Title: Asclepius Revisited

Author: Still Waters

Fandom: Star Trek TOS

Disclaimer: Not mine. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.

Summary: 76 McCoy episodes. 76 McCoy-centric reflections, codas, and missing scenes.

Notes: "Balance of Terror." Otherwise known as the "Spock encounters bigotry" episode - but that's not what caught my attention. In perhaps the most ridiculous bit of minutiae yet, this chapter is based off of one second of wordless action on screen. When the red alert is called during the opening wedding scene, Kirk and Scotty go to the comm. At 1:58 on the DVD, Scotty moves away, heading to Engineering and, in the background, you can see McCoy standing near the wall with his head bowed. By 1:59, he raises his head and starts walking out of the chapel. When you watch Angela Martine, the bride-to-be, during the first scene, she enters the chapel, kneels, bows her head, gives a little nod, and gets back up. At the very end of the episode, when Kirk comes to see her in the chapel after Tomlinson dies, she is already kneeling – and before she gets up, she bows her head and gives a little nod. Putting that together with McCoy's occasional verbalizations of faith (as in his reply of "Amen to that" to Kirk's hope that McCoy's services wouldn't be needed after the decision to attack the Romulan ship), this piece became a connection between McCoy and Angela, and a study of his own interest in individual "protocols." I also needed to at least try and explore some reason for Tomlinson dying while Stiles looked fine despite the fact that they were both in the gas-filled phaser room for the same amount of time, so that found its way here too. I hope I did the characters credit. Thank you for your continued support, and thank you to the reviewers I am unable to personally respond to via private message. I truly appreciate you reading!

12.

Despite his passionate outbursts and frequent need to throw convention to the wind, Leonard McCoy had lived most of his adult life by protocol. He started with the substantial world of medical protocol, where everything was an algorithm, an expected sequence of action and stepped approach. It was drilled into him until it was second nature, a way to ensure diagnostic and treatment uniformity, to lead toward answers in a logical, scientific manner. When he joined Starfleet, McCoy simply added another set of protocols, and another set of paperwork, to his long experience. And while he understood and appreciated the logic, comfort, and sense inherent in both of those organizational and field-specific protocols, McCoy had always found himself more fascinated with the personal protocols that they brought to light. How, even while following established guidelines, everyone still brought some unique part of themselves to the pattern and wove it into the rote steps.

McCoy had been down in phaser control once, several months ago, tending to an unconscious lieutenant, when a red alert sounded. He saw Angela Martine and Robert Tomlinson look to each other, something wordless passing between their eyes in a comfortable, practiced moment as they moved to their stations. He then saw Angela, even as her hands were moving through the diagnostics, bow her head briefly, her lips moving silently before she nodded slowly, looked back up and answered the Bridge's status call with crisp military precision. McCoy remembered noticing Angela's action, even through his own drilled responses, because it was obviously routine – a silent spiritual moment seamlessly integrated into the bustle of unknown danger and the familiarity of regulation.

And because he recognized those soundless words.

"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…."

McCoy came from a long line of devout Southern Christians and even though his medical career had often shaken his faith, he never lost that core. The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi was very similar to his Hippocratic Oath - a personal, nonmedical mantra, and one he held in equal regard.

The words were bittersweet – a prayer of peace over hands that readied weapons. But no less than the prayer of a physician who prayed his own purpose would become obsolete.

The same prayer McCoy silently offered with every red alert.

His protocol.

Some people had different protocols for different situations. Christine, for instance, would reach back and lightly touch her hair clip as she started emergency protocol for incoming away team casualties. But with on-ship injuries, she would briefly touch her left thigh, covering the motion by smoothing down her uniform, as she launched into action. Others, like Angela, kept the same protocol for all situations, good and bad. As she walked into the chapel on her wedding day, she immediately knelt at the altar and bowed her head. Her lips didn't move this time before she nodded briefly and stood to begin her new life. McCoy had always wondered about these little differences between people – those individual moments of personal experience and psychological wiring poking through regimented activity. The scientist ached to study them further, but the humanity always won out – the understanding and compassion that people should have something that was private and theirs alone, and that the beauty of life was in not quantifying every aspect of it.

So, he observed. Because he couldn't not see.

Couldn't miss how, when the red alert sounded, Angela and Tomlinson looked to each other, their lives long since one in that shared protocol.

And couldn't miss his own natural response. Because as Scotty bolted to his engine room and the room began to scatter in drilled response, McCoy remained against the wall. He bowed his head silently, offering a prayer to both the God of his upbringing and the benevolence of all those beings and beliefs that had comforted patients past:

Please don't need my skills. Please watch over everyone. Please let life prevail. And should my skills be called upon, let me honor the lives under my hands, to whatever end.

McCoy raised his head on the echo of a silent "amen" and found that, for several seconds, it was just himself, Angela, and Tomlinson in the vacant chapel. He felt Tomlinson's fleeting gaze before procedure kicked in and broke the moment - McCoy striding with subdued purpose toward sickbay and Tomlinson grabbing Angela's hand as they rushed to their station.

Several tense hours later, a relieved McCoy was telling Jim that it could have been much, much worse. And it was the truth. Twenty-two radiation burns kept him and his staff busy, but ended with twenty-two living, convalescing crewmembers.

