Fic: Starting Over, 3/3
Starting Over, Part IIb. Go here for the full header.
Although, twenty hours later, as she sat in a stadium watching what looked like nothing so much as giant cabbages engaged in some sort of performance art that resembled a cross between Terran jiu-jitsu and Rigellian operetta, the thrill was somewhat gone. The Fr'oxian government had not, as a matter of fact, given her permission to take samples of anything, or so much as readings with a tricorder-they'd explicitly banned both. Captain One was not happy with either condition, but apparently the Federation was in need of some mineral abundant on their planet, so Ally was merely observing.
The performance built to some sort of climax-she had lost track of the story quite a while ago; probably about when Dana sat down next to her-and ended with what appeared to be the lead cabbage eating its rival. "Please tell me that isn't real," Dana said, her breath warm and distracting against Ally's ear.
"I hope not," she replied, and tried very hard not to shift away. Two and a half months in, and she was no closer to figuring out if Dana was merely very friendly or interested. It was so much easier with Cait, she thought. One minute she smiled at me, and the next minute, I was flat on my back. She looked up as Dana brushed a lock of hair back behind her ear and noticed some sort of light-greenish dust on her hair. Frowning, she leaned over to look closer, and then to inspect a strand of her own hair.
Strange. She couldn't feel it or see it on her own hair, but she would bet a lot of credits that she and Dana-and, as she looked around her, probably everyone else in their party-was covered with a fine layer of the light-greenish dust. That was disconcerting. The report on the planet had come back saying that the atmosphere was fine for them to breathe, though, and nothing else in the report had given her to understand that there was anything to worry about, in terms of inhalants.
"What's wrong?" Dana asked.
"Green powder," she said. "In your hair. Probably mine, too, although I can't see it."
Dana turned Ally's face to her with gentle fingers on her chin, stared in her eyes, checked her pulse with warm fingers against her wrist, and leaned in to listen to her breathe. "You don't seem to be having a reaction yet. Do you itch?"
"No," Ally said. "Well, now that you mention it, I do, but it's probably just the power of suggestion." She narrowly resisted scratching at her nose.
"Probably," Dana agreed, but the furrow remained between her eyebrows.
Still, as they left the stadium, Ally's worry overcame her fear and she caught up to Captain One. Waiting until she caught One's attention, she said, "Captain, I'm somewhat concerned about the green powder in our hair."
Captain One frowned and pulled out a lock of her hair. "It looks like pollen."
"It does," Ally said, "but as I am not able to run a tricorder scan, I'm not confident in declaring that it is safe."
The captain gave a short nod. "We'll get back to the ship and decontaminate as soon as possible. If a single person so much as sneezes, tell me and we'll beam out immediately."
Just then, Dana coughed, and Ally and Captain One spun to look at her. "Were you trying to get someone's attention?" the captain asked.
Dana shook her head.
One flipped open her comm. "One to Yorktown. Four to beam up; I'll conclude the diplomatic negotiations posthaste."
Ally nodded, and felt a tickle build in her throat. As she felt the familiar transporter tingle, she swallowed, trying to suppress it, but a moment after materializing, she doubled over, coughing.
"Shit," Dana said between coughing fits. "Lieutenant, seal off the transporter room. Cathcart to Boyce."
Ally wiped her streaming eyes but could not stop coughing long enough to stand up, let alone anything else.
"Boyce here," she heard over the intercom as Dana stuck her in the neck with a hypospray.
"I need isolation and decontamination for minimum six people, and medical authority to order the captain off the planet now. Jarvis's airways are swelling as I speak; if I can't reverse this she'll need to be intubated in a minute or less."
"Lieutenant," Boyce's disembodied voice said to the transport tech, "get Number One up here now, my orders, and beam all of them to Sickbay Isolation Chamber Three on my command." There was a pause. "Then the secondary transporter room will beam you in as well, since you've been contaminated."
"Yes, sir," the lieutenant said.
Ally's vision was starting to gray at the edges; everyone sounded like they were very far away, even though Dana's hands were on her shoulders, and the last thought she had before she passed out was, Some fucking mycologist I am.
* * *
Gradually, Ally became aware of hisses and beeps around her, and it took another few minutes before she recognized them as standard Sickbay noises. She opened her eyes as soon as she could, and stared at the bland ceiling in the regular Sickbay, not isolation. Well.
A minute or two later-or perhaps well after that; she wasn't too certain about time-the curtain opened, and Dr. Boyce appeared. "You're awake," he said.
"Yes," she croaked, and sighed, the air making a strange whistling noise in her abraded throat. "How long?"
"Five days, although two of those were on purpose," he said, reaching up to hypospray her with something that felt cool on the inside of her throat almost immediately. "You had a bad reaction to the standard treatment for mold-spore exposure. It would have been nice if there was a flag on your file for asthma." He raised an eyebrow at her, and she had the strangest sensation that if he wore glasses, he'd be glaring at her over them. Nonetheless, he offered her a glass of water that had been sitting beside the biobed, and she took a sip gingerly.
"Sorry," she said, and her voice already sounded better. "I haven't had any symptoms in twenty-odd years."
"No excuse," Dr. Boyce said, then sighed. "You almost died, Ally."
Well, what could you say to that? "What happened?"
"After the mold spore hit you and triggered what was probably the worst asthma attack of your life, Dana gave you an antihistamine/steroid combo, which didn't do anything. You keeled over, flatlined before we could get you even out of your uniform, and after restarting your heart and getting you breathing again, we had to dose you with three different antifungals before we figured out what worked. As it turned out, you're more sensitive to this particular spore than most of the rest of the ship, and also-" He glared at her again. "You're allergic to the first- and second-line antifungals for spore exposure."
"Which two?"
"Alpharazin and ciromycelin."
"Never had either. Not my fault."
Dr. Boyce sighed again. "I know." He checked the biobed readings, waved a tricorder over her, and said, "Your readings are coming back to normal; now it's just a matter of recovery. How are you feeling?"
"Like someone ran over me with a grav-sled. Twice."
"I can do something about that." He gave her a second hypospray, and a few moments later, she felt significantly better. "Better?" She nodded. "Well enough for visitors?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"Because both Cait and Dana made me swear to comm them the minute you wake up, and you know they'll both be in this room within a minute of finding out that you're up." Dr. Boyce raised an eyebrow again. "Dana was sick as a dog, as well, and I had to knock her out to get her to leave your bedside. I guess the two of you have come a long way since the reception?"
Ally could only blame what she said next on the drugs, or being exhausted, or both. "Not far enough."
"I don't think I needed to hear that," he said, although he was smiling.
"I'm sure it's not the worst thing you've heard about my love life, either." Ally sighed. "Yeah, they can come visit."
Dr. Boyce nodded. "I'll comm 'em." He left, and Ally stared at the ceiling, blinking.
Less than five minutes later, Cait and Dana appeared, both out of breath and each trying to elbow the other out of the way. Dana won the race to the bedside, but Cait spoke first.
"Ally!" she said. "Oh, sweetheart, we were so worried."
"You sound like my mom," Ally said, frowning. Dimly, she was aware that she was still loopy. "Hi, Dana."
"Oh, Ally," Dana said, reaching out to touch her and pulling back at the last moment. "You died."
"I'm alive now." Ally suspected that the conversation would be surreal even without the drugs.
"And she'll be staying that way," Dr. Boyce said from the foot of the bed. Ally looked up, and he was very poorly suppressing a grin. "Don't overtire her."
"I'm already tired," Ally said.
Dana looked at her, worried, and then over her head at the biobed readings.
Cait looked at Dr. Boyce, who shrugged, still not-grinning, and sighed. Leaning over to kiss Ally on the forehead, she said, "Ally, I'm going to head out; I've got to be on shift in about twenty minutes. You call me if you need anything?"
It was clearly a strategic retreat. "Okay, Cait. Thanks for stopping by."
Cait and Dr. Boyce left, and Dana hesitated. "Is it okay if I stay?"
Ally closed her eyes briefly. "Well, yeah. That's why Cait and Dr. Boyce left."
"Oh." Dana blinked, and turned to pull over a chair. "Are you sure you're all right?"
"I think Dr. Boyce gave me the good stuff," she said. "I sort of feel like I'm floating."
"You're starting to slur," Dana said. She reached out and finally touched Ally, gently brushing her hair back off her forehead. "Sleep, Ally. It's all right."
Ally yawned. "Yeah," she said, not sure what exactly she was responding to. Maybe the warmth of Dana's hand against her head. Her eyes fell shut, and she opened them briefly. "Hey, thanks."
Dana didn't ask what for. "You're welcome."
Her voice was the last thing Ally heard before she fell asleep.
* * *
Ally woke up with a start, sometime later. "Computer, what the fuck time is it?" she croaked, her throat having gone dry again and the hypospray having long since worn off.
"It is 0100," the computer said, and Ally sighed. She couldn't remember who was usually on gamma shift.
"Ally?"
Well, apparently she didn't need to remember; Dana had been sleeping in the chair. She rubbed her eyes and stretched, and Ally watched appreciatively; although her hair was coming loose from its ponytail and her uniform was rumpled, she was still gorgeous. Which reminded her-Ally touched a hand to her own hair and grimaced.
"How are you feeling?" Dana asked.
"Grimy," Ally said. "Like I haven't showered in a few days." Her voice was still ragged, and she resisted the urge to cough.
"Oh, hold on." Dana produced a hypospray from somewhere and shot Ally with the same whatever-it-was that made her throat feel better. "Would you like some water?"
"Can I dump it over my head?"
Dana smiled. "No, but if you drink it, I'll see if we can get you out of here and into a shower."
"If you can do that, I will love you forever," Ally said without thinking. "Um. I mean-"
"I know what you mean," Dana said. She was smiling, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. "Here."
Ally took the proffered water, and drank. The water hitting her throat made her realize that she was also ravenously hungry. "Great. Now I don't know if I want food or a shower more."
"You can have both, I think, although probably not at once." Dana took back the cup and set it down on the table. "Can you try to sit up all the way?" She held out a hand.
Ally took it, and levered herself up to a seated position. Her head swam for a moment, and Dana clicked her tongue. "Your blood sugar's a little low. I'm sorry about that. I can give you a hypo now, or you can have some broth in a few minutes."
Ally made a face. "Hypo now, shower first, then food."
