Title: Sunday Morning Coming Down

Characters: McCoy

Rating: K+

Wordcount: 1769 (3713)
Warnings/Spoilers: Basic TOS spoilers and speculation. Also, disinclination to follow a dysfunctional fandom chronology, and liberties with Southern accents.

Summary: If fate had ever given Leonard McCoy a second chance, he swore that he would take it with both hands. Or the reason why he had to be drafted, come V'Ger, and how he wound up happy. McCoy/OC.

AN: It is a literary trope as old as dirt, and for good reason, that the only place to rest and recover is at home. It speaks to the stability of the family place, and sturdiness of tradition, that for so many men, home from war, it is the only place to lick their wounds. They dream about it when away, and are contented by it when we return.

One of the more frustrating things about TOS is, as is typical for shows from the 1960s, each new episode is a tabula rasa for the characters. So, we never really see the emotional or physical ramifications of—some of the truly horrific things that occur—each episode. Death, fatal injury, injury, attempted rape, mind control—POOF!—all better. Except it doesn't really work like that, not even in the 23rd century.

The reason for this fic is the memory of DeForest Kelley, a truly wonderful man; and because Love goes both ways.

Of the Sleeping City Sidewalk

The truth of the matter is, the USS Enterprise limps into port. They are stripped down to their last bolts, and the fact that the engines still work is the singular miracle due to the genius of Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. Crewmembers have been talking dreamily about non-replicated food for weeks, and most of the Command crew (particularly the Captain) is down to the last shreds of their uniforms. All those problems, though, are only with things. For years, McCoy and his kind have been throwing datachip after datachip at Starfleet Command, and yelling at the top of their lungs and underscoring with the bright red of blood that five years is too long to be in space.

A man needs his place, and for all the technological advancements of the Enterprise, replications and shore leaves simply are not sufficient rest for the crew. By the end of the first year, morale and efficiency hovers five points lower than it did at the beginning of their voyage. By three years, more than a quarter of the crew has rotated out, citing stress and psychological reasons. Morale and efficiency wavers around seventy-five percent for the next two years. The condition once known as "shellshock" and "PTSD" pops up with alarming frequency.

Leonard McCoy does not dare to isolate the officer's morale and efficiency. He doesn't dare isolate his own, mainly because he knows he's lying. If he were an honest CMO, he'd have slapped himself with an "Unfit for Service" months ago, because he's overworked, overtired, and his nerves are shot. But who would he report it too? He's Chief Surgeon, Chief Medical Officer, Chief Psychiatrist and, on the days when Spock is injured or too busy, half the head of Sciences.

Even Spock, the private logical Vulcan that he is, concedes the need to return home. Though he does not say so much in so many words, the dark eyes of the Vulcan look strained. He even lets McCoy win, a time or two, and when pushed, simply says, lowly:

"For balance, Dr. McCoy."

It's as true an answer as McCoy has ever gotten from him. Jim, of all of them, is the aberration. He pushes into being an Admiral, pushes into more responsibility, more work, more prestige. McCoy tells him it's a mistake. He tells him again, in four different languages, and half a dozen swear words. But he doesn't listen. If it isn't a sign of his troubles, McCoy doesn't know what is.

When his time is up, he resigns his commission. Never again will he return to space.

The Old House is still in good shape. It was set far enough back in the Georgian woods that the wars of the past four centuries have passed it by, unsuspecting. It isn't a manor house, but the long porch welcomes him, as it always has, and the long white façade of the Greek revival style, with its classically clean lines, have always looked beautiful, peeking out from beneath the green.

No one on the Enterprise would have suspected Leonard McCoy to own close to a hundred acres of good farming soil, but he does. His wife had taken everything; but, family land was family land. His forefathers were buried in this soil, and he had fought to keep it. Perhaps not as hard as he had fought for his daughter, Joanna, but it was close. She was his future; this was his past.

He pays a local handyman, Stewart, to keep up the house. Milledgeville itself is still a sleepy little hamlet, almost as stuck in history as he is. There are only a few things to do here, even to visit the local sites, half of which are rarely ever open.

It's the kind of leisure he prefers. It's the kind of rest he needs.

The tail under his jacket thumps him in the side, twice, and McCoy turns his cerulean eyes down to meet Rory's darker blue.

"Just wool-gathering." He murmurs, and puts Rory down gently. The puppy takes off as quickly as his stubby legs will carry him. McCoy watches him go. In his dreams, it is almost like this: the clean, sweet scent of Georgia pines blowing down the drive, the slow crunch of gravel underneath his boots, the dark-haired, beautiful, beautiful girl rushing down the porch to meet him with a child's warmth and ready affection.

