FIC: A World of Solemn Thought
Title: A World of Solemn Thought
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer & Warnings: They don't belong to me. Be advised there is a heavy theme of death (not major-character).
Word Count: 4,219
Summary: McCoy never wanted this day to come, but it has: Joanna knows what he did.
Notes: This is the continuation of the Hard-Earned Rights series. It all began when Jim was in a shuttle crash and he met a strange girl. There is one more fic in the series following this, which will bring it to a close. Title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe poem.
Hard-Earned Rights // Just About Time // The Graceful Waltz // One // The Grave Memorial Of A Life Unlived // Houses & Heartwarmings // Guess Who's Coming To Dinner // Enterprise On My Mind // Your Fate's Not In The Stars // A World of Solemn Thought // Time Can Never Kill The True Heart
When Joanna McCoy was six years old, her mother had put her in a somber black dress and told her that this was the last time she was ever going to see her grandpappy. On that day, Jocelyn also told Joanna that her father was going away as well, the words spoken with regret and pain, anger never too far away. It had been the very worst day in her entire life. She remembers scant few details, but they stick in her mind like ghosts that refuse to be exorcised. All she knows is that the smell of lilies still reminds her of the pervading odor of death that won’t dispel and the sound of brazen bells makes a chill go down her spine as she wonders whose life they’re tolling away.
She and her mother visit David McCoy’s gravestone on an annual basis and lay flowers as a sign of respect. Joanna is fifteen now and her father is pushing the envelope of space while she wanders the earth and pays respects in his place.
This is her ninth visit to a familiar place and she is not alone. She’s only ever met her paternal great-grandfather three times in her life, but there he is there in rough shape, looking all the world as if he had endured a pilgrimage to find his way to this strange mecca. He’s always looked at her like she’s her father’s child and she’s not sure that her great-grandfather thinks on that as a good thing.
“Joanna,” he roughly remarks, this man that her father was named for. “Your mother said you visited, but I didn’t know if she was telling the truth.”
“I loved my grandfather,” she says and she knows that it’s more than just a plea of love that she says because she’s supposed to. She had loved him with all her heart. David McCoy had always made time for her when she was a young girl and even though she had been all of six when he passed, she has fond memories of being held safely in his arms. He had taken her to every science museum within reason and taught her things like she was an adult. He taught her about the two-hundred-and-six bones in the human body and whispered secrets about her father in her ear. He had brought her flowers when she was upset and chocolates when she was celebrating accomplishments - no matter how minor.
And then one day he was gone. Her father left in quick succession and she still doesn’t understand why except that her parents have told her that the strain David’s death put on them broke their marriage like the last straw on a camel’s back. She takes pictures to his grave and sets them amidst the flowers, whispering to him all the places she’s seen and all the things she’s done. She sits there once a year and tells him everything she’s learned about the world around her.
She’s told the absent David McCoy about everything - even the deep dark secrets that she doesn’t dare tell Mom, Dad, Clay or Jim about now.
Here, standing beside her weak great-grandfather and professing her insistence of adoration for David McCoy, she feels as though she’s been left out of the loop for a long time. She braces Leonard up carefully, knowing that he’s weak and his bones are degrading, but he insists that he’s healthy as a horse and won’t let death pry him away.
“Seems a surprise to me, is all,” Leonard drawls. He’s the one that built the family home and passed it down through the lineage after he moved away. “What with your father and all.”
The cold chill that Joanna feels when church bells ring and the smell of lilies overpowers her returns with great force, knocking her in her lungs and stealing away all of her breaths. Her fingers tighten on her black shirt (worn out of a sign of respect and overdone grief). “What about my Dad?” she asks, feeling like the six-year-old at the funeral again while she stares at a casket and a body and doesn’t quite understand why death has to happen.
Leonard Laertes McCoy simply looks at her with all the sympathy in the world and Joanna has never wanted to rebel more and push him away. She continues to hold him up with the knowledge that her physical being is frozen where she stands, unable to do anything but continue along in this strange riptide that is bringing her closer to the truth.
Her gaze is stuck on the names of her grandparents engraved before her on tombstones that promise them eternal rest and she can smell lilies, only lilies.
“Your father, that godforsaken sonuvabitch that bears my name, he killed my boy,” Leonard growls. “Took his life away from him. He killed him,” he accuses, sending Joanna reeling into a shock that she’s not sure she can move from. “You’re a good girl to be here,” Leonard finally says as an afterthought. “You give your mother my love.”
She feels him go, distantly, as he slips away from her grasp, but she doesn’t quite see it. Her world has gone blurry as she stares at the graves and tears take over. Without even knowing it, she’s somehow falling to a sit on the dewy grass and she stares at a gravestone that can’t give her any answers.
Her mother comes to pick her up twenty minutes later. Joanna’s eyes are bloodshot red and her cheeks are blotchy from crying.
“Darlin’,” Jocelyn sighs as she sits down beside her daughter and tugs her in close, kneeling and immediately earning grass stains on her thick beige pantyhose. “Hey, princess, what’s the matter? Grandpa’s somewhere better now, you know that.”
