Trigger Warnings for mentions of past potentially graphic abuse and suicide.
He was back.
Joan Archer was a burning ball of anxiety and bullheaded determination. She had just finished a round of sims when checking her com revealed a name that filled her throat with bile and made her shoulders tense in anger. Jonah Cole was back on active duty and in his office. And it was about stars-damned time she and he and a very long discussion. Her foot bounced like a jackhammer as she worked up the courage to do the right thing, to make the move to initiate all the things that needed saying. Joan was no coward. She knew she needed to do this and she wasn't going to let herself be the victim once more.
Cole, she had called him in the public chatroom. She had never even called him by his last name to his face. It was always Jonesy, Jonah, The Jonesman, or her particular favorite, GhostBoss. It had always been him who had addressed her by her surname and never her first. Now though how the tables were turned as she marched up with purposeful strides to his office.
Once at his door, Joan paced up and down the hall waiting for Ellis to be freed from the conversation going on behind closed doors. Even when she came out she did nothing more than bob a greeting of her head to him before storming up to the open door and rapping sharply on it.
"Permission to enter, Pilot Cole?"
Her eyes bored into him as she addressed him in an uncharacteristicall y formal manner with her back straight and hands clasped behind her back. Only once she had been granted the right to enter did she quietly shut the door and move to stand in front one of the "guest" chairs although she did not take a seat. Instead she gripped the back of it with a tight, white-knuckled grip of both hands. "I believe we have a very serious matter to discuss, starting with an explanation on your part," she bite out between clenched teeth that made the muscle of her jaw bulge.