Dana nodded, dialed up what was presumably some glucose on the hypospray, dosed her, and held out a hand again. Ally took it again, swung her legs off the table, and stood, shakily. She was wearing a hospital gown; hadn't particularly noticed until she stood. At least she would be getting a shower, she thought, and clung to Dana's arm to walk the few steps to the Sickbay shower room.
Sickbay, of course, had the only water shower on the ship, and Ally stood under blissfully hot water for a good five minutes until she remembered that she was in there to do things like wash her hair. She cleaned up and finished rapidly after that, and toweled dry before dressing in real clothes that Dana had left for her.
"Feel better?" Dana asked, when Ally left the shower room. She smiled as Ally nodded vigorously.
"Look," Ally said, "you don't have to babysit me anymore; I think I'm okay to feed myself and fall over into bed." It was, after all, the middle of gamma shift, and surely Dana had something she'd rather be doing.
"No problem," Dana said breezily. "I'm off-duty anyway."
"Don't you want to sleep?"
"Not if you need help," Dana said, and bit her lip.
Ally chose to ignore any implications of it beyond the obvious, and smiled. "Okay, then. Thanks for the help." She let Dana lead her to her own quarters, and patiently waited for her to run to the mess for some food.
As she ate the bland broth that was all that Dana would allow her, she said, "Tell me what happened over the last five days."
"Ah, well," Dana said, perched on Ally's desk chair. "Dr. Boyce put you in a coma, after he restarted your heart, until he could figure out what to do with you. I responded pretty well to the alpharazin, so I was back on my feet a day or so later. He figured out it was a spore right away, and cursed the fact that the only spore researcher on the ship was currently in a coma."
"I'm sure he did," Ally said, laughing. "Sorry."
"Not your fault. Anyway, we managed to keep it from spreading too far, but both Boyce and the transporter tech got sick. You're the last to recover."
"Did you save any for me?" Ally asked, unable to keep a wistful note out of her voice.
Dana laughed. "Oh, don't worry. There are a whole bunch of little samples bagged and tagged in a secure container for you."
"Oh, good."
Dana smiled again, kind of a strangely indulgent look. Ally's brain recognized it and refused to categorize it. No, she thought. She's just being nice. I was sick, and she's a nurse. She can't possibly-she can't possibly think that me geeking out about mold spores is cute. She shook her head.
"Is the soup okay?" Dana asked.
"It's fine," Ally said. "Bland, but I don't think I'm going to throw it up."
"Good," Dana said. "Are you sore, headachy, anything?"
>
"Tired," Ally said, finishing off the last of the soup. Her eyelids were growing heavy again. Dana took the soup bowl from her, and she said, "Hey, Dana, thanks. This is above and beyond the call of friendship."
"No problem," Dana said with another indulgent smile. "Lie down. I'll get your shoes."
Ally scooted under the covers and stuck her feet out; Dana pulled off her shoes, and she tucked them under the blanket. "I'm pretty much out," Ally said, or tried to say.
"That's fine. Call me if you need anything, okay?"
"Yeah, sure," Ally said, and just before she got sucked under into sleep, she thought maybe she felt Dana's lips on her forehead. It was probably just a dream, though.
* * *
A day later, Ally evaded any possible medical objection to her return to work simply by not asking Dr. Boyce if she could do so; she went to her lab at 2300, and found the package full of samples sitting on her desk. Yes! She set up the proper isolation procedure and started running various scans.
She was so buried in her work that she didn't notice someone entering the lab until she felt arms around her waist and a head buried in her shoulder. She stiffened; at first, she thought it was Cait because who else would dare, and Cait totally shouldn't be daring anymore. A moment later, though, she realized it wasn't Cait; it was-she turned her head to check-Dana. What? "Dana?" she said.
"Mmm," Dana said, and kissed the side of her neck. All very pleasant but-what was going on?
"Dana, hey, um, what's going on?"
"Oh, Ally." Dana's hands stroked over her waist and hips. "God. Kiss me now."
"I can't; you're-" Dana flipped her around and she was suddenly pressed against her own lab bench, Dana covering her pretty much from neck to knee. The next thing she knew, Dana was kissing her, lips moving against hers, mouth opening to touch the seam of her lips with the tip of her tongue.
Ally wrestled herself away and looked at Dana. This was really weird, even with the strange sort of flirting that they'd been doing over the last couple months, and the way that Dana had been acting since the away mission. "Dana?" she said. "No, seriously: what's going on?"
"God, Ally, I can't stop thinking about you, about your breasts, about your lips, about how much I want you to touch me, about how much I want to touch you." Dana looked up at her, and-something was weird about her eyes.
Before she could determine what it was, Dana leaned in for another kiss, her hands sliding up Ally's arms and back down again.
It was a good kiss-Dana was, in addition to being apparently well-practiced at kissing, reasonably uninhibited, and Ally let her explore the inside of her mouth with little resistance. Still, when Ally pulled away, she tipped Dana's head down to look in her eyes, and finally realized what was wrong. It was dark inside the lab, and Dana's eyes were dark brown anyway so it was difficult to tell, but her pupils were bare pinpricks. That was wrong for so many reasons-the low light and the fact that lust caused one's pupils to dilate most primarily-and Ally said, "Dana, something's wrong. Your pupils are constricted."
"I love it when you talk nerdy," Dana said, her voice low and throaty. She leaned in for another kiss, but Ally turned her head, and Dana started kissing her neck.
This is not right. She shouldn't be acting like this. What on earth is going on? And she won't-or possibly can't-stop. I need to get her to stop. Do I just hypo her? Yeah-she'll be so embarrassed when she finds out what she did. Fortunately, Ally kept a couple of hyposprays around for emergencies, loaded with antihistamines, antifungals, analgesics, and other miscellaneous useful drugs. One was only a few inches away from her hands, and while Dana probably sucked a hickey into her neck, she flicked the end of it with her thumb until it was loaded with a medium-grade dose of something that would knock Dana out for a few hours. She dosed Dana and broke her fall, stretching her out on the floor so she was in a comfortable-looking position, and stood over her prone body, wondering, Well, what do I do now?
The answer came quickly: solve the problem. She sent a textcomm to Lt. Zel before running a tricorder over Dana; finding a few hormonal anomalies, she took a blood sample and ran it through the machines.
Some strange compound showed up in Dana's blood; Ally isolated it easily. It wasn't anything she'd ever seen before, though-except that group on the end. That group actually-Ally switched back to a slide of the spore-yes, the same group occurred in the makeup of the spore. Strange. Clearly it was some sort of side result of the spore, but what? Also, hadn't the spore been killed-
That was it. Dana took a sample of the live version of the spore, added alpharazin, watched the spore die-and decay, into mostly water, a little ethanol, and trace amounts of the compound in Dana's blood. Great. It was some sort of intoxicating agent. She fed the data into the computer, came up with a model, and asked the computer to calculate what might kill it.
While the computer was still running, Ally's comm beeped. "Jarvis here," she answered, recognizing Dr. Boyce's personal comm frequency.
"Ally?" Cait's voice asked quietly.
"Cait? What's wrong?"
"I think something's wrong with Phil," she said. "He's acting-weird. And his pupils are constricted."
"What's he doing?" Ally said. If it was anything like what had happened to Dana, she didn't really want to know, but she needed to know for diagnostic purposes.
"He's-I'm sorry, Ally, this is going to gross you out-but-well, normally it's only once in a night, but we've had sex three times so far and the only reason we stopped is because I insisted we should take showers. Separately. I mean, it's not that-that's not a problem, trust me-but it's-he keeps talking about-shit, this is embarrassing." Cait took a deep breath. "He keeps saying things like how much he loves me, and how beautiful I am, and how lucky he is to have me, and how amazing I am, and how-fuck, Ally, this is weird."
"So he's in the shower right now?"
"Yeah. He's singing in there, Ally. It's fucked up."
"Okay," Ally said. "Look, he's not the only one. The same thing-well, something similar-is happening to Dana. Can you knock him out? If you're in his room, I know he's got hyposprays in practically every drawer."
"How do you know that?" Cait asked curiously. "Never mind; there's probably a really boring explanation, and the shower just went off, so I've only got a minute or two. What should I give him?"
Ally told her, and said, "Can you bring him down to my lab once he's conked out-I know he's not exactly small, but you can call Security for help or something."
"Yeah. Yeah, I'll see you in a bit. Thanks, Ally."
She flipped the comm closed and sighed. Well, at least she knew what the mold spore-alpharazin precipitate was doing-it was removing inhibitions, probably with some libido enhancement. That might make it easier to turn off.
Fifteen minutes later, Cait directed a couple of red-shirted security guards to put Dr. Boyce's unconscious form next to Dana's. After they left, Ally ran the tricorder, took a blood sample, and said, "Yep. It's some sort of bad combination of that spore and alpharazin. How many people had it, do you know?"
"I think the five of you-well, not you; you had an allergic reaction and they put you through dialysis-plus Phil and the transporter tech. Why?"
"I need to call them and warn them, or get someone to pre-emptively knock them out. Or something."
A hail sounded at the door a moment later, and without waiting for a response, the door opened and Captain One walked in. "Cait? Ensign Jarvis? Where's Phil?"
Cait pointed to the floor.
The captain's eyes narrowed. "Cait, what the hell is going on?" She looked up, and Ally could see that her pupils were constricted, too. One's hands were clenched into fists, and she was holding herself more stiffly than usual. If Ally had ever had any doubt that her captain had absolutely iron self-control, she lost it at that point.
"Everyone who was given alpharazin to get rid of the mold spores is having a bad reaction to the combination; it appears to lower inhibitions and increase libido. We knocked them out until I can synthesize an antidote," Ally explained.
"Oh," Captain One said. "That makes sense." Her hands flexed. "I believe that I, too, am having the reaction." Muscles worked in her jaw. "Good God, Cait, haven't you figured out by now that Phil's quite desperately in love with you? And Ensign Jarvis, you're probably the only one on the ship who doesn't know how Nurse Cathcart feels about you, although she's at least a little confused because--fuck."
Ally's eyes widened; she didn't know if it was because the captain had sworn, or because of everything else she'd said. Dana-what?
"One-" Cait said, but Captain One interrupted.
"Don't let me call Chris, okay?"
"We can knock you out, too until we find a cure," Cait said.
"That would-" One took a deep breath. "That would be an excellent idea." She sat on the floor next to Dr. Boyce and lay down, her arms at her sides. "Do you need blood samples before you dose me?"
