They departed Starbase 4517 at 0730 the next morning, bound for a routine check of Ceti Alpha V. Rosalie never did get those temporary quarters. Instead, she slept in sickbay aboard the Enterprise, curled beneath the covers in her biobed with her padd on the tray table beside her, and when the ship slipped out of the docking bay with the buoyant glide of engaging thrusters, she put down her glass of orange juice and did an uncoordinated, capering jig in her chair, feet clacking on the footplates and arms flailing giddily. It was such a joyous dance that he chuckled as he watched her over the top of his padd.
She blushed to the roots of her hair and lowered her arms. "Sorry," she muttered sheepishly.
"I'm not."
That radiant, lovely grin. "Me neither," she admitted, and wiggled in her chair. She bounced as she picked up her glass and drained the contents in two long swallows.
"You do realize this means it's back to the grind?" He set his padd down and sat back in his chair.
"I do," she answered, and picked up her empty glass in a futile effort to coax a few last drops from the bottom.
"You want some more?" he asked, pleased at the uptick in her appetite and the remarkable improvement in her attitude.
"Please?" She held out the empty glass.
He rose from his seat and plucked it from her grasp. "More orange juice, coming up." He carried the glass to the replicator, placed it under the dispenser, and keyed in his request. "I'll have to teach you how to use this now that you'll be here a while." He carried the refilled glass to her tray table and set it down.
"Thank you, Doctor." Thin, splayed fingers snaked out to curl around the bottom of the glass, and she pulled toward herself with painstaking care. When it was close enough, she picked it up in both hands and took a prodigious gulp.
Good, he thought. She needs to get her body back on track. Thanks to the illustrious Dr. Boswell, she's been afraid to do anything but hide in the bed and cling to her padd. Barely ate unless I prodded her and drank even less. Didn't do laps around sickbay, didn't ask to look out the window. Just stared at that damn padd and stole glances at the sickbay doors like she expected Boswell's goons to storm in and carry her off.
Frankly, you were worried about the same thing, his conscience admitted. It's why you've been hovering ever since she came back with her Federation credentials, and why you copied them in triplicate just in case of convenient database failure. You couldn't shake the sneaking suspicion that it was too easy, that before you left, she'd try an end run around standard Federation protocols and trump up a reason why Rosalie had to stay, and never mind her wishes on the matter or the properly-filed paperwork. Maybe she'd demand another, more thorough psych eval from a third party or make the not-entirely-invalid claim that the Enterprise was hardly the best place for someone to undergo intensive rehab and acclimatization to modern society. After all, nearly getting blown to smithereens in a life-or-death struggle for the fate of the Federation was an annual event in these parts. Either way, Dr. Boswell didn't strike you as the type to give up easily.
Which is why you never let Rosalie out of your sight once you patched her up and got her fed and watered. You planted yourself at her table in the commissary while she picked at her food, one eye on your padd and one on the door, and you ate your vegetarian chili without tasting it because you were too busy scrutinizing other diners for signs of nefarious motives. When she was finished, you gave her a brief tour of the station in which neither of you had much interest, and then you shepherded her back to the safety of the ship, where she sought refuge in her bed and you hunkered behind your desk like a knight at the battlements.
It's also why you filed a complaint with the ethics committee that same afternoon. You gave Rosalie a chance to rest, and then you prodded her up and out of bed in order to take her statement. You felt like a rotten sonofabitch asking her to relive that carnival of indignities so soon, but you knew that you had to get her account on record as soon as possible, lest someone accuse you of coaching her or influencing her recollection of events. So you waved your padd in her pinched, dispirited face and made her recount the whole sorry spectacle in a drained monotone that made your skin crawl because it was so unlike the woman you'd known just the night before, when you'd both set to laughing over a slice of bad peach pie. And when it was over, you bundled it with your written account of the misconduct, your official complaint under the appropriate statutes, and the footage from Boswell's sickbay and sent it to the ethics committee and the chief of Starfleet Medical. You were tempted to send them copies of her enthralling little treatises on the eugenics policies of Philip Green while you were at it, but in the end, you left those lie for fear of being accused of biased muckraking. Then you sat in your chair and watched her slump in hers like the weight of the world was on her bowed shoulders and cursed that arrogant idiot for making her road far harder than it had to be.
You figured you'd asked enough of her for one day, so you just reminded her to sit up straight and let her be, but you never let her out of sight. You watched her out of the corner of your eye while you scrolled through pill and sheet counts and filed various training certificates for the interns. You reviewed rotation change requests and sick leave requests. You kept an ear open while you double-checked the count and dosages on the prophylactic hypos and the binary-method birth control injections. You kept hoping she would talk, even if only to herself while she fiddled with her padd, but she was morose and silent, lost as she'd been during that first groggy day when she'd awakened to find herself so long and far from home.
You were reluctant to leave her alone in a deserted sickbay, so you found reasons to putter around until 2300. You considered staying overnight, bunking down in the cot in your office, but Boswell's smarmy accusation of emotional overinvestment dogged you, so you made a final check of her covers and left a glass of water(with flexible straw)within reach on the tray, and then you went to your quarters for the night. You left your com on all night in case she called for you in the night, tormented by a fresh spate of nightmares, but she never made a peep. The only sounds were her deep and even breathing and the rustle of the covers as she rolled in her sleep. No goons crashing the gate, no terrified cries, and it wasn't long before you went out like a light, exhausted by the constant vigilance.
Well, there was no need for it now. The specter of Dr. Boswell was receding with every second. There was the possibility-the eventual probability, really-of a hearing before the ethics committee, but that was weeks, if not months, in the future. Starfleet Medical received hundreds of thousands of communiques a day from ships, shuttles, outposts, and starbases across the galaxy, and while complaints were fast-tracked through the labyrinthine system, the cogs of bureaucracy still ground exceedingly fine. If he were lucky, he'd receive acknowledgment of receipt within forty-eight hours. After that, it was anyone's guess. Hell, if Starfleet were particularly backlogged, he might not hear boo on the subject until Rosalie was disembarking the ship with her bags in hand.
And if there is a hearing? If Starfleet demands you testify before the committee? If they want her to testify?
They'd cross that bridge when they came to it. Until then, there were more important matters he could deal with, such as getting her rehab back on schedule. He snagged a stool with the toe of his boot and swung it into position in front of her. Then he settled himself on it, knees splayed. "Now that I know you're not going anywhere, we need to discuss your rehab."
She paused in the act of taking another sip. "Have I not been doing well?" she asked
"No, no, you're doing just fine, coming along very well," he assured her. "I couldn't be more pleased. I'd just like to talk about adding a few things to your current repertoire."
"Like what?" Dubious. She took another sip of juice.
