There was nothing so sweet as a peach in Leonard McCoy's mouth the next morning as he accompanied Miss Walker to her appointment with the illustrious Dr. Boswell. It tasted of too much coffee and the antacid he'd been swigging all morning in a fit of nervous anticipation. His stomach was an apprehensive knot beneath his skin, and his eyes were dry from sleeplessness. He'd been up half the night reviewing his case file, and every time he'd tried to sleep, he'd dreamed of granite-faced orderlies marching into sickbay to carry off a screaming Rosalie, whose arms and legs snapped like dry kindling in their indifferent, iron grips.
You should've let me die, she'd said sadly as her splintered forearm had jutted grotesquely through the torn skin of her arm, and blood had pattered to the floor in a grisly trail to the door. You should've left me in that cryotube. I would have been asleep. Now I'm going to feel it. I'm going to feel everything.
In the end, he'd given up on sleep and trudged to sickbay, where he'd rifled aimlessly through the shelves and eyed his various experiments without enthusiasm. Mostly, he'd held vigil over Rosalie, who'd huddled beneath the blanket in a painfully-tight ball. Now and then, she'd whimpered in her sleep, and his hands had itched to smooth her limbs until they uncurled and her breathing lost that worrisome, ragged edge that spoke of nightmares behind her twitching eyelids, but he'd kept his hands to himself and settled for sitting on a stool at the foot of her bed and catching up on correspondence. Letters from his mother and brother. Invitations to various conferences, most of which he'd had to refuse. Journals and articles from medical associations, a convivial note from an old neuroscience professor at UMiss.
She'd woken once, had moaned softly and shifted beneath the coverlet, limbs shivering spasmodically with the feeble effort, and then then she'd opened her eyes and looked at him. Her lips had twitched in a sleepy smile, and she'd been so small and vulnerable that his heart had ached.
It's going to be all right, he'd wanted to tell her, but he hadn't known any such thing, hadn't wanted to make a liar of himself at the eleventh hour, so he'd simply given a curt nod and a gruff order to go on back to sleep now. That small, sleepy smile had brightened for an instant, a filament on the flashpoint of failure, and then she'd rolled over and closed her eyes, fingers fisted in the sheets and face buried in the pillow.
Frankly, she looked no better this morning. In fact, she looked diminished, hunched and shrunken in her her chair as she rolled along with jerky, graceless movements. Her shoulders strained against the harness.
Hardly a ringing endorsement of my care, he thought morosely.
"Sit up," he said for the third time. "You're straining in the harness."
She immediately straightened. "Sorry, Doctor. "Everything tenses when I'm nervous, and right now, I'm scared to death." Her voice shook. "Besides, I didn't get much sleep last night."
That makes two of us.
A sympathetic grunt. "Try to relax. It's just a preliminary exam, and now that you've got your Federation ID, you can refuse treatment."
She stopped, tucked against the far wall to let pedestrian traffic pass. "Then why can't I just refuse right now? I don't want to do this. I don't want a new doctor when I've got an excellent one right now." She looked at him, obdurate and terrified, and he didn't need a bioscanner to see that her stress levels, which had begun to climb the minute she'd gotten out of bed this morning, were now in the stratosphere. She was pale as milk and stiff as a board, and she was trembling, a subtle vibration in her hands and feet.
Nothing should have to live under this much stress, he thought as he watched her in helpless silence. It's a wonder she hasn't collapsed. If you did this to an animal, they'd call it cruelty, but do it to a human being, and it's suddenly bureaucratic necessity.
"If it were up to me, I wouldn't make you. I'd turn you around and take you right back to the ship," he said. "I still can if you want me to, but if I do that, they're likely to think I'm trying to hide you or am coercing you into staying. You get through this dog-and pony show and still refuse, they can't say mum about it."
She nodded. "Guess we'd better get on, then," she said, and ground into reluctant motion again, and she was so miserable and defeated that he wanted to weep as he led her onward, a driver prodding a broken horse to the slaughterhouse.
He stopped in front of the door. The trembling was readily apparent now, a steady thrum that made her heels drum on the footplates. She looked at him, eyes too big and lips too white. Are you going to make me do this? A mute plea for mercy that he could not grant.
I'm so sorry, sweetheart. "You ready?"
"No." So soft and mournful that he almost relented, consequences be damned, but then she forced her shoulders back and rolled through the door with her head held high, and he could only follow.
You're a bastard, Leonard McCoy, he thought as he entered the sickbay. Its layout was close to that of the Enterprise, with rows of biobeds separated by a corridor and doors that led to surgical suites and the intensive-care unit. The beds were periodically interpersed with supply closets and scrub rooms and medicine lockers, and the CMO's desk and observation area were twice as large as his own.
Nice setup, he mused, and the doctor in him catalogued the array of state-of-the-art equipment.
A prim, unsmiling woman rose from the behind the desk and approached with regal, martial gravitas. "Dr. McCoy." It wasn't a question.
"Yes, ma'am, I am," he answered with the politeness of long-ingrained habit.
