Author's Note: For where_no_woman's first drabble challenge. (WNW being the LJ community for Trek ladies; particularly the fridged, disappeared, nameless, and forgotten.) Prompt was: Joanna McCoy, rebellion. For the record and also the purposes of this fic, I have decided that Bones is about 36 at the beginning of the five year mission. Because of science. By which I mean, Karl Urban's actual age.
The second time Joanna sets foot aboard the Enterprise, she is 16 years old.
She beams in with her head cocked to the side and one hand on her hip, despite the scolding of the technician at the space station's transporter. Her dad serves on the flagship, for fuck's sake, and she knows more than enough about transporter theory to understand that she's not going to lose any parts just because she's not standing at parade rest.
Conversely, Ensign Chekov, who's manning the Enterprise's transporter console—entirely for her benefit she suspects; Dad has never gotten over his twitchiness about dematerializing in one place and rematerializing somewhere else—seems to have no objection. He just grins disarmingly at her in welcome.
Her father is waiting for her in front of the pad, arms crossed. Jim Kirk is at his side with that giant, crooked grin that has perhaps only become wider than in her memory.
Joanna stands, unmoving, for a long moment as her father looks at her because she wants him to see how much she's changed. She's sure he knows, academically, but she wants him to feel it, to understand with certainty that while he was exploring strange new worlds, the one he left behind kept turning.
She counts longer legs, tighter pants, and higher boots among the new assets that aren't discernible from monthly video communications that end at the neck. He's already heard the way she talks now, though. He's seen the hard edges of her smiles for him. Now he can have the complete fucking picture, live and in all dimensions.
His pause is brief. He comes to meet her and doesn't hesitate before wrapping her in an awkward hug; when she was younger, she used to tell him he needed more practice. Joanna stiffens and barely raises her arms. She shoves her hands in her pockets once he releases her.
"New look?" he grumbles mildly, tugging at the sleeve of her soft, black, leather jacket.
Joanna shrugs. "Gary got me a bike for my birthday," she explains dismissively. "Perfect marks last semester." Again.
She watches the twitch start in Dad's eye before he turns quickly to glare at Jim for his approving whistle, instantly silencing questions about make and model on the tip of the captain's tongue.
"We going?" Joanna asks, indicating the hatch leading into the corridor.
Her father doesn't ask her why exactly her stepfather bought her a motorbike nearly eight months ago without anyone bothering to tell him. But Joanna comforts herself with the fact that he very obviously wants to.
*
Technically, she is not supposed to be aboard the ship. The Enterprise is a Constitution class cruiser, the frontline of the armada. Which means crewmembers only, barring emergency and diplomatic necessity. But Jim Kirk pulled off being a 25-year-old captain of the pride of the fleet, so it's never surprised her that he can finagle a few day's visit for unauthorized personnel. Particularly when the ship's in dock for routine maintenance.
He jokes about her being an ambassador—at least according to the paperwork—and insists that the "tradition" of dinner with the senior officers be upheld. (Her father points out that it's not a tradition given that it's only happened once before, but Jim just says, "It's a new tradition, Bones! Don't nitpick," and slaps him on his shoulder.)
At dinner, her father watches her deliberately not look at him. Jim calls her "Jo" like she was just there yesterday and not almost three years ago, and seems mildly confused when she doesn't giggle helplessly into her hands at all of his jokes.
Everyone else treats her with the same polite affection and asks after her life and her studies and her plans like it's a family reunion, and maybe it is. Maybe they all count as distant relations—no more distant than her dad after all—a big, happy, goddamned dysfunctional family in space. It's all just familiar enough to piss her off about how comfortable she's not.
She answers like she would if it were a family reunion: noncommittal grunts and monosyllables as she picks at her plate and tries to very visibly appear as though she wants to be anywhere but here.
"I'm failing biology. And chemistry," she announces when the opportunity presents itself.
"Since when?" her father demands and she can practically feel the air shift from the intensity of his scowl.
"Since now," she replies, sneering right back. Since she threw her last few tests on purpose. Since she realized with sudden clarity the road down which she was traveling and tried to bank a hard right to who-knows-where out of sheer stubbornness. Her mom assumes that she's acting out as she tries to figure out what she wants, as she works out her identity. If her parents could ever carry on a conversation of more than five sentences, Joanna is sure Mom would have told him that. It's almost the exact opposite of the truth, but at least it'd give him something to work from.
