The Five Things Jim Kirk Had to Tell Joanna McCoy
Five.
“And…and then he said that I smell like, like…dog…poo!” Joanna wailed as her uncle held her in his arms. “He said I smelled like dog poo and was made of dog poo ‘cause I’m so stupid.” She sniffled and settled in closer to him.
“Do you know why that boy said those things to you, Joanna?” Kirk said in a gentle, explanatory manner. She shook her head.
“He said those things to you because he likes you.”
She cocked her head and furrowed her brow, considering. She was very confused. “But, Uncle Jim, it wasn’t nice. And you said before, after I gotted in trouble at my school, that if I want other kids to like me then I hafta be nice to them.”
Kirk nodded. “That’s true, Joanna. But boys, well, we do things differently than girls. We expect you to know what we’re about, because we think we’re a whole lot simpler than we actually are.”
Joanna put her thumb in her mouth and snuggled closer to her uncle. “Like complicated?”
He nodded approvingly. She was getting smarter every day, and the fact that she said it as only a child would, “compwicated”, only made it dearer. “Exactly like complicated, Joanna. Did Mr. Spock teach you that word?”
She shook her head sleepily. “No, Daddy did, when I asked him about you. He said you and him was complicated.”
He nodded and swung her up onto her shoulder. He could already feel her drool leaking onto his uniform, but he found that he didn’t mind. He and Bones were complicated, that’s for sure. It seemed as if they had been trying to figure out their relationship, or whatever the hell it was, since the Academy. They way that they had served together over the past two years on the Enterprise had changed a lot, but it seemed like neither of them was willing to address it.
“Joanna?” he asked softly.
No answer. He smiled as he walked through the halls of his ship with a child on his shoulder. He saw only Spock and Yeoman Rand, and while Spock had raised an eyebrow and looked at him knowingly, both of them had let him pass to take Joanna on to her bed in her father’s quarters. McCoy was there when he brought Joanna back, and he saw his eyes soften for a brief second at the sight of him and his daughter entering his room. The good doctor moved to say something, but Kirk shook his head and set the small girl down in her bed, tucking her in gently. McCoy stood at the end of the bed.
“So,” Kirk said finally, and stepped away from the bed. “Complicated, huh?”
His best friend narrowed his eyes in confusion.
“Joanna told me that you said we were complicated,” Kirk supplied, gesturing between them with an empty hand at the ‘we.’ McCoy met his eyes evenly.
“You know we are,” he replied gruffly.
And that was all there was to it; they didn’t talk about it again for almost a year, but by then, both of them were so tired of waiting that the surrender came more like a sigh of wind than an exchange of dialog. They slipped into their new routine as easily as if they were breathing, and all they had to do was keep breathing.
Four.
In one of the USS Enterprise’s empty recreation rooms, Captain James T. Kirk was dressed in a pink apron with a matching bonnet and was answering to Mrs. Nesbitt. His companion was dressed in a top hat and suit jacket, with one of Chekov’s ties as an accessory. Joanna McCoy had been aboard the ship for less than a week, but she already had most of the crew wrapped around her finger, the Captain and his CMO chief among them.
She stood and offered to pour him some more (imaginary) tea, and he inclined his head and lifted his cup.
“Mrs. Nesbitt,” Joanna said as she poured him some tea, “may I ask you a question?”
“Of course, Mr. McCoy."
(Joanna had elected to dress as the man in this scenario because, as she put it, “Uncle Jim makes a pretty lady.” Instead of feeling offended, Kirk had decided to take it as a compliment, because Joanna sure as hell hadn’t asked Uhura to have a tea party with her. Obviously Joanna was saying he was prettier than Uhura. Obviously.)
“Is Santa real?”
Kirk takes a sip of his tea, considering. “Did someone tell you that he wasn’t?”
Joanna shook her head. “No, but when I was ‘sploring with Pavel, he told me that Santa was inwented by a little old lady in Leningrad. Where’s Leningrad?"
He sighed. “Leningrad is in Russia.”
He paused for a moment, setting his cup down and leaning back in his chair. Leave it to Chekov to tell a child that the Russians invented Santa. Jesus. He removed the bonnet and, after setting it on the table, ran his hand through his hair.
“Don’t you want to go ask your dad about Santa?”
Joanna looked at him. “Dad doesn’t believe in Santa, that’s why he doesn’t get any presents,” she added primly. “But ‘fore the holidays in school, I always make him drawings and things. I think he likes those.”
Kirk remembered then the way McCoy had a drawer full of Joanna’s drawings, haphazard minotaurs and stick-figure fathers and daughters holding hands with the stars high above them littering in the pages. He had found them by mistake when looking for, of all things, the sleeping pills that his friend had prescribed to him after a particularly grueling mission in the Laurentian system.
