Chapter Text
2272
Wish I were with you, but I couldn't stay;
Every direction leads me away...
Pray for tomorrow, but for today
All I want is to be home.
- Foo Fighters, "Home"
He listened to the news feed coming through the speakers with half of his attention, as the other half concentrated on the small child sitting up on the table. Bright kid. Three years old. McCoy didn't fail to recognize the significance of that.
The sunlight was poking its way through the clouds, and on Deneva, things were still chaotic. Nothing like they had been three years ago, though; nothing like the bloody wars that rocked this world and so many others.
Now, the chaos was about living again. Rebuilding infrastructure. Restoring services. Destroying what last lingering traces of the Empire remained here.
McCoy looked at the little boy; a rusty-haired, gray-eyed kid with a smart look to him. The son of one of the rebel leaders in this area. The same rebel leader who McCoy had chased into the night, leaving behind the knife that had been pointing into his kidney. Man was way too old to start a family, but that hadn't stopped him; really, though, McCoy couldn't complain about the results.
"Am I done?" the child asked, both eyebrows up hopefully.
"Yeah, kiddo. You're all good," McCoy replied, ruffling the boy's hair before lifting him down off of the table. "Tell your parents to find you some more greens, though."
"Aye, sir!" the kid said, snappily, then grinned and took off out of the room.
McCoy put his stethoscope back on the tray, then took a breath and looked out the window. Business had been tapering off, slowly but steadily, over the past few months. There had been a time, just after Deneva declared its independence, that he ran for days on end at a time trying to keep up with the wounded. There weren't many doctors, and that was nearly so fatal as the war had been, as Empire forces and rebels collided here, three years ago.
The Empire still stood, though it stood in tatters. It managed to hang onto Sol and a half-dozen other worlds certainly, then a handful more only tenuously even now. Emperor Spock had taken his throne a little over two years ago; that was enough to make McCoy smirk, from a distance, though he wasn't sure why. There wasn't really anything funny about it. Not for Spock, or the Empire, or the free worlds that were trying to find their way back to governing themselves.
Spock had managed to take that position by offering help. Bringing Vulcan aid and supplies, and healers to a terrified and hurting world that had been ravaged for months. Bringing Klingon cruisers to patrol around worlds outside of Sol, to protect them from any scavengers (and there were many) who would swoop in. His woman was gone; when he came forth, he did so alone and with a certain... humanity that McCoy had been genuinely taken aback by.
He had even reached out to the rebels, but the rebels would have none of it. An Emperor was still an Emperor; the Empire was still something that they had been fighting for decades to end. McCoy didn't blame them. Not now, not after all this.
But for their part, the rebels raised a conditional white flag inside of Sol. There could be no doubt that they still aimed to end the Empire's reign all the way back to Earth where it had started, but were willing to keep the fighting to the worlds that were still battling for their right to govern themselves for now.
Deneva was ratifying its new constitution today.
He had quit drinking; had no choice but to quit drinking, really. Once he joined the rebellion, McCoy had to become very useful, very quickly. There were a few things that helped him do it. A real purpose, for one -- not just patching up Starfleet's officers from attacks, but helping people who had been fighting for something more than power or glory. That had been a big part of it.
The second part was Joanna.
It was rocky. It still was rocky, for that matter. When all of the trappings were stripped away, and all of the formalities were gone, they had no option but to get real with each other and quickly. They fought, they hurt each other with cutting words, and after all of that, they started healing each other's wounds. Sometimes even the ones they had inflicted and still did. Sometimes the ones left over from their former lives.
She worked with him at the small clinic, a nurse who was studying to become a doctor. No university currently stood on Deneva to give her a degree, but her father and his father had been healers, even though they had often forgotten that, and it was in her blood.
They were both a part of this rebellion now. And knew they would die as members, if not of battles along the way, then of old age. Some were carefully vetted into it, and they were two of those.
Most people were born into it, though. That little boy who McCoy had been giving a check-up was one; born a rebel, would die a rebel, just like his genetic half-brother had.
Even amongst the rebels, no one knew what Montgomery Scott was. To some, he was a brutal mass-murderer who had done something so terrible that the ends couldn't justify the means, even as they tried to make the most of those ends. To others, he was a martyr, a word that rankled McCoy -- sacrificing his soul and life for the greater good of humanity.
For McCoy, though, and for those others who had known him even peripherally, he was neither. He was what he was, nothing more or less.
And for a very few, he didn't truly exist at all.
In their minds and hearts, that name belonged to someone else, a young man who had died in 2239.
She had been vetted as a rebel. Her strawberry blond hair was faded to gray, and a face that should have been beautiful wore ancient scars. McCoy probably could have removed them for her, but when he offered, she only replied that they were a part of who she was and she wasn't ashamed of them.
It took him a long time to come to see her as a person unto herself; when he heard the whole story, it was almost impossible to stop looking at Jenna Richmond as part of a catalyst that had changed the shape of the universe. But eventually, as he got to know her, he realized that she was only human. Just like the rest of them.
He stopped by her little shack on the way back to his own; inside, her adopted son was carrying around his infant boy, singing quietly in some language that McCoy didn't recognize. He gave Josh a quick smile, then gestured to the radio that was sitting silent on Jenna's kitchen table. "They're going through the constitutional process, you know."
She chuckled, moving around the table to clear it from dinner. "Yeah, I know I'm missing history, here."
"So, what's the excuse?" McCoy asked, mostly joking.
Jenna stopped and then shrugged. "Why listen to that, when I can listen to him?" she asked, nodding her head towards her son and grandson.
McCoy fell quiet for a moment to listen. Still didn't recognize the words, but it was a beautiful song. "What is it?"
There was an expression that crossed her face that he had seen before, often enough to know what it was. "It's an old Welsh lullaby."
Then she smiled, tipping her head to the side and closing her eyes, touching on the ancient memories that went with her ancient scars:
"Oh, how happily shines the star,
"All through the night,
"To light its earthly sister,
"All through the night.
"Old age is night when affliction comes,
"But to beautify man in his twilight...
"We'll put our weak light together
"All through the night."