"Hey, Jo," Jim interrupts with clear desperation. He slides his drink towards Dad as an obvious suggestion, though he doesn't take his eyes off of Joanna. "How about I give you a tour of the ship some time tomorrow? It's been a while, right? I could-"
"I'd like it if Commander Spock showed me around," Joanna replies cutting Jim off and training her gaze on the Vulcan in question.
She rehearsed that look in the mirror for two weeks before she pulled up beside Andrew Harris when they were leaving track practice and invited him to climb on the back of her bike.
The table goes silent save for Dad choking on his drink and Uhura snorting indelicately into her napkin. Spock's right eyebrow lifts towards his razor-straight fringe. At the other end of the table, Sulu's eyes widen and the clear desire to laugh is written across his face. He discreetly elbows Chekov, who ignores him, choosing instead to grimace down at his plate.
It's the same grimace, Joanna notes, he wore the last time that she was aboard, when Dad caught him at a table in the mess at lunch, teaching a giggling Joanna how to curse in Russian. His forehead scrunches and his eyebrows raise until they disappear behind dark brown curls, lips pursed in some mixture of chagrin and evasiveness.
"If that is your preference Ms. McCoy," Spock says at last, pulling her attention back. "I have free time available from 0815 to 0910 hours tomorrow morning which should be suitable for a cursory presentation regarding key systems."
"That'd be great," Joanna drawls, smiling.
The table recovers as Chekov stammers out a question about Joanna's trigonometry class.
Leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, Jim is quite decidedly pouting.
Joanna would feel sorry for him, but for someone who does his damnedest to make a career out of being cool, it should be obvious that she's not going to demonstrate any preference for her dad's favorite.
*
She makes a show of fixing her hair the next morning before she leaves her father's quarters. His face is so red that she almost gives it up, nearly exclaims, "Shit, Dad, it's not like it's a date. I'm just screwing with you. Don't burst a fucking aneurysm."
She doesn't, however, because that would be counterproductive. She's a McCoy. She sticks to her guns.
And besides it's not like it's totally, completely, absolutely impossible in all universes or anything. Probably. She's not a little girl anymore, is the point, and she's felt Andrew Harris up pretty thoroughly on more than one occasion, and only once was out of scientific curiosity. Letting him return the favor was always just for kicks. She's smart enough to know that sundry make out sessions and one guy's hands on her tits don't exactly make her a woman of the world, but she's getting there in her own time.
Spock's voice is soothing and pleasant to listen to, which is good because what he's saying isn't really stimulating. He talks to her about each of the ship's major systems in brief, the general theory of how they work, how they're interconnected, and what is expected of their individual overseers. He explains the repetitive barrage of operations tests and systems analyses that the skeleton crew will be performing over the course of the week.
It is nothing she doesn't already know.
Her personal console at home has long been filled with all the schematics and overviews and regulations and job descriptions that she could get her hands on. Which is a lot. Starfleet is nothing if not proud of both its achievements and its intentions. The genuine enthusiasm is such that it took her years to realize that every bit of even the most innocuous information had a pitch wrapped up in it.
Joanna walks the corridors of starships often in her sleep, and that's part of the problem.
Logically, Spock saves sickbay for the end of the tour so that he can drop her off there. She ignores the tug in her chest and rejects that destination. He tilts his head slightly as he peers at her, but he does not protest.
Joanna spends her morning on the bridge instead, watching as they cycle through various stress tests and put the ship's computer through its paces. She hovers near the helm console, just out of the way, and stares at the stars twinkling on the viewscreen.
*
They're supposed to be having dinner, just the two of them, but the food's not even on the table before they're fighting. Her father's never been a patient man.
"Nothing," she replies perfunctorily to his demand to know what's wrong with her.
"You haven't said more than three words to me at a time since you've been here!"
"Well, here have four," Joanna replies, making a show of counting each word off on her fingers.
"Dammit, Jojo," he swears softly.
Joanna rolls her eyes, frowns, and turns away. She's already tired of being angry, but she's still too frustrated to stop.
"Look, I know this is- has always been hard for you, but-"
And that she can't take at all. The Divorce Speech. The Broken Family Mantra.
We love you very much- the script goes. The problem Joanna has always found with it, however, is that when you're younger, you don't understand how it could possibly be true. And when you're older, you know that it doesn't really amount to shit even if it is.
"Go to hell," she spits before marching out the door and storming off through the mostly empty corridors.
*
The first person who crosses her path is Chekov. She could think of worse eventualities. He eyes her, slightly bewildered, clearly considering the fact that she is alone.
