Something was off. Not wrong, precisely; Dr. McCoy still came into sickbay promptly at eight o'clock every morning and left sometime after eight at night, when wiry, genteel Dr. Pennicott came in with his soft London accent and tweedy conviviality. The breakfast glop came every morning at seven, delivered by Nurse Ogawa with a smile and a faint whiff of talcum powder. Frick and Frack, better known as Yeomans Connor and Stuart, put in their appearance at nine, and from nine until ten-thirty, she floundered and flopped on a vinyl therapy mat while sweat beaded in her armpits and in the crack of her ass and she prayed that the Tijuana brass section that occasionally took up residence in her gut wouldn't put in an untimely appearance the next time they rolled her legs above her head.
Everything was as it should be, and yet, it wasn't. There was a tension in the air that hadn't been there before. Dr. McCoy, who had heretofore been possessed of a crotchety, gruff affability, was now taciturn and morose, even downright waspish. He scarcely spoke to her these days, and though his daily tests of her range of motion were still thorough and gentle, he no longer engaged in idle conversation, no longer prodded at the ragged edges of her mind with curious fingers. He no longer looked at her with those penetrating brown eyes or offered her a fleeting curl of lip before he sprang to his feet, clapped her on the shoulder, and returned to his desk to bury his nose in his padd or arrange the contents of his myriad tube racks. Nor did he grunt at her not to burn her damn eyes out on the padd screen even as his stylus scrolled to the next page on his own. Now he just tugged on her limbs, gaze fixed on her wrists and ankles, and trudged back to his desk to record the results. No pat on the back or words of encouragement. Just the shuffle of feet and the squeal of his stool wheels, and he left her to the one-sided company of her padd.
I'm just another monkey in a cage, she thought sadly as he stalked past her bed without so much as a glance and sat down at his desk.
"Good morning, Dr. McCoy," she said hopefully.
His only response was an incomprehensible grunt. His head was already bent to his padd.
Are you mad at me? she wanted to ask, but she was too old to be asking such childish questions, and so she ignored the sting of his indifference and fussed with her covers, smoothed a wrinkle in the cotton and pinched it into a lopsided ridge again.
Not to mention too needy, her brother said. But then, you always have been. You've always had to be the center of attention, always assumed everything was about you. You were always clinging and crying and showing off. Mama and Daddy couldn't go five minutes without you needing something or wanting something, couldn't have ten minutes to themselves because you might need them. And God forbid someone else needed them. Then the whole damn world liked to come to an end because it didn't revolve around precious little Rosalie.
Two hundred years, and you haven't changed a bit, he said bitterly. It's still all about you. For Christ's sake, he's a doctor on a goddamn spaceship. He was a doctor before the universe dumped you into his lap, and he'll be one long after she's shut of you. And in case you haven't noticed, he hasn't exactly been hovering at your bedside with a cloth to soothe your aching brow. Half the time, he isn't even here. He comes in in the morning, stays until after your session, and takes off for parts unknown until dinner. A few more hours of puttering in his workstation back there and sucking coffee, and then he's off until morning. Just because he's the center of your suffocating little world, that doesn't make you more than a fart in a high wind in his.
Who knows where he goes when he's not ankle-deep in your bullshit? Maybe he's doing rounds in ancillary clinics on other decks, or maybe he just goes home for a nap and a handjob from some perky little nurse. God knows there's enough of them giving him the doe eyes. The only one who doesn't is Ogawa. Hell, maybe he's got a wife and kids or a girlfriend, someone to keep his bed warm and his balls high and tight. Maybe he's catching hell at home or his wife cut him off until he calls the mother-in-law. Maybe one of his rugrats is squirting shit from both ends.
She considered that as she picked up her glass of morning orange juice and took a sip. He'd never mentioned a wife or children, but then, why would he? It wasn't her business, and anyway, doctors weren't in the habit of discussing their private lives with their patients. Patients were problems to be solved, and they were treated as such and left behind at the end of the day along with the discarded booties and latex gloves and dirty scrubs mounded in the biohazard bins. They most certainly weren't confessors to be taken into confidence.
I don't see a wedding ring, she noted as her gaze dropped to his hands. His long fingers were bare as they curled around the edges of his padd, and she saw no tan line on the third finger of his left hand.
Maybe they do things differently nowadays, her grandmother mused. Traditions have a habit of changing. Maybe they wear necklaces instead or get tattoos. Could be they don't do anything at all anymore. Getting married was dying out by the time you were coming up. Lord knows what's happened to it now. Maybe the idea of taking vows before God died with the first mushroom cloud. I reckon putting trust in the Almighty doesn't hold much appeal once you've seen your neighbor's skin boil off from radiation sickness. Maybe folks just join bodies and call it good. Babies come with or without the paperwork.
Even if he isn't married, odds are good he's got someone waiting at home, her brother opined. Guys like that don't go too long without getting their dipstick wet.
An image arose her mind of Dr. McCoy undulating beneath the bedsheets, thin cotton covers pooled at the base of his spine as his ass rose and fell in a sinuous, copulatory rhythm. Elbows propped on the mattress and head bent to the flesh of an unseen throat as the bedsprings creaked in strident accompaniment to his hips and the headboard knocked against the wall.
Dear God, what is wrong with me? she thought, mortified, and tried to quell her burning shame with a gulp of orange juice.
Unfortunately for her, her throat seized, and she coughed and wheezed and spluttered a spray of orange juice down the front of her scrubs.
Dr. McCoy looked up from his padd, brows drawn together in a thunderous scowl and lips pursed in preparation to deliver a stinging rebuke, but then he dropped his padd with a clatter and shot to his feet. "Breathe," he ordered as she coughed and heaved. The glass of juice listed dangerously in her grip, and he snatched it from her and set in on the tray table. "Breathe, I said." His hand braced her spasming back as he reached for his trusty bioscanner.
"Sorry," she croaked as the orange juice burned in her nostrils and dribbled down her chin.
"What the hell happened?" he demanded.
Oh, nothing. I was just imagining you in bed, she thought wildly, but discretion told her such honesty would hardly lead to the reestablishment of cordial relations, and so she settled for the more diplomatic truth of, "It went down the wrong pipe, that's all," and dissolved into another coughing fit.
"Those sheets were fresh," he grumbled, hand firm and steadying on her hunched back. "Do you need a sick bowl?"
She shook her head.
"Nurse Ogawa," he barked. "Bring a fresh scrub top for Miss Walker."
"Yes, Doctor," came the faint reply from the interior of the linen closet.
He scowled down at her while he waited for Nurse Ogawa to arrive, and she wanted to curl in on herself and hide. There was no good humor in his face, no lively curiosity in his eyes or gentleness in his touch. There was only The Doctor, stern and impatient and faintly disapproving as he took in her wet, juice-sticky smock and the juice in the ends of her hair.
I didn't do it on purpose! she wanted to shout. Jesus Christ, what crawled up your ass and died?
Probably the same thing that crawled into your panties, Daniel jeered. Well, you ain't got nothing to worry about there, little sister. That man isn't going to waste one look on you, let alone a second. You don't drink swill when you have your pick of chardonnay. The only thing you were ever good for was easy pickings for drunk frat boys who wanted to know if your pussy was as tight as the rest of you, and not a one of them called you the morning after.
Daniel! her grandmother exclaimed, scandalized. That is enough!
It might've been enough, but it was also true. She'd never had a serious relationship, had never gone courting, as the old folks put it. While her cousins had giggled over makeup parties in their bedrooms and gone on first dates to the movies, she'd stayed home and read her mother's stash of bodice rippers and wondered what it would be like to see a man "inflamed with insatiable passion" or dance in the moonlight with a diadem in her hair. While they were courting in the mall and learning about love in the backseat of their parents' SUVs, she'd sat on the porch of her Grandmama's house and listened to her reminisce about the good old days, when she and Granddaddy had been young and they'd found love by the porch light and gone dancing on the promenade to Abba and John Fogelberg and Leo Sayer, and on prom night, when all her cousins had gone to the dance, long and lovely and escorted by dapper young princes, she'd gone to the country club with grandmama and eaten shrimp and grits and tried not to wish she was somewhere else, with a corsage on her wrist and a young man's cologne on her skin.
