Theoretical Physics

[madimpossibledreamer]

Cut sentence as things got shuffled and moving a whole lot faster than intended: Uhura agrees, and then at McCoy’s incredulous eyebrow she adds, “That’s a...future version of Spock, I think? From a timeline that no longer exists. He didn’t share too many of the details.”

Main Points:
Star Trek (the 2009!movie verse) Cambion AU (New Genesis)
Summary: McCoy gets his answers.
Word Count: 1742
Rating: Teen

 

        McCoy didn’t particularly expect to find Uhura punishing a punching bag, but perhaps expectations are a slightly unrealistic thing to have when it comes to the Enterprise. “Nice form.”
        “Thank you.” She doesn’t even pause, and doesn’t sound out of breath. “I assume there’s a reason you came looking for me?”
        This had better not be some sort of test, too. “The Captain said I should come to you for answers, and you seem like the sanest one on this crazy ship.”
        She laughs, but finally stops, going for the water bottle. “I’m afraid there you’re wrong, Doctor. Welcome to Wonderland.”
        He raises his eyebrows. Why are they all trying to warn him off this? Surely the truth can’t be that unusual. “I haven’t seen a rabbit wandering around yet.”
        “Wait around long enough and you just might.” She finishes off with a few stretches, turning to him with a smile. “So, you’ve been cleared for answers?”
        They all clearly don’t know how stubborn he is. “Yes, and you had better believe I’m not leaving ‘till I get some. Especially if it has anything to do with them all treating me like the Second Coming.”
        “It was probably more curiosity than anything.” She says that, but she still sounds a little amused, and maybe a little gently disapproving. “Sulu won’t mind if we borrow the garden.” So it’s not like it had been an accident that Sulu had been there. While probably not officially, unofficially it was his domain.
        That probably also means that it probably hadn’t been directly a joke about the clearance, if she’s not wanting to broadcast it all over the ship.
        “So, now that you’ve got me where you want me, what is this all about?” Her hesitation indicates she’d probably been telling the truth and it’s a story that’s difficult to believe, but it pokes at his already fraying temper. “Come on, spit it out already.”
        “You’re every bit as bad as he is,” she informs him, before starting by asking him a question. “How much did you hear about the Romulan incident?”
        “The one that got you all medals and all of my staff gossiping like they’d never left medical school? Quite a lot, but I was never too sure how much to believe.” He considers what to add, but gets glared at for the trouble, so elects to stay silent. If he’s going to be blamed for taking his sweet old time, he might as well—
        No. That’s the part of him that gave up talking. The one that said he might as well prove Jocelyn and all the others right about him. So he smiles sweetly, a look that would have his nana rightfully suspicious, and then adds the barest bones, without all the embellishments, he has. Let no one say he’s no contrarian without lying through their teeth. “A single Romulan ship armed with some sorta planet-killer took out Vulcan and damn near took out Earth, and you’re all the heroes who stopped it.”
        She shifts a little, opting for what looks like very careful weeding rather than meeting his eyes. The only way she could be more uncomfortable, he’s pretty sure, is if he’d been completely and utterly genuine in his praise of the returning heroes. “I guess as summaries go, not bad.” She doesn’t let being taken off guard show, but he gets the strange feeling he’s earned a bite of respect, now. Friendly as Uhura seems, she’s a wary one. “How much do you know about the connection between gravity and time distortions?”
        That’s a strange question. “The basics. I’m not a physicist.”
        “What about black holes?” she continues, quiet and unassuming. Like the horse right before it startles and kicks you.
        Just because he hasn’t had to exercise his brain too much of recent doesn’t mean he’s that out of practice, though. “The Romulans had a deployable black hole,” horror harshening his voice, and behind that another sudden realization. “You’re meaning to tell me you’re all time travelers?”
        She shakes her head. “No, of course not. None of us are holovid actors, so there’s no way we could act normally and keep that a secret.” She smiles back. She’s good, turning his own tactics against him.
        “That’s what you’re going with?” It would explain...a lot, actually, but it’s also so fantastical.
        “Well, you’re right that it’s not perfectly accurate. Formerly Ambassador Spock is from the future, as were the Romulans. Kirk shared a mind-meld with the Spock you just met. The rest of us only know about it. But yes, if you ask around the command staff or Pike or Boyce, you’ll get your confirmation.” She pauses and waits, continuing to work in the garden, letting him frown and cross his arms as he thinks about it.
