catalogued her vertebrae. A slow blink as you dropped a crumpled bill into an open saxophone case or rusty, tin cup. They never missed a note, never quieted that ceaseless, mournful cry, muffled wails behind a velvet curtain.
What mattered was jouncing over the cracked and pitted cobbles that ran through the red light district and the taciturn attendant muscling her heavy chair up the single step and into the dim interior of the sex shop. It had smelled of incense and latex and silicone, and she had been so startled by the wares on display that the collared clerk must have thought her either a simpleton or a hopeless prude, but her grandmother had chortled with delight and shooed the attendant outside and bid her browse to her heart's content.
Honey, nobody in here cares what strikes your fancy, so long as the money's good. Besides, this city's got plenty of secrets of its own.
She had been right, as she so often was. The clerk had not so much as blinked as she had shyly pushed her choices across the counter with her ears burning beneath her hair like banked embers. She had simply bagged them as neatly as you please and told her to have a nice day in a patois thick and strong as blackstrap molasses, and had gone back to her magazine before the door had finished closing behind them.
What mattered were truths she had discovered within the bag. There had been no midnight fumbling sessions in the backseat of her father's Escalade, no tipsy groping in linen closets at weekend house parties. No awkward first fuck beneath a magnolia tree, with cheap wine on her teeth and grass and sweat in the crack of her ass. Her first pleasure had come at the caress of her own fingers when she was fourteen, and she had surrendered her maidenhead to the dildo she had found in that sweatbox sex shop just off Bourbon Street. Its touch, so rude and intrusive and coldly mechanical, had awakened both desire and curiosity and stoked a hunger she could never fully satisfy with its carefully-molded length.
If it could not grant her warmth and intimacy, then at least it had prepared her well for the sloppy, brutish advances of the frat boys who had seen her as a novelty to be tested or a kink to be explored, a story to be shared over beers at the next kegger. No gentle hands or sweet swords whispered in her ear. Just impatient grunting as they tugged on her panties and pushed up her blouse and wrestled with her trembling, spasming thighs. Rough hands bruised her skin and coarse whiskers left razor burn on her face and neck, and when they were finished and staggering as they tucked themselves away, she had lain atop the rumpled, musty sheets in an indelicate sprawl, too sore and spastic to move. They had blinked at her in owlish stupefaction, as though she were an error already rued, and left her with muttered farewells that carried the yeasty stink of booze and quiet loathing.
For her part, she had waited until the door had closed behind them, and then she had struggled into her clothes as best she could and levered herself into her wheelchair. There could be no secrecy in her departure, not with the chair beneath her skinny shanks. Eyes alight with mockery and prurient curiosity had followed her progress as she had crept toward the door with her gaze fixed on the narrow path in front of her.
No shame, she had always admonished herself as conversation had faded like stilled wind. No shame in this. You have as much right to a good fuck as the cheerleaders and the sorority sisters and the Southern belles hiding their loveliness behind pencil skirts and tortoiseshell eyeglasses. But there was always shame, part and parcel of the sour sweat drying on her skin and the drying come crusting on her strained thighs and threatening to glue her to the upholstery of her seat; shame and a sinking suspicion that she had sold herself too cheaply to a lover less deserving than the silicone cock that had been her first. There had been no fire in it, no mutual passion, no sense of connection beyond the slick, undulating join of their bodies, but it had been better than nothing, better than the prospect of spinsterhood, and so she had taken what she could from those who would give it and willed it to be sufficient.
Even with the drunkards and the slumming dickheads and the desperate nerds who called it a pity fuck and an act of nonconformist philanthropy, her opportunities had been few and seldom satisfying. Even if her partner awarded her with an inadvertent orgasm in pursuit of a unique notch for his bedpost, neither her heart nor her mind were likewise enflamed. It was an experiment dispassionately observed and unsuccessfully concluded, and whenever she heard her classmates and compatriots rhapsodizing about the glories of a good lay, she could only listen with envious ears and wonder what she was missing.
Something tells me this young doctor could show you, her grandmother said slyly, her voice so clear and true in her mind that her chest cramped with longing.
His hands were warm and firm upon her back. There was nothing indecent in them, no hint of impropriety, and yet she found them soothing. There was a gentleness behind his careful efficiency, a suppleness that made her muscles relax into his touch. His fingers reached the top of her spine and interlaced to cradle her neck, and she purred when he slowly turned her head first one way and then the other.
He raised an eyebrow. "There anything I should know?"
"I'm fine," she murmured, and ignored the heat that bloomed on her nape. "It's just..." She shrugged helplessly. It's just been a while, that's all."
He waited for her to elaborate, and when she did not, he grunted. "I'm going to sit you up now." He slipped his arm behind her shoulders and curled his other hand around her furthermost calf. "Ready? On three. One, two, three."
He sat her up and swung her legs over the side of the bed in one fluid motion, and when she swayed and threatened to topple headlong into his chest, he steadied her with a hand on her shoulder. "Let me know when you can sit on your own." He scooped his bioscanner from a nearby tray with practiced ease and conducted a brief scan.
"I'm good," she said once she had found her elusive center of gravity and anchored herself by curling her hands around the edge of the bed in a vise grip.
"Uh huh," he replied, and dubiously released his hold. When she did not crumple bonelessly to the floor in an untidy sprawl of tangled limbs and bloodied nose, he stepped back and seated himself on his stool. "Your trunk control will get better, too, if you stick to the regimen I have in mind." He placed his palms beneath her bare feet. "Push down for me as hard as you can," he ordered. "Don't strain."
She dutifully obeyed. The skin of his palms was a pleasant friction against the soles of her feet, and her toys splayed and curled at the unexpected sensation. Her heels rose of their own accord, the nervous prance of a skittish foal, and she waited for the inevitable clucking rebuke, but it never came. He merely jotted a note into his tablet with his stylus. When he was finished, he released her feet.
"Did I pass?"
"It's not an either/or test," he answered. "You did well enough, but I'd like to see it better."
Of course you would. Your kind always do. "If I bring up my grades, do I win some shoes?"
