one.
Jacq is sixteen and she's back from Tarsus IV. Horrifying things are replaying behind her eyes and she can't deal with Starfleet doctors hovering over her shoulders like the damn inspectors that used to stand just there and mutter inappropriate comments about Jacq's fine-ass, tainted body.
"Get out of my face," she snaps at one, when they look at their PADD, using that special voice and treating her with kid gloves as they ask her how she's dealing with the change in gravity. "I'm not a fucking five year old. It's fucking easy to deal with the change in gravity and if you haven't noticed, my muscle mass is a bit over the charts in comparison to my weight because of it, so I'm warning you now when I say that it fucking hurts to get punched in the face by yours truly."
"Miss Lawson-" they start, using the fake name she'd made for herself on Tarsus IV.
"Doctor," Jacq corrects, because I didn't get a fucking degree at eleven so I could be called Miss, I got a degree and a PhD at eleven to be called what I am, what I want to be. Even if 'Wendy Lawson' isn't a doctor, she – Jacqueline Winona Kirk – is one and Jacq will be damned before another piece of what she's worked to make of herself is taken from her.
The Starfleet doctor eyes her precariously at that, scrolling through their PADD before resuming conversation, referring to her as Miss Lawson and even fucking Wendy at one point, before Jacq gets so pissed that she feigns falling asleep. Once they've left, she gets up, grabs her bag and leaves through the window.
Jacq is sixteen and she's back from Tarsus IV. Never again is anyone going to keep her anywhere.
She figures that she's stupid for even entertaining the idea that Frank would welcome her back. Upon seeing her, he's stock still, but when she goes to saunter past him into the kitchen his hand grabs her hair, which shouldn't be possible because it's barely an inch long.
Jacq falls back into old habits with her stepfather at that, thinking of Sam – Sam who got kicked out and ran away – and her mother – who is somewhere else in the damn universe, somewhere that is not Iowa, Earth – as she squeezes her eyes shut. However, Tarsus IV must have changed her more than she'd thought, more than the doctors had mentioned, because a kick that should have broken her ribs seems to have barely bruised them, when she checks later.
Collecting her few wanted possessions, like a set of paper novels that used to belong to George Samuel Kirk and a tatty, half-emptied Starfleet gym bag with LAWSON. W printed on the strap – because Jacq doesn't have things, because she doesn't have possessions, because everything she valued, she took with her to Tarsus IV, because Wendy Lawson was listed as to be executed and her belongings were recycled – Jacq leaves what should have been a home she could grow old in. I'm never coming back here, she thinks, before taking a shuttle to San Francisco, hacking her records on the fly with a crappy computer that nearly overheats under her furiously typing fingers.
A month later, a Starfleet officer by the name of Christopher Pike stops by her flat and treats her to dinner, questioning her newfound lodgings and independent living. When he leaves, he pauses at her door and dares her to join Starfleet, to take up the Command Track. Now, Jacq hasn't ever let up on a dare before – the only problem is that she's sixteen and Pike knows it. I can do two years, Jacq thinks, already making plans and scoffing at the fact she's making them at all. And four years? Fuck that, I'll do it in three.
Jacq has a bad past with sex.
It started when she was nine, when she was just a young girl and Sam's a boy, but every girl's a girl. She remembers how Frank would take her up to his bedroom, the one he's supposed to share with her mother, except Winona isn't there and Jacq is her replacement. It's all fucked up and Jacq can recall knowing it was bullshit from the start, but Frank threatened to do worse to Sam. When Sam had run away, Jacq had tried to as well, but Frank got her back, soon enough. Only when she was thirteen going on fourteen did she finally get away, taking the secret flight to Tarsus IV-
But Tarsus IV wasn't any better. On the colony planet, she was alone, just another face in the crowd of farmers. They lived in huts, with thin walls between them and the sky was lavender, but the sun still heated the planet too much for them to handle. Jacq worked muddy grain fields in a pair of shorts and a sports bra – any other clothes were for sleeping in, when the nights got cold and the rain pounded down through gaps in roofing. In the daytime, the inspectors would leer and comment, watching her and most of the other female workers, because Tarsus IV was a dictatorship and a patriarchal dictatorship at that. Men ruled and only once did a good one show up to haul the bad away from Jacq, as she screamed for help.
Jacq had to watch them execute him in front of her and when she takes drugs now, months later, she hallucinates during back-alley sex – trying to get something of herself back, trying to find a different meaning to sex that isn't associated with violence and lack of consent – and sometimes, Jacq sees his brains on the floor.