"Dr. Moira Boswell." She extended a pale, thin hand, unadorned by either jewelry or nail polish. "And this is the patient?" she asked, as though Rosalie were a mildly-interesting slide preparation and not looking right at her with a game smile on her face.
"This is Miss Rosalie Walker, yes," he said, and shook her hand. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
"Hello, ma'am. It's a pleasure to meet you," Rosalie said, and offered her own hand.
Boswell blinked, nonplussed, and accepted her hand. She gave it a single hurried pump and released it as though it were a particularly noisome appendage. "Likewise," she muttered unconvincingly, and stepped back. She gestured to the biobed nearest her desk. "Put her over there," she commanded as though Rosalie were a new piece of equipment, and strode to the nearest supply closet.
Rosalie turned and spared him a searching glance, and then she rolled forward and parked her chair parallel to the biobed. There was no handrail, and the bed was too high for her to boost herself up. She set her brakes and folded her hands in her lap. She swung out her footplates, and he stepped forward to help her stand, but before he could, Dr. Boswell asked, "What are you doing, Doctor McCoy?"
"Her bones and muscles are too weak to start strength and transfer training, and your bed is too high, so I'm doing an assisted transfer," he explained.
"I'd prefer you didn't." Clipped and imperious. She nodded to two nearby orderlies, who swept in and shouldered him aside. Neither spoke or offered instructions to Rosalie. They simply seized her at ankles and armpits and manhauled her onto the bed. Her blouse rode up to expose her midriff, and she tensed against their indifferent grip.
"And I'd prefer your orderlies didn't manhandle my patient," he shot back. "Her bone density is improving rapidly, but she's still not used to contact and bruises easily.
The orderlies stepped back, and Rosalie teetered precariously on the edge of the bed, feet splayed and hands scrabbling for purchase at its narrow edge. He hurried forward and put out a hand to steady her, front knee in a deep bend and rear leg in a long stretch, a fencer in an impossible lunge. He waited until he felt her settle, and then he released his hold and retreated.
"Poor balance," Boswell remarked. "Is her coordination equally poor?" Boswell peered at her with clinical interest, a padd in one hand and a bioscanner in the other.
"It is. I'm hoping it will improve once her strength does. Her trunk control has shown some improvement."
"Minimal," Boswell murmured dismissively. She stood in front of Rosalie and waved the bioscanner over her.
"Any improvement is good in my book." Besides, it's only been a few weeks.
"Mmm," was Boswell's only reply as she consulted the bioscanner readings. "She's showing abnormally high cortisol readings," she said.
That's because she's afraid, which you'd know if you bothered to look at her, he seethed. "This is a stressful situation for her," he pointed out.
"Perhaps it would be less stressful if you waited outside until I've finished my examination," she suggested. She dropped the bioscanner and picked up a penlight.
If I leave, then who're you going to talk to? he thought furiously. It sure as hell isn't her.
"No," Rosalie snapped, so sudden, sharp, and unlike her customary quiet murmur that he flinched. "Dr. McCoy stays here."
Dr. Boswell ignored her. "Please, Doctor, I work best without interference."
"And I said no," Rosalie repeated. "He stays here. The Federation's code of patient's rights states that patients not incapacitated or otherwise in need of urgent, life-saving treatment may request that their primary physician accompany them to all specialist appointments. Dr. McCoy is my primary physician. I want him here."
He wasn't sure who was more surprised, him or Dr. Boswell, who surveyed Rosalie with cold scrutiny.
I'll be damned, he thought in amazement. She's got some piss in her vinegar, after all. He was absurdly pleased at this development, and bounced from heel to toe and back again. Then, as he looked at Dr. Boswell, She's not as dumb as you thought she was, is she, Doctor?
"He stays," Rosalie insisted. "If not, I'm throwing myself off this table and crawling out of here." She clutched the edge of the biobed in a white-knuckled grip and glared at Dr. Boswell in mute, mulish challenge.
"You can stay," Dr. Boswell said as though she were conferring a great favor and not adhering to Federation rules. She raised Rosalie's eyelid with brusque jerk of her thumb and shone the light into her eye. She repeated the action with the other eye. "Follow my pen with your eyes only, she ordered.
Rosalie obeyed.
Dr. Boswell switched off the penlight and set it aside. Then she seized Rosalie's hand and rolled it left to right to check the rotation of her wrist. It balked at being rolled to the right, and Rosalie grimaced.
Dr. Boswell dropped her hand and made a note in her padd. "Not much range of motion."
"It's limited," he agreed. "Some of it's spasticity and contracture, but scans showed warping of the trapezium and pisiform carpals in each hand.
"Possibly due to positional habituation. I'm guessing she doesn't move much."
"I've got her doing ninety minutes of PT a day. As to what she was doing two hundred and forty years ago, I couldn't say. I wasn't exactly around to observe," he said drily. "How about you ask her? Her mouth works pretty well."
"I want your medical opinion, Doctor. I have no interest in unreliable information from a patient."
"'Unreliable information from a patient?'" he repeated incredulously, and narrowed his eyes at her. "My God, man, haven't you ever heard of a case history?"