"No," Ally said, and knelt next to her with the hypospray. "I'm sorry, Captain."
"Jarvis, don't apologize, just do your job. It's all I've ever expected of you, whether you are sleeping with my best friend or not. Oh, fucking dose me before I say anything else stupid."
Ally obliged, and pressed the hypo to the captain's neck. The captain sighed as she passed out, and Ally took a deep breath of relief.
"That's some powerful shit, if it can get One to drop an f-bomb or two," Cait observed mildly.
"Are we pretending she didn't say anything?" Ally asked. "I would definitely be in support of that."
"Yes, let's," Cait said. "Let me call Security; I'll see about getting the other three people restrained. How are you doing?"
"I'm fine," Ally said. "I didn't have the alphazarin in my system long enough to have any effects, as far as I know, although I should check."
"You should," Cait agreed. "This isn't transmitted from person to person, is it?"
"I don't know," Ally said. "You want me to check you?"
"Probably not a bad idea."
Ally drew her own blood, and a sample of Cait's; Cait proceeded to locate Lieutenant Tyler, Ensign Statler, and Petty Officer Colfax. The latter two were asleep, but once they awakened, they displayed the same symptoms. Lieutenant Tyler's girlfriend, Ensign Waldorf, had him tied to the bed when Cait commed her. "I don't know what's wrong with him! I was going to put some clothes on and go find someone in Medical!"
Cait, Ally discovered a few minutes later, had no traces of the compound in her blood; Cait was relieved. Ally's blood was also clean, which was remarkably convenient. Tyler, Statler, and Colfax all had the same compound in roughly the same percentages as One, Boyce, and Cathcart, unsurprisingly.
The computer beeped with a result an hour or so later; Ally looked at the screen. "Yeah, no," she said, mostly to herself.
"What's wrong?" Cait asked.
"This will work, but it's toxic to humans. See the hydroxyl group there?" She pointed to the screen. "Computer, remove the hydroxyl group and calculate the change in effectiveness."
"Removal of the hydroxyl group will decrease effectiveness by 0.5 percent," the computer responded, a minute or so later."
"So we're down to 99.5 percent?" Ally asked.
"Affirmative," the computer said.
"I'm okay with that. Cait, you okay with that?"
"Sounds good to me."
Ally synthesized some of the antidote and dropped it into the petri dish containing the residue; it immediately broke down into its component elements and water. She ran the elements through a few calculations. "Shit," she said. "If we use this, we'll have to do chelation afterwards."
"Worth it?"
"I don't think there's an option otherwise," Ally said, and sighed. "Let's get them down to Sickbay."
* * *
An hour or so later, Ally had successfully argued the gamma-shift head doctor into letting her dose the captain and the CMO with something that would turn into toxic heavy metals, and then start chelation protocols. It had probably mostly worked because Lt. Zel appeared, apologizing for the delay, and, after looking at her data, backed her up. Dr. Donhowe wanted to start with Petty Officer Colfax, but Lt. Zel vetoed that right away. "Doctor, this is not the Romulan Star Empire; we do not experiment on enlisted personnel."
Donhowe frowned, but agreed to let them wake Tyler and start with him. He insisted on waking the lieutenant up himself, and did so as Ally loaded up a hypospray with the antidote.
"Where's Ginny?" Tyler asked, as soon as he came to.
"We'll call her for you," Cait said, as Ally dosed him with first the antidote and then, a full sixty seconds later, the chelation therapy. Lt. Zel watched with approval.
Tyler remained curiously silent during the entire procedure, and about five minutes after the chelation started, said, "What happened?"
"Leftovers from the mold spore affected you badly. How are you feeling now?" Ally asked.
"Mostly normal, I think. My mouth tastes like copper."
"That's to be expected. You'll have to stay here until the chelation is done, but that shouldn't be too long now." She checked the numbers above his bed. "Maybe another half hour."
"Okay," Tyler said. "Can you still call Ensign Waldorf for me? I think I owe her an apology."
Ally nodded, and Cait went to do so.
Twenty minutes later, they'd awakened and dosed everyone affected; the therapy worked. Even while checking biobeds to see when the chelation was complete, Ally suddenly found herself without anything to do. She collapsed in a chair between Dana's and Dr. Boyce's beds, as they were in a small room together.
"That was some amazing work, Ally," Dr. Boyce said, turning to look at her. "You stayed level-headed the whole time, from what I hear." He nodded at Cait, who was on his other side.
"I did," Ally said, a little light-headed. She grinned at Dr. Boyce.
He smiled back, and then returned to a serious look. "Although you didn't have medical clearance to return to work. I should put you on bed rest for the next week."
"With all due respect, sir, I'm the one who can stand at the moment." Ally yawned, wide enough to make her jaw crack.
"You should go to bed," Dana said. She'd been oddly quiet since awakening.
Ally looked over her head at the biobed screen as it beeped. "Your chelation is complete. You should probably get some sleep, too, Dana."
"Yeah," Dana said, but didn't move.
"Why don't you walk her to her room?" Cait suggested, probably intentionally ambiguous.
"I can do that," Ally said. She stood, offered Dana a hand, and helped her off the biobed. "Everything okay?"
Dana nodded.
Just then, Dr. Boyce's biobed beeped. "Stick a fork in me; I'm done," he said, and swung his legs off to one side. "You coming?" he asked Cait, oddly hesitant.
Ally held her breath and heard Dana do the same.
"Yeah, sure," Cait said, off-handedly.
Phew, Ally thought, and exchanged a glance with Dana.
Dr. Donhowe signed the discharge forms and ordered them all to take forty-eight hours of sick leave. Lt. Zel congratulated her on a job well done, and apologized again for taking over an hour to respond. Ally nodded awkwardly and promised a report as soon as possible, and they left. Fortunately Cait and Boyce had quarters on an entirely different deck from Dana or Ally, so they avoided awkwardness once they exited the turbolift.
"Ally," Dana said, when they were just coming up on her room. "I-shit. I am so sorry."
"Can I come in?" Ally said, instead of responding.
"Yeah," Dana said, and once the door closed behind her, continued. "God, Ally, I am so fucking sorry. I shouldn't have come anywhere near you; I should have figured out that something was wrong and gotten my ass down to Sickbay before I assaulted you."
"How were you supposed to figure out that something was wrong if Dr. Boyce couldn't?" Ally asked. "I'm glad you came to me, so I was able to find out that something was wrong right away. I'm-yeah, okay, I'm not going to lie: you coming on to me was really unexpected and I wasn't sure how to get you to stop without knocking you out, but . . ." She trailed off. "You've got to know it wasn't entirely unwelcome."
"I didn't know," Dana said. "Was it that unexpected? Well, shit."
"You did reject me in front of pretty much everyone I know, including my boss," Ally pointed out.
Dana winced. "Yeah. About that. Force of habit? Can we forget it happened? I realized I was an idiot about five minutes later, and I've been trying to make up for it ever since."
Ally laughed. "I think we've done a really good job of dancing around each other for months. Even Captain One noticed."
"Did she?" Dana asked. "Oh, dear."
"Yeah. Apparently when she lost her inhibitions, her first urge was to tell everyone off. Probably because Captain Pike isn't around."
Dana smiled. "So what now?"
"I am so fucking tired," Ally said, and yawned again. "How about we sleep?"
"Together?" Dana asked.
Ally shrugged. "Clothes on, even. Unless you don't want to?"
"Oh, hell yes," she said, and strode forward to pull Ally into her arms.
Ally rested her head against Dana's chest and sighed in relief.
"You'll have to be big spoon," Ally said sleepily, and Dana chuckled. Boots, socks, outer bits of uniforms, and bras got strewn across the room, and Ally didn't miss how Dana stared at her breasts once the bra was off, but they fell onto the bunk and curled up together chastely. Dana's bunk was small; no larger than standard, but they fit themselves into it easily.
"This is nice," Ally said, tucking Dana's arm against her chest.
"This is wonderful," Dana said, and buried her nose in Ally's hair.
"Mm-hm," Ally said, and drifted off, surrounded by Dana's presence.
* * *
When Ally woke up the next morning, she was warm, and fully rested, and comfortable in a way she hadn't been in a while-even while realizing that she hadn't so much as shifted in the past few hours, and her arm was tingling.
Dana had shifted; one of her legs was between Ally's, and her right hand was under Ally's shirt, her fingertips just brushing the bottom curve of her breast. Ally felt her nipple pebble, and sighed.
Dana's hand flexed, and she hmmmed in Ally's ear. God, Ally thought. I would give a lot of credits to have her shift her hand about two inches up . . . She shifted, rubbing her thighs together.
"Mmm, Ally?" Dana asked sleepily.
Fuck. Sleepy Dana was hot as fire. "Dana," she said.
"Oh, shit, I'm sorry." She withdrew her hand from Ally's shirt. "I seem to be doing that a lot recently."
"You're welcome to," Ally said, her voice as low as it ever got. "Just ask me first?"
Dana held still for a moment. "Ally, can I touch you?"
"Oh, please do." She wriggled around until they were facing each other. "But I want to watch you do it."
"Okay," Dana said, her face full of awe and wonder, and slid her hand up under Ally's shirt again. Slowly, she trailed her fingers over Ally's ribs, brushing her nails against the underside of her breast, and finally, what felt like an eternity later, she closed her fingers around Ally's left breast.
Ally gasped; she was definitely aroused, and if Dana would only move her thumb just a bit-"Fuck it," she said, and leaned forward to take Dana's lips with her own. She kept the pressure light-how Dana had kissed under the influence of the alien spore compound might not have been how she normally kissed-but partway into it, Dana moaned, flexed her fingers, and moved her hand around Ally's back to tug her in closer.
A moment or two later they broke apart, breathless, and Dana said, "I have horrible morning breath."
"I probably do, too," Ally said, "and I really don't care."
"I do," Dana said. "That is, about me. Not you."
Ally groaned. Of course, now that they'd stopped kissing, she had to pee. Morning sex is just a comedy of errors sometimes. "Okay," she said. "You go brush your teeth, I'll brush mine, and we'll get back to business?" She ended the question on a hopeful note.
"Okay," Dana said, and smiled. Ally grinned back, and rolled herself out of bed. Dana got up in one fluid motion, and headed to the bathroom. Ally listened to her brush her teeth, tried not to hear her relieve herself, and heard some soft swishing of clothing that was intriguing. Even more intriguing was when Dana left the bathroom completely nude.
