Archive of Our Own

In the third week Nyota was in tenth grade, Bones was called to pick her up. He was mildly annoyed. It had been a while since the kids had gotten in any kind of trouble, at least outside the home. It was a busy day at the hospital and he didn't have time for the interruption.

He was all geared up to tell her that, when he walked into the office and saw her face. Instead, he strode toward her with a concerned, "What the hell happened?"

She stood her ground in a way Bones didn't like, a way that said she was bracing for something to hurt. He put a hand to her chin to look at the worst of the damage, a cut swelling up beneath her right eye. Since she hadn't answered him, he asked, "Who did this?"

"He looks worse," she said, half-defiant, half-terrified. Then, apologetically, "I told him to stop touching my hip. Twice. So he went for my breasts, and I just—I stopped him."

Something colder than ice and hotter than hell rushed through Bones veins. He kissed the crown of her head and said, "Wait here, okay?"

"Bones," she sounded uncertain. "Can we just drop it?"

Bones, in a way, wished he could, just to give her what she wanted. He'd long ago accepted that the kids had him wrapped in a twisty bow around their fingers, but aside from a couple of months when "Karu had been pushing boundaries, they'd never taken advantage of it. Hell, they even went to bed when he told them to.

He sighed. "Pumpkin, even if I didn't personally need to be reassured this kid is gonna be raked over the coals, I wouldn't want to let him off to go and try it with some other girl who doesn't know how to fight back, or just won't."

Closing her eyes briefly, Nyota nodded. "I get it."

"After this we'll go to the hospital and get you cleaned up and let all the nurses try to make themselves your favorite."

It got a smile out of her. "Good plan. I like that plan."

Bones did too, but there was business to attend to first.

*

"Dr. McCoy," the principal said, rising from his chair. Bones liked Principal Pike. He seemed to genuinely care about the students more than how the school board viewed him.

For that reason, Bones held out his hand and said, "Principal."

Pike gestured for Bones to have a seat. Bones took one. He didn't beat around the bush. "What's being done to the kid who was inappropriately touching my child after having been repeatedly told no?"

Pike blew out a breath. "Ah."

It took Bones a second, but then he realized, "She didn't tell you."

"She wouldn't talk at all. Carver Holstead, on the other hand, had a pretty rousing tale."

Bones just raised an eyebrow. Pike shrugged. "Kid's for shit at lying. Doesn't know how to keep it small. Aside from which, no kid is an exemplary student for a year and a half and suddenly decides to become a raging hell-monster, which was how he would have had it."

"She doesn’t like fighting, not if she thinks something else will solve the problem." It was an understatement. He'd seen all the kids go ridiculously out of their way to avoid confrontation. That alone told Bones that Holstead had scared her, enough that she'd finally resorted to pure instinct.

"Mm." Pike leaned back in his chair. "It actually drives some of her teachers crazy. The whole point of the lesson is to argue and she just keeps her thoughts to herself."

Bones knew. It had been mentioned at nearly half of every parent-teacher conference for each of the kids since he'd taken them in. He knew he should probably be addressing the problem, but there were so many others that seemed to take precedence. "You'd probably do the same thing, if you'd been through what she has."

Pike took it at face value, as Bones had hoped he would, and said, "All right, fair enough. Holstead's been suspended for two weeks and taken off the football team. I have to give her detention, though, you have to realize that."

Bones ran a hand over his face. "You do what you have to. I'm going to go out there and explain to my kid that she was right to defend herself, no matter what school policy says."

"Do that," Pike said. "And tell her she's serving her three days of detention with me."

That was unusual. "With you?"

Pike smiled. "I'd like to get to know her a little more. She seems like a remarkable young woman."

Bones growled, "You don't know the half of it."

*

Nyota must have texted Jamie and "Karu something, because when Bones finally drove home with her, the other two were sitting at the kitchen table, homework spread out in front of them, talking in the broken, coded way that Bones had decrypted to some extent, but not enough to really understand. They only slipped back into it when highly stressed. Jamie was on his feet the second he saw her face, even though it really wasn't too bad now that it had been cleaned up and bandaged.

She said, "I'm okay, J."

Jamie kept looking, like he was searching for the scratches and cuts that weren't visible. Bones hoped if they were there Jamie or "Karu could find them, since he hadn't managed. After a long moment, Jamie said, "Okay."