"Which are notoriously unreliable, as you know, particularly when taken from patients of dubious mental capacity. Besides, you've already provided a thorough case history. To take another would be a waste of time." She pushed Rosalie's hand back until she cringed and made another note on her padd.
"'Dubious mental capacity?'" He felt like a broken record. "Have you even read my damn report? If you had, you'd know there was nothing wrong with her mind."
"Tests are helpful for baselines, but they can be deceptive. She might not function well in practical tests. Have you attempted to test her practical skills?"
"You mean like talking?" he suggested, and sarcasm lined his tongue like sour cream. "She passed that one with flying colors. She does pretty well with eating and drinking and thinking and feeling, and if you'd bothered to look at a damn thing I sent you, you'd know she possesses exceptional critical-thinking and problem-solving skills and one hell of a lot of self-awareness. You know, the things you need to be considered a human being. You'd do well to treat her like one and be a credit to your profession."
"I sense a great deal of emotional involvement here, Dr. McCoy," she said coolly, and her thin lips curved in a smile that did not reach her eyes. "And you're hardly one to talk about being a credit to your profession."
Please, son. Please. "What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded.
Another humorless smile. Her eyes were hard inside her face. "Please, Doctor. Your exploits with Captain Kirk are infamous. Sneaking him aboard the Enterprise, helping him break the Prime Directive on Nibiru, violating medical ethics by injecting him with an untested serum created from blood you obtained without consent. The only reason you're still here is because Kirk's reckless heroism saved the planet. If not, you'd be treated plague victims on Rudaras-12 and squeegeing rotting flesh into the biohazard drains."
The relief was so acute that he laughed, a sharp, angry caw. "You act like saving lives is beneath you," he said, and contempt burned in his belly like an ulcer. "And if I hadn't synthesized that serum and raised Jim Kirk from the dead, the earth would be so much dust in the cosmos, so you can spare me the self-righteousness."
"And emotional involvement?" he went on. "If by not treating her like a Rhesus monkey with a bad case of hubris, then yes, I am emotionally involved. Dammit, she's a person in need of help, not another opportunity for your extensive resume. You might be an expert on bioprostheses, but from where I'm standing, you don't know or or give a single damn about the people attached to them, and that's a sorry state of affairs for a doctor. A doctor without give a damn isn't a doctor at all, That's a goddamn scientist."
"A rousing speech, Doctor," she said, and the condescension in her voice was smooth as glass. "Doctor or scientist, what I am is successful, and I can guarantee you I will do more for her than you ever could."
He wanted to protest, to claim that the healing in his hands was no less than hers, that Rosalie was, in fact, blossoming under his patient, meticulous care rendered by gentle patient hands, but he knew that it would do no good and only bolster her claims of emotional overinvestment, and so he held his tongue.
She flashed him a triumphant, Cheshire-cat grin so smug he could practically see the feathers floating from the corners of her mouth and spun away from him to seize Rosalie's left foot.
She stripped it of shoe, AFO, and sock with practiced efficiency. It was bare and pathetic in her palm, archless as an infant's. The toes fanned and curled with nervous energy as Dr. Boswell surveyed them with a critical eye. "The circulation's adequate. No arch, and the bones feel exceedingly fine." She squeezed Rosalie's foot, and Rosalie keened and flinched. "This is after bone density treatments?"
Dammit, stop hurting her. "Yes."
She turned and picked up a tiny, thin-gauge needle, and then she jabbed into into the sole of Rosalie's foot without warning.
"Dr. McCoy!" Rosalie yelped.
Goddammit, you merciless asshole, he thought furiously, and clasped his hands behind his back to keep them from reaching for her. "It's just a reflex test. It's all right."
"A reflex test?" Shrill and disbelieving. "But you never-" A yelp as the indignity was repeated on the opposite foot. "Dr. McCoy," she pleaded, and the betrayal in it scored his heart.
"It's all right. It's just a few tests, and then it's done," and oh, God, he hated himself because she was helpless and cornered and in the clutches of an amoral jackass, but Boswell was right; if Starfleet suspected him of emotional overinvestment, they could wrest her from him despite all the patient rights in the world.
Just hang on, sweetheart, he prayed as he gazed at him in wordless entreaty. An hour of this, and it will be all over. You'll never have to see her again if you don't want to.
Bet you're not the first person to ask that trade of her, noted his agonized conscience. By the looks of her, they've asked it plenty. And she's given it, whether she wanted to or not.
Dr. McCoy, her eyes said, wet and wretched, and he did nothing.
Her chest hitched once, twice, and he was convinced she was on the brink of another crushing meltdown, but she simply stilled and swallowed. The light drained from her eyes, and she simply sat like a broken doll, blank gaze fixed on a point over Boswell's shoulder.
So much for her honest doctor and little piece of home, he thought bleakly, and dug his fingers into his wrist in an act of penance. I'm sorry I let you down, sweetheart.