“Did Daddy kill him?” she demands, the words shaking as they come out of her mouth. For all her silence in tense situations, for her calm when the world is falling apart, she can’t bear to be calm and still now. This is her world and it’s shattering away from her. “Mom? Did Daddy kill my grandfather?”
Jocelyn doesn’t answer immediately, but her hesitation is all that Joanna needs.
“Why?” she gives a hopeless and tiny cry of abject disappointment. “Why would he?”
Jocelyn adjusts her grasp on Joanna and they end up a pile on the ground. “He was trying to be a good son,” she murmurs softly, rubbing her hand over Joanna’s back as she tries to inhale deep breaths and her body shakes for it. Jocelyn sighs with heavy despair. “Your great-grandpappy was here, wasn’t he,” she says with disapproval as she stares at the flowers that Leonard always brings for David McCoy. “That man…”
Joanna stares forward into the distance of the plot and tries to understand how she could have so blindly let her father deceive her when he’d taken something from them all.
“Joanna,” Jocelyn murmurs. “This all happened a long time ago. Leonard and I have made our reconciliations. It’s not something you have to worry about.”
In the depths of her mind, however, Joanna knows that it doesn’t go so easily. She doesn’t have a grandfather who loves her because her father took his last breaths away and took him away. She lets her mother rouse her to her feet and leans heavily on her, but she doesn’t allow forgiveness to even trickle close to her feelings of despair and abandonment.
“He killed him,” Joanna sobs the words out, her lower lip shaking uncontrollably as Jocelyn doesn’t deny it and Joanna sags against her mother’s side. She’s never wanted to see her father in anything but a perfect light, but now he’s something of a murderer with a scalpel in his hand and her grandfather’s last breath in the other. “He killed him, didn’t he, he…he…” she breathes shallow inhalations and lets out broken cries as Jocelyn brings her close.
Never once does she deny it.
“He was just trying to be a good son,” Jocelyn repeats, as though it has some kind of meaning to Joanna, as if it’s going to change the fact that one day David McCoy was alive and the next he was gone and it was by her father’s hand.
He’s not God, he’s not supposed to make those kinds of decisions.
“Shh, baby, it’s okay,” Jocelyn whispers, pressing a kiss to the messy hair at Joanna’s temple. Joanna tries to believe in her mother’s words, but the more she lets them resonate in her mind the more she begins to understand that her life is never going to be the same again now that this veil has been pried off.
Her father took away a part of her life. She doesn’t want to so easily forgive him for this. She doesn’t think that anything should just be okay after that.
*
The call has been waiting for twenty minutes by the time McCoy returns from dinner.
Jim is still in the mess hall because he’s been corralled by several eager staff who want him to be an active part of their festivities, but no one’s ever wanted a grumpy doctor for those and so they let him slip off to his and Jim’s quarters where the vidphone is holding a call for him. At first he thinks it has to be a mistake because the timer is counting twenty-plus minutes and anyone would have left a message.
When he sits down to take the call, he finds out that it’s not a mistake at all.
“Jo, baby, what happened?” McCoy asks with sudden alarm when he gets his first glimpse at her. Her eyes are red and she looks furious and miserable at once, her face pale and her lips blotchy. Slowly, the misery gives way to rage and McCoy can feel the foreboding sense that this isn’t going to go very well at all. “Joanna,” he asks again, with more trepidation than before.
“I just want to ask one thing,” she says, her voice steady. He can see the way she’s gripping the table is making her knuckles turn white and every swallow she takes seems like a desperate gulp. “Just one thing and I want an honest answer. I’m old enough for you to tell me the truth.”
Time has stopped before on the Enterprise. Time has looped. Time has done every possible permutation, but never before has it slowed to a crawl on the sole basis of the fact that Joanna looks the way she does and is about to ask him something.
“I promise,” McCoy says.
“Did you kill my granddaddy?” Joanna asks in a small voice that somehow manages to encapsulate an endless amount of pain and rage.
McCoy shifts uncomfortably and old memories that have been long buried start to arise again and he doesn’t know what to say. “It’s complicated, Joanna.”
“You promised me an honest answer,” she doggedly says, eyes boring in on him and as demanding as her words. “Did you kill him?”
McCoy feels pinned to a corner and as though someone is coming at him with a scalpel to pull out his tongue. He doesn’t know what to say to her that’s going to make this situation better and she wants to hear the truth from him. He knows his daughter. She already knows. She already knows the darkest, blackest sin that rests on McCoy’s heart and she just wants to hear it from his lips.
“Tell me!” she half-shrieks in contorted pain, eyes wild.
“Joanna, he was very sick…”
“That doesn’t give you the right!”
“And he asked me…”
“The cure was there! They found a cure three months later,” she gets out the words as her tears fill with fresh tears that trickle down her cheek and sure enough, it takes little more than this to get McCoy going, sending him over the edge of a cliff he thought he’d put long behind him. She inhales hard and angrily wipes away at her tears with the back of her palm. “You killed him and he could have been saved. You took him away, you took my Granddaddy away,” she accuses wildly, the tears coming forth faster than she can stop them.