Don't you worry about it darlin' Grandmama had said, and patted her hand, because Grandmama knew everything. You're as pretty as a picture, and your day will come. You'll have a grand romance one day, you'll see. She'd patted her bony hand and smiled her most reassuring smile, and then Rosalie had dropped a spoonful of grits onto the white linen table cloth with a jerk of her palsied, stupid hand and tried not to cry as she stared at the mess and the white-jacketed waiter pretended not see it.
The grand romance her fairy grandmother promised had never materialized. She'd lost her virginity to a frat boy with beer and Jaeger on his breath on a bed that smelled of dust and unwashed gym socks. The only parts of her he'd touched had been her breasts and her too-dry cunt, and there had been no tenderness in it, no storybook passion. He'd fucked like he partied, hard and indiscriminately, and it had hurt when he'd pushed into her, a garden hoe plunged into arid soil. She'd cried while he'd worked, back of her hand crammed into her mouth to stifle the sounds, and prayed it would be over quickly. She couldn't remember his name now, and his face was an indistinct blur on the periphery of her vision, but she could remember the yeasty, sour reek of his breath against her cheek with perfect clarity, and the poster hung above his bed. Kurt Cobain, as she recalled, gazing down at her bobbing breasts with his mournful blue eyes as her paramour pounded into her, oblivious to her marked lack of enthusiasm and the convulsive juddering of her legs as her innocence was pulled up by the bloody roots.
That was fuckin', was all her wasted Romeo had slurred when it was over, and then he'd rolled over and staggered over the carpet of dirty clothes that littered the floor and left her in the cooling mess to go to the bathroom. He'd never come back, and she'd limped home with her business full of blood. The PA had nearly shit a brick when she'd rolled in with her legs splayed awkwardly in the wheelchair and her thighs smeared with blood, but she'd cleaned her up without complaint and settled her into bed, and from then until she left to get married a year later, she'd called her Carrie White.
It hadn't gotten much better after that. There had been a few good decent men, a handful who could at least remember her name for the night, and who had bothered to make sure she was ready before they went merrily to town between her spraddled legs. One had even been so chivalrous as to help her back into her chair afterward, seizing her by her spindly elbows and powerlifting her into her seat like a concrete pylon, but most had seen her only as an available hole and a story to tell on the golf course or the barstool in some rosy, distant future of law firms and tasteful wives installed in opulent two-stories with lush, green lawns. There had been no wine and roses, no midnight strolls under the stars, and there were certainly no rings or bittersweet memories of the one who got away.
Yeah, well, there isn't going to be any of that here, either. Even if McCoy didn't give a rat's ass about my bony knees and floppy legs with all the tone of a noodle and the curvaceousness of a ruler, he wouldn't be interested. Doctors don't shit where they eat. They don't fuck what they fix, either. So I can wish all I want, but it's just going to be another childish daydream.
She tried to ignore the heat of his palm as it splayed between her shoulder blades and swallowed the renewed impulse to ask him if he were mad at her, a child begging pardon for some unknown sin. Her legs twitched with the need to draw up to her chest, and she was miserably relieved when Nurse Ogawa appeared with a scrub top and a fresh set of sheets.
"All right, Miss Walker," she said with brisk cheer. "Let's get you squared away here." She held out her hands, and Rosalie curled her fingers around her slender forearms and scissored her legs until one foot fell off the bed. She huffed and sat up, and then dragged her other foot off the bed. "Well, it wasn't pretty, but it was effective. Good job," she said, and though Rosalie knew it was well meant, the effusiveness grated.
"Thank you, ma'am," she said, and brushed her hair out of her face. She waited for Dr. McCoy's more forthright assessment of her dry-land frog paddle, but none came. He was already back at his desk, nose buried in his padd. She surveyed him in bewildered consternation, and the nettling sting of rejection deepened.
She clutched the edge of the bed while Nurse Ogawa arranged her chair in preparation for her imminent transfer, and when she turned and held out her arms, she gripped her wrists and slid off. The nurse was smaller than Dr. McCoy, and far less solid, and they swayed precariously for a moment until she found her center of gravity. Then it was an awkward, shuffling box-step to the chair.
"Stop dragging your feet, Miss Walker," he grunted from his desk. "You know better."
That doesn't mean I can do better right now, she thought peevishly, but she bit her lip and doggedly lifted her feet a fraction higher.
"Good job," Ogawa encouraged mechanically. From McCoy, there was only bilious silence.
To hell with you, then, she seethed, and collapsed into her chair, and screw what he thought of her form.
She followed Ogawa into the bathroom, legs throbbing with exertion. It was small, polished steel and antiseptic, and even her sleek, new chair crowded the toilet when she pulled inside. Ogawa stood on tiptoe beside the sink, shanks wedged against the smooth, round basin to let her pass. Rosalie pulled as close to the opposite wall as she could and set her brakes, and then she raised her arms above her head without being prompted.
Ogawa pulled off the soiled top and hung it over the handrail beside the toilet, and then she handed her a damp rag. "To clean yourself up there," she explained, and gestured at her neck and chest.
"Thank you," she said tonelessly, and took the proffered cloth. She blotted at her neck and chin to rid it of the orange juice's sweet stickiness, and then she went to work on her chest and the underwire of her bra. "Don't think this is going to get it out of my hair," she said, and scrubbed at the fabric beneath her breasts.
Ogawa plucked the cloth from her and began to pat it in the ends of her hair. "Probably not," she conceded. "But that's what showers are for. I'm sure it'll all come out after your session."
I'm thirty, not three, and I'm not soft in the head. But she was too tired to squabble with the vanguard of the Florence Nightingale Auxiliary in a claustrophobic bathroom with orange juice drying on her tits, and so she bit her tongue against a sharp retort and simply said, "Yes, ma'am." Her grandmother always said politeness was a lady's most reliable defense.
She handed Ogawa the rag in exchange for the fresh scrub top and slipped it over her head.
"There now," Ogawa said with that infuriating brightness. "That's much better."
"It certainly is," she agreed, and grit her teeth against the urge to add, "You ridiculous fool." Instead, she willed her slumping shoulders back and released her brakes. "Well, best get to it, shouldn't I? Soonest begun, soonest done."
"That's the spirit," Ogawa answered, a cheerleader in full throat, and Rosalie was tempted to suggest she replicate herself a pair of pom poms. But she wasn't so far gone in her pique at the doctor's inexplicable pissiness to descend into rudeness, and so she offered a brief smile and backed out the door.
"Thank you," she said when she'd cleared the door. To Dr. McCoy, she said, "You have a good day now, Doctor."
There was no response from either of them. Nurse Ogawa simply offered a faint twitch of lip and swept around her and down the corridor between the beds, and the doctor simply scrolled to the next page on his padd. The former's indifference bothered her not at all. To her, she was just another body to be moved and an ass to be washed, just another shift's dirty, unglamorous work. But the latter's continued lack of give a damn infuriated her. More than that, it hurt. Until this sudden, mystifying silence, she'd thought him different from the myriad doctors who'd come before and seen her as nothing but a complaint to be silenced and an account to be charged. She'd believed him when he'd said he cared.
Especially after the wheelchair, Grandmother Lavinia said. You couldn't believe it when he came wheeling that honey down the way. The sickbay model with which you'd been making do was nice enough, but that one...well, it was beautiful. There was no other word for it. It was compact and sleek and clean, and you knew even before you got into it that it would be perfectly balanced and light as a feather. It wasn't some half-assed catalogue job with a handful of "custom" parts hastily tacked on; it wasn't an amalgamation of that'll do and good enough. It was yours from caster to push handle, built from the ground up with you in mind.
