Title: What Could Be Possible
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: Kirk/Spock/McCoy
Summary: Joanna learns about her father’s marriage and doesn’t know what to think.

If she thought the idea of her father re-marrying was weird, when he came home with two husbands, Joanna was utterly shocked. The marriage—marriages?, geez nobody tells you how to label these things! Joanna had decided sourly—had been officiated on some faraway planet (the alternative to marriage, her father will explain to her years later when she asks, was death by stoning at the hand of an angry Priestess) and it wasn’t even legally binding but all three of them acted like the marriage was real. This made her absolutely crazy with confusion.

She asked her father “Can’t you, I dunno, annul it?” over breakfast.

He continued to read leisurely through a digital copy of the morning’s newspaper and sip at his coffee. “What’s to annul?”

Joanna brightened. “Exactly!”

He lifted his eyes to meet hers and said slowly, as he blinked, “Do you know where Jim’s gotten to?”

She deflated again, confused as ever at the soft, affectionate timbre of his voice when he said her new stepfather’s name. Joanna stabbed her fork into her bowl of honeyed oatmeal and shrugged. Subsequently her father returned his attention to his reading, no doubt classifying and dismissing her behavior as young adolescent moodiness.

Which it could have very well been during any other visit to Earth, except for this news she hadn’t figured out yet. Then there was the awkward fact nobody else seemed worried about it but her.

It’s not that Joanna didn’t know her stepfathers before the weird arrangement happened; in fact, she had harbored a minor crush on Captain Kirk between the ages of eleven and twelve until she replaced him with a cute boy in glasses from her biology class who always greeted her with a shy smile. (After all, it’s hard to stay in love with somebody you never see, isn’t it? Obviously, she had thought back then, as she proudly let go of her crush, she was coming into her wisdom as a woman.) Spock was different than Jim but no less entertaining; he, for one, had answered her inquisitive questions with endless patience the first time they met, and treated her as an intellectual equal (despite that they both knew she wasn’t, though she often fantasized that may change some day).

Joanna put away these thoughts as she stealthily approached her target.

Jim was inspecting an antique lawn mower which had been rusting in their shed for years. He called her over after he spotted her loitering behind a tall oak tree, pretending not to watch him.

“Hey there, kiddo,” he said, and tugged her in close for a hug.

Joanna squirmed beneath his arm for a moment then gave in and let herself enjoy his easy affection. Afterwards, Joanna pulled away and crouched by the lawn mower to poke a finger at a fraying cord dangling to the ground. He said something about bio-diesel and ancient motor and she half-listened until a niggling thought become too much to bear.

“Uncle Jim,” she interrupted his rambling, “isn’t Starfleet against it?”

“Against what?” he queried back, looking at her curiously.

She had to look away from the strange orange halo around Kirk, created by the rising sun at his back, and dropped the stick in her hand. She studiously followed the ant crawling over her shoe with her eyes as she spoke. “The you-know,” she said vaguely. A broad gesture of her hand quickly engulfed him and the house, where her father and her other stepfather currently were.

Jim was silent for a second or two then said, “Oh, you mean our ‘thing’.” He circled around the lawn mower and her at a drifting pace before suddenly dropping down with a graceful fold of his knees to sit cross-legged in the grass. Then her Uncle Jim fixed his blue eyes upon her, but his gaze seemed gentle rather than sharp. “It’s not on record with Starfleet, Jo.”

“Why?”

“Because they might have something to say about it—and frankly, I don’t want to hear them bitch about a part of my life I have no problem with.”

“Oh.” He said it so casually she had to bite her lip and think about what that meant.

Jim kept looking at her but she didn’t say anything else about this new—and more familial—relationship between them because of the marriage. It wasn’t like things had changed that much, she consoled herself. But just to make certain, she said, “Ice cream?”

A side of her stepfather’s mouth quirked. He didn’t need to ask. “Sure, if you think we can sneak it by your dad.”

“Don’t we always?”

Jim laughed at that. “You’re my kind of girl, Joanna,” he said, completing their ritual since she was seven and he fed her chocolate ice cream until she agreed to like him forever. With a grin, he added, “Help me move this to the front yard.”

Joanna huffed. “We’ve got an electric rider, Uncle Jim.”

“Spock will probably dismantle this old gal once he realizes it exists. He has a habit of disassembling every mechnical contraption he comes across if he’s never seen it before, new or old. One time the three of us were stranded at a station which had an old battery-powered coffee pot. Spock took it apart, of course, but hadn’t put it back together by the time Bones had woken up and, ha ha, I don’t know if you know what your father is like without his morning cup—”

“—he’s a bear,” she inserted helpfully.

Jim broke into laughter that could undoubtedly be heard by the neighbors down the road. She smiled.

Once he had regained control of himself, he continued, “What was I saying? Oh, yeah, so I want to try it first before I dedicate it to Vulcan curiosity… not to mention Bones will hate the racket it makes!” He winked.

Why Jim took special delight in aggravating her father, she didn’t quite understand, but she intended to have a front row seat on the porch when her father came stomping out of the house. Between their combined strength (she always liked the opportunity to show off how strong she was for a girl), she and Jim dragged the lawn mower around the house and he cranked it up with obvious glee.

