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The first time they meet, she is fifteen years old and everyone on the Enterprise treats her like a child even though she doesn’t feel much like one anymore. In the mess, over dinner, her father makes a fuss over her hair (which is now as blue as his uniform) and that’s when she sees him for the first time, catching his eye as he hides a smile, pretending (like the rest of the crew) that he’s not listening to Jim and her dad argue about her stupid hair.
He is a Starfleet officer and five years her senior--it should feel like a lifetime, but it doesn’t. Two days later, she’s eating breakfast alone again because her dad and Jim have gone off to do something “important” (which she knows is code for something she really didn’t need to know about the two of them) and she’s so lost in thought that she almost doesn’t hear him offer to trade his strawberries for her eggs, since she isn’t eating them?
He calls her Miss McCoy and she can’t help but blush because he’s the first boy to really treat her like something other than an object of curiosity—back home, all they want is to touch and be touched, no one wants to just talk to her like an equal. He’s smarter than she’ll ever be and it’s intimidating, but when he smiles shyly at her and asks what she does for fun back home in Georgia, she can’t help but talk because she can see there is something in his eyes, a loneliness that she can only attribute to the fact that he is younger than everyone else on the crew—a fate she happens to share at this particular moment.
They talk for so long that he’s late for his shift on the bridge and she feels bad, but the smile he gives her before he rushes out of the mess lets her know that he doesn’t mind. She spends the rest of the day in a haze, barely able to concentrate on anything except curly hair and a sudden desire to learn to speak Russian.
They don’t see each other again until the night before she leaves to go back home, when she gathers up all of her courage, sneaks out of her room, and knocks on his door. Blushing, as he answers it in nothing but his pajama bottoms, she asks if it’s okay to write to him after she goes back to Georgia. When he agrees without hesitation, she is giddy and embarrasses herself further by kissing his cheek and then fleeing down the corridor, her heart beating a mile a minute as she whispers his name, a dreamy smile on her face.
She writes to him almost more often than she writes to her father, and his replies are always full of the news of the ship that her dad will never tell her about. They also betray his own fears and doubts, most of them stemming from age and inexperience, which she does her best to sooth away with encouragement and silly, mindless chatter about her life on Earth. Soon, they are no longer Miss McCoy and Ensign Chekov, but Joannka and Pasha and to her, it feels like they’ve never been anything else.
On her seventeenth birthday he surprises her with a vidcall, which she takes during her lunch break at school. When he calls her ‘my lastochka’, she has to ask what that means because her school doesn’t have the funding for a universal translator. To her amusement, he’s clearly embarrassed when he explains the meaning, as if he’s not sure he’s allowed to call her anything as affectionate as ‘little swallow’.
She doesn’t object to the nickname, or the possessive pronoun that goes with it.
They don’t see each other in person again until she is eighteen and he is twenty-six, after three years of nothing but letters that have grown increasingly more affectionate and tender as time passes. When she steps off the transporter pad, she is surrounded by what seems like half the bridge crew and only has time to smile at him before she’s being whisked off to dinner with her father and Jim in their quarters, which lasts well into the ship’s night.
They don’t have a moment together until late into gamma shift when she knocks on his door, feeling more nervous than she did the last time she stood in the same spot. When he lets her inside, there is a moment of awkward silence until he smiles at her, brushing his fingers against her cheek.
“I did not know if you would want to see me,” he whispers, the uncertainty in his voice making her stomach twist in a familiar way. There is a tension in the air between that she doesn’t fight, their lips fumbling in an awkward first kiss that is more desperation than tenderness as he holds her tightly, like he’s afraid she’ll run away from him now that they have crossed the invisible line they’ve been skirting for almost a year.
The second kiss is much better, as are the third and fourth. By the fifth, she’s forgotten everything but the feel of his body pressed against hers and the heat of his touch as he slowly undresses her, kissing every inch of her body in reverent worship.
Even though she’s never done this before, she’s learned a thing or two listening to her friends at school and it brings her a deep satisfaction to watch the slow pleasure on his face when she takes him in her hand, her curious exploration earning her a hiss of Russian curses until he stills her hand with his own.
“It will be over too soon if you keep doing that,” he says softly, smiling, and she blushes because this is all so new and unfamiliar, even if it feels like the most logical thing in the world. When his fingers move between her legs, brushing against places that she has only dreamed about him touching, she is the one that curses and he laughs, pressing kisses against her stomach and whispering her name like a prayer as she comes undone at his touch.
When the time comes, he is gentle with her like she knew he would be, but it still hurts and he murmurs encouragement and endearments in a mix of languages until her body relaxes and he begins to move again, setting a rhythm with his hips that brings them both over the edge when he presses his fingers against her and whispers “Come for me, Joannka”.
Afterwards, in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets, she knows she should leave—what if someone notices she’s missing from her quarters?—but he pulls her closer, as if hearing her thoughts and just presses a kiss against her forehead.
“Sleep, lastochka,” he whispers, smiling gently at her. “I will wake you before you are missed.”