Ally's eyes widened and her mouth fell open as Dana crossed the room, all sleek grace and long legs and curves and--fuuuuuuuuck. Her body was all sensuality, but in contrast, she looked nervous, and Ally hastened to reassure her. "You're beautiful. Really, truly, amazingly, I-never-thought-I'd-ever-see-anyone-who-looks-like-you-naked beautiful."
"Thank you," Dana said, and smiled, although Ally thought perhaps she still looked a little uncertain. "Your turn. There's a spare toothbrush in the cabinet."
Ally jumped up, raced into the bathroom, hurried her way through a pee, a toothbrushing, and a quick check to make sure that she still smelled okay. Good enough. Stripping off her shirt, pants, and underwear, she hesitated for a moment-it was pretty obvious even when they were both dressed that she was several levels of hot below Dana, but she'd told herself she'd gotten over that while sleeping with the frankly-stunning chief engineer. Or maybe not. She looked in the mirror, grimaced, and thought, Well. Might as well get it over with.
She stepped out of the bathroom and Dana turned. Ally held out her hands in a "ta-da" gesture, and Dana smiled. "Oh, Ally," she breathed, and Ally flushed red, probably from head to toe.
"Come here," Dana said, and Ally went. Dana pulled her flush against her, head-or shoulder, as it was-to knee, and stroked her hands over Ally's back and shoulders, as much as she could reach. "You are so beautiful, Ally," she said. "God, your breasts."
Ally looked down at her own chest. "Well, yeah, they're big," she said. It was pretty undeniable.
"I just want to-" Dana said, then stopped, bit her lip, and blushed.
"You just want to what?" Ally asked, curious.
"Suck on them," Dana said, looking to the side.
"Well, yeah, that's-" Suddenly, everything clicked. "You haven't done this before, have you?"
"No," Dana said after a moment, still red. "Well, sex, yes. With another woman, no."
Ally smiled, as gently as she could. "I promise you, it's not that complicated. If you like it, odds are that I'll like it. Here." She led Dana to the bunk, indicated that she should lie down, and after she did, lay next to her. "You should probably kiss me before the toothpaste wears off."
Dana laughed and leaned in to oblige. Ally pulled out all the stops and used every trick she had with her tongue to get Dana to stop being nervous, and it seemed to work. Dana moaned and stroked Ally's breasts, cupping first one and then the other, running her thumb over the nipples, and finally rolling the nipples between her thumb and forefinger. Ally stroked one hand lightly over Dana's side, wanting nothing more than to roll the other woman onto her back and explore every inch of her body with her hands and lips and tongue and to drive her to at least two and more like five hard, wet orgasms, but this was not the time. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later. If she were lucky.
Wait. I'm in Dana Cathcart's bed. Naked. I'm lucky by definition. Dana had, by that point, broken the kiss and started sucking on Ally's neck, just under the corner of her jaw. Ally gasped, and moved a hand between them to trace circles on Dana's collarbone, dipping lower and lower with each circle until she was touching her breast. Dana's nipple hardened to a point, and Ally smiled as she felt Dana's teeth scrape against her collarbone.
Dana lifted her head, looked at Ally, and said, "Is this okay?"
"Yes," Ally said. "Yes, yes, yes. I'll tell you if something isn't. Believe me. Just don't bite too hard."
"I can bite?" Dana asked, pressing her lips together as if to suppress a smile.
Ally grinned. "Be my guest."
Dana grinned back, ducked her head, and started nipping gently along Ally's collarbone, down to her chest, and then quickly swirled her tongue around Ally's nipple.
Ally gasped and jerked, and when Dana added teeth carefully, she moaned and clenched her fingers in the other woman's hair. "You like that?" Dana asked, but with a tone that indicated that she already knew the answer.
"God, yes." Ally let Dana explore her breasts-well, 'let' probably wasn't the right word, but she didn't stop her for a good, really, really good, five or ten minutes. Eventually, though, she just couldn't take it anymore, and she dragged Dana's head back up for a kiss.
"My turn?" she said. "Please?"
"What do you-" Dana swallowed. "What do you want to do?"
"Touch you?" Ally said. "Taste you? What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know," Dana said. "I know what I like, sure, but I don't know what I like when it's you."
"Fair enough," Ally said. "Anything you don't want, that you would expect to be on the menu? Also, while we're at it, is there anything I need to know that I don't because I didn't hack into your file?"
Dana laughed. "No. No surprises in my file. I am not apologizing for that again, by the way."
"No problem," Ally said.
"And no, no vetoes off the standard menu. You want to use your fingers, go ahead. You want to go down on me-" She shuddered. "I'm getting wet just thinking about it."
"Me too," Ally said, and pushed Dana onto her back. "Okay?" Dana nodded. "Good." She kissed her, hot and wet and thorough, and cupped her face with her hands. "Mmm, you taste good. I like your toothpaste, whatever it is, but I like the taste of you better." Ally wasn't sure if talking more would make Dana more relaxed or not, but she'd never been particularly silent in bed and it was probably better if Dana learned that sooner rather than later.
Fortunately, Dana writhed under her, arching up for another kiss, and Ally smiled. "God, I've thought about this so much," Dana said between kisses, and Ally closed her eyes and shuddered.
"Yeah?" Ally asked, inordinately pleased, and Dana nodded. "What was I doing, when you were thinking about us?"
"Kissing me," she replied. "Everywhere."
"I think I can manage that." Ally straddled Dana's hips and stroked her hands over her shoulders, down her arms, and caught her fingers and brought them to her mouth, one hand at a time. Dana gasped as Ally scraped her teeth over the center of her palm, and flicked her tongue between each of her fingers, ending by curling her tongue around the pads of her fingers. Dana was moaning even before she finished one hand, and when Ally kissed her way up one forearm to lick the crease of her elbow, her voice caught and she cried out.
"Shit, that's my elbow," she said a moment later.
"Mm-hm," Ally said, mirroring her actions on the other side.
"I'm going to die," Dana said fervently.
"It's only the little death," Ally said, and dotted kisses up Dana's bicep to her shoulder. "Mmm, your skin is so soft. I'm glad I didn't find this out until now, or I wouldn't have been able to keep my hands off of you."
Dana laughed. "Please, keep your hands on me."
"Only if you keep your hands on me."
Dana's hands immediately flew to Ally's shoulders, and Ally laughed. She buried her face in the side of Dana's neck and inhaled. God. She smelled good, she tasted good, she felt amazing, she looked amazing-now to get her to sound amazing. Ally slid down a few inches and cupped one of Dana's breasts in her hand. Rolling her eyes up, she watched Dana's face as she took her breast into her mouth, and was rewarded by Dana's eyes closing and her mouth falling open in a soft sigh. It's a good start. However, the ultimate reward was a couple feet lower, and damn she couldn't wait to get there.
After sucking both of Dana's breasts into wet brown peaks, she chased kisses all over her ribs, poked her tongue into Dana's navel, eliciting a laugh, and licked stripes into the hollows just inside her hipbones. Settling herself between Dana's thighs, she looked up and said, "If you want me to stop, or move, or change anything, just say so. And you're more than welcome to grab my head or hair. In fact-" She pushed up and pulled her ponytail holder out of her hair, shaking it around her shoulders. "Better?"
Dana nodded, eyes wide. She reached down to touch Ally's hair with gentle fingers, and Ally leaned into her hand for a moment, eyes closed. "Mmm," she said. After a moment or so, though, she shifted down and blew a cool stream right between Dana's legs, and Dana curled up to watch. "I love this part," Ally said, and traced a finger down the seam of her labia.
Dana was so wet that Ally's finger came away dripping, and she spared a moment for a brief feeling of smugness before delving that same finger down to circle her entrance and then back up to ghost over Dana's clit. She repeated the movement until Dana gasped, and then parted her folds gently and used her tongue to follow the same path. "God, you taste good," she said, looking up for a moment.
"Ah!" Dana twisted her head from side to side. "Damnit, Ally, please."
There it was, that note of desperation she'd been waiting for. "Yes," she breathed, and stroked the flat of her tongue over Dana's clit.
Dana cried out again, spreading her legs wider, and clutched handfuls of Ally's hair, plainly trying not to shove her around, but Ally took the hint, pressed closer, and started sucking.
If there was one thing Ally knew how to do, it was this, and she had Dana shuddering and moaning and finally screaming her name as she hit the edge and tumbled over in a relatively-short period of time. "Oh, God, Ally!" She clenched her thighs around Ally's neck briefly, and then relaxed, boneless, against the mattress. "Fuck."
Ally crawled up the bed and kissed Dana deeply. "Mm," Dana said. "Is that what I taste like?"
"Maybe a little," Ally said. She settled on Dana's right side, between her arm and her body, and rubbed her first two fingers between Dana's legs. Dana jumped, and when Ally lifted her fingers to Dana's mouth, Dana sucked on them for a moment, mimicking Ally's earlier motions with her tongue. It was Ally's turn to shudder. Removing her fingers from Dana's mouth, she replaced them between Dana's legs and stroked in slow circles. "Again?" she asked.
"I-don't know-"
"Oh, but you can," Ally said, settling in to murmur in her ear. "It's still fresh in your mind, how it felt when I tasted you, when I used my tongue on you." She sped her hand up somewhat. "How it felt when you had your hands in my hair, and when you were pulling me against you because you couldn't get enough of my mouth." She sped up her movements again. "Come for me, Dana. Come with my fingers on your clit."
Dana jerked, stiffened, and cried out. "Fuck, Ally!" She shuddered against Ally's hand, and pulled her over for a kiss with significantly more strength than she probably should have had.
A few moments later, she asked, "Are you always this-talkative? And dominant?"
Ally shrugged. "Yeah." No sense pretending otherwise.
"God, that's hot," Dana breathed.
Ally blinked, and working entirely on instinct, grabbed Dana's wrists, pinned them above her head, and hovered over her, lips only an inch away from the other woman's. "Believe me; I may be almost a foot shorter than you are, but I damn well can lead."
Dana went limp under her and moaned. "That is the hottest thing that anyone has ever said to me. Ever."
"Yeah?" Ally said, and something inside of her grew warm.
"And not just because your breasts are so close to my face," Dana added with a smile.
Ally snorted, and scooted up to rub her chest on Dana's face. Dana laughed, pulled her wrists out of Ally's hands, and cupped her breasts, squeezing gently.
