Then Comes Spock, 5/15
Title: Then Comes Spock: Down to the Bones
Author: teaoli
Characters: McCoy, Spock, Uhura, Ambassador Spock, Sarek, OFC, Enterprise ensemble
Summary: The Enterprise has completed its first mission & its senior crew have settled into their roles. Unusual circumstances send Spock and Uhura to the Vulcan colony. Sequel to Don’t Lose Your Compass, which is also available somewhere on lj and might even eventually make it to my journal.
( Read Hybridogenesis )
( Read Clarity )
( Read Business as Usual )
( Read First Comes Love )
“Alright, Sawbones. Start talking.”
McCoy looked from his glass of thirty-year old scotch and frowned.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. What did you call me?” he asked the pretty lieutenant glaring at him from across the neatly empty recreation room. “And what exactly do you expect me to say to you?”
He’d chosen this particular lounge because, in spite of the comfortable faux-leather armchairs, simulated fireplace and book-lined walls, its lack of viewscreen to play a facsimile of the heavenly bodies gliding by the starship, its small size and generally poor acoustics for musical recordings and performances meant it wasn’t very popular. He could reasonably expect to spend an evening alone with his whisky whenever he retreated to what the crew had inevitably dubbed the Bone Locker.
“‘Sawbones,’” she quoted herself before pushing away from the closed door and moving towards the pair of brandy colored chairs flanking a small round table apparently carved from aged maple.
She lifted his bottle to peer at the label, then quirked up an eyebrow in an unconscious imitation of her damned husband.
“Sawbones,” she said again. “‘Terran English; colloquial, antiquated: a surgeon or physician.’ Coined at a time when surgeons were considered little more than butchers, whose main duties were seen to be the amputation of limbs, rather than the respected practitioners we view them as today.”
She plopped into the seat next to his and crossed her arms again.
“I take it you’re displeased with me tonight?” he asked, dryly. He took a sip of whisky.
“I’ve been displeased with you for a lot longer than just tonight.” She actually harrumphed at this. “This is just my first opportunity to talk to you about it, uninterrupted. Spill.”
He stared at her in, if not complete, then at least abject, confusion. There were a number of things going on lately that might have upset her. For all he knew, it could have been simply the fact that he was a member of the gender she deemed responsible for the current state of her figure.
Not that she had anything to worry about, he noted after a quick glance at the long legs issuing forth from her short regulation skirt. So what if those legs were now topped with a round bump centered on her middle. She was still fine-looking woman. Looking at her was more than easy on the eyes; it was balm for the soul. Her green-blooded hobgoblin probably didn’t know how good he had it. Then again, McCoy figured, he probably did.
The boy was cold, not stupid. Or blind.
“Which of the myriad of things we men undoubtedly do wrong, each and every day, do I stand accused of?” he asked. “I will endeavor to make it up to the lady, if I can’t undo it.”
Uhura smiled in spite of herself. She genuinely loved the cranky man seated next to her, and had tried numerous times to fix him up with a suitably tolerant woman. But his ex-wife had done a number on him that, so far, he hadn’t been able to let any other woman undo. Not quite. And she wasn’t sure she wanted him anywhere near the only one to have ever come close.
“I’d like to know why Spock has to go to T’Khasi Vokaya to let their doctors poke and pry at his gonads when you and your staff could just as easily do so here,” she said, her expression darkening. “Bones, he really doesn’t want to go. He’ll do it because Starfleet ordered the tests, but he really doesn’t want to go back there. Not for this.”
McCoy leaned back in his chair. He ran a finger around the rim of his glass as he thought up an appropriate reply. Unable to come up with one, he decided to make do with an inappropriate one.
“Woman, what in god’s name makes you think I, or any other medical professional on this ship, would want to fiddle around with your husband’s family jewels?”
Uhura bit back a laugh as the image of just such a medical professional crossed her mind. The same image leapt into Bones’s as he watched her struggle not to grin.
“She don’t count!” he snapped, and the reference to a certain blonde nurse caused them both to lose the battle to maintain composure.
It felt good to laugh. There weren’t many people who made him want to these days, Bones acknowledged as he roared alongside Uhura. His days of easy conviviality had gone out the same door his ex-wife had slammed in his face. He’d made new friends over the past nine years, first at the Academy, later on the Enterprise. But a slow chill would probably sneak up on Hades before he felt like the wildly fun-loving man he’d been before his marriage.