“Joanna,” McCoy barks, feeling as wild and out of control as she looks. “What was I supposed to do?” he demands, feeling weak and sounding lost. “He asked me. He begged me, my own father asked me to end his pain. Do you think it was easy?”
“You managed to go on,” she accuses, not bothering anymore to brush at her tears. They shine in the dull light of the room so many miles away in Georgia and McCoy would give anything to reach through the screen and brush them away, but he knows she wouldn’t let him. “You went on, you found a new life, and you’re happy. You’re happy and he’s gone and he’s gone because of you,” she keeps going, even though her words come out in half-hiccups. “I don’t want to talk to you,” she says, finding some deep reserve of strength. “Don’t call me. Don’t ever call me. You took him away and I loved him. If you ever really loved him, you wouldn’t have let him go.”
She takes in another shaky breath and dismisses him with a single shake of her head.
The comm goes dead and McCoy is left staring at his reflection in a dark screen, his cheeks stained with tears and a panicked look in his eyes.
Jim finds him some time later, though McCoy has no idea how long it’s been. He’s still processing the conversation and the fact that when he tried to dial Georgia, the number isn’t permitted through. She’s blocked him out of her life and McCoy doesn’t know how to fix this. He’s repaired damaged spines and has fixed broken bones, but he’s suddenly left with the distinct inability to solve this severance in his relationship with his daughter.
“Bones,” Jim says with alarm when he finds him. “Bones, what happened?”
“Joanna knows what I did.” The words are heavy and McCoy had known that one day, he would have to speak them. He just never thought it would be like this.
Jim doesn’t respond to that. He merely slides an arm around his shoulder and begins to aid him to his feet, pushing him to bed and setting him down on the edge. Jim strips him of his uniform and replaces them with regulation pajamas, laying him back and covering him with a blanket before he crawls in to spoon McCoy from behind.
“It’s okay, Bones,” Jim reassures. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’ll figure something out.”
They stay like this for almost two hours and for that whole time, McCoy tries to seek out sleep, but it doesn’t come. All he can think about is Joanna and the nightmares and the way his stomach turns with guilt, assaulting pangs of pain that make him wonder why he had ever thought to listen to his father’s last requests.
Jim isn’t in bed with him anymore. He’s slipped away and McCoy can just distantly hear his voice in the other room.
“Joanna, please, please, talk to me.”
“Jim.” It’s cold and sounds nothing like it could even broach affection. It makes McCoy feel even smaller somehow, colder. “I don’t want you to call me. I blocked your number.”
“I’m not just a pretty face, Jo,” Jim is saying evenly. “I’m a genius. I can unblock it as many times as it takes.”
“Don’t,” is Joanna’s forceful reply. “I don’t want to talk to him and I don’t ever want to talk to you. I told you not to call me.”
“Joanna,” Jim pleads to no avail.
McCoy hears the static on the other end that signifies that the transmission has been cut short. He turns to his back and stares at the blank ceiling. Starfleet regulates that they don’t touch it and so Jim’s plan of painting on ancient constellations is one of many that has fallen by the wayside. His hand rests lethargically against his chest and dimly, McCoy feels the beating of his heart as though it isn’t trying to slowly curl in on itself. He hears the shuffle of sheets before he feels the press of Jim’s warmth against his back, drawing him in tight and close.
“You heard,” Jim says. It’s not a question or an accusation so much as it’s an acceptance of facts. His hand slowly rubs circles against McCoy’s back and McCoy feels like he can’t draw in deep breaths. He’d thought, stupidly, that this had been tucked away in his past. He never expected Joanna to find out so soon.
McCoy feels as if the grief is filling his veins and weighing him down like concrete as he sinks beneath the pull of the ocean.
“She’ll forgive you,” Jim insists quietly. “She’ll forgive us.”
McCoy knows his daughter better than Jim does, for all of Jim’s dedicated devotions to the McCoy family. He knows that when a McCoy loves someone so deeply and is willing to do anything for them, it doesn’t just go away. It’s been almost ten years and McCoy still feels the guilt of injecting the lethal substance into his father’s carotid artery.
“No she won’t, Jim,” McCoy says hoarsely. “This isn’t going to just go away. She’s just being a good granddaughter.”
David McCoy would have been so proud of her. Somehow that stings harder than all of Joanna’s rage and disappointment in him.
*
The hurricane isn’t settling by any means. If anything, the gale winds of fury from Joanna and despondent despair from Bones are making things worse and Jim sits in the eye of the storm staring up at a calm and clear blue sky and wondering how he’s supposed to make things better between the two of them. He takes advice from Sam on the issue (“sorry to hear. I’ve never exactly done the step-kid route before or I’d offer more help”) and that triggers something in him that sends him to a private room to dial up Iowa.
His mother answers the vidphone and Jim gives her a bright smile. “Mom,” he greets pleasantly. “You’ll be happy to know that I’ve been married for three months and two days and I’m still not divorced.”
“Don’t you start with those statistics, you will jinx this,” Winona says, spitting somewhere off the screen and making Jim wince at the old wives’ tales that his mother has a tendency to believe in. “How is Leonard?”
Jim pauses, lips pressed together, and he shakes his head. “Not well. Can I uh, can I talk to Frank? Just for a little,” he requests, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.