"Joanna, you are not supposed to move around the ship without an escort," he says after a moment. His expression is apologetic. She realizes that he doesn't want her to feel patronized. At barely-twenty and a senior officer on the flagship—with a few years under his belt during which he was even younger—Joanna supposes Chekov's endured enough patronization to last a dozen lifetimes.
"I can take you whereever you might want to go," he assures her after she remains silent. "Or…back to your father?"
"I want to join Starfleet," she blurts out because he's listening and his eyes are hazel and he's only a few years older than her, and besides anyone who graduates from Starfleet Academy at 17 has to understand expectation. "I want to join Starfleet and be a doctor."
"Both noble goals," he says slowly. "But you are not happy?"
"I'm going to become him!" she says, indignant, gesturing in the general direction of her father's quarters. "Or worse, I'm going to fail to become him and that'll be even more pathetic."
He studies her thoughtfully, and Joanna can see it in his eyes. Your father's a great man. Why shouldn't you want to be like him?
He doesn't say it though, and for that Joanna is indescribably grateful.
"It's like a stupid fucking cliche," she continues. "Daddy runs off to…all of this, so little Jo decides to do the same thing. Maybe then she'll feel closer to him. Maybe then she'll understand what the big goddamned deal is."
She folds her arms across her chest, defiant, but her voice comes out soft. "I don't want that to be my story."
"But is it?" he asks, holding her gaze. "Are those truly your reasons?"
Joanna shrugs and thinks about dreams of space folding around her, blanketing her in stars, and new worlds and new people that no one's ever seen before.
"I'm sixteen, how the hell should I know?" she lies.
His look is skeptical, as well it should be.
"I wanted to be a Starfleet officer," he says quietly. "There are many reasons I might not have. There are many things others might think about why. But I wanted to, so I did it."
And it's really not that simple. But in a lot of ways, it sort of is.
*
When she returns to her father's quarters, he's waiting up for her.
She doesn't tell him.
In fact, she doesn't say anything at all.
But the next morning, she leaves with him, and spends the day quietly helping him do inventory in sickbay. She cannot hide the reverence with which she treats the instruments, and the first time she catches him smirking at her, she rolls her eyes. She allows subsequent instances to slide.
There are two major interruptions.
The first interruption—perpetual—is the captain. He seems to have no other purpose than to annoy her father; who, in turn, insists that there must be many other things that Jim is called upon to do besides that. Jim denies that this is true and reclines across one of the biobeds. Eventually, Joanna gives in and tells him the specifications of her bike, which distracts him for a full half-hour.
The second interruption—brief in duration—is Chekov. He appears to deliver a PADD to the loitering captain from Commander Spock, which Joanna is sure contains somewhere within an entreaty to stop fucking around, but in Vulcan-speak. When Chekov turns to go, Joanna slips out the door after him, and the navigator is caught off-guard when she backs him against the bulkhead and presses her lips against his.
"Holy fucking shit," he says in Russian once she has released him and her face flushes with pride. For an instant, his eyes dart, panicked, towards sickbay. But Joanna slips back in through the door smoothly before he has time to say anything else.
Later, they meet in Stellar Cartography, and up on the big screen, he shows her a series of projections, mapping all of the planets and systems the Enterprise has visited.
*
Jim decides not to accompany them to the transporter room when it's time for Joanna to leave. He just shakes her hand with exaggerated seriousness on the bridge and says, "Later, kid," with a nod.
Joanna thinks this is an improvement. Partially because he clearly wants to allow them a measure of privacy. Partially because Gary tried too hard at first too, and that quickly became tiresome. Frankly, Jim is a lot better, but—and if they discussed such things she's certain Dad would agree—she doesn't want it to go to his head or anything.
The hug is still awkward.
"I love you, Jojo," he whispers into her hair.
"Yeah, I know," she responds. His grip slackens but she holds on for a few moments longer.
When Joanna does move away, her face is impassive and smooth. She steps onto the pad and blinks against the blinding white lights ringing it, immediately assigning them the blame for the moisture in her eyes.
Her father nods to Chekov at the control station and Chekov's hands move smoothly over the bright panel.
"Energizing."
Joanna smiles, bites her lip, and says, "Bye, Pavel."
She wiggles her fingers at him in a wave until she can't feel them anymore. The last thing she sees is the furrow of her father's brow as confusion passes over his face.
When Joanna rematerializes at the station, she is still grinning, her hand still raised in farewell.
The technician gives her a disapproving look.
She gives him the finger.