Rosalie offered neither resistance nor protest as Dr. Boswell's expert hands pulled and tugged and twisted. She cried out when she tested her heel cords and shoved her bony knees chinward, but she was all out of pleas and the hope to make them. When Dr. Boswell shoved her backward and arranged her on the bed like an anatomist's dummy, she submitted without even a cry, simply lay on the bed and endured, face inscrutable.
"Good God, you're going to pop her ACL you keep wrenching like that," he protested after a particularly rough bend.
"I have tissue regenerators," was all Dr. Boswell said as she scribbled on her padd.
Rosalie blinked at him, dazed and lethargic, and then she turned her face to the wall in final surrender.
Horses pawing at dirty straw. The brief trill of a phaser and his father carrying a worn bridle to the truck.
C'mon, sweetheart, don't quit on me.
Why not? You quit on her. His jaw ached.
"Get her up," Dr. Boswell barked to the two orderlies who had been hovering nearby, and they dutifully hauled her upright. Rosalie blinked at the floor, fingers curled around the edge of the bed.
"I'm going to get a blood sample."
"No." It was the first word Rosalie had said since his spectacular fall from grace.
"As an unregistered alien, you have no discretion in medical matters and must submit to any tests or examinations that I deem necessary," Boswell said, and reached for a syringe.
"As of this morning, I am a Federation citizen and am within my rights to refuse any procedure."
That brought Dr. Boswell up short. She frowned and picked up her padd and scanned Rosalie's file. "I see," she said, and he detected a distinct note of chapped ass that pleased him to no end. "Let me get you a consent form. She fiddled with her padd for a few moments and handed it to Rosalie along with a stylus. "Sign here."
That took too long for a simple consent form, he thought, and his brow furrowed in concern.
Rosalie accepted the padd but not the stylus and painstakingly began to read.
"Young lady, my time is very valuable and extremely short. I assure you it's just a standard consent form. Please sign it so we can proceed," Dr. Boswell said impatiently.
Rosalie ignored her, long, bony finger extending to scroll down the screen. Dr. Boswell's lips twitched in a moue of reflexive distaste.
"Dr. McCoy," Rosalie said softly, head bent to the screen.
He approached the bed. "Yes?"
"This isn't a standard consent form. This names her my primary physician and gives her the right to make all medical decisions on my behalf."
"What?"
"There must be some mistake," Dr. Boswell claimed, and reached for the padd, but miraculously Rosalie was faster and handed it to him instead.
He read the document with rising incredulity, and each word stoked the anger that had been rising inside him from the moment Boswell opened her mouth. "Let me guess," he managed through the fury massed in his chest like a crushing fist. "You figured she'd never read it, or that if she did, she'd never understand it."
"Doctor, it was an honest mistake." She offered him an apologetic, collegial smile.
"Mistake, my ass," he snarled. "We're done here." He shouldered her aside and picked up Rosalie, who clung to him as fiercely as she could. He could feel her trembling, the dangerous thrum of a bowstring about to snap.
It's all right. I've got you now, he thought. He fought the impulse to rub her back and dispel a measure of that terrifying tension. To hell with a proper transfer. He turned and set her in her chair.
"Go," he said. "Go back to the ship, right now. I won't be far behind."
She turned and fled, bare feet thrust before her like a battering ram, and when he was sure she was out of Boswell's reach, he bent and gathered her shoes, socks and AFOs.
"Doctor McCoy, I assure you-"
He rounded on her, Rosalie's footwear cradled in one arm. "Your assurances are worth less than a counterfeit credit. I know damn well what you were trying to pull. I just got lucky she's a hell of a lot smarter than you give her credit for, and you can bet your ass I'll be filing a complaint with the ethics committee and anyone else who'll listen."
"A complaint from a wet-behind-the ears doctor who's already thumbed his nose at Starfleet regulations at least three times?" She scoffed. "I'm sure it'll be given all the consideration it deserves."
"Goodbye, Ms. Boswell."
"It's 'Doctor'," she said stiffly.
"No. It isn't."
He turned on his heel and marched out of sickbay, and then he set off for the ship with his heart in his throat and his stomach in his toes.
I never should've let that go on, he remonstrated with himself as he stalked down the corridor with Rosalie's shoes and braces bundled against his chest. I should've pulled her off that table the minute she touched her. Now Rosalie's running loose on a starbase barefoot and traumatized and rightly convinced I'm an asshole, and I'm about to get into a career-threatening pissing match with a high-ranking member of Starfleet Medical.
Just another day in the life of one Leonard H. McCoy, sighed the voice of hard experience. You tried to save your father and failed, sat there in a room that smelled of piss and terror and festering rot and listened to the strongest man you ever knew scream and cry and beg to die while he stewed in his own shit. You got married and failed because you were too busy pickling your guilt with all the booze you could get your hands on and trying to bury a man who wouldn't stay dead. You tried to be a doctor back home and failed because you were too young and untested for folks with eighty years on their old bones. You tried to keep Jim from killing himself and failed because you couldn't stuff enough self-worth and common sense into that idiot head of his, and the only reason he's still walking around is because of a rogue government science project from the past. Now you've tried to help Rosalie and failed because you were too much of a coward to tell that petty tyrant to kiss your ass.