For all of his life, he and Frank have had possibly three serious conversations that stretched past sports, the weather, and the mutual topic of family members. Jim knows that he’d rather go to Jocelyn or his mother with the issue, but he thinks that if anyone’s going to understand the situation, it’s going to be Frank.
“First you tell me if Leonard is okay,” Winona warns.
“He’s just tired, Mom,” Jim protests quietly. “He’s withdrawn and lethargic, but we’re having issues with Joanna. He’s just upset,” he insists, knowing that if he can just somehow get this to smooth out, then Bones will be back to himself and Joanna will forgive him. She has to. This can’t be how their lives play out with happiness just faintly in the backdrop while they charge forward into heartache. “You can talk to him after. I’ll…rouse him from bed,” Jim says with uncertainty, not entirely sure he’s capable of that considering that he had been unable to even sit up and eat when Jim had last checked on him. “Please, Mom. Frank?”
“Give me a minute,” she coaxes, leaving the screen. “Frank? Jim’s on the phone for you!” she calls out from what sounds like just down the hall.
Jim tries his best not to tense. He’s lived so long with Frank in quiet tension and trying to avoid each other because they didn’t know how to deal. Jim’s an adult now and should be more mature than that, but he still doesn’t know how exactly a person is supposed to act in these situations. He smiles politely when Frank sits down. His brown hair is greying speedily now, tinged at the temples, and Jim wishes he could say he’s unaffected by the same phenomenon. The stress of Captaining a ship doesn’t just slip off him like water on a duck.
“Hey Jim,” Frank greets with a nod. “Your mother said you wanted to talk?”
“I did,” Jim agrees, fisting the material of his pants again and again. “It’s sort of about you and me, in a way. Back when I was a kid and I was acting out, what did you do to stabilize me?” He can see Frank smirking, about to protest and Jim doesn’t blame him. “I mean, against you. How did you manage to get me to take it out on the world instead of my family?”
“Is it Joanna?” Frank asks with quiet sympathy.
“Never exactly had a stepchild acting out before,” Jim concedes. “Thought I’d ask you after some of the things I put you through.”
Jim almost regrets asking the moment the words out of his mouth. Frank is just staring at him with a wry smirk on his face. “I didn’t have much success in that area, Jim,” he points out. “You were determined to act out and I wasn’t your birth-father. Hell, you drove my car off the damn cliff to get our attention. Winona did her damnedest, but I was lost. What’s going on with Joanna?”
“She’s upset about something her Dad did,” Jim admits, feeling uneasy about this particular part because Joanna isn’t exactly in the wrong. Bones did send David McCoy off the mortal coil and into the great beyond. He just had his reasons. “I just…don’t know what to do,” he admits, brows furrowed together.
He’s thirty-two. He’s married. He’s the goddamn Captain of the Enterprise. He’s supposed to know these things by now. And yet, he doesn’t know how to stop Joanna from being so angry at Bones that she wants to cut the both of them out of her life.
“She’s the only kid I’m gonna get,” Jim says and down in his core he knows that’s the truth and that he ought to be upset about it, but if he’s only going to get one shot at a child, Joanna’s the very best that he can ask for. “And now she doesn’t want anything to do with us. I don’t know…” Jim tenses, teeth pressed together. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
And there it is. For all his determination, he can’t exactly push forward when he doesn’t have a plan and a playbook to go by.
“All I can tell you is to do what I didn’t,” Frank says after a long moment of silence pervades the millions of miles of space between them. “Give her attention. Don’t give up. Devote yourself to giving her all the love you can even if she says she doesn’t want it and then you just have to hope she’ll come around.”
Jim nods, knowing that it’s decent advice and yet knowing at the same time that he wants something far more immediate than that.
“Thanks, Dad,” Jim quietly murmurs with a nod. It’s a serious name and reserved for special occasions. Jim thinks he’s used it for Frank maybe six times since they’ve known each other, but if now isn’t an apt time for it, then Jim doesn’t know when is. He tries to muster a smile, but it feels strange on his face and he closes down the communication and turns to look at where Bones is still sleeping in bed. “Bones,” he calls over quietly. “Bones?”
“Jim,” Bones replies exhaustedly. “I’m tired.”
Jim crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed, his hand resting atop Bones’ chest and his sluggish heartbeat before Jim presses his forehead against the warm skin there at the open ‘V’ that Bones’ shirt offers. “Are you okay, Bones?”
Bones just looks at Jim through dulled eyes and he feels the shake of his head, the one that makes Jim feel even more lost at sea. Joanna is so distant and Bones is floating away from him and Jim can’t be an anchor to either of them.
“I don’t know, Jim,” Bones admits, his voice heavy with his drawl and the grief of his words. “I really don’t know.”
Jim just wants to make it okay again.
“Go to sleep, Bones,” Jim coaxes, not knowing the answer but thinking that if he can’t yield a solution, he can at least offer temporary respite. “Go to sleep and I’ll still be here in the morning.”
It’s not going to make it better. Jim knows that. Jim doesn’t want to even think about this as a no-win situation so all he can do right now is hope and pray that when morning comes around, something will be different.