"Dr. Boswell's assessment aside, you're improving. Your muscles are getting stronger, your ligaments more flexible. Your bone density is increasing. You're nowhere close to normal levels yet, and you won't be for a while, but at least you won't break your damn ankles transferring to the toilet." He held out his hand and beckoned for a socked foot, which was duly presented. "You're not shying from incidental touch, either." To demonstrate the point, he drew a thumb over the plane of her foot. "All incredibly positive signs. So I'd like to start you on basic transfer training."
"What's your definition of basic?" She swirled the contents of her glass.
"Right now? I'll be happy if you just get easy with rolling over and sitting up on your own for as long as a minute. I'd also like to work on determining your center of gravity and getting you comfortable with shifting your weight. You haven't had to do it much, and you need to learn. Maybe once you get to Earth, you can get set up with PCAs to do for you like you're used to, but here on the ship, you're on your own. I can't spare the personnel. Besides, the more you can do for yourself, the better. PCAs get sick or stuck in traffic or just say the hell with it, and if they do, you'll be prepared to fend for yourself while you figure out whose ass to chew."
She grinned at that. "At least you didn't call me lazy." Her gaze dropped to her glass.
"Miss Walker, that is the last word I'd use to describe you." He gave her foot a reassuring squeeze. "You just need the proper tools, is all."
"When do we start?"
"I'd like to start this morning."
She nodded as though that were the response she'd been expecting. "Does this add more time to my sessions?" she asked, and set the now-empty glass on the tray table, and he didn't miss the mournful note in the question.
Probably figures I'm going to start chipping away at her free time until her life is an unending series of sessions and appointments and dates with the therapy mat. "No. An hour and a half is what I asked of you, and I don't intend to change that anytime soon. I figure we can schedule it for the last half-hour of your daily sessions. I'd like to start at three times a week and work up from there."
"Will you be the one doing it?" She tugged fretfully on her fingers.
"I'll be supervising the first few sessions until Connor and Stuart get the hang of it, and I'll be checking in on you from time to time to make sure no one's getting lazy."
"Will it hurt?"
He lowered her foot and surveyed her in silence. She asks that a lot. It's like she expects everything she does or achieves to be an endurance contest between her spirit and her flesh, like she has to know if she can take it.
Not for the first time, he wondered just what kind of medicine they'd practiced back then, in a time before laser scalpels and bioscanners and tissue regenerators that did the work of healing without the penance of pain. He thought of screaming boys in wooden boxes, and of the scars on her thighs and the backs of her knees, and of her terror of the benign Dr. Pennicott as he'd advanced on her in the middle of the night with a hypo full of good intentions.
He rocked the stool to and fro with the back of his heel. "I won't lie, you're going to be plenty sore the first few times, especially your arms and shoulders, probably your back, too. And the soreness'll make you want to stiffen up, but it's important that you don't. You need to keep moving and stretching so those muscles don't seize up on you. That said, it shouldn't hurt. I'll give you something for the pain and inflammation to keep you comfortable. I'm not a bastard."
"Dr. McCoy, you are anything but," she said. He was pleased to see that her stress levels were at zero. She'd been operating under a siege mentality for far too long. "I suppose it's back to the grind, then?" She straightened in her chair and put her hands on the rims as though to head for her morning shower.
She sounded so resigned, a soldier heading for the tedium of the trench, and he made a decision. "You most certainly are," he confirmed. "But we're going to do things a little differently today."
"We are?" She straightened further.
"We are. You're going to take a shower, and I'm going to have a cup of coffee, and when you're done, we're going on a tour of the ship. If you're going to be here for the next year, you ought to make yourself acquainted with it. Sickbay might be the best part of the ship, but it's far from the only one, and it may be you find something other than your padd to occupy your mind. We'll do your session and assessment when you get back. Deal?"
She bounced in her chair, and her eyes sparkled inside her face. "Oh, I feel like I should get all dressed up," she said, and clapped her hands in happy anticipation.
He fought to suppress a grin. "It's just a starship, not the promenade."
Her cheeks turned a lovely rose. "It might be old hat to you, Doctor, but it's my first one. It's like your first glimpse of a champion quarterhorse or your first ride in a ragtop convertible with the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. You never forget it."
Her delight was infectious, and he rocked on the balls of his feet. "Well, Miss Walker, it would be my pleasure to escort you on your first encounter."
"And the pleasure of your company will be mine," she answered, and inclined her head.
I do believe that's Rosalie for a curtsey, he mused, and his lips twitched in admiration.
It fascinated him, the way she adapted as best she could to the demands of both the world in which she found herself and the one from which she had so rudely departed. She had been raised to politeness and civility despite the fragility of her body, and when she could not curtsey for the seat under her behind or the lopsided weakness of her legs, she simply found another way. He wondered how she'd come to it, that simple, elegant dip of her head. Had it been a moment of happy serendipity, a movement never intended but gladly appropriated and refashioned to her purpose, or was it the product of hours of dogged, painstaking practice in front of a mirror, dipping and nodding and wrestling unruly nerves and spastic muscles into submission?
The latter, I suspect, he thought as she grinned at him. I don't think her body ever gave her an inch she didn't pay for in pain and shame.
He pictured her in front of that mirror, ten years old and with her long, golden hair in a ponytail, staring into the spotless glass and willing her scrawny, bowed body to unfurl, to become as lithe and supple as her mother's, as everyone else's. Fingers curled so tightly around the armrests of her chair that her nails pierced the cheap vinyl. Cheeks flushed with exertion and stiff-necked determination as she dipped and bobbed like a disgruntled cockatiel as she fought to mimic the fluid movement meant for knees and hips. Hisses of frustration and helpless tears as the girl in the mirror fell short of the one in her head. Salt and despair on her upper lip and clogging her nose.
God knew how long it took. Years, maybe. Years of sitting in front of that mirror and bobbing and rocking and dipping and strangling the armrests of her chair in a white-knuckled grip. Years of salt and sweat on her upper lip, until it was as familiar to her as her mama's sweet tea. Years of cursing her intransigent body for its refusal to yield.
And then, one day, probably when she least expected it, it had happened. Obdurate muscles had relaxed just enough, and a graceless, spasmodic bob had become an elegant dip. For one fleeting instant, the girl in the mirror had matched the one in her head. A hard-won victory.
How long did it take you? Three years? Four? Longer? Were you dreaming of some snaggle-toothed kid in junior-high study hall, or were you still practicing it when all the other girls were swanning effortlessly down the spiral staircase at their debutante ball? An inch of ground and a single scrap of normal, and all it took was six years in front of a mirror.
He couldn't ask her; it was too personal, too far beyond the bounds of his professional mandate, so he crossed his arms and said, "Go on, now. Get showered. There's a lot to see, and I want to get your assessment done before dinner."
