( As promised, Jack leaves from his graveyard double shift at the gas station sometime around 9 a.m. and heads directly over to the nebulous, nondescript place Dr. McCoy's GPS pin takes him, decidedly not thinking too much about how oddly the setting is integrated on his ride over. He's got brain damage, he tends to zone out, it's fine.
The guy that shows up on Bones's door looks decidedly in need of a doctor. Aside from looking generally unhealthy โ too skinny, dark bruises under his eyes, every bit as tired as five years of shitty sleep would imply โ there's also a glaringly obvious prosthetic attached to his leg just beneath the right knee. The smallest finger of his left hand is conspicuously absent, and a clean bandage is taped over the stump with what must have been his Best Effort at one-handed wound dressing.
He knocks on the doorframe despite it being open, then offers an awkward: )
Knock knock.
( A beat passes.
On its heels, a customer-service polite yet Daria-esque monotone ramble follows. )
Sorry, I don't know why I said that. I hate people who do that. I just knocked with my hands, I don't need to do it again with my mouth. That was stupid. Hey. Hi.
[ Schedule well and truly clear- it'd already been but after this strange assortment of illness and symptoms rolled into his inbox, he really didn't have much choice but to make sure it'd stay clear long enough for him to get a solid chunk of research and work done. At least he's got the room for it.
Looks like a rundown little house, opens into a pretty modest sitting room, the lab and actual treatment happening in the back. The air's rife with the smell of antiseptic and coffee, the sofa worn but clean, and the doctor himself tall, broad, and only a little exhausted. He'd grabbed a nap while waiting for this particular patient.
Or rather, this particular tragedy. ]
Jesus christ, kid. [ He thought everything sounded bad enough but this? This LOOKS worse. ] Don't know if I wanna examine you first or feed you. Come on, get your hide in here so we can figure out what's wrong with ya. Or rather, what's right.
I think this is the nicest way anybody's ever insulted me, so that's something.
( The response is mild, the verbal equivalent of a shrug. It won't take long to cotton onto the fact that Jack is not what you might call emotive โ he rests at a pretty neutral baseline of comically unfazed and politely apathetic.
He follows orders unobtrusively, and does his best not to telegraph the instinctive discomfort he feels at being in a clinical setting. It's nothing personal, Bones, it's just that the last doctor's office he was in belonged to his sketchy therapist, and their sessions were less of a productive experience and more of an exercise in routine gaslighting.
He perches tentatively wherever he's gestured, and offers up the first thing that comes to mind about what might be right with him: )
I have good teeth? Not that you're a dentist, but I heard overall health begins at the mouth? Then again, I heard that on a commercial for a dentist's office, so that might be oral propaganda...
[ To the back, to a fairly futuristic looking exam table- closest thing to a bio-bed Leonard could rig without breaking every last temporal regulation. A fair ways ahead of current scanning technology, but not so overtly so as to rattle a mind from the past. Present.
Whichever.
Least the kid doesn't seem that easily rattled. Makes this easier. ]
Could very well be. How's the leg hold'n up?
[ At the very least, what's left of it. It'll keep the kid busy talking about whatever in god's green earth has happened to leave him all sorts of scuffed up and sore while Leonard grabs a tricorder, holding up the wand over the kid's severed pinky for an initial scan. ]
( Jack is the least easily rattled human being on the surface of planet earth, probably. So he's got that going for him, at least. )
Well, it's not, which is... kind of the problem.
( There's nothing there to hold up anything, you see. At the very least, the stump is fully healed โ if perhaps a bit irritated by the new prosthetic he's just learning to walk on.
The finger, far less so โ he obediently holds it up to get scanned, revealing a very fresh still-healing wound. Spencer did a pretty clean job severing it, at least, though he left Jack to bleed into dirty snow for quite some time before anybody showed up to treat it.
