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i.
The girl was exhausted. Tears and dirt streaked her cheeks, and her emaciated body trembled with the effort of sitting upright. When the baby in her arms started to fuss, her face crumpled up again, lined with desperation and grief.
McCoy knelt by the pallet and lifted the newborn from her arms. "I'll take him," he said gruffly. "You get some sleep."
She didn't understand the language, but she smiled weakly and sunk into the blankets. He knew he should call a medic to bring food and water, if they could even find clean water in the cesspools they called wells on this planet. But she was out of danger now and it could wait. With her eyes closed and faced relaxed she looked like a child herself, one in dire need of a few hours of sleep.
Local custom or not, she was too damn young to be a mother, and this war-torn planet was no place to raise a kid. Maybe the baby's father was one of the dead lying beneath shrouds outside. Maybe he was one of the rebels behind bars in another building.
The baby boy - small but healthy, his shock of hair thick and dark like his mother's - squirmed and whimpered. McCoy cradled the baby in his arms like he had hundreds of times before and walked to the window.
The planet's surface was dry as dust, swept with cold wind and pockmarked with ugly, spiny bushes. But he remembered nights so hot and humid the air felt like a living thing, Spanish moss draped in trees and cicadas making a racket in the darkness, and he hummed an old, old song until mother and child were sleeping peacefully.
-
ii.
McCoy looked up at the sound of somebody delicately clearing her throat.
"Lieutenant Uhura," he said.
She hesitated in the doorway of his office with a wary glance over her shoulder. "Am I interrupting something?"
"Just a mold culture that got a little out of control," McCoy said. "No big deal." They'd stopped Cho and Borges' experiment before it managed to eat the entire lab; that was a victory in his book, never mind that the lab looked like the aftermath of a salad war and slimy green tendrils still crept along some of the walls. He gestured for Uhura to come in. "What do you need?"
She came into the office but didn't sit down. "I don't want to take up any of your time. I know you're almost off duty, so if you can point me in the direction of some information I'll be out of your way. I was going to talk to Dr. Cho but she's..." Another glance over her shoulder. "Busy."
McCoy tried to remember if he'd ever seen Uhura nervous before. They were only a couple of months into their mission, but already she'd proved she had nerves of steel on more than one occasion. She didn't seem like the type to spook at talking to a doctor either.
Not unless it was something troubling. Or embarrassing.
He really hoped this wasn't about some Vulcan sex thing.
"I've got time," he said. "What is it?"
Uhura sat down and folded her hands in her lap. "What do you know about Pujoor's disease?"
McCoy blinked. Not a Vulcan sex thing, then. He hadn't read Uhura's file - no reason to yet, she was healthy as a horse - but he'd spoken to her often enough to know a thing or two about her background. "Is it your mother?" he asked. "Or your grandmother?"
Her eyes widened in surprise, then she smiled self-consciously and shook her head. "My great-aunt, actually, but she's like a grandmother to me. How did you know?"
"Pujoor's is a virus that affects older women, mostly in eastern and sub-Saharan Africa," McCoy said. "You're a couple of decades too young for it, Lieutenant. Bad news from home?"
"I received a message from my mother yesterday," Uhura said. "My great-aunt's just been diagnosed and she's really worried. They both are. My mother doesn't trust - she doesn't know if they can trust everything the doctor's telling them."
"There's a lot of conflicting information out there about Pujoor's," McCoy began. "And the treatment has to be adapted to each patient's body chemistry. It takes some trial and error, but if they caught it early enough your great-aunt should be fine."
Uhura nodded thoughtfully. "That's what I've read. Can I ask you a few questions?" Polite as can be, like she actually expected him to say no and send her on her way.
McCoy stamped down a pang of annoyance. Maybe a distrust for doctors ran in the Uhura family. "Sure. What do you want to know?"
She didn't have a PADD with her and she wasn't consulting any notes, but she asked a series of straightforward, methodical, and very thorough questions, and she listened to each answer with the attentive look of someone who was memorizing every word. McCoy told her just about everything he knew about the progression, treatment and prognosis of Pujoor's disease, as well as what he remember about the few times he'd encountered the virus in person.
When she'd finally run out of things to ask and he'd run out of information to tell, Uhura glanced at the clock on his desk and exclaimed, "Oh, no! I'm so sorry, Doctor. You were supposed to be off duty two hours ago."
McCoy shrugged. He was never really off duty on the Enterprise, and a conversation about an ordinary virus was a big improvement on the usual queries about suspicious rashes that interrupted his free time. "There will still be food in the mess when I get there. Just a second, I've got one more thing," he said as Uhura stood up. He paged through a couple of screens on his computer. "Doctor Suri Gaur. She's a viral specialist in Cairo, knows more about Pujoor's than anybody else in the world. A day trip to Nairobi is no big deal, and she owes me a few anyway. I'll get in touch with her, tell her to expect a note from you. It can't hurt to get a second opinion."
