#ofcuriouspursuits

~

It’s best to think of the intervening period as simply waiting. It’s best not to remember them as eaten with frustration and bitterness. It’s best not to dwell on the undeserved sense of humiliation or the inability of his friends to talk to him around the empty sleeve of his uniform. An empty sleeve, it might be worth pointing out, that he left hanging and present. He’d refused the weekly order request to have the sleeve removed.

He didn’t speak much, either. His sleeve did enough talking anyway. This emptiness is temporary. It will be filled again.

~

“I’m sorry.”

Leonard really wished Jim had...

Well, that wasn’t fair to Jim. He really wished what? Jim had continued to sulk in Leonard’s biobed area, waiting for Leonard to address him? Continue starting half sentences that trail off when Leonard would close his eyes? No, Jim didn’t need to put up with that.

But what could Leonard have done? Jim’s presence made the heaviness in him sink farther down. He can’t deal with what he’s missing and Jim too. In the end he says nothing, and Jim leaves.

Leonard really wished Jim had said it when he were awake.

~

It feels like Scotty is the only one he talks to. He takes to wearing the favored engineering undershirt: a black tank top, and twists into sitting forms that stretch the unscarred, smooth skin where M’Benga amputated. He’s not self conscious here in the tubes, sitting feet away from a still. Maybe it’s because Scotty doesn’t think Leonard’s arm as some tragedy. Scotty treats it like the most exciting thing since they updated the core.

“They’re things of beauty, Len. More subtle than I’m used to working with, but still a work of art.”

“You’ll have to teach me to maintain it.”

“Oh no, not me. It’s too biological for my taste. Our fearless Commander might be a better bet, he seems to have a knack for calibrations of any sort.”

Leonard leans forward, placing his mug on the spot they worked out through trial and error, then reaches up and flips the tap on the still until his mug almost overflows. “Spock? No, he’s already helping me design the tricorder updates.”

Scotty turns his mugs in his hands, the dangerously deceptive clear liqueur sloshes to the brim. “Y’know, Carol would help if you asked.”

“Yeah.” She’s helping even when he doesn’t ask. He knows where the anonymously submitted bits of improved program for running diagnostics on a bionic arm were coming from. “She would.”

They’re quiet for a moment. A pipe in the back releases a puff of steam, the chatter of some of the Engineering crewmen rise and fall in the distance. If they were on a ship in the ocean, he figures he’d be rocking back and forth right now. Maybe their technologically reigned in gravity was better, the alcohol already had him rocking well enough.

“Well, Leonard,” Scotty stands on suspiciously steady legs, “Thank you for taste testing this batch with me. I’ll need to start another, well, now.” He pats the  empty still. Leonard tips his mug, settling amid the extraneous tubes and pipe features that led nowhere important but were arranged to look necessary for camouflage. He had nowhere he needed to be, and no reason to pretend otherwise. So instead, in the faint hum and distant clacks and clamors of the able bodied and purposed, he allows the moonshine to rock him to sleep, pretending all the while it was the ship herself.

~

“Len, are you comfortable?” M’Benga asks. His only response is a glare. “I’ll take that as a yes. Nurse, stand by.”

Leonard chooses to stare at the holo display in front of them, where his shoulder scan is laid bare, the muscle and bone made opaque to highlight the network of nerves that end abruptly shortly after the three main nerve cords split into the terminal branches.

“Can you lift your shoulder?” M’Benga asks, his tone perfectly blank and respectable in spite of the bitter look on Len’s face. “Good. Any pain?”

“Just from answering these questions.”

“Right.” If it were any other crewman being examined, they wouldn’t know the texture change. Len did, M’Benga was trying not to smile. The pit of his mood bottomed, he calmed down from untamed grouchiness to resignation. “Are you ready?”

He meets Geoffrey’s eyes for the first time in a long time. Geoffrey does smile at that, and Leonard feels the rush of connection. It felt good to finally start healing. “Ready.”