Uhura was breathless by the time she steered him back on track.
“Seriously, Len. Why won’t you do it here? I won’t believe you if you tell me you can’t. And don’t give me any nonsense about pointy ears or green blood, either. I know you two have secret man-crushes on each other. What gives?”
Much as he’d rather not be the one to have this conversation, he hated to disappoint the person who was his closest friend next to Jim Kirk. The fact that she was four months knocked up and as likely to dissolve into tears as she was to throw a right hook helped ease his decision.
“Darlin’, I don’t have to tell you what this could mean to Vulcan repopulation efforts,” he said.
For the space of a long sip and a longer moment he was quiet, searching for the most diplomatic way to explain his dilemma. Diplomacy wasn’t exactly his specialty.
“For us, this isn’t much more than an interesting puzzle, hog-tied to a happy event,” he eventually came up with. “For them, it could a mean a radical new take on how they go about rebuilding their race.”
Uhura leaned forward, and rested her hands on her knees. Shoulders drooping and head tilted toward the floor, she looked at McCoy out of the corner of her eyes.
“I know,” she whispered, then sighed. “Spock knows it, too. But that doesn’t explain why you can’t just do your studies here and then send them your findings. It doesn’t explain why I have to put up with Spock’s voice making an android sound passionate in comparison every time we talk about going.”
“Your pointy-eared lovebug always sounds like an android!” Bones told her.
She aimed that mean right hook at the arm attached to hand holding the glass of thirty-year-old scotch.
“Maybe it’s like with RPGs.”
Spock’s eyebrow slid up. The left one. Uhura, her head in his lap, smiled up at him and ran a finger over it.
“Rocket propelled grenades?”
“Role-playing games,” she corrected with a laugh. “Very popular on Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries, I believe. They were usually set in one imagined fantasy-world or another. Was that redundant? ‘Imagined fantasy world’?”
“Nyota…”
“Anyway, players adopted the personae of individual characters who were members of several available races. Fantasy races, of course,” she said cheerfully.
She raised both eyebrows, waiting for him to speak.
“Indeed,” Spock replied after a pause.
Usually, Spock would have preferred to stay silent until a person made her point, but he knew Nyota desired a response from him. She wasn’t trying to fundamentally change him, he knew, but she did want him to at least be more aware of, and therefore more comfortable with, typical human conversation patterns. Usually, her lessons were limited to moments when they were alone and had nothing of consequence to discuss. She used non-verbal cues to alert him to her “teaching moments.”
Usually, he was a willing student. Tonight, already having sensed where this conversation was going - most of her non sequiturs of late had to do with the reasons behind their upcoming trip to T’Khasi Vokaya - he was feeling less inclined towards tractability. Clearly, however, she would not continue without further encouragement from him.
As was often the case, when it pertained to the ways in which his bond-mate’s mind worked, curiosity had won over impatience.
“And how are the circumstances played out in this game similar to our own?” he asked. He pulled her body more fully onto his lap, and relaxed his customary posture to snuggle with her on the common area sofa.
“In many of the games, I think… or in at least one of the worlds in one of the games… Let me explain about the races, first,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his chest. She let out a soft purr at the feel of soft fabric against her skin. She really did love what she thought of as Spock’s leisure-wear.
“The races, Nyota?”
“Hmmm? Oh yes, each world usually had at least three races of people. The good, the bad and the in-between. Or something like that. Humans and elves -” She felt him tense slightly at the word elves. “- were almost always were two of the races. And sometimes, they mated. The resulting children were called half-elves.”
He stroked the growing belly hidden beneath her black night gown - really one the shirts he preferred to wear while off duty, but he’d long since come to terms with the idea that she liked wearing his clothes. When he’d offered to procure identical ones for her sole use, she’d explained that she enjoyed wearing the shirts as much because they were his as she did because they were comfortable. Now, he thought idly, he rather enjoyed seeing her wearing it. He kissed her forehead.
She continued without demanding of him more concrete feedback.