One look, and you knew there was only one mind that could've come up with it, could've known your frailties so intimately. It hadn't come from some self-styled accessibility consultant or some bureaucratic bean counter at the insurance company who decided your fate not based on your needs but on the depth of your daddy's pockets. Nor had it come from some one-size-fits-all warehouse where they churned out glorified wheelbarrows and charged you an arm and a leg and most of your dignity to look like a Panzer on a budget, clunky and boxy and feminine as a footlocker. It had come from the doctor. He might not have assembled it with his allen wrenches and his screwdriver, but he'd made it all the same. He had held your lopsided, bony body in his hands and learned its imperfections and recorded them on his padd, and then he had taken that knowledge so meticulously gathered and turned it into that chair.
It hurt your chest to look at it because you could see everything that had gone into it-the thought, the attention to even the smallest detail, the care. The simple human by-God decency of it. Lord knows how long it must've taken him to get it right, how many hours he must've spent going over the measurements and calculations and combing through journals and catalogues to find just the right part for what you needed. Hours? Days? Maybe even weeks. He told you when you first met that he did nothing half-assed, and damned if that chair didn't prove his point.
It felt even better than it looked. It cradled your behind and supported your back, and for the first time in your life, you felt straight, as though everything were where it ought to be. No slumped shoulders or buckled hips or knees knocking and rubbing together. No backache as you struggled to keep from listing to the left. No sore neck from trying to push a chair too heavy for your atrophied muscles. It was just...right. Just so.
And Lord how it handled. Like riding on the wind. Going up and down that aisle with nary a hitch, you could almost believe there was a place for you in the world. It was so free and easy, and you wondered if that was how other people felt when they passed you on their two good legs and smiled just because, if they felt like flying without wings, arms outstretched and heart following their dreams somewhere beyond the clouds. You spun, too, spun and slalomed, and as the chair obeyed your slightest touch with fluid grace, quicksilver cupped in the palm of your hand, you thought that this must be what dancing felt like, and in your mind's eye, you saw yourself spinning across the polished parquet of a ballroom bathed in the glow of crystal chandeliers, a debutante come to the ball at last. You've been given a lot of things in your life-toys, books, trips to Europe and Lake Tahoe with your family-but that chair was your first true gift, rare as a Faberge Egg and just as priceless.
You couldn't tell the doctor that, not without sounding like a fool and crying all over yourself like a hormonal schoolgirl, so you tucked it close to your swollen heart like a cherished keepsake and settled for a handshake and a hoarse "Thank you," and then you spun away before you started bawling and ran as far as your wheels could roll, ran until the grey sickbay walls became a magnolia-lined drive that wound on forever, over red clay and sweet hay and bluegrass lush as Eden. You rolled until the muscles in your arms burned, and only the threat of being too sore to move in the morning made you stop.
And the doctor? He was pleased as punch, or you thought he was as he watched you wear a fresh set of grooves into his floor. He followed you for the first few laps up and down the aisle, arms folded across his chest and steps unhurried as you darted ahead of him like a hummingbird rushing headlong toward the sun. He was pretty as a peacock in his blue tunic, and by the gleam in his eye as he watched you reap the fruits of his painstaking labor, his feathers were in full, preening flourish. Which is why his sudden studied indifference hurts so much. You can't shake the feeling you've disappointed him, insulted his kindness and a gift so generously given.
She has that effect on people. Daniel said gleefully. She disappointed Mama and Daddy so badly that they had her put in storage. Hell, for all the good it did, they could've put her in regular storage next to the old box springs and the old canning equipment. She could've gathered dust all the same, and think of the money they would've saved.
Daniel Walker, that is enough, Grandmama Lavinia cried, her defender to the last, and Rosalie would have given every minute of her resurrected life just to bury her face in the crook of her neck and smell her perfume.
"Screw you," she croaked around the hard, hot knot of grief in the center of her chest.
McCoy's head snapped up. "What?"
I wasn't talking to you, she thought. "I'm sorry," she said. "I haven't got the foggiest idea what I did to put starch in your britches, but I never meant you any insult, Doctor. If it was my waterworks over the chair, it won't happen again. If I'm not working hard enough, then I'll work harder."
He stared at her in mute stupefaction, stylus hovering dumbly over his padd. "What on earth-" he began, but before he could finish, Yeomen Connor and Stuart arrived in their green scrubs and crepe-soled shoes.
"Morning, Doctor," they said, oblivious to his thunderstruck expression. "Morning, Rosalie. You ready to get started?"
No. She waited, sure that the doctor was going to speak, but he merely dropped his gaze to his padd again.
She cursed the Brothers Imbecile for their timing, spun on her proverbial heel, and marched into the therapy room.
"I have a feeling we're in for a good session today," Stuart predicted, and bounced on his toes. "All right, let's get you on the mat."
Down she went, from a princess on her crystal throne to a beggar grubbing in the dirt, fingers clawed and sticky on the vinyl mat and lips kissing the memory of other people's asses and feet. She was acutely aware of the orange juice in her hair, the sweet, sickly-sour tang of old vomit.
Stop touching me, she wanted to shout, but the PTs were already lost to their routine, stretching and arranging her to their liking. She was nothing to them now, a doll in the hands of obstreperous children. Her muscles locked, legs rigid and arms pulling toward her chest, hands curled into bloodless, cadaverous fists. Stop, stop, stop. But they did not stop, driven by the goal set before them by Dr. McCoy's carefully-laid treatment plan. They merely redoubled their efforts, massaging and exhorting and admonishing her to relax.
"Stop," she whispered, but they did not hear. They simply plucked at her limbs with greater determination.
"Rosalie, c'mon, you gotta do your part if you wanna get better," Connor urged.
It's CP, not a slipped disk, you simpleton, she thought viciously as the young woman pulled her arm away from her chest. I'm never going to get better. All I can do is not get any worse.
"Stop," she repeated.
"No can do, Rosalie," Stuart said with condescending, effervescent familiarity, a personal trainer goading their intransigent client to the next exercise. "Let's work." He gripped her thigh and made to slide her leg over.
That was fuckin', slurred her first frat-house Romeo, and Kurt Cobain gazed down at her from above a rattling headboard.
She disappointed Mama and Daddy so much that they had her canned. Should've just put her in regular storage beside the old box springs and Mama's old canning equipment. She would've gathered dust all the same, and think of the money they would've saved.
"Stop!" she howled, and jerked her leg from Stuart's presumptuous grasp. "Stop touching me, dammit!"
The doors to the therapy room opened to reveal Dr. McCoy. "What the hell is going on in here?" he demanded, and fixed them all with a baleful glower.
"Dr. McCoy," Stuart began, but Rosalie cut him off.
"I can't," she said thickly. "I know you're already mad at me, but I can't do this right now."
He surveyed her in stony silence. "Out," he snapped, and she thought he meant her, but Stuart and Connor scrambled to their feet. They sidled from foot to foot in awkward indecision, and Stuart opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it upon careful consideration of the doctor's expression.
"Yes, sir," he said meekly, and fled, a bewildered Connor in tow.
McCoy strode toward her as she lay on the mat, eyes blazing inside his face. "Now, Miss Walker, you tell me why you're kicking up such a fuss in my therapy room." He bent and reached for her shoulder.
She flinched, heart pounding and adrenaline sour in her mouth.
He froze, hand hovering over her hunched shoulder. "Hey." Soft and low, and he dropped into a crouch beside her head. "Easy. I'm not going to-" He dropped his hand between his knees.
"I know,"she answered quietly, but her legs tried to curl into her belly, and she couldn't stay the helpless tremors that shook her from head to toe.
"Then why are you shaking?" A shadow above her head as he waved the bioscanner over her.
"Adrenaline."
"I can see that, but why?"
She shrugged. "Sometimes when people are angry with me, they're rougher than they mean to be."
"What in the hell makes you think I'm mad at you?" he demanded indignantly. That earned him a huff of wry amusement, and he hung his head and ran his fingers through his hair. "Well, I'm not mad at you," he said gruffly. "I'm just worried. The way you were carrying on, I thought you were being assaulted."
"That explains this morning. What about the last three days?" A hand snaked out to trace idle lines on the toe of his boot.
