Chapter 2: Bones
Leonard McCoy stops trusting the world when he's seven. It's the middle of summer and the sun seems to be doing it's best to set all of Georgia on fire the way it beats down. The temperatures aren't even dropping at night. He's staying at his aunt's house for the summer because his Momma is in the hospital for the third time this pregnancy and his Poppa is getting called all over the planet for doctoring things. It's not bad. For all that Leonard's a city kid, he loves his aunt's house on its acres of lush green grass and the apple orchard out back. He and his multitude of cousins - this appears to be the summer of sending kids to relatives houses - have free reign of the land.
It's brilliant.
One particularly hot day, ten-year-old Cynthia declares that they should make a raft and take it down the creek. She is the oldest of their little group, the same as Leonard and cousin David are the youngest, and is usually the one to make all the big decisions about what they should play. Everyone agrees. Their older cousins, the teenagers, have been telling them stories about doing the same thing, and it's not like the kids haven't been playing in the creek all summer. So they take some old boards and rope from the barn, and gather fallen branches from the orchard, and manage to argue together a rickety little raft that just barely holds all of them.
Bonus: it floats.
So the five kids play around with the raft, dragging it over rocks where the creek is shallow and having fun trying to balance when they're actually over water deep enough that none of the raft is touching the bottom. They don't notice when the creek widens out or gets consistently deep enough that even Cynthia would be able to stand on the bottom and still be underwater. They can all swim anyway, because no one unable to swim was allowed in the creek.
They do notice when the creek spits them out in the Chattahoochee River and that's when things start to go wrong. They're miles from home and the river here is fast and deep, sweeping the suddenly panicking children and their rickety raft farther downstream. Downstream, where water churns foamy white around the boulders that line several sharp and terrifying drops. The raft, held together with luck and childhood dreams, come apart under the onslaught and only four children wash up on the shore.
Leonard spends the night in a hospital for the first time, attends his first funeral, and returns home to a baby sister who will never get to meet her big brother's best friend.
When he's nine, his family moves from the high-rises of Atlanta to a small house with a single stall and paddock out back. He receives a horse for his tenth birthday. He treats her like she's made of gold, brushing her every day and riding whenever the weather permits. He keeps his grades up only because those are the conditions of keeping her. When he's eleven, cousin Cynthia drags him out of school early and dares him to eat some alien meal that involves live food. After he's finished vomiting up anything he's eaten ever, she tells him that she's joining Starfleet just as soon as she's old enough. A few months later when the adults start asking, Leonard says nothing about where she's gone.
Cynthia took David's death the hardest, after all.
Leonard graduates early and spends his first semester in college poking at the sciences before finally deciding to follow his father into medicine. The medical school he wants to get into is quite competitive, so he takes the initiative to sign up for an internship that sends students to work on isolated colony worlds in exchange for college credit and work experience. This is where he learns that he suffers from aviophobia and absolutely loathes space travel.
Working on Tarsus IV where he is assigned is pleasant enough. The doctor there was just going to have him doing paperwork and the like, but Leonard knows a lot about medicine from his father and is a quick study on his own, so he's bumped up to unofficial nurse with the stipulation that patients get to choose if they're comfortable with it. The tech out here can be a bit fritzy, even the higher quality medical equipment, so Leonard learns natural remedies from little old ladies who have lived on this rock since the colony was founded, learns how to splint sprains and set bones when the regenerators aren't working. Sutures become his specialty along with cheering up kids with the sniffles.
Mostly he deals with the sniffles and patches up this one kid who apparently doesn't know how to stop getting into fights. He likes the work he does, feels accomplished at the end of the day, and doesn't take the first ride back to Earth when it's offered.
Somewhere in there, he makes friends with an eccentric engineer who makes moonshine whiskey in his living room and uses homemade transporter tech to turn it into liquid ambrosia. The guy's a nut who won't stop talking about the deathtrap he's planning on building or the insane theory he's going to kill himself proving, but they wind up spending at least one evening a week together. It's why he tells the man about blight when no one else has seen him for several days. No one seems worried about it. The little old ladies Leonard makes tea for say that this sort of thing happens every once and a while. It's no big deal.
Leonard is nineteen, human, male, and with the exception of a few horse related injuries and a near-death, river induced nasty childhood flu, has been healthy his entire life. He has experience as a doctor and, while he has a habit of having a drink at the local bar while being underage according to colony law, he's never been arrested for it. His records are clean. When his ration card comes, it's green.