She executed that dainty bob again and spun in her chair, and then she was off like a shot in search of an available nurse or orderly. When she had corralled a willing amanuensis and disappeared through the sickbay doors, he made a beeline for the replicator and ordered coffee with three sugars.
Hypocrite, muttered his conscience as he carried the steaming cup to his desk, but he banished it with an indifferent grunt and sat down. He'd mainlined the stuff in his med school and academy days, cup after cup as he'd pulled all-nighters and powered through mandatory clinic hours and endless rotations on various wards. Besides, it was a much better vice than booze, which had nearly pickled his mind and his liver in the year after his father's death and during his interminable divorce, when Pamela's ambitious, cold-blooded lawyer had done his level best to pick the meat from his bones and she had been only too happy to help, determined to avenge too many nights left alone while he fought a battle he couldn't win.
Your father's death, his conscience sneered. That's a neat way of putting it.
Please, son. Please.
He silenced the voice with a sip of coffee and grimaced. Scalded water, heavily sugared. He drank it anyway. The alternative was a morning without caffeine, and that was a burden he refused to bear. Caffeine blunted the sharp edge of his tongue and softened the fractious edges of his temper, and his staff had learned not to come to him with ridiculous requests or confessions of momentary idiocy before he'd had his first jolt of liquid patience.
You did well enough with Rosalie.
Rosalie is a patient. Patients don't get the sharp edge of my tongue unless they've earned it by being a fool.
You mean like the engineering yeoman who came in last week with scald injuries? the voice reminded him.
Any engineering yeoman who stayed awake in Intro Maintenance knows the jeffries tubes run hot down by the laundry, he protested. If the idiot hadn't been trying to watch porn on his padd while venting the tubes, he'd've had two hands and eyes on the job. I bet Scotty has him cleaning the deck with his toothbrush.
He was about to continue his impassioned defense of his bedside manner when Rosalie returned from the shower. She had traded her loose morning scrubs for a crisp, white blouse and black pencil skirt that fell to her calves. Black nylons peeked from beneath the hem. If it weren't for the incongruous, white sneakers on her feet, she could've passed for a professor on her way to her first lecture of the day.
Or the naughty librarian in a porno, his mind supplied helpfully as he took in the sleek, golden fall of her hair over one shoulder, and he seized his coffee cup and sought refuge behind the rim to smother a mortified splutter.
"I figured it wouldn't be polite to go wandering around the ship looking like an escapee from the long-term ward," she explained, and her lips shone with a thin coat of clear gloss. Powder on her nose and blush on her cheeks. "I'm not up on current fashion trends, but I thought you couldn't go wrong with clean and simple." She raised her shoulders in a diffident hitch.
This is who's hiding under the grit and bruises left by all that damage, he marveled, and his mouth went dry. She was beautiful, warm sunlight on cool, clear water, and his fingers itched to stroke her hair and test its glossy softness.
Instead, he drained the last of his coffee and said, "You look just fine. Besides, this isn't a beauty pageant. Most folks around here make do with Starfleet-issue." He set down his empty cup and retrieved his pouch from the bottom drawer of his desk. He clipped it to the waistband of his pants at the hip and rounded the desk.
Rosalie's eyes fell to the pouch. "Does this tour come with a few free jabs?"
He snorted. "No. Though now that I think on it, you're due for your first round of vaccinations. This is just a precaution. If I leave it, I'm liable to stumble headlong into some ensign who scratched himself after handling a Rigellian puffer pod in the botanical lab."
"I take it that's bad."
Another snort. "The pods produce a fine pollen. Most of the time, it's harmless, just a minor irritant, like dust or ragweed. But put it anywhere near a mucous membrane or genitalia, and you're in for a world of regret."
"You speaking from experience?" she asked as they headed for the door.
"I'm a doctor," he answered, noncommittal and evasive.
Her lips curled into a smirk. "I see." Her eyes twinkled.
"Anyway," he said, and tried to ignore the heat blossoming in his cheeks, "it burns like napalm and is just as hard to get off. And if that's not bad enough, it causes severe swelling."
She winced. "How bad?"
"Like a pool noodle."
She giggled. "Oh, heavens. If it weren't for the godawful burning, it could be alien Enzyte."
"Enzyte?"
"When I was little, they had these ads on TV for 'natural male enhancement.' You popped a pill, and it was supposed to increase the size of your-" She paused to consider the politest term. "-business," she concluded delicately.
It was so prim and genteel, so Southern, that he wanted to laugh.
What was it she called me? He bit the inside of his cheek to quash a fit of laughter. The last piece of home that I've got left. Well, she's got home in every pore.
"Don't tell me: it sold."
"I guess it must've. The ads ran for years. The fellow in them even got a name. Smilin' Bob."
"Smilin' Bob?" He stepped into the corridor and set off for the turbolift.
"Mmhm. He always had this creepy, exaggerated smile on his face. Like the Joker, except too busy getting up to the business to fuss with killing. Later on, there was even a Mrs. Smilin' Bob. She had a smile big as life, too. Due to her husband's recent upturn in his business dealings, or so the commercials would have you believe, but I suspect she was just glad to have a break from all her husband's fiddling."
He bit the inside of his cheek again and shook his head in disbelief. "And people believed this nonsense?"
She shrugged as they joined the knot of people waiting for the turbolift. "I surely couldn't tell you. Maybe they did. They bought enough to keep the company going for years, after all. Or maybe they were just desperate. Desperation makes people stupid. People used to believe Spanish fly was an aphrodisiac. Don't you have that kind of thing nowadays?"
"What? Aphrodisiacs?"
She shook her head, and her hair cascaded over her thin shoulder like silk. "People peddling miracle cures on TV. Diets. Exercise equipment. Investment opportunities in rare gold coins."
"Crooks and snake-oil salesmen, you mean." He tore his gaze from her hair and clasped his hands behind his back. "The Federation has strict regulations against those kinds of schemes. Had to after the war. They were rampant. Every con artist and their grandmother were shilling cures for radiation sickness, and thousands died swilling turpentine and antifreeze. Took years to get it under control." He waited for her to roll into the turbo lift and stepped in behind her. "There are still pockets of black-market drugs on Earth, but not many. The Ferengi do a brisk trade in them, but the Ferengi trade in anything worth a credit."
"Credit?"
"It's the unit of currency for Federation planets that still use money, which are most of them."
Her brow furrowed. "So other planets use money, but we don't? How does trade work then?"
"Credits. I get credits every month for being a CMO. I can use them to buy things on shore leave."
"Ah, so you do get paid."
The doors opened, and he stepped into the corridor. "In a manner of speaking, I guess, but it isn't much, and it's only good on planets not named Earth. Most of the time, they just sit there, gathering dust and interest."
She followed him out, faithful as a shadow. "Well, at least you can have savings."
