ooc: Profile
History:
Once upon a time in the future, Leonard McCoy was just an average doctor with multiple initials after his last name from all his degrees. So maybe not that average, when you think about it. He graduated from Ole Miss, but otherwise he’s about as Georgian as Coca Cola. He settled down with a woman named Jocelyn and even had a daughter named Joanna, but the settling didn’t last very long before life threw a massive wrench in the works.
His father caught a terrible, incurable disease. Leonard tried his best to find a cure for it, but to no avail. After some time, the pain got too much for his father to bear, so he plead for Leonard to put him out of his misery. More stalling ensued, but eventually, Leonard buckled under the pressure and acquiesced. He’d have a hell of a time convincing everyone else, but he was convinced he did a merciful thing, as hard as it was. Well. Up until someone else found a cure for that disease.
Exactly three months later.
Now, this is just speculation, but if anything’ll put a lot of stress on a marriage, something wretched like that would be just the thing to do it. In the end, the bonds of holy matrimony turned bitter before breaking entirely. Jocelyn divorced him, taking ‘the whole damn planet’ with her as she went. Despite being about as scared of space as most humans are scared of sharks, Leonard up and joined Starfleet. A bit of a rush decision, too, considering he didn’t even have time to get his nice red uniform in order.
In between ranting and raving about the horrible safety hazards on a transport ship, he met Jim Kirk. And somewhere between the way up and the way down, he found himself a friend and an unshakable nickname to go along with it. He’s been called Bones so often by now that sometimes he has trouble thinking of himself as Leonard, not gonna lie. But getting back to where I was going before, Jim and Bones ended up raising hell during their three years of Starfleet Academy training. Well, more precisely, Jim ended up raising hell and Bones got dragged right along with him. Although Bones *did* once punch out an admiral while he was a cadet, so take his complaints with a grain of salt.
When assignments came in, Bones got assigned to the Enterprise with relatively little fuss. Jim, however, was stuck on dry land until his academy hearing was resolved. (Turns out Starfleet didn’t like their cadets cheating on unbeatable tests. Who knew?) This left Bones with a very difficult dilemma, and by difficult I mean ‘turned around within two seconds and snuck Jim onto the Enterprise’. Of course, said sneaking involved injected Jim with a vaccine to fake an illness and then treating Jim’s notorious allergies for the rest of the day. Still, he was kind enough to point out the Enterprise on the shuttle there, so that totally makes up for it.
From this point on, his role in the plot diminishes. Oh, he’s always around, but mostly just as an advocate for Jim. When Jim storms onto the bridge raving about Romulans, Bones is already trying to intercept him and intercede on his behalf. When Spock maroons Jim on Delta Vega, Bones picks a fight with a very badly chosen metaphor. In between, he inherits the role of Chief Medical Officer when the previous one bites the space dust due to the previously mentioned Romulans,He takes care of Pike when he’s rescued and various Vulcans when their planet isn’t. And when the whole messy business is over, he sticks along on the Enterprise as Chief Medical Officer.
Not bad for a simple country doctor, huh?
Personality:
Since McCoy’s a doctor, he tends to do most of his battles with words instead of phasers. He’s a very stubborn man who won’t give up the argument until he’s done CPR on it twice just to be sure it’s really over. He’s acerbic and grouchy, as if he’s permanently woken up on the wrong side of bed and he needs alcohol to approach sober. He speaks eyerolls and raised eyebrows like a second language, which isn’t too surprising considering some of the brain trust he’s found himself surrounded by. The kind of people who willingly disassemble their atoms to boldly go where no one sane’s gone before deserve all the help they can get. McCoy just specializes in a very sarcastic kind of help.
Emotion rules McCoy, so much so that logic’s long given up and gone on permanent vacation. McCoy’s a very passionate, hotblooded person. He can’t stand around and be levelheaded when there’s a crisis. And when he’s on the Enterprise, there’s *always* a crisis. McCoy thinks fast, which is easy enough since he relies so heavily on gut feeling. If someone doesn’t keep up, he’s not going to take the time and slow down. Still, it’s more easy to earn a good sniping than his much more serious ire. He’s got coal of morality stoking all that fire. The right thing is more important to him than the reasonable thing, any day of the week. It doesn’t matter how far up the chain of command or the excuses given; when someone’s spreading around serious wrong and a side of shade, McCoy’s the first in line to call them out on it.
He snipes because he cares. Not just a superficial, easily faked care, but the kind that cuts right to the bone (har har). Oh, sure, he treats his patients well, but that goes standard for any CMO who wants to keep their job. It’s not enough to cure a disease or treat an illness for him. He genuinely wants the people around him have less suck-filled lives. He’ll bitch about Jim not taking care of himself all day long because if he doesn’t nobody will. He’ll argue with Spock about emotions over logic because he’ll make himself miserable the way he’s acting now. Well, also because he deserves it, but partially the misery thing. If a friend’s depressed, he’ll offer words of encouragement, and if the words he has in mind won’t work, then he won’t hesitate to go get someone who’s words *will*.
McCoy acts like he’s fighting a grudge match against the universe. Most of the time, it feels like the universe is winning. He simply refuses to give up another inch. He’s tenacious to the point it starts twisting around from a virtue into a serious flaw. Just because he’s willing to argue doesn’t mean he’s automatically correct, and he nurses his bitterness the way most people try to push it aside. McCoy’s completely aware of his willingness to go to the wall for his friends, and that only makes him grumble even more about it. He’s a cactus with the soul of a teddy bear, and he’d prefer it if the teddy bear part stayed underwraps. Of course, ‘prefer’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘can’. Spend more than ten minutes with him and his compassion’s as obvious as a lens flare added during post production.
Third Person Sample:
Most engineers knew Newton’s Laws like the way through Jefferies Tubes, but Bones’d put his faith behind Murphy’s Law any day of the week. He could count on one hand the number of missions that didn’t end with at least one person sent to Sickbay with a previously incurable illness, some kind of spore induced trip gone south, nearly fatal head injuries, or a rapidly spreading virus. On bad days, all of them happened at once. On the really bad days, all of them happened to the same person. On the worst days, they all happened to Jim. What possessed people to come up here on this little intergalactic field trip through the wonders of Everything Is Going to Kill You, Bones didn’t really know. Frankly, he didn’t want to know. Of course, Bones ended up on the Enterprise just the same as them, so he’d started to wonder if the joke was really on him.
They saw a strange planet and immediately thought of all the fun ways they could get themselves murdered climbing mountains. Climb it because it’s there, because nobody’d been there before, because maybe those mountains were made of diamonds, hell if he knew, he just knew that as sure as Jim’d swagger through the hallways like he owned the place, there’d be an excuse for it. When Bones saw those very same mountains, all he could see were the traps. The loose foothold that’d send an ensign into a crevice before anyone could reach out to grab him. The shuttle just guaranteed to lead to motion sickness on the way down and the bends on the way up. All the viruses put to paper and all the ones just waiting for the right condition to start royally screwing with immune systems from here to kingdom come.
Bones’ job wasn’t to go exploring, to find new and interesting rocks to write home about, to get poked with sharpened sticks by Klingons, to make nice to diplomats. His job was to fix up the crew when all those traps sprung open at once.