"We can get you some shortly. The replicator's working through a backlog at the moment. I'd also like to get you into some AFOs."
She groaned. "Those damn things are still around?" she asked plaintively. "Just how advanced is this so-called advanced medicine of yours again?"
"Sorry to disappoint, but like I said, some things don't change. Those happen to be one of them."
"Please tell me they're at least breathable now," she whined. "They make my feet smell like old cheese and rancid gym socks."
The good doctor absorbed that tidbit with serene equanimity. "Well, luckily for the both of us, designs have improved since the last time you had a pair."
"Thank God for that," she muttered drily, and was surprised to see a flicker of amusement in his eyes.
He heel-walked his stool across the room to a bank of neatly-labeled drawers. He opened one in the center, withdrew a slender, black object the length and width of a mechanical pencil, and returned to her bedside.
"Another updated syringe?" she asked as he uncapped its tip, and resigned herself to another jab.
"This," he said as he toggled a slider switch on the pencil's side, "is a three-dimensional scanner." As he spoke, her leg was surrounded by a wash of soft, blue light. "It'll make a mold of your legs, which the replicator will use to create your AFOs."
"Huh. I guess there have been some improvements, after all. It sure beats plastic tubing and cold plaster that rips out most of your leg hair when they peel it off." She fought the impulse to wiggle her toes as the light passed over them.
She was mesmerized by the elegant sweep of the light over her pale flesh. It should be cool, she thought as it lapped between her toes and rose to cover her calves and nip at the backs of her knees. Like light reflected on snow or the soft, liquid fall of a silk evening gown over the sensuous curve of a socialite's hip, but it's not. It just is, like the reflections that dance on the ceiling of an indoor swimming pool. It would be like slipping the tips of my fingers inside a mirror.
She was so absorbed in the play of the light over her skin that she jumped when it vanished, abruptly snuffed by a click of the slider. Balance deserted her, and she floundered precariously on the edge of the bed.
Dr. McCoy's hand shot out to steady her. "Helluva startle reflex."
"Sorry. It's always been pretty bad." When he dropped his buttressing hand from her shoulder, she said, "So, what's next on this thrilling foray into twenty-fourth-century medicine?"
"Another throwback, one that sure will thrill you as much as the others. I'd like to give you some tests to gauge your mental aptitude."
"To prove I'm neither an imbecile nor a psychopath, in other words."
He shifted uncomfortably. "Well, yeah," he admitted apologetically. "It's standard procedure."
"Lead on, then."
"First, I want to give you a tour of our facilities, give you an idea of what you can expect."
"You have facilities?" She looked down the long row of beds that lined the walls and saw no therapy equipment stowed in unobtrusive corners, no balance balls stuffed into cubbyholes like packets of illicit contraband. There were only grey walls and cupboard stocked will pills, bandages, and pipettes.
"Sickbay is actually a small complex of rooms." He gestured to a door behind and to the left of his desk. "My office is through there." He pointed to a set of doors she had not noticed before, halfway down the aisle. "The doors on the right lead to intensive care, the OR, and cold storage. The doors on the left lead to our OT and PT rooms. That's where you'll be doing most of your work."
"Let me guess: it's full of mats, light hand weights, balance balls, parallel bars, and hand cycles."
"Mats and weights and balance balls, yes," he agreed. "But the parallel bars and handcycles will have to be hauled out of storage, assuming they weren't sucked into space when that damn Romulan blew up half of sickbay or obliterated when Admiral Marcus lost his fool mind and tried to blast us to kingdom come. If they were, I guess that's one more job for the replicator."
She gaped at him with rising alarm. "Wait, wait, wait. Someone blew up half of sickbay and another lunatic tried to blow you up? Am I on a warship in the middle of Armageddon? Because if I am, I don't think it's exactly the place to commit to long-term rehab. I thought you were an exploratory vessel." She hunched her shoulders and cast a wary glance around the room, as though she expected a gun-wielding soldier to leap from a hidden compartment in the walls or slither from beneath the bed.
"It's been a rough few years," he said, and she could only sputter at him,
He abandoned his stool and stretched to his full height. "I wouldn't worry. Odds are good that we've seen the worst of it." He considered a moment. "Of course, I thought that last year," he muttered darkly. "And the year before that."
"How comforting."
"Sorry." He tossed his three-dimensional scanner onto his desk. "Can you sit here while I find you some med socks and a wheelchair, or do I need to lie you back down?"
"I'll be fine as long as there aren't any sudden noises."
A skeptical cluck from the back of his throat, but he left her there and strode to the door on the left.
"Do I at least get a helmet and a flak jacket if it all goes to hell?" she called after him as he disappeared into the adjoining room."
"Trust me sweetheart," came the faint reply. "If it goes to hell, I'll be right here, knee-deep in casualties. "Besides, death by violence is rare on a starship. You're more likely to die from a hull breach or catastrophic warp core failure."
"Once again, you prove yourself a comfort, Doctor," she answered dourly.
Another pause as he weighed her words for insult. "Death in both cases would be instantaneous," he offered as though such knowledge were a salve against creeping horror.
He emerged, pushing a manual wheelchair the likes of which she had never seen. Oh it was spare and boxy and boasted a sagging seat that promised hours of discomfort and ungainly indignity as her scrawny ass sank lower and lower in its flimsy depths, but it was also completely translucent, window glass and spun sugar.
"Is that plastic?" she marveled.
He scoffed. "No. It's a carbon fiber three times stronger than titanium but light as cardboard. It can bear loads of up to six hundred pounds. It's durable, too. Won't crack or fracture on impact, and the wheels are designed to reduce palmar friction."
He sounded so much like a proud, eager salesman that she grinned. "Have they fixed the problem of warped rims and broken spokes?"
"The spokes are made from the same material as the frame, so you'd have to really work for any damage or breakage." He plucked the spoke and gave it a vigorous tug to illustrate his point, and she was surprised to find that she missed the musical ping of a spoke in true. "As for warping, I can't say it's impossible since they aren't usually used long enough to test it, but according to the manual, they can be easily balanced." He parked the chair at an angle and set the brakes. Then, he swung the footrests to the side.