He rounded the sinuous curve in the corridor and stopped. Rosalie sat at the end of the line for the turbolift, feet still outthrust. Her toes fanned and curled, fanned and curled, and her legs twitched convulsively. Her head was bowed, and her hair hung in her face, but he could see her quaking shoulders and her bloodless, white-knuckled grip on her armrests.
She's about three seconds from a meltdown, the doctor inside his head assessed coolly, but his heart lurched inside his chest.
He reached her and dropped into a crouch at her side. "It's Dr. McCoy," he said softly. "Hang in there. We're almost there."
She snorted and turned her turned her head to expose one eye and one pallid cheek. No lively twinkle, no soft, shy smile, only wariness and the expectation of another cruel disappointment. She glanced at the jumble in his arms and turned to study her shuddering knees again.
"Here, let's get your shoes back on." He set the shoes and braces on the ground beside him and snagged her footplate with three fingers. He turned her to face him. "Set your brakes?"
A somnambulistic hand reached down and obeyed. "We're going to miss the turbolift."
He shrugged. "There'll be another." He hovered for a moment. "Can I look at your feet?"
She blinked, surprised that it was a request and not a physician's fiat. Slowly, her left foot extended.
"Thank you." He cupped it in his palm and gingerly raised it to peer at the sole. It was warm, almost hot to the touch, and coated in a fine sheen of sweat. Fever? he wondered. She'd been fine this morning. He carefully inspected the sensitive flesh and winced at the needle mark he found in the center of her sole. Small, but it was already beginning to bruise, and there was even evidence of bleeding. He scowled and dropped his gaze to the footplates, where he discovered several tiny droplets of dried blood.
"Son of a bitch," he swore. I'm going to have Boswell's ass on a flagpole, he vowed. "I'm sorry, Rosalie. I never should've let this happen," he said.
"I trusted you." Mournful, a child who's discovered their parents' most glaring imperfection in a thunderclap of pain and shattered hope.
"I know you did, and I was proud to have it." He gently lowered her foot. "I'm sorry I wasn't worthy of it." He patted her knee.
She cocked her head. "Why didn't you stop her?" Wounded and accusatory.
Dr. McCoy, she echoed inside his head, plaintive and beseeching.
"Because I figured if we just got it over with, she couldn't come back later and claim you didn't give her a chance, or that I was an interfering busybody."
"You were covering your ass."
"And the bases," he retorted. "But yeah, I suppose I was." He shook his head. "Not one of my finer moments, but I wanted to keep you here. Well, not here," he amended. "On the Enterprise."
"Why?" Curious now.
Because I want to know you. I want to know just what I pulled out of the stars like a message in a bottle.
He shrugged. "Because I started this walk with you. It's only right that I finish it," he said and turned his face so she couldn't see the flush creeping into it. He cleared his throat. "Of course, I'll understand if you'd rather I didn't after-"
"There's no way in hell I'm going with Boswell."
"I didn't figure you would, but I can set you up with Pennicott if you want, or M'Benga. He works swing shifts and substitutions."
She studied him, elbows on her armrests and hands skimming her shivering knees. Her hair framed her face in a soft fall of golden wheat. "You're the finest doctor I've ever had. I'm not giving you up because you had a bad morning," she said, and managed a small, pained smile. "Just don't make me go back there."
"Sweetheart, it'll be a cold day in hell before you see that woman again," he promised, and picked up a sock. "I'm going to fix you up once we get back to sickbay. I didn't bring my kit this morning. Are you hurting anywhere besides your feet?" He slipped the sock onto her foot, mindful of the abused flesh.
"I think she wrenched my knees and adductors. They hurt."
He grunted, unsurprised. He'd seen cadavers handled with more care by first-year med students. "I'm going to leave your braces and shoes off until I fix you up. Otherwise, I'm just going to wind up pulling them off again." He picked them up and set them on her lap. "At least this way, you won't be barefoot and crazy."
She yodeled laughter.
"I'm going to push you if you don't mind. It'll give both of us a chance to settle."
He circled to the back of her chair and grabbed the push handles, and when she released the brakes, he rolled her toward the turbolift. She trembled on and on, an incessant shiver of nerves and excess adrenaline that bunched her muscles beneath pale flesh and rattled the AFOs in her arms like castanets.
"Easy now," he murmured, and guided her into the turbolift. "If you start feeling pukey or getting chills, put your head as far down as you can. It'll pass. It's just anxiety."
She nodded and closed her eyes. The doors closed, and the lift slid noiselessly downward, quicksilver through an hourglass, and he reached out to brush his fingertips over her shoulderblades in a gesture of comfort. I'm still here, sweetheart. It's gonna be just fine now. Up and down, a slow counterpoint to the frenzied electrical impulses racing beneath her skin. Soft and steady, easy as an after-dinner ramble down a winding country road.
"It's all right. It's all right." A reassuring mantra as the turbolift deposited them on the deck and he pushed her toward the familiar comfort of the ship, and by the time they were rolling into sickbay, the helpless, convulsive shuddering had begun to subside.