After a few moments, Ally lowered herself to the mattress beside Dana. "Good morning?" she said.
"Yes, very good morning. Although I think we're well into the afternoon by now." Dana frowned. "But what about you?"
"What about me?" Ally said, although she knew full well what Dana was asking.
"What do you taste like?" Dana asked, tracing a line down Ally's neck and chest to the point of one nipple.
"You can find out," Ally said, struggling to remain nonchalant in the face of the image that Dana's words had invoked, "or you can find out what I feel like, or you can watch while I get myself off."
Dana sucked in a breath. "As hot as that last one sounds, no. I want to be the one to do it." She threaded one arm under Ally's neck, pushed her onto her back, and stroked one hand down her body until her fingers rested on Ally's pubic hair. "Are you wet?"
Ally spread her legs slightly. "Why don't you find out?"
Dana dipped her fingers down. "Oh, yes. Just from getting me off?"
"And seeing you naked, and you touching me-oh!" Dana found her clit with ease-well, yeah, Ally, she's got a degree or two in the female anatomy-and rubbed. "God, just a little to the left-yes, fuck, right there."
Dana's inexperience in getting other women off showed only briefly, when she slowed down at a moderately-inconvenient moment, but Ally ordered her to speed up and, above all, not to stop, and soon she was shaking and swearing her way through her own orgasm. "Fuck, Dana, fuck that's good."
"Was it?" Dana asked, shy but obviously pleased with herself.
"Yes," Ally said, panting.
Dana withdrew her fingers from between Ally's legs and sucked on them for a moment. "Mm," she said. "My new favorite vintage."
Your only favorite vintage, Ally thought, but didn't say anything. She'd shared before, and as much as she absolutely wasn't interested in sharing Dana with anyone, well, she didn't want to jinx it by getting possessive. Not yet, at least.
"Ugh, we're sticky," Dana said.
"That's half the fun," Ally said. "But if you want to move to the shower, I will pin you against the wall, sling your leg over my shoulder and fuck you with my tongue."
"That would be so much more fun in a water shower," Dana said, but her breath hitched.
Ally shrugged. "Well, yeah, but those are hard to come by shipboard, and you'd be surprised how fun a sonic shower can be."
"Oh, yeah?" Dana said, one eyebrow arched. "Show me."
So Ally did. Twice.
* * *
A couple days later-days in which Ally and Dana barely left the bed, let alone Dana's quarters-their idyll came to an end when Lt. Zel called Ally in for a meeting.
"I'm sorry I don't have my report done yet," Ally said. "I was on forty-eight hours' sick leave. I'll have it done this afternoon."
"That's not a problem," Lt. Zel said. "I actually wanted to ask you about your evaluations prior to me. They seem, well, inconsistent with what I've observed."
That's a nice way to put it. "I, um." Ally stopped, swallowed, and started again. "I was mostly in medical?"
"Yes," Lt. Zel said encouragingly.
"I'm kind of a lousy EMT? I mean, I had the training and passed all the tests and stuff but any time there's a medical emergency I get flustered and screw things up."
Lt. Zel frowned. "But you just took charge in a medical emergency, came up with the right treatment, administered it, and, from what I observed and from what Lt. Commander Barry has told me, you were completely level-headed the entire time."
"That wasn't a medical emergency, it was a scientific puzzle," Ally said. "I know it's the same thing, but I don't want to jinx it?"
"All right," Lt. Zel said, amused. "Well, you continue solving your scientific puzzles, and if you keep this up, I'll be recommending you for a promotion at the end of the year."
Ally looked up, floored. "Really?" she squeaked, and coughed.
"Yes, really," Lt. Zel said, with a gentle smile.
* * *
". . . And she said that if I don't fuck up in the next year-well, that's not exactly what she said but close enough-then she'll be recommending me for a promotion!" Unfortunately, her voice squeaked again, but even that couldn't dampen Ally's excitement.
"That's amazing!" Dana said, beaming. She swung Ally into her arms and kissed her soundly. "You're halfway to transferring to the Enterprise."
"Well, not quite halfway," she said, then paused. "Um."
"Um?"
"I know it's been maybe three days, but-maybe do you think if we're still together you'd want to go to the Enterprise, too? I mean, you can think about it? Or we can talk about it then?" Ally felt her face turning bright red.
"Ally, love, it's been a lot more than three days," Dana said. "And I don't suppose I ever told you this, but I'm pretty much on the Yorktown because Captain Pike reassured me it was the best way to spend the next three years, if I want to end up on the Enterprise."
"Oh," Ally said. "Oh, awesome." She still had one more question, though. "And I know it's been however-much-longer-than-three days, and my history as far as you know it doesn't support this, but, um . . . are we exclusive? 'Cause I'd like to be."
Dana looked at her, one eyebrow raised. "What on earth makes you think I'd share you with anyone?"
"Oh, good," Ally said, relief all out of proportion for the length of the relationship. "And I am not sharing you with anyone, either, just so that's clear. Especially not Dr. Boyce."
Dana grinned. "I don't know, Ally. He's pretty hot."
Ally just groaned.
Master Post
Although, twenty hours later, as she sat in a stadium watching what looked like nothing so much as giant cabbages engaged in some sort of performance art that resembled a cross between Terran jiu-jitsu and Rigellian operetta, the thrill was somewhat gone. The Fr'oxian government had not, as a matter of fact, given her permission to take samples of anything, or so much as readings with a tricorder-they'd explicitly banned both. Captain One was not happy with either condition, but apparently the Federation was in need of some mineral abundant on their planet, so Ally was merely observing.
The performance built to some sort of climax-she had lost track of the story quite a while ago; probably about when Dana sat down next to her-and ended with what appeared to be the lead cabbage eating its rival. "Please tell me that isn't real," Dana said, her breath warm and distracting against Ally's ear.
"I hope not," she replied, and tried very hard not to shift away. Two and a half months in, and she was no closer to figuring out if Dana was merely very friendly or interested. It was so much easier with Cait, she thought. One minute she smiled at me, and the next minute, I was flat on my back. She looked up as Dana brushed a lock of hair back behind her ear and noticed some sort of light-greenish dust on her hair. Frowning, she leaned over to look closer, and then to inspect a strand of her own hair.
Strange. She couldn't feel it or see it on her own hair, but she would bet a lot of credits that she and Dana-and, as she looked around her, probably everyone else in their party-was covered with a fine layer of the light-greenish dust. That was disconcerting. The report on the planet had come back saying that the atmosphere was fine for them to breathe, though, and nothing else in the report had given her to understand that there was anything to worry about, in terms of inhalants.
"What's wrong?" Dana asked.
"Green powder," she said. "In your hair. Probably mine, too, although I can't see it."
Dana turned Ally's face to her with gentle fingers on her chin, stared in her eyes, checked her pulse with warm fingers against her wrist, and leaned in to listen to her breathe. "You don't seem to be having a reaction yet. Do you itch?"
"No," Ally said. "Well, now that you mention it, I do, but it's probably just the power of suggestion." She narrowly resisted scratching at her nose.
"Probably," Dana agreed, but the furrow remained between her eyebrows.
Still, as they left the stadium, Ally's worry overcame her fear and she caught up to Captain One. Waiting until she caught One's attention, she said, "Captain, I'm somewhat concerned about the green powder in our hair."
Captain One frowned and pulled out a lock of her hair. "It looks like pollen."
"It does," Ally said, "but as I am not able to run a tricorder scan, I'm not confident in declaring that it is safe."
The captain gave a short nod. "We'll get back to the ship and decontaminate as soon as possible. If a single person so much as sneezes, tell me and we'll beam out immediately."
Just then, Dana coughed, and Ally and Captain One spun to look at her. "Were you trying to get someone's attention?" the captain asked.
Dana shook her head.
One flipped open her comm. "One to Yorktown. Four to beam up; I'll conclude the diplomatic negotiations posthaste."
Ally nodded, and felt a tickle build in her throat. As she felt the familiar transporter tingle, she swallowed, trying to suppress it, but a moment after materializing, she doubled over, coughing.
"Shit," Dana said between coughing fits. "Lieutenant, seal off the transporter room. Cathcart to Boyce."
Ally wiped her streaming eyes but could not stop coughing long enough to stand up, let alone anything else.
"Boyce here," she heard over the intercom as Dana stuck her in the neck with a hypospray.
"I need isolation and decontamination for minimum six people, and medical authority to order the captain off the planet now. Jarvis's airways are swelling as I speak; if I can't reverse this she'll need to be intubated in a minute or less."
"Lieutenant," Boyce's disembodied voice said to the transport tech, "get Number One up here now, my orders, and beam all of them to Sickbay Isolation Chamber Three on my command." There was a pause. "Then the secondary transporter room will beam you in as well, since you've been contaminated."
"Yes, sir," the lieutenant said.
Ally's vision was starting to gray at the edges; everyone sounded like they were very far away, even though Dana's hands were on her shoulders, and the last thought she had before she passed out was, Some fucking mycologist I am.
* * *
Gradually, Ally became aware of hisses and beeps around her, and it took another few minutes before she recognized them as standard Sickbay noises. She opened her eyes as soon as she could, and stared at the bland ceiling in the regular Sickbay, not isolation. Well.
A minute or two later-or perhaps well after that; she wasn't too certain about time-the curtain opened, and Dr. Boyce appeared. "You're awake," he said.
"Yes," she croaked, and sighed, the air making a strange whistling noise in her abraded throat. "How long?"
"Five days, although two of those were on purpose," he said, reaching up to hypospray her with something that felt cool on the inside of her throat almost immediately. "You had a bad reaction to the standard treatment for mold-spore exposure. It would have been nice if there was a flag on your file for asthma." He raised an eyebrow at her, and she had the strangest sensation that if he wore glasses, he'd be glaring at her over them. Nonetheless, he offered her a glass of water that had been sitting beside the biobed, and she took a sip gingerly.
"Sorry," she said, and her voice already sounded better. "I haven't had any symptoms in twenty-odd years."
"No excuse," Dr. Boyce said, then sighed. "You almost died, Ally."
Well, what could you say to that? "What happened?"
"After the mold spore hit you and triggered what was probably the worst asthma attack of your life, Dana gave you an antihistamine/steroid combo, which didn't do anything. You keeled over, flatlined before we could get you even out of your uniform, and after restarting your heart and getting you breathing again, we had to dose you with three different antifungals before we figured out what worked. As it turned out, you're more sensitive to this particular spore than most of the rest of the ship, and also-" He glared at her again. "You're allergic to the first- and second-line antifungals for spore exposure."