“When half-elves had children of their own - at least in some of the worlds - with a human or with an elf, they didn’t end up with quarter-humans, or quarter-elves. The children were either one or the other,” she told him sleepily. “The genetics don’t make sense if you only consider the human model of sex determination. But that’s how it worked, at least in some of those worlds.”
“That scenario differs completely from ours,” he said quietly. The ministrations of his hands were, as he had hoped, lulling her to sleep. “If we were to follow the model of these… fantasy worlds, we would expect our children to be fully human, would we not?”
“Yeah, but I just meant… you know, the part about the genetics not making sense.” She was near enough to sleep that she fumbled and slurred her words slightly. “And you, you know, you’re sort of like a half-elf. Why should you make sense?”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Doctor McCoy,” he whispered to his sleep-silly mate.
She giggled softly as he picked her up and carried her to their sleeping chamber.
McCoy couldn’t sleep. He stared out into the darkness of his sleeping alcove. Three hours ago, he’d been laughing. Not the fake, kiss-ass - polite laughter - expected of him whenever Jim dragged him off to some official social event. I wasn’t the Gotcha! cackle of triumph that flew out on the (very few) occasions he’d managed to stump Spock, or at least trip him up with his own logic. It wasn’t even the sometimes derisive/sometimes rueful chuckle that often burbled out of his chest after seeing Jim Kirk slip into skirt-chasing mode again. No, it was god’s honest, bust-a-gut, piss-your-pants, glad-to-be-alive-and-Damn! -do-I-feel-good laughter.
The only person who shared that kind of laughter with him these days was probably never going to talk to him again. That is, she’d never talk to him again if she managed to keep her hands from wrapping around his neck next time she saw him.
“For us, this isn’t much more than an interesting puzzle, hog-tied to a happy event,” he’d said. “For them, it could a mean a radical new take on how they go about rebuilding their race.”
At first, when she’d sat forward and started staring at the floor, he’d been afraid she was about to start crying.
Call him what you will, and McCoy suspected most called him a sour old cuss behind his back, he was a sucker for a lady in tears. He didn’t have time for whining women, but he couldn’t bear to see a lady like the lieutenant in cry.
“I know.” Her voice had been so low, he’d had to strain to hear it. She looked at him out of the corners of dry, but sad, eyes. “Spock knows it, too. But that doesn’t explain why you can’t just do your studies here and send them your findings. It doesn’t explain why I have to put up with Spock’s voice making an android sound passionate in comparison every time we talk about going.”
“Your pointy-eared lovebug always sounds like an android!” he’d said, and she’d thrown a punch that’d nearly made him drop his whisky.
They’d laughed a little then, but it hadn’t been the same as before. Besides, she’d gotten serious again, pretty quick.
So he’d done the only thing his whisky-addled brain could come up with at the time. He’d told her the truth.
“Ambassador Sarek asked me to send him his son.”
She’d gotten that look in her eye. The one that said “I know you’re as warm as oven-fresh peach cobbler under all that crust.” But Bones was sure she’d see things differently in the morning.
Their friendship was good as dead, soon as she had time to think things over. Or as soon as the damned hormones started working their magic again.
Pretty certain he would be kicking himself for what he was about to do before the night was over, but equally certain he wasn’t going to get much sleep until he got it over with, McCoy climbed out of bed.
He pulled uniform pants over his pajama bottoms and jammed his feet into a pair of leather slippers.
He left his quarters before he could change his mind.
Several corridors and two turbolift trips later, he found himself facing a couple of junior communications officers.
“Which one of you is awake enough to put me in touch with Ambassador Sarek on the Vulcan colony?”
A considerable advantage of being chief communications officer, as well as a dab hand utilizing and manipulating the tools of the trade, was not needing anyone’s assistance when making ship to planet transmissions over vast expanses of space.
Leonard McCoy was long gone from the main communications center by the time Lieutenant Uhura entered and gave the two junior officers on duty a unexpected break.
Ten minutes after their cheerful exit amid promises to return in an hour - they’d both heard of the odd sleeping habits of expectant mothers and were not shocked to see their chief so early in the morning, though her offer of relief was something of a surprise - she was sitting in her private office and had initiated contact and was gazing at the face her husband across huge distances of both time and space.
“Ambassador Spock,” she said. “Can you tell me why my husband is terrified at the thought of going anywhere near your people?”