“Yes, I think he does,” Kirk said absentmindedly.
A few moments passed, and then an impatient Joanna said, “Uncle Jim, you still haven’t answered my question.”
He grinned easily at her. “So, I’m not Mrs. Nesbitt anymore?”
She nodded decisively. “I’m not Mr. McCoy either. I’m just Joanna now.”
“Well, Joanna, Santa…” He paused. “Santa is like this tea. You can’t see it, you just have to imagine it, and it’s real. So, maybe Santa as a person isn’t real, not in the way that you’re Joanna and I’m Uncle Jim, but he’s real in the way that dreams are.”
Joanna cocked her head, considering. “Do you think Mr. Spock believes in Santa?”
Kirk laughed. “Do I…? I think that Mr. Spock thinks that invisible tea and Santa are illogical. Now,” he said, “I have to be getting back up to the bridge. Wouldn’t want anyone making bad decisions.” He stood and ruffled Joanna’s hair.
“You’re wrong about Mr. Spock though,” Joanna added as Kirk moved to the door. He turned around.
“Oh?”
She looked up at him as she stacked the tea coasters. “Mr. Spock had a tea party with me the other day. He said he had a lovely time. And,” she continued, “he had lots of imaginary tea, he said it was the best ever!”
Kirk blinked and, after a moment, shook his head, grinning. Maybe there were some things that he would never understand.
Three.
Joanna was fourteen when McCoy received a phaser shot straight to the chest. The nurses were tending to him as best as they could, and Spock was helping where he felt it was necessary, but Kirk was worried silly. He had hailed his best friend’s daughter as soon as he was stable, and Joanna had beamed aboard the Enterprise the next day.
They stood in the medbay next to the good doctor’s bedside. Joanna slipped her hand inside of her father’s.
“Uncle Jim?” she asked softly, not taking her eyes off McCoy.
“Yeah, Joanna?”
“Could he die?” Her voice broke. “Will…will he?”
Kirk looked down at his friend. “He could. Nurse Chapel said that his injuries are severe enough. But Spock has been doing an awful lot to keep him alive, and he says that there’s a good chance your dad will come out of this just fine. If there’s one man that I trust like I trust your dad, it’s Spock.”
He smiled wryly. How different he was already from a few years ago, when he had hated the half-Vulcan with ever fiber of his being. Spock Prime had said that their friendship would define the both of them. He wasn’t sure about that yet, but the two of them were pretty damn close, and that was saying something. “But I don’t know if he will or not. The way I reckon it, Joanna, is when the doctors and nurses have done enough, it’s all up to the patient and their will. Your daddy has nothing but will.”
Joanna nodded and sat down on the bed next to her father. Kirk felt, somehow, like he didn’t belong. Joanna and Bones were blood. He was just…there. Sure, he and McCoy shared a deep friendship, and sure, maybe he cared more about the older man than he would ever know or fully realize, but that…it didn’t mean anything.
“I, uh… I should go. Get back to the bridge. You stay here with your dad, Joanna.”
She looked up at him. “You should stay, Uncle Jim. He’d want you to. You’re just as much family as I am.”
Any futile urge that Kirk may have had to leave the medbay and his injured best friend was quashed in the way that the young girl looked at him. She really was her father’s daughter, he reflected; just like Bones, she knew, somehow, what he was thinking, on some level at least.
“Will you just tell me that everything’s going to be okay?” she asked finally. He ignored the tears that are falling down her face, because he had never been any good at comforting anyone but her father, and instead he put his hand on her shoulder.
“I’ll believe it if you say it.” Joanna’s voice was soft, so soft that he wasn’t sure at first whether he had heard her correctly.
“I have to believe he’s coming out of this okay, Joanna. Your dad means more to me than you know. I wouldn’t be here or anywhere without his friendship.” He looked up to meet her eyes. “He has to make it. He has too much to leave behind.”
And later, if Kirk snuck into the medbay when the rest of the crew was spread thin throughout the ship and Nurse Chapel was away, and clenched McCoy’s hand tightly in his own as he leant close and whispered don’t you fucking die on me now, Bones, I’m not ready, well… There was no one there to witness it besides the stars, and they weren’t going to say a thing.
Two.
Joanna was twenty-two when she first realized that she resented her father for not being around when she was a kid. Sure, she got to visit him aboard the Enterprise, which invariably led to good times with the crew, who seemed to think that she was the best thing since sliced bread, but it just wasn’t the same.
She had wanted him there for her high school graduation, but he was with the Enterprise on the other side of the galaxy and couldn’t make it. She had wanted him there for her prom, but he was being held captive with Kirk on some alien planet. She had wanted him there to meet her first serious boyfriend, but…
She was tired of making excuses for him.
