#oh joan

So, for ‘shirt’ we’re going to read ‘one of those hella cool leather bomber jackets with the 506 Pair of Dice emblem,’ okay?  

There’d been some confusion at the coat rack, and as Dick looked at the impossibly slim sleeve of the bomber jacket in his hands, he had a realization. "Is that mine?" he asked, looking over at the only person who was still putting on a coat.

Joan, who'd just finished sliding her hands into sleeves that were far too long for her arms, looked down at the coat that was clearly cut to wider shoulders than hers and looked embarrassed. "I am so sorry," she said, shrugging out of it and handing it back to him, swapping it for her own, their hands touching briefly as the coats were returned to their rightful owners.

But even after, there was a lingering sense that she was still there, and it was maddening.  "You smell nice," Lew said, coming up to Dick and giving an appreciative sniff. "Who got cozy with you this morning?"

Dick stewed a little, embarrassed by the thought of the perfume's wearer getting, as Nixon had put it, cozy. There was a flash of perfume somewhere on the jacket's collar, picked up from the brief contact with her neck. It was the only answer. "Joan and I accidentally swapped jackets," Dick replied. Nixon raised his eyebrows.

"Was that before or after you spent some time canoodling in the coat closet?" Dick felt his face turn beet red, knowing, of course, that they hadn't been anywhere near the coat closet, let alone in it, but the implication had been there to be made. His friend only chuckled. "Oh, Dick, we have to work on your poker face."

"We didn't do anything wrong!" he said anxiously, feeling thoroughly scandalized.

"Oh, no," Nixon replied over his shoulder. "We're working on it for the day you do."

The explorer’s mouth impatiently twitched as she read the scribbled note, short dark locks tumbling over her brow in a messy wind tousled disarray. 

“Oi - She started, her voice somewhat huffy, “Firstly my strength comes from years upon years of and training - trust me, my childhood years Norn master at arms didn’t allow any short cuts, neither did I want that myself… as for my… ‘smarts’, well, my own Father saw to my education, reading me to sleep in three different languages before I could even write, but I mean…”  A dry smug grin was flashed, not entirely reaching her still sharp, judgmental eyes. “There’s also a bit of a natural adeptness I could speak of, on both accounts…”

Joan Warren had never started anything for the sole purpose of pursuing a man.

She had not taken a place at Goucher simply because it was handy for the men of Johns Hopkins, had not taken a job in the maps and graphs department of the Government Printing office because it put her in close proximity to the civil service, and she most certainly had not joined the paratroopers because she was convinced that was where the best dates were to be found. She had done all these things because they brought her closer to her own goals, a four-year degree she could turn into a job, a job that made use of her skills and talents, a unit within the army that demanded (and received) the best a person had to offer.

And if all those places were where men were to be found...that was simply a coincidence. If being the best meant being where the boys were, then that was where Joan was going to be. In her mind, girls sat on the sidelines and cheered - but a woman would get in and pitch. And that was precisely what she intended to do.

It was one of the reasons she hadn't gone home to Wyoming when she was done with school. Her mother had gotten a little weepy over it - but what was waiting for her in Wyoming, except tea-parties with the neighbors? Endless at-home afternoons, filled with optimistic, pointed remarks about how much growing up Mrs. So-and-so's son had done at college, and my, what a handsome young man he turned out to be, and wasn't it just amazing that he had lettered in three sports and captained the football team?

  No one ever said a thing about Joan's college letters, or her grade point average, or the state and school records she'd set on the track field. None of those things seemed to make her a thing to be desired.

And, to be perfectly honest about Mrs. So-and-so's son, he might have been handsome, but the average letterman in college had bored her. Oh, it was all well and good to let a boy take you to the movies on a Friday night, and let him get into some heavy petting in the car on the way home - but to tie oneself to a man like that? A man who could speak very eloquently on the universal rights of man in a philosophy class, and claimed he liked a girl with a sense of humor who loved the outdoors, but who, as soon as you were married, demanded that you hang up your tools before you'd had a chance to accomplish anything, to have dinner on the table every evening by six, keep the house immaculate, and produce two point five children while maintaining your figure?

If that was married life, it could count her out.

Lieutenant Sutton had the right idea, making the army a career. Her mother couldn't understand it - but Uncle Jack and Aunt Michie did. Aunt Michie, who'd practically mothered her through prep school and college, who'd had a career of her own before marrying a man twenty years older than her, who had been known and respected in the Paris art world, and who knew, as she always did, what her niece needed after the cap and gown had finally been hung up. The spare room in their Dupont Circle apartment was hers for the taking,  as well as a latchkey for the back door to keep all her comings and goings unobserved (and unreported to her mother.)

Her aunt had a more bohemian approach to parenting that suited Joan just fine - and her uncle a healthy respect for his niece's gifts and talents, and the ways they could be of use out in the world. It had been Uncle Jack who had cheered her track meets, come to her senior thesis defense, talked her through a few particularly bad break-ups. They don't deserve you, Joanie, he'd always say. You're not built to settle for average.

Not built to settle, that was her. And every man she met in Washington - and the rest of the world, frankly - was average. (And how could they not be, compared to the men she knew and loved, like Uncle Jack?)

Which was why it was completely unforeseen that one day, out of the blue, she should get a compliment on her form at the shooting range, and feel a sudden flutter in her stomach at the voice of the man who said it, a man whose opinion she respected, whose knowledge on the subject was unquestioned, who was known to mean what he said. Oh, god in heaven, not now.