Summerhill, Atlanta, Georgia
That's the nice thing about "working from home," Jocelyn Darnell reflects, when she finally drags herself out of bed at two-thirty in the afternoon. There's no real set start time.
Now if only she didn't feel so damn miserable.
She shuffles into the kitchen in search of decongestant. This morning, when she rose early (as always, every Monday-Wednesday-Friday) to drop Joanna off at daycare, she didn't bother to change out of her pajamas, knowing full well she would soon be right back where she started: in bed, warding off whatever the hell has her laid up and sick as a dog.
That's the other thing about working from home—you only do it when you're afraid of infecting everybody in the office. Double-edged sword, really.
A yawn makes her still-sore throat tingle painfully. She starts up the coffee maker. Tea would probably be better, but she's still exhausted and she needs to get something done before the nanny brings Joanna home at five. She stands at the counter for a moment in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, enjoying the warm patch of sunshine coming in through the window above the sink. For the last four days straight, it was nothing but cold, drizzly winter rain.
Before she can make her way to the cabinet and locate a mug, the communicator console on the wall buzzes, and Jocelyn notices for the first time that she has four missed calls. For a moment she's worried it's her boss—she really needs to answer those messages about next month's meeting with the Andorian clients—but then she sees the Boston area code: Ananya.
Ananya, her best friend from prep school in Houston, whose gossipy streak is delightful and a mile long. Ananya who kept in touch long after she moved away to attend some tiny, liberal-arts women's college and Jocelyn shuffled off to study economics at Ole Miss. Ananya who got Jocelyn through her divorce with a strategy that was fifty-percent being a sympathetic ear, twenty-percent sending care packages of chocolate and booze, and thirty-percent coming up with her own spectacular rants about your ex-husband, commanding officer of the USS Asshole since 2254.
Jocelyn hesitates in front of the comm console. Ananya has been all over the upcoming midterm elections, and Jocelyn really doesn't have the energy to listen to another rant about excessive defense spending and the Laurentian System.
Four missed calls, though. That's a lot even for her. Either Kevin's decided to make an honest woman out of her, or somebody's died.
Jocelyn picks up, audio only. "Hey, Nan."
Ananya, without preamble: "Have you seen the news?"
Jocelyn can feel the beginnings of a headache behind her eyes. She pinches the bridge of her nose. "No. Why?"
"Get online now."
Jocelyn pauses, because there's real alarm in Ananya's voice now. She can imagine her friend's dark eyes wide, her brow creased with worry.
"Hang on." She pads into the office and returns with her tablet.
"Are you online?"
"Two seconds." In short order the tablet is powered up and connected to the network, and Jocelyn pulls up her news feed—a tailored mishmash of local alerts and planetary broadcasts. At the top of the feed is a San Francisco Chronicle article, mirrored as "trending" in the right margin above the ads.
Developing Story: Massive Seismic Activity Detected on Vulcan; Planetwide Evacuation Possible
She scans further in the newsfeed and finds a Starfleet press release from an hour earlier stating that several ships have been deployed to handle whatever shadowy crisis is unfolding in Vulcan space. There are seven of them in total, listed in alphabetical order: the Antares, Endeavor, Enterprise, Farragut, Hood, Truman, and Wolcott.
"Crazy, right?" Ananya asks.
"Yeah," Jocelyn agrees. "Crazy."
Half an hour later the Chronicle article updates, and Jocelyn has to read the headline twice.
Vulcan Destroyed in Planetwide Attack
There's a video floating around online, looping over and over. It's fuzzy and off-kilter, captured from afar by the telescopic camera at a Starfleet outpost on a neighboring planet, Delta Vega. In the space of about six seconds, Vulcan crumbles in on itself and vanishes, so fast and efficient it almost looks fake. A number of armchair skeptics are wondering just that online, although there are just as many posts talking about Vulcan friends and colleagues on Earth somehow all reacting at the moment of the planet's destruction. Something about mental bonds between family and loved ones being broken. Jocelyn doesn't know what to make of that—she doesn't know any Vulcans, and the whole touch-telepath thing is confusing at best.
There's a viral tag in Standard: #IGrieveWithThee, and a corresponding one in Vulcan. More than Vulcan speaker—nearly all humans, as far as Jocelyn can tell—has been quick to point out the Vulcan one has a critical grammar error, so everyone should use the Standard one instead.
And there's another Starfleet press release: of the seven ships deployed to Vulcan, six have been destroyed in a massive battle, ambushed by a Romulan ship that apparently claims no allegiance to the Empire, and has now vanished from Vulcan space. The news outlets are going haywire: where did it come from? Is it heading to Earth? Are they next?
Jocelyn skims through the list of lost ships twice before doubling back and catching the phrase cadet-crewed. She minimizes the newsfeed.
Without Joanna bouncing off the walls, the house is quiet, barely touched by ambient noise: the central heating, winter birds chirping outside, the occasional distant hum of a hovercar on the road.
Cadet-crewed.
She tabs open the contacts folder on her tablet without thinking, then frowns and closes it. She still has Leonard's contact information, of course, but he won't be reachable on a civilian comm.
If he's reachable at all.
She tabs open the contacts folder again—and hesitates. Maybe it's because the news is still too surreal, because it hasn't sunk in yet that an entire planet and all its inhabitants are now gone forever, a hole in the map on the other side of the quadrant. Maybe it's because—she's woman enough to admit it—it's still awkward between them.
If Leonard is alive and well, if by some insane chance he's on the one ship that made it out, then she's the last person he'll want to talk to about it.
She stares at the tablet screen.
Once upon a time, she would have believed she could make a clean break from any relationship. She hasn't been dumped since the tenth grade, and that's a streak she hasn't broken since—not even with him. (He can call it "mutual" all he wants; she's the one who decided to bite the bullet and get on the phone with a lawyer.) But she's not twenty anymore, and things stick now more than they used to. Joanna—light of her life, best part of her world and then some—is, of course, the reason why. Jocelyn has come to terms with that. Being a divorced parent is simply part of her reality.
Leonard is a damn grown-up, and she isn't responsible for him. He can take care of himself. It doesn't change the fact that he'd be leaving people behind.
Looking back down at her contact files, Jocelyn swipes down on the screen of her tablet, scrolling up from the L's to the E's. The name is right there, nestled between her cousin in Paris and one of her work colleagues: Eleanor McCoy. Jocelyn opens the contact file and hits call.
She's always liked Leonard's mother, and she's pretty sure Leonard's mother has always liked her. If she has any lingering regrets about the divorce, it's how little they've been in touch, how little time Eleanor has spent with Joanna. Whatever comes of today, Jocelyn thinks, maybe it's time Jojo starts getting to know her grandma better.
If there's anything to be known beyond what Jocelyn can glean from the 24-hour news cycle, Eleanor probably knows it already. If not, well, that makes two of them.
A/N: There are two sides to every story, and this is a little snapshot of hers.
Full disclosure: I love writing about Jocelyn. Given that she's barely a mention in the first reboot film, there's tons of room for fanfic writers to interpret her as they choose. My sense of her is that she's basically a good person, if difficult to live with, in the same way I imagine McCoy is difficult to live with. I don't think either of them did anything wrong (like cheating) to prompt their divorce, but you can have an ugly, painful, drawn-out breakup between two people who have fallen out of love, even if no one involved messes up. (If you're interested in reading more about that, my other fic, "No More Goddamn Furniture," shares a little bit of the story from McCoy's perspective.)