He parked her beside her bed and made for his padd and kit. He grabbed both from the desk and returned to squat in front of her. "I'm going to fix you up, I promise," he said, and carefully peeled off her socks. "But I need to document your injuries first. Just give me ten minutes, all right?"
"That's fine," she said, but she didn't sound fine. She sounded uncomfortable and pushed past well past her limit.
He pulled out his bioscanner and ran it over her from head to toe. Heartrate and blood pressure were elevated, and her cortisol levels were off the scale. Body temperature was normal despite the clammy warmth of her feet, and there were no signs of infection or illness. Oxygen levels were normal. Sugar levels were low, but he suspected that could be remedied with a decent meal. Signs of minor dehydration. Progesterone levels were low, testosterone high. He made a mental note to have Nurse Ogawa supply her with whatever form of feminine hygiene product she preferred. Based on her levels, it wouldn't be long, and the last thing he needed was a mess on her sheets or some idiot orderly mistaking it for a catastrophic hemorrhage and calling him in at three in the goddamn morning to be a tampon valet.
Over her legs, and there was clear evidence of bruising on her knees and shins. More bruises on her scrawny calves, and there was a perfect circle around her bony ankles. No sprains, thank God, but a pull on her right adductor.
Goddamn you, you incompetent tit, he thundered inside his head. And this was from a routine physical. God knows what you might've done with impunity, no oversight, and a little more time.
Deep tissue bruising on both feet, as well as minor puncture wounds in the sole. The damage was more severe than it would have been in the average person. Most people's feet were toughened and desensitized by years of walking, weight-bearing, and incidental contact with hard surface and idly-scrubbing hands, but Rosalie's feet hadn't touched the ground for more than three seconds since they'd pulled her out of her mama, and they'd been insulated from incidental touch by shoes and footplates and layers of plastic and polymer. Dr. Boswell's hasty hands might as well have been iron vises around the thin, delicate bones. She hadn't broken anything, but it had been a near miss, and he had no doubt that Rosalie's feet were throbbing like abscessed teeth.
"Jackass," he muttered darkly, and picked up his padd. "I'm going to photograph these."
She nodded, but her bottom lip disappeared beneath her teeth, and her feet shrank from him, toes curling. Before she turned her head, he saw her face flush with humiliation. He lowered his padd and sat back on his heels.
"The people I'm sending these to are doctors, Miss Walker. I guarantee you they've seen it and worse before."
"I know. It's just-" She chewed her lip gaze fixed on the workstation behind his desk. She shrugged.
It's just all your flaws out there for the whole world to see. He thought of her trussed in the stirrups while gawking obgyn interns paraded through the room like schoolchildren on a field trip and recorded her humiliation for posterity on their clipboards.
"I won't do this if you don't want me to," he said. "But it might be the only way to hold her accountable and bring her down a peg."
"Go on," she said thickly. "Just...not my face."
"Not your face," he agreed. It didn't matter; her face would be part of the dossier should his complaint ever come before the ethics committee, but if granting her this small, useless mercy sweetened the bitter medicine he was asking her to swallow, then he'd do it gladly.
He started with her feet. He photographed them from every angle. She whimpered when he picked them up to photograph the bottoms and tried to pull them from his grasp.
"I know," he soothed. "I know it hurts. I can feel the swelling. I'm sorry, sugar. Just let me get this picture and I'll treat it."
She whimpered again, but her feet relaxed, and he silently blessed her forebearance. He raised one rapidly-darkening foot and took several closeups of the puncture in the thin flesh. Another set for the other foot, and then he opened his kit and produced an analgesic hypo and a tissue regenerator. "Here we go," he said, and pressed the hypo to the top of her foot. She flinched at the sudden cold pressure but managed to hold the foot steady.
Good girl, he thought, and pressed it to the other foot. "Almost done. That should help the pain. She bruised you to the bone."
Her only response was a snort. I told you so.
I know you did, and the guilt bubbled in his stomach and soured his mouth. He picked up the regenerator and pressed it to her foot. "This'll heal the injury itself."
He felt her relax underneath his hand as the regenerator did its work, and when he glanced up, he was pleased to see a hint of color in her cheeks. Her foot was cooling, too, and losing its noisome clamminess. The regenerator chirped to signal the completion of its task, and he switched to the other foot.
"You've got some bruises and a mild pull of your adductor, but you should be fine in a day or so," he told her. "I'll tell Stuart and Connor to go easy on the leg stretches tomorrow, but you need to get back at it or you'll lose the ground you've gained."
"Yes, Doctor."
"As for today, once I've finished patching you up, we're going to the commissary to get you fed. And watered. You're dehydrated again."
She had the grace to look abashed. "Sorry. I was so nervous that I was worried about having an accident."
The way things went this morning, I wouldn't've blamed you if you had. Would've served her right. "Well, there's nothing to worry about now except collapse from malnutrition." The regenerator chirped, and he switched it off and set it aside.
"Can't you just use the replicator?"