THE END
Pairing: Kirk/McCoy
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer & Warnings: They don't belong to me. Be advised there is a heavy theme of death (not major-character).
Word Count: 4,219
Summary: McCoy never wanted this day to come, but it has: Joanna knows what he did.
Notes: This is the continuation of the Hard-Earned Rights series. It all began when Jim was in a shuttle crash and he met a strange girl. There is one more fic in the series following this, which will bring it to a close. Title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe poem.
Hard-Earned Rights // Just About Time // The Graceful Waltz // One // The Grave Memorial Of A Life Unlived // Houses & Heartwarmings // Guess Who's Coming To Dinner // Enterprise On My Mind // Your Fate's Not In The Stars // A World of Solemn Thought // Time Can Never Kill The True Heart
When Joanna McCoy was six years old, her mother had put her in a somber black dress and told her that this was the last time she was ever going to see her grandpappy. On that day, Jocelyn also told Joanna that her father was going away as well, the words spoken with regret and pain, anger never too far away. It had been the very worst day in her entire life. She remembers scant few details, but they stick in her mind like ghosts that refuse to be exorcised. All she knows is that the smell of lilies still reminds her of the pervading odor of death that won’t dispel and the sound of brazen bells makes a chill go down her spine as she wonders whose life they’re tolling away.
She and her mother visit David McCoy’s gravestone on an annual basis and lay flowers as a sign of respect. Joanna is fifteen now and her father is pushing the envelope of space while she wanders the earth and pays respects in his place.
This is her ninth visit to a familiar place and she is not alone. She’s only ever met her paternal great-grandfather three times in her life, but there he is there in rough shape, looking all the world as if he had endured a pilgrimage to find his way to this strange mecca. He’s always looked at her like she’s her father’s child and she’s not sure that her great-grandfather thinks on that as a good thing.
“Joanna,” he roughly remarks, this man that her father was named for. “Your mother said you visited, but I didn’t know if she was telling the truth.”
“I loved my grandfather,” she says and she knows that it’s more than just a plea of love that she says because she’s supposed to. She had loved him with all her heart. David McCoy had always made time for her when she was a young girl and even though she had been all of six when he passed, she has fond memories of being held safely in his arms. He had taken her to every science museum within reason and taught her things like she was an adult. He taught her about the two-hundred-and-six bones in the human body and whispered secrets about her father in her ear. He had brought her flowers when she was upset and chocolates when she was celebrating accomplishments - no matter how minor.
And then one day he was gone. Her father left in quick succession and she still doesn’t understand why except that her parents have told her that the strain David’s death put on them broke their marriage like the last straw on a camel’s back. She takes pictures to his grave and sets them amidst the flowers, whispering to him all the places she’s seen and all the things she’s done. She sits there once a year and tells him everything she’s learned about the world around her.
She’s told the absent David McCoy about everything - even the deep dark secrets that she doesn’t dare tell Mom, Dad, Clay or Jim about now.
Here, standing beside her weak great-grandfather and professing her insistence of adoration for David McCoy, she feels as though she’s been left out of the loop for a long time. She braces Leonard up carefully, knowing that he’s weak and his bones are degrading, but he insists that he’s healthy as a horse and won’t let death pry him away.
“Seems a surprise to me, is all,” Leonard drawls. He’s the one that built the family home and passed it down through the lineage after he moved away. “What with your father and all.”
The cold chill that Joanna feels when church bells ring and the smell of lilies overpowers her returns with great force, knocking her in her lungs and stealing away all of her breaths. Her fingers tighten on her black shirt (worn out of a sign of respect and overdone grief). “What about my Dad?” she asks, feeling like the six-year-old at the funeral again while she stares at a casket and a body and doesn’t quite understand why death has to happen.
Leonard Laertes McCoy simply looks at her with all the sympathy in the world and Joanna has never wanted to rebel more and push him away. She continues to hold him up with the knowledge that her physical being is frozen where she stands, unable to do anything but continue along in this strange riptide that is bringing her closer to the truth.
Her gaze is stuck on the names of her grandparents engraved before her on tombstones that promise them eternal rest and she can smell lilies, only lilies.
“Your father, that godforsaken sonuvabitch that bears my name, he killed my boy,” Leonard growls. “Took his life away from him. He killed him,” he accuses, sending Joanna reeling into a shock that she’s not sure she can move from. “You’re a good girl to be here,” Leonard finally says as an afterthought. “You give your mother my love.”
She feels him go, distantly, as he slips away from her grasp, but she doesn’t quite see it. Her world has gone blurry as she stares at the graves and tears take over. Without even knowing it, she’s somehow falling to a sit on the dewy grass and she stares at a gravestone that can’t give her any answers.
Her mother comes to pick her up twenty minutes later. Joanna’s eyes are bloodshot red and her cheeks are blotchy from crying.
“Darlin’,” Jocelyn sighs as she sits down beside her daughter and tugs her in close, kneeling and immediately earning grass stains on her thick beige pantyhose. “Hey, princess, what’s the matter? Grandpa’s somewhere better now, you know that.”
