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: There isn't much McCoy in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and most of it is passing moments of griping at Spock or worrying about Jim when he's down on the planet. I decided to focus on the sickbay scene where Spock comes in to tell Captain Christopher that, while his own name didn't come up as relevant in historical records, that his son's did. McCoy has this big grin on his face upon Captain Christopher finding out he's going to have a son, and I decided to explore that moment of humanity within the larger questions of time travel surrounding it. As always, I hope I did the characters justice. Dialogue quoted from the episode does not belong to me. Thank you for reading and thank you to all who have continued to follow this series over the years. I truly appreciate your support.
17.
They were talking about uprooting a man from his present to protect humanity's future, discussing human lives in terms of risk versus benefit to the abstract nature of time. Of telling a military officer, a family man, that he was now a prisoner because he had "made no relevant contribution" according to a scan of historical records, implying that a man's life on its own wasn't significant enough to be returned to his time and family.
Retraining, reeducation, whether a man could learn to forget his own family. McCoy felt sick.
And then Spock, by his own admission, made an error. A son, Colonel Sean Jeffrey Christopher, heading the first successful Earth-Saturn probe.
McCoy found himself beginning to smile, the first flutters of hope taking root in his chest.
It got better.
Captain Christopher had stated earlier that he was a father, yet an irritated shake of the head led him to interrupt Spock's news. "Wait a minute, I don't have a son."
McCoy looked to Kirk and found that same little smile forming; lips turning with hope under command-weary eyes preparing for the necessity of finding a way to manage the impossible, yet again.
It fell to McCoy to bring it home, to pronounce the birth of a child who, until now, was known only to history. "You mean yet," he grinned.
As the pressing question of how to both return the Enterprise to her future and return a man to his past filled the room, McCoy focused on Christopher. The Captain was ignoring the finer points of logistics and looking off to a future well beyond the technological advances surrounding him. There was that familiar little smile and shake of the head McCoy knew so well, seen on countless parents across countless planets; that almost goofy, love-drunk grin at the miracle of life.
"A boy. I'm going to have a son."
Past, present, or future, nothing changed the joys of parenthood, or the joy McCoy felt in helping usher new life into the world. While he may not have had a physical hand in this birth, he still had the privilege of announcing it and seeing the excitement bloom on a father's face; a welcome touchstone of humanity in the midst of a highly technical problem. Getting the Captain back to Earth to create and meet that son without potentially jeopardizing the future of the entire universe was not going to be easy. But Jim's "well, that's it, isn't it?" had said it best. Time to do what the Enterprise crew did best – make the unknown, known, the impossible, possible. Use the strength, intellect, and experience of over four hundred souls to find a way. A way to preserve the future, a way to restore a man to the past.
And a way to prove that history was a poor judge of one man's relevance.
Because history may have recorded the accomplishments of the Captain's son in space, but a child needed more than a bright mind and an education to accomplish such feats. They needed love, support, values. Someone who believed in them, who found joy in their joy, success in their success. McCoy was not only a physician who had assisted children into the world, he was a parent himself. Even while worrying about everything that could go wrong, stomach twisting with the overwhelming need to protect the little life in his arms, his face had been sore from the constant smiling the first week of his daughter's life, eyes dry from staring off into space and imagining their lives together ahead.
It was the same look McCoy recognized on Captain Christopher's face now. And if that love, that pre-emptive joy and hushed excitement, that selfless ability to disregard statements of your own usefulness in favor of those of your children….
…..well, if that wasn't relevant to the progress of humanity, McCoy didn't know what was.