He nods at the wand; he's been in the hospital a lot and never seen anything like it. )
[ Cloning a whole limb might take some doing but- provided there aren't any dangerous genetic markers at play here? He should be able to swing it. The pinky's an easy fix, honestly- quick sample of blood popped into what looks like little more than a microwave (don't ask) that McCoy plugs some equation or another into before turning his attention back to the truly bedraggled and SAD figure that's come into his care. ]
Mm? Tricorder. Full body scan with a single tool- [ Said tool bleats a sad little rondo, layer after layer of alerts pinging here and there in a quiet cacophony of electronic madness that has the doctor staring wide eyed down at it as though in fear of an imminent explosion. When the noises come to a fever pitch, McCoy knocks it with the heel of his hand twice to silence it. ] -that has never seen this many deficiencies and errors in a single humanoid body before. Good lord.
[ Right, filters. Time to filter for issues, look at one thing at a time. ]
( Jack ventures helpfully, his legs (fake and real) swinging absently back and forth, his heels bonking softly on the table. He's a patient... patient, as it were, displaying quiet interest without any real hurry to be anywhere.
One fun thing may soon become apparent to Bones that Jack is not aware of, though. Jack has believed since he was 18 that he was going to die from FFI, he truly believes he hasn't slept in years. He's been seeing a psychiatrist at no charge, and he's of the belief that it's because they want to study his brain when he dies.
According to McCoy's tricorder, Jack does not have FFI. He does have an entirely different sleep disorder altogether, though it's got more in common with narcolepsy and somnambulism than anything.
He's also emitting enough cosmic void-rift radiation to fuel a god damn sun. And he's completely, utterly oblivious to it. )
It is several not good sounds. It is every not good sound, how in the hell are you still up and walking?
[ There are many, many things wrong here, but that void radiation is the most concerning. how he can just radiate that and not melt his own bones is-
What.
How.
Definitely too sober for this, or not sober enough, either way the 'microwave' dings and McCoy sets his tricorder aside and out of it's misery for the moment, pulling on gloves (portable sanitation fields are a bear to set up), and grabbing his multi-regenerator and sterilizing spray. ]
Let's start small. Hold out your hand, this might sting a little- [ Two quick, cold, tingling blasts of the spray to clean and numb the local area, and he pulls out a perfectly formed pinky, looking more or less like it'd just been lopped right off the kid's hand. ]
( He volunteers blithely, offering his hand out again.
A little knit does form in his brow when Bones pulls a fucking finger out of a microwave, but he doesn't retract his hand. It's morbidly fascinating, if... slightly gross. )
That's, like, the third weirdest thing I've seen today, easily.
( Is it weirder seeing a severed finger fresh from the microwave, or seeing it the moment it got severed in the first place? Probably the former, right? It's totally the former.
But look, if it gets him back into double digits (pun intended) he's not about to complain. )
[ Keep the kid talking, keep him distracted from the slow pass of the regenerator over the join of finger and cut, tendon and bone, nerves and blood vessels slowly knitting together little by little. For the moment it should feel like a dull itch, if anything. ]
( The youths earns a small breath of a laugh โ joke recognized and appropriately appreciated. )
Probably not.
( He muses, blissfully unaware of McCoy's internal conflict. )
The first one was an upright deer that seemed to really, really like Jalapeno chips, and the second was like a Benjamin Button situation, but in reverse. I know that sounds like, just, normal aging, but it's different, I promise.
On the other- I'm damn curious now. How does Benjamin button happen in reverse but still not behave like normal aging?
[ The deer, now, he's not asking. That way lies madness. That's a walking nightmare if he thinks about it for too damn long.
Pass by pass, the cut vanishes, bone, blood, and tendon all mending like it'd never happened. Long as the kid doesn't ask for an explanation? They're good. ]
It was in the right direction, but it definitely wasn't normal. It happened all at once, in like a twenty minute period. I mean newborn baby, toddler, child, preteen, twenties, mid-life crisis, golden years, creepy old man, and then... poof again on fast-forward. It was... objectively horrifying.
( All of this to say, when you've seen as much weird shit as Jack has on such a regular basis, you tend to stop asking for things like explanations. Half the time they're not satisfying, and the other half you were happier not knowing in the first place.
He gives his finger a wiggle. It works. He perks up a little, faintly. )
( Yeah, based on all the screaming, he's inclined to agree with the excruciatingly painful thing. It was not pleasant to witness. Granted, probably less pleasant to experience. Generally not a good morning all-around for anybody involved.
