Bones and Blighted Roses

by La Guera

When the Enterprise discovers a cryotube adrift in space, it reignites restless fears of Khan and his colony of genetically-enhanced superhumans, but what's inside turns out to be anything but, and Dr. McCoy finds himself face to face with living medical history. Sometimes it takes the deft hands of a surgeon to make things whole again.

6. Strays

Dr. Leonard McCoy swept into sickbay with a spring in his step and his arms full of long-awaited booty. After mulling it over for a while, the replicator had finally coughed up the AFOs, shoes, and padd he'd ordered for Miss Walker. It was still working on the wheelchair he'd designed for her, but it, too, would be done in a day or so, and then he could see about correcting her horrifying posture and alleviating some of the stress on her joints. Five days into her stay and three days into the PT regimen he'd recommended, it was clear that she was in pain, and never mind the Loxtan or the anti-inflammatories with which he injected her every morning. She never said boo about it, never whined or begged off of the daily routine, but it was evident by her pinched face and slumped shoulders and the constant, uneasy shift of her body in the ill-fitting wheelchair as she gazed out the window at the unchanging vastness of space.

All the AFOs in the galaxy aren't going to end her pain, pointed out the calculating clinician inside his head. What she needs is surgery, and more than a little. You can encase her in plastic and metal to the eyeballs like some space-age mummy, and all it'll do is postpone the inevitable. If she doesn't go under the knife, she'll be all but immobile within ten years, and so wracked with pain, life will hardly be worth living.

And I told you that I'm not pushing her on it, he shot back. Not right now. If she's not ready for it, I'm not going to to be like those callous bastards on those godawful films and back her into a corner just because I can. I'm not going to force her. She's not a lab rat who doesn't know what's happening to her. She damn well does know, and she's exhausted and scared and looking for a place to sort out the mess she's in, and if I push her too hard to fast, I could do more harm than good. There's no point in mending her body just to break her spirit.

That may be, conceded the dry voice of his inner attending physician. But if you wait too long, it might be out of your hands. You've got a good heart, Doctor, but I'll remind you that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. See that it doesn't lead your feet to that unfortunate piece of asphalt.

And I'll remind you that the first rule of my profession is to first do no harm, he countered waspishly. There's been enough harm done already.

He remembered the weight of her as she'd leaned against him in the hydrotherapy pool, head on his shoulder and small arm around his neck. She'd sagged against him as though she lacked the strength to even raise her head. No strength, no hope, just water dripping from the ends of her hair and her fingers bunching loosely in the fabric of his wetsuit and her breath against his neck. She'd been fragile and floundering and holding on for dear life, and he'd wanted to bundle her up and take her home and feed her his mama's pot roast, but he'd only squeezed her shoulder and eased her up into the sling and sent her back to her chair. She'd followed him back to sickbay without a word, and she'd gone with Nurse Ogawa just as quietly when she'd ordered her into the bathroom to change out of her wetsuit. Orderly and neat as you please, and it had broken his heart.

It still ached to see her now, truth be told. She was too quiet, a ghost inside her skin as she went about her daily routine. She spoke when spoken to and was polite to the nurses who shepherded her through the tasks of bathing and dressing and combing her long hair, but she offered nothing of herself and seldom smiled. No chit-chat, no laughter, just stolid, plodding obedience and stiff-necked stoicism as she watched the world through wary blue eyes.

Worst of all was the slumped resignation with which she followed the PT interns into the therapy room. That first morning, she'd hesitated when they'd come for her, had turned in her chair and looked at him as though to say, Do I have to? Are you really going to make me do this? When he'd only eyed her levelly over the rack of test tubes currently perched on the edge of his desk, she'd nodded as though that were what she'd expected and squared her shoulders. A sigh almost too soft to hear, and then she'd followed Yeoman Stuart into the therapy room, sharp chin thrust thrust forward in grim defiance, a prisoner following her wardens to the gallows. Chin up and shoulders back. He could almost hear the admonition as she'd disappeared into the room, and he'd felt a dull pang of guilt as the door had closed behind her.

The ensuing rehab session had hardly soothed his uneasy conscience. He'd kept an eye on it via the observation system at his desk while he'd catalogued various bacteriological samples they'd collected on their last away mission, and though his hands had remained steady at their task, assigning specimen numbers in his small, precise hand, his heart had dropped inside his chest. Stuart and Connor were fine, conscientious yeomen, and he could find no fault with their technique. It was textbook, in fact, crisp and professional and firm. And yet...

And yet, it made your stomach turn to see her lying there with her palms pressed to the vinyl of the therapy mat and her eyes squeezed shut against the intrusion of their hands on her body. You didn't need the bioscan readings or the increasingly-exasperated exhortations of Connor and Stuart to tell you she was in distress. It was written all over her face and in the hard, unbending lines of her body as they pulled her this way and stretched her that way, in the pallor of her cheeks and the furrows in her forehead. At one point, Connor rolled her onto her side and straightened her tugged her arm until it was straight out in front of her, and she bit her lip as if to stifle a cry. Her eyes opened for just a moment, bleak and disgusted and so very tired. She seemed to be looking right at you. You knew she wasn't; she had no idea the cameras were even there, but the feeling persisted until she closed her eyes again, and you turned off the monitor and buried yourself in your test tubes and tried not to think of her clinging to you in the hydrotherapy pool, or of dying horses pawing feebly at the churned mud of their reeking stalls.

It made me feel like a- she said inside your head, and her lips rounded with the word your imagination could tease out if it cared to, and the unfinished thought reverberated inside your skull while you pretended to care about a diatomic bacterial sample you'd scraped from a dry riverbed two weeks before Rosalie Walker and her ancient disability floated into your lap in her battered cryotube.

It didn't get much better when she trudged out of there forty-five minutes later(until then, you didn't know people in wheelchairs could trudge, but damned if she didn't manage it), sweaty and silent and with her gaze fixed on the heels of Stuart's shoes. She didn't say a word, just followed Ogawa into the shower and left you to your post-session consult. You hoped she'd brighten up once she came out of the shower, freshly-scrubbed and free of their analytical scrutiny, but she was no better. She just parked herself beside her bed and let Ogawa brush her hair. She looked like a goddamn mannequin for all the life she showed, and you were so spooked by that godawful blankness that you ordered a bowl of blackberry cobbler from the replicator and told her to eat it. You muttered some plausible-sounding bullshit about her needing to replenish her caloric intake and keep her electrolytes in balance, but in truth, you just wanted to see some semblance of life in her face, some proof that her head hadn't slipped beneath the water while no one was looking.

At first, you were afraid that wasn't going to work, either, that she was just going to sit there like a hunk of statuary until the nurses wrangled her into bed that night, but then she picked up the spoon and dipped the end into the thick, syrupy sludge of macerated blackberries.

Never thought I'd see a doctor who prescribed sweets, she murmured, and took a bite, and the knot in the center of your chest loosened because sass was a sign of life. She was still on edge-her elevated stress levels were proof of that-but she wasn't ready to throw in the towel and topple headlong over it.

Don't get used to it, you grumbled, and took yourself to your desk. You spent the rest of your shift watching her from the corner of your eye while you finished catalogiung your samples and wrote preliminary reports on the ones you'd examined. She finished the cobbler and licked the spoon and asked for a glass of water, which you were only too happy to give her, and then she spent most of the next seven hours rolling up and down the aisle, an animal restlessly pacing the confines of her cage. She seemed so small, diminished, as though Stuart and Connor had torn a piece of her away with every touch of their hands. Maybe that's what drove her to wear grooves into the sickbay floor with the tread of her wheels. She was looking for the parts of herself that they had so unthinkingly carried away and trying to piece herself back together before they came back for more and reduced her to nothing but wisps of hair and bones worn smooth by the grip of impersonal hands.

Sometimes she offered you a shy, fleeting smile when she turned at your desk to begin another circuit, and it was all you could do not to drop your test tubes and bury your face in your hands, because she was trying so hard to be good, to be keep her chin up and her cheeks dry. To be a lady and preserve the insulted tatters of her dignity as long as she could. Ladies were polite. Ladies smiled even when all they wanted to do was scream and cry and carry on until they wanted to throw up. A good lady never broke, no matter how much it hurt.

And whatever else this cold, inaccessible world of grey walls and narrow doors and ruthlessly-tugging hands determined to shape her into something better, something more acceptable to its unforgiving shape made of her, she would be a lady. A lady in a cage without even the illusive comfort of gilded bars and shafts of sunlight slanting through the windows.