"I could, but you need to get out of here for a while, eat real food and be someplace that's not sickbay. See other people." He picked up her foot and began to massage it with his palms, erasing Boswell's grip with each deft, measured press. She needed touch that didn't hurt, didn't carry with it the promise of pain and suffering. He couldn't hold her hand or stroke her hair or sing lullabies in her ear like her mother or her memaw would have done, but he could do this, could offer her a touch of human kindness to offset the lonely, grinding monotony of rehab and the uncertainty of life as the last of her kind.
She purred, and her toes stretched into his touch, a cat lazily extending its claws as it drowsed in the summer sun. "Feels good," she murmured, and tilted her head back to expose her pale throat.
He hummed in acknowledgment. "Your PCAs ever do this?"
"Only when they were washing my feet in the shower," she answered, and yawned. "Grandmama took me for pedicures now and then. I never much cared for the filing because I was so ticklish, but I loved the footbath and massage."
He rubbed her baby toe between his thumb and forefinger and grinned surreptitiously at the floor at the resultant unseemly sigh that slipped from her mouth. Her entire foot contracted with the pleasure of the unexpected touch, and he heard her seat cushion hiss as she rose off the seat for an instant. Another measured tug, another throaty sigh that spoke of hands in far less innocent places. He repeated the process with the next toe, and the next, and each time, her foot curled and splayed and pressed eagerly into his hand in search of greater contact.
Dr. McCoy, this is an ethics violation on par with that of Dr. Boswell earlier today, warned the disapproving voice of the doctor inside his head, and while he could not disagree, nor could he bring himself to care. He'd never seen anyone so touch-starved in his life, so hungry for human contact not wrought of necessity. Jim had his moments, of course, chummy and convivial and constantly slinging his arms around his shoulders as they walked the corridors or drunk and clinging after one too many shots and too many reminiscences about his dead and sainted father and what he might think of his boy made good, but he at least had the friendly touches of a crew that had rapidly come to adore him-Nyota's pats on the wrist after the Friday night poker games, Scotty's backpats as they discussed plans for routine maintenance. Weekly sparring sessions in the gym with Sulu, where they engaged in a bit of good-natured tussling in the name of fitness and greater combat proficiency.
And the women, of course. Starfleet had no explicit prohibitions against fraternization, but damned if Jim wasn't going whole hog. He was fairly certain he'd bedded at least half of his nursing staff and a good number of the yeomen. He'd heard a few stories, a few whispers drifting out of the commissary and the scrub room about the good captain and his penchant for loving and leaving, and there was the sad business of Christine Chapel, who'd packed up and transferred out after a simple roll in the hay had soured into frustrated, mismatched expectations on both sides. He was still pissed about that, truth be told. Chapel had been the finest head nurse on his staff, and while Ogawa was perfectly competent in the position, she simply couldn't match Chapel's ability to run sickbay with well-oiled precision.
And then there were the persistent rumors about him and Carol Marcus that had sent him running for the medkit and its prophylactic hypos. Jim had just grinned and nudged him with his shoulder and flashed him a sunny, cocksure grin and told him not to worry, but he couldn't shake the feeling that the whole business was going to end in a sorry mess.
You say that about everything, Bones, Jim said inside his head.
And nine times out of ten, I'm right, he countered as his fingers kneaded a stubborn knot of tension where her arch should have been. Above him, Rosalie moaned softly.
We're alive, aren't we?
Only because Spock and I are there to haul your ass out of the fire. Besides, that's an awful low bar to set for success.
Jim only grinned, all cornfed Iowa innocence, and McCoy only growled and shook his head and returned to the task at hand and to Rosalie, whom he suspected had never been afforded the opportunity to be so damn stupid. He couldn't speak to her life before her date with that godforsaken cryotube, but from what little she'd told him, there hadn't been many friends to pat her shoulder or ruffle her hair or offer the occasional hug after a night of dancing and drinking. No team sports or group hike, no aerobics or cycling classes, no swim team or horseback riding. No getting sloppy drunk with friends and lying in a contented tangle of limbs while she laughed and nothing in particular. And no sheepish morning-after goodbyes. No reason to touch another human being just because.
Lack of touch could be just as harmful as a blow if it went on long enough. He'd seen bright-eyed foals and waggle-tailed puppies go dead-eyed and catshit mean after being left too long to their own devices, abandoned in stalls and tied to trees once the novelty wore off, lying in the dirt and snapping at anyone who drew near because experience had taught them that nothing good ever came from a descending hand.
He'd seen it in people, too, in children ignored by workaholic parents and old folks left to rot in rest home common rooms. After a while, they simply surrendered to the isolation and smothering loneliness and waited to die, going through the motions until their bodies quit. Rosalie wasn't nearly so far gone, but the eagerness with which she nudged her foot into his cupping hands spoke of loneliness gone deep into the bone, the kind of loneliness that hollowed everything it touched and left behind nothing but eyes full of what might've been.