"I'm not sure how you normally transfer."
"From a bed to the chair? I usually don't. The attendants did the heavy lifting."
"Well, we don't have attendants here, and while I could temporarily assign a nurse, I'd rather you do it yourself if you can."
"If I can't?"
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." He stood in front of her and held out his arms, bent at the elbows. "Show me."
She reluctantly pried her fingers from the edge of the bed and braced herself on his shoulder, and then she wiggled her hips from side to side until her shanks were nearly off the bed. She bent and gripped the forearm of his opposite arm, and then she took a deep breath and dropped off the bed.
Her feet, unaccustomed to weight bearing, promptly began to ache, a dull, bruised throb that radiated into her calves and threatened to cramp her stringy hamstrings.
Dr. McCoy gently extricated his forearm from her vise-like grip and dropped his hand to her hip. "Put your hand on my shoulder," he ordered. When she did, he applied firm, stabilizing pressure to her misaligned hip and spun her around so that she hovered over the wheelchair seat. "Sit."
She plopped gracelessly into the sling, breathless and with her splayed feet smarting and akimbo on the footplates. Christ almighty, but I'm out of shape, she thought dismally as her legs jittered with exhaustion.
"We'll work on your form," the doctor said not unkindly. "For now, it's a win that you made it in one piece."
"Now you're being generous," she said, and squirmed to adjust herself into a more upright position. "The bed's higher than I'm used to, but I'd be lying if I said that had much to do with it. I feel eighty." She huffed in irritation and squirmed more, the points of her elbows digging into the armrests as she dragged her buttocks backward by force of will.
"Since you're technically two hundred and sixty years, I'd say you're ahead of the curve," he said drily.
The unexpected humor surprised her, and she uttered a reedy wheeze of laughter.
"I can lower the bed a bit, and a handrail might help. There won't always be a nurse around."
"This chair's too big," she pointed out, and hated herself for being a font of endless complaints. The doctor was just as much out of his element as she was, and needling and nagging him about each new inconvenience she found in this bizarre brave new world would hardly ensure his continued goodwill.
"It is," he agreed. "It's also the only kind I've got right now. Once I get a better read on your abilities, limitations, and overall condition, I can design one to meet your needs, but I won't know what they are until you follow me and let me do my job." There was no heat in it, no rebuke or righteous indignation, only bald fact, but she felt chastened all the same, and she fought the ridiculous impulse to hang her head and mumble an apology to her toes, which had curled on themselves like frightened fieldmice.
"Let me get these med socks on you before I show you the PT room." He dropped into a crouch in front of her and unrolled a pair of socks. "Pick a foot." He held out a sock.
She thrust a foot at him, and it was immediately enveloped by snug warmth.
"It's going to be awkward for both of us for a while," he said quietly as his nimble fingers chafed her newly-socked foot. "I'm not ashamed to say I'm a damn good doctor, but nothing in my med school textbooks prepared me for this. I'm working blind here, and I'm going to need a little patience while I figure things out." He lowered her foot to the footplate with exquisite care and picked up the other sock.
"I know it's a lot to ask given everything that must be going through your head right now. If you believe us, you're a time-traveler two hundred and thirty-five years in the future and nothing is how you remember it or where you left it. If you don't-" He shook out the sock and slipped it onto her waiting foot, Prince Charming presenting his boon to a wasted Cinderella. "-then we're all lunatics and nothing is still where you left it or how you remember it. It's a mess either way. You may think I'm a lunatic, but I'm a lunatic who's trying to help you. Whether it's enough or not isn't for me to say, but I'm doing the best I can."
"Why do you care?" she asked as he finished with her foot and set it into place on the footplate.
"Because it's my job," he answered as though it were the most obvious truth in the world.
She snorted. "Please. If you were just doing the bare minimum your job required, you would've stopped with the preliminary physical and the first round of blood draws, made sure someone brought me a tray of swill when the clock said so, and fobbed me off on the first underling who didn't look like they were going to quit or keel over if someone dropped another brick on their load. You would've told me to shut it the first time I complained and ignored everything that came out of my mouth that wasn't simpering gratitude. And you certainly wouldn't be rubbing my cold, ugly feet."
He regarded her from his crouch. "I don't know how they ran things back then, Miss Walker, but half-assed doesn't pass muster on this ship, especially not in this sickbay. As long as you're here, you're under my care, and I'll be damned if you'll leave it worse than when you came to it. Now, when you've gotten yourself situated, follow me into the PT room." He dusted his hands on the knees of his pants and rose from his crouch, and then he turned and marched toward the PT room.
She could only gape after him.
Oh, honey, I do believe this one has some fire to him, her grandmother observed. This could be interesting.
She closed her mouth and collected herself and followed him down the aisle. As she suspected the chair was too deep and too wide, a behemoth that swallowed her up, but it was impossibly light, like riding a feather on the wind. She was soon on his heels, so close that she could hear the shift and rustle of his clothes as he moved. She could smell him, too, clean skin and shaving cream and starched fabric. It was a remarkably human smell in an otherwise sterile environment, and she savored it as they passed through the doors and into the room beyond.
And there ended her momentary buoyancy, because the doctor was right; some things never changed, and the PT room, it seemed, was one of them. It held the same array of equipment designed to push, pull, stretch and bludgeon her body into grudging compliance with a world that had neither the place nor the patience for it. There were the same drab mats and blank walls, the same stinging, medicinal smell, camphor and rubber mats and disinfectant to wash away the meaner stink of agonized bodies writhing in pursuit of acceptable imperfection, and over it all hung an air of oppressive melancholy and wasted breath.
I can't, she thought suddenly as she stared at objects terrible in their familiarity. No matter where I go or what I do, this is all my life will ever be, a series of rooms and schedules and therapy sessions. If anyone ever wanted to take a measure of my life, it would be a series of charts and fucking timesheets and medical diagrams. I can't do this, not again. Please, God, don't ask me to do this again. She curled her fingers around the rims of her wheels to keep her arms from wrapping around her in a protective embrace.