"Which two?"
"Alpharazin and ciromycelin."
"Never had either. Not my fault."
Dr. Boyce sighed again. "I know." He checked the biobed readings, waved a tricorder over her, and said, "Your readings are coming back to normal; now it's just a matter of recovery. How are you feeling?"
"Like someone ran over me with a grav-sled. Twice."
"I can do something about that." He gave her a second hypospray, and a few moments later, she felt significantly better. "Better?" She nodded. "Well enough for visitors?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"Because both Cait and Dana made me swear to comm them the minute you wake up, and you know they'll both be in this room within a minute of finding out that you're up." Dr. Boyce raised an eyebrow again. "Dana was sick as a dog, as well, and I had to knock her out to get her to leave your bedside. I guess the two of you have come a long way since the reception?"
Ally could only blame what she said next on the drugs, or being exhausted, or both. "Not far enough."
"I don't think I needed to hear that," he said, although he was smiling.
"I'm sure it's not the worst thing you've heard about my love life, either." Ally sighed. "Yeah, they can come visit."
Dr. Boyce nodded. "I'll comm 'em." He left, and Ally stared at the ceiling, blinking.
Less than five minutes later, Cait and Dana appeared, both out of breath and each trying to elbow the other out of the way. Dana won the race to the bedside, but Cait spoke first.
"Ally!" she said. "Oh, sweetheart, we were so worried."
"You sound like my mom," Ally said, frowning. Dimly, she was aware that she was still loopy. "Hi, Dana."
"Oh, Ally," Dana said, reaching out to touch her and pulling back at the last moment. "You died."
"I'm alive now." Ally suspected that the conversation would be surreal even without the drugs.
"And she'll be staying that way," Dr. Boyce said from the foot of the bed. Ally looked up, and he was very poorly suppressing a grin. "Don't overtire her."
"I'm already tired," Ally said.
Dana looked at her, worried, and then over her head at the biobed readings.
Cait looked at Dr. Boyce, who shrugged, still not-grinning, and sighed. Leaning over to kiss Ally on the forehead, she said, "Ally, I'm going to head out; I've got to be on shift in about twenty minutes. You call me if you need anything?"
It was clearly a strategic retreat. "Okay, Cait. Thanks for stopping by."
Cait and Dr. Boyce left, and Dana hesitated. "Is it okay if I stay?"
Ally closed her eyes briefly. "Well, yeah. That's why Cait and Dr. Boyce left."
"Oh." Dana blinked, and turned to pull over a chair. "Are you sure you're all right?"
"I think Dr. Boyce gave me the good stuff," she said. "I sort of feel like I'm floating."
"You're starting to slur," Dana said. She reached out and finally touched Ally, gently brushing her hair back off her forehead. "Sleep, Ally. It's all right."
Ally yawned. "Yeah," she said, not sure what exactly she was responding to. Maybe the warmth of Dana's hand against her head. Her eyes fell shut, and she opened them briefly. "Hey, thanks."
Dana didn't ask what for. "You're welcome."
Her voice was the last thing Ally heard before she fell asleep.
* * *
Ally woke up with a start, sometime later. "Computer, what the fuck time is it?" she croaked, her throat having gone dry again and the hypospray having long since worn off.
"It is 0100," the computer said, and Ally sighed. She couldn't remember who was usually on gamma shift.
"Ally?"
Well, apparently she didn't need to remember; Dana had been sleeping in the chair. She rubbed her eyes and stretched, and Ally watched appreciatively; although her hair was coming loose from its ponytail and her uniform was rumpled, she was still gorgeous. Which reminded her-Ally touched a hand to her own hair and grimaced.
"How are you feeling?" Dana asked.
"Grimy," Ally said. "Like I haven't showered in a few days." Her voice was still ragged, and she resisted the urge to cough.
"Oh, hold on." Dana produced a hypospray from somewhere and shot Ally with the same whatever-it-was that made her throat feel better. "Would you like some water?"
"Can I dump it over my head?"
Dana smiled. "No, but if you drink it, I'll see if we can get you out of here and into a shower."
"If you can do that, I will love you forever," Ally said without thinking. "Um. I mean-"
"I know what you mean," Dana said. She was smiling, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. "Here."
Ally took the proffered water, and drank. The water hitting her throat made her realize that she was also ravenously hungry. "Great. Now I don't know if I want food or a shower more."
"You can have both, I think, although probably not at once." Dana took back the cup and set it down on the table. "Can you try to sit up all the way?" She held out a hand.
Ally took it, and levered herself up to a seated position. Her head swam for a moment, and Dana clicked her tongue. "Your blood sugar's a little low. I'm sorry about that. I can give you a hypo now, or you can have some broth in a few minutes."
Ally made a face. "Hypo now, shower first, then food."
Dana nodded, dialed up what was presumably some glucose on the hypospray, dosed her, and held out a hand again. Ally took it again, swung her legs off the table, and stood, shakily. She was wearing a hospital gown; hadn't particularly noticed until she stood. At least she would be getting a shower, she thought, and clung to Dana's arm to walk the few steps to the Sickbay shower room.
Sickbay, of course, had the only water shower on the ship, and Ally stood under blissfully hot water for a good five minutes until she remembered that she was in there to do things like wash her hair. She cleaned up and finished rapidly after that, and toweled dry before dressing in real clothes that Dana had left for her.
"Feel better?" Dana asked, when Ally left the shower room. She smiled as Ally nodded vigorously.
"Look," Ally said, "you don't have to babysit me anymore; I think I'm okay to feed myself and fall over into bed." It was, after all, the middle of gamma shift, and surely Dana had something she'd rather be doing.
"No problem," Dana said breezily. "I'm off-duty anyway."
"Don't you want to sleep?"
"Not if you need help," Dana said, and bit her lip.
Ally chose to ignore any implications of it beyond the obvious, and smiled. "Okay, then. Thanks for the help." She let Dana lead her to her own quarters, and patiently waited for her to run to the mess for some food.
As she ate the bland broth that was all that Dana would allow her, she said, "Tell me what happened over the last five days."
"Ah, well," Dana said, perched on Ally's desk chair. "Dr. Boyce put you in a coma, after he restarted your heart, until he could figure out what to do with you. I responded pretty well to the alpharazin, so I was back on my feet a day or so later. He figured out it was a spore right away, and cursed the fact that the only spore researcher on the ship was currently in a coma."
"I'm sure he did," Ally said, laughing. "Sorry."
"Not your fault. Anyway, we managed to keep it from spreading too far, but both Boyce and the transporter tech got sick. You're the last to recover."
"Did you save any for me?" Ally asked, unable to keep a wistful note out of her voice.
Dana laughed. "Oh, don't worry. There are a whole bunch of little samples bagged and tagged in a secure container for you."
"Oh, good."
Dana smiled again, kind of a strangely indulgent look. Ally's brain recognized it and refused to categorize it. No, she thought. She's just being nice. I was sick, and she's a nurse. She can't possibly-she can't possibly think that me geeking out about mold spores is cute. She shook her head.
"Is the soup okay?" Dana asked.
"It's fine," Ally said. "Bland, but I don't think I'm going to throw it up."
"Good," Dana said. "Are you sore, headachy, anything?"
>
"Tired," Ally said, finishing off the last of the soup. Her eyelids were growing heavy again. Dana took the soup bowl from her, and she said, "Hey, Dana, thanks. This is above and beyond the call of friendship."
"No problem," Dana said with another indulgent smile. "Lie down. I'll get your shoes."
Ally scooted under the covers and stuck her feet out; Dana pulled off her shoes, and she tucked them under the blanket. "I'm pretty much out," Ally said, or tried to say.
"That's fine. Call me if you need anything, okay?"
"Yeah, sure," Ally said, and just before she got sucked under into sleep, she thought maybe she felt Dana's lips on her forehead. It was probably just a dream, though.
* * *
A day later, Ally evaded any possible medical objection to her return to work simply by not asking Dr. Boyce if she could do so; she went to her lab at 2300, and found the package full of samples sitting on her desk. Yes! She set up the proper isolation procedure and started running various scans.
She was so buried in her work that she didn't notice someone entering the lab until she felt arms around her waist and a head buried in her shoulder. She stiffened; at first, she thought it was Cait because who else would dare, and Cait totally shouldn't be daring anymore. A moment later, though, she realized it wasn't Cait; it was-she turned her head to check-Dana. What? "Dana?" she said.
"Mmm," Dana said, and kissed the side of her neck. All very pleasant but-what was going on?
"Dana, hey, um, what's going on?"
"Oh, Ally." Dana's hands stroked over her waist and hips. "God. Kiss me now."
"I can't; you're-" Dana flipped her around and she was suddenly pressed against her own lab bench, Dana covering her pretty much from neck to knee. The next thing she knew, Dana was kissing her, lips moving against hers, mouth opening to touch the seam of her lips with the tip of her tongue.
Ally wrestled herself away and looked at Dana. This was really weird, even with the strange sort of flirting that they'd been doing over the last couple months, and the way that Dana had been acting since the away mission. "Dana?" she said. "No, seriously: what's going on?"
"God, Ally, I can't stop thinking about you, about your breasts, about your lips, about how much I want you to touch me, about how much I want to touch you." Dana looked up at her, and-something was weird about her eyes.
Before she could determine what it was, Dana leaned in for another kiss, her hands sliding up Ally's arms and back down again.
It was a good kiss-Dana was, in addition to being apparently well-practiced at kissing, reasonably uninhibited, and Ally let her explore the inside of her mouth with little resistance. Still, when Ally pulled away, she tipped Dana's head down to look in her eyes, and finally realized what was wrong. It was dark inside the lab, and Dana's eyes were dark brown anyway so it was difficult to tell, but her pupils were bare pinpricks. That was wrong for so many reasons-the low light and the fact that lust caused one's pupils to dilate most primarily-and Ally said, "Dana, something's wrong. Your pupils are constricted."
"I love it when you talk nerdy," Dana said, her voice low and throaty. She leaned in for another kiss, but Ally turned her head, and Dana started kissing her neck.