Uhura stared at him. "You're referring my aunt to a friend of yours?"
McCoy didn't know what her problem was - maybe she thought he'd been promoted too far too fast (like everybody else on the ship) or didn't deserve to be CMO, maybe she didn't like that he was Jim Kirk's friend and partner in crime, or maybe she just didn't like doctors in general - but she didn't have to sound so damn surprised. He scowled. "I can hardly make a house call myself, can I? I'm stuck out in this tin can as much as you are, Lieutenant."
To his surprise, Uhura laughed. "I didn't mean it like that. I'm sorry, Doctor. Please don't be offended. I'm only surprised because... look, you know what most Starfleet doctors are like. They're interested in the most mysterious alien diseases or the most promising cures, and all the rest of it..." She waved her hand toward the doorway and sickbay. "All the rest of it is a nuisance. I don't think many of your colleagues would bother to know so much about a boring virus that only affects old women back on Earth, or to spend two hours of their own time talking about it when it's not even their patient who's sick."
She was smiling at him now. McCoy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "I'm a doctor," he said defensively. "Talking about diseases is what we do best. Jim says it's ghoulish."
"It is, a little bit," she said. "But thank you anyway. My mother will be relieved to have more information and another doctor to talk to."
She was still smiling when she left. McCoy guessed Mama Uhura wasn't the only one who would be sleeping a bit easier now.
He wrote up a note for Suri Gaur to include in the next databurst to Earth, then he closed up his office to head down for dinner. He had one foot out of the sickbay door when he heard a crash of glass and metal behind him, and Dr. Cho's voice saying, "Uh-oh. I think it's coming back to life."
McCoy sighed, rolled his eyes, and turned around. "What the hell is that man-eating mold of yours doing now?"
Dinner would have to wait.
-
iii.
"Let me in."
McCoy crossed his arms over his chest. "No."
"I'm going to kill him," Jim snapped. "Let me in now."
McCoy didn't budge. "That's a real persuasive argument. Let me think about it. Hmm, let's see. No. Come back later, after you've cooled off."
"Bones."
"Jim. The patient is stable but still weak. There's no way I'm gonna let you in there to blow your top off at him while he's recovering."
Jim threw his arms up dramatically and made a noise an awful lot like a growl. "The patient is a reckless, careless, idiotic, crazy fool who almost got himself killed and-"
"Funny, that sounds like somebody else I know."
"And he's only seventeen!" Jim shouted. "What the hell was he even doing fighting those bastards? He's not supposed to, that's why there was a security team. What the fuck was he thinking?"
"He was doing his job, Jim," McCoy said. "Maybe when you were seventeen you couldn't find your ass with your own two hands, but Chekov is a Starfleet officer, and he's a damn good one. The team was attacked. They fought back. It's happened before. It'll happen again."
He didn't add that he agreed with Jim on this one: Chekov was too fucking young to be out there fighting, no matter what uniform he wore. But there was nothing either of them could do about that except try to convince the kid kamikaze heroics weren't part of his job description.
Jim leaned against the wall, tilted his head back and closed his eyes. He breathed in and out quietly for a minute or so, then he said, his voice low, "That was close."
McCoy joined him against the wall, finally satisfied Jim wouldn't barge into the recovery room and start shouting. "Yeah," he said. "Too close."
Four members on the away team, four life-threatening injuries. Those weren't the kind of numbers McCoy liked in his sickbay. But life-threatening wasn't life-ending, and all four of them would recover. This time.
"You know they're making bets?" Jim said. He opened one eye and looked at McCoy with a crooked grin. He hadn't shaved or showered in a few days and there were shadows under his eyes. "Back on Earth, at the Academy, on other ships. They've got a pool running about when I'll lose my first crew member." His grin slipped a little. "Scotty tells me some folks think they're gonna collect on long odds any day now. Nobody expected it to take this long."
McCoy had as many buddies hooked into the Starfleet gossip mill as Scotty did; he knew damn well just how quickly and how spectacularly everybody from the newest crop of cadets up to the loftiest admirals was assuming Jim Kirk would fail.
He clapped his hand on Jim's shoulder. "So we've proved the fuckers wrong for another day."
Jim laughed humorlessly. "Yeah. One more day."
"And we'll do it again tomorrow." McCoy shoved him lightly. "You smell like shit, Jim, and you look worse. In six hours the meds will be wearing off and you can scold the kid all you want, but not until you get yourself cleaned up and rested."
Jim shot him a narrow look. "I thought I was the one who gave the orders around here."