Well, her cage was about to get a little bigger. He couldn't give her sunlight or its warmth on her face or days without the tug and knead of demanding hands, but he could give her a window of sorts. The padd he carried would afford her a glimpse of the world that waited for her down below and a means to escape the monotony of routine and the tedium of staring at the vast expanse of nothingness. She could study any subject that captured her fancy to her heart's content, could follow it down the labyrinthine rabbit hole of cross references and suggested readings and let her mind focus on something other than the less-than-thrilling prospect of her current circumstances. She could write her own papers on the subject if she wanted, and if he were lucky, it would draw her out of her jealously-guarded shell and get her talking for more than five minutes at a time and about something other than long-term prognoses and the endless grind of humiliating therapy sessions. Stir-craziness was as deadly as an unchecked aneurysm, and he was determined to keep her mind as active as possible.

Of course you are, sneered an oily, malevolent voice inside his head. You've seen what happens to minds gone to rot, haven't you? To birds left too long in their well-intended cages?

Please, son. Please, pleaded another voice, and he turned from it and back to the safer business of seeing to a patient he could still save, whose pain he could still ease.

She was sitting by the observation window now, dressed in the light scrubs that served as her wardrobe and blinking dully at the unchanging landscape beyond the open partition. She turned her head at the sound of his approach and offered him a polite smile.

"Hello, Doctor," she said softly.

"I come bearing gifts," he announced, and nodded to the jumble in his arms.

"Really?" She straightened as best she could and studied the contents with interest.

He dropped into a squat in front of her chair. "Don't kick me in the face," he said, and began to arrange the various items at her feet.

A huff of amusement. "Now that you've said it, I'm more likely to do it since I get more spastic when I'm nervous." She released the brakes on her chair and retreated a few paces before setting them again.

"I'll keep that in mind." He scuttled forward and held out a hand. "Before we try on your new AFOs, I want to see your feet."

She thrust out one socked foot, and he cradled the fragile heel in his palm and peeled back the sock. She shivered and started in the chair, and her toes curled and fanned in a helpless, fretful arrhythmia.

"I'm not going to amputate it," he grumbled, but his touch was gentle as he drew the tip of his index finger along the skin to test sensation and elasticity. Her foot stiffened and jerked at the touch, unaccustomed to such stimulation, but he merely held on until she relaxed. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"I know."

The quiet confidence in it surprised him, but he betrayed nothing. He merely traced another exploratory line along her instep and a third on the sole that nearly earned him the kick in the face he had hoped to avoid. The skin there was soft as a newborn's and just as sensitive; it was also, he noted with approval, much pinker than it had been when he'd first laid eyes on them in the cryotube, where they'd been a mottled, alarming purple that had prompted fears of gangrene or frostbite or diabetic necrosis. Her foot was far less swollen as well, and warm as it rested in his palm. The muscle relaxants and stretching were clearly doing their work.

He replaced the sock and returned her foot to the footrest, and she dutifully presented the other. It was an oddly imperious gesture, and he bit back a grin as he inspected her dainty offering. Like its counterpart, it showed evidence of improvement, pink and warm and vital beneath his fingertips. He pulled up the sock and lowered her foot to its customary resting place. "They look much better," he told her, and chafed the flesh through the thick cotton. He wanted to get her used to frequent stimulus. She'd never walk without help, but she'd be standing if he could help it, and it wouldn't do to have her break her damn neck because the texture of bare floor or carpet was too much for her sheltered nerves.

"I can't speak to how they look, but they certainly feel better. They're usually so cold." She waggled her toes inside the sock.

"Most things do better with proper circulation. Hold out your hands?"

She obeyed, a lady presenting her favor to a suitor, and he examined her nail beds with a hum of satisfaction. "Better here, too." He released her hand and turned his attention to her AFOs, which lay at his feet like a pair of denuded severed limbs. "You're making progress, Miss Walker."

"Please. That's hardly my doing, Dr. McCoy. You should be laying it at the feet of those muscle relaxants."

"It's not just the Loxtan. If it was, the effects would be temporary and would take longer. The stretching you've been doing has loosened the muscles and made it easier for the blood to get where it needs to go. Give yourself a little credit."

"It's only been three days. I could still make a mess of it."

"You could," he agreed, and reached for an AFO. "And if and when you do, I'll be glad to ride your a-butt right back into line."

She giggled, and her feet splayed restively on the footplates. "God bless your honesty," she said fondly.

"I'm glad you appreciate it," he replied gruffly, and held out his hand for her left foot, which she duly supplied. "You're probably the only one around here who does."

"Somehow, I doubt that," she retorted shrewdly, and the frankness startled him.

She's not wrong, son. His mother's voice, light and brisk, and he was struck by a momentary pang of homesickness. Ain't nothing wrong with honesty, either. Your Daddy and I raised you to it, you and George both. Even as a youngun, you were prone to it, sometimes to a fault. More than a few times, your Daddy had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing when you offered up your opinions on a matter. He damn near choked himself to death when you were four years old and told Mrs. Gwinnett that the new hairdo of which she was so proud at the monthly summer social looked like the shave on old Mr. Hobart's poodle, and I liked to have died when you told Miss Florence that her pie tasted like rhubarb and drywall when she offered you a taste just before the pie contest when you were six.

It took some patience and a run of weekends mucking stalls and sweeping floors and helping me with the sewing instead of playing at the creek out back of the house, but it wasn't too long before you understood the difference between forthrightness and just plain meanness, and you never took pleasure in your few steps across the line; in fact, you took pains not to hurt anyone if you could help it, and if you did, well, I've never seen a more contrite soul in all my life.

You might've rubbed a few folks the wrong way with your bald honesty-Mrs. Gwinnett, for instance, who gave you the stink eye until the day you left for college, or poor Miss Florence, who was so upset by your assessment of her pie that she drew herself up and left without entering it into the competition. She never offered you a bite of anything ever again, though as I recall, she softened considerably once you were thirteen and mowing her yard every week and taking special care not to chew up her prized rosebushes-but most people respected it. Your father surely did, and nothing made him prouder than to sit on the porch a spell after work and talk to you. He knew you'd never insult him with a lie, and he loved you for it, so much. I did, too. While all the other mothers down the ladies' auxiliary fretted about what their boys weren't telling them and swapped stories of searching their rooms for signs of secret girlfriends or some bit of dangerous tomfoolery, like beer or a stolen phaser, I never had to worry about any such nonsense, because I knew my Leo would never lie to me. You were a good boy, you see, and it just wasn't in you to be any way else.

That honesty kept you out of trouble, too. Your common sense and unwillingness to suffer fools kept you away from folks who weren't worth your time or the damn to spare for them. Like those oafs at the University of Missouri who wasted their time boozing and carousing and washed out by the end of their freshmen year with nothing to show for it by the pounds they'd put on. Or the stuffed shirts at the Academy who thought the only reason to go into space was to see what they could take from it and try to civilize the ignorant, savage aliens while they were at it, and never mind that a lot of them had been sailing the stars for a far bit longer than upstart humans. Your reputation kept you out of that mess with Jim, too, the one that would've gotten him bounced out of Starfleet if that crazy Romulan, Nero, hadn't picked just then to lose his mind and try to obliterate the Federation. You were the first person they started looking at when that pointy-eared fellow kicked up the dickens about his test being tampered with. He was sure Kirk had had help with his ridiculous little stunt, and who better to suspect than his best friend?

They dragged you before the committee with the sleep still in your eyes and the tats still in your hair to grill you about what you knew and when you knew it, and all you could do was stand there at attention in your cadet dress reds and tell the truth. They were skeptical at first, but you had a parade of professors and fellow students willing to testify to your good name, and it wasn't long before you were just a bewildered bystander to the whole sorry affair, watching Jim lie in the uncomfortable bed he'd made for himself and hoping his mouth and cocky attitude didn't get him in more trouble.

So much for that dream, he thought wryly as he guided Rosalie's twitching foot into the molded plastic of the AFO and fastened the magnetic strap across her ankle. "Too tight?" he asked.

"No."