This is not right. She shouldn't be acting like this. What on earth is going on? And she won't-or possibly can't-stop. I need to get her to stop. Do I just hypo her? Yeah-she'll be so embarrassed when she finds out what she did. Fortunately, Ally kept a couple of hyposprays around for emergencies, loaded with antihistamines, antifungals, analgesics, and other miscellaneous useful drugs. One was only a few inches away from her hands, and while Dana probably sucked a hickey into her neck, she flicked the end of it with her thumb until it was loaded with a medium-grade dose of something that would knock Dana out for a few hours. She dosed Dana and broke her fall, stretching her out on the floor so she was in a comfortable-looking position, and stood over her prone body, wondering, Well, what do I do now?
The answer came quickly: solve the problem. She sent a textcomm to Lt. Zel before running a tricorder over Dana; finding a few hormonal anomalies, she took a blood sample and ran it through the machines.
Some strange compound showed up in Dana's blood; Ally isolated it easily. It wasn't anything she'd ever seen before, though-except that group on the end. That group actually-Ally switched back to a slide of the spore-yes, the same group occurred in the makeup of the spore. Strange. Clearly it was some sort of side result of the spore, but what? Also, hadn't the spore been killed-
That was it. Dana took a sample of the live version of the spore, added alpharazin, watched the spore die-and decay, into mostly water, a little ethanol, and trace amounts of the compound in Dana's blood. Great. It was some sort of intoxicating agent. She fed the data into the computer, came up with a model, and asked the computer to calculate what might kill it.
While the computer was still running, Ally's comm beeped. "Jarvis here," she answered, recognizing Dr. Boyce's personal comm frequency.
"Ally?" Cait's voice asked quietly.
"Cait? What's wrong?"
"I think something's wrong with Phil," she said. "He's acting-weird. And his pupils are constricted."
"What's he doing?" Ally said. If it was anything like what had happened to Dana, she didn't really want to know, but she needed to know for diagnostic purposes.
"He's-I'm sorry, Ally, this is going to gross you out-but-well, normally it's only once in a night, but we've had sex three times so far and the only reason we stopped is because I insisted we should take showers. Separately. I mean, it's not that-that's not a problem, trust me-but it's-he keeps talking about-shit, this is embarrassing." Cait took a deep breath. "He keeps saying things like how much he loves me, and how beautiful I am, and how lucky he is to have me, and how amazing I am, and how-fuck, Ally, this is weird."
"So he's in the shower right now?"
"Yeah. He's singing in there, Ally. It's fucked up."
"Okay," Ally said. "Look, he's not the only one. The same thing-well, something similar-is happening to Dana. Can you knock him out? If you're in his room, I know he's got hyposprays in practically every drawer."
"How do you know that?" Cait asked curiously. "Never mind; there's probably a really boring explanation, and the shower just went off, so I've only got a minute or two. What should I give him?"
Ally told her, and said, "Can you bring him down to my lab once he's conked out-I know he's not exactly small, but you can call Security for help or something."
"Yeah. Yeah, I'll see you in a bit. Thanks, Ally."
She flipped the comm closed and sighed. Well, at least she knew what the mold spore-alpharazin precipitate was doing-it was removing inhibitions, probably with some libido enhancement. That might make it easier to turn off.
Fifteen minutes later, Cait directed a couple of red-shirted security guards to put Dr. Boyce's unconscious form next to Dana's. After they left, Ally ran the tricorder, took a blood sample, and said, "Yep. It's some sort of bad combination of that spore and alpharazin. How many people had it, do you know?"
"I think the five of you-well, not you; you had an allergic reaction and they put you through dialysis-plus Phil and the transporter tech. Why?"
"I need to call them and warn them, or get someone to pre-emptively knock them out. Or something."
A hail sounded at the door a moment later, and without waiting for a response, the door opened and Captain One walked in. "Cait? Ensign Jarvis? Where's Phil?"
Cait pointed to the floor.
The captain's eyes narrowed. "Cait, what the hell is going on?" She looked up, and Ally could see that her pupils were constricted, too. One's hands were clenched into fists, and she was holding herself more stiffly than usual. If Ally had ever had any doubt that her captain had absolutely iron self-control, she lost it at that point.
"Everyone who was given alpharazin to get rid of the mold spores is having a bad reaction to the combination; it appears to lower inhibitions and increase libido. We knocked them out until I can synthesize an antidote," Ally explained.
"Oh," Captain One said. "That makes sense." Her hands flexed. "I believe that I, too, am having the reaction." Muscles worked in her jaw. "Good God, Cait, haven't you figured out by now that Phil's quite desperately in love with you? And Ensign Jarvis, you're probably the only one on the ship who doesn't know how Nurse Cathcart feels about you, although she's at least a little confused because--fuck."
Ally's eyes widened; she didn't know if it was because the captain had sworn, or because of everything else she'd said. Dana-what?
"One-" Cait said, but Captain One interrupted.
"Don't let me call Chris, okay?"
"We can knock you out, too until we find a cure," Cait said.
"That would-" One took a deep breath. "That would be an excellent idea." She sat on the floor next to Dr. Boyce and lay down, her arms at her sides. "Do you need blood samples before you dose me?"
"No," Ally said, and knelt next to her with the hypospray. "I'm sorry, Captain."
"Jarvis, don't apologize, just do your job. It's all I've ever expected of you, whether you are sleeping with my best friend or not. Oh, fucking dose me before I say anything else stupid."
Ally obliged, and pressed the hypo to the captain's neck. The captain sighed as she passed out, and Ally took a deep breath of relief.
"That's some powerful shit, if it can get One to drop an f-bomb or two," Cait observed mildly.
"Are we pretending she didn't say anything?" Ally asked. "I would definitely be in support of that."
"Yes, let's," Cait said. "Let me call Security; I'll see about getting the other three people restrained. How are you doing?"
"I'm fine," Ally said. "I didn't have the alphazarin in my system long enough to have any effects, as far as I know, although I should check."
"You should," Cait agreed. "This isn't transmitted from person to person, is it?"
"I don't know," Ally said. "You want me to check you?"
"Probably not a bad idea."
Ally drew her own blood, and a sample of Cait's; Cait proceeded to locate Lieutenant Tyler, Ensign Statler, and Petty Officer Colfax. The latter two were asleep, but once they awakened, they displayed the same symptoms. Lieutenant Tyler's girlfriend, Ensign Waldorf, had him tied to the bed when Cait commed her. "I don't know what's wrong with him! I was going to put some clothes on and go find someone in Medical!"
Cait, Ally discovered a few minutes later, had no traces of the compound in her blood; Cait was relieved. Ally's blood was also clean, which was remarkably convenient. Tyler, Statler, and Colfax all had the same compound in roughly the same percentages as One, Boyce, and Cathcart, unsurprisingly.
The computer beeped with a result an hour or so later; Ally looked at the screen. "Yeah, no," she said, mostly to herself.
"What's wrong?" Cait asked.
"This will work, but it's toxic to humans. See the hydroxyl group there?" She pointed to the screen. "Computer, remove the hydroxyl group and calculate the change in effectiveness."
"Removal of the hydroxyl group will decrease effectiveness by 0.5 percent," the computer responded, a minute or so later."
"So we're down to 99.5 percent?" Ally asked.
"Affirmative," the computer said.
"I'm okay with that. Cait, you okay with that?"
"Sounds good to me."
Ally synthesized some of the antidote and dropped it into the petri dish containing the residue; it immediately broke down into its component elements and water. She ran the elements through a few calculations. "Shit," she said. "If we use this, we'll have to do chelation afterwards."
"Worth it?"
"I don't think there's an option otherwise," Ally said, and sighed. "Let's get them down to Sickbay."
* * *
An hour or so later, Ally had successfully argued the gamma-shift head doctor into letting her dose the captain and the CMO with something that would turn into toxic heavy metals, and then start chelation protocols. It had probably mostly worked because Lt. Zel appeared, apologizing for the delay, and, after looking at her data, backed her up. Dr. Donhowe wanted to start with Petty Officer Colfax, but Lt. Zel vetoed that right away. "Doctor, this is not the Romulan Star Empire; we do not experiment on enlisted personnel."
Donhowe frowned, but agreed to let them wake Tyler and start with him. He insisted on waking the lieutenant up himself, and did so as Ally loaded up a hypospray with the antidote.
"Where's Ginny?" Tyler asked, as soon as he came to.
"We'll call her for you," Cait said, as Ally dosed him with first the antidote and then, a full sixty seconds later, the chelation therapy. Lt. Zel watched with approval.
Tyler remained curiously silent during the entire procedure, and about five minutes after the chelation started, said, "What happened?"
"Leftovers from the mold spore affected you badly. How are you feeling now?" Ally asked.
"Mostly normal, I think. My mouth tastes like copper."
"That's to be expected. You'll have to stay here until the chelation is done, but that shouldn't be too long now." She checked the numbers above his bed. "Maybe another half hour."
"Okay," Tyler said. "Can you still call Ensign Waldorf for me? I think I owe her an apology."
Ally nodded, and Cait went to do so.
Twenty minutes later, they'd awakened and dosed everyone affected; the therapy worked. Even while checking biobeds to see when the chelation was complete, Ally suddenly found herself without anything to do. She collapsed in a chair between Dana's and Dr. Boyce's beds, as they were in a small room together.
"That was some amazing work, Ally," Dr. Boyce said, turning to look at her. "You stayed level-headed the whole time, from what I hear." He nodded at Cait, who was on his other side.
"I did," Ally said, a little light-headed. She grinned at Dr. Boyce.
He smiled back, and then returned to a serious look. "Although you didn't have medical clearance to return to work. I should put you on bed rest for the next week."
"With all due respect, sir, I'm the one who can stand at the moment." Ally yawned, wide enough to make her jaw crack.
"You should go to bed," Dana said. She'd been oddly quiet since awakening.
Ally looked over her head at the biobed screen as it beeped. "Your chelation is complete. You should probably get some sleep, too, Dana."
"Yeah," Dana said, but didn't move.
"Why don't you walk her to her room?" Cait suggested, probably intentionally ambiguous.
"I can do that," Ally said. She stood, offered Dana a hand, and helped her off the biobed. "Everything okay?"
Dana nodded.
Just then, Dr. Boyce's biobed beeped. "Stick a fork in me; I'm done," he said, and swung his legs off to one side. "You coming?" he asked Cait, oddly hesitant.
Ally held her breath and heard Dana do the same.
"Yeah, sure," Cait said, off-handedly.
Phew, Ally thought, and exchanged a glance with Dana.