And what would you do if not this? asked a pitiless voice inside her head. Travel the world? Lock yourself in an ivory tower with your books and your moldering treatises and primary sources crumbling into inconsequential dust? Indulge in an epic love affair and set up house in some quaint little villa by the sea, with an adoring husband and a pair of rambunctious children at your feet?
You always did have a febrile imagination. The world you knew is the stuff of legend and lore, a fairy tale whispered to disbelieving children by amiable drunks and dotty aunts. Who can say what it looks like now? Maybe mankind has been driven beneath the earth to live in labyrinthine caves and on terraformed seabeds. Even Dr. McCoy, for all his grumbling compassion, admits that people like you were so kindly obliterated by modern medicine. If that's true, then the world has no need of ramps and handrails and accessible doorways. You would be as helpless as a fish out of water, and just as useful.
Your precious ivory tower would be out of reach, too, barred, not only by winding staircases that ascended into the heavens, but by obsolescence. That degree of which you were so proud is so much faded ink and brittle lambskin by now, two hundred and thirty-five years out of date. Besides, Daniel probably used it for kindling the minute you went into the can.
The thought of her younger brother inspired grief and a dull, festering anger, and her muscles seized with the urge to double over with her chin on her knees, but McCoy was eyeing her with mounting suspicion, and so she breathed through her nose and past the cramp massed in the center of her chest and pretended to be fascinated by a row of weights on a nearby table.
Don't you pay that voice any mind, Grandma Lavinia said sharply. As long as you're living, you've got a fighting chance. You can always learn what you don't know and go from there. All it takes is a little gumption, and that's one thing you've never lacked, my little rose. And don't you listen to his foolishness about Daniel, either. He loved you.
The voice chuckled, leather braces dragging through sucking river mud. Please, it said. Who's spinning fictions now, Lavinia Peabody Walker? I thought you prided yourself on your honesty, it needled, and clucked in feigned disappointment. Then again, I suppose love makes hypocrites of us all. Daniel might have loved her when he was still in short pants and easily enthralled by her lively bouts of storytelling, when she'd get so excited by the task and swept up in the moment that she'd wobble in her chair and rock back and forth like a hobbyhorse. Hell, what kid wouldn't be excited to have an amusement park ride for a sister?
Sure, he loved her, but he loved Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too, and those old DVDs of Barney and Sesame Street, but then he grew up, and love died. That's the thing they don't tell you about love, those prattling, long-winded poets. It changes. It waxes and wanes, ebbs and flows, and sometimes-more often than folks would care admit-it curdles, rancid and noxious as spoiled milk.
Nonsense and poison, her grandmother interrupted. And don't you believe a word of it.
Hardly, and you know it. If it were, then divorce lawyers wouldn't be the fattest worms in the dirt. Love is as fickle a flame as the minder who tends it, and most folks aren't exactly wielding the eternal flame. If they were, then you'd be carrying the last name of some hayseed Georgia farmboy who left you nothing but a stain on your dress and a warmth on your thigh and a handful of photos in an old album. John Peabody wasn't the first to win your heart. He was just the last eligible man standing when you got tired of giving it away, and isn't that the very definition of romance, my, my, my. That story should be a Lifetime movie, shouldn't it?
You've always been a smart girl, Rosalie, I'll give you that, the voice said, unfazed by her grandmother's impertinent interruption. You've always been able to sense the bullshit even if you couldn't avoid swimming in it. So, tell me: do you think me a liar, twisting the knife for my own sadistic pleasure, or am I just the only one willing to speak the truth you've felt in your bones for a long time?
Her grandmother drew herself up to speak, but the voice was faster, a scalpel slicing through undefended flesh. You can blow wind until it comes out both ends, but there isn't a platitude or nugget of homespun wisdom you can spout that will change the fact that Daniel wasn't there when they pulled your precious little red rose from the earth and plunged her into a frozen, eternal night.
She waited for a rebuttal from her grandmother, staunch and fervent and stinging as a lash, but there was only silence, ringing and vast and final, and the voice chuckled with satisfaction.
The truth is more faithful than love, more constant, and it will outlast all your mule-necked memaw's heartsick defenses. Pride won't will your brother into that room between your parents or erase the last words he ever said to you, and even the most potent grandmother's love can't change history.
As for your notions of a grand love affair, well, you can put them to bed right next to the past of wishful thinking. The great summer of your life is long past, when you were sixteen and flexible and still possessed of the idealistic hope that the best was still ahead for you. Now you're thirty and jaded and stiffer than ever, and while the doctors might not be as cold and draconian as you remember, not as eager to inflict pain in the name of pragmatism and progress, the equipment in here is proof that the world below this spaceship is the same. You are still a charity case, a problem to be solved by clever hands and potent poisons and just enough human interaction to keep you alive. As far as they're concerned, survival is a suitable substitute for happiness, and if it isn't, well, that's too bad. No one on this ship is going to look at you with anything other than curiosity and pity and the miserable, furtive gratitude that they're not you. You might've surrendered your worthless cherry to some slobbering frat boy before it shriveled between your spastic legs, but your heart will never ride in someone else's hands.
This is what you are and all you will ever be, an experiment to be poked and prodded and painstakingly recorded in a doctor's medical file long on terminology and diagnoses and short on blood and tears and thwarted, caged humanity. You're a tool, Rosalie, a hothouse flower forever trapped beyond the reach of the sun and cursed by God to know what could have been if He'd been a little kinder or taken a little more time when He drew your form in its patch of sacred earth. Stop reaching for a sun you'll never touch and let nature take its course. Let Dr. McCoy takes his notes and record his stats and mark your insignificant progress, and when the time is up and he's as disappointed and disillusioned as the others, maybe he'll have the compassion to let you turn your face from a light that offers no warmth and sleep forever.
I should've breathed in the fluid, she thought dully. Before the anesthesia paralyzed me and sent me under, I should've taken a gulp. One breath is all it would've taken. Just one, and I would've drowned, if not immediately, then when the pneumonia set in and turned my lungs into waterlogged, bacterial sponges.
