Much Ado About Vulcan (A Spock Love Story) - COMPLETE

Guts and Gossip

Dissection was surprisingly uneventful.

We were presented immediately after entering the room with a complete female adult Gorn cadaver, alongside innumerable incomplete body parts from other species, and asked to examine them. The full dead body lying on a metal slab took many of the students by surprise, but after five years, I'd lost my ability to freak out over death.

I'd learnt that it was just an inescapable part of life.

Five minutes into my turn with the scalpel on the Gorn, when I was up to my wrists in brain-matter searching for a hypothalamus, Dr. McCoy appeared behind my shoulder.

"Found it yet, Treebeard?" he asked me, leaning over the table to get a closer look at what I was doing, his white scrubs covered in a mysterious green liquid that I didn't even want to ask about.

"Treebeard? Still? Seriously. I'm twenty-three, doctor..." I quipped back.

Since my first lesson with him five years ago, Dr. McCoy had jokingly referred to me as Treebeard, and it didn't look like he was going to stop any time soon.

'Treebeard' was a character in 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, a set of books written by author J.R.R Tolkein, whom I had studied in high school for my 'Ancient Literature' unit of English. 'Treebeard' was a member of a mythical species, the 'Ents', who were walking, talking tree-people. They were responsible for the protection of their forest, and their kind.

In my first dissection lesson, I had made the mistake of mentioning that I used to be a member of Greenpeace. That, my love of Tolkein's work, and my surname 'Birchwood' had led Dr. Leonard McCoy to a invent nickname that had lasted five years.

"Seriously," he replied, the corner of his mouth quirking up into a smile, "Now hurry up your chopping, cadet, we don't have all day. Do you have that hypothalamus or not?"

I stuck my tongue out of the corner of my mouth, dug slightly deeper into the Gorn brain, and finally reached my goal.

"Yes. Yes I do." I replied proudly, holding up a small, smooth section of the brain with my pair of metal tweezers, now covered in blood.

"Excellent." Dr. McCoy replied, patting me on the back as I placed the hypothalamus in a small metal container, ready for inspection under a microscope, and wiped my bloody hands on my white scrubs.

First day back and I was already covered in blood. Typical.

Dissection was one of my favourite aspects of studying medicine. Despite the fact that I often went home smelling like a morgue, I found it fascinating to see how the anatomies of different species compared to each other.

That, and the fact that on some days, you just need to chop a dead body up to feel better about yourself.

Today was an example of the latter.

I set down my pair of tweezers on the table, pushed a dark curl out of my face and walked off to join a group of my peers, who had congregated around the cold inanimate torso of what appeared to be a Klingon.

"Anything interesting in there?" I asked, having snuck up behind them, all engrossed in their work.

Su Ling, a healthy pair of Klingon lungs in her hand, spun around to look at me and beamed.

"Alex!" she exclaimed in surprise, "Biochem was amazing!"

I cursed inwardly, I'd almost forgotten. Of course biochem was amazing, biochem was always going to be amazing. I was trying my best to forget about the disastrous events of that morning's maths lesson, but they were all suddenly flooding back to me in vivid technicolour.