"The last three-?" He sighed. "Ah, hell." He reached between his knees and picked up her scrawling hand. "I'm not mad at you, Miss Walker." He gently rotated her wrist. "Squeeze my hand. I got a call from Starfleet Medical," he said quietly. "They want to see you on our next trip to Starbase 4517 next week."
"Is that bad?" Unease drew a cool finger down her spine, and her body, which had begun to relax, tensed again.
"They just want to get a look at you. Dr. Boswell is an expert in the field of orthopedics and bioprosthetic medicine. She might be able to offer insights and treatment options I didn't think of." He lowered her hand.
That doesn't answer my question. "Then why do you look like somebody up and died?"
He shifted, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. "They might want to keep you on."
Keep her on. Like she was the hired help, scuttling through the back corridors and lugging slop buckets. "What if I don't want to stay on?" she replied hotly."We had an agreement."
He shifted again, rocked back on his heels. "Ordinarily, that would be enough, but since you're not a member of a recognized alien species or a Federation citizen, they can refuse to recognize it."
"A recognized alien species?" she repeated scornfully. "I'm a god-I'm a human being for God's sake!" She slapped the mat in impotent frustration. "Jesus fucking Christ, I'm so damn tired of having to prove it."
His hand hovered over her shoulder again. "I know. It's a mess of bureaucratic bullshit and semantics."
The hell you know, she snarled inside her head. "Those semantics have teeth."
"I know." He sidled down her body until he reached her socked feet, and then he picked one up and began to chafe it between his cradling hands.
"Can you refuse?"
"To hand you over?" The ball of his thumb kneaded the scrawny, archless sole of her foot just behind the big toe. "I could bluster a bit, but it wouldn't do much good. My career's not but two years old, and Boswell outranks me as both a doctor and a member of Starfleet. It wouldn't take her long to go over my head. A day, maybe two." Warm palms pressed gently against the sides of her feet, and the pads of his fingers massaged her from heel to toe.
"So since Starfleet considers me a piece of space junk, they can do whatever they want with me?" she said bitterly.
"I'm sorry," he answered, and his fingertips rose to skim her bony ankle.
Fat lot of good that does me, she thought petulantly, and closed her eyes against the scald of tears.
Don't be hard with him, Rosalie, darlin', her grandmother counseled. It's a bitter pill, but it's not his doing, and I don't know too many doctors who'd be down here on their knees, giving you a foot massage after you spilled orange juice on their bed and caterwauled at their PTs. He's doing the best he knows how, same as you, and it's not fair to expect a doctor who's known you for a week to risk his professional neck. It'd be nice, but it's not the way this old world works, not even in the twenty-third century.
If nothing else, try to remember all the kindnesses he did for you, how he stayed with you all that first night and made sure you had a clean sick bowl. How he gave you fair warning before he started pushing and pulling on you, and how he gave you a choice for the first time in your life. How he fed you grits and blackberry cobbler, and if you ever start to forget those things or start to think they don't matter, then I want you to remember the chair your little behind is riding on and give that man the respect he deserves.
She raised her head from the mat and peered at him as he knelt over her toes like an attentive vassal. His hands were thorough and unhurried as they worked her sensitive, easily-bruised flesh. He was so very careful, gaze intent as he studied the effects of his work on her spindly limbs.
He calls himself a doctor, but he's not, she thought as he rubbed her fleshless calves. He's a healer. Doctors hand off all the dirty work to someone else and take all the credit when it works and chalk it up to an act of God when it doesn't. He's knee-deep in the stink and the shit, and I think he'd drown himself in it if it meant he could keep me out of it.
And they're going to take you out of his hands, said a dismal voice inside her head, and she let her head drop to the mat and loosed a strangled bleat.
"Oh, now there's no need for that," he said, and it was so pained and plaintive that she snorted in spite of her misery. Her foot was lowered to the mat, and she heard the asthmatic, sticky wheeze of knees over vinyl. A moment later, he appeared in her blurry vision.
"Yes, there is. I don't want to go."
He gripped her shoulders and eased her to a sitting position. "It's a starbase, not Siberia." He slipped an arm around her to hold her up. "For what little it's worth, I'm not keen on the idea, either."
It's worth more than a little, she thought, and rested her head on his shoulder.
His boots squeaked on the vinyl. "Now, come on. I'm not going make you work with the PTs today, but you are going to work." He slipped his free hand beneath her knees, and when she wrapped her arms around his neck, he rose and carried her to her chair. "How about something without hands?" He set her down with persnickety care and waited until she was properly seated, and then he turned and snatched a handcycle from the nearby equipment table. "Come on," he ordered, and jerked his head in the direction of the main room.
She followed him through the doors and was relieved to see no sign of Connor or Stuart. Now that the moment had passed, she was ashamed of her outburst. Still, apologies were in order the next time she saw them.
If you see them again, her brother reminded her.
Dr. McCoy set the handcycle on the floor in front of his desk. "Put your feet on the pedals."
She rolled up behind it, set her brakes, released her footplates, and jabbed her toes at the waiting pedals. The right foot settled into place easily, but the left wavered and floundered drunkenly until the doctor guided it home.
"I want you to pedal. It'd be nice if you could get them all the way around, but I'll settle for an honest effort. Your flexibility's improved, but your stamina and muscle strength are still poor," he said prosaically.
"Go on and say it, Doctor. They're string beans with feet."
An abbreviated grunt. "Well, get those string beans cooking," he commanded. "We'll try for one minute."
"Before we start, I'm sorry you had to hear my foul mouth."
"Cussing is like gas, Miss Walker. Everyone's got to let it out sometimes."
She sputtered in watery amusement. "Bless you, Doctor."
"Now pedal."
She hesitated. "Whatever happens, Dr. McCoy, I want to thank you. I've never been treated so kindly or with so much patience. Thank you for taking the time. And for the chair. I've never had one finer."
"Welcome," he replied diffidently, and crossed his arms. "And it's just a wheelchair."
"And I told you, no, it isn't," she answered, and with that, she began to pedal, head bowed and shoulders bent to the harness.
Not ten hours later, he was running down the corridor between his quarters and sickbay in his sweatpants and undershirt, socked feet slapping the floor. He'd been roused from his woefully inadequate sleep by the com and the panicky voice of the night nurse on the other end, and he blinked grit and the sudden brightness of the deck from his eyes. As he neared the door, there came a shrill wail and the resounding, musical crash of tumbling bedpans.
"Ah, hell," he swore, and swung into sickbay.
He was greeted by the sight of Dr. Pennicott advancing on a hysterical Rosalie with a hypospray and a pinched, grim expression, a soldier wading into battle against a fearsome dragon. And Rosalie was fearsome as she thrashed in the grip of four orderlies with a strength that surprised him. She was crying as she bowed off the bed and kicked wildly at Dr. Pennicott's stomach. Her face was flushed and wet with tears, and her upper lip was thick with snot. An orderly tried to force her arm to the bed, and she screamed, pain and terror and blind panic.
"Everyone stop!" he bellowed.
All motion ceased. The orderlies clutched Rosalie's twitching limbs, and Dr. Pennicott froze, hypospray poised above her bunching thigh. He fixed him with a befuddled expression.
"Dr. MCCoy," she clearly needs to be sedated," he said incredulously, and gestured to Rosalie, who sobbed in her human bonds, chest heaving.
"Put that down," he barked, and stalked to the bed. "Now."
"But-" Dr. Pennicott protested doggedly.
McCoy rounded on him. "The last time anyone put her to sleep, she woke up and it was two hundred and forty years later," he hissed. "Now put it down."
Dr. Pennicott lowered the hypospray.
He elbowed past the orderly charged with restraining her arm. "What the hell happened?"
"We don't know." Dr. Pennicott. "One minute she was out like a light, the next she was screaming to wake the dead and crying."
She was still crying, hard, wrenching sobs pulled from the pit of her stomach, and she struggled feebly in the grasp of the orderlies.
"Let go, dammit," he snapped. The flesh beneath their hands was already reddening dangerously with the promise of bruises. Four sets of feet immediately took a step back, and he scowled at the livid finger marks on her skin. "Tomorrow morning, you will all report to sickbay for a refresher course on how to handle combative patients."