Oh, I had savings, and plenty of them, he thought bitterly as he strode toward the promenade deck. The lawyers and Pamela made short work of that. She got every penny I'd made and the house besides and left me sleeping in motels and Federation shelters and choking down MREs, I was six months at the Academy before I got the smell out of my clothes.
"Don't know what I'd use them for," he said, and tried not to think of Pamela's face as she'd stood in front of an Atlanta judge and demanded everything he owned as recompense for the sins of inattention and strangling grief.
He'd be the first to admit he'd been a sorry excuse for a husband once his father took sick shortly after they married. He'd been fresh out of med school and convinced he could save him if he tried hard enough, could do what all those doctors with years of experience could not. He'd spent days at a time holed up in labs and obsessing over charts and readouts until his eyes burned. He'd slept in his clothes at his desk and concocted dozens of serums and implausible treatment regimens and gone home smelling of stale sweat and unbrushed teeth. He'd stayed only long enough to shower and pick up a change of clothes, and Pamela had been left alone in a bed meant for two.
He'd driven his parents to appointments and consultations and held his mother's hand while specialists delivered dire prognoses and spoke of timetables and stages of progression, and once they'd determined there was nothing more to be done and sent his father home to wither inside his skin, he'd spent his days at the lab and the long night hours on the farm, sleeping in his childhood bed and listening to his father snore. His mother had tried to tell him, had urged him to go home and see to his wife, but the thought of living his life while his father's faded with every hour had struck him as an act of treachery. So he'd shaken his head and stayed as long as she'd let him, and when she'd chivvied him out, he'd gone to the labs instead of going home.
Pamela had tried at first, God bless her soul. She'd kept food waiting in the oven and wrapped up in the refrigerator and left clean clothes by the door along with his comb and his toothbrush. She'd sent notes of encouragement to his padd and left love notes scattered around the house or stuck to the steering wheel of his car. She'd come to the labs a few times with sandwiches wrapped in foil and Thermoses full of soup and rubbed his head and shoulders while he glowered at screens that refused to reveal the secrets of his father's salvation, but consumed as he'd been, he'd scarcely paid her any mind as she'd wrapped her arms around him and pressed kisses to the top of his head. He should've appreciated it, treasured it for the love it was, but he'd been too busy trying to cheat death to notice. It shamed him to think of it now, but he'd even shrugged her off a time or two, irritated that she was distracting him from the pursuit.
He'd been a fool, a short-sighted fool, and it had only gotten worse. Three months after they sent him home with a handshake and a bag full of medications to slow the progression of the disease, the bad days had begun to far outnumber the good. One morning just before Thanksgiving, his father had stopped with his spoonful of oatmeal halfway to his mouth, blinked at his mother with foggy, uncomprehending eyes, and said, Who are you? His mother had called him, crying so hard he could scarcely understand her, and he had gone home with a suitcase and a pouch full of hypos.
And still Pamela hadn't given up. She'd come each afternoon to spell his mother while she ran errands in town or just took a walk around the farm to clear her head and breathe air not fraught with tension and festering grief. She'd read to his father and tidied the house and helped make supper. She'd been there the first time his father forgot his name and asked what a farm boy was doing being so familiar in his house, and she'd done her best to console his mother as she sat in the kitchen and wept into a dishtowel so the sound wouldn't carry to their bedroom, where his father moaned in his fitful sleep. He should've venerated her for that, shouldn't extracted his head from his ass and kissed her hands and face and thanked her for her sacrifice and unwavering patience, but he'd been wild with grief, made savage and blind by it, and he'd taken it for granted and barreled deeper into the hunt, left her to fend for herself while he brooded and fixated and chased shadows that dissipated at his tremulous, hopeful touch.
She'd made a last-ditch effort that Christmas, had come to the farmhouse with groceries piled in her arms and a too-wide smile stretched across her face and done her damnedest to will the Christmas spirit into brittle bones and preoccupied minds. She'd stocked the pantry and scrubbed the kitchen and then she'd spent most of two days cooking turkeys and pies and assorted sides. She'd hovered and goaded them to eat, and she'd coaxed him outside to walk around the pastures. He could still remember the weight of her head against his shoulder as they'd circled the paddock and the rasp of his flannel shirt against his skin. He wished like hell he could go back and put his arm around her instead of letting it hang limply at his side while he plodded over the frost-bitten soil and worked out chemical equations for yet another miracle serum. But he had been too far gone, pulled too deeply within himself, and by the time he'd realized his mistake, it had been too late.
Sometimes you wonder when it was that she gave up, his conscience mused as he guided Rosalie toward the promenade. Maybe it was then, when nothing she said or did could turn your head the way she used to do when the mere sound of her voice stirred the butterflies in your stomach and made your heart turn a giddy fillip inside your chest. Or maybe it was when the food she cooked went largely untouched, nibbled at by unenthusiastic mouths inside hangdog faces. You can still hear the solid, final thud the turkey made as it bounced down the recycler chute, eleven pounds of a twelve-pound bird still on the bone. You can still smell the pies, too, cherry and pecan, cloyingly sweet in the heavy air.
And you can still hear her crying, standing over the sink with her hands braced on the counter and her hair in her face. Quiet. No anger then, not yet, just hurt and exhaustion. You should've gone to her then, should've slipped your hands around her waist and rested your chin on her shoulder like you did when you were courting and utterly besotted, and told her that you loved her, because you did, you truly did, but then your father started hollering from upstairs, terrified by the unfamiliarity of the room he'd slept in every night for forty years, and you left her to cry it out over dirty silverware while you went upstairs and wrestled him back into bed.
Maybe it was then, or maybe it was later, when she crawled into your boyhood bed and pressed her cold, bare feet into your calves and pressed hot, slow kisses to your nape and shoulders and murmured, Please, Leo, honey, please. C'mon, darlin'.
You knew what she wanted-hell, what you both needed. It had been so damn long for you both, so damn long since you'd felt anything but guilt and anger and desperation, and God knew you wanted to be something other than the son who couldn't stop his father's decline and ease his mother's anguish and the husband who wasn't any sort of man to the wife he'd promised to love just five months past, but the thought of doing such a thing in your parents' house while your father was upstairs dying by degrees was too much, so when she nipped your ear and slipped her hand into your pajama pants, you sighed and gently extricated yourself.
She didn't yell or cry or get out of bed and storm out of the room. No, she stayed right where she was, one arm slung across your chest and her ruthlessly-evicted hand lying slackly against your crotch and cheek pressed to your back, but she was stiff as your prick wasn't, hard as a length of cordwood against your spine.
I love you, Leonard, honey, she said into your shoulderblades. I love you so much. It was the last time she ever said it, and on the bad nights, when you lie in the dark and enumerate your endless failures, it rings in your ears and burrows into your heart like a thistle. I love you so much. Choked and soft and so full of tears, and it makes your heart clench and burn inside your chest, because her love for you should never have been a punishment endured.