Yes, you should have, the voice agreed, the low murmur of a mother soothing her feverish child. But it's too late now. God's twisted little rose has been transplanted into a new hothouse, and there's no one to dig you up and carry you home, to resettle you into the familiar soil of home. You're own your own now, and you have no choice but to endure.
"Not much has changed here, either, I see," she said, thin and strengthless and impossibly tired.
She expected Dr. McCoy to show off his timeless, state-of-the-art equipment and bore her with an explanation of its uses, but instead, he said, "Come on. Let's get you back into sickbay proper and start those tests I mentioned." His eyes were dark, almost black in their intensity as they surveyed her face, and behind the clinical curiosity of a surgeon assessing a critical wound were confusion and concern.
Sense the infection, do you, Doctor? she thought cynically as she met his gaze. Then you're sharper than most. Most don't see past the fact that my ass is parallel to the ground. Don't waste your time trying to reach it, though. No one ever does, and you couldn't fight it if you did. If you killed it, you'd kill me, too.
She offered him a bloodless grin and let him lead her back to the main ward.
She was still bloodless and grave as Dr. McCoy sat behind his desk and watched her pore over the test he had set before her. He could see the tension in her hunched shoulders as she pecked grimly at the virtual keyboard on her desk, fingers stiff and priapic as they jabbed at letters he could not see. Though the Loxtan he had given her had relaxed her considerably and allowed greater range of motion and freedom of movement, the cords in her neck still strained and bulged grotesquely with every keystroke. Every now and then, she was spurred to frenetic activity, the tapping of her fingers a frenzied, sloppy timpani that reminded him of an arrhythmic heart, and color would rise in her cheeks, hectic and alarming and utterly fascinating. Part of him wanted to stop her, abort the test and order her to bed, but he let her be. There was no signs of distress beyond the high color in her cheeks, and the ruthless scientist in him wanted to know just what kind of engine she was running under her mangled hood.
A better one than people think, I'd wager, his father said, and he could see him in his mind's eye, rawboned and hardy and thoughtful beneath the wide brim of his hat.
No doubt there, he answered easily, and he was back home on the family porch in Decatur, ass parked in a rocker his father had carved himself and feet propped on the porch railing. I've seen stupid, and she isn't. But I'm not sure she's quite right, either.
No, his father agreed. No, she isn't.
It was not danger he sensed, or simmering psychopathy that would reveal itself in a gaudy explosion of violence and chaos, nor was it the serene amorality of a sociopath. It was subtler, the bitter resignation of a prisoner without hope of pardon or freedom.
The walking wounded. His father nodded sagely and rocked in his chair, and the runners creaked companionably on the worn, whitewashed boards of the porch. Somewhere along the way, someone's fetched her a blow from which she's never recovered. They sank it deep, too, hit something vital. Who knows when it happened? A while, maybe. Old wounds sometimes hurt the worst, and even after they scar over, they can throb and flare when you least expect it.
It's a big one, Dad. The biggest I've ever seen, and deep, too. I have a feeling I'm only looking at the surface.
Just take it slow, son. One step and one stitch at a time. The size of the wound doesn't matter if you keep at it.
She grimaced and shifted and drummed doggedly on the keyboard. She scowled at the screen, pinched and pale and pensive in the reflected light.
"It won't determine the rest of your life," he said mildly. "It's just to get a baseline."
She answered without looking at him. "You're not the only one who doesn't half-ass it, Dr. McCoy." Tap-tap-tap went her fingers in their inscrutable, palsied code, and there it was again, a glimpse of the person behind the latticework of scars and bruises and bones badly-mended.
"All the same, take a break if you need it. This isn't timed. And remember to drink your water."
She heaved a sigh and ceased her tapping, and then she straightened with a muffled groan, hands clenched into fists. "Damn chair," she grumbled, and pushed away from the table. She rolled to the tray at the end of her bed, and a splay-fingered hand shot out to grab the half-empty glass of water she had left there. She fastened her lips around the straw and took several long, convulsive sips. When she was satisfied, she set the cup on the tray again and gazed at him with innocent expectancy. "Better?"
"There's no need to be such a damn smartass," he groused, and crossed his arms.
She startled him with an eruption of laughter. She threw back her head and let her amusement fly, and years of care and unhappiness fell away. She was young, if not lovely, and her broad, white smile brightened her wan face.
"Thank you, Doctor," she said, eyes alive with merriment, and then she spun the chair with a snap of her slender wrists and returned to her testing carrell. As soon as she set the brakes, solemnity settled over her like a mourning shawl. The flicker of life in her eyes guttered and died, and she became a creature of reflex and singular purpose. Fingers to keys and confessions to paper.
Answer the questions and show me your soul, he thought darkly as the minutes passed and the curve of her spine deepened and the clack and clatter of the keys took on the timbre of nails driven into sanctified wood.
On and on she wrote, page after page of thoughts he could not see. She wrote through the shift change at fifteen hundred, an inexhaustible little drummer girl who played Nurse Bellwether right out the door, and she outlasted his bladder and his maddening curiosity and two more glasses of water. She scarcely blinked as she worked, and she sometimes hummed and rocked in her seat, moved by the intricate dance of her fingers.
"Are you recreating the Magna Carta?" he demanded irritably when the hour neared seventeen hundred and she still had not finished.
She stopped then, and when she turned her head, her eyes were opaque glass inside their sockets, as blank as ancient statuary that had not seen the sun in a thousand years. "I'm just singing for my supper, Dr. McCoy," she said flatly, and gooseflesh rippled on his arms and puckered the flesh of his thighs inside his uniform pants.
I'm looking straight at the wound now, aren't I? he thought, mouth dry and flesh too snug around his bones.
Yep, his father said, and there was neither warmth nor ease in him now. He dropped his booted feet from the porch railing with a heavy clop and sat ramrod straight in his rocker, keen eyes fixed on a point on the distant horizon. It was the look he got when one of the horses pulled up lame on a trot around the paddock or the dairy cows dried up before their time. And I still think you're seeing naught but the surface.