After the prick comes the mildest, most monotone-sounding: )
Ow.
( Nerve-endings confirmed, all things seem to be in working order. )
So are you, like, a mad scientist or something? How do you even have... a finger microwave?
( Consider this less an earnest search for an explanation and more idle small talk. )
( It'll definitely solve the spiders-specific hallucination, which is really his biggest issue. The normal hallucinations he can deal with, you get used to those, but nobody likes spiders. They're creepy.
His hands drop back down into his lap, and he absently links his fingers โ then spends a second or two marveling at the novelty of how symmetrical it feels again. Cool. )
Um.
( Shit.
When is the last time he ate? His condition and the meds he's on kind of kill his appetite โ and that's on top of a lifetime of going hungry already. Forgetting to eat happens more often than not.
He takes his best guess. )
I had a frozen burrito last night sometime? Why, does that matter?
( Pretty sure. Like, 70% confidence.
He'll circle back around to that time displacement thing eventually. )
[ It's not a big kitchen, what he has tucked alongside his lab slash exam room- but it's big enough for him to feed himself and the occasional guest. The great weird wide world being what it is? He has guests slightly more often than previously anticipated.
Reasons the sofa's a pull out.
McCoy swings back out to the sitting area with a glass of sweet tea (calorie are calories at this point) before swinging back to the kitchen, muttering under his breath about underfed children stressing him out, reheating something hearty and home made. ]
( Calories are indeed calories. Frankly, Jack gets most of his from sugary drinks anyway. He practically survives on the contents of the frozen drink machines at work.
He does as he's told, but he does seem faintly perplexed as he goes โ more perching on the edge of the cushion than sitting back comfortably. )
First of all, I'm not a child. Just so we're clear. I own a gas station.
( Which... granted, that's a pretty recent turn of events and he's not very good at running a business, but it's a credential worth pointing out. )
Second- is this like a normal thing doctors do... whenever you're from? Food service? Because the most I've ever gotten from any doctor's office is, like, a lollipop โ which I realize doesn't actually help my case about being a grown-ass adult, but if you don't like candy you're dead inside and I'll die on this hill.
The last thing you recall is a frozen goddamn burrito more than twenty some odd hours ago, your vitals are all over the place- any supplements or further treatments I give you depend on some kinda reasonable baseline. You don't have one.
[ So.
Feeding. ]
You're a grown ass man, sure, but I hesitate to call you 'grown up'. To be fair, I don't call a lot of people grown up.
[ Shit, most of the time he doesn't call HIMSELF grown up. ]
If I'm gonna get done what needs do'n, you need to eat.
( He pulls a face, some muted, toned-down version of annoyed washed over with a tad more mild bemusement. )
Wow. It's been... a really long time since I've been condescended to by somebody actively heating up leftovers for me. I forgot how weird that feels.
( Somehow, this version of events comes with less vitriol than his foster mother had the last time it happened. )
I don't know whether to thank you or leave you a three-and-a-half star Yelp review. ( A beat. ) I mean, I guess you did make me an entire finger for free, so... maybe that's an automatic four.
You'll get a leg too, once I know replacing the marrow won't make the rest of your spine implode.
[ He can make the framework and lay down cloned flesh neat as anything- but the marrow? That's gotta come from somewhere already in the body- especially with how the leg had come off in the first place. After that's sorted, however long it takes?
He'll see what he can do about the rest. ]
What'll that bring me up to? Four point one?
[ he says, bringing over a platter of reheated roast chicken, potatoes, and asparagus. ]
( Okay, admittedly, this does smell a lot better than microwaved gas station burritos โ his primary form of sustenance for the last five-odd years, alongside hot pockets, slurpees, and poptarts. His diet has less to do with an inability to cook, and more to do with a repressed appetite and general apathy. Why bother, when you're not hungry and you're just going to die any time in the next six to forty weeks? )
You're making it really hard to dislike you, and I'm not sure how much of that has to do with the free limbs. If you can make me slightly taller somehow, it'll be four point nine with a complaint in the comment section.
