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Jim Kirk doesn’t trust doctors.
Now, as a rule, Jim Kirk doesn’t really trust anyone. But he especially doesn’t trust doctors, because in his experience, someone only gets into medicine for one of two reasons: a frankly disgusting amount of empathy, or a desire to learn how to prolong suffering for as long as humanly possible. The former didn’t survive ten minutes if they were dumb enough to leave their little family practices, and the latter he begrudgingly respected, but they held no real allegiances on a ship, their skills making for powerful bargaining chips, and a free agent was dangerous.
But then he met Leonard McCoy.
Kirk had expected him to land firmly in the former category the second he glanced at his file and saw that he had been conscripted, commuting some sentence or another. The fleet churned through doctors, and was desperate enough to pull civilians if they could muster half an excuse to. All empathetic, spineless worms who just wanted to give chubby little babies their vaccines. Half of them ended up hanging themselves. It was annoying as hell, and Kirk expected this one to be no different.
And then he looked a little closer, because you don’t get to where he is without being paranoid, without learning about your crew thoroughly, and saw that his little convict had actually already commuted his sentence-and then signed up for another tour of his own free will.
Unusual, but not unheard of. Kirk imagines that he was strong-armed into it.
Great, he thinks. He’ll be a neurotic wreck. What sort of crime did this wimp even commit? Some sort of light treason, probably-the courts loved sending peaceniks out into the black to get eaten alive.
And then Kirk sees that he was commuting a murder charge of all things, and becomes a whole world more interested.
It would be ridiculous to try and curb humanity's bloodlust. Murder was a natural, efficient way to solve a problem, to assert dominance, to survive and thrive. But they couldn’t have crafted society, put man on the moon, achieved warp drive technology, and conquered their galactic neighbors without any sort of regulatory system in place. It can’t be a free for all.
Man was a civilized animal.
So civilian murders happened-and happened often, though nothing compared to the fleet. But just like in the fleet, they happened for a reason.
Most never went to court.
But apparently, his doctor’s did.
Kirk did a little digging. Pulled up the court records, public data, no clearance necessary. Found a charge of wrongful homicide, a divorce, and a perfunctory custody hearing.
Kirk isn’t the sort of man who feels pity. But even he had to admit that McCoy got a raw deal, and only really halfway deserved it.
After all, murdering the guy your wife is fucking? Well, that’s actively encouraged.
But murdering the guy you think your wife is fucking, only to realize she was actually fucking his wife? That she let you catch on to her infidelity to lead you to a conclusion just left of center, and got you to do her girlfriend’s dirty work for her?
Well. Now that’s just sloppy.
So little Joanna McCoy gets two mommies, and daddy gets to choose between patching up soldiers or submitting to state-sanctioned torture. Then, presumably, he stays in the black because there’s nothing left for him back home.
Now Kirk has no idea what to expect from the man, and it pisses him off how much that excites him.
Their first meeting doesn’t shed much light on him either. He’s gruff, and refuses to betray any sense of intimidation. Kirk wants to respect that, but it’s honestly just kind of annoying. Doctors are like that, though-they think they’re gods because they hold your life in their hands, or whatever. As if they don’t all have knives and fists and teeth.
McCoy barrels into sickbay, and barks orders at startled nurses. He drinks from a flask openly while on duty. He collects antique surgical equipment, and threatens to test them on patients when they annoy him.
Crew mortality plummets under his watch.
He’s proud of what he does, Kirk realizes after a time, and so many pieces fall into place once he does. McCoy lost everything except this, so now this is everything, and his pride benefits them all-if someone dies when he’s not good and ready for them to, he sees it as a failure of his skills. He goes to great lengths to ensure the survival of his patients. This is good for their numbers, but it still makes it difficult to get a read on him.
And Kirk is still curious.
So he gives him a prisoner with an infected wound, and orders to “do whatever, we got what we needed”. A test, to see what he does with a patient he has no obligation to cure. To see if he nursed the alien anyways, like a conscripted wimp, or if he pounced on the chance to torture him to death like most willfully enlisted doctors would.
Kirk watches him to see which he does, and what he does is neither.
What he does is let the infection fester for weeks, takes pictures and notes, and tests theories.
Kirk watches his doctor bounce on his toes, looking more alive than he’s ever seen him in the weeks he’s been aboard, rambling animatedly about gangrene over a half-dead Andorian. Their prisoner is looking more gray than blue, eyes glazed with fever, restrained to the biobed, though at this point he’s far too weak to fight. Kirk watches McCoy poke at the weeping, festering wound with his gloved finger, digging in until he pulled a groan from the dying alien, and laugh, and make a note on his PADD of the delayed reaction time to external stimulus.
It was then that Kirk knew McCoy was special.
Sure, he had his little “morals”, and he claimed to stick to them, but they were all flimsy, self-contradictory things. At the end of the day, Kirk saw now that he wasnt a doctor out of empathy, or out of sadism, though he seemed to possess both in strange, contradictory amounts.
No, this man was simply curious.
Hungry for information at the expense of all else, eager to split someone open to see how they worked. Kirk saw it in his eyes, bright and shimmering and just shy of manic. He’s attentive in his duties, short tempered with his staff, and scars an ensign for life by trapping her injured hands under the dermal regenerator for treatment before explaining in detail the utility of his orbitoclast and his intentions to show it it’s first use in a few hundred years if she insists on acting like she’s already brainless and mishandles corrosive chemicals again. Typical behavior, but he’s more efficient in it, and smiles occasionally, and doesn’t stink of booze quite so much.
The Andorian dies of complications, and Kirk expects McCoy to calm down, but instead he just dissects him, and the next time they speak he babbles at him about what exactly is in Andorian blood that makes it oxidize blue.
Intimidation keeps subordinates on their toes with their heads down, but constant fear is draining, and leaves people restless. One of the many mistakes Pike made that he won’t be repeating-it was worth it to keep an eye on crew morale.
And when McCoy runs out of things to do with the corpse, his eyes dull again. He shows up for duty hammered instead of just professionally buzzed. His threats are notably less creative. He doesn’t bounce and ramble about medical history and xenobiology.
Simply put, he’s bored. Mentally understimulated. Kirk knows the feeling.
And he wouldn’t care, except McCoy was so…interesting, during those weeks he had a project. Kirk interacted with him to keep an eye on him, but found himself looking forward to running into him despite himself.
At least if he was to get friendly with anyone on board, the CMO makes some sense-there’s less risk in that, he’s already a department head and Kirk can’t imagine McCoy gunning for a captaincy.
McCoy was an interesting man to eat lunch next to, at the very least. Or he was, while he was energetic and occupied. Kirk can’t prompt him into rambling about amputation anymore, and he’s getting to be so boring again.
They ransack a city on their next away mission, and Kirk decides to continue his little experiment, ordering one of the more intact corpses be brought back aboard. It’s a strange sort of creature, bipedal with four arms. Kirk can’t even begin to imagine how its muscular system or skeletal structure facilitate that. If all goes as he expects, he’ll get to learn soon enough.
He tags along for its delivery to sickbay, to issue the vaguest set of orders he ever has.
“See what makes these guys tick.”
McCoy bounces on his toes, eyes sparkling.
This begins a trend, one that Kirk and McCoy both happily benefit from. If tossing a corpse or a prisoner at his strange little sawbones once in a while kept him happy and attentive, Kirk is sure he’ll be glad for it the next time he needs someone to dig shrapnel out of his back.
He still doesn’t trust him, of course-Jim Kirk doesn’t trust doctors.
But he may have decided that he wants to keep this one.