Well, there was a comforting thought. He shifted in his seat and masked his unease by coughing behind his loosely-fisted hand.
She watched him in dispassionate silence and offered a knowing, humorless twist of her thin lips.
"At this rate, I'd say you're about to sing yourself hoarse," he replied, unnerved by her gelid, reptilian gaze, an alligator surveying him from the murky, concealing depths of its bayou. "Just give me what you've got."
"Yes, Doctor," came the polite reply. "Do I need to press any keys?"
"No, I got it. You just...take a break," he finished lamely.
She released her brakes and pulled away, and when she was at a respectful distance, he slid into the carrel. He entered his access code and transferred her test file to his padd, and then he powered down the terminal.
"You'll be on your own for a while," he told her. "There are nurses if you need anything."
"And if I want to get back into bed?"
He blinked at her, momentarily nonplussed, and looked at the bed. Then, realization dawned. It was still to high for her to safely transfer. "I'll have one of the nurses adjust it, but I don't want you in it for a few hours. You need to be up and about, get your body back into rhythm."
"What can I do to while away the hours? This place doesn't strike me as an entertainment hotbed."
"We'll see about getting you a padd." He held up his own. "But it might take a while because-"
"Because the replicators are backlogged," she finished for him.
Nothing wrong with her recall, he noted wryly. "In the meantime, you can look out the window." He tucked his padd under his arm and crossed to the window opposite her bed. "The view doesn't change much, but it's something." He pressed a button on the side panel, and the shade covering the window withdrew to reveal the vast, cold blackness beyond. "If you think you're going to be sick, for God's sake, don't decorate my sickbay with your stomach contents. There are some sick bowls on the tray behind you."
He hesitated, racking his brain for words of wisdom or comfort that would draw her from her pinched, round-shouldered melancholy, but he could think of nothing that would penetrate the cold, shuttered blankness of her eyes, and so he gave her a last searching look and left her to gaze upon the yawning emptiness of the final frontier.
He was still unsettled ten minutes later as he listened to Spock droning on about roster rotations and minor conduct infractions committed by overzealous ensigns and bored yeomen and surreptitiously scrolled through Rosalie Walker's test beneath the long, abetting edge of the conference table.
"-suggest more stringent penalties for such carousing in the future," he said piously.
Jim simply smirked and fiddled idly with his tab. "Such as?"
"Perhaps a few hours in the brig would be sufficient."
"A few hours in the brig for a bit of horseplay?" Scotty said incredulously. "It's a ship, not a penal colony, and there's no faster way to destroy morale than to become a lot of smothering, joyless tightarses."
"Discipline is not an unpleasant imposition, Mr. Scott, it is a necessity, especially on a starship with limited space and resources."
"Discipline, sure, but there's a fine line between it and draconian tyranny."
"You are overstating the situation," Spock retorted blandly. "I'm suggesting temporary confinement, not public flogging.
"Well, thank God for that," Scotty shot back, and his dry tone was so like Rosalie Walker that he looked up from his pad.
"I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Spock on that," Jim said.
"Thank you, Captain," Spock said pompously, and straightened in his chair.
If I didn't know better, I'd say he was gloating, McCoy thought, amused.
His triumph was short-lived, however. "I'd hardly call basic discipline an unbearable tyranny, Mr. Scott." Jim spun his padd in a lazy circle, and Scotty slouched in his seat, fuming. "That being said, I think a stint in the brig for a bout of ill-advised roughhousing is excessive."
"There. You see? A man with sense," Scotty declared, and gestured at Jim with enthusiastic grandiloquence.
"May I point out that Captain Kirk has, in the past, demonstrated little respect for the rules and regulations of Starfleet and has, in fact, elected to disregard both chain of command and the Prime Directive."
"That decision saved your life, dammit," McCoy snapped indignantly.
"A fact of which I am well aware, Doctor," Spock answered coolly, and McCoy was seized with the unbecoming impulse to cuff him about the pointy ears.
"Then you could try being just a little bit grateful." He tightened his grip on his padd beneath the table and wished for a glass of whiskey.
"I assure you that I am grateful, Doctor," Spock said, unfazed by his rising irritation. "But my gratitude for the eventual outcome of that decision does not change that fact that the Federation's first and most inviolable rule was flagrantly broken to the probable detriment of a developing civilization."
"A civilization that would've been obliterated otherwise," McCoy pointed out.
"A most regrettable consequence, but perhaps one that was meant to be."
McCoy sputtered at him. "'Meant to be'" he repeated. "Don't tell me that you're abandoning your vaunted Vulcan logic in favor of some mystical belief in fate and ultimate destiny."
Spock cocked an eyebrow at him. "Not at all. In fact, leaving the Niburu to the whims of its volcano would have been the most logical and prudent course of action."
Because it's just so easy to stand by and record the extermination of an entire civilization like it's some goddamned holonovel. He opened his mouth to resume the ethical duel, but before he could fire his scathing rebuttal, Jim raised his palm to forestall further discussion.
"We've covered this ground before," Jim reminded them with the weary patience of the long-suffering. "I see no point in going over it again. As far as the yeomen go, a verbal reprimand should be sufficient. If it isn't, we'll revisit the situation." Before Spock could protest the pronouncement, Jim turned to Uhura, who sat beside Spock. "Lieutenant Uhura, have we received any new orders from Starfleet?"
She shook her head. "No, sir. Our only scheduled assignment is our check on Ceti Alpha V."
The captain stiffened imperceptibly. Ceti Alpha V was the planet on which they had exiled Khan and his followers after the crazy bastard had tried to single-handedly bring down the Federation, destroy the Enterprise, and had managed to reduce Starfleet headquarters and the Academy to piles of smoldering rubble and mangled bodies. The Academy and headquarters and their surrounding environs had been rebuilt, but the loss of life had been enormous, and Starfleet and the Federation had a vested interest in keeping tabs on Khan and his movements.
"When is that scheduled?" The slowly-twirling padd had stilled.
Uhura consulted her padd. "Five weeks, sir."
"Which means that at our current speed, we should set course for Ceti Alpha V within four weeks," Spock supplied.