That honesty of yours has saved others, too, his mother went on proudly. Like those girls you sometimes rescued from the Academy cadets who plied them with alcohol and then tried to sweet-talk them home. You certainly weren't above flirting; you're a grown man with needs and wants, after all, but you never saw the appeal of bedding a woman who'd count you as nothing but a shameful regret in the morning, so you never tried your luck with anyone who looked to be three sheets to the wind. Your classmates were seldom so discriminating, and you found yourself running interference for young ladies who'd gotten in over their heads, prying them from the grips of their would-be Romeos. You even had to save one from Jim once, though to his credit, he was equally smashed and just trying to work his cocksure magic. He desisted with boozy magnanimity once you got his glassy eyes to focus, and he even apologized to her before wobbling back to your table, where he gaped at you in chummy, doe-eyed adoration until you set your own unfinished drink down in disgust and dragged him back to the dorm to sober up. He was all throbbing head and sheepish contrition the next morning, wheedling for a hangover cure on the way to morning mess, and like you always do, you gave in. Because it was Jim, and because back then, he was about the only thing you had left.

And for all his flaws, Jim was always there. When the cadets whose bad intentions you thwarted bowed up and threatened to cave your head in with a barstool, he was there with his loud mouth and his fists at the ready, and if you found yourself on the losing end of a fight, he was there to pick you up and dust you off and commiserate about the shiner you were sporting. If you weren't, he slapped you heartily on the back and helped you see the lady home. Now and then, you had to remind him not to flirt with a girl heaving the night's excess into the gutter while you held her hair and awkwardly patted her back, but most nights, he was the perfect boy scout, hovering over her while you called a cab or poured her into the arms of her friends.

The other boys at the Academy sneered behind their hands and called you a goodie-goodie, but the young ladies knew you were someone to rely on. They trusted you, respected you, and every once in a while, one would come up to you on the green with her padd clutched to her chest and thank you for seeing her friend or her sister or her cousin out of a bad situation. Sometimes, the face looking back at you from behind the soft fall of hair was the same one that had been spewing vomit onto your shoes the night before, and she'd stammer and murmur and blush to the roots, and ever the gentleman, you'd put her at ease with a smile and a ma'am and a shuffle of your feet. Sometimes, your gallantry earned you a date, but you were still raw from the hurt Pamela had put you through, so it was rarely more than a polite dinner and a kiss on the cheek. Sometimes it was, and it was sweet while it lasted, but like you told Jim that day on the transport shuttle, you were down to your bones, so there wasn't much of you to spare for someone with stars in their eyes and high expectations, and most of them moved on.

I'm not sure what this has to do with my smart mouth, he told her as he slipped the AFO onto Rosalie's other foot and fastened the strap.

Well, it just speaks to your nature, sweetheart. You're honest because you've got a good heart. This little thing here ain't been around you five days, but she senses it. So does Jim, which is why you're usually one of the first people he comes to when he's got a problem or a decision to make. Even that Spock fellow respects you, for all the pompous grumbling he does about you. They both do. They know your heart's in the right place even if it's attached to a sharp tongue, and they trust it. It's one of the few smart things that Jim boy's ever done.

He smiled wistfully at his mother's ringing endorsement and slipped the modified shoe over the AFO. "This is the shoe I talked about," he said as he fastened the buckle. "It's got a lift in the sole itself so you don't have to worry about slipping it in and out every morning."

"What if I want more than one pair of shoes?"

He blinked. "Then I suppose we'll just have to replicate you another pair. It's easy enough." He lowered her foot. "Set your brakes. I want to check the fit and balance."

She did so and swung out her footplates for good measure.

"You a shoe fan?" he asked as he held out his hands.

"Not really," she answered as she took his hands. "But just because you can't stand up doesn't mean you want to look like a hospital matron all the time."

He had no answer for that, and so he simply said, "On three."

She rose unsteadily to her feet and rested her hands on his shoulders to balance herself. Her hips swayed for a moment, bewildered by the shift in their customary position, and then they stilled. She was upright and far straighter than she had been, though there was still a tendency to lean forward. Weak lumbar and trapezius muscles, no doubt, but that could be corrected with continued therapy, and if that didn't help enough, then they could try a temporary brace that would force her to hold herself straight and gradually reprogram a lifetime of muscle memory.

"How does that feel?"

She considered. "Odd," she said at last. "The ground feels different under my feet."

"That's because you're actually standing on your feet instead of the insole or instep. Without the braces, your ankles and knees collapse, and you end up pronating. It's a wonder you haven't blown your ACLs half a dozen times. It also helps that your hips are level. You've probably been compensating for years to make up for the length difference between your legs. I'm guessing that's why the longer leg hyperextends more than the other. I've also noticed that your left Achilles is a lot tighter than your right. It's because the heel of the shorter leg hardly bears weight or touches the floor. Heightens your risk of rupture."

"And these shoes will fix all that," she said dubiously.

"It'll be more gradual than surgery, but it will improve things for you if you keep up with the rehab."

"I don't think my calves or ankles like this much," she said, and shifted her weight from one foot to the other and back again.

"Why?"

"It burns and aches."

"It probably will for a while. As bad as they are for you, those off-kilter positions are what they're used to, and they're going to fight the changes. It's uncomfortable, and you're going to be tempted to rip these off and hurl them against the wall, but I need you to wear them as much as possible. You can take them off at night and on lazy Sunday mornings, but other than that, you need to keep them on."

"How do you even know when it's Sunday around here?" She gazed around the room at walls that boasted neither clock nor calendar.

"Padds show date and time. So do the ship's computers. "It's Thursday morning, if you were wondering."

"I was." She shifted again. Her legs began to tremble with incipient muscle exhaustion. "Why does it feel like there are hot nails being driven into the bottoms of my feet?" She lifted one foot from the floor and stamped like an impatient foal.

"Your bones are still thin, and don't take this as an insult, but you've got bony feet. Not much padding to absorb the weight."

"I feel pretty, oh, so pretty," she sang dourly under her breath, and he once again found himself treading awkward and unfamiliar ground.

"Let's sit you down before your legs give out," he said, and eased her back into the chair. Her spindly legs juddered and twitched on the footplates, temporarily out of her control as muscles unaccustomed to such hard work sent out strident distress signals. She sat rigid as a tentpole in the sagging seat, fingers curled around the armrests. Her face was flushed, whether from exertion or shame, he could not tell.

You've got nothing to be ashamed of, sweetheart, he thought as he undid the buckle of her shoe. I know you're doing the best you can. "It's called clonic spasm," he said as he pulled off her sock. "It's common for CP as far as I can tell. It's nothing you can control."

She surveyed him in inscrutable silence. "Okay."

"What I trying to tell you is that there's no point in being ashamed of it," he said brusquely.

Her mouth twitched. "I suppose you can't blame someone for getting the runs from a bad burger, either, but I imagine they'd still be embarrassed as hell if they messed themselves in public," came the brisk reply, and she gazed down at him from behind long, blonde lashes.

He could find no fault with her logic, and so he busied himself with an examination of her bare foot. There was a pressure indent on the sole, and he was certain it would give way to a bruise by dinnertime, a smarting souvenir from her first foray into standing and proper posture. Well, there wasn't much he could do about it; until her feet toughened up, they were an occupational hazard. Of more pressing concern was a hot spot on her talus. "That hurt?" He gave it an experimental prod with the tip of his finger.

Her emphatic flinch was all the answer he needed. An examination of her other foot yielded the same result. He picked up the AFOs and rose from his crouch. "Sit tight," he ordered, and carried them to his desk. He shoved his padd out of the way with an impatient sweep of his hand and set the braces in its place. Then he went to the supply cabinet, keyed in his code, and began to rummage among the various rolls and packets of gauze, cotton batting, and compresses. One by one, he inspected and rejected them all. He even considered the possibilities afforded by a hunk of foam shoved into the dim recesses of the cabinet's rear, but that he dismissed as too rigid. He tossed it back with a sigh. It was all either too flimsy for the job or too abrasive.

Well, hell, he thought, hands on his hips and eyes fixed on the contents of the cabinet as though he could conjure a suitable material through sheer force of will.

There's always the replicator, suggested the unflappable voice of practicality.

He grunted and slammed the door to the uncooperative cupboard, and when he had reengaged the lock, he stalked to the hapless replicator mounted in the wall behind his desk. He jabbed a finger at the keypad, then stopped, considering.

What would you use to cushion your bony feet if some jackass told you you had to encase them in plastic every day for the rest of your life?

His finger hovered in front of the keypad for a moment, and then he punched in his selection. Please wait, the machine pleaded as it processed his request. Estimated time of completion: 2 minutes. He rolled his eyes and heaved a put-upon sigh at its crotchety intransigence.

"It'll be ready in a few," he called as he scowled at replicator, which, unfazed by his cantankerousness, simply clacked and ground along on its appointed rounds.