"Yes, sir," they chorused.
"Dismissed," he said curtly, and they beat a hasty retreat. Dr. Pennicott hovered uncertainly over his shoulder.
"Give me a minute? I know that this is your rodeo, but..."
"Nonsense, Doctor," he replied. "You are the CMO." He rose on his toes and then rocked back on his heels. "Should you need me, I'll be doing a scrub count."
"Thanks."
Dr. Pennicott hesitated for a moment, arms swinging idly in front of him, and then he nodded, clucked his tongue against his cheek, and drifted toward the surgical prep room. When he was gone, McCoy grabbed the privacy curtain between the biobeds and pulled it closed.
"Miss Walker, it's Dr. McCoy," he said, and reached for her shoulder. He was rewarded with a yelp, and she tried to tuck her arm beneath her body. "Damn." He grabbed his scanner and swept it over the limb.
Damn orderly sprained her arm. Probably when she was trying to twist away from him. He put down the bioscanner and picked up a hypo of local anesthetic. "I need you to hold still," he told her. "This will kill the pain until I can fix it." When she recoiled from the advancing hypospray, he gripped her uninjured shoulder to prevent her retreat. "Hold still, I said." He pressed the tip to her shoulder and injected the medication.
She was still crying, great, hitching sobs that frightened him with their intensity, but he saw the anesthetic take hold. Her body lost some of its cadaverous rigidity, and her arm went utterly slack, fingers splayed at the end of her hand like a dead albino spider. When he was sure it would cause no pain, he lifted her arm and probed the muscles and tendons. He felt a minor pull in her shoulder and a moderate tear in her elbow. Neither were serious, but they would've hurt like hell, especially with her spasticity increasing the pressure on the injuries.
"I'll have you fixed up in no time," he assured her, and grabbed a tissue regenerator. "You want to tell me what's going on?"
She looked at him with swollen eyes. "You should have left me in that cryotube," she answered, and the force of her sobs doubled.
He blinked, stunned. That was the last thing he expected to hear. "Stop talking nonsense," he snapped. What brought this on?
"It's not," she managed through her tears. "I'm just space junk." She loosed another wail and tried to curl in on herself. "You should've let me die. I would've been asleep. I never would have known." She heaved and rocked from side to side on the bed. "Now I'm going to know. Now I'm going to feel all of it." She keened, a wordless howl of misery and fear that made his stomach clench.
He willed himself to keep the tissue regenerator steady and his voice even. "That's enough, Miss Walker. You need to take a deep breath and get a grip. Your vitals are out of control. Now, you listen to me. Do you hear me? Nod if you do."
She nodded.
"Good. Deep breath in." She drew a shaky, rattling breath. "Hold it. Now let it out. Nice and slow." She exhaled in a protracted whoosh. "Again."
It took a good half-dozen repetitions before her heart rate and blood pressure dropped to acceptable levels and another three before they returned to normal. Two more, and the incessant sobs began to taper into glottal, exhausted whimpers.
"Good," he said softly, and finished treating her injuries with a final, precise stroke of the regenerator. "I'm going to leave your arm numb for a minute to let the treatment set. In the meantime, you're going to tell me what brought this on." He dropped the regenerator onto a tray and pulled a stool to her bedside.
"I had a nightmare. I was in the cryotube, and it was dark and cold. Something was wrong. I wasn't supposed to be awake, but I was. I could feel the tubes in my throat, and the suspension fluid. It was pouring into my mouth and nose, and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I was drowning, and I couldn't see, and I didn't want to die alone in some metal tube." She started to cry again, but without her earlier ferocity. It was quiet and strengthless, as though each breath required more strength than she had left.
"When I woke up, it was pitch dark," she continued.
He frowned. Sickbay was programmed to run ambient lights mounted above each biobed after the main lights were dimmed. It should have been dark, but not absolutely so. A patient could arrive at any time, and doctors and nurses needed to be able to assess injuries and read ampoule labels. "Are you sure?"
Another nod. Tears dripped across the bridge of her nose.
He turned on the stool and stuck his head around the curtain. "Yeoman," he called to an orderly turning pillows for want of anything better to do. "Did the lights go out in here earlier tonight?"
He nodded. "But only for a second."
"Why?"
"I don't know, sir."
"Well, find out. Go ask Mr. Scott, and if he doesn't know, then have him send a team to run a diagnostic on the electrical systems in here."
He straightened, eyes bright with sudden purpose. "Yes, sir." He returned the pillow to the bed and scurried off to fulfill his mission.
That doesn't explain all the carrying on about being space junk and wanting to die, his father noted, and he spun to face the bed again. "What was all that business about wanting to die?" he prodded.
She sniffled. "I don't want to die, but if I'm going to, I'd rather it be quick."
"What are you talking about? Aside from your CP, you're perfectly healthy."
"Now, yeah," she agreed. "But I won't be if Dr. Boswell gets a hold of me. I looked her up after our talk this morning."
Of course you did, he thought dourly. He was tempted to confiscate her padd, but it was her only connection to a world beyond the ship, so he let it be. "What about her?"
"She's an orthopedist, all right, but she's also a researcher and a bioethicist. If you leave me with her, I'm going to die like a lab rat in a cage, and God knows how long it'll take." The crying, which had subsided, returned with a sudden, furious vengeance, and the monitors above her head showed high, dangerous spikes in adrenaline and cortisol.
"Miss Walker, you are being ridiculous," he said flatly. "She might have the bedside manner of a dead carp, but she's a doctor, and a good one by her extensive resume. She's bound by the Hippocratic oath to do no harm."
"So were the ones who did this to me," she snarled, and gestured to the scars on her thighs and behind her knees. "So were the ones who made me stand in a wooden box for hours until I hit muscle exhaustion. So were the ones who stuffed me into that tube and forgot me for two hundred and forty years." She looked at him, beseeching and furious, and then she simply dissolved, mouth open in a soundless cry of anguish.
He thought of the boy in that godawful box, weeping and pleading for release while nurses offered bloodless platitudes and empty encouragement and his forebearers circled him like carrion crows and documented his torment with video cameras and notes scrawled in their indecipherable hand. He thought of her nightmare, of drowning in the dark in the vast nothingness of space with none to witness her passing but the cold, inscrutable faces of the stars. He thought of waking up in the dark to the stink of antiseptic and a squad of orderlies eager to pin you down for the brief, sucking kiss of a hypospray wielded by a doctor you knew only as the one on the night shift.
Oh, sweetheart. It's going to be all right, I promise you.
The doctor in him knew he couldn't touch her, couldn't wrap her in a blanket and an embrace and rock her until the hysteria loosed its hold, but the man in him simply couldn't sit there and watch her thrash in the clutches of a thousand old terrors, and so he scooted his stool closer to the bed and rested a hand on her knee. "You're on the Enterprise, he reminded her. "As long as you're under my watch, nobody's going to hurt you, you hear?"
"That's the point," she cried. "I'm not going to be under your watch. I'm going to be under hers, and God knows what happens to you when no one else can see. God, some of the things she writes..." She tried to enfold herself in a protective embrace, but her numbed arm refused to cooperate, so she clutched her belly with her good arm and wept.
"What things?" he asked blankly.
She flapped her hand at her padd, which lay on the tray table at the foot of her bed, and he maneuvered himself within reach with a deft shuffle of his feet and picked it up. He tapped the screen to wake it from sleep and quickly accessed her viewing history. Articles on Atlanta, starting from 2020 and moving steadily forward. Genealogical research on Walkers and Peabodys.
She's looking for her family, he thought, and his chest tightened in sympathy.
So much research in so few days, all annotated and highlighted. It was amazing, really, and he would have researched it further and talked to her about it if he weren't so focused on getting to the bottom of her sudden fear of Dr. Boswell and its attendant fatalistic certainty of a terrible, lingering death in the bowels of some sadistic medical laboratory. He filed it away for future reference and created a search filter for Dr. Moira Boswell.
And was promptly greeted by one hundred pages of results.