Jim nodded. "Any reason we shouldn't make it, Mr. Scott?"
"No, Captain. She's purring like a kitten."
"Good. What about you, Bones?" Jim swiveled his chair to face him. "Any medical crises to report?"
"I've dispensed a few hangover cures, but other than that, the only patient in my sickbay is Miss Walker."
"Our hitchhiker."
"My patient," he corrected.
"And?"
"Her name is Rosalie Walker. She's thirty years old, and according to the tests I've conducted, she has Cerebral Palsy."
"I am unfamiliar with that condition, Doctor," Spock said with his customary detachment, but McCoy saw the glint of curiosity in his eye and the sudden attentiveness of his posture. He sat forward in his chair and tented his elbows on the table. Uhura, too, was intrigued. She set her padd on the table, nimble fingers poised over the screen as though to take notes. Scotty continued in his amiable sprawl, but his eyes were focused inside his face.
"That's because it was last seen in 2179, when the last known sufferer died. Medical advancements in the early twenty-second century eradicated it. She's a piece of living medical history, Jim."
"Does her condition present any danger to the ship or its crew?" Spock asked, as if she were a particularly virulent pathogen
He scoffed. "No. It's congenital and neurological with concomittant orthopedic factors. The only danger she presents is to the finish on the door to the head. Damn wheelchairs don't fit."
"How does she seem otherwise?" Jim tapped the stylus of his padd on the table.
He shrugged. "She doesn't talk much other than to complain, but she listens, and as far as I can tell, she hasn't lied about her medical history, which is rare." He eyed Jim, who offered him a roguish, cocksure grin.
"Have you conducted a psychological evaluation?" Spock again, officious as ever.
McCoy rolled his eyes. "I know how to do my job. Yes, I performed a psych eval, and a standard intelligence test."
"And?"
And kiss my ass, you green-blooded hobgoblin, he thought churlishly, and interlaced his fingers on the table. "Her psych eval shows nothing abnormal. She's withdrawn and mistrustful and confused, but that's normal for a situation like this. She might show anger in the next few days, but that's normal, too. I expect the wariness to improve once she feels comfortable in her surroundings. The confusion and anger might take a little longer."
A lot longer in the case of the anger, he thought. I think that's been there a hell of a lot longer than the past few days.
"Is she stable enough to move?" Spock inquired.
"Move?" McCoy repeated blankly. "She can't walk. Her feet are the density of eggshells, and the rest of her bones are riddled with moderate osteoporosis. One wrong move, and she could be the proud owener of multiple stress fractures. I've started the treatments, but it's going to take some time."
"You misunderstand, Doctor. I was inquiring as to whether she could be transferred to the nearest starbase."
"Transferred to the nearest starbase?" he echoed, and Christ, he sounded like a broken record. "My God, man, she's a human being, not a hunk of freight. You can't just wake her up, tell her everything she's ever known is gone, and drop her off with a hearty clap on the back and a good luck."
"Still, the facilities on the starbase would be better equipped to deal with her needs."
"How would you know? You haven't so much as poked your head in sickbay since we brought her in," he countered furiously. "Besides, the doctors there won't have the slightest idea what they're dealing with."
"Neither do you," Spock retorted with implacable calm and irrefutable logic.
"Maybe not," he conceded. "But I know more than anyone has in nearly one hundred years, and I've got the time. The wards on a starbase are busy and full of people with contagious diseases she's never been exposed to. According to her antibody panels, she needs at least a dozen vaccinations, all of which have the potential for side effects and adverse reactions. If she goes to a starbase, they'll adminster them in a cluster or all at once, upping the risk of a reaction. Here, I can administer them individually and monitor their effects. This disability hasn't been seen in years, and no one knows what might happen if a vaccination goes bad. Including me," he said before Spock could interrupt to point out the obvious once more. "But I can have eyes on her twenty-four-seven."
"What about your research and experiments?" Jim asked.
"I can still do them. Like I said, she's not much of a talker, and aside from the occasional trip to the bathroom, she doesn't ask for anything. I've designed a program of medications and therapy to start correcting the issues I can, and she's agreed to commit to the program. Stretching and light aerobics and hydrotherapy coupled with a regimen of Loxtan."
"You obtained her consent?" It was Spock's turn to sound dumbfounded, or as close as a Vulcan could get, anyway.
"Don't sound so surprised, Spock. I'm not an ogre." He passed his padd to Jim, who perused the consent form with pursed lips.
"On whose authority did you make such an agreement?" Spock demanded.
"On my authority as a doctor," he snapped. "She needs treatment, Spock, and I offered it. It's part of my oath as a doctor.
"As a Starfleet officer, your ability to fulfill your oath is constrained by your responsibilities to Starfleet and your subordination to the chain of command."
"The hell it is."
"As such," Spock went on as though he had not spoken, "And as she is an alien-"
"She's not an alien!"
"She might be human, Doctor, but she is not a citizen of the Federation. The cryogenics facility in which she was stored attempted to move its clients to a satellite location on the moon just before the outbreak of the nuclear war that destroyed much of Earth's civilization and infrastructure. However, the transport shuttle was struck by asteroid fragments and suffered a catastrophic hull breach. The cryotubes were ejected in the subsequent explosion, and most of them incinerated upon re-entry into the upper atmosphere. The remains of two tubes were discovered on the banks of Lake Michigan. They contained only ash and a few bone fragments. Since most tubes were incinerated, there was no way of knowing who might have survived. When no survivors turned up within a few days of the crash, it was presumed that the entire shipment had been lost."
"Except for Miss Walker's," Jim supplied, though his eyes were still scanning the contents of McCoy's padd.
"Clearly. But investigators at the time presumed her dead as well."
"Meaning she has no Federation ID number," McCoy said dully.
"She does not," Spock confirmed. "As far as the Federation is concerned, she does not exist."
"But how did her cryotube survive when the others didn't?" Scotty mused, and scratched behind his ear.
"Unknown. It is possible that her cryotube was nearest the breach and was therefore thrown clear of the explosion by the force of suction. If hers were the first tube ejected, it might have escaped the blast radius and drifted through space for the next one hundred years."