Then Spock stumbled in with Tomlinson and a choked report that he was going back for an injured Stiles whom he had temporarily dragged to safety.

And relief became a memory.

Tomlinson was already dead. But they began resuscitation protocol anyway because that's what you did when you didn't know how long someone had been down and Spock was already gone. They got Tomlinson's heart beating just in time for it to stop again. McCoy was barking orders for full life support as he rushed back to the doors and helped relieve a greener-than-usual Spock of an unconscious Stiles. With Christine attending to Tomlinson, McCoy and Mara performed the second resuscitation of the evening as Spock filled them in.

Phaser coolant leak. Tomlinson pulseless when Spock got there. Stiles breathing as of twenty seconds ago.

They got Stiles back quickly and were stabilizing him when Christine's raw voice reported the results of Tomlinson's cranial scan.

Complete brain death.

McCoy bowed his head as Christine called Angela to sickbay. He offered a silent prayer for strength to inform a young woman she was a widow before ever being a wife, and then got back to Stiles.

When she arrived, McCoy left Stiles under Mara's watchful eye and went to Angela's side. He held steady as she choked back a sob and threw her arms around him, the grief vibrating through both of them with McCoy's words. Watched her look at Tomlinson's half-open eyes just as she always had, then bow her head, swallow hard, and nod her agreement to withdraw the machinery. Felt his heart break as she lay her ear to the boy's chest, eyes closed as she absorbed the last erratic beats of the freed heart, and saw the shudder as she heard it stop. All McCoy wanted to do was sit with her in her grief, to celebrate a life she had loved so deeply.

But Mara's sharp curse and a monitor's scream pulled him back to a de-satting Stiles.

Fifteen minutes later, he was glaring up at Stiles' monitor when he saw Angela ghost her fingers over Tomlinson's mottled hand, bow her head, and with a slow, mournful nod, tears dripping in silent grief, walk out of the room. But she caught McCoy's eyes briefly on the way, and even through the rush of hypoxic protocol, he knew exactly where she was going.

McCoy bowed his head with a silent prayer that she find some comfort there, and went back to cursing Stiles' lung function. By the time Jim came down for a report, Stiles was stable and McCoy was able to send Jim where he needed to be.

The night grew longer.

After assisting with post-mortem care on Tomlinson, checking on a still somewhat subdued Spock, and sharing a drink with a shaken Jim Kirk who couldn't understand how Angela could say she was all right and mean it while Jim's own grief raged, McCoy found himself being drawn to the chapel. Memories of quiet, incense infused hospital chapels melded with those of makeshift off-world altars; of charred crosses formed from the burnt remains of native homes; broken hyposprays worn to uselessness through repeated, desperate inoculation bound into the symbol of his faith with strips of plastiskin…..of the raw need for peace, silent tears, and a resounding "why", even as he knew he could never bear the answer.

The chapel was dark, embracing the shadow kneeling at the altar. He turned to leave, intimate with that sanctity, when three soft words drew him back.

"Please, come in."

McCoy slowly crossed the room and knelt at her side.

Angela turned and looked at him, clouded eyes searching his face for one fleeting moment before finding what she needed. And as she smiled wistfully under drying tear tracks, McCoy realized what she saw. A connection. "Will you pray with me?" she asked, a tinge of nervousness under the hopeful tone.

McCoy was no minister, but that wasn't what she was asking. "Of course," he replied, voice wavering with the memories of sacred words shared under dimmed hospital lights and skies newly devoid of stars.

Angela's lip quivered under the relief that washed over her face. She turned back to the altar, bowed her head, and began to speak.

McCoy's eyes widened. She looked back up at his silence and brightened, just for a moment, at his surprise. "I find it more comforting," she explained shyly. "Do you know it?"

McCoy's old-fashioned reputation went far beyond his medical practices alone. "Yes I do," he said. "Although my pronunciation generally leaves somethin' to be desiahd," he exaggerated his drawl, blue eyes sparkling under deep emotion.

Angela laughed, bright and clear, before a sudden sob stole her breath. Swallowing hard, she looked up. "He won't mind," she decided, certain under her grief.

They met each other's eyes. He wasn't Tomlinson, never would be. But that's not what this was about. And she wasn't looking for understanding, for reasons why this had happened.

She was seeking someone who understood what she needed to do.

Her comfort. Her protocol.

Their protocol.

McCoy nodded silently and turned to face the altar. Together, they bowed their heads and began to pray.

"Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…"

Notes:

- I had forgotten all about The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi until I suddenly found myself typing that line in this story. When I went back to double-check the wording, I realized how incredibly McCoy it was, and could see him identifying with it and holding himself to that standard. The full text is as follows:

"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen"

- "De-satting" refers to a patient's oxygen saturation (detailing the percentage of oxygen available on their hemoglobin) dropping.

- Toward the end of this piece, I've expanded on the brief reference in "Friday's Child" to McCoy having been part of a traveling medical relief team.

- The last line is the first part of the Lord's Prayer in Latin ("Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name"). I cross-referenced it with several online sources, but did not double-check the translation myself. My apologies if there are any inaccuracies.