But Joanna isn't a girl anymore; she's a grown woman, making her way through the Academy. He's already spent a weekend with her in San Francisco, and won't be able to see her again until the holidays. He almost doesn't want to see her again, because regretting what he has missed is so painful, and because her eyes, his blue, are so happy and free from shadows.

She's the best of him.

It takes longer than he thinks to open the house up again. It's old-fashioned, just like him, and so he goes around the house, pulling off dust covers and turning up the shades. The automated systems have prevented much in the way of dust, but there isn't any food in the preserved cupboards, so he makes a note to head into town and get some. He throws the long, plantation windows open with wild abandon, and turns off the recyclers. Just the smell of good, clean Georgia air will brighten his mood and ease his throbbing headache.

Rory has since decided that the braided rug near the ancient, enormous fireplace makes a nice bed, and settles, in that doggish, thumping way, to take a nap. McCoy decides that means it's time for his errands. He'll pop into the grocers, and the hardware store, for some bare necessities and the leash and collar Rory desperately needs. Eggs, milk, coffee, a loaf of bread, and half a case of whiskey. The whiskey will help his headache, he's almost sure of it.

"You just lay there, boy." He says, gruffly. "One of us needs to get enough sleep." It's a hollow joke, and it falters somewhere between his mouth and the puppy's ears. The dog's face, he thinks, looks entirely too sympathetic.

It gets around quick after Sunday service that Doctor Leonard McCoy, one of those McCoy's, is back in town. Agnes MacPherson, all prim lines from her white bun to her long full skirt, who has lived in Milledgeville her whole life, and has known Leonard, and Leonard's father, and Leonard's grandfather, is one of those little old ladies who cluster in the doorway to see their native son returned to them.

"Why, Agnes." Miss Thomson whispers, shocked, "He's nothing but skin and bones! What did they feed him, out in space?" Agnes says nothing, her mouth drawn tight across her real teeth. She is shocked by how tired he looks. The lines in his face are haggard, and the bags under his eyes are distinct. He looks old, older than his years. There is gray coming in that dark bay, and his cerulean eyes are so dull they look washed out.

It takes only a split second to place those eyes which look right through her as if she isn't there. They look just like the eyes of her grandfather's grandfather, who had worn the gray and fought at that ancient battle in Gettysburg. Agnes never knew him, but she knew those century old eyes, still aching in their monochrome frame. Weariness and grief, in equal measure.

She knows what she sees, and saddens a little: he looks like a soldier, back from the war. He passes through the flock of Milledgeville's best with little more than a few nods of his head and a few, curt "Good mornings." There is just enough of a downward slope to those shoulders that she instinctively bites back her comments, and nudges old Miss Agatha Snickett, who she still hasn't forgiven about her prize-winning pie back in '50, when she opens her shrewish mouth.

But his hand, when he takes hers to say hello, is still gentle.

Watching his back, ramrod straight under a tattered corduroy coat, pass slowly down the sidewalk, Agnes quirks her lip a little. Now is no time for gossiping, but action. Leonard McCoy hasn't got any people to take care of him any longer, after that trouble with his wife and that tragedy with his father. He's all by himself out on that big house, and nobody to take care of him at all. It's a shame. It's a double shame, because whoever sent him out into the wide reaches of the galaxy with a ship full of strangers didn't bother to take care of him neither.

"Ladies," she says softly, and a dozen white-haired, heads turn her way. "Ladies, I do believe we have a disposition to be taking, and a stratagem to plan."

"Why, Miss MacPherson" Miss Agatha responds, "I do believe you're right." Agnes nods, knowing, in the best way of little sleepy towns, that their long-running little feud will be laid aside in this instance.

Compared to some of the treks on strange planets he's made, the walk back from town isn't that arduous. It's long enough, however, for him to shift the bag of groceries he carries to his other arm. It isn't the exertion, however, that makes beads of sweat trickle down his temples, and sting stubbornly at his eyes. Even the gentle, little old ladies of Milledgeville pressing in on him had made his heart race with tension. Why, it's practically a sleeping city sidewalk compared to the vulgar flock of vultures who beset him in San Francisco.

But his heart races, because he knows the truth. That if those little old ladies hadn't looked at him with innocent eyes and asked him if he were come to sit and stay a while, he would've bought a whole case of whiskey, and let the rest of the Enterprise be damned. The societal pressure is the only thing that's kept him from the edge, right now, right this moment.

But later? He'll still have a bottle of whiskey, and enough sedatives for a small army. He can't stop thinking that thought once he's imagined it.

"Leonard," he groans to himself, "Leonard, you've got to get a hold on yourself."

It all feels like one slow, steep precipice—one that his fingers can no longer claw and grasp and get a hold of. He's slipping towards the edge, he knows, terrified. What will pull him back, when he no longer has the will to hold on any longer?

What terrifies him most is that he doesn't know.