Bones felt some of the tension he'd been carrying since he first saw her drain out of him. It was too cold for eating outside to be an option, but two years into owning the house they'd knocked out everything but the support beams in one corner and built a sunroom with one-way glass. He said, "How about we do Chinese in the sunroom?"

The three of them all loved Chinese, but particularly Nyota, who liked to order in the language. She had evidently begun teaching it to herself a year ago. The sunroom was everyone's favorite room for hanging out in. "Karu said, "I'll set the table."

Nyota asked, "The usual?"

*

In between patients the next day, Bones texted Nyota, "Call me when you're on your way home."

He was in the middle of notations when his phone rang. He picked up and skipped preliminaries. "How was detention?"

"Kind of…fun," Nyota said, sounding happy but unsure about being happy.

"Was there liquor involved?"

"Haha," she said, but she had laughter in her tone. "He asked me what my favorite subject was."

"Arabic," Bones said, because he might not always understand his kids, but he knew them, dammit.

"Yeah. I guess he served for a while. He told me stories about Tehran and taught me a few phrases I didn't know."

"Were any of them dirty?"

"Get your mind out of the gutter," she told him.

He grinned. "I'm glad, pumpkin."

"I…he listened. Would he have listened if I'd talked yesterday?"

"I think so," Bones admitted.

"Should I have, uh, I dunno trusted him?" She sounded ashamed, as if trusting her instincts had been wrong.

"You trust where and when you decide," he told her, his voice rough. "You have all the right not to, at any juncture."

"But, I mean, it maybe hurts me at times, I think. Not trusting. I just don't know which would hurt more."

He wanted her there, wanted to be able to pull her to him and fold her up, keep her safe from the decisions she was having to make, the chances she would eventually need to take. "Maybe," he agreed, "maybe it does. But fighting your own instincts never ends well. If there's one person you don't have the energy to fight with all the time, it's yourself. That's all I know."

Nyota sighed. "Thanks, Bones."

He winced, wishing he had something more for her. She said, "Love you," so quick she didn't even expend an entire breath, and hung up.

*

The second day of detention, Principal Pike and Nyota constructed a 3-D puzzle. "We built the Taipei 101 Tower. It was pretty cool. He said maybe one day I'd get to see it."

Bones said, "You will." He might not always give in to "Karu's desire for poisonous plants, or Jamie's puppy eyes when he wanted cookies, but the big things, the stuff the kids wanted in a life-experience type way, those he was never going to deny them, no matter what he had to do to make it happen.

"Maybe we could all go," Nyota said, then laughed in the affected way she had when she was pretending not to care about something.

"That'd be great," Bones cut her off with an almost aggressive sincerity. He put a family vacation to Taiwan on his list of shit-to-make-happen.

*

After the third detention, it was Principal Pike who called Bones. Bones looked at the number and tried to stay calm as he answered, "McCoy."

"Nyota's fine," Pike said, evidently hearing some of the concern Bones was trying to hide. "We watched a French film without the subtitles. Her fluency is way better than mine, I need to brush up."

"She's good with languages," Bones said.

"Understatement. Which is what I wanted to talk to you about."

"I'm not putting her in a college program. The district already talked to me about it. School has been a big enough struggle for her, being older than her classmates, having had to catch up on so much to even attend, I'm not putting her in an even stranger environment for a few days a week. I'm willing to talk tutors, but that's it."

There was a pause before Pike said, "I should have checked her records before I called; I see what you are talking about, but no, that's not where I was going."

Bones rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "Oh. Then what?"

"There's a program for high school kids in the city to serve an internship at the UN. The particular one I'm thinking of takes two kids a year, but honestly, I'd be shocked if she couldn't nab one of those positions."

Bones thought about it. Was it really that different from throwing her to the wolves of college? Then again, other high school kids did it. And she would probably love the idea. He breathed in through his nose. "I'll talk to her about it."

"Great. Get back to me either way."

*

Bones brought the idea up with Nyota later that week, when the four of them were spending an evening together. He wanted the boys there, since she was most honest in their presence. Turned out he needn't have worried, since her response was to sit utterly still for a moment, then launch herself at Bones, hugging him more tightly than he would have credited her being able to manage.

"That," "Karu declared solemnly as Nyota began to detach, "is awesome."

"Pretty soon we're gonna be saying we knew you when," Jamie's smile was 99% pride and 1% twisting, painful fear.

Nyota rolled her eyes. "Every rock star needs an entourage."

Bones just pulled her back in for another hug, swallowing his laughter. After all, what she was saying was completely and utterly true.