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Leonard didn't even remember how the argument started, only that the blood was pounding in his temples and Spock's smirk was insufferable.
"Why you pig-headed, green-blooded..." Leonard groped for a word to encompass the sheer bloody-mindedness of the man standing in front of him, eyebrow rising steadily skyward, and grinned when it popped into his head. "Mule! That's what you are, a stubborn old mule. You got the pointy ears an' everything."
Spock blinked. Leonard took a moment to revel in finally, finally having gotten one over on the bastard, before Spock's face went carefully blank. "I see," he said at last, with no inflection.
Leonard squinted at him. "'I see'? That's it? Nothing about me being an illogical witch doctor?"
"Your medical qualifications or lack thereof are not the topic of this conversation, which I see no point in continuing. Good day, doctor." With a sharp nod, Spock turned and bent over his scanner.
Leonard stared. There was no hint of the usual wrinkle between Spock's eyebrows that appeared whenever he'd been exposed to a particular heinous bout of illogic. His shoulders were squared, spine rigid, mouth a flat line. Leonard found himself suddenly presented with a disconcertingly vulcany vulcan. "Well I'll be," he said. "I've gone and actually made you upset."
"Vulcans do not become upset," Spock replied, right on cue, but it sounded flat, even for him. No raised brow, no tilted head; just a quick, efficient flick of his wrist to change the disc he was examining before he returned to complete stillness.
"And you're deflecting." Leonard leaned a hip against the counter. "Come on, Spock. It's no fun for either of us if you're actually hurting."
Spock said nothing, but Leonard could detect a minute tenseness around his mouth.
"Well, okay then. I've said all that before, about your blood and your ears and your damn pigheadedness." He counted them off on his fingers and tapped his chin thoughtfully. "Usually you take it as a compliment, or turn it around and make me look like a donkey while you get to swan off with your nose in the air. " He frowned. "Come to think of it, I called you a donkey last week, and you told me something about how if I can't tell apart equine quadrupeds and felinoid bipeds, then I had no business practicing medicine. What is it about mules in particular, Spock?"
Spock's grip on the scanner tightened. "It is of no consequence, Doctor."
"Like hell it isn't." The corners of Spock's mouth turned down slightly, and Leonard softened his voice. "Spock. Talk to me."
Silence, for a few minutes. Leonard bounced on his heels a bit as Spock worked through the next disc. He was just about to give up and go pester Jim when Spock said, abruptly, "It was a minor incident from my childhood." He paused, and then straightened, tucking his hands into the small of his back and directing a stony stare at the far wall. "Two of my professors found my rapid progress through the educational curriculum to be...unexpected, considering my heritage. They suggested that perhaps my scholastic aptitude was a consequence of my hybrid genetics, much as a mule is capable of performing more physical labor than either the horse or the donkey from which it is bred. The hypothesis spread, and a geneticist specializing in hybrid research was consulted. My father consented to allow her to take samples." His gaze turned distant, and he continued more quietly, "I was not aware that the word retained such negative associations in my mind. Such reactions are not logical."
A beat. "Bullshit!"
Spock's head snapped around. "Such imprecations are not necessary. I am fully aware..."
"You shut up, Spock. I don't want to hear it." Leonard clenched his fists until his nails dug into his palms. "You just shut up. 'My father consented', christ. You're telling me your teachers, who are supposed to be watching over and encouraging you, called you an animal to your face and your daddy, what, let them turn you into a science experiment?"
Spock's head tilted a degree to the right. "It was hardly to my face, Doctor. I happened to overhear from my learning cubicle when they assumed my hearing did not have the full range of a full-blooded vulcan's. And my father was correct to consent. To advance the cause of science is a valuable and noble –"
"Are you even listening to yourself?" Leonard's hands shook. Spock's eyebrows tilted downward at the interruption, but Leonard felt no smugness at having shut him up again, only the rage fizzing along his bones. "Your father consented? What about your consent, huh Spock? Did you consent to letting them violate your bodily autonomy? 'Allowed her to take samples', my God."
"I was the equivalent of a human six-year-old at the time. One can hardly expect a small child to make responsible medical decisions."
Leonard stared. Spock seemed honestly confused, head tilted at a further angle, like the fact he'd had his brilliant brain dismissed as some sort of inbred quirk, that he'd been experimented on as a child was acceptable instead of horrific.