( This is honestly a feat. After Dr. V, it's a miracle his guard has dropped as much as it has since walking in here. Maybe it's because everything about McCoy feels like the exact opposite โ where Dr. Vicedomini is manipulatively nice and made up of a series of mind games and microaggressions, this guy feels like super-honest strangely genuine-aggressions. He also hasn't bragged a single time about his abundance of extra medical degrees, so that's a nice change of pace. )
[ For himself, McCoy makes a pot of coffee and settles in an armchair opposite the sofa, having had something to eat earlier in the day. It's just one meal, it won't fix everything, hell, it won't fix anything, but it'll make McCoy feel better about discussing a full limb replacement and whatever the hell is wired slightly to the left in the kid's brain. ]
Don't much care about being liked, I'd rather be good at my job. And that depends less on my manner and more on whether or not I'm able to help someone.
[ Which, nine times out of ten, he is. And even in that tenth spot- he makes a damn good fight out of it. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
for @oldfashionedfutureboy
The guy that shows up on Bones's door looks decidedly in need of a doctor. Aside from looking generally unhealthy โ too skinny, dark bruises under his eyes, every bit as tired as five years of shitty sleep would imply โ there's also a glaringly obvious prosthetic attached to his leg just beneath the right knee. The smallest finger of his left hand is conspicuously absent, and a clean bandage is taped over the stump with what must have been his Best Effort at one-handed wound dressing.
He knocks on the doorframe despite it being open, then offers an awkward: )
Knock knock.
( A beat passes.
On its heels, a customer-service polite yet Daria-esque monotone ramble follows. )
Sorry, I don't know why I said that. I hate people who do that. I just knocked with my hands, I don't need to do it again with my mouth. That was stupid. Hey. Hi.
no subject
Looks like a rundown little house, opens into a pretty modest sitting room, the lab and actual treatment happening in the back. The air's rife with the smell of antiseptic and coffee, the sofa worn but clean, and the doctor himself tall, broad, and only a little exhausted. He'd grabbed a nap while waiting for this particular patient.
Or rather, this particular tragedy. ]
Jesus christ, kid. [ He thought everything sounded bad enough but this? This LOOKS worse. ] Don't know if I wanna examine you first or feed you. Come on, get your hide in here so we can figure out what's wrong with ya. Or rather, what's right.
no subject
( The response is mild, the verbal equivalent of a shrug. It won't take long to cotton onto the fact that Jack is not what you might call emotive โ he rests at a pretty neutral baseline of comically unfazed and politely apathetic.
He follows orders unobtrusively, and does his best not to telegraph the instinctive discomfort he feels at being in a clinical setting. It's nothing personal, Bones, it's just that the last doctor's office he was in belonged to his sketchy therapist, and their sessions were less of a productive experience and more of an exercise in routine gaslighting.
He perches tentatively wherever he's gestured, and offers up the first thing that comes to mind about what might be right with him: )
I have good teeth? Not that you're a dentist, but I heard overall health begins at the mouth? Then again, I heard that on a commercial for a dentist's office, so that might be oral propaganda...
no subject
Whichever.
Least the kid doesn't seem that easily rattled. Makes this easier. ]
Could very well be. How's the leg hold'n up?
[ At the very least, what's left of it. It'll keep the kid busy talking about whatever in god's green earth has happened to leave him all sorts of scuffed up and sore while Leonard grabs a tricorder, holding up the wand over the kid's severed pinky for an initial scan. ]
no subject
Well, it's not, which is... kind of the problem.
( There's nothing there to hold up anything, you see. At the very least, the stump is fully healed โ if perhaps a bit irritated by the new prosthetic he's just learning to walk on.
The finger, far less so โ he obediently holds it up to get scanned, revealing a very fresh still-healing wound. Spencer did a pretty clean job severing it, at least, though he left Jack to bleed into dirty snow for quite some time before anybody showed up to treat it.
