This is Of Glorious Plumage! Of Glorious Plumage fell prey to an idea/non-plot bunny! Of Glorious Plumage wrote this attempting to be cracky! Of Glorious Plumage might have failed, depending on your sense of humour! Of Glorious Plumage speaks in the third person!
Warning: A few swears....Of Glorious Plumage uses nasty words in real life more than they should be used, and that leaked over into this. Also, implied K/S.
Selfish whoring: Please review because Of Glorious Plumage has abandoned food in order to live off of them.
The Original Series
It takes Janice Rand hours to do her hair. She's timed it. HOURS. But she thinks it's worth it.
She becomes distinctive, attention drawn away from her plain face. Her hair and her legs are her best physical attributes – so she wears Starfleet's demeaning, sexist short skirts, and she painstakingly weaves her luxurious golden hair into a complex pattern above her head.
She is grateful that she doesn't have to undo her updo too often. It's the one redeeming aspect of sonic showers – she doesn't actually have to let down her hair for it to get clean. As long as she's careful about how she places her head when she sleeps, she can get away with not having to rebuild the whole thing for about a week.
"Why do you do it?" one of her fellow yeomen asked her.
"Why not?" she replied.
The truth is that she does it for him. The captain. James T. Kirk. Also known as the most attractive man she has ever worked under.
But he never notices her hair. Never notices her stunningly sexy legs constantly on display thanks to that hated skirt. Never notices how she smiles at him, bats her eyes at him. Never notices how she's the best goddamn yeoman on the entire ship.
It makes her a bit bitter. The man's supposed to be the greatest womanizer in Starfleet, and he won't even look at her, much less ask her for a one-night stand or a quickie in the turbolift.
But she weaves her hair, ignores the way he and Mr. Spock look at each other, and keeps on trying.
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The Mirror Universe
It's not that she's vain – much – but that she needs a place to hide her disruptor pistol.
Sure she has the dagger in her boot, but everyone knows that, and of course she keeps a miniature phase pistol tucked in her cleavage, but that's not unexpected for a woman serving on the I.S.S. Enterprise. What is unexpected is when she reaches into her cleverly styled hair and pulls out a very nasty disruptor.
No one sees it coming.
Well, a few do. But they all end up quite dead.
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The Animated Series
If she weren't a fictional television character, Janice Rand would probably hunt down and kill the animators. How hard can it be to draw hair?
Apparently, it's too hard for the 1970s-era, psychedelically-high, college-drop-outs in charge of her hair.
She can pardon the fact that they color with a 'lemon' colored crayon (her hair is golden, by the way), but she will never forgive them for constantly messing up the basic pattern. It is four rows and four columns and it should not change from scene to scene!
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Star Trek XI
Hair? What hair? Thanks to the fucking Narada, Janice Rand's hair was burned off.
She was on C-deck, helping Dr. Puri prep an extra room for any casualties that Sickbay would be too crowded to deal with when the Enterprise dropped out of warp over Vulcan and ran into some trouble of the pissed-off-Romulans-from-a-future-dimension variety. Somehow a fire was started, Dr. Puri lost his life, and Rand lost her hair.
She knows she should be grateful: she didn't die like so many others, the burns weren't actually too bad, and Puri was quickly replaced by the capable McCoy. Hell, losing some hair (well, ALL her hair, whatever) was nothing compared to losing an entire planet. But still.
As time went by, she lost her bitterness and her hair grew out. At first she thought she would be thankful for it, but, for some reason, it was curly like a poodle's, making it very hard for her to style it (unless she straightened it, but she never really got around to purchasing a flat iron – the only one on the ship was Nyota Uhura's and though Janice and Uhura had become pretty good friends, she did not imagine the other woman would be pleased to have her asking to borrow it every day). Also, she had gotten used to short hair; the weight was unfamiliar and bothersome.
Eventually she found the perfect length: long enough to pull back, but not long enough to weave together. It worked for her. Especially when Captain Kirk complimented her on her hair one day (of course, he was under the influence of sex-pollen-spore-stuff and Spock was as close to glaring at her as he ever got, but Janice disregarded those facts in a breathless haze of bliss and concentrated on not swooning too much).