“Did Daddy kill him?” she demands, the words shaking as they come out of her mouth. For all her silence in tense situations, for her calm when the world is falling apart, she can’t bear to be calm and still now. This is her world and it’s shattering away from her. “Mom? Did Daddy kill my grandfather?”
Jocelyn doesn’t answer immediately, but her hesitation is all that Joanna needs.
“Why?” she gives a hopeless and tiny cry of abject disappointment. “Why would he?”
Jocelyn adjusts her grasp on Joanna and they end up a pile on the ground. “He was trying to be a good son,” she murmurs softly, rubbing her hand over Joanna’s back as she tries to inhale deep breaths and her body shakes for it. Jocelyn sighs with heavy despair. “Your great-grandpappy was here, wasn’t he,” she says with disapproval as she stares at the flowers that Leonard always brings for David McCoy. “That man…”
Joanna stares forward into the distance of the plot and tries to understand how she could have so blindly let her father deceive her when he’d taken something from them all.
“Joanna,” Jocelyn murmurs. “This all happened a long time ago. Leonard and I have made our reconciliations. It’s not something you have to worry about.”
In the depths of her mind, however, Joanna knows that it doesn’t go so easily. She doesn’t have a grandfather who loves her because her father took his last breaths away and took him away. She lets her mother rouse her to her feet and leans heavily on her, but she doesn’t allow forgiveness to even trickle close to her feelings of despair and abandonment.
“He killed him,” Joanna sobs the words out, her lower lip shaking uncontrollably as Jocelyn doesn’t deny it and Joanna sags against her mother’s side. She’s never wanted to see her father in anything but a perfect light, but now he’s something of a murderer with a scalpel in his hand and her grandfather’s last breath in the other. “He killed him, didn’t he, he…he…” she breathes shallow inhalations and lets out broken cries as Jocelyn brings her close.
Never once does she deny it.
“He was just trying to be a good son,” Jocelyn repeats, as though it has some kind of meaning to Joanna, as if it’s going to change the fact that one day David McCoy was alive and the next he was gone and it was by her father’s hand.
He’s not God, he’s not supposed to make those kinds of decisions.
“Shh, baby, it’s okay,” Jocelyn whispers, pressing a kiss to the messy hair at Joanna’s temple. Joanna tries to believe in her mother’s words, but the more she lets them resonate in her mind the more she begins to understand that her life is never going to be the same again now that this veil has been pried off.
Her father took away a part of her life. She doesn’t want to so easily forgive him for this. She doesn’t think that anything should just be okay after that.
*
The call has been waiting for twenty minutes by the time McCoy returns from dinner.
Jim is still in the mess hall because he’s been corralled by several eager staff who want him to be an active part of their festivities, but no one’s ever wanted a grumpy doctor for those and so they let him slip off to his and Jim’s quarters where the vidphone is holding a call for him. At first he thinks it has to be a mistake because the timer is counting twenty-plus minutes and anyone would have left a message.
When he sits down to take the call, he finds out that it’s not a mistake at all.
“Jo, baby, what happened?” McCoy asks with sudden alarm when he gets his first glimpse at her. Her eyes are red and she looks furious and miserable at once, her face pale and her lips blotchy. Slowly, the misery gives way to rage and McCoy can feel the foreboding sense that this isn’t going to go very well at all. “Joanna,” he asks again, with more trepidation than before.
“I just want to ask one thing,” she says, her voice steady. He can see the way she’s gripping the table is making her knuckles turn white and every swallow she takes seems like a desperate gulp. “Just one thing and I want an honest answer. I’m old enough for you to tell me the truth.”
Time has stopped before on the Enterprise. Time has looped. Time has done every possible permutation, but never before has it slowed to a crawl on the sole basis of the fact that Joanna looks the way she does and is about to ask him something.
“I promise,” McCoy says.
“Did you kill my granddaddy?” Joanna asks in a small voice that somehow manages to encapsulate an endless amount of pain and rage.
McCoy shifts uncomfortably and old memories that have been long buried start to arise again and he doesn’t know what to say. “It’s complicated, Joanna.”
“You promised me an honest answer,” she doggedly says, eyes boring in on him and as demanding as her words. “Did you kill him?”
McCoy feels pinned to a corner and as though someone is coming at him with a scalpel to pull out his tongue. He doesn’t know what to say to her that’s going to make this situation better and she wants to hear the truth from him. He knows his daughter. She already knows. She already knows the darkest, blackest sin that rests on McCoy’s heart and she just wants to hear it from his lips.
“Tell me!” she half-shrieks in contorted pain, eyes wild.
“Joanna, he was very sick…”
“That doesn’t give you the right!”
“And he asked me…”
“The cure was there! They found a cure three months later,” she gets out the words as her tears fill with fresh tears that trickle down her cheek and sure enough, it takes little more than this to get McCoy going, sending him over the edge of a cliff he thought he’d put long behind him. She inhales hard and angrily wipes away at her tears with the back of her palm. “You killed him and he could have been saved. You took him away, you took my Granddaddy away,” she accuses wildly, the tears coming forth faster than she can stop them.
