Work Text:
Jo is used to being kept in the dark.
She knew so little about her parents’ divorce that she hadn’t realized her daddy was leaving for good until he was wrapping his arms around her and kissing her goodbye. Even at five years old, she knew she hated the way adults talked around serious issues, rather than just putting the truth out there.
She doesn’t remember much about the Enterprise’s plummet to Earth. Ten years old and buck-toothed, she was running around in the front yard when her momma called her into the house and held Jo on her lap as they watched the story unfold on the international news channel. Jocelyn stroked Jo’s hair and held her tight until the call came through and Jo could see her father’s exhausted, sweat-streaked face for herself. She just held her hand up to the screen and told him that she loved him very much and that she was doing an accelerated science program over the summer. He nodded, listening intently as always.
Thinking back, she can’t believe she hadn’t noticed that the streaks were tears, not sweat, and that his eyes kept flickering to something off-screen, steady beeping and hushed voices.
It isn’t until she was fifteen that Jo learned Jim Kirk was dead when the Enterprise hit San Francisco, and she was so furious that she didn’t speak to the captain or her father for a solid week.
“Joanna banana, I’m fine now, I promise. See, all ten fingers. I can show you all ten toes, too.”
“Jo, honey, you were ten. What was I supposed to tell you?”
“He died, Dad. You died, Uncle Jim! I would have liked to hear it from one of you instead of a medical journal, okay?”
She cried with the normal enthusiasm of a heartbroken teenager, but things slowly knit back together and she made her father promise to never keep crucial secrets from her ever again, with the same enthusiasm of a teenager who believes she’s always right.
Years after, Jim brings up the whole “people in torpedos, and Bones thought he was going to lose his arm and we thought we were going to lose Bones,” thing over brunch.
Jo takes a long look at her father over her coffee cup, one eyebrow raised sharp enough to cut through steel. Leonard matches her inch-for-inch until Jim starts laughing hard enough to rattle the table.
Jo just sighs and shakes her head.