Whenever the exact moment, something changed over that miserable holiday. By January, the chill inside the house was as cold as the bite of the winter air outside. A week after New Year's, she stopped sleeping in the master bedroom and took up in the bedroom she'd once thought to be a nursery someday. Not that you noticed at first; you were still sleeping anywhere but home five nights out of seven.
It wasn't until you stepped out of the shower to find her in the bathroom with a suitcase in her hand that you realized how bad it was. You stood there naked and wet and blinking water from your eyes. There were tears in hers as she looked at you.
I'm leavin', honey, she said. She reached out and pulled a towel from the rack and held it out like a white flag of surrender.
You squinted at her, uncomprehending as water dripped down your legs and onto the tile floor.
Where are you going? Your mama's? You took the proffered towel.
No, honey, you don't understand. I'm leavin'.
It clicked then, and you stood there with the towel halfway to your face. Damned if you didn't have the gall to be surprised. What? Why?
She huffed humorless laughter and shook her head. I can't do this anymore. I can't keep waiting for you to love me again.
I do love you, you protested, and reached for her with waterlogged fingers. For God's sake, my father's dying.
I know, sweetheart, I know, she said, and reached out to stroke your damp cheek. And I am so sorry. But honey, he's taking you with him, and I can't stand to sit here and watch.
Pam, darlin', you whispered, stunned and beseeching, but she only shook her head and stepped forward to press a kiss to your forehead.
Goodbye, Leonard, honey. Her voice broke on your name as though it were too sharp for her mouth, and then she clapped a hand thereto, spun on her heel, and fled.
You wanted to follow her, chase her down and beg her not to leave, but your heart was fluttering inside your chest like a hummingbird battering itself against the bars of its cage and your knees felt like loose ball bearings, so you just stood in the middle of the room with the towel hanging from numb fingers. Eventually, you took two steps to the left and sank to your knees in front of the toilet, and then you rested your head on the cool, porcelain rim and cried, towel clutched in your hand like a security blanket.
You hoped it was just a bump in the road and prayed that she'd come back once she'd had a chance to clear her head and be tended by family and friends who could devote the time and attention she deserved, but the days went by, and she stayed gone. She stopped coming by the farmhouse to read to your father and do for your mother. She wasn't there the day you and George had to move him from the bed in which he'd made you both to that godawful room off the parlor because his body had begun to fail along with his mind. She wasn't there to see your mother crying in the doorway with the hem of her apron pressed to her mouth while you and your brother stretched rubber sheets over a mattress that still smelled of must despite a thorough sunning and airing on the porch. She wasn't there to see you sleeping in your clothes, or to see you giving your father a sponge bath because the man who'd taught you how to ride and turn a calf had shit himself. She wasn't there to see your greying mother on her knees on the front porch, scrubbing piss and shit out of the mattress while the dirty suds oozed down her wrists and seeped into the wood beneath her knees. She wasn't there to see you tweezing splinters out of her knees through the tears in your eyes, and she wasn't there to see you unscrewing the cap on a bottle of Beam and downing most of it in the stables, curled in the corner of one of the milking stalls and watched over by one of your father's favorite heifers, who chewed her cud and flicked her tail and surveyed you with quiet sympathy when you vomited into the straw.
She was never there again, and it made no difference how many com calls you made or how many messages you sent begging her to come home. You'd had your chance to hold her heart and squandered it, and she no longer cared what you had to say. The calls and messages went unreturned and unanswered. And still you sent more, because now that she was gone, her absence was all you could feel, and your wedding band was an accusatory weight around your finger.
The last time you saw her without her life-devouring lawyer, you were curled in the corner of the milking stall and crying into your knees. Each sob was wrenched from your guts by a cold, pitiless fist, and you wanted to be sick, but you couldn't quite manage it, so you hitched and heaved and dug your nails into the hay-dusted fabric of your dress pants. That's how she found you, huddled in the empty stall and keening low in your throat.
Leonard, honey, she said, and crouched in front of you, careful to keep her skirt smoothed over her knees. You could smell her powder and perfume, light and sweet above the odors of hay and absent heifer.
I couldn't save him, Pammy, I-I couldn't, you croaked, and uttered a cracked sob. My Daddy's gone, and I couldn't. You rocked back against the stall hard enough to rattle the slats, to punish yourself for your failure, and hissed between clenched teeth.
I know, darlin', she crooned, and reached out to brush your burning temple with cool fingertips. It's all right, honey.
But she didn't know, she couldn't. She hadn't been there when he forgot your name and your mother's face, forgot the years that built you. She hadn't been there when the man who'd never raised his voice had screamed and raged and spewed obscenities to shame a longshoreman. She hadn't been there when he'd wandered into the living room with shit running down the backs of his legs and asked where he was in a small, lost voice so unlike his confident baritone. She hadn't been there when he'd been too weak and wasted to get out of bed at all, when you'd had to straddle him like an obstreperous calf and force a nasogastric tube up his nose and down his throat while he bleated and flailed and pleaded with you to stop hurting him, son. She hadn't been there when you'd climbed off after the dirty deed was done and sat down on the floor and cried with sweat running down your arms and the back of your neck. She hadn't been there when your father, who had never been anything but proud of you, had turned to the sound of your voice and said, I hate you, you little cocksucker. Been waitin' to do that for years, haven't you? Then he'd looked the other way and drifted off to sleep. He had no memory of it when he awoke several hours later, but you've never forgotten it. You spent the next year trying to drink it away, but there was no booze bitter enough to scrub it clean. You still hear it every now and then, when the days are bad, and you have to tell some family that their kid isn't coming home from their adventure among the stars.
I hate you, you little cocksucker. Please, son. Please.
She hadn't been there the night he remembered his love long enough to beg you to do the unthinkable. Please, son. Please. Gnarled, work-roughened hands clawed in the fabric of your shirt and eyes hellishly lucid behind the film of long illness.
She hadn't been there when you made your choice.
So you twisted away from that merciful, solicitous hand. Don't! An animal snapping at the well-intentioned hand of its would-be rescuer. You should have burrowed into it, should've lunged forward and buried your feverish face in her shoulder and accepted the solace she offered, but loss and shame had split your sternum wide and laid your heart bare, and the simplest touch was an agony, a harrowing of exposed nerves.
And with that, the last of her love died. You saw it go, just as you saw your father's chest rise and fall for the last time and heard the shuddering, phlegmatic wheeze of his dying breath. She dropped her hand and brushed off her skirt, and then she rose with the sussurrating shift of nylon and the creak of good leather shoes.
I'm sorry for intruding, Dr. McCoy, she said with polite formality. I'll leave you to it.