"It's fine. It's not like I have anyplace I need to be," she answered mildly. "It seems to go a lot faster with food."

"Food is composed of much simpler compounds."

"So is that how you make everything in the world these days? With replicators?"

"I suppose you could if you had one big enough, and there are a few industrial replicators, but most things are still manufactured by humans. We have to have something to do now that we've stopped killing each other."

"We have?" she said with blank incredulity.

"You sound surprised."

"That's because I am. When I went into the human cannery, the Ukraine had dissolved into a maelstrom of civil war and bioterror attacks that spawned rumors of zombies shambling across the earth, the U.S. was in the grips of an evangelical hysteria that threatened to swallow sanity and civil order whole, Mexico was a morass of starving, broke people caught in the crossfire of at least a dozen different drug cartels, and people were merrily shooting each other for the crime of getting lost at night or asking for help after a car accident."

"Zombies?" he repeated incredulously.

"Yeah. They were big at the time. You know, Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z. Well, no, I don't guess you would know," she said thoughtfully. "Trust me, they were big back then. And then when reports came in about people eating the family dog alive while high on bath salts or chewing their mother's face off while high on Spice, or the ones about drug addicts decomposing alive because of Krokodil, suddenly it didn't seem so crazy that dead folks might've popped up for a second go-round."

Jesus Christ, what kind of sick, apocalyptic hell were you living in? he wondered as the timer on the replicator ticked steadily downward.

"So, when did we finally stop blowing each other to hell?"

"2053. Once most of the planet received a hot dose of radiation, people figured out that maybe reaching for the button every time a disagreement broke out was a bad idea."

"You don't say?"

He snorted. "Yeah, well, people have always a little slow on the uptake. If they weren't, I wouldn't be seeing cases of suppurating flesh wounds that could've been treated in a second if they hadn't tried to play doctor with the butter."

"Butter?"

"You don't want to know."

The replicator chirped and spat out a swatch of soft fleece. This he carried to his desk, where he seated himself in his chair and angled his reading lamp to shine on the center of the desk. He set the braces aside and spread the swatch in the bright square of light. Then he opened the topmost drawer of his desk and took out an old laser scalpel and a cauterizer.

"If we had a grand time of it blowing ourselves up, then what's left of Earth?" she asked, no doubt envisioning miles of cratered, blackened earth where her world had once been.

"The planet's fine," he grunted as he smoothed the soft fabric. "There were a few geographical changes, and there were a few rough years until we made First Contact. The Vulcans helped with the reconstruction efforts."

"The Vulcans? Isn't that what the elf said he was?"

"His name is Spock," he reminded her. "And yes." When the swatch was as smooth and straight as he could manage, he pinned the top corners with his empty coffee mug and his padd and reached for the laser scalpel.

Yes, best not to tell her that the Atlanta she remembers, the cradle of her interrupted life, was vaporized in a mushroom cloud of toxic dust and scalding ash, or that most of the institutions and landmarks of her childhood are gone, replaced by ones she cannot possibly understand. That would do wonders for her already-rocky equilibrium.

And just wait until she learns about Philip Greene.

He winced at the thought as he flicked on the scalpel and carefully cut a small oval from the bottom. With any luck, she'd never hear that name, never have cause to wonder why it was spoken with such distaste, children fearfully invoking the bogeyman they knew to lurk under their bed.

And if she does? needled the perpetual town crier inside his head who wailed of shuttle crashes and industrial accidents and shattered skulls yet to come. She's smart as a whip and curious besides, and based on that never-ending treatise she wrote on your intelligence test, she knows how to investigate and correlate and follow the trail of breadcrumbs laid by those who have gone before. How long's it going to be before she's scrolling through the mountain of information about World War III and sees the references to a post-atomic terror? And how long after that before she stumbles across his name and reads about the great eugenics purge of the impure and broken and undesirable? What will she think when she realizes that people really haven't changed all that much, that a lot of them would be glad if folks like her never made a comeback, if they remained an unfortunate relic of history?

I can't protect her from the world, he countered. He put the small oval on the hard surface of his desk to let it cool and rose from his chair to retrieve a tube of medi-adhesive from a tray behind him. It was ordinarily used to treat minor cuts too small for a suture but too deep for a steri-strip, but it would do nicely for what he had in mind. I could try. I could censor what she read and sanitize her archive searches, but sooner or later, she'd find herself on Earth with a box of replicated clothes and a padd and the address of an intake center, and it would still be there for her to find. It would still hurt just as badly, maybe more because she never saw it coming. At least if she finds out about it here, she'll have people to talk to and time to figure out how to feel about it.

He sat down at his desk again, unscrewed the cap of the adhesive, and daubed a few beads of the clear, viscous liquid onto the perimeter.

"What are you doing?"

"Making a pad for your talus bones," he answered without looking up. "If I don't, you're liable to rub yourself raw and develop ulcers."

"Been there," she said. "They used to use this foam stuff."

"I thought we'd try this. Figured it might be more comfortable."

"Are you going to put it on the ankle straps, too? Sometimes they cut into my skin if my feet swell."

"You shouldn't have much problem with swelling anymore," he said, but his eyes slid to the underside of the straps as they lay on the desk like strips of debrided flesh, and his mind was already calculating the measurements. No harm in being safe, and giving her something familiar was so much the better. He picked up the nearest brace and pressed the fabric onto the plastic before the adhesive could dry.

"I'm surprised you need to," she noted. "I thought that wand you used was accurate to the micromillimeter. There was no accusation in her tone, and when he chanced a glance at her as he reached for the cauterizer, she was sitting much straighter in the chair, and her eyes were alive with interest. There was even a bit of color in her cheeks, a development that pleased him to no end.

"It is. Most people don't move when I use it. And if you're going to apologize, don't," he said firmly, because he could feel it coming. "As you can see, it's nothing we can't get around." He turned on the cauterizer and used it to strengthen the seal between the fleece and the plastic. The air filled with the acrid stink of singed plastic, and he wrinkled his nose in reflexive disgust.

"You're pretty good at that," Rosalie observed, and coughed against the stench.

"I am a trained surgeon," he answered mildly as he traded the cauterizer for the laser scalpel and cut another oval from the fleece. "Besides, my mother taught me how to sew."

"Did she? Did you always know you wanted to be a doctor, then?"

"From pretty young, I guess. I was about eleven or so when the thought first entered my mind. Before that, I thought about being a vet. Came natural with being on a farm. I used to go with my dad around the farm during calving season. I can still turn a calf if I have to."

"Something that comes up often, is it?" she said lightly, and when he looked up, she was smiling. Not the tired, timid smile of reflex and social obligation, but a genuine smile that reached her eyes and softened her face.

He was so surprised that he nearly squirted adhesive onto his sleeve. "Not so much these days," he managed, and pressed the oval into the plastic. "Before Starfleet, I used to help out on the farm when I could. Milk, turn calves, treat for hoof rot." The cauterizer made another appearance, and he braced for another round of the caustic stink.

"So sewing was your mama's contribution to your medical career?"

"Sewing was my mother's cure for smartass," he answered wryly, and damned if she didn't laugh. Her shoulders shook as she clutched the arms of her chair and belly-laughed. It was a lively, merry sound, and so unexpected after days of morose silence and humorless grunts that several of the nurses turned their heads in surprise, half-fluffed pillows and trays of fresh hypos in their hands.

"She contributed plenty to my career," he said, pleased to see this change in her demeanor. "She's a smart woman. She taught me to read before I ever made it kindergarten, and she made sure I read a little of everything. Her father was a doctor, and she used to let me play with his old stuff. He had this old bioscanner the size of a cowbell that I used to play with-"

"Bioscanner?" she interrupted blankly.

"The thing I'm always waving over your head."

"Oh, the salt shaker," she said cheerfully. "All right."

"Yeah, the salt shaker," he muttered drily. "Not like it takes skill to operate or education to interpret the readouts properly. Anyway, he had one the size of an old cowbell, and I used to carry it around the house, diagnosing everyone with various dire diseases."

She giggled. "I take it you cured them."

"I was the best doctor in three counties," he said with a surge of childhood pride.

"I just bet you were," she said softly, and he knew that she was picturing him as he was, knee-high to a grasshopper and sporting a cowlick and carrying that brick of a bioscanner in both hands as he solemnly diagnosed his brother with Andorian scurvy and colorectal pinworms.