With a snarl, Leonard stalked towards the lab's comm unit. "I'm calling your daddy and giving him a piece of my mind." He'd barely made five steps before long fingers closed gently, but firmly, around his wrist.
"You will not. You must understand. It was hardly the first time I had been in and out of laboratories. I am the only known surviving vulcan hybrid in existence. Such research into my physiology was necessary, not only in service to science, but also to determine how I was to be kept alive. My medical treatment can be difficult, as you yourself have often informed me, and I was not the healthiest of children." He searched Leonard's face and must have found it mutinous, because his eyes shuttered. "Doctor. McCoy. Please."
That splashed ice water all over the fires of his indignation. Leonard stopped straining against the grip on his arm. How many people had heard Spock's 'no' and barreled on into doing whatever it was they wanted anyway, like he had been about to do? He slumped back against the counter. "All right. All right, dammit. I won't yell at the vulcan ambassador." Spock eyed him suspiciously, but released his wrist.
"Thank you." Spock paused, and added, almost tentatively, "It would not be meet for the chief medical officer aboard the Enterprise to be the catalyst for yet another interplanetary incident."
Leonard snorted, and was rewarded with a minute slumping of Spock's shoulders. "Yeah, yeah. I'll play nice with the hobgoblins. Just so long as you know I don't agree with what those idiots did, all right?"
"Understood." Spock took a step back, regarding him with what might have been affection in the narrowing of his eyes. "You are a most illogical human."
"You bet your ass I am. And now this illogical human has got to git, so I'll leave you to your star maps or whatever."
"I am endeavoring to determine the composition of the nebula which we passed at 2200 hours, sixteen point eight minutes yesterday. It has a most unusual..."
Leonard waved his hand and beat a hasty retreat. "I'm a doctor, not an astrophysicist. I'm getting out of here before you talk my ear off. Have fun." He glanced over his shoulder once as the doors hissed open, to watch the graceful curve of Spock's back as he settled over his sensors again.
Mule. Honestly. IDIC, his ass. Leonard stomped back to the medical bay and flung himself into his chair. He glared at his computer, before booting it up and flipping through his old files. As he'd suspected, there was an article he'd been assigned in one of his genetics classes, which his professor had asked the students to skim as an intriguing case study. An interspecies mix, though not one that any of them would be likely to encounter in Starfleet. Human-vulcan hybrid, primarily vulcanoid in appearance, viable. A picture of DNA polymer chains, skin cells. Six years old. Lord.
He spun away from the screen in disgust and thumbed his comm panel.
"McCoy to Captain Kirk."
A moment, and then. "Kirk here. What's up, Bones?"
"Jim, I've got a mission for you. Tonight you're going to take that first officer of yours down to the rec room and play chess with him."
"...What's going on with Spock?"
"Nothing's going on with that green-blooded thorn in my side. You're just going to play with him until he inevitably beats the pants off of you.. Doctor's orders, and if you question them I'm making it so you can only have salad for the next week."
Silence. Leonard stared moodily at his cabinet and wondered if it was too early to break out the brandy.
"...you know, I think that's some care about Spock you're showing, Bones. Changing your tune?"
"I can change your rations card right now, Jim. Salad for a month."
"A joke, a joke," said Jim hastily. "But you know...why don't you join us? Uhura's supposed to be singing tonight. Spock might even break out his lyre again, and then you can continue your last argument about whether music is emotional or not."
"Of course music is emotional. Just because the elf doesn't want to admit it...."
"See? there you go. It'll do you both good." Jim's voice went warm and wheedling. "Don't make me start issuing my own orders."
"...fine, I'll be there. Can't have the vulcan thinking he won that last one." Jim signed off with a laugh, and Leonard couldn't help grinning back. Jim would coax a vulcan smile out of his first officer, and then they'd have a nice, friendly, good old-fashioned debate. He frowned back at the screen, then flicked it off and dug through his padds until he found the one listing routine check-ups. Spock was scheduled for the day after next, which meant he'd spend the shift hiding in the science labs and claiming ships' business when one of the nurses finally got fed up enough and dragged him down to medical bay.
Well, then. Leonard would fetch him himself, and, when he'd finally gotten the infuriating man into medical bay, he'd sit him down and before he even started filling up the first hypo, he'd ask if it was all right to poke it into his skin.
They'd argue about it, of course, because the pointy-eared bastard didn't know a good medical decision when it was screaming in his face. But he would, Leonard thought grimly, ask.