The instrument Geoffrey picks up is long with a fine point, sort of like a headless tricorder wand. It contains a charge inside, fine-tuned to the low level electrical impulses of most nerves, which, paired with the biobed’s nueroscanning setting, would measure the damage to his severed nerve endings. Geoffrey applies the tip to Leonard’s arm.

“Radian Nerve, C5 and C6.” For one silently screaming moment, Leonard could feel nothing. Then his, to his immense relief, his shoulder tensed, a strange tingling feeling crawling from the empty space where his arm used to be.

“Feeling it.” He says, watching with relief as the nerve on the screen glows with activity. The dimness at the tip, that was skin, it wasn’t meant to carry charge.

“Okay. Moving from C6 to C7, then to C8 and T1.” The tingling from his shoulder moved over to his clavicle in a hazy patch, focusing on a tight line from the clavicle to the pectoral, as if someone  were tugging at a single thread of muscle.

“Still feeling it.”

“This is good,” Geoffrey says, taking the wand away from Leonard’s shoulder. The feeling persists then fades, like the glowing on the screen. “We’ve got eight more points to go.”

“Fantastic.” The euphoria of realizing he hasn’t lost nerve function wears down slightly. This was going to get tedious fast.

~

If he were pressed, he’d admit he talked to Spock, but it barely counted. They talked work, code, brainstormed possible bugs and changes Leonard may have to adjust to, but as the reasoning to bring up that the subject they were working on happened to be McCoy himself was purely emotional, there was no logical backing to bring it up and they could avoid the topic entirely.

Yeah, he should’ve known that reasoning wouldn’t last long. Vulcans always cheated there. He was getting ready to go when Spock finally speaks up.

“Do you blame the Captain for your lost arm, Doctor?”

“I told you, I’m not licensed as a Doctor right now, Spock.” Not fully. Not until he’s recovered.

“From the number of times you’ve corrected me otherwise, I was under the impression you would always be just a Doctor.” Spock says, the touch of wry humor not slipping by Leonard. He rolls his eyes in response. “You did not answer the question.”

“No.”

“Perhaps you should tell him, as he seems to think you do.”

“Right. Any other advice stored away in your purely logical brain?”

Spock returns to looking at his PADD. “You’ll need to boost your muscle mass to support the weight of the arm. The Captain exercises each morning for 67 minutes, he has never been adverse to company.”

Leonard contemplates hitting his head against the door. “Not for the full 67 minutes, mind you.”

No response. He takes that as a sign he can leave now. The door slides open.

“About Carol Marcus....”

“Leave it, Spock.” Leonard says, doing just that.

-

He’s early, having miscalculated based on Spock’s 67 minutes comment and due to sheer nervous energy. So by the time the doors to the gym slide open, he’s stretched out and staring with some trepidation at the weights. He turns on instinct and makes eye contact with Jim by accident. There’s a microsecond where he’s afraid Jim will leave, but instead he nods at the weights.

“I’ll spot.”

Good enough.

-

“McCoy.”

Len pauses but doesn’t turn to look. It took him ten minutes to set the micro goggles to aim at the right part of his arm so he could continue setting in the artificial neurons.

“Nurse.”

“You know damn well we’re both off duty.”

Expletives. That’s not good. He turns, the empty metal hinge his lower arm attached to swinging freely. “Christine,” he says tentatively.

“When was the last time you talked with Carol?” She’s poised stiffly, eyes hard enough to cut steel. His own dart to his hand on the table. “Don’t tell me since the accident.”

She doesn’t want him to tell her, so he doesn’t. She steps closer and leans into his face.

“It was an accident.”

“I know.” He hisses with just as much venom.

She straightens up, gives him one last look. “Then tell her you know.” She stalks off to the doorway. “And let the Captain know you’re well enough to make up your own duty roster, since you’re talking to him again.”