"Like I said, she contributed plenty to my career," he said, and cut two more strips of fleece from the rapidly-dwindling swatch. "Sewing just wasn't part of it. Threaded sutures went out before the twenty-second century. Though I guess it did come in handy for that project in my History of Pre-Federation Medicine course," he mused. "We had to stitch up various animals with whatever material we had on hand. The cow was a cinch. The tadpole was a bit trickier."

"Tadpole?" she echoed.

"Of course. How else to test your fine motor skills?"

"I'm sure I couldn't tell you."

"Tadpoles. Well, that's how Dr. Kramer did it, anyhow." He glued the strips of fleece to the ankle straps and pressed them together to form a tight seal. "What about you? What did you want to be?"

"Oh, all kinds of things. A mermaid, a ninja, a princess, a mighty warrior queen. I had quite the imagination. When I got a little older, I wanted to be a detective. But you couldn't do much detecting back then if you couldn't sneak around, and I had the stealth capabilities of a Sherman tank."

He snorted in amusement and carried the braces to her chair, where he resumed his crouch and held out his hand. A small foot was promptly presented.

"It wasn't until middle school that I took up the idea to be a teacher," she said, as he slipped her foot back into the AFO, the prince presenting a glass slipper to Cinderella. "I couldn't run or sew or cook. I couldn't even wipe my own behind half the time, but I could learn. That I could do, and better than the little turds who made fun of me. So I set my mind to it and learned my butt off. Science, English literature and grammar, languages. You name it, and sir, I learned it. If I couldn't earn respect any other way, then maybe I could get it that way, and I figured that if I could learn it, then maybe I could teach it, too. I loved most of my teachers, and I wanted to be just like them."

He thought of the essay she'd written for his intelligence test, clear and concise and often starkly beautiful in its prose. Beauty wasn't a trait often found in historical treatises, but there it had been, fine as diamond dust scattered across the pages. The strength of the mind behind it had been evident; hell, even Spock had called it impressive, and that was high praise, indeed, from him. Jim had read it from top to bottom, and this from a man who'd seldom met a book for which he'd had the time during his Academy days, There was talent there, and a formidable one. If she'd had the temperament for it, the patience to deal with the laziness and ineptitude of students, she might've been an exceptional teacher.

She's still might, murmured the obdurate voice of hope. She's thirty, not eighty, still plenty young enough to get off this ship and make her mark on the world. You've just got to set her as right as you can before you set her loose.

He put on her shoes. "And did you?" He held out his hands.

"Become a teacher?" She opened her footplates and set her feet on the floor. "I was about to when the whole business with the cryotube happened. Wanted to get my PhD in history and then get my teaching certificate. Then..." She stopped, and her gaze, which had been so bright, dimmed. "Well, the rest is history," she finished, and there was a terrible, sour irony to it that tightened his stomach.

Another glimpse of the wound, his father said somberly.

She came up with the first tug and settled her hands on his shoulders, and he rested one hand on her hip and splayed the other over the small of her back to prevent her from toppling backward and going ass over teakettle over the wheelchair. It was gentle and perversely intimate, a dance not yet begun. This close, he could smell the astringent infirmary soap Ogawa had used in her morning shower, and it was intrusive and perversely incongruous with the softness of her hand on his shoulder.

She should smell like jasmine and rose, he thought nonsensically, and blinked at the strangeness of it.

"Anyway," she said suddenly, "I did get my degree, at least."

"Let me guess: history," he ventured, relieved to be distracted from that odd, wistful thought.

She blinked in astonishment. "How'd you know?" She offered a puzzled smile. "Don't tell me you've got mind-reading equipment in here?" Her eyes surreptitiously scanned the room in search of nefarious, thought-snatching equipment tucked discreetly into a nearby cabinet.

He chuckled. "Just a guess from that test you took. There are a few majors with that level of thoroughness, and you don't strike me as the philosophy type."

"Actually, I do have a Philosophy minor," she admitted sheepishly. "And Religion. And Spanish. And German."

"My God," he sputtered. "How many lambskins did you want?"

"I liked learning," she said simply. "I liked knowing things. Besides, it's not like I had much else to do. I had some friends, but it's not like I was out partying. Most people don't want to bump and grind and get bombed with someone who came with their own nurse. Even if they did, it's not like the hot nightclubs were rolling out the accessibility ramps. So I took classes instead. Safer than trying to drive an electric wheelchair when you're bombed. And it might not've impressed the students, but it got the professors' attention, sure enough. Opened doors to a few internships and letters of recommendations. And it passed the time while everyone else was off screwing in Cabo."

"I'm going to ease you down and take another look at your feet," he warned.

She sank into the chair as neat as you please when his hands settled on her hips and guided them downwards, and she never made a peep as her legs shook with exhaustion tremors hard enough to rattle the footplates. She scooted back in the seat and thrust out her trembling feet and looked at anything but her unruly limbs.

It's all right, he wanted to tell her, but he only squatted and removed her shoes and braces. "You could still be a teacher," he said as he examined her feet. "There are plenty of fine programs. Starfleet might even have a place for you if you decide you can't live without replicator food."

"I'd have to find an accessible ship, wouldn't I?" she said with a wry grin. "And a school, for that matter. I don't think most places would take degrees two hundred years out of date. They're probably so much dust and faded ink by now. I wonder if my parents kept them after-" She lapsed into abrupt silence. "Don't see why they would," she said, and snorted.

We're dancing around the wound again, he realized uneasily. And I'll be damned if I trust myself to handle it just yet.

"Trust me, Miss Walker; you could ace any admissions exam you set your mind to. There's plenty of correspondence courses you could take while you're here, and by the time you left, you'd have your pick of institutions willing to roll out accessibility ramps upholstered in red carpet to get you in the door."

She beamed. "Bless you, Dr. McCoy. I do believe that's one of the finest compliments I've been paid in a long time."

Well, I doubt your cryotube came equipped with an intercom system, he thought, but she was radiant, almost lovely in her pleasure, and so he said, "I know a good mind when I see one. As for the rest of you, the padding seems to have done the trick." He replaced the braces and shoes with brisk efficiency and sprang to his feet. "You need to check your feet every day. If you see any hot spots, you report them to me right away. Not three days later when you're bleeding through your socks. Understood?"

She nodded. "Yes, Doctor." Her expression was all solemn promise now, but the radiance remained, a shaft of sunlight piercing a leaden horizon, and in it, he could see the soul behind those tortured, misaligned angles.

I see you, Miss Walker. Triumphant and not a little amazed at who he glimpsed behind the veil.

"All right," he said. "Now that we've got your body sorted out for the time being, how about we find something to occupy your mind so you'll quit wearing grooves in my damn floor?" He bent and scooped the new padd from the floor in question. "This is a padd, and with it, you can access practically the whole damn store of human knowledge. Now, to turn it on, you just..."

While his garrulous CMO instructed their taciturn, crooked foundling in the wonders of modern technology, Captain James T. Kirk sat in his ready room and wished like hell for an aspirin. He'd been reviewing incident reports and requisition requests for hours, and somewhere between a request for three cases of industrial lubricant from Scotty and one for a tube of lubricant of an entirely different sort from a young yeoman, his head had begun to throb with a dull, insistent pressure. His ass ached from sitting in the chair for so long; no doubt Bones would be howling about deadly clots come to lodge themselves in his lungs and give him a pulmonary embolism. He probably should get up for a stretch, but if he did, he wasn't sure he could convince himself to sit down again, and so he stretched his legs beneath the table in a half-hearted effort to appease his inner Bones and scrolled to the next request.

Great, his portable Bones grunted morosely. If there was a clot in there, you've just set in loose in your circulatory system.

Have a little faith, Bones, he soothed. Another half-hour, and I'll head over to the bridge for a while.

Bones was not to be mollified. That's what you said an hour ago, he retorted irascibly.

Besides, it's not like I've got anything to worry about. You've already raised me from the dead.

Bones made no reply, but he could sense him fuming, and in his mind's eye, he saw him scowling as he stumped about his meticulously-ordered sickbay and muttered under his breath about the tenacious luck of fools. The vision inspired a wave of affection, and he smiled around the top of his stylus as he scanned a request for Andorian rock candy from a nurse on Pennicott's shift. Another half-hour and he would call it day and head to the bridge. With any luck, Bones would've torn himself away from his new patient, and they could discuss plans for the weekly officers' poker game and bullshit session. No Romulan ale this time(Nero's genocidal rampage had strained relations with the Federation to the breaking point, and there was heated talk of embargoes and economic sanctions from both sides), but Scotty always had something on hand, the canny old pirate, and Bones likely had a fifth or two of Kentucky bourbon stashed away. For medicinal purposes, of course.