        Only startling slightly as he crouches down to join her. “Been a while since I’ve had my hands in the dirt,” he explains. Most of it is hydroponics, sure, but not all of it, just that extra eccentric touch. Like a piece of home, helping out nana with the farm. He realizes with a start he hadn’t even thought about the fact he was in space for a bit, a first as far as he can recall. “Kirk and Spock didn’t just know me from my journals, did they?”
        She laughs. “They probably kept up with what you wrote, not just because they like learning things, but because it was a way of keeping up with you, yes. Without writing to you or calling you and scaring you away.”
        He swallows the urge to say that it wouldn’t, because even this has been so strange and unnerving and there had been the flimsiest pretext for it. No, they’d been right to stay away, but with the way they look at him, he’d been missed, and here they’d never met. “Why me?”
        “A version of you served on the Enterprise before, and they missed you,” she tells him. It’s hard to picture. Well, he thinks that, but he’s lying to himself again, isn’t he? This, all of this, is everything he should hate. Even now, he can recite every way to die in space from memory, because starships are a fool’s enterprise and anyone with even a lick of sense should know that, but...a part of him actually feels at home. No one would mind that he prefers reading hard copy when it comes to textbooks, finds it sticks better in his head. Hell, they might actually prefer an irascible doctor, someone to keep them all in line. Lots of stares, true, but none of them, not even Kirk or Spock, had presumed to know him, not in this universe anyhow. He’d been given space, to settle in. A choice. It’s clear now that Kirk hoped he’d stay, done his best to court his services as a doctor (and maybe more) and then just...left it, as a gentleman should.
        “You’re dancing around the question,” he observes, annoyed. “Kirk. Why’s he hung up on a washed up old country doctor?”
        She lets her own annoyance show on her face for the first time. Given that cool look, she is fully prepared to disembowel him on her captain’s behalf, and he immediately revises his list—Uhura is the most dangerous person on the ship. “I can’t fully blame you for the assumptions. Kirk’s reputation is larger than life, and he had me fooled for a while myself. But the Captain never puts anything less than 110 percent into everything he does, and between you and me, he’s prone to burnout. He even takes his one-night stands seriously. He’s been trying to settle down, and I think whatever he saw of you said you were at least pretty good friends.”
        That...actually makes sense. “On account of his kid, huh? Shook him up a little.”
        If he wasn’t looking for it, he wouldn’t have spotted the surprise. “He wouldn’t have mentioned that to just anybody.” It occurs to her to add, “...I wouldn’t go spreading it around. The mother almost didn’t tell him.”
        Ouch. And here he thought the divorce had been bad. At least he was allowed to see Joanna in vid calls. Sure, it’s probably on account of trying to stay out of the whole baggage of, as Uhura had put it, Kirk’s reputation, but it still has to sting. “I’m the very picture of discretion,” he promises. 
        “And no, it wasn’t just because of that. He’s been trying to clean up his reputation for a little while now, after it started causing problems for his captaincy and the functioning of the Enterprise.” She pauses and then adds, “...he probably didn’t want to influence you too much, but I don’t care about that and you probably deserve to know. M’Benga wants to work with the Vulcans, because that’s where he’d do the most good, but he’s been staying on just because the Admirals have been trying to play politics and assign someone of their choosing to the position, and Kirk would get himself killed not cooperating with a doctor he doesn’t trust.”
        That’s fascinating. So the man had actually done his best to withhold things that might bias him in the direction of staying, and no matter how much Kirk might bluster about how it’s all for Leonard’s own good McCoy is no stranger to that kind of self-sabotage. And that also means that the higher-ups hadn’t been hoping to stick Leonard with a space assignment in punishment. If anything, they’re probably hoping he moves on. Now the talk of teaching makes sense. He’d thought it’d been a ‘if there’s one thing worse’ type of stick to smack him into place, but now he’s starting to get the idea that it’s the exact opposite. They had been hoping he’d take it, maybe so they could reassign Boyce, which just proves they’re even more out of their goddamn minds than he’d previously diagnosed. There’s no way he’s ending up with a bunch of snot-nosed brats to babysit. And sure, Kirk would fight for him, make sure he’d get whatever assignment he chooses, even if it’s not what the man would want, even if it puts his own neck on the line.
        “I’ll keep an open mind,” he promises. She doesn’t look too impressed by that, but it’s better than dropping to his knees and begging to stay. He has to maintain some kind of fragile dignity.