Fic: Challenging History, Chapter 1
Title: Challenging History
Author: gixxer_pilot
Summary: McCoy didn't buy the old adage that time healed all wounds. Neither did his daughter Joanna. The problem? As a publicity stunt orchestrated by the Admiralty, both McCoys are now officially part of the Enterprise's crew. And with nearly twenty years of animosity to work through, no one is particularly pleased about it, least of all Jo and Len.
Author's Notes: I wrote this little ditty going on two years ago as a very rough, very quick reply to Space Case Writer 13's unfinished Star Trek fic. In her 'verse, among other things, she featured a circa 22-year-old Joanna McCoy, whose relationship with her absentee father could best be described as 'tumultuous'. I had no intentions of posting what I'd written when I shipped it off to her, but I decided it was doing no good sitting on my flash drive collecting virtual dust. So, I dusted it off, polished it up as best I could to make it all shiny and pretty, and then added in a bit of Kirk and Chapel for good measure. It's unbetaed, so any mistakes are mine. Despite the fact there might be a spelling error or rough sentence here or there, I hope it passes the mass' muster. (Oh, and happy birthday, Spacie!) Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek or any of the characters you'll see in this fic. I don't even own the characterization of Joanna McCoy. That belongs to Space Case Writer 13. Spacie, I'm just borrowing Jo for a little bit. I promise I'll give her back if Tony Stark lets you take a break from The Avengers fandom. (But for the record, I'd like you to keep writing Avengers. It's win!)
Chapter | 1 | 2 | 3 |
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Chapter 1
"Christine, help."
Enterprise head nurse Christine Chapel rolled over in her bed, buried her face in her pillow and screamed. Squeezing her eyes shut, she pretended for a blissful few seconds that ignoring the pleading man on the other end of the comm would make the problem disappear. 'I'm not listening, he can't hear me, la, la, la, la!' she thought as she wondered what could possibly precipitate this kind of a rude awakening at such an ungodly hour.
The continued an insistent chime of the comm alert cut through the silence of her quarters right before Kirk's voice joined the cacophony of noise. "I know you're awake, and I'm not leaving you alone until you at least acknowledge that I'm breathing."
Whipping her head around Chapel stabbed the button mercilessly to allow the captain a face-to-face connection. She pointed one finger directly at the screen with one hand while she tried desperately to tame her normally impeccable blonde hair with the other. "Were you born with this kind of shit timing, or did you really have to work to perfect it?"
Jim snorted. "The answer is, 'D: none of the above'. It was a dormant gene I discovered by accident."
A wry smile crossed the head nurse's lips as she looked down to ensure that she was, in fact, wearing clothes. Satisfied that she'd at last remembered to throw on a tank top and yoga pants before she crashed, Christine told Kirk, "Touché, Jim. I suppose there has to be a reason that you're still alive after captaining this ship and your insane crew for the past fifteen years. Well, aside from that magic horseshoe everyone is convinced you have shoved up your ass," she added, flippantly waving her hand through the air.
"That among other things," Kirk replied with a suggesting waggle of his eyebrows.
"Leave it to you to find a way to make that sentence sexual. And for the record, no, I did not need to know that," Chapel said with a hard shudder.
Kirk actually threw his head back and laughed, loud and long from the pit of his belly. "You do my physical. You should know the truth on that."
"No, Dr. McCoy does your physical. I just keep him from killing you while he's got you on the table, that's all. But, if you're going to wake me up in the middle of the night after I've worked a double with the crabbiest surgeon in the entire Fleet, I might just forget about next year's appointment and let him finish what he claims he's started," Chapel said, drawing her knees up to her chest and pushing a piece of hair behind her ears. She stretched her neck and rubbed at a particularly sore spot on her lower back.
"Nah," Jim said, waving a hand at the screen from his quarters. "You wouldn't do that, because the next target your boss finds won't be as amusing."
"Well, there is that," Chapel admitted with a shrug of her petite shoulders. "But as much as I love chatting with you half dressed in the middle of gamma shift, I am still tired. What do you want, Captain?"
"They're at it again," Jim said succinctly, his face going from relaxed and passive to stony and resolute in just under a second.
Christine had to work to keep the scowl off her face. "Joanna and Len?" she asked tightly.
"Who else?" Kirk said with a disgruntled sigh.
Chapel groaned and collapsed back into the warm, comfortable embrace of her overstuffed bed. Covering her face with her hands, she swore loudly enough for Kirk to hear it on his end of the feed. "Why! Why do they do this to us?"