But that was for later. Right now, he had to wade through this endless stream of reports, so he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and pretended to care about the endless parade of forms, names and scrawled signatures.

Pike left this part out when he gave you that sell job in that San Francisco dive, muttered a gritty, cynical voice inside his head, sandpaper and broken concrete against his nerves, and he winced and considered calling Bones down to give him that damn aspirin.

There was a lot Pike never told him. He'd never gotten the chance, blown to hell by two rounds to the chest from a phaser rifle. The golden boy who'd saved Earth from destruction hadn't been fast enough to save the only guy who'd bothered to give him a second look and a chance to be something other than the screwup, malcontent son of a Starfleet hero, and he'd breathed his last on the floor of a ruined conference room while he was too busy trying to bring down a shuttlecraft with a firehose. He had gotten there too late, had realized what was happening only as Spock was pressing his fingertips to the captain's face and gazing into his fading eyes, and there had been no Bones with a cryotube then. Just scattered bodies and smoking wreckage and the hard floor beneath his knees and Spock's hand heavy on his shoulder.

Sometimes, he thought about asking Spock what he'd found as he'd rummaged through the contents of a dying man's head, what he'd felt as he'd sorted through thoughts and feelings never meant for his scrutiny, but he'd never quite dared. It had struck him as unseemly somehow, a gross breach of privacy against a man who'd shared very little of himself in life. They weren't his to see, those snatches of life snagged by Spock's grasping fingers. Spock could be forgiven his intrusion, excused by his lingering grief over the loss of his home world and the helpless desire to know if it was a trait shared by humans, but he knew better, and so he left the knowledge to Pike, God rest his soul, and to Spock, whose sense of propriety would never permit him to divulge the secrets he'd plucked from his head.

Get real, sneered the voice of his stepfather inside his head. You've never asked because you're afraid of what you might find. You're afraid that the old man never thought of you at all in those last minutes, or that if he did, the last thought of you he had before the lights went out was disappointment. God knows he wouldn't be the first person you let down, would he? You've let your mother down more times than you can count. She's spent far too much of herself chasing after you and trying to get you to act like a civilized human being, too much of her energy apologizing and making excuses for your asshole behavior. How many times did she have to leave work to come down to the school for another rousing round of Your Son Is a Disciplinary Problem? Or drag your ass out of jail when you graduated to vandalism and public intoxication? I'm sure she was so proud to be dragging her teenage son out of the drunk tank in her work uniform, offering mortified smiles to the neighbors while you puked on her shoes.

God knows you disappointed me.

Well, lucky for both of us, I never gave a fuck about what you thought of me, he thought savagely, and scrolled to the next form in the queue. You weren't my old man.

Let's talk about your old man, why don't we? his stepfather needled. What do you think dear old sainted George would say if he could see you now? The only reason you didn't get bounced out of the Academy on your ass for that little stunt you pulled is because Nero interrupted your disciplinary hearing. A few minutes later, you'd've ended up slinking home with your tail between your legs and begging me for a job sweeping up the garage. Boy, I bet that would've made the old man proud, seeing his hotshot kid as a broom jockey for the guy who took over slipping it to his wife.

Yeah, well, I didn't. I stopped Nero and saved Earth. And made Captain faster than anyone in Federation history.

Only because your buddy, McCoy, felt sorry for your ass and sneaked you on board, and not before Vulcan got vaporized by that antimatter ray. And the only reason your cocky ass is in that seat now is because you let Pike die. You didn't earn that seat; you lucked into it, just like you've blundered into everything else. You coast by on your father's name and others' good graces, and you don 't care who you hurt while you're flying by the seat of your pants. You could've killed McCoy's career before it ever started, would have if it hadn't been Pike in the chair, and you let Spock's mother die and spat into his wounds to get your foot back in the door. You nearly destroyed the Enterprise on her maiden voyage, and you can thank Scotty for saving you from that particular sin. Which you duly did by firing him when he had the stones to tell you to shove it up your ass. And hey, for an encore performance, you single-handedly pissed off the Klingon Empire by violating the Neutral Zone and killing a patrol crew. Thanks to you and your overzealous vengeance quest, the Federation might find itself ass-deep in a war it's not prepared to fight. So, yeah, you might've saved the planet like some big damn hero, but only until the Klingons get tired of paying lip service to diplomacy and blow some pisspot Federation outpost. Wonder how many bodybags your buddy Bones will be zipping up in sickbay once the shooting starts in earnest? And unlike you, they won't have the benefits of Khan's super-blood to bring them back.

And hey, what about San Francisco? There were only about twenty-five hundred casualties on the ground when the Vengeance plowed headlong into downtown and demolished several city blocks and a huge chunk of the Academy before it righted itself. Just a little gift from its most celebrated cadet. But that's the way with you, isn't it? Once you've taken all you can from something, you don't give a flying fuck what happens to it afterwards.

The thought of San Francisco inspired a leaden nausea. It had taken nearly a year for the city to rebuild, and even now, there were still scars and subtle traces if you knew where to look-vacant lots where apartment buildings had once risen over the Bay or buildings whose purposes had shifted. The bakery where he'd once snagged the best sourdough he'd ever tasted was now an antique scrivener's store, with quills and inkpots and ballpoint pens displayed in the window, and though the bar where he'd raised so much hell was still there, its name had changed, and gaudy neon had given way to lush potted plants and tasteful plate-glass windows.

Starfleet Headquarters and the Academy had sustained heavy damage. The roofs of both had collapsed, along with the east wall. The student dormitories and classroom complex had been buried beneath tons of rubble, and the libraries and archives had burned. The med compound had lost power and been flooded by severed water lines, and rescue workers and recovery teams had spent days sifting through the rubble and bring out the dead and wounded and rounding up escaped animals from the biology labs. Bones had volunteered for a med rotation as soon as he'd patched up the surviving crew, and for nearly three weeks, he'd put in sixteen hour shifts at the makeshit infirmary and staggered back to his temporary quarters, covered in blood and swaying on his feet. He'd treated cadets and civilians alike, and God knew how many lives he'd saved with those miraculous hands, but he knew that he had because Bones was too proud to quit and too soft-hearted to give up.

He also knew how many he'd lost, because Bones told him. On the good nights, he'd shuffle in tired but satisfied, head held high as he shucked his filthy scrubs and tossed them into the recycler on the way to the shower, but on the bad nights, he'd stagger in, stooped and silent, and shuffle into the bedroom he shared with him and two others, where he'd plop onto his cot and bury his head in his hands.

"I lost one today," he'd croak to the floor between his feet, voice hoarse and raw from barking out orders and screaming for retractors and scalpels and hyposprays, and then he'd simply sit, head hung low and hands dangling between his green-scrubbed thighs.

Most of the time, he'd come out of it after a stiff drink and a few minutes to himself, would sigh and run his fingers through his hair and bend to unlace his dirty sneakers in preparation for his badly-needed shower, but there had been that awful night near the end of his rotation when he'd come in, dead-eyed and lurching like he'd started on the bourbon long before he made the door, and it had frightened him so badly that he'd frozen where he stood, ten years old again and watching his alcoholic stepfather reel through the living room with a bottle in one hand and a leather strap in the other. Then he'd blinked, and it was just Bones again.

He'd followed him into the room, past the two sheet-covered humps of their snoring roommates. Bones hadn't said a word as he'd plopped onto his cot like a man twice his age and simply sat, staring at the floor between his feet.

"I lost one today," he'd said hoarsely. Then, "She was thirteen years old. Thirteen."

"Bones-," he'd begun, but that was as far as he'd gotten, because Bones had spoken again.

"She was playing with her little brother in front of building when the roof came down and buried 'em both," he'd said dully, and picked listlessly at the hair at the spar of his wrist. "The brother was six; he died instantly. Being crushed by a thousand pounds of concrete'll do that, I guess. The girl was luckier. She was pinned under a piece of rebar for two days." He'd snorted. "Luckier. Shit."

He'd tried again. "Bones-" But then Bones had looked at him, and his eyes had been so wet and raw with misery and lack of sleep that he'd flinched.

"I thought I had her," he'd gone on. "She had multiple crushing injuries and blunt force trauma, and she was dehydrated all to hell, but I got her stable. I did."