Pam, wait, you called, but she had done all the waiting for you she was ever going to do, and she left without a backward glance. The last thing you ever saw of Pamela McCoy was the slender line of her back as she walked away, straight and proud as she went back to the house to say goodbye to your mother. The next time you saw her, she was Pamela Branch again, flint-eyed and flanked by her blood-thirsty lawyer and gunning for your pride as well as your last credit.
Maybe the death of your marriage was preordained the minute your father took sick, but you've always thought that the petty cruelty of the divorce had its roots in the barn, when you rejected her love one time too many. While most new wives were the center of their husbands' worlds, she'd been left behind, left behind with only the memory of white lace and jubilant kisses and ignored in favor of charts and microscopes and centrifuges, and while most new wives were busy loving the nights away in the arms of the man they loved, she'd been left to sleep alone and hold on to the slender, crumbling hope of tomorrow. She had loved you as long as she could, had stayed and done for and done without longer than most new brides would, and all she had to show for it was a wedding dress in the closet and a handful of broken promises. No house, no babies, and no happily ever after.
What else but resentment could explain the fact that she tossed you out of the house by court order three days after your Daddy went into the ground and had your assets frozen two days later? How else to explain the bile she spewed when she went before that Atlanta judge and testified that you were a cold, emotionally-abusive drunk who'd married her under false pretenses? And you could hardly disagree when you still had the evidence of last night's bender in your eyes and on your breath.
Maybe you deserved to get left for the leaving you'd done and the neglect of the soul you'd vowed to love, honor, and cherish, but you'll never understand what possessed her to come out of the courtroom and declare you a miserable, worthless bastard and no-good son of a bitch with fire in her eyes and contempt in her voice. Maybe it wasn't fair what you'd done, wasn't kind, but it was your father, and you'd done the best you could with your heart throbbing on the outside of your chest with every breath. You'd never strayed, never shouted, and even at your drunkest, you'd never raised a hand to her. The thought had never entered your befuddled mind.
So when she swanned down the courthouse steps the day your divorce was finalized and you were left with nothing but your bones and the clothes on your back, you weren't expecting her to stop and offer you a triumphant, smug smile, a cat toying with a wounded mouse too weak to dodge the fatal swipe. Nor were you expecting her to rise on her toes in a grim parody of what she'd done on your wedding day and whisper in your ear, The only blessing to ever come out of this was that I never ended up with your child in my belly. The thought of being tied to you for the rest of my life makes me sick. Oh, and sugar? What you did give me was never that good to begin with. Thanks to that judge, I got all of you that mattered, and you can kiss my ass.
Words designed to cut to the bone, steeped in the venom of love disappointed. She left you without a backward glance a second time, and all you could do was stand there in the suit you'd borrowed from your best friend and wonder how you were supposed to put yourself back together with a hundred credits to your name.
She might've gotten all of you that mattered at that courthouse, but that wasn't all she took. She got your best friend, too, in the end. You were long gone by the time that news came down the pike, two thousand miles away in a dorm in San Francisco, but it was still a blow to the solar plexus when you called him on the com one day and she passed in the background, dressed in one of his t-shirts and eating a bowl of ice cream. You could only gape. He tried to explain and to justify, but you reached out with numb fingers and clicked off the com, and after the shakes had subsided, you went to Jim's room and took him up on his standing offer to go drinking. You got blind drunk for the first time since you climbed onto that godforsaken shuttle with a bender on your breath and three days' stubble on your chin, and while you were heaving your churning, bourbon-soaked guts into the toilet of your quiet single room, you couldn't stop thinking about Pamela with her legs wrapped around your best friend's ass and wondering just how long she'd been running in that particular derby.
He pushed the thought aside with a grunt. Pamela had made her bed and kicked him out of it long ago, and there was nothing left down that road but bitterness and regret. Better to stay on this one, where he might still do some good.
He studied Rosalie from the corner of his eye as she rolled along beside him. She was still straining against the harness now and then, but far less than before, and there was a noticeable improvement in her posture as she wheeled herself along. Straighter and less prone to listing to the left. Her eyes were clear and alert inside her face, and the constant tension that had plagued her since she'd been pulled from cryosleep was absent. Now she was curious and wide-eyed and thrumming with excitement.
Looks like the little bird's glad to slip her cage for a while, he thought, and smiled to himself.
"It's just the promenade," he said as the doors slid open to reveal the bustle of the ship's main shopping and leisure area. "Nothing special. Just a few shops and the commissary."
Rosalie grinned as she took in the colorful tumult of red and blue and green. She laughed with delight. "They look like macaws," she said as she watched a gaggle of yeomen pass with trays in hand and heads pressed together in earnest conversation.
He supposed they did, now that he looked on it. Bright reds and vivid blues, splashes of color against a sterile background of grey and white. He watched them for a moment and then turned to gaze at Rosalie, who surveyed the flurry of activity with avidity. Pink lips twitched, and delicate, golden eyelashes fluttered.
You'd rush headlong into it if you could, wouldn't you, sweetheart? he thought, and quashed the impulse to stroke her shoulder. So much energy, and nowhere to put it.
Maybe she would do better somewhere else, suggested the voice of self-doubt inside his head. Not with Boswell-only a lunatic would've left her with that sadist-but on another starbase or on a planet. Somewhere with more to see and do and a better chance to develop her interests and make friends. There's not much to do cooped up on a starship. At least if she were on a planet, she could explore her surroundings, maybe talk to people not too busy with duties to give her the time of day. She could observe the local culture and conduct historical research to her heart's content. It would certainly provide more mental stimulation than scrolling idly through her padd and staring out the window all day.
You're the only piece of home I've got left, she reminded him, and in his mind's eye, he saw Boswell ruthlessly jabbing a needle into the sole of her foot.
No, the best and safest place for her was with him, where he could manage and monitor her treatment program and ensure that nothing hurt any more than the treatment demanded. It might be lonely, but it was only for a year, and maybe he could talk to Jim about rounding up some volunteers to come visit her for an hour or two a few times a week. He'd play on their curiosity about this visitor from the distant past if need be, and if he were lucky, she'd find a friend or two, someone with whom to socialize outside of sickbay and the nurses who helped her dress and bathe every morning.
If she's got the energy and can pass the test for it, maybe I can get her on with the archivist corps, he mused as she edged closer to let incoming crew members pass. I'm sure they could use another historian to catalogue, collate, and document the information gathered on the civilizations we encounter. She's slow, but thorough, and I don't doubt she could outthink and outwork most of the ones we've got now. If her attitude toward her therapy is any indication, she's driven and proud, and she damn sure wouldn't half-ass her duties. If the archivists wouldn't take her, maybe the cartography crew would. They always need someone to update their records and cross-check coordinates. It's not glamorous, and it's far below her intellectual capabilities, but it's better than rotting in front of a padd all day, and it'd earn her a few credits to help her get started once she gets home.