He nods at the wand; he's been in the hospital a lot and never seen anything like it. )
What's that?
no subject
[ Cloning a whole limb might take some doing but- provided there aren't any dangerous genetic markers at play here? He should be able to swing it. The pinky's an easy fix, honestly- quick sample of blood popped into what looks like little more than a microwave (don't ask) that McCoy plugs some equation or another into before turning his attention back to the truly bedraggled and SAD figure that's come into his care. ]
Mm? Tricorder. Full body scan with a single tool- [ Said tool bleats a sad little rondo, layer after layer of alerts pinging here and there in a quiet cacophony of electronic madness that has the doctor staring wide eyed down at it as though in fear of an imminent explosion. When the noises come to a fever pitch, McCoy knocks it with the heel of his hand twice to silence it. ] -that has never seen this many deficiencies and errors in a single humanoid body before. Good lord.
[ Right, filters. Time to filter for issues, look at one thing at a time. ]
no subject
( Jack ventures helpfully, his legs (fake and real) swinging absently back and forth, his heels bonking softly on the table. He's a patient... patient, as it were, displaying quiet interest without any real hurry to be anywhere.
One fun thing may soon become apparent to Bones that Jack is not aware of, though. Jack has believed since he was 18 that he was going to die from FFI, he truly believes he hasn't slept in years. He's been seeing a psychiatrist at no charge, and he's of the belief that it's because they want to study his brain when he dies.
According to McCoy's tricorder, Jack does not have FFI. He does have an entirely different sleep disorder altogether, though it's got more in common with narcolepsy and somnambulism than anything.
He's also emitting enough cosmic void-rift radiation to fuel a god damn sun. And he's completely, utterly oblivious to it. )
no subject
[ There are many, many things wrong here, but that void radiation is the most concerning. how he can just radiate that and not melt his own bones is-
What.
How.
Definitely too sober for this, or not sober enough, either way the 'microwave' dings and McCoy sets his tricorder aside and out of it's misery for the moment, pulling on gloves (portable sanitation fields are a bear to set up), and grabbing his multi-regenerator and sterilizing spray. ]
Let's start small. Hold out your hand, this might sting a little- [ Two quick, cold, tingling blasts of the spray to clean and numb the local area, and he pulls out a perfectly formed pinky, looking more or less like it'd just been lopped right off the kid's hand. ]
no subject
( He volunteers blithely, offering his hand out again.
A little knit does form in his brow when Bones pulls a fucking finger out of a microwave, but he doesn't retract his hand. It's morbidly fascinating, if... slightly gross. )
That's, like, the third weirdest thing I've seen today, easily.
( Is it weirder seeing a severed finger fresh from the microwave, or seeing it the moment it got severed in the first place? Probably the former, right? It's totally the former.
But look, if it gets him back into double digits (pun intended) he's not about to complain. )
no subject
[ He's in his thirties, he can say youths. ]
Do I wanna hear about the other two?
[ Keep the kid talking, keep him distracted from the slow pass of the regenerator over the join of finger and cut, tendon and bone, nerves and blood vessels slowly knitting together little by little. For the moment it should feel like a dull itch, if anything. ]
no subject
Probably not.
( He muses, blissfully unaware of McCoy's internal conflict. )
The first one was an upright deer that seemed to really, really like Jalapeno chips, and the second was like a Benjamin Button situation, but in reverse. I know that sounds like, just, normal aging, but it's different, I promise.
no subject
[ Better for his sanity to not ask. ]
On the other- I'm damn curious now. How does Benjamin button happen in reverse but still not behave like normal aging?
[ The deer, now, he's not asking. That way lies madness. That's a walking nightmare if he thinks about it for too damn long.
Pass by pass, the cut vanishes, bone, blood, and tendon all mending like it'd never happened. Long as the kid doesn't ask for an explanation? They're good. ]
Do me a favor and wiggle that for me.
no subject
( All of this to say, when you've seen as much weird shit as Jack has on such a regular basis, you tend to stop asking for things like explanations. Half the time they're not satisfying, and the other half you were happier not knowing in the first place.
He gives his finger a wiggle. It works. He perks up a little, faintly. )
Woah, look at that. Neat.
no subject
[ Over and over, ad infini? The very idea makes Leonard want to twitch- but he's working, so his hands remain steady. ]
Good. I'm gonna give you a little prick, let me know if you feel it.
[ Nothing more complicated than a sanitized, single use needle, tapping the pad of the kid's finger. ]
no subject
After the prick comes the mildest, most monotone-sounding: )
Ow.