Frankly, however, Jacq feels lucky that the one time she does get pregnant, it's been so many months since Tarsus IV that it can only be one of the poor sods she'd let fuck her on Earth. With a frown, she twirls her tablet between her hands before pausing and detaching the blood-processer that should have told her she had an STD, rather than a strange parasite growing inside of her.
"This is fucked up," Jacq mutters. "I can't be a mother." Jacq has a life-plan, too. Motherhood isn't part of it. She's already taking online courses to bump up her qualifications, retaking a couple just to prove she still retains shit that she learnt when she was a kid and bored as fuck with normal school. I'm going to be a Starfleet captain, I'm going to have my own ship and crew.
Jacq can't be a mother.
"It's strange, y'know," Jacq babbles at a stranger in the waiting room, "life and reproduction and all that jazz. I mean, how did our ancestors even figure out how to do the deed? Did they just do it and then, a couple months later, boom, lady starts having contractions and then there's something squalling and shitting all over them?"
The stranger, admirably, doesn't tell her to shut up. Jacq, less admirably, runs away when her fake name is called over the intercom.
I can't do this! Jacq lets out a scream into her pillow upon getting home to her flat, holding her breath as she's filled with a kind of…sorrow, one that radiates from something that is most definitely not her.
"Shit. Shit, shit, shit, telepathic baby-"
Jacq finds herself going to a more shady doctor, who checks her over and gives her a prescription that will get her the needed vitamins from Federation pharmacies, that will help her carry a half-human baby to term. They give her the usual human pregnancy run-down – no alcohol, I knew, but stars, the reality is shit and sushi, too? – before adding on that she should probably track down the Vulcan baby-daddy, as Vulcan's aren't into sharing on the whole biology front.
"Shit. Shit, shit, shit, Vulcan baby-"
Jacq remembers sleeping with…two different Vulcans, but one was a lady, so she discounts her. The other had been respectfully shitfaced on chocolate liquor. He tasted like it, too, the Kirk recalls whimsically, before groaning how the shady doctor advises against consuming chocolate, as one of the few things they do know Vulcans are susceptible to.
Unfortunately, as Jacq doesn't have a fucking clue who he is, she has to turn to available online literature and it's hopeless. They betray nothing, Jacq thinks, the only thing stopping her from hacking them is her lack of Starfleet computer – the one thing she's confident in using to hack an alien archive over sixteen light-years away. For fucks sake, I don't even know how long this thing will last!
It lasts: Eleven. Fucking. Months.
"You better be worth this, Elfy," Jacq groans while in labour, the nickname one of much thought – using the words 'elf' and 'baby' as a reference to how Vulcans have pointy ears and how her baby…is a baby. "Fucking hell!"
"Please do not swear in my hospital," the shady doctor reprimands, five hours later delivering a pointy-eared baby girl with red blood, a high copper level, a heart below her lung, one kidney and something that looks like another appendix, but which apparently would usually be green. Probably red, now, Jacq guesses, thinking of her clearly not-green cheeks. "You'll have to go to a town hall to get her registered."
"Aw, fucking hell, really?"
"I'm a doctor, not an administrator, Doctor Lawson."
"Elfy, I'm really out of my mind, but I'm also on drugs," Jacq sways slightly as she stands, waiting for the correct forms to both register her kid with the Federation and have her adopted. "I'm going to name you and then I'm going to give you away to some nice family. It's not going to be a closed adoption, before you ask, because I'm not that fucking stupid and my mom and brother would probably track me down just to kill me if they ever found out about you and then found I gave you away forever-"
"Doctor Lawson, your forms," an actual administrator comes into the room, sitting down at their nice desk and passing over a tablet, along with a handy touch-pen. "Social Services have been called. They'll arrive in a moment."
Jacq nods and takes a moment to eye the most likely very unclean tablet, before sitting down finally, shifting Elfy to one arm and picking up the touch-pen. Briefly, she pauses, realising she's using her right hand to write rather than her left, but then she shrugs. I'm ambidextrous anyway.
Social Services appear sometime around when she starts filling out the final parts of the adoption forms. When they take her daughter, her small, hot body leaving her arms, Jacq feels something like pain. It's only an hour later, after she feels that familiar yet foreign set of feelings – her daughter's feelings, the ones she's been feeling for eight months, that she could recognise without even trying, feelings that are want, fear, loss, sadness, pain – that Jacq realises that perhaps, she's made a mistake.
I've never been wanted before.
Jacq cries herself to sleep, even if she knows her choice was for the best.