"I know you did," he'd said helplessly, because he'd known then what Bones was going to say. Hearing it was the last thing he'd wanted to do, but he'd also known that he had no choice. If he turned and walked away, Bones would hold it inside until it festered, until occasional sips from his favorite flask became constant pulls and those steady, miraculous hands developed a constant tremor that never quite stilled. He'd seen it before, heard it in the rattle of his stepfather's torque wrench against a freshly-scrubbed engine black as he'd swayed over a car inside his father's garage. So he'd stood there between his two snoring roommates and listened with a mounting ache in the center of his chest.

"I thought she was out of the woods. Dammit, Jim, she should've been." The plaintive, disbelieving cry of a soul demanding redress from a capricious god. "She was up and talking and eating. Hell, I even let her folks come in to sit with her. Her mother was sitting right there when she-" He'd stopped and dropped his gaze to the floor again, and he'd massaged his wrist as though it pained him. "When she had a goddamned pulmonary embolism. One minute, she's talking, and the next, every alarm on the damn bio bed is screaming."

"Clots are always a risk with crush injuries. Any first-year med student knows that." He'd rocked slowly to and fro, itching idly at his wrist. "I couldn't give her anti-coagulants right away on account of the internal bleeding and subsequent surgery, but I put her on them as soon as I could. When there was no abnormal bleeding seven days post-op, I took her off 'em, and for damn near two weeks, she was fine. No signs of clots."

"I opened her up, and there were just so many clots. Everywhere I looked, there was another damn clot. I'd bust one up, and there'd be another one a minute later. It was like she was hemorrhaging through her tissues, like she had Ebola or hemorrhagic fever or Tellarite compression syndrome. I tried, Jim. I tried so hard, but the more I worked, the worse it got. My hands just couldn't keep up." He'd been rocking vigorously by then, hunched and erratic and panting, and he'd known that he'd been back in that hotbox operating room, scalpel in hand and sweat in his eyes and trying to beat the devil.

"She died right there on the table." The rocking had slowed, and he'd buried his head in his hands. "I was wrist-deep in blood when she had a massive stroke. I tried everything-vasoconstrictors, transfusion-hell, I even tried old-fashioned cardiac massage, but-" He'd shrugged, a convulsive spasm of shoulder. "She was thirteen, Jim. Thirteen. She should be out with friends and getting the vapors over pimple-faced boys, not lyin' on a slab in Morgue Four. "Jesus Christ." He'd leaned forward on the cot, elbows propped on his thighs, and for one terrible moment, he'd thought he was going to be sick, but then he'd begun to cry, a harsh, ragged bark of anguish quickly muffled by the back on his hand. "Jesus Christ," he'd repeated weakly, and wrapped his arms around his middle as though to keep his insides in.

It's not your fault, Bones, he'd thought as he'd listened to him strangle on his muffled grief. That girl didn't die because you weren't fast enough or good enough. She died because Pike was right. I was a cocky bastard who didn't listen. She died because I didn't listen to the voice in my head that insisted violating the Neutral Zone was a bad idea. She died because I wouldn't listen to Scotty when he refused to sign for those damn torpedoes. She died because I wasn't as smart or as good as I thought I was.

She died because I didn't realign the warp core fast enough.

But he couldn't say any of that around the knot in his chest and the lump in his throat, and so he'd simply shuffled to the duffel at the end of Bones' cot and retrieved his hip flask from atop the jumble of clothes and assorted toiletries. He'd unscrewed the cap and taken a long swallow before he'd held it out to Bones, who'd taken it without a word and drained it one morose sip at a time. As for him, he'd squeezed his shoulder and retreated to his own cot, where he'd sat on the edge and watched Bones drink and pretended not to see the tear stains on his face, and when one of their roommates had rolled over and blearily suggested that they shut up and turn out the light and go the fuck to sleep, he'd fixed him with a glare so gelid that he'd promptly rolled over and retreated to the safety of his blanket.

No shower for Bones that night. He'd drunk the flask dry and blinked owlishly at the light with red-rimmed eyes, and then he'd turned it out and slept in his scrubs, the toes of his creased, dirty sneakers hanging off the end of his cot. He'd woken up the next morning with bloodshot, haunted eyes and a thunderous scowl, and though he'd reported for duty at the volunteer hospital with his customary professionalism, he'd hardly spoken for the rest of his rotation. Even grousing monosyllables had been beyond him, and Jim had known that his heart wasn't in it. It had flown away along with the little girl he couldn't save, and it hadn't come back until he was back aboard the Enterprise and afforded the welcome distraction of treating cuts and bruises and the occasional case of lungworms.

He, too, had been haunted by the casualties, by the long list of names of those he couldn't save. When a young medical yeoman had brought him the list of the dead, he'd carried it to his desk, poured himself a jigger of scotch, and scrolled through it over and over, a penitent paying obeisance to those he had wronged. He'd read them until his eyes burned and blurred, convinced that if he only looked long enough, the damage would be undone and the person to whom it belonged would walk through the door and offer him a smile and a crisp salute. There's been a mistake, sir. Dr. McCoy says I'm fit for duty. Ensign Jordan, reporting for duty. After all, he was the cowboy, the child luck favored, and hadn't he once so proudly boasted that there were no unwinnable situations?

But there had been no mistakes, no jovial ensigns reporting for duty. The dead had remained dead no matter how many times he'd scrolled past their names or said them aloud like an invocation, and in the end, he'd had to pour himself another jigger of scotch and dictate forty-three letters of condolence to the families left behind when he hadn't been smart or fast enough to elude the pursuing hounds. There were form letters he could have sent, bloodless, pre-recorded communinques into which he could plugged their name and rank, but they had seemed a cold and cowardly tribute to those who had placed their lives in his hands, and so he had sat in his chair and recorded each in turn, had spoken their name and rank with reverence and thanked their families for their service and sacrifice. He'd recorded until he was hoarse and the scotch burned his throat like lye, and then he'd gone down to sickbay and slumped in a chair beside Bones' desk while he filled out autopsy reports and death certificates, and stared at the bodies zippered in plastic bags and draped in Federation flags. Thirteen bodies neatly arranged on silent biobeds. The rest had been lost to space, and as he'd blinked at the lucky few, he'd wondered what the other families would think when the shuttle brought home an empty casket.

It was one of the many lessons Captain Pike never had the chance to teach him, and he often wondered what he would have thought, what he would have said in his place. Would he have dictated individual letters of condolence for each crew member, numbing the pain in his throat with swallows of scotch and uttering each name like an apology for his failure? Would he have gone down to sickbay to hold vigil over the bodies and get drunk under the watchful, sympathetic eye of the ship's doctor? Would he have escorted the flag-draped bodies to the transport shuttle and stood to attention while his eyes burned and shuttle crews carried the caskets inside with somber care and Bones surreptitiously waved a bioscanner over him and muttered about abnormal vitals and too much damn stress and not enough food or sleep.

And you think of your father, whispered the voice of his stepfather. You wonder what he would think. He was a larger-than-life presence when you were a kid, a holographic picture projected on the living room wall about the com screen and rising from the corner of your mother's dresser drawer and your desk in your room. He was a legend. A goddamn saint. You must've heard the story of how he saved the U.S. 's crew a thousand times by the time you were six, and for the longest time, until reality set in and you began your illustrious career as a world-class fuckup, you wanted to be just like him. Would he be proud of all the lives you saved by kicking that warp core back into realignment, or would he shake his head and damn you for the forty-three you didn't and blame you for the twenty-five hundred lives snuffed out when your ship plummeted from orbit and skimmed the skyline, a tectonic plate rearranging the world to its whims with no thought to who or what was in its path? Would he blame you for the old men, women, and children you flattened in their offices and apartments, for the babies never born because the maternity ward collapsed on top of laboring mothers trapped in the stirrups while nurses fled and dogged doctors shielded their patients with their bodies, or would he absolve you of all the guilt you've so rightfully earned and commend you for having the bald stones to go into a malfunctioning warp core with nothing but your courage and an unspoken prayer.

He was captain of a starship for fifteen minutes and saved eight hundred lives, including yours, Pike told you once upon a time, and sometimes, when you're lying in bed and the ship is deep in the rhythms of Delta shift, you wonder who it was that wrote the condolence letter for him.

He sighed and tossed his padd onto the table. The pain in his head was now a constant, dull roar, and he closed his eyes and gently kneaded his temples with the points of his fingertips.

You call Bones down here, he's liable to think you're having a brain hemorrhage.

Nevertheless, he was reaching for the com, when Uhura's voice erupted from it. "Captain, I have an incoming call from Starfleet Medical."