You've felt like that a time or two. After your father died, the guilt and loneliness threatened to swallow you whole. You spent the days before the funeral with your arms wrapped around your belly, swallowing sobs and lurching through the too-quiet rooms of your childhood home like a drunk. Hell, you wanted to be drunk, to numb the gaping hole inside your chest with something stronger than well-meant platitudes and cold casseroles from the neighbors who came to call, but you needed to be strong for your mother, who shattered with her husband's final breath, so you staggered through the hours with your guts cradled in your arms and observed the social graces expected of you as a son of David McCoy. And when you couldn't take it any more, you fled to the barn and curled up in the corner of an empty stall and cried yourself sick, shielded from scrutiny by hay and horseflesh.
You felt it when Pamela left, curled on a marital bed gone cold and staring at your wedding band through bloodshot eyes. Sometimes you curled yourself around her pillow just to have something to hold and pressed your nose to the pillowcase to catch a trace of her scent through the reek of bourbon. The bottom dropped out the night you couldn't smell her anymore, and you shredded the pillowcases and threw them in the recycler, and then you drank yourself blind on the living room floor and cried for your wife and your Daddy and the children you'd never managed. You cried for anyone to come and put you back together again, but you'd put your father in the ground and Pamela had left and taken your future with you, and you were too ashamed to show up on your mother's porch-and it was just hers now-with snot on your face and whiskey on your breath, so you curled into a ball to protect your soft insides and slept on the floor. And you would've stayed there forever if the process server hadn't shown up the next morning with the papers in his hand. His footsteps on the front steps sounded so much like your father's boots on the front porch that you thought it was him for a minute, that it had all been a terrible nightmare from which you had awoken. Then you opened the door and saw that bland little messenger boy with his padd in his hand and a stillborn smile pasted on his face, and you knew. A press of a button, and you were ordered out of the house you'd thought to be your home. Fifteen minutes later, you were standing on the end of the driveway with a box in your hands and a duffel at your feet.
You felt it in that shuttle bathroom, hiding on the toilet like a goddamn stowaway and wondering how your life had come to this. A refugee on your own planet, sleeping in hostels and shelters and eating MREs handed out by Federation relief workers who served them with distant, sympathetic smiles. Sometimes you earned your keep by volunteering in the makeshift clinics, but very few folks wanted to chance it with a tosspot itinerant with bloodshot eyes and three days' stubble on his chin. Nowhere to go and no one to love, and too ashamed to let your mother see what you'd become, so you took your chances in space, where no one would know the extent of your disgrace. If it wouldn't have cost innocent lives, you'd've been glad if the shuttle imploded shortly after takeoff and took your worthless life with it.
Truth be told, this is as much for you as it is for her. You can't remember when you last touched someone for the sheer kindness of it. Jim, probably, slaloming out of some bar arm-in-arm, or that sweet, young woman you dated for a few months at the Academy. She was smart and driven and kind, and it was obvious that she was sweet on you, but she was also too soon, too close to Pamela, who still haunted your dreams and reminded you of all your failures. Jim or that woman, it's been years since you've touched for the simple comfort of it. Taking care of Rosalie salves that godawful ache in the center of your chest that throbs and pulses with the purulence of bitter memories. You couldn't save your father, and you couldn't repair the wreck you made of your marriage while you wallowed in your guilt and heard the hiss of a hypo in your burning ears, but you can do this. There is still good in your hands, still warmth. You can't make her walk, can't lift this burden from her, but you can make it easier to bear and remind her that not everything in the world cuts and breaks and bruises.
He cupped her heel and lightly pinched her heel cord, and she shivered and rose in the chair, a cat arching to meet an idle caress. She gazed down at him through half-lidded eyes, fingers curled around the armrests of her chair. "You are the oddest doctor I've ever met," she said. "I've never had one rub my feet."
"You need seeing to," he said gruffly, and squeezed her foot to send any excess fluid toward her kidneys.
She reached out and brushed his shoulder. "Thank you. For trying. Even my own parents gave up on me, and now here you are just..." She blinked and swallowed. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were an angel."
He snorted. "Don't let your imagination run away with you. I'm just a country doctor." He set down her foot and picked up the other.
She quieted, and little by little, the tension ebbed from her until she was limp as a noodle in her chair. She blinked at him with drowsy affection and dozed as his fingers did their patient work, and as she sagged in her chair, slack and placid and content, he found that his own body was relaxing, too. His jaw relaxed with an audible creak, and the headache that had massed behind his temples in the aftermath of his skirmish with Boswell receded.
He stopped when he reached the bruises on her calf. "All right. Let's get you fed." He put down her foot and picked up her socks.
She snorted and started and sat up in her chair. "Bless you, Doctor McCoy," she said, and wiggled her feet with relish.
"It's my job."
"No, it isn't."
No, it isn't, he agreed, but he only put on her socks and AFOs and shoes and rose with a mutinous creak from his knees. "Come on," he ordered, and gestured toward the door.
She smiled, and in it, he saw the soul behind her battered armor, tenacious and hopeful and lovely. It made her beautiful, and behind the ever-present ache in his chest, his heart fluttered.
There's something here, son, his mother said. Tend it carefully, and you might be surprised by what you get.
She's my patient, Mama, he reminded her. All I'm gonna get is a successful outcome
His mother only smiled, and as Rosalie rolled out the door, his own lips responded in kind.