“Joanna,” McCoy barks, feeling as wild and out of control as she looks. “What was I supposed to do?” he demands, feeling weak and sounding lost. “He asked me. He begged me, my own father asked me to end his pain. Do you think it was easy?”
“You managed to go on,” she accuses, not bothering anymore to brush at her tears. They shine in the dull light of the room so many miles away in Georgia and McCoy would give anything to reach through the screen and brush them away, but he knows she wouldn’t let him. “You went on, you found a new life, and you’re happy. You’re happy and he’s gone and he’s gone because of you,” she keeps going, even though her words come out in half-hiccups. “I don’t want to talk to you,” she says, finding some deep reserve of strength. “Don’t call me. Don’t ever call me. You took him away and I loved him. If you ever really loved him, you wouldn’t have let him go.”
She takes in another shaky breath and dismisses him with a single shake of her head.
The comm goes dead and McCoy is left staring at his reflection in a dark screen, his cheeks stained with tears and a panicked look in his eyes.
Jim finds him some time later, though McCoy has no idea how long it’s been. He’s still processing the conversation and the fact that when he tried to dial Georgia, the number isn’t permitted through. She’s blocked him out of her life and McCoy doesn’t know how to fix this. He’s repaired damaged spines and has fixed broken bones, but he’s suddenly left with the distinct inability to solve this severance in his relationship with his daughter.
“Bones,” Jim says with alarm when he finds him. “Bones, what happened?”
“Joanna knows what I did.” The words are heavy and McCoy had known that one day, he would have to speak them. He just never thought it would be like this.
Jim doesn’t respond to that. He merely slides an arm around his shoulder and begins to aid him to his feet, pushing him to bed and setting him down on the edge. Jim strips him of his uniform and replaces them with regulation pajamas, laying him back and covering him with a blanket before he crawls in to spoon McCoy from behind.
“It’s okay, Bones,” Jim reassures. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’ll figure something out.”
They stay like this for almost two hours and for that whole time, McCoy tries to seek out sleep, but it doesn’t come. All he can think about is Joanna and the nightmares and the way his stomach turns with guilt, assaulting pangs of pain that make him wonder why he had ever thought to listen to his father’s last requests.
Jim isn’t in bed with him anymore. He’s slipped away and McCoy can just distantly hear his voice in the other room.
“Joanna, please, please, talk to me.”
“Jim.” It’s cold and sounds nothing like it could even broach affection. It makes McCoy feel even smaller somehow, colder. “I don’t want you to call me. I blocked your number.”
“I’m not just a pretty face, Jo,” Jim is saying evenly. “I’m a genius. I can unblock it as many times as it takes.”
“Don’t,” is Joanna’s forceful reply. “I don’t want to talk to him and I don’t ever want to talk to you. I told you not to call me.”
“Joanna,” Jim pleads to no avail.
McCoy hears the static on the other end that signifies that the transmission has been cut short. He turns to his back and stares at the blank ceiling. Starfleet regulates that they don’t touch it and so Jim’s plan of painting on ancient constellations is one of many that has fallen by the wayside. His hand rests lethargically against his chest and dimly, McCoy feels the beating of his heart as though it isn’t trying to slowly curl in on itself. He hears the shuffle of sheets before he feels the press of Jim’s warmth against his back, drawing him in tight and close.
“You heard,” Jim says. It’s not a question or an accusation so much as it’s an acceptance of facts. His hand slowly rubs circles against McCoy’s back and McCoy feels like he can’t draw in deep breaths. He’d thought, stupidly, that this had been tucked away in his past. He never expected Joanna to find out so soon.
McCoy feels as if the grief is filling his veins and weighing him down like concrete as he sinks beneath the pull of the ocean.
“She’ll forgive you,” Jim insists quietly. “She’ll forgive us.”
McCoy knows his daughter better than Jim does, for all of Jim’s dedicated devotions to the McCoy family. He knows that when a McCoy loves someone so deeply and is willing to do anything for them, it doesn’t just go away. It’s been almost ten years and McCoy still feels the guilt of injecting the lethal substance into his father’s carotid artery.
“No she won’t, Jim,” McCoy says hoarsely. “This isn’t going to just go away. She’s just being a good granddaughter.”
David McCoy would have been so proud of her. Somehow that stings harder than all of Joanna’s rage and disappointment in him.
*
The hurricane isn’t settling by any means. If anything, the gale winds of fury from Joanna and despondent despair from Bones are making things worse and Jim sits in the eye of the storm staring up at a calm and clear blue sky and wondering how he’s supposed to make things better between the two of them. He takes advice from Sam on the issue (“sorry to hear. I’ve never exactly done the step-kid route before or I’d offer more help”) and that triggers something in him that sends him to a private room to dial up Iowa.
His mother answers the vidphone and Jim gives her a bright smile. “Mom,” he greets pleasantly. “You’ll be happy to know that I’ve been married for three months and two days and I’m still not divorced.”
“Don’t you start with those statistics, you will jinx this,” Winona says, spitting somewhere off the screen and making Jim wince at the old wives’ tales that his mother has a tendency to believe in. “How is Leonard?”
Jim pauses, lips pressed together, and he shakes his head. “Not well. Can I uh, can I talk to Frank? Just for a little,” he requests, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.