Good God, she must have been at this all day, probably from the minute I headed to the bridge this morning.
Well, what else does she have to do all day besides watch the walls close in and the orderlies fiddle with the pillows?
He searched within the results for "bioethics" and medical history. That turned up a more manageable twenty-five results. He settled on the stool and selected the first one, and within ten lines, he understood her previously-inexplicable terror of a woman she knew only by name. The spittle soured in his mouth and evaporated altogether, and he wished the stool had a back to hold him up, and for a shot of bourbon to ease his flaring conscience. He lowered the padd and looked at Rosalie, who watched him in miserable silence.
See? her expression said, and he did. He saw so very clearly.
"I want to go home," she told him. I want my memaw." And then she simply broke, crying so hard she couldn't breathe. The wails rose and fell like warbling klaxons and drew Pennicott from the prep room hypospray in hand.
"No," he said. "She doesn't need another damn needle."
What she needs is to be held by someone who loves her, surrounded by familiar smells and familiar skins and the comforting sounds of home, he thought bleakly as the full weight of her loss had its ugly, cruel way with her.
You should've let me die, she reproached him inside his head, and he wondered if she wasn't right, if it wouldn't have been kinder to let her sleep until the aging cryotube failed and scattered the dust of her bones across the galaxy.
No. It's thinking like that that got your father killed. You gave in to his pleading. You stopped trying and let him go with a press of your hypospray, and three weeks later, they unveiled the drugs that would've saved him. Don't you dare make that mistake again, Leonard McCoy. Don't you dare give up.
"I want my memaw, she repeated, as though she thought him capable of such a miracle.
You know that feeling, don't you, Leo? That particular grief has been festering in your heart since they laid your father in the ground. Six years on, and even though you know death is forever, you still hope he'll come walking through your door one day, farmer's brogans clumping on the floor and eyes bright and lucid beneath the brim of his hat.
"I know you do." And I'd give her to you if I could, sweetheart. I surely would. "Hush now," he soothed, and rubbed her shivering leg from ankle to knee. "Hush. Whatever happens isn't happening tonight. You're safe here, I promise you."
He sat at her bedside and stroked her leg until taut muscles went slack and her erratic breathing evened out, and then he rose and went to the replicator, where he ordered half a glass of warm milk dusted with cinnamon. He carried it to her tray table and set it down. "I want you to drink this. It'll help you sleep." He toggled a switch on the side of the bed and raised the head to a sitting position. "Do you need help holding it?"
She took a deep breath and wiped her red-rimmed eyes. "I don't think so." She snagged the tray with uncoordinated, pawing fingers and pulled it closer. She slowly curled both hands around the mug and closed her eyes at the warmth that seeped into her palms, and then she raised it to her lips and took a careful sip.
That's my girl, he thought. Slow and easy. He watched the monitors with satisfaction as her vitals improved and her cortisol levels declined to less terrifying levels.
"It's my grandmother's recipe," he said.
Her bottom lip wobbled precariously at that, and he was sure his idiot mouth had undone the milk's comforting work, but then she replied, "Grandmamas always seem to know best, don't they?"
"Yeah, they do," he agreed, and saw a flash of his own paternal grandmother, a short, bowlegged woman with leathery skin and smiling eyes who flitted around the farmhouse kitchen during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the annual family barbecue, and who always saved the biggest piece of peach pie just for him. "You drink that down now," he admonished her, but there was no heat in it, and his fingers itched to brush a strand of hair from her damp face.
She obliged without a whimper. She was spent after the night's histrionics, and her eyelids drooped over unfocused eyes. The mug was listing badly by the end, held only by the lax crook of her fingers through the handle, and only the fact that it was nearly empty spared them from a repeat of this morning. When she had downed the final mouthful, he plucked it from her drowsy grasp and set it on the edge of his desk.
"You go on to sleep now," he urged, and lowered the bed to its original position.
She blinked sleepily at him. 'M sorry 'bout the ruckus, Doctor."
"Don't you worry about it. They're just bedpans. They wash." He pulled the blanket over her shoulders.
"G'night."
"Goodnight, Miss Walker."
He waited until her breathing deepened and settled into the unmistakable rhythm of sound sleep, and then he picked up her padd, transferred her research into the illustrious Dr. Boswell to his, and marched out of sickbay with it clenched in his fist like a stone.
Rosalie might have been settled, but he had never been less, and as he stalked onto the turbolift and ascended to the captain's quarters, his mind seethed with snippets from the essay he'd glimpsed before she had gone into total meltdown.
Given what you saw, can you blame her? his father asked. That was bad enough. She probably read the whole thing, driven by boredom and that natural, tenacious curiosity of hers. And God knows what's in it. Curiosity has an awful way of turning on those who wield it.
How the hell did I miss it? he wondered as the lift glided to a stop and deposited him on the deck.
You were busy, son. She might be your only patient, but she's not your only responsibility. There were inventories to double-check and requisition forms to fill out and performance reviews to conduct. Not to mention your personal research and experiments and peer reviews for various medical journals. It's not like you were laying down on the job. You did the best you could with the time you had.
Well, it wasn't enough, he remonstrated as he stormed down the corridor, scattering yeomen like startled pigeons as he went. If she hadn't had so much time on her hands, I'd've merrily sent her to that woman with her wheelchair door prize and never given it a second thought. Dammit! How could I have been so careless?
Like a lab rat in a cage, Rosalie said dolefully inside his head, and a boy in a wooden box screamed and screamed.
Jim, untroubled by glaring failures, was sound asleep, and thus, his door was firmly shut when he started pounding on it with the side of his fist.
"Jim, get up," he called, and drummed furiously on the door. "Dammit, Jim, up! Don't make me use a medical emergency override."
Muffled muttering from inside Jim's quarters. The rustle of bedclothes. The door slid open to reveal Jim, silhouetted in the darkness of his cabin, nothing more than a rumpled shock of hair and a flicker of socked feet. "Wha' th' hell, Bones?" he slurred, and McCoy heard the whisper of nails on bare skin. "Lights," Jim, grunted, and the room was illuminated in a wash of white.
McCoy barreled inside without waiting for an invitation. "I'm not giving her to that woman, Jim," he announced.
Jim squinted at him. "What the hell are you talking about?" He yawned and scratched the inside of his thigh.
"Rosalie. I'm not giving her to Dr. Boswell."
Jim groaned and rubbed his eyes. "Bones, I love your passion, I really do, but this couldn't have waited until morning?"
"No, it couldn't. I just finished peeling her off the ceiling in sickbay. Took half an hour and a glass of warm milk to calm her down. One of my damn orderlies sprained her arm."
"She get violent?" His voice was still rough with sleep, but his eyes were clearing rapidly, and McCoy could see the gears of his mind picking up speed.
"Hysterical, more like. She had some kind of nightmare about drowning in her cryotube, and when she woke up, the power was out in sickbay."
That caught his attention. "What do you mean out?"
McCoy shrugged. "Some kind of momentary blip, to hear a yeoman tell it. I sent him down to engineering to see about it."
Jim hummed in approval. "Let me know what they find." When he wasn't nearly getting the ship blown to pieces by hostile aliens or crazy admirals, he was meticulous in its care. He might've skimmed every textbook he ever had in the Academy, but damned if he didn't read every letter of Scotty's frequent maintenance reports.
"You know I will," McCoy said. "Dammit, Jim, I'm more worried about Rosalie. I'm not giving her to that woman."
Jim peered at him with sleep-swollen eyes. "What's gotten such a bee in your bonnet about this? I thought you said she was preeminent in her field."
"She is, but dammit, Jim." He stopped and rubbed his nape, and in his mind's eye, he saw Rosalie thrashing in the grips of those cack-handed orderlies and cowering from the advancing Dr. Pennicott and his hypo of good intentions.
"Bones," Jim said, "I know you've got a thing for strays, but sometimes you've got to let them go. This Boswell might be able to help her." He gave him a bracing pat on the arm.
"The hell she will. She'll hurt her, Jim. She'll hurt her bad, and I can't just stand by and let it happen because Boswell's got more paper on the wall."