Next chapter...
Author: teaoli
Characters: McCoy, Spock, Uhura, Ambassador Spock, Sarek, OFC, Enterprise ensemble
Summary: The Enterprise has completed its first mission & its senior crew have settled into their roles. Unusual circumstances send Spock and Uhura to the Vulcan colony. Sequel to Don’t Lose Your Compass, which is also available somewhere on lj and might even eventually make it to my journal.
( Read Hybridogenesis )
( Read Clarity )
( Read Business as Usual )
( Read First Comes Love )
“Alright, Sawbones. Start talking.”
McCoy looked from his glass of thirty-year old scotch and frowned.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. What did you call me?” he asked the pretty lieutenant glaring at him from across the neatly empty recreation room. “And what exactly do you expect me to say to you?”
He’d chosen this particular lounge because, in spite of the comfortable faux-leather armchairs, simulated fireplace and book-lined walls, its lack of viewscreen to play a facsimile of the heavenly bodies gliding by the starship, its small size and generally poor acoustics for musical recordings and performances meant it wasn’t very popular. He could reasonably expect to spend an evening alone with his whisky whenever he retreated to what the crew had inevitably dubbed the Bone Locker.
“‘Sawbones,’” she quoted herself before pushing away from the closed door and moving towards the pair of brandy colored chairs flanking a small round table apparently carved from aged maple.
She lifted his bottle to peer at the label, then quirked up an eyebrow in an unconscious imitation of her damned husband.
“Sawbones,” she said again. “‘Terran English; colloquial, antiquated: a surgeon or physician.’ Coined at a time when surgeons were considered little more than butchers, whose main duties were seen to be the amputation of limbs, rather than the respected practitioners we view them as today.”
She plopped into the seat next to his and crossed her arms again.
“I take it you’re displeased with me tonight?” he asked, dryly. He took a sip of whisky.
“I’ve been displeased with you for a lot longer than just tonight.” She actually harrumphed at this. “This is just my first opportunity to talk to you about it, uninterrupted. Spill.”
He stared at her in, if not complete, then at least abject, confusion. There were a number of things going on lately that might have upset her. For all he knew, it could have been simply the fact that he was a member of the gender she deemed responsible for the current state of her figure.
Not that she had anything to worry about, he noted after a quick glance at the long legs issuing forth from her short regulation skirt. So what if those legs were now topped with a round bump centered on her middle. She was still fine-looking woman. Looking at her was more than easy on the eyes; it was balm for the soul. Her green-blooded hobgoblin probably didn’t know how good he had it. Then again, McCoy figured, he probably did.
The boy was cold, not stupid. Or blind.
“Which of the myriad of things we men undoubtedly do wrong, each and every day, do I stand accused of?” he asked. “I will endeavor to make it up to the lady, if I can’t undo it.”
Uhura smiled in spite of herself. She genuinely loved the cranky man seated next to her, and had tried numerous times to fix him up with a suitably tolerant woman. But his ex-wife had done a number on him that, so far, he hadn’t been able to let any other woman undo. Not quite. And she wasn’t sure she wanted him anywhere near the only one to have ever come close.
“I’d like to know why Spock has to go to T’Khasi Vokaya to let their doctors poke and pry at his gonads when you and your staff could just as easily do so here,” she said, her expression darkening. “Bones, he really doesn’t want to go. He’ll do it because Starfleet ordered the tests, but he really doesn’t want to go back there. Not for this.”
McCoy leaned back in his chair. He ran a finger around the rim of his glass as he thought up an appropriate reply. Unable to come up with one, he decided to make do with an inappropriate one.
“Woman, what in god’s name makes you think I, or any other medical professional on this ship, would want to fiddle around with your husband’s family jewels?”
Uhura bit back a laugh as the image of just such a medical professional crossed her mind. The same image leapt into Bones’s as he watched her struggle not to grin.
“She don’t count!” he snapped, and the reference to a certain blonde nurse caused them both to lose the battle to maintain composure.
It felt good to laugh. There weren’t many people who made him want to these days, Bones acknowledged as he roared alongside Uhura. His days of easy conviviality had gone out the same door his ex-wife had slammed in his face. He’d made new friends over the past nine years, first at the Academy, later on the Enterprise. But a slow chill would probably sneak up on Hades before he felt like the wildly fun-loving man he’d been before his marriage.