"Penny for your thoughts, Doctor?" she said from beside him. This close, he could smell the astringent sickbay soap, so incongruous with her liveliness.
She should smell like magnolia or jasmine, he thought again, and rocked onto his toes.
"I'm thinking you should stop gawping and take a look around," he said mildly, and settled onto his feet again with the creak of his leather uniform boots.
She blushed. "Where do you think I should start?"
"Pick a direction. It's all one big circle." The rose in her cheeks made her lovely, and he swallowed to moisten a throat suddenly gone dry.
"Well, all right then." She shifted in her chair and pushed her buttocks more firmly against the back of the seat, and then she set off along the promenade, a fieldmouse creeping from her burrow. He ambled beside her as she meandered past the handful of storefronts, hands clasped loosely behind his back. Now and then she slowed with the whetstone hiss of palm on handgrip and peered into a storefront.
"You can go in, you know."
"Oh, I don't have any credits. I wouldn't want to waste their time. Besides, those aisles look awfully narrow. I'd be afraid I'd make a mess."
He furrowed his brow and turned to scrutinize the small shop's layout. Sure enough, the displays were arranged in tight clusters that left little room to maneuver a wheelchair; truth be told, it would be a tight fit for anyone much bigger than your average first-year ensign. It was a design of necessity rather than deliberate, malicious exclusion, but the end result was the same.
"I'm sure the clerk would be happy to help you if you needed something," he said lamely, and rocked back on his heels.
"I'm sure they would," she agreed placidly, but the light in her eyes had dimmed, replaced by a wistful resignation he recognized all too well. It was the face of well hell and pass the next handful of dirt.
Dammit. "I can see if they've got a catalogue you can order from," he offered.
"Thank you, Doctor, but I won't put you to the trouble. You've been so kind already."
"I've been doing my job, is what I've been doing," he grumbled, and turned his head to hide the blush that crept into his cheeks.
A huff of laughter as she resumed her exploration of the promenade. "Getting me away from that Boswell woman was hardly part of your job."
"The hell it wasn't. She's an embarrassment to the entire damn profession." He was silent for a moment. "Was it like that? When you were alive the first time around, I mean?"
"There's a sentence you don't hear every day." Amused. Then, "Like what?"
"All cramped, crowded, hard to get around."
"Honey, is water wet?" She paused to peer into a dispensary that offered a limited selection of lotions and soaps. "The year I was born, the President signed a law that was supposed to grant broad accessibility reforms. Almost thirty years on, and I never saw a bit of difference. It was just as hard to get around at thirty as it was when I was a squirt in short pants and trying to get a handle on the fattest pencil. Never really did, either." She gave a sardonic snort. "Want to hear something funny?"
"Shoot."
"The easiest place to get into was the place where they canned me. Guess they had to make it easy to roll the popsicles down the hall to the storage floor."
There's nothing funny about that at all, he thought, and his stomach rolled at the image of Rosalie being sedated and stored like summer preserves. "What about schools? Doctors? Churches?"
She shrugged. "Most of them paid lip service to being accessible. Whether they were or not was a different story. The churches did better than most by a long chalk on account of the good Lord wanting as many pennies from His faithful as He could squeeze."
"I take it you're not a woman of faith."
"I believe in God, Dr. McCoy," she said. "I just didn't put much stock in His servants." She leaned forward to sniff the scented air that wafted from the shop. "So nice," she murmured, and her lips twitched in a fleeting, rueful smile.
Probably smells like ambrosia after weeks of sickbay soap, he noted. "Something catch your fancy?"
"It's the honeysuckle. It reminds me of my memaw's yard." She blinked and swallowed and turned to study the flash and rustle of passing legs. Then, just as quickly, she straightened and faced front again. "Anyway, no use whining and pining over it. I don't have a cent-or a credit-to my name." She sent her chair forward with an abrupt snap of her wrist.
He made a mental note to get her a catalogue of the various soaps and lotions on offer. He'd have to limit her to the lighter, less-obtrusive scents; strong ones could exacerbate allergies and impede his ability to properly diagnose patients, but it might improve her mood to smell like something other than confinement and isolation and antibacterial body wash.
From the promenade to the arboretum and hydroponic garden, and as she rolled carefully along the rows, lips parted in wonder as she craned up at the willowy, sheltering fronds of a Risan date palm, he smothered the ridiculous urge to offer her his arm. She was still small, still fine-boned and dainty as she gazed ever upward at her too-large world like a Liliputian princess, but she was infinitely less fragile in her crisp, white blouse and black skirt. She was solid on her bones, more vibrant, and she sat more easily in her chair.
This is what she looks like when she forgets she hurts, he realized with no small amount of wonder himself. It's like finding a gold ingot under a layer of tarnish.
It doesn't matter if she's made of pearl and adamant under there, said the doctor inside his head. She's your patient, and you'd do well not to forget it. The last time you forgot, your father died.
He tore his gaze from the sharp, fine lines of her profile and squeezed the spars of his wrist until the flesh burned with the promise of bruises.
"Is it fruiting?" she asked, and leaned forward with a creak of cushion and seat sling, spindly elbows propped on her knees.
He stepped forward to peer the small fruits nestled at the base of the fronds. "I believe they are."
"Can you eat them?"
"You can. You ever had a fig?"
"A few."
"They're a bit like a fig and a cherry had a baby."
"You've had them, then?"
"Mmm. The ship makes a stop on their home planet once a year, usually near Christmas." He reached up and plucked four of the plumpest fruits with deft fingers. "Whole damn planet is like a tropical island. I guess Starfleet figures it'll help us forget that we're not home for the holidays."
"And does it?"
He thought of his older brother, surrounded by his wife and children at their modest homestead, ambling through the fields with his hands in the pockets of his overalls and breath pluming from his mouth beneath the bill of his dirt-smudged cap. He thought of his mother's house, sprawling, white clapboard and warped pine boards on the front porch. A pair of rockers looking down the long, winding drive and a porch swing most often occupied by rambunctious grandchildren who hooted and cawed and left dirty footprints on the slats. A kitchen thick with people and the aroma of turkey and stuffing and giblet gravy. His grandmother's peach pie, still warm from the oven.
"No," he said, "but it's as close as we're going to get for the next four years." He held out the handful of dates.
She pinched one between her thumb and forefinger and dragged a date toward her mouth with painstaking care. Her nostrils flared with concentration. "Thank you," she said once it was over the safety net of her skirt, and stretched her neck to take a dainty nibble. She sat back and rolled the sliver of fruit over her tongue. "Tart and sweet. I know you said they were the bastard child of a cherry and a fig, but I'm not sure if it's more of a raisin or a cranberry."
"A craisin?"
She chuckled, surprised. "They still have those Frankenfruits?"