The bond doesn't fade at all as the years pass. She starts at Starfleet Academy, sharing a room with a girl named Nyota Uhura who does not put up with her philandering behaviour and Jacq focuses on the bond in class, when she's bored – which is a lot. Working her way up the Command Track is slow and laborious, because Starfleet values experience as much as it does education, though Jacq still eventually manages three years rather than four.
But her shared bond with her daughter is interesting. Jacq won't ever admit what she'd really doing when she zones out during lectures about things she already knows, but dammit, if her baby girl isn't a clever little shit. By the time she's two, Jacq has dreams with her real-life presence and while she doesn't always remember them, Jacq knows that her girl was in them and that Elfy meant for her to be there.
She only slips up once.
"Bones," Jacq mumbles as she woozily presses up against him, "Bones, help, please."
He scowls at her, pulling her off him, but keeping her upright as she sways. "What have you done to yourself?"
"Snacking all day, didn't realise," Jacq can feel her tongue losing more and more function. "Trace amounts of something I'm-"
"Allergic to, damn it, girl," Leonard swears, before easily hefting her up into his arms, shouting for cadets to get the fuck out of the way as he rushes her to the campus medbay. Upon getting there, he lays her on a gurney, calling for help as he brings up her medical file, looking through her list of allergies. "What the hell have you been eating?"
Jacq's too weak to reply, but she still clumsily tries to itch her stomach as it gets uncomfortably tingly on one side. I shouldn't have stuffed my damn face. Maybe I could have developed a tolerance or shit…can you even develop a tolerance for allergies or is that just for intolerances? I'll have to ask Bones later. A hypo gets stuffed into her neck and all of a sudden, her airway becomes a hundred times clearer.
"This is why you should only ever have replicated food," Leonard mutters, "Replicators don't let you eat things you could have reactions to."
"Not my fault," Jacq says, before pushing up into a sitting position, itching her side properly, finally, pushing her shirt up a little. "Thanks for the save, Bones." Leonard scoffs and goes to reply, only for his eyes to catch on her bare slice of skin. Jacq raises an eyebrow, surprised. "And here I thought we had a platonic relationship-"
"Push up your shirt," he barks, still staring. Jacq frowns, but complies, watching his eyes flicker around her bare skin.
"What's the matter? Do I have a rash?" Jacq looks down, thankful that she doesn't have big boobs anymore, after surgery the year before. Her six-pack is fine – as hell – and her stretch marks from Elfy are silver and fucking itchy, but other than that…nothing. She pushes her shirt down, looking at Leonard in confusion. "What's the matter, Bonesy?"
"You've had a kid," he mutters, before scrolling through her medical file with a deep frown. Jacq stares for a long moment before swearing, reaching out and taking the PADD from him. "Hey!" he starts, before Jacq shuts it off.
"That's not your business or anyone else's."
"If you've been pregnant, your medical records for it should be on your file-"
"Well it fucking isn't!" Jacq hisses, before getting off the gurney, coming close. "You keep your mouth shut, Leonard McCoy, or I swear…" a tense silence falls, before Leonard nods sharply.
"Fine. I didn't see anything, but don't think we aren't talking about this at some point again in the future, especially if something happens that requires an answer to the question, have you ever been pregnant before, do you hear me, Kirk?"
"I hear you," Jacq says, another doctor approaching to check her over and get Leonard to fill out a post-use requisition form for the hypospray.
They're in a park. It's empty except for them both and Jacq finds herself biting into a P&J sandwich, before she abruptly takes control of the dream, changing it to just jam.
"No nuts, elfy," Jacq warns her for seemingly the hundredth time – fifteenth – they've done this. Elfy giggles, eating her own sandwich before getting up, looking like any normal human four year old, if not for the pointed ears sticking out from scraggly, dark blonde curls. "Where are you going?"
"Swing me?" she asks, before running over to the swings, Jacq following her and helping her out. Soon, Elfy's flying high up into the sky, slipping off her swingseat into the air, the sun fading rapidly as stars take their place. Jacq swims up through the air to where Elfy's floating away, wrapping an arm around her warm waist, pulling her close. Manipulating the dream, she makes the right Earth constellations appear, using her own memory as a map before she points.
"Look. You see those three stars there, in a line?"
"Yes."
"That's Orion's Belt – and there, you see that twinkling star?"
"With the different colours?"
"Yeah, baby, with the different colours – that's actually more than one star, they're three. The Three Sisters."
"Do I have sisters?"
"Not from me," Jacq presses a kiss to her head. "Do you have any siblings with your parents, honey?"
"No. I don't have parents anymore."
Jacq feels horror spin inside her chest, looking down at her daughter in pain. "You don't-"
Jacq doesn't always remember her dreams when she wakes up. She doesn't remember that one.