"Until our sensors picked it up," Jim murmured absently, his gaze still fixed on the padd screen in front of him.
You're not reading the consent form anymore, McCoy thought as Jim's expression shifted. I thought the same thing when I first read it, damn near walked into the wall.
"As she is not a recognized citizen of the Federation, you should have consulted-"
"Is this her intelligence test?" Jim interrupted Spock's impending discourse on proper intake protocols and held up McCoy's padd.
"Part of it. She was still trying to work on it when I called time on account of the meeting."
"Still working? Christ, Bones, I didn't write this much on my Academy entrance exam."
Well, you weren't exactly a model student, Jim. The only covers you cracked were the ones on your bed. "She's thorough, yes."
"Thorough? There's got to be sixty pages here."
"Seventy-five." He had counted on the turbolift. "And she never got to the final question."
"May I see, Captain?" Spock held out his hand, and Jim passed him the padd. After a moment, he said, "These results are most impressive. The doctor is correct in his assessment of her as thorough. Indeed, her level of detail borders on the obsessive."
"Coming from you, I suppose that's a compliment," McCoy replied peevishly.
The pointy-eared bastard had a point, though. It was obsessive. It was also meticulous and exceedingly well-organized with citations and footnotes and cross references; that these were two centuries out of date and drawn from texts that had long fallen into disuse or out of favor was irrelevant. It was an historical treatise that would put most academics to shame.
And its existence calls into question a long-held belief in medical history, observed a professorial voice inside his head that reminded him of his xenobiology instructor, a sparse, angular man with a voice cool and dry as talcum powder. We have always believed that those born with congenital defects of the nervous system were also afflicted with inferior intellects. Delays, we called them in our magnanimous, enlightened kindness; our more ruthless predecessors called it retardation, Whatever the name, the meaning was the same. They were human, yes, but lesser, and to be pitied. A fortunate few might approach normal intelligence, might become happy, productive members of society, but most were limited to a sheltered, unenviable existence in discreet institutions and family homes.
But this shows us for liars and short-sighted fools, and it makes you wonder what else she's hiding in that head of hers.
Imagine the paper you could write, whispered the voice of ambition. It could change our perceptions of ancient medicine and shape the way we treat patients with neurological disorders. The historical implications alone are staggering, and not just from a medical aspect. Historians would be salivating at her firsthand accounts. So would sociologists, for that matter. She's a treasure trove of the past, and people would kill for even a glimpse of what she knows.
"While this is most fascinating, the fact remains that we are an exploratory vessel that may encounter dangerous situations and hostile species. In the event of an emergency, we are unprepared to deal with her needs. It would be better for all involved if she were transferred to a starbase, where conflict is far less likely."
"Less likely, but not impossible. The Klingons have been known to blow up a starbase. So have the Cardassians. And if some crazed admiral decides to target our ship again, we're going to be knee-deep in crew members with 'special needs'. Are you saying we should just jettison them, too? I know that deserting the inconvenient is your standard operating procedure, but my conscience tends to balk at abandonment."
"If you are referring to the incident with the Captain on Delta Vega, you might recall that I was emotionally compromised at the time."
"Fine. What's your excuse now?"
Jim blinked at his sudden vehemence. "If you don't mind me asking, Bones, why are you so invested in this? Is it really because she's a twentieth-century medical marvel?"
He thought of her terror as she emerged from the anesthesia into the drab, mechanical world of a starship sickbay, and of the fragile longing in her voice when she spoke of home and her grandmother's grits with sawmill gravy and sausage drippings. He thought the way her expression had collapsed when she had stepped into the therapy room and realized that her future bore a haunting, bitter resemblance to her past. He had thought-hoped-that the dam would break then and she would cry out the rage and the loss and the fear she could not articulate, but she had regained her equilibrium at the last moment, a plummeting gymnast making a hail-Mary grab for the bar just beyond her skimming fingertips. She had zipped herself up at neat as you please and told him what she thought he wanted to hear, and then she had dutifully followed him back to the sheltering bunker of the testing carrel, where she had hidden until the sting of this latest blow had faded to comfortable numbness.
I'm just singing for my supper, Dr. McCoy, she said inside his head, pale and stoic in her chair, and he suspected that she had been doing just that for a very long time, baring her myriad flaws to curious eyes in exchange for a place at the table, no matter how mean and cramped. It had been a fleeting glimpse of the festering wound hidden beneath layers of impenetrable armor.
He thought of her startling, inexplicable laughter at his fit of pique, and of a boy in a standing box and dragging himself through parallel bars with exhaustion on his face and weights of steel and leather on his feet. He thought of thoroughbreds strangling on their own fluids and pawing feebly at the damp, fetid earth of their stalls, and of farmers averting their gazes from the horrors their neglect had wrought.
He thought of his brother retrieving his father's phaser from the cab of truck.
He thought of the writing on his padd, coaxed from the keyboard by palsied, uncooperative fingers and possessed of a spare, often stunning beauty.
He thought of a room that stank of piss and rot and festering rage, and of a voice drifting out of the dark. Please, son. Please.
"Please, Jim." No logic now, only an entreaty, an appeal to their friendship. "I know I can do this. I just need time. She trusts me. It's tentative, but I can work with it. If you ship her off to a starbase, there's no guarantee she'll follow the regimen I've suggested."
"Do what, Doctor?" Spock's voice, intrusive as the buzzing of a fly, and equally inconsequential.
"Jim," he pleaded. "Please. She deserves a chance."
C'mon, Jim, c'mon. I've followed you down every crazy road you've ever started, most of them against my better judgment. I've never complained, and I've never asked for a damn thing in return. Just give me this.
"All right, Bones," he said at length. "She stays, but she's your responsibility, and if at any time she becomes an impediment to the safety of this ship or its smooth operation, she goes to the nearest starbase. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good." Jim offered him a sunny grin and turned back to the rest of the table. "Now, what's next on the docket?" he asked, and for the rest of the meeting, McCoy was content to drift on the comfortable hum of his voice.