( Nerve-endings confirmed, all things seem to be in working order. )
So are you, like, a mad scientist or something? How do you even have... a finger microwave?
( Consider this less an earnest search for an explanation and more idle small talk. )
no subject
[ The simplest thing, clearly, the leg is gonna take another few sessions he figures. But that'll solve the hallucinogen problem.
He thinks.
He hopes? ]
...Let's just call me a physician that happens to be time displaced and leave it at that. Now- when's the last time you ate?
no subject
His hands drop back down into his lap, and he absently links his fingers โ then spends a second or two marveling at the novelty of how symmetrical it feels again. Cool. )
Um.
( Shit.
When is the last time he ate? His condition and the meds he's on kind of kill his appetite โ and that's on top of a lifetime of going hungry already. Forgetting to eat happens more often than not.
He takes his best guess. )
I had a frozen burrito last night sometime? Why, does that matter?
( Pretty sure. Like, 70% confidence.
He'll circle back around to that time displacement thing eventually. )
no subject
[ It's not a big kitchen, what he has tucked alongside his lab slash exam room- but it's big enough for him to feed himself and the occasional guest. The great weird wide world being what it is? He has guests slightly more often than previously anticipated.
Reasons the sofa's a pull out.
McCoy swings back out to the sitting area with a glass of sweet tea (calorie are calories at this point) before swinging back to the kitchen, muttering under his breath about underfed children stressing him out, reheating something hearty and home made. ]
no subject
He does as he's told, but he does seem faintly perplexed as he goes โ more perching on the edge of the cushion than sitting back comfortably. )
First of all, I'm not a child. Just so we're clear. I own a gas station.
( Which... granted, that's a pretty recent turn of events and he's not very good at running a business, but it's a credential worth pointing out. )
Second- is this like a normal thing doctors do... whenever you're from? Food service? Because the most I've ever gotten from any doctor's office is, like, a lollipop โ which I realize doesn't actually help my case about being a grown-ass adult, but if you don't like candy you're dead inside and I'll die on this hill.
no subject
[ So.
Feeding. ]
You're a grown ass man, sure, but I hesitate to call you 'grown up'. To be fair, I don't call a lot of people grown up.
[ Shit, most of the time he doesn't call HIMSELF grown up. ]
If I'm gonna get done what needs do'n, you need to eat.
no subject
Wow. It's been... a really long time since I've been condescended to by somebody actively heating up leftovers for me. I forgot how weird that feels.
( Somehow, this version of events comes with less vitriol than his foster mother had the last time it happened. )
I don't know whether to thank you or leave you a three-and-a-half star Yelp review. ( A beat. ) I mean, I guess you did make me an entire finger for free, so... maybe that's an automatic four.
no subject
[ He can make the framework and lay down cloned flesh neat as anything- but the marrow? That's gotta come from somewhere already in the body- especially with how the leg had come off in the first place. After that's sorted, however long it takes?
He'll see what he can do about the rest. ]
What'll that bring me up to? Four point one?
[ he says, bringing over a platter of reheated roast chicken, potatoes, and asparagus. ]
no subject
You're making it really hard to dislike you, and I'm not sure how much of that has to do with the free limbs. If you can make me slightly taller somehow, it'll be four point nine with a complaint in the comment section.
( This is honestly a feat. After Dr. V, it's a miracle his guard has dropped as much as it has since walking in here. Maybe it's because everything about McCoy feels like the exact opposite โ where Dr. Vicedomini is manipulatively nice and made up of a series of mind games and microaggressions, this guy feels like super-honest strangely genuine-aggressions. He also hasn't bragged a single time about his abundance of extra medical degrees, so that's a nice change of pace. )
no subject
[ For himself, McCoy makes a pot of coffee and settles in an armchair opposite the sofa, having had something to eat earlier in the day. It's just one meal, it won't fix everything, hell, it won't fix anything, but it'll make McCoy feel better about discussing a full limb replacement and whatever the hell is wired slightly to the left in the kid's brain. ]
Don't much care about being liked, I'd rather be good at my job. And that depends less on my manner and more on whether or not I'm able to help someone.
[ Which, nine times out of ten, he is. And even in that tenth spot- he makes a damn good fight out of it. ]