I can't just pass her off like an old dollar bill and pretend I don't know what might happen to her. I do that, and I'll see her behind my eyelids every night for the rest of my life. She and my father might take up checkers on the front porch. He collected strays, too.
"Why are you so convinced that Boswell's a bad idea?" Jim asked, exasperated.
McCoy thrust his padd at him. "That's why." He tapped the screen with his finger.
Jim took the padd from him and shuffled to his couch, scratching all the while. He sat with a graceful plop and motioned for him to follow suit, but he only crossed his arms and swayed from side to side and tried not to think of Rosalie in that sickbay bed, keening for a memaw who was never coming, or of dying horses thrashing in their stalls with bloody foam in their nostrils.
Like old space junk, she hissed inside his head. You should have let me die.
Please, son. Please.
Jim's eyes, which had been scanning the screen, froze.
Found it, McCoy thought, but there was no satisfaction in it.
Jim read for a long time. Now and then, his free hand rose to his mouth, and he worried his thumbnail with his teeth. It was a habit of long standing, and no matter how long or how loudly he nagged him about it, he did it anyway. He'd long since learned to pick his battles when it came to Jim, so he smothered the rebuke that bubbled to his lips and pretended not to notice.
"It could just be a holdover from her Academy or med school days," he said when he was finished, but the words lacked conviction, and his posture betrayed his unease. Hunched and shrunken, as though he were ducking a blow. He lowered his thumb and immediately raised it again. "You know, didn't you take rhetoric classes?"
He had, in fact, and the professors had made him argue several controversial opinions, opinions he found loathsome and utterly contrary to his decency as a human being. He'd done it, white-knuckled and thin-lipped and desperate for the grade and the promise of doctorhood, but he'd never been easy with it, had never brushed it off as easily as his classmates, who'd defended the indefensible and swanned from the lecture hall with laughter on their lips. Guilt had burned in his belly and clung to his skin like the humid Missouri heat, and he'd left the hall on numb legs and made a beeline for the shower and a shot of Beam to rid his mouth of a taste bitter as gall.
"Yeah," he admitted. "I did. "But I don't think that's what this is." He gestured at the padd. "One I could buy, but it's not just one." Jim's finger skimmed the screen to bring up the list of links. Besides, most professors don't keep students' old papers for more than a semester, and they certainly don't publish them years later, not unless they're looking to either bury them or hop on some bandwagon. I'd bet my last credit those are recent. They certainly sound like a doctor." He thought of that long-ago boy, screaming inside a wooden box.
Jim scanned another page, pinched and silent, hunched over the padd now, and McCoy's mouth twitched with the urge to snap at him to sit up, dammit, but he needed him to see, so he held his tongue. Jim's eyes flew down the page, and his scissoring teeth scraped the cuticle of his thumb raw.
"Stop that," he chided helplessly.
Jim raised his eyes from the padd. "Hm?"
"You're going to gnaw it off."
He looked at his thumb as though he couldn't quite remember how it had gotten there, and maybe he couldn't. When Jim finally set his mind to something, there was nothing under God's heaven that could shake him from his purpose. He lowered his wounded thumb to his lap. "Sorry, Bones," he said sheepishly.
"How many times have I told you?" He crossed to the couch and reached for his pouch of hypos and regenerators before he remembered it wasn't there. In his haste to reach the calamity unfolding in sickbay, he'd left them on his bedside table. "Shit."
"Don't worry about it, Bones. Mankind survived for thousands of years without the intervention of modern medicine."
"They also died by the untold thousands," he reminded him. "I don't suppose you have anything in your bathroom?"
"It's a little raw skin, not a gaping phaser wound. I'll be fine." When he only grunted at him, Jim added, "I'll get it treated as soon as we're done here." He promptly wiped his thumb on his boxers. "Besides, I thought we were more worried about your newest favorite patient."
McCoy scowled. "I can damn well worry about more than one thing at a time."
"Don't I know it," Jim retorted drily, and he was tempted to slap the smartass out of him.
"Those essays, Jim. Jesus. Do I want to know how bad they got?"
"No," he answered, and the immediacy of the response made his blood pound in his ears. "How did you find them?"
"I didn't. She did. She's got a lot of hours to kill when she isn't in therapy. I guess when I told her about the probable transfer this morning, she decided to look up just what she had to look forward to."
"Bet she enjoyed that," Jim said wryly, and grimaced.
"Yeah." Guilt churned in his gut.
I'm just old space junk, and they can do whatever they want with me.
He plopped down in a chair and scrubbed his face with his hands. "Good God. I don't understand how she got into Starfleet with views like that."
"They don't exactly have the most rigorous admissions standards, Bones. I mean, look at me." Jim's lips twitched in a self-deprecating smirk.
He snorted. "My ass, Jim. You're a damn genius when you want to be."
"Maybe she hid it, toed the line through med school and the Academy and only let her freak flag fly when the ink was dry on her credentials. Look at Admiral Marcus. He was researching and developing those Dreadnaught-class starships for years, and no one suspected a thing. No one would have suspected a thing, either, if I hadn't listened to Khan and opened that torpedo. He had everyone fooled, including Pike."
You're wrong, Jim, he thought morosely. It wasn't that no one suspected; it's that no one cared. You don't build a fleet of military starships by yourself. He had help, and a lot of it. Marcus wasn't the only one. He was just the only one crazy enough to get caught. Starfleet knows it, too. That's why it didn't exactly leave no stone unturned when it came to investigating the mess. A few token discharges, forced retirements, and a high-ranking sacrificial lamb to serve a pissant prison sentence, and it trumpeted its exhaustive relief and restoration efforts. They didn't want to look too hard because then they'd have a whole hell of a lot of explaining to do.
Just imagine what the medical branch of Section 31 must be like, whispered a brittle voice at the base of his brain, and he saw Rosalie in cold, metal stirrups with an even colder speculum jammed between her legs.
"That doesn't explain how that garbage cleared peer review," he said, and swallowed against a wave of nausea.
Now, son, you know that ain't true, said his father. Kind but firm, disappointment and impending discipline. There are plenty of fine doctors out there, good men and women doing the best they can and using their God-given gifts to help folks who're hurting, but there are also bad ones, folks with noble intentions but no skills or white-coated bureaucrats with all the skill in the world but neither kindness nor conscience in them. Boswell is one of the latter, and she's not the only one. There are plenty like her in labs all over the galaxy, so blinkered by hypotheticals and the possibilities of tomorrow that they can't see the patient sitting in front of them today. They've gotten smarter since the days of Philip Greene and his glorious eugenics plan for a better day, better at hiding, and there are far fewer of them than there used to be, thank God for small favors, but they're still there, practicing their nasty little magic behind closed doors and calling it progress.
He thought of Admiral Marcus, driven mad by his obsession and xenophobia and willing to sacrifice a crew that included his daughter to advance his twisted cause, and of a small boy tortured by the hands charged with healing him. He thought of Rosalie, whose parents were so desperate to fix her that they sealed her inside a cryotube and sent her to God on the promise of con artists.
I'll be a lab rat in a cage.
Lab rat. Space junk. Christ almighty. "I don't care how it got past peer review. I'm not giving her up, not to them."
"I'm with you, Bones, but if this Dr. Boswell has clout, it might not matter."
"There has to be something, Jim!" Pleading. "Dammit, I can't just wake her up and dust her off and send her off to a life of God knows what."
Jim regarded him in thoughtful silence. "I've always known you had a bleeding heart," he said at last, "but you're invested even for you. What is it with her?"
Because sometimes I see her. Not just her body-skinny legs and lopsided hips and clumsy fingers-but her, the spark that makes her Rosalie. I catch flashes of her sometimes when she says good morning and goodnight, and when she's bent over her padd, so absorbed in the screen that I have to remind her to hold herself up. She gives me a sheepish grin and a quiet apology, and in her shy smile, I see the lovely woman she is when she's not wracked with pain and constantly being reminded of the piss-poor vessel the Almighty saw fit to stuff her into. I see her when she smiles and when she laughs at my cantankerous grumbling. I see her when she rolls up and down sickbay in the chair I gave her and turns figure-eights for the sheer, happy hell of it. I see her when she forgets how much she hurts.