"Because we love them, even if makes us idiots for it?" Kirk supplied ruefully with a self-deprecating smirk.
"Yeah, yeah," she grumbled, scrubbing one hand over her face. Christine sighed, pushed herself up from her bed and licked her lips. Staring at the man on the screen, she set her shoulders, pulled her hair back with the binder that permanently resided on her wrist and exhaled a long, deep breath. "All right. You want to play this like we normally do?" she asked after a beat.
"What do you always tell me? If it ain't broke, don't fix it?"
"So divide and conquer it is then?" Christine asked, throwing her legs over the side of her bed. "I'll take Jo."
"I've got Bones."
"Meet you in five," Chapel said and cut the connection.
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She heard the argument well before she saw it. Even through the thick walls of sickbay, there was no mistaking the sounds of a full-fledged McCoy argument. Chapel was sorely regretting the decision to walk past her replicator on the way out the door. A scalded tongue was a small price to pay for a little bit of awareness a quick cup of coffee would have afforded her.
"Good Lord, how long has this been going on?" Christine asked as she walked into the waiting area near her boss' office. She pursed her lips and pushed Kirk's booted feet from the surface of the admin desk stationed just to the right of the door, glaring at the captain as the man lounged casually in the chair he'd pulled up for comfort. "Conduct unbecoming, Captain."
Jim paused the game he was playing on his comm and flipped the unit closed. He looked down at his grey Starfleet Academy sweatshirt and jeans and shrugged. "You know my rules: no uniform, no rank. But to answer your question, they've been screaming at one another for the past ten minutes. Probably longer, actually, if you count the time it took me to walk down here after M'Benga called me."
"Jesus," Chapel muttered as she heard a particularly sharp set of expletives hurled by a male voice followed by an equally ferocious higher pitched retort.
Jim read the Enterprise's head nurse's expression. "No shit. It sounds like World War IV in there. I don't think Spock and I did the much yelling even when we were kicking Nero's ass from here to…whatever time he ended up in."
Planting one hand on her hip, she pointed to the sealed door that was McCoy's office. "I think I'd rather take on an entire pack of Klingons right now instead of those two."
"Christine," Jim began, drawing out the sentence to grab Chapel's attention, "You and me both."
"So now what?" she asked, glaring at the door as if it might help.
Jim hopped up from his chair and walked up beside Christine. "Now, we just have to interrupt."
Chapel turned her head and fixed the blonde man with an incredulous stare. "You go right ahead with that. Let me know how it works out for you."
Sighing, Jim set his jaw and took a step towards the door. "Since when did 'captain' become synonymous with 'relationship counselor'? Tell me that."
"Since the Admiralty thought it would be a good idea to put two generations of McCoys on the same ship?" she asked, rhetorically apologetic.
"Remind me to kick their asses, would you?" Jim growled lowly.
Chapel crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at the thought of the stuffy, out of touch men in their shiny brocade in their perfectly safe offices back on Earth. It was so nice to be appreciated. "I'm not going to remind you, Jim. I'm going to help you do it."
Kirk, one foot hovering in mid air, spun on his foot and barked out a laugh. "Now that I would pay good credits to see!"
Chapel allowed herself the small luxury of a chuckle before she waved her hand back towards the door, and the reason both senior staff members were out of bed at 0300. "You want to do the honors, or should I?"
Kirk tipped his head back and forth, lifting his eyebrows as he thought. "I don't know. Maybe we should let this one play out a little bit, let them get it out of their systems. This is going to keep happening unless they figure out their issues with one another."
"You think that's wise, Jim?" Christine asked, trepidation and surprise coloring her tone. "There's almost twenty years of pent-up animosity between them. I've heard both sides - I know you have, too. I don't think one screaming fight is going to fix everything that's gone wrong. They're both too stubborn for their own good."
"Of course I know that," Kirk snorted. "But it sure as hell can't get any worse."
Christine disengaged her selective deafness and allowed the rip-roaring fight between father and daughter to seep into her consciousness yet again. She swore she heard the sound of something fragile whip through the air a millisecond before it smashed into little tiny pieces against the wall. The yelling inside paused long enough for both combatants to take a breath every fourth sentence as the fighting continued in earnest. Sure, it couldn't get any worse, but she wasn't entirely convinced this was the way to make it better.
But the one thing Christine did know for sure was that there was no way in hell she was about to interrupt the fight.
Unlike Kirk, she really didn't have a death wish.
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Next Up: Joanna and Len have a 'heart to heart'. Oh, dear.