Behold, I have again committed fanfic!

Mercy

 

A response to the “Where No Woman Has Drabbled Before” prompt, “Ex-Mrs. McCoy, dead on arrival”

Warning/summary: Death. Addictions. Neo-Calvinists angry at God. Excessively grim.



“I'm sorry, Jocelyn. I'm so, so sorry.”

“No,” she said firmly. Her baby sister. Couldn't be.

“Dammit, Joce, don't make me...I was the doctor on duty when they brought her in. She wasn't breathing, had no pulse, no brain activity. I tried to revive her even so, but the....She wouldn't have been your sister any more. It was too late.” Leonard's eyes looked glassy and a little wild. He would have saved Jennilee if he could. He'd have given his right arm to save his wife's wild, crazy, self-destructive twenty-two year old little sister, who'd lived through a hundred gut-wrenching scrapes. Not this time.

She couldn't see it. The wounded, guilty look in his eyes was invisible through her own haze. “No, no, no. No. No.”

Leonard McCoy wrapped his arms around his wife, who bunched up as small as possible with her head bowed. He breathed in the scent of her hair, two shades darker than Jennilee's bright blonde. “I'm so sorry, darlin'.”

She broke away from him. “Leave me alone,” she hissed, and stumbled to her office at the back of the house. He started to follow, then sat down on one of the living room chairs. He was exhausted. He would wait until Jocelyn came back, and then they would talk.

Jocelyn jittered back and forth in her office for a little while, pacing off the first blind rush of rage and grief, then turned to go out of the room, back to Leonard. Comfort. Her eye lit on her personal comm. A message light was blinking. “Hey...hey, Jocelyn. I, uh, I'm having a little trouble here. Pick me up? Yeah. Call me. Love ya sis.”

Jocelyn threw the comm across the room, where it hit the wall and smashed into many pieces, well beyond repair. She folded into a heap on the floor, and stayed there as if turned to stone.

Out in the living room, Leonard fell asleep in the chair.


At the funeral, one of her father's Cooperative Baptist colleagues, an austere woman with a gentle voice, spoke of God's mercy. “We do not know the mind of God. We know only that His love is infinite, His forgiveness likewise. No one who turns to the ever-flowing fountain of healing will be denied. We need only proclaim forgiveness likewise to our brothers and sisters on this earth and among the stars, that we are redeemed.”

Jocelyn listened in stony silence, her fingers twisted together in her lap. If she'd answered when Jennilee called. If she'd interfered sooner. If she'd told their father all she knew about Jennilee's behavior. If she hadn't given Jennilee money, which had surely been spent on the ethanol and pharmaceutical cocktail that the toxicology report had revealed. Jennilee had told Jocelyn she needed the credits for rent.

If time ran backwards. Time was unforgiving.


It was the clink of the whiskey bottle that set her off. “Drinking again?” she asked, acid in her voice. Her throat hurt.

“Just settlin' my nerves, darlin'.” His gentle middle Georgia diction, which had always charmed her, grated on her nerves. His drinking, which was not excessive, had never bothered her before. Now it did.

He came close, and she could smell the whiskey on his breath. Whiskey and death. “Get away from me,“ she spat, and realized she meant it.

She was supposed to love her husband. She was supposed to forgive him.

He would not believe she wanted him to leave until she served him papers, wouldn't believe she really wanted a divorce as she hired a vulture in the shape of a man. He kept talking about reconciliation and counseling until the vulture picked him clean. Then he finally went away, and took her failures with him.

Jocelyn sat alone in her empty house. She could not forgive Leonard, could not forgive herself, and there was no mercy from God.

 

ST fanfic: True Grits

Star Trek, in the new movie's AU though it helps if you've seen The Final Frontier. Leonard McCoy decides to show some friends around his home town. McCoy, his Mama, Kirk, Spock, Uhura, and the Tree That Owns Itself. The Tree is real, as are the various musicians referred to. Everyone else is fictional.

( (One of my professors told me last week that DeForest Kelley was from Athens. It would be more accurate to say that he spent time here growing up, but since they never say where in Georgia McCoy is from, I decided Athens was as good as anywhere. I meant to play this for laughs, but then it got all seeeerious and character-studyish. It might still be funny, if you live in Athens.) )