He could have been there; he just chose not to be. He could have been a doctor anywhere. After all, wasn’t he always telling Uncle Jim, “I’m a doctor, not a…” Her dad could have been a plain old country doctor back in Tennessee, or the three other Southern states that her mother moved her around in.
Her father sent her a wave on her birthday, tried talking to her, but she cursed at him and told him that she never wanted to talk to him again.
Kirk talked to her immediately after, and what he said had her immediately ashamed and hating him instead.
“Joanna, the reason your father has stayed on the Enterprise all these years is because I asked him. He had been offered other positions as CMO, both aboard other Starfleet vessels and planetside. I asked him to stay, because I lo-Because he means a lot. I couldn’t let him go.”
She joined Starfleet to spite her father, to show him that she could do whatever her did but better, and she hears around the Academy stories of her father and Kirk when they were still at school, and it warms her heart. She hears one professor say that she’s the best possible mix of both of them (Kirk’s rebellious spirit and McCoy’s focus, said the professor, and she tried to resent him for comparing her to the both of them but instead, she found herself rather pleased, for some reason she could never figure out.)
She received a message from Starfleet Command three months after her birthday telling her that her father had been relieved of duty aboard the Enterprise and, barring any sort of complication, would be returning to the Academy to teach and supervise medical classes. Even though it’s what she wanted, she doesn’t feel pleased with herself, and instead feels rather empty.
McCoy came home and things were supposed to be better, but they weren’t. He started drinking again, not enough to be a problem but the way she knew he used to drink after the divorce and when her mom wouldn’t let him see her. He would spend long nights with a bottle in his hand and looking up at the stars, and she could tell her was thinking about Uncle Jim and just missing him.
She was old enough to understand now, even if she hadn’t been when she was a kid. She knew how much they meant to each other, how deep their love ran. She wasn’t stupid, goddammit.
“Maybe it’s better with you there and me here,” she finally said to her father one night as he stood leaning against the kitchen counter and looking out of the corner of his eye toward the sky.
“I’m sorry about what I said before. I didn’t mean it. And I don’t… I don’t hate you. I never have. I just think that he needs you a lot more than I do. You need each other.”
Her father didn’t say anything, so she continued on.
“You’re his personal gravity. He needs you there to stabilize him. I’ve been doing just fine on my own. I want you to go back to the Enterprise, dad. I already talked to Spock. The CMO position hasn’t been filled yet. I think they’ve been waiting for you.”
“Joanna-”
“Uncle Jim told me that you only stayed because he asked you. And it’s, it’s fine, really. I want you to be happy, dad.”
He considered her carefully. “Do you know what you’re saying, Jo?”
She shoved her hands in her jeans pocket. “I know. And I’m okay with it.”
He nodded and set the bottle down, choosing to pull her close to him instead. “I love you, Jo,” he said. “I do.”
(And if Joanna thought not as much as you love him, well, no one could begrudge her that. She pretended to ignore her father’s message to the Enterprise. “I’m coming home,” he said, and then softer words as he talked to Kirk in a tone that she had never heard him use on anyone, not even her. Home is where the heart is, she thought, and she let all of her resentment go.)
What Joanna didn’t, and would never know, was that her father came in her room that night as she slept, and he tucked her in for what he felt might be the last time. She was getting too old for that now, anyway. He brushed the hair away from her face and spoke softly as he knelt by her bedside. “I didn’t stay just because he asked me, Jo. I stayed because it was never an option to do otherwise.”
One.
“Your father’s not coming home this time, Joanna,” Kirk said, and he managed to have his voice not break this time, like it had all the times he had practiced saying those same words in his room aboard the Enterprise.
Joanna looks strangely removed from the news that he just gave her.
“I just got assigned as CMO aboard the Volantis. I was going to tell him when you got back, I thought he’d be proud.”
He didn’t know what to say for a moment. “I’m sure he would have been,” he said finally.
Joanna stuck around for a few more minutes, but in the end she left his office rather quickly. There was no reason to stay anymore, not really. They had both changed so much. He had more of her father than she ever did or could.
She stopped at the door. “Thank you for telling me, Uncle Jim.”
He nodded wearily and ran his hand over his face. “I had to. Wouldn’t have been right, you hearing it from someone else.”
She offered him a small smile, and then left. She imagined he was feeling the worst of it, anyway. She didn’t know what she could do to comfort him.
Zero.
When Kirk told Joanna that he loved her father, the only thing she had to say was, “I know. I’ve always known.”
He couldn’t help but be relieved, even in his old age. She couldn’t help but wonder if her father had known, but she felt that there was no way that the love between her father and Uncle Jim could have gone unnoticed.
Some things, she thought, don’t really have to be said aloud to be heard. Some things, just are the way they are.