Uhura was breathless by the time she steered him back on track.
“Seriously, Len. Why won’t you do it here? I won’t believe you if you tell me you can’t. And don’t give me any nonsense about pointy ears or green blood, either. I know you two have secret man-crushes on each other. What gives?”
Much as he’d rather not be the one to have this conversation, he hated to disappoint the person who was his closest friend next to Jim Kirk. The fact that she was four months knocked up and as likely to dissolve into tears as she was to throw a right hook helped ease his decision.
“Darlin’, I don’t have to tell you what this could mean to Vulcan repopulation efforts,” he said.
For the space of a long sip and a longer moment he was quiet, searching for the most diplomatic way to explain his dilemma. Diplomacy wasn’t exactly his specialty.
“For us, this isn’t much more than an interesting puzzle, hog-tied to a happy event,” he eventually came up with. “For them, it could a mean a radical new take on how they go about rebuilding their race.”
Uhura leaned forward, and rested her hands on her knees. Shoulders drooping and head tilted toward the floor, she looked at McCoy out of the corner of her eyes.
“I know,” she whispered, then sighed. “Spock knows it, too. But that doesn’t explain why you can’t just do your studies here and then send them your findings. It doesn’t explain why I have to put up with Spock’s voice making an android sound passionate in comparison every time we talk about going.”
“Your pointy-eared lovebug always sounds like an android!” Bones told her.
She aimed that mean right hook at the arm attached to hand holding the glass of thirty-year-old scotch.
“Maybe it’s like with RPGs.”
Spock’s eyebrow slid up. The left one. Uhura, her head in his lap, smiled up at him and ran a finger over it.
“Rocket propelled grenades?”
“Role-playing games,” she corrected with a laugh. “Very popular on Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries, I believe. They were usually set in one imagined fantasy-world or another. Was that redundant? ‘Imagined fantasy world’?”
“Nyota…”
“Anyway, players adopted the personae of individual characters who were members of several available races. Fantasy races, of course,” she said cheerfully.
She raised both eyebrows, waiting for him to speak.
“Indeed,” Spock replied after a pause.
Usually, Spock would have preferred to stay silent until a person made her point, but he knew Nyota desired a response from him. She wasn’t trying to fundamentally change him, he knew, but she did want him to at least be more aware of, and therefore more comfortable with, typical human conversation patterns. Usually, her lessons were limited to moments when they were alone and had nothing of consequence to discuss. She used non-verbal cues to alert him to her “teaching moments.”
Usually, he was a willing student. Tonight, already having sensed where this conversation was going - most of her non sequiturs of late had to do with the reasons behind their upcoming trip to T’Khasi Vokaya - he was feeling less inclined towards tractability. Clearly, however, she would not continue without further encouragement from him.
As was often the case, when it pertained to the ways in which his bond-mate’s mind worked, curiosity had won over impatience.
“And how are the circumstances played out in this game similar to our own?” he asked. He pulled her body more fully onto his lap, and relaxed his customary posture to snuggle with her on the common area sofa.
“In many of the games, I think… or in at least one of the worlds in one of the games… Let me explain about the races, first,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his chest. She let out a soft purr at the feel of soft fabric against her skin. She really did love what she thought of as Spock’s leisure-wear.
“The races, Nyota?”
“Hmmm? Oh yes, each world usually had at least three races of people. The good, the bad and the in-between. Or something like that. Humans and elves -” She felt him tense slightly at the word elves. “- were almost always were two of the races. And sometimes, they mated. The resulting children were called half-elves.”
He stroked the growing belly hidden beneath her black night gown - really one the shirts he preferred to wear while off duty, but he’d long since come to terms with the idea that she liked wearing his clothes. When he’d offered to procure identical ones for her sole use, she’d explained that she enjoyed wearing the shirts as much because they were his as she did because they were comfortable. Now, he thought idly, he rather enjoyed seeing her wearing it. He kissed her forehead.
She continued without demanding of him more concrete feedback.