Only later, as Jim grinned unrepentantly at Joanna’s scowling father, did Jim’s behavior make sense to Joanna. He was like a mischievous little boy pulling on a girl’s pigtails in order to annoy her simply because he liked her; Leonard was, in essence, Jim’s girl.

Joanna couldn’t help but laugh at this image in her head. Her father cut a look at her from his stance on the porch’s steps but didn’t ask why she was laughing. This was just as well, since by then the mower had started to smoke ominously. Moments later, Jim abandoned it with a surprised shout and a dive just before it caught fire and blew up like a box of firecrackers.

“Daddy’s mad,” Joanna murmured, fiddling with a length of charred metal between her fingers. It was still slightly warm to the touch.

Spock fished another piece of the ruined lawn mower out of the blackened grass and scrutinized it. “I suspect Jim did not account for the volatility of the fuel stabilizer when combined with the age of the gasoline.”

“Aren’t you mad too?” she pressed.

He turned his head to consider her for a brief moment. “Negative. It was an accident.”

When Leonard had dragged his husband off of the burning lawn and started yelling at him (after checking him over for injuries), Joanna had watched Jim’s face morph from sheepishness to a quiet kind of reserve. He had waited until Joanna’s father took a breath to continue his rant then leaned in and kissed Leonard. Joanna had turned her face away to allow them privacy, embarrassed by the evident tenderness of the moment. Then she heard Jim apologize for killing their family mower, whereupon her father had replied, “You matter more, Jim.”

She stood up from her squat, letting the memory fade as she stretched her legs, and retrieved an empty fire extinguisher lying on its side in a flowerbed. Joanna hugged the red canister to her chest and eyed the Vulcan some feet away. His face was impassive as he poked and prodded at various remnants of the lawn mower but she felt a sense of disappointment from him.

She offered, “Uncle Jim was gonna let you take it apart.”

Spock said nothing as he stood and joined her near the porch. Joanna followed him back into the house in silence and lingered by the kitchen while he disappeared down the hallway that would take him to the bedroom where Jim had gone to change his clothes.

It occurred to her belatedly her words hadn’t surprised Spock. Did the two men know each other so well?

Joanna waited until after her father told her to go to bed and came into her room to make sure she was settled for the night. He was stubborn about the ritual and never listened whenever she reminded him she was too old for this kind of supervision. His only explanation was “You’re still my little girl. I get to tuck you in.”

“Dad,” Joanna said, worrying a loose thread of her bedcovers as he sat on the edge of her mattress, “why did you tell me?” She clarified quickly, “About you being married to Uncle Jim and Spock, I mean.”

He pulled her fidgeting hand away from the thread and cupped it between his own, rubbing her knuckles. “You had to know first, Joanna.” Her hand was squeezed gently. “It’s okay if you aren’t happy about it. You and I—we’re always family, no matter what.”

She looked at him and saw that he meant what he said. Some of her anxiety eased. “I… don’t get it, I guess.” At his silent invitation to continue, she added, “I know Uncle Jim loves you. I knew that a long time ago, but how’s it fair that he loves Spock the same way?”

She didn’t think what she said was funny but her father chuckled. “Sweetheart, don’t get me wrong, I was jealous in the beginning. Fact is, I thought Spock was the sorriest bastard I’d ever set my eyes on—”

Her eyes widened in surprise.

“—and Jim was a fool to think otherwise.”

“But?” she wanted to know.

“But I eventually figured out what it was Jim liked about Spock. The secret is,” he said, leaning toward her, “you just have to learn how to see beyond his prickly surface.”

Prickly is not a word she associated with Mr. Spock. But the thought of it made her giggle.

“He’s really no different than Jim or me, minus those pointy ears of his.”

Joanna smiled. “His ears are cute.”

He let go of her hand in order to tweak her nose. “Do not fall in love with a hobgoblin, darlin’,” he warned her.

She shot back, “Why not? You did.”

Now he smiled, and the sight of it wasn’t as startling as it once was, back in the days when her father didn’t smile much at all. “I guess I did,” Leonard admitted.

Hearing that, Joanna’s confusion lessened somewhat. She wiggled until she was suitably ensconced under her bedcovers and her father took the cue to let her be. He smiled at her one last time, just as his fingers reached out to lower the lighting of her room, and she closed her eyes with the image burning against the backs of her eyelids.

In the quiet darkness of her room, she mulled over a few things—and drew a few conclusions as well. She would have to give Uncle Jim and Spock a chance, it seemed, because her father was happy to be married to them. Maybe their relationship didn’t make sense to her (was it because she hadn’t met the right boy yet? And what if there were two boys she liked at the same time?), but it made sense to them. So she had to be satisfied with that until she learned, some day, how a marriage between three people could be possible.

-Fini

Related Posts:

• Bring Out the Sun – from August 1, 2024
• Follow Me Dark – from November 30, 2023
• Say a Little Prayer – from November 10, 2021
• Twist and Take – from October 31, 2021
• Clear from the Battle (But Not the War) – from October 11, 2021