"Starfleet Medical? Should I call Bones in on this?"

"I don't know, sir. It concerns the woman we found in the cryotube."

"I see. Thank you, Lieutenant. Put them through."

"Yes, sir," she said, and a moment later, the com screen filled with the image of a prim, slender woman with brown hair greying at the temples.

"Captain Kirk? I'm Dr. Moira Boswell."

"Dr. Boswell, what can I do for you?"

"According to a recent transmission from Commander Spock, you recently discovered a human woman floating in a cryotube."

He groaned inwardly and silently cursed Spock's fastidious nature. "Yes, we did."

"Have you identified her?"

"We have. Her name is Rosalie Walker, and according to my CMO and commander Spock's research, she's been in stasis for two hundred and forty years."

"Spock's report indicates that there were some medical abnormalities."

"There are, but none that pose any threat to the ship or its crew."

"We would like to determine that for ourselves."

"I trust Dr. McCoy's judgment implicity, Dr. Boswell."

"Given your track record, that's hardly a ringing endorsement," she retorted drily.

"We're not scheduled to return to Earth for a year."

"No, but you are scheduled to visit Starbase 4517 on your way to Ceti Alpha V, are you not?"

"Yes."

"Then she can report there for further examination and to determine the best course of treatment."

"Dr. McCoy has already prescribed a course of treatment."

"A second opinion never hurts. It should be a matter of routine. Unless, of course, you have reason to doubt his medical expertise.

He bristled. "I have every confidence in his abilities," he said coolly.

She offered him a vulpine smile that did not reach her eyes. "Good," she said. "Then we have nothing to worry about. See you soon, Captain." Almost jaunty now, and the vulpine grin stretched even wider. Then she vanished as she terminated the connection.

"Hell," he sighed, and pressed the button on the com. "Kirk to McCoy. Please report to my ready room. And bring an aspirin."

There was no reply from Bones, but he stalked in a few minutes later, kit in hand.

"I only asked for an aspirin, Bones," he said as Bones set his kit on the table and opened it to produce not just the desired aspirin, but a bioscanner.

"Yeah, well, if you're asking for an aspirin, your head must be about to fall off," he grunted, and jabbed the bioscanner at his temple. "Only you could get yourself worked up over a little peace and quiet."

"I am not worked up," he protested. Then, quietly, "I've just been thinking, that's all."

McCoy's expression softened. "You've been doing that a lot lately." He peered at the readout from his bioscanner.

"Hazard of all this peace and quiet," he said drily. "'M I going to live?"

"Just a headache," he admitted grudgingly, and dropped the aspirin into his palm.

"Don't sound so disappointed, Bones," he teased. "I'm sure I'll fulfill your dire predictions sooner or later."

"Don't even joke like that, Jim," he chided. "You've already died on me once. I'm not sure you'll get that lucky the second time around."

"C'mon, Bones, that wasn't luck. That was the skill of your legendary hands."

"The hell it wasn't. If Khan's blood hadn't had magical healing properties, you'd be six feet under the sod," he snapped.

He decided to change the subject before he was treated to another lecture on his idiot recklessness. "I just got a call from a Doctor Boswell at Starfleet Medical about our hitchhiker."

Bones froze, hand hovering over the lid of his kit. "What did they want?"

"They want her to report for an examination when we get to the starbase."

Bones plopped into an empty chair. "Examination, my ass. They want to take her."

"So what if they do? They're trained doctors, too, you know."

"That may be, but they don't know how to handle her."

"Handle her? What, is she psychotic?"

"No! She's just...scared, Jim. Everything and everyone she's ever known is gone, and she's just trying to figure things out."

"I can't blame her there," he said, and thought of the years before Pike had goaded him into Starfleet with the challenge to meet or better his father's achievement, when he wandered from place to place and odd job to odd job in search of a place to call his own.

"She's not doing too badly, all things considered. She's diligent in her therapy and quiet as a mouse. Doesn't fuss or bother anybody. I wish she'd talk more, but I'll be the first to admit that doctors and nurses aren't the best conversationalists."

"Oh, I don't know, Bones. We've had some amazing conversations."

The corner of his mouth twitched. "My point is, she's making progress, coming out of her shell. I got her a padd this morning, and she's happier than a pig in slop. I'm liable to go back down to sickbay and find her eyeballs fused to the screen." He sounded perversely approving, almost hopeful. Then he grew serious again. "She's adjusting, Jim. If we move her now, she might retreat right back into shell and not come out."

"They have trained psychologists on hand."

"They don't have the time I do. They take her, and she'll get one hour twice a week sandwiched in between rehab sessions with ten different PTs."

"And?" he said, nonplussed.

"And I don't want to put her through that if I don't have to," he snapped, and the vehemence of it startled him. "She needs time and patience, and I can do that for her. I might not be able to get her out of that damn chair, but I can ease her pain, make her comfortable, leave her a little better off than when I found her. She deserves to have at least one doctor do that for her."

"Why are you so invested in this?"

Bones didn't answer right away. He simply sat, legs stretched in front of him and fingers interlaced across his chest. "She doesn't talk much, but when she does..." He trailed off and studied the toes of his black work boots. "She's told me a little bit about the way medicine used to be, what they used to do to her before the world got some damn sense. I try not to think on it too much because it makes me sick. There's no excuse for some of the things they did," he said, and though his voice was quiet, Kirk could hear the anger in it, dark and seething and bitter as blood.

"When I was a kid, my dad used to go out to the other farms to treat animals that had gotten down," he murmured suddenly, and slowly rotated his feet at the ankles.

He said nothing, confused by the abrupt non sequitur. He simply rested the point of his chin on the backs of his fingers and listened.

"Most times, he could do for them. A little salve, a good sheep-dip, maybe a simple wash and a walk around the paddock. But sometimes he couldn't. Sometimes it only took one look to know there was nothing to be done, you know?"

He didn't, but he nodded all the same, fascinated by this rare glimpse into his friend's head.

"And when that happened, well..." He shrugged, but did not elaborate. Instead, he said, "You'd be surprised to see how stupid people can be, how cat-shit mean. Most of them were just dumb as hell as opposed to malicious, but if you handle a thing too rough, it'll break no matter what your intentions." Bones looked at him then, his eyes dark with truths and memories only he could see. "That woman's been handled far too rough, Jim, and it's left a mess. I don't know if these hands have the skill to clean it up, but I do know they won't hurt her, won't leave more bruises than she's already got."

And there it was, the heart he tried so hard to hide behind layers of irascible sarcasm and cantankerous reserve. It was the same heart with which he'd been presented on the transport shuttle along with a grumbled surname and a hip flask of bourbon. The same one he'd seen when Bones had come back for him at the dry-dock and dragged him onto the Enterprise against his better judgment, blustering his way past a timid security officer and sneaking him into sickbay at the risk of his fledgling Starfleet career, the only career left to his divorce-ravaged bones. The same one he'd worn on his sleeve when he'd sat on his cot in his filthy scrubs and wept for a thirteen-year-old girl he couldn't save.

You've found yourself another stray, haven't you, Bones? he thought fondly, and his fingers burned with the memory of a hip flask pressed into his palm.

"I'll do what I can, but I don't have much sway with Starfleet Medical. If this comes down to a pissing contest, I'm not sure what good I'll do."

"You might not have the biggest pecker in the pissing match, but by God, you've got the widest spray," Bones muttered drily.

"Thank you, I think."

"Welcome. Don't get too used to it. Your head's swollen enough as it is."

"Bones, you wound me. I am but a humble young captain."

Bones rolled his eyes. "Humble, my ass," he said, but his eyes twinkled with amusement.

Kirk rose from his chair and rounded his desk to sling an arm around his shoulders. "Ah, c'mon, Bones, you know you love me."

Bones huffed in exasperation and muttered under his breath about insufferable egomaniacs, but he didn't deny it, nor did he resist when he steered him towards the door.

"Where are we going?" he demanded and lunged at the table as they passed to snag his medkit.

"To the bridge, of course. I am the captain, after all."

Bones snorted. "Really? I hadn't noticed." But there was a spring in his step as they left the ready room, and by the time they stepped into the turbolift, he was humming.

Kirk shook his head, but he listened to the tuneless warble with clandestine pleasure as the turbolift ascended to the bridge. I might be a failure and a fuckup and a corn-fed fool, he thought as Bones bounced and rocked on the balls of his feet. But at least I was smart enough to accept that flask.

Bones paused in his absent crooning. "What?" he demanded irritably.

James Kirk could only smile.