For all of his life, he and Frank have had possibly three serious conversations that stretched past sports, the weather, and the mutual topic of family members. Jim knows that he’d rather go to Jocelyn or his mother with the issue, but he thinks that if anyone’s going to understand the situation, it’s going to be Frank.
“First you tell me if Leonard is okay,” Winona warns.
“He’s just tired, Mom,” Jim protests quietly. “He’s withdrawn and lethargic, but we’re having issues with Joanna. He’s just upset,” he insists, knowing that if he can just somehow get this to smooth out, then Bones will be back to himself and Joanna will forgive him. She has to. This can’t be how their lives play out with happiness just faintly in the backdrop while they charge forward into heartache. “You can talk to him after. I’ll…rouse him from bed,” Jim says with uncertainty, not entirely sure he’s capable of that considering that he had been unable to even sit up and eat when Jim had last checked on him. “Please, Mom. Frank?”
“Give me a minute,” she coaxes, leaving the screen. “Frank? Jim’s on the phone for you!” she calls out from what sounds like just down the hall.
Jim tries his best not to tense. He’s lived so long with Frank in quiet tension and trying to avoid each other because they didn’t know how to deal. Jim’s an adult now and should be more mature than that, but he still doesn’t know how exactly a person is supposed to act in these situations. He smiles politely when Frank sits down. His brown hair is greying speedily now, tinged at the temples, and Jim wishes he could say he’s unaffected by the same phenomenon. The stress of Captaining a ship doesn’t just slip off him like water on a duck.
“Hey Jim,” Frank greets with a nod. “Your mother said you wanted to talk?”
“I did,” Jim agrees, fisting the material of his pants again and again. “It’s sort of about you and me, in a way. Back when I was a kid and I was acting out, what did you do to stabilize me?” He can see Frank smirking, about to protest and Jim doesn’t blame him. “I mean, against you. How did you manage to get me to take it out on the world instead of my family?”
“Is it Joanna?” Frank asks with quiet sympathy.
“Never exactly had a stepchild acting out before,” Jim concedes. “Thought I’d ask you after some of the things I put you through.”
Jim almost regrets asking the moment the words out of his mouth. Frank is just staring at him with a wry smirk on his face. “I didn’t have much success in that area, Jim,” he points out. “You were determined to act out and I wasn’t your birth-father. Hell, you drove my car off the damn cliff to get our attention. Winona did her damnedest, but I was lost. What’s going on with Joanna?”
“She’s upset about something her Dad did,” Jim admits, feeling uneasy about this particular part because Joanna isn’t exactly in the wrong. Bones did send David McCoy off the mortal coil and into the great beyond. He just had his reasons. “I just…don’t know what to do,” he admits, brows furrowed together.
He’s thirty-two. He’s married. He’s the goddamn Captain of the Enterprise. He’s supposed to know these things by now. And yet, he doesn’t know how to stop Joanna from being so angry at Bones that she wants to cut the both of them out of her life.
“She’s the only kid I’m gonna get,” Jim says and down in his core he knows that’s the truth and that he ought to be upset about it, but if he’s only going to get one shot at a child, Joanna’s the very best that he can ask for. “And now she doesn’t want anything to do with us. I don’t know…” Jim tenses, teeth pressed together. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
And there it is. For all his determination, he can’t exactly push forward when he doesn’t have a plan and a playbook to go by.
“All I can tell you is to do what I didn’t,” Frank says after a long moment of silence pervades the millions of miles of space between them. “Give her attention. Don’t give up. Devote yourself to giving her all the love you can even if she says she doesn’t want it and then you just have to hope she’ll come around.”
Jim nods, knowing that it’s decent advice and yet knowing at the same time that he wants something far more immediate than that.
“Thanks, Dad,” Jim quietly murmurs with a nod. It’s a serious name and reserved for special occasions. Jim thinks he’s used it for Frank maybe six times since they’ve known each other, but if now isn’t an apt time for it, then Jim doesn’t know when is. He tries to muster a smile, but it feels strange on his face and he closes down the communication and turns to look at where Bones is still sleeping in bed. “Bones,” he calls over quietly. “Bones?”
“Jim,” Bones replies exhaustedly. “I’m tired.”
Jim crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed, his hand resting atop Bones’ chest and his sluggish heartbeat before Jim presses his forehead against the warm skin there at the open ‘V’ that Bones’ shirt offers. “Are you okay, Bones?”
Bones just looks at Jim through dulled eyes and he feels the shake of his head, the one that makes Jim feel even more lost at sea. Joanna is so distant and Bones is floating away from him and Jim can’t be an anchor to either of them.
“I don’t know, Jim,” Bones admits, his voice heavy with his drawl and the grief of his words. “I really don’t know.”
Jim just wants to make it okay again.
“Go to sleep, Bones,” Jim coaxes, not knowing the answer but thinking that if he can’t yield a solution, he can at least offer temporary respite. “Go to sleep and I’ll still be here in the morning.”
It’s not going to make it better. Jim knows that. Jim doesn’t want to even think about this as a no-win situation so all he can do right now is hope and pray that when morning comes around, something will be different.
THE END