McCoy patted his arm. "We just let you think that because you have so much fun sitting in the chair. Now go. I don't want to see your ugly face back here for six hours, got it?"
Jim exited sickbay, but not before making a rude gesture not quite befitting the conduct of a Starfleet captain. McCoy shook his head and went back to check on his patients.
One day at a time. It was the only way they would make it.
-
iv.
The afternoon sun dappled the garden behind the house. The window was open and old lace curtains stirred in the breeze. The climate control had to work harder to keep the room cool, but the smell of fresh-cut grass and flowers in high summer bloom made up for it.
"Len. Len, come on over here and sit down. You worry too much."
McCoy turned away from the window. "I'm not worrying," he lied. "I'm just watching the birds. Those damn robins are building a nest under the eaves again."
His father smiled, not fooled for an instant. David McCoy had once been a strong man, tall and broad-shouldered, dark hair and a charming smile. But now he was little more than a skeleton strung together by sinew and skin.
"Come sit by your old man," David said. His hair was mostly gone, his skin pasty and gray against the stark white bedclothes. "Give me a minute of your time."
"You've got all the minutes you want," McCoy said. But he pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. He didn't need the monitors and computers set up around the bed to know his father was fading fast. He could hear the painful rattle with every breath, see the unsteady way David's eyes refused to focus and his hands trembled atop the white sheets.
"You give me too many minutes," David said. "You should be at home playing with your little girl. That's more important than hanging around here watching an old man die."
McCoy didn't say, You're not dying. They both knew it wasn't true. David's body was breaking down piece by piece. The respirator breathed for him in a slow, steady rhythm; tubes and wires kept his heart pumping and his blood flowing.
"Dad," McCoy said. His usual promises and reassurances caught in his throat.
"I'm tired, Len," David said. "Tired of this whole damn thing."
McCoy reached to gently take his father's hand. David's skin was papery and dry, fragile enough to crack at the slightest scrape and too weak to mend again.
"You know what your mother used to say?" David asked.
McCoy barely remembered his mother. Ringing laughter, the smell of lilacs, pale hair in the sunshine, that was all he could recall. "What did she say?"
"She used to say, she knew we'd go somewhere else after this life, and she knew that place was a lot like Georgia in the summer. She promised to prove it to me one day." David paused for breath. It was a long moment before he spoke again. "I don't want to get a stranger in here to help," David said. His eyes crinkled closed. His breath was sharp with pain. "But I will if you want me to. There's nothing wrong with my mind. They won't refuse me this."
McCoy squeezed his father's hand lightly. David was right; even if he fought it, they wouldn't rule against him. David McCoy always won every fight he threw his hat in.
Except this one. The disease was an opponent he couldn't beat.
There were three switches on the machines. Boxes of circuits and miles of cable, centuries of medical knowledge and all the technology the twenty-third century could offer, months of painstaking research in a hundred fruitless experiments, and that was what a man's life came down to: three little switches to keep his body running when flesh and blood weren't enough anymore.
"You don't have to call anybody else, Dad," McCoy said.
-
v.
The shuttle bay was crowded and noisy, tense with nerves and excitement. Everywhere cadets in red formed groups and lines; from every direction names and orders rang over the crowds.
"Be safe," Jim said, and with a handshake McCoy walked away, following orders, falling in line to head up to the Enterprise -
(Sometime early in their second year, they met up after late labs to grab a bite to eat. They took their sandwiches out to the cool, green grass of the med center quad. The sky was clear, rare for San Francisco, and Jim had flopped onto his back, stretched out long and said, "You know what Professor Reyes told me today?"
McCoy had leaned back onto his elbows. "What?"
"She said she didn't expect me to come back this year. Figured I'd wash out or get kicked out."
A year before, McCoy might have agreed with her; Jim Kirk hadn't exactly settled into the Academy with the smoothest of transitions. But now he only snorted and asked, "What'd you tell her?"
Even in the darkness he could see Jim's smile, but his voice was serious when he answered. "I told her she couldn't get rid of me that easily." He paused for a moment. "I never even used to think about it. It was too much trouble to care. I never really wanted anything before, you know?"
McCoy had wanted a lot of things in his life, and most of the ones he'd gotten had slipped away. He said nothing.
"But this," Jim went on. He pointed lazily at the stars. "Wanting that. To be up there. To go there, however far it goes. That's different.")
- and he stopped.
Turned around. Marched back and grabbed Jim's arm. "Come with me," he said, and when Jim gave him his best Bones, you are a crazy man, let me go look and demanded to know what was going on, he only said, "I couldn't just leave you there looking all pathetic."
It wasn't the kind of explanation their superiors would look too kindly upon, but it was good enough for Jim. McCoy would worry about everybody else later.