Chapter Text
With vaguely humanoid, see-through glass bodies as adults and a collection of sand-based granules as their infant form, the Ko'chokhkol had the honor of being the strangest lifeforms Leonard had ever encountered.
Disease, when it came to the Ko'chokhkol, had a similar distinction in presenting bizarrely. A strange "fever" had ran through the inhabitants, causing pressure to accumulate inside the Ko'chokhkol more quickly than it could withstand, bursting them from the inside out. Although all Ko'chokhkol were meant to go through a gradual pressure increase to develop their glass forms, the acceleration meant that their glass forms couldn't withstand the constant increasing force.
It was horrifying. Leonard couldn't remember the last time he had been so unsettled by a disease (his medical school years, maybe). Although they had no centralized nervous system, they certainly had sentience in a different way, and the thought of any creature going through the internal combustion and pain almost made him heave. They had been wary about bringing him into the hospital to see his first patient, telling him that their civilization had video technology and he could just watch it on the screen. But he had insisted, telling them that videotape can leave out crucial information, like smell or other clues that wouldn't be able to be conveyed.
And now he was standing in the room of an amorphous, pulsing orange small form. This was a child; as Leonard watched, various grains of sand heated up and melted, shifting through temperature gradients as the pressure inside the child varied wildly. The head priestess had told him that Ko'chokhkol children were comforted by a soft pitch of A =440 Hz, handing him a tuning fork that when struck, produced that pure tone. Slowly approaching the child, he lightly struck the object against his boney head and watched as the small form deflated for a second, before wildly inflating again as his body pulsed red.
This child's name was a whistling that Leonard couldn't reproduce; the Ko'chokhkol had a polyphonic language, where sounds produced at the same time conveyed meaning. But even though he couldn't say it, he still wanted to know, he had told the head priestess before heading in. After a second of silence, she had made the whistling noise that was the child's name.
Although all the Ko'chokhkol had no vocal structures or anything except holes all over their body that would get closed off when they wanted to convey different pitches, there was no mistaking that piercing whistling the Ko'chokhkol child was making. Pain. Excruciating.
He didn't need the universal translator to tell him that.
Leonard took a deep breath in through his nose and looked around.
No smell of burning; although he was surprised, mulling it over in his mind made it make more sense. They were silicon-oxide and combustion happens through the oxidization of a compound. If it's already an oxide, no burning can happen. Despite the lack of burning, he had already stopped from a distance, noticing a faint heat as he neared the center of the room.
He struck the tuning fork again. This time, the child's amorphous form seemed to congregate moreso in the direction that Leonard was in. At any other time, the analysis of biology would've been extremely interesting; however, Leonard couldn't dismiss the little hiss of air that the child let out when moving in his direction.
With a solemn look on his face, he approached the child even more closely and held his breath for a moment. This child was suffering. And as a damn good physician, he'd do his best to gather information to figure out what was going on. He raised his tricorder and began scanning.
Leonard H. McCoy cared a lot about patients. Some in the Federation would even say he cared too much--to potentially be in conflict-zones and have that be used against him as a liability is just one of the many reasons why on normal ships, the Chief Medical Officer would never be part of a landing crew. After all, they have more prominent uses as a support for your crew; a backup, in case you end up being injured.
It seems that the Enterprise had a tendency to treat him as a firstline option, instead of a backup. Instead of avoiding hurt, they assumed that he would be able to heal them all. Sure, he's a very good physician. He isn't CMO of the Enterprise for nothing, after all. But sometimes he wonders how many lives could have been saved on the Enterprise if the crew had just been a little more careful, instead of relying on him to cure them all.
He's a good healer. He isn't able to always be the savior, however.
Sometimes, it gets to him. Alcohol serves as his best friend to help him cope when Jim is off with Spock, the two of them having more time together now that both officially know they're t'hy'la. Jim's sworn that t'hy'la doesn't mean he and Spock are going to get hitched or anything, but soulmates seems like a pretty god damn romantic thing.
Not that he'd ever blame Jim for being happy. Or Spock. Even if it means that his stupid little heart gets freaked out whenever Jim comes running in yelling about how Spock's dived in front of him to take a bullet again, or when Spock wakes up and (occasionally) isn't an ass and Leonard can actually figure out what Jim sees in the guy.
But that's not the issue, really. He knows what Jim sees when he looks at Spock. Spock's foreign and that's interesting. Spock is witty and insightful, someone who Leonard would love to take apart and dissect, like some kind of personality lobotomy. He'd love to see how his amygdala processes loves because it's obvious that Spock is full of emotions, despite his remarks otherwise. He'd love to hear how Spock reacts to that proof, to finally not be able to have a logical response to evidence that he does have them.
That's not really useful, though. And here he was, sitting in his room, sipping at alcohol, wondering how selfish it was for him to be thinking about his best friends being happy together, when he had seen a child in excruciating pain today with the knowledge that the child would only have a few more days at most to live. There it was, the grappling with self-loathing; his wish to be together with Spock was never going to be beneficial at all. If Jim and Spock found out, they would probably feel like they would have to hide a relationship from him, or even worse, not start one because of his feelings. And even now, when Leonard could be contemplating what to do about that sick child, he's distracted by this.
There's a little pang in his heart.
Poor child. How many children had died from this? And while there were adults suffering from this, the children were much more vulnerable since they grew at an accelerated speed to adults. Sickness was a cruel sort of misery.
So there he sat, in his room.
Guilt, pain. Or something along that line. He sits there, miserable, until he takes a breath to compose himself. He will do his best tomorrow, when the priestess agrees to give him samples from previous patients so he can analyze them to access if there was an extraneous compound at work. It'd have to do.