Bravo Fleet
Summary
As a newly minted captain, Sawyer is a bundle of nerves that she won’t let surface and a ramrod stiff spine from years of expecting the worse. She’s certainly not an optimist, but she won’t deny others their hopes and dreams just because they don’t exist for her. Bee is a survivor at heart, stemming from a brutal childhood and a grim future that only changed because of a aging SF officer who believed in her enough to push her to change.
Appearance
Heavily tatted and usually terse, Bee is a firecracker with a determined stride and an almost constant frown. She has shoulder length brown hair that she usually keeps pinned out of her face and pale blue eyes that always seem a little angry and distant. Her body is lean, sturdy, scarred and fit, posture wary and defensive even when relaxed or asleep. Bee’s speech is colored with a very thick Southern drawl. She stand’s at 5’5″.
Most of Bee’s clothes worn off duty are years out of date and worn, though sturdy. Her signature style consists of a thick leather jacket, layered tank tops, ripstop cargo pants and reinforced boots.
Personality
Bee is practical, blunt, guarded and jaded. She can flip from cold to passionate in the blink of an eye. It takes a little bit to get Bee to let her guard down as survival was her first instinct for many years. She habitually sticks her foot in her mouth, but will apologize… eventually. There’s a lot of trauma in Sawyer’s past. She had to grow up hard and fast on a dog-eat-dog brutal colony world, and has never quite found a sense of security and safety because of it. She’s fiercely protective over those that she chooses to love, and feels very deeply, though has difficulty showing it. Her sense of morality has vastly improved as the years go on and she’s learned to let others in. Bee has a short fuse and a sharp edge with a set jaw and a cold stare. She is always ready for a fight, though she has learned that it is not always the best option and that isn’t the answer for everything. Relaxing for Bee is popping in a set of ear pieces and losing herself in music. It’s also her favorite way to ignore others.
Her daughter Lara is her pride and joy even if they rarely get to see each other in person as of late. She soaks up every crumb of her daughter growing up safe and happy on Earth as a normal, healthy child allowed to be a child. They speak often through messages and short com calls. She’s extremely ambitious, but has lost the need to shove others down to get ahead. Both she and Lara grew a lot since moving to Earth, then Starfleet.
Bee rarely responds to Lily, only Sawyer, McBee or Bee.
History
The original idea for the McBee family was to settle on an independent fringe colony world. No politics. No pandering: just the wild frontier on some newfound to lose their vices and start over again. Instead they got Chama which was a melting pot of races all thrown into a dusty little fringe colony where nothing was green, pirates were a regular occurrence and crime was pretty much the only way to get ahead. All too fast her parents fell to the same drug and alcohol addicts that they’d suffered on Earth, leaving Bee largely an afterthought to raise herself. Sure, there were neighbors (who called her Little Bee) that’d look after her much like one would the many street dogs wandering loose in the streets, but for the most part she ran wild with a group street kids and orphans.
As she grew older, she fell in with a gang and got mixed up in all kinds of trouble that she’d rather forget. Options that were open to her once dried up with the gang association hanging over her head, so she had little choice other than to dig in deeper and just try to survive as the intensity of the crimes grew. If she didn’t participate, she became a victim: it was that cut and dried. By her late teens Bee was newly pregnant and staring down the barrel of a very short existence if something didn’t change. While she could still hide her pregnancy, she started petitioning supply ships for a crew position with a fake ID until someone took her low-balled offer and hired her to move cargo. It got her off world which was the important part, and some of the crew took a liking to her enough to teach her some basic profitable skills beyond how to wave a firearm and bust knees.
She ship hopped for a while, often finding someone to bunk up with or a parental figure to help her out with Lara while she worked her ass off to earn her place. Bee earned a reputation for being doggedly reliable and willing to learn, which earned her a place on several ships that her personality otherwise would have had her passed over for. She was a cook, a deckhand, a freight master, a hired gun and everything in between. On one ship Bee would manage a hold and on the next she’d be stocking ship stores or acting as the unassuming bodyguard for the captain: the only theme that followed was that the jobs were mostly legitimate as she really was trying to do better now that there was a little life depending on her.
Luck struck when Bee was twenty and she met a soon to retire Starfleet officer in a seedy bar named Charlie Sawyer and shared a few drinks and stories. They ran into each other a few times after that, and eventually began keeping tabs on each other as two friends who loved bourbon and had a habit of ending up in the worst bars in the quadrant. After Charlie ended up pulling Bee’s ship out of an ugly boarding, he met Lara and proposed a plan. See he and his missus had this big old house in Toronto that was half empty since his kids had moved out, and fringe space was just such an ugly place for little girls to grow up in… And that was how Bee and Lara ended up becoming official Sawyers living in said big old house in Toronto.
Charlie didn’t let Bee just rest on her laurels, though. He pushed her to tone down her temper and whittle away bad instincts, further her education and work on her excessive cursing. When the time was right he starting priming to steer her towards Starfleet where he had hoped she’d find an outlet as a budding security officer. It worked insofar as she was ambitious enough to rip into her courses to prove herself- even submit to counseling both for mental health and her image- enough to squeek by. She landed her first assignment: fine. The second went smooth. The third, however, saw more action, but it wasn’t handled in a way that she thought benefitted their crew and their interests. When she brought it up to the captain, he asked if she wanted his job, so she told him yes. Just as blunt as ever. He threw the command course at her with the expectations that she’d crash and burn, but she didn’t. Bee grew.
The USS Delphine continued to hone her under the expert eye of a more likeminded captain as his executive officer. Her transfer to the Vostok as a commanding officer came unexpectedly and quickly on it’s heels, leaving Bee little time to prepare or even pack before dossiers were shoved in her hands and she was boarding a shuttle.