"And a few more besides. Pluots, grapples, peacherines."
"Peacherines?"
"Don't ask." He popped a date into his mouth and sucked on it with quiet relish. Craisin or cherry, he loved the damn things. He'd bought them in bulk on the trip to Risa IV and spent shore leave popping them into his mouth at every opportunity. He'd eaten them by the handful and then by the pound, and when he'd turned up at the rendezvous point on the last day with twenty pounds on them in boxes stacked against his chest by grinning Risan merchants who'd happily counted his credits, Jim had laughed himself sick, hands on his knees and tears streaming down his face. He'd still been laughing his fool head off when they'd rematerialized on the transporter pad aboard ship, and never mind his dire warnings against the probability of a gruesome transporter accident in which Jim's idiot, guffawing mouth fused to the fabric of his uniform pants.
Jim might've laughed himself sick and dismissed his medical advice, but he'd also remembered his fondness for them, and he did his best to keep him in a steady supply. If they couldn't be found on their routine visits to a starbase, then he requisitioned them on his supply list. They could be replicated, of course, and that did in a pinch, but the computer's approximation was a pale imitation of the real thing.
Or the real McCoy, his brother chortled, and he rolled his eyes and sucked the sweetness from the disintegrating fruit.
Rosalie slipped the rest of her date into her mouth, and the doctor in him noted the stiff, clumsy splay of her fingers as she coaxed the fruit inside.
Even with the Loxtan, fine motor control induces tension and intention tremors. Christ, it must be exhausting trying so hard to control every movement. "Once your PT takes hold a little more, things like that'll come easier," he said, and nodded at her hand as it dangled from the armrest of her chair like an anesthetized spider on the end of a thread.
"I hope so," she answered, and sighed around the bulge in her cheek, an exhausted soldier eyeing the next fifty-yard dash to the trenches and shouldering her bayonet.
He swallowed his date and picked up another. "You're tired a lot, aren't you?" he asked shrewdly.
"Depends on what you mean by tired." She swallowed her date and rubbed absently at one nyloned knee. "I don't feel like sleeping all the time, if that's what you're asking, but there are plenty of days I could gladly lie down and not get up again for a thousand years. Sometimes-" She shook her head and shifted in her seat.
"Sometimes what?" he prodded, but she only shook her head.
"Nothing. Just a bit of pointless wool-gathering. You going to eat that date?"
Nothing, my ass. More like something you don't want to tell me.
Everybody's entitled to their secrets, honey, his mother chided. Even people whose bodies aren't entirely their own. Lord knows you've got more than a few. The patient, metronomic clack of knitting needles.
Not when those secrets pertain to their health, they aren't, he countered.
Every secret affects your health, leaves its mark, his father said, seated next to his mother on the front porch, sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled to the elbows and hand curled around a glass of sweet tea. If it didn't, you wouldn't see people eaten up by guilt and grief and coming to you with their skin hanging off of their bones and holes in the lining of their stomachs big enough to pass your finger through. Hell, your own secrets might've put you in the ground if you hadn't staggered onto that shuttle and smack into Jim Kirk. The way I see it, you can't fault her for keeping a tight hold on the one thing the world left to her, not when your fists are clenched just as tightly.
I can't tend what I can't see.
And sometimes you can't even when you can, his father reminded him. Besides, there's still time. She's brightening by the day, sticking her head out of the foxhole just a little further. What she won't tell you today, she might tell you tomorrow.
He lowered his palm to offer her the last date.
She picked it up with the same pained care as before. "Thank you, Doctor." It disappeared into her mouth.
He grunted in acknowledgment and picked a few more for himself. He popped them into his mouth at regular intervals as he followed her around the room. Now and then, she stopped to study a display, always careful to stop a few feet in front of the table or display case, lest an errant brush of her footrest send them toppling to the floor and bring the head botanist from his office in a towering fury.
So fastidious, so painfully, eternally aware of all the places into which she could not fit, and it made his chest ache in sympathy. She lingered over the samples from Earth-the tulips and rhododendrons and gardenia blossoms, and her lips trembled at the sight of kudzu vines coiled possessively around a stake planted in a bed of black soil.
Home, sweet home, sweetheart, he thought, and rested a hand on the push handle of her chair as though to offer comfort.
"Never thought I'd see that here." Too high, a bird singing its song through a strangling fist. "Don't they know that stuff'll take over if you let it?"
"We've got protocols in place."
"Sugar, I don't think it gives a fart in a high wind for your protocols," she muttered drily, and he nearly choked on the remnants of his date.
"Well, we've got them all the same," he said, and coughed into his fist to dislodge a fragment of date from the back of his throat. When she continued to stare at the kudzu, he said quietly, "I can get you a place on Earth if you like. Emory has a good rehab facility, and it's close to home."
She turned her head to scowl at him. "You wrested me from Dr. Boswell because you wanted to finish what you started, and now you're hot to get rid of me?"
"I am not hot to get rid of you," he retorted indignantly. "I just want you to be in the best place for you. Maybe being home will make things easier."
"There is no home for me now, Doctor McCoy. There's just Earth, and it'll be there a year from now."
"And if it's as inaccessible as you remember it?"
"Then I'll adapt. It's what I do."
He thought of the small shop on the promenade, too small for Rosalie to browse, and of the quarters in which she could not live for want of handrails. He thought of the sickbay bathroom, barely large enough to accommodate her chair and the only bathroom on the ship that she could safely use. He thought of too-high beds and desks and chaperoned showers. In her world, to adapt meant to do without, to learn to live within the confines of a designated cage.
He came around the side of the chair to crouch beside her. The kudzu was a rich, deep green as it clung to the stake with possessive tenacity. There in its display, it looked so delicate and benign, an elegant garland of green, but he'd seen its strength firsthand, had seen it overrun rose gardens and bury trellises and neglected fences beneath its twining vines. Rosalie gazed at it in remote silence, mind turned to a time and place he couldn't see.
I wonder who's sitting on her front porch, he thought. I wonder if she ever got to sit there, too.
He popped the last date into his mouth and lodged it beneath his tongue like a pill. He held it there until it dissolved, and then he rose and gave her shoulder a squeeze. Time to go, sweetheart. She looked up and flashed him a small, weary smile.
No lying down today, doc? her eyes said.
Not today. Not for a long while.
He led her out of the arboretum and back to sickbay, and ten minutes later, she was on the mat, sweating and floundering beneath three sets of goading, assessing hands. She grunted and groaned and strained beneath their relentless, clinical prodding, a bird snared within the tendrils of throttling kudzu vines. She never cried, never begged them to stop, but there was no light in her eyes, either, and as he knelt on the mat and ordered her to resist the press of his palm against her spine, the sweetness of Risan dates was thick and cloying on his tongue.