"A fucking coward?" Incredulity dripped from every syllable of the phrase. She should think not. Cowardice was not a trait becoming of someone like her. Anger surged up and threatened to swallow her whole, but some part of her unwilling to make things worse came in and pushed it all back down. "What ever I may be, whatever you might think I am, I am not a coward. I never have been and I never shall be, not even on my death bed." She had no argument to back up her statement, didn't even have the processing power to think of one, but she would stand by her statement until she died.
Call me Jim. Oh, Jocelyn Branch was capable of that. "You want me to call you by your first name? What, does Kirk remind you too much of how they addressed you on Tarsus?" She wished that she was capable of that eyebrow raise that Leonard had always done, but she had no such luck. "You want me to call you by your first name? Fine. Go to hell, Jim."
"Do you really think Leonard's going to take that well?" Bitter laughter erupted from somewhere deep inside her. "There's no way that he'll willingly get back into bed with you after he finds out what you've done to me. I can't say that I know whether or not he'll say that I've deserved what I've gotten, but I can tell you one thing, Jim." She wasn't sure why she was continuing to talk about this, but it was almost cathartic. "Do no harm." She let the three words roll off her tongue, silence reclaiming the space between them once the last syllables faded away. "Leonard McCoy is a doctor. He took the Hippocratic Oath, and he will live and die by those three words. I knew him for years, knew him well enough to know that he hates any person that inflicts pain on another living being. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what you're doing right now?" Jocelyn loved to try and scare the people that she hated, but even now she was merely trying to tell Jim what awaited him. This was a warning, not a threat. "So you do this and you take your thrills from it, but I'm not sure Leonard's going to be too thrilled if he finds out what you've done."
Jocelyn let out a broken scream, the feeling of her cut being ripped open bouncing off of every nerve ending and amplifying as it went. So much for stoicism. She would've laughed about how far off Jim's theory was if she had been capable of such an act. She had considered forcing Jim to drag the answer out of her, but she was thoroughly reconsidering her choices. She'd wanted to play her cards close to her chest but was quickly abandoning that tactic. "That's not it at all, Jim." She spat out his name with pure vitriol. If she was going to be forced into a first name basis, she wasn't going to do it kindly. "Jealousy. Pure and simple. I fucking hate that my worthless ex-husband has found solace and comfort in you." She'd always hoped that Leonard would realize his mistake in leaving and come crawling back to her. It became clearer and clearer as the months went by that such an act was not in the cards.
That was why she'd found herself at Starfleet Academy not three months prior to the present. She needed to check on her ex-husband, figure out why he hadn't come back on the midnight train to Georgia, why he wasn't begging for her to take him back. And then she had seen Jim, found out that the two men were fucking. Leonard was happy, and that made her sick to her stomach. That, quite simply, was why she continued to stick the knife in about the relationship that Jim and Leonard had. If her pathetic doctor wasn't going to come back to her, she could at least try and piss off his boyfriend. So far, it'd worked. But at quite the cost. Realizing that she'd not spoken a word in minutes and that her entire thought process had been internal, she spoke again. "Leonard was supposed to come crawling back to me and you ruined that." She levelled her most hate laden glare at Jim, wondering if that would suffice as an answer. She hoped that if she accepted the answer as the truth (which it was) that he would leave. She wanted him gone, even if it meant having her (apparently psychotic) nurse come in to do a number on her.