“When half-elves had children of their own - at least in some of the worlds - with a human or with an elf, they didn’t end up with quarter-humans, or quarter-elves. The children were either one or the other,” she told him sleepily. “The genetics don’t make sense if you only consider the human model of sex determination. But that’s how it worked, at least in some of those worlds.”
“That scenario differs completely from ours,” he said quietly. The ministrations of his hands were, as he had hoped, lulling her to sleep. “If we were to follow the model of these… fantasy worlds, we would expect our children to be fully human, would we not?”
“Yeah, but I just meant… you know, the part about the genetics not making sense.” She was near enough to sleep that she fumbled and slurred her words slightly. “And you, you know, you’re sort of like a half-elf. Why should you make sense?”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Doctor McCoy,” he whispered to his sleep-silly mate.
She giggled softly as he picked her up and carried her to their sleeping chamber.
McCoy couldn’t sleep. He stared out into the darkness of his sleeping alcove. Three hours ago, he’d been laughing. Not the fake, kiss-ass - polite laughter - expected of him whenever Jim dragged him off to some official social event. I wasn’t the Gotcha! cackle of triumph that flew out on the (very few) occasions he’d managed to stump Spock, or at least trip him up with his own logic. It wasn’t even the sometimes derisive/sometimes rueful chuckle that often burbled out of his chest after seeing Jim Kirk slip into skirt-chasing mode again. No, it was god’s honest, bust-a-gut, piss-your-pants, glad-to-be-alive-and-Damn! -do-I-feel-good laughter.
The only person who shared that kind of laughter with him these days was probably never going to talk to him again. That is, she’d never talk to him again if she managed to keep her hands from wrapping around his neck next time she saw him.
“For us, this isn’t much more than an interesting puzzle, hog-tied to a happy event,” he’d said. “For them, it could a mean a radical new take on how they go about rebuilding their race.”
At first, when she’d sat forward and started staring at the floor, he’d been afraid she was about to start crying.
Call him what you will, and McCoy suspected most called him a sour old cuss behind his back, he was a sucker for a lady in tears. He didn’t have time for whining women, but he couldn’t bear to see a lady like the lieutenant in cry.
“I know.” Her voice had been so low, he’d had to strain to hear it. She looked at him out of the corners of dry, but sad, eyes. “Spock knows it, too. But that doesn’t explain why you can’t just do your studies here and send them your findings. It doesn’t explain why I have to put up with Spock’s voice making an android sound passionate in comparison every time we talk about going.”
“Your pointy-eared lovebug always sounds like an android!” he’d said, and she’d thrown a punch that’d nearly made him drop his whisky.
They’d laughed a little then, but it hadn’t been the same as before. Besides, she’d gotten serious again, pretty quick.
So he’d done the only thing his whisky-addled brain could come up with at the time. He’d told her the truth.
“Ambassador Sarek asked me to send him his son.”
She’d gotten that look in her eye. The one that said “I know you’re as warm as oven-fresh peach cobbler under all that crust.” But Bones was sure she’d see things differently in the morning.
Their friendship was good as dead, soon as she had time to think things over. Or as soon as the damned hormones started working their magic again.
Pretty certain he would be kicking himself for what he was about to do before the night was over, but equally certain he wasn’t going to get much sleep until he got it over with, McCoy climbed out of bed.
He pulled uniform pants over his pajama bottoms and jammed his feet into a pair of leather slippers.
He left his quarters before he could change his mind.
Several corridors and two turbolift trips later, he found himself facing a couple of junior communications officers.
“Which one of you is awake enough to put me in touch with Ambassador Sarek on the Vulcan colony?”
A considerable advantage of being chief communications officer, as well as a dab hand utilizing and manipulating the tools of the trade, was not needing anyone’s assistance when making ship to planet transmissions over vast expanses of space.
Leonard McCoy was long gone from the main communications center by the time Lieutenant Uhura entered and gave the two junior officers on duty a unexpected break.
Ten minutes after their cheerful exit amid promises to return in an hour - they’d both heard of the odd sleeping habits of expectant mothers and were not shocked to see their chief so early in the morning, though her offer of relief was something of a surprise - she was sitting in her private office and had initiated contact and was gazing at the face her husband across huge distances of both time and space.
“Ambassador Spock,” she said. “Can you tell me why my husband is terrified at the thought of going anywhere near your people?”
Next chapter...