Are you all right? Quiet concern at his back as he'd pretended not to see her in favor of sheets he hadn't cared about in weeks, soft and solicitous and more than he deserved given that he'd been avoiding her for days because he couldn't bring himself to tell her that the rug was about to be yanked from under her unsteady feet all over again.
Sweetness and tenacity and a lively spirit encumbered by flesh too weak to contain it. Goodness, pure and simple, and he couldn't stand aside and allow it to be poisoned by ruthless scientific curiosity and the bland indifference of Starfleet bureaucrats.
"Because she'll die," he said flatly. "Her body might go on, maybe for decades, but there's more to a human being than meat and bone. There's a soul, Jim, and they'll crush it. They might not mean to, but they won't care if they do. She's not space junk, Jim, not a goddamn lab rat for them to play with. She has a name and a past and a hell of a mind, one that might do a hell of a lot in this world if given the chance. She's not a rolling petri dish or an anomaly to be studied and dissected. She deserves to have a life, one she chooses, with trees and grass and the sun on her face. It's my duty as a doctor worth the name to see she has that chance."
"No offense, Bones, but most doctors would consider that going far beyond the call of duty."
"Yeah, well. I'm not most doctors." He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms.
"No, you're not," Jim agreed. He scratched the bridge of his nose and flashed him a fond smile. Then he studied the padd again, and the smile faded. He set it on the couch and stood. "The ride's never smooth," he muttered, and crossed to the com on the wall beside the door. He thumbed it on. "Kirk to Commander Spock."
"Yes, Captain," came the reply, and he wondered how the pointy-eared bastard could sound so goddamned awake at ass o'clock in the morning.
You're awake.
Yeah, but I'm not happy about it.
"Report to my quarters immediately."
"Yes, Captain." The com clicked off.
Five minutes later, Spock was at the door, impeccable in his blues.
"Did you even sleep?" MCCoy demanded, irked at his bright eyes, polished boots and perfectly-combed hair.
"Yes, Doctor." Crisp as his uniform. He cocked his head as though studying an intriguing zoological specimen, and McCoy was suddenly acutely aware of how he must look, with his puffy eyes and disheveled hair and sweatpants. "I take it you did not?"
"Not near as much as I wanted," he admitted, and rubbed his burning eyes.
"C'mon in, Spock." Jim yawned and waved him in.
Spock stepped inside, hands clasped behind his back. "Based on the lateness of the hour and the state of your dress, I presume this is an emergency?" He looked from Jim to him and back again.
"No, Spock, I thought I'd round you and the captain up for a game of midnight poker," he snapped. His head throbbed with the need for sleep, and he was in no mood for his persnickety bullshit.
Spock merely quirked an eyebrow.
Jim scooped the padd from the sofa and passed it to him. "Miss Walker found these this afternoon during her adventures with her padd."
Spock perused the contents, face impassive. "They appear to be a series of apologies for Philip Greene's eugenics polices in the late twenty-first century. While the ideas expressed are undeniably worrisome and repugnant, I fail to see why they warrant an emergency meeting in the middle of the night."
"Look who wrote them," Jim said.
Spock's eyebrows crept toward his hairline. Vulcan for surprise. "'Dr. Moira Boswell'," he read. "Is this the same Dr. Boswell who requested to examine the doctor's patient?"
"I'm right here," he grumbled. "And her name is Rosalie."
"It is," Jim answered, ignoring him.
"I can't turn her over to someone like that. It goes against my every instinct as a doctor." And as a man.
"While I appreciate your position, Doctor, I am afraid there is nothing we can do. As she is not recognized as a Federation citizen or a citizen of its protectorates, the customary rules do not apply."
"You've said that, dammit. But there's got to be something. We can't just-" He gestured furiously at the padd. "You're a scientist. You know what can happen when science is utterly divorced from ethics."
"You said the rules don't apply because she's not a Federation citizen," Jim mused.
"That is correct."
"Well, what would it take to confer citizenship status?"
"If records for her exist, then they could be entered into current Federation databases, provided that she could provide corroborative evidence of her identity."
"All her papers were probably incinerated in the nuclear attack on Atlanta. Even if they weren't, it's not like they packed them in her cryotube," McCoy said, and ran his fingers through his hair.
"Papers would be irrelevant. As you might recall, records of her existence do exist from the accident at the cryotube facility. Samples of her DNA were taken for identification purposes. I presume your preliminary physical took additional samples?"
"Of course. It's standard protocol."
Spock nodded. "Once genetic identity has been established, then she would need to present herself for an interview to ensure that she is, in fact, real and not an android or a hologram. Once those criteria are met, she would be presented with official identification and granted the full rights and protections of a Federation citizen. Including the right to refuse treatment from Dr. Boswell and retain Dr. McCoy as her primary physician."
"How long would the process take?" Jim was chewing on his abused thumb again.
"As Dr. McCoy has already collected the necessary samples and performed a thorough physical, and I have already discovered her DNA sample in the cryolab records, it should take only a few moments to establish a match. The interview, however, will prove considerably more difficult. The wait can be weeks."
"We don't have weeks. We're scheduled to arrive at Starbase 4517 in three days," he pointed out.
"While my skills as a science officer are considerable, even I cannot bend time," Spock said with implacable pomposity.
"Maybe not, but maybe I can," Jim said thoughtfully.
When Spock raised a decidedly skeptical eyebrow at that, McCoy was in perfect accord.
"I do not understand, Captain."
"Being the golden boy who saved the Federation twice in two years has to count for something, right?" he answered, and flashed a sunny, boyish grin. "Spock, see about matching that DNA. Bones, you keep Miss Walker healthy and happy."
"And what are you going to do?" he asked.
"I'm going to call in a few favors at Starfleet command." He clapped him on the arm. "Don't worry, Bones, we got this." He ambled to the com again. "Kirk to bridge."
"Yes, Captain?"
"Increase speed to Warp Eight. I want to get there with time to spare."
"Yes, sir."
Jim flipped off the com and offered him another grin, cocksure and rumpled and impossibly young as he moved to save the day in nothing but his undershorts, and in that moment, he loved him, loved him as fiercely as he had ever loved his wife or his sainted mother, and he thanked God that he'd taken the chance and offered him his name and his flask on that godforsaken shuttlecraft. He might be a pain in the ass, but I couldn't have picked a better friend.
He bounced on his toes, discomfited by the sudden wave of sentimentality. "I better get on back to sickbay, make sure she's not tearing it up again," he said gruffly.
"You do that. And make sure to follow up on that power fluctuation."
"Yes, sir. Goodnight, Jim. Spock." He nodded in farewell and took his leave.
Spock followed him into the corridor. "I should have results for you in twenty minutes."
"Good."
Spock increased his pace and disappeared around a bend in the corridor. He returned to the turbolift and then to sickbay, where he found Dr. Pennicott sitting at his desk with an air of rumpled dignity. The scattered bedpans had been collected and returned to their cart, and Rosalie was dead to the world, curled on her side and snoring softly into her pillow.
"Everything all right in here?" he whispered.
"Tip-top," Pennicott replied, and tugged on the fabric of his tunic. "She's been out since you left."
"I expect she'll sleep until morning now. Wake me if she doesn't."
"Of course, Doctor."
"I didn't mean to step on your toes earlier."
"Nonsense. As I said, you are CMO. Besides, she seems to have an affinity for you."
He looked at Rosalie as she snored beneath the blanket, her face smooth and unspoiled by tears. He thought of her in the hydrotherapy pool, a small, broken bird huddled against his chest, and of her hand warm and soft in his own.
She just knows a safe place when she sees one, his father said, and the pride in it made his jaw ache.
"Just keep an eye on her," he ordered, and left as quickly as he had come. He marched to his quarters, convinced he wouldn't be able to sleep, but he was out the minute his head hit the pillow, and when his com buzzed with the DNA results Spock promised fifteen minutes later, he did not stir.