Dr. Donhowe signed the discharge forms and ordered them all to take forty-eight hours of sick leave. Lt. Zel congratulated her on a job well done, and apologized again for taking over an hour to respond. Ally nodded awkwardly and promised a report as soon as possible, and they left. Fortunately Cait and Boyce had quarters on an entirely different deck from Dana or Ally, so they avoided awkwardness once they exited the turbolift.
"Ally," Dana said, when they were just coming up on her room. "I-shit. I am so sorry."
"Can I come in?" Ally said, instead of responding.
"Yeah," Dana said, and once the door closed behind her, continued. "God, Ally, I am so fucking sorry. I shouldn't have come anywhere near you; I should have figured out that something was wrong and gotten my ass down to Sickbay before I assaulted you."
"How were you supposed to figure out that something was wrong if Dr. Boyce couldn't?" Ally asked. "I'm glad you came to me, so I was able to find out that something was wrong right away. I'm-yeah, okay, I'm not going to lie: you coming on to me was really unexpected and I wasn't sure how to get you to stop without knocking you out, but . . ." She trailed off. "You've got to know it wasn't entirely unwelcome."
"I didn't know," Dana said. "Was it that unexpected? Well, shit."
"You did reject me in front of pretty much everyone I know, including my boss," Ally pointed out.
Dana winced. "Yeah. About that. Force of habit? Can we forget it happened? I realized I was an idiot about five minutes later, and I've been trying to make up for it ever since."
Ally laughed. "I think we've done a really good job of dancing around each other for months. Even Captain One noticed."
"Did she?" Dana asked. "Oh, dear."
"Yeah. Apparently when she lost her inhibitions, her first urge was to tell everyone off. Probably because Captain Pike isn't around."
Dana smiled. "So what now?"
"I am so fucking tired," Ally said, and yawned again. "How about we sleep?"
"Together?" Dana asked.
Ally shrugged. "Clothes on, even. Unless you don't want to?"
"Oh, hell yes," she said, and strode forward to pull Ally into her arms.
Ally rested her head against Dana's chest and sighed in relief.
"You'll have to be big spoon," Ally said sleepily, and Dana chuckled. Boots, socks, outer bits of uniforms, and bras got strewn across the room, and Ally didn't miss how Dana stared at her breasts once the bra was off, but they fell onto the bunk and curled up together chastely. Dana's bunk was small; no larger than standard, but they fit themselves into it easily.
"This is nice," Ally said, tucking Dana's arm against her chest.
"This is wonderful," Dana said, and buried her nose in Ally's hair.
"Mm-hm," Ally said, and drifted off, surrounded by Dana's presence.
* * *
When Ally woke up the next morning, she was warm, and fully rested, and comfortable in a way she hadn't been in a while-even while realizing that she hadn't so much as shifted in the past few hours, and her arm was tingling.
Dana had shifted; one of her legs was between Ally's, and her right hand was under Ally's shirt, her fingertips just brushing the bottom curve of her breast. Ally felt her nipple pebble, and sighed.
Dana's hand flexed, and she hmmmed in Ally's ear. God, Ally thought. I would give a lot of credits to have her shift her hand about two inches up . . . She shifted, rubbing her thighs together.
"Mmm, Ally?" Dana asked sleepily.
Fuck. Sleepy Dana was hot as fire. "Dana," she said.
"Oh, shit, I'm sorry." She withdrew her hand from Ally's shirt. "I seem to be doing that a lot recently."
"You're welcome to," Ally said, her voice as low as it ever got. "Just ask me first?"
Dana held still for a moment. "Ally, can I touch you?"
"Oh, please do." She wriggled around until they were facing each other. "But I want to watch you do it."
"Okay," Dana said, her face full of awe and wonder, and slid her hand up under Ally's shirt again. Slowly, she trailed her fingers over Ally's ribs, brushing her nails against the underside of her breast, and finally, what felt like an eternity later, she closed her fingers around Ally's left breast.
Ally gasped; she was definitely aroused, and if Dana would only move her thumb just a bit-"Fuck it," she said, and leaned forward to take Dana's lips with her own. She kept the pressure light-how Dana had kissed under the influence of the alien spore compound might not have been how she normally kissed-but partway into it, Dana moaned, flexed her fingers, and moved her hand around Ally's back to tug her in closer.
A moment or two later they broke apart, breathless, and Dana said, "I have horrible morning breath."
"I probably do, too," Ally said, "and I really don't care."
"I do," Dana said. "That is, about me. Not you."
Ally groaned. Of course, now that they'd stopped kissing, she had to pee. Morning sex is just a comedy of errors sometimes. "Okay," she said. "You go brush your teeth, I'll brush mine, and we'll get back to business?" She ended the question on a hopeful note.
"Okay," Dana said, and smiled. Ally grinned back, and rolled herself out of bed. Dana got up in one fluid motion, and headed to the bathroom. Ally listened to her brush her teeth, tried not to hear her relieve herself, and heard some soft swishing of clothing that was intriguing. Even more intriguing was when Dana left the bathroom completely nude.
Ally's eyes widened and her mouth fell open as Dana crossed the room, all sleek grace and long legs and curves and--fuuuuuuuuck. Her body was all sensuality, but in contrast, she looked nervous, and Ally hastened to reassure her. "You're beautiful. Really, truly, amazingly, I-never-thought-I'd-ever-see-anyone-who-looks-like-you-naked beautiful."
"Thank you," Dana said, and smiled, although Ally thought perhaps she still looked a little uncertain. "Your turn. There's a spare toothbrush in the cabinet."
Ally jumped up, raced into the bathroom, hurried her way through a pee, a toothbrushing, and a quick check to make sure that she still smelled okay. Good enough. Stripping off her shirt, pants, and underwear, she hesitated for a moment-it was pretty obvious even when they were both dressed that she was several levels of hot below Dana, but she'd told herself she'd gotten over that while sleeping with the frankly-stunning chief engineer. Or maybe not. She looked in the mirror, grimaced, and thought, Well. Might as well get it over with.
She stepped out of the bathroom and Dana turned. Ally held out her hands in a "ta-da" gesture, and Dana smiled. "Oh, Ally," she breathed, and Ally flushed red, probably from head to toe.
"Come here," Dana said, and Ally went. Dana pulled her flush against her, head-or shoulder, as it was-to knee, and stroked her hands over Ally's back and shoulders, as much as she could reach. "You are so beautiful, Ally," she said. "God, your breasts."
Ally looked down at her own chest. "Well, yeah, they're big," she said. It was pretty undeniable.
"I just want to-" Dana said, then stopped, bit her lip, and blushed.
"You just want to what?" Ally asked, curious.
"Suck on them," Dana said, looking to the side.
"Well, yeah, that's-" Suddenly, everything clicked. "You haven't done this before, have you?"
"No," Dana said after a moment, still red. "Well, sex, yes. With another woman, no."
Ally smiled, as gently as she could. "I promise you, it's not that complicated. If you like it, odds are that I'll like it. Here." She led Dana to the bunk, indicated that she should lie down, and after she did, lay next to her. "You should probably kiss me before the toothpaste wears off."
Dana laughed and leaned in to oblige. Ally pulled out all the stops and used every trick she had with her tongue to get Dana to stop being nervous, and it seemed to work. Dana moaned and stroked Ally's breasts, cupping first one and then the other, running her thumb over the nipples, and finally rolling the nipples between her thumb and forefinger. Ally stroked one hand lightly over Dana's side, wanting nothing more than to roll the other woman onto her back and explore every inch of her body with her hands and lips and tongue and to drive her to at least two and more like five hard, wet orgasms, but this was not the time. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later. If she were lucky.
Wait. I'm in Dana Cathcart's bed. Naked. I'm lucky by definition. Dana had, by that point, broken the kiss and started sucking on Ally's neck, just under the corner of her jaw. Ally gasped, and moved a hand between them to trace circles on Dana's collarbone, dipping lower and lower with each circle until she was touching her breast. Dana's nipple hardened to a point, and Ally smiled as she felt Dana's teeth scrape against her collarbone.
Dana lifted her head, looked at Ally, and said, "Is this okay?"
"Yes," Ally said. "Yes, yes, yes. I'll tell you if something isn't. Believe me. Just don't bite too hard."
"I can bite?" Dana asked, pressing her lips together as if to suppress a smile.
Ally grinned. "Be my guest."
Dana grinned back, ducked her head, and started nipping gently along Ally's collarbone, down to her chest, and then quickly swirled her tongue around Ally's nipple.
Ally gasped and jerked, and when Dana added teeth carefully, she moaned and clenched her fingers in the other woman's hair. "You like that?" Dana asked, but with a tone that indicated that she already knew the answer.
"God, yes." Ally let Dana explore her breasts-well, 'let' probably wasn't the right word, but she didn't stop her for a good, really, really good, five or ten minutes. Eventually, though, she just couldn't take it anymore, and she dragged Dana's head back up for a kiss.
"My turn?" she said. "Please?"
"What do you-" Dana swallowed. "What do you want to do?"
"Touch you?" Ally said. "Taste you? What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know," Dana said. "I know what I like, sure, but I don't know what I like when it's you."
"Fair enough," Ally said. "Anything you don't want, that you would expect to be on the menu? Also, while we're at it, is there anything I need to know that I don't because I didn't hack into your file?"
Dana laughed. "No. No surprises in my file. I am not apologizing for that again, by the way."
"No problem," Ally said.
"And no, no vetoes off the standard menu. You want to use your fingers, go ahead. You want to go down on me-" She shuddered. "I'm getting wet just thinking about it."
"Me too," Ally said, and pushed Dana onto her back. "Okay?" Dana nodded. "Good." She kissed her, hot and wet and thorough, and cupped her face with her hands. "Mmm, you taste good. I like your toothpaste, whatever it is, but I like the taste of you better." Ally wasn't sure if talking more would make Dana more relaxed or not, but she'd never been particularly silent in bed and it was probably better if Dana learned that sooner rather than later.
Fortunately, Dana writhed under her, arching up for another kiss, and Ally smiled. "God, I've thought about this so much," Dana said between kisses, and Ally closed her eyes and shuddered.
"Yeah?" Ally asked, inordinately pleased, and Dana nodded. "What was I doing, when you were thinking about us?"
"Kissing me," she replied. "Everywhere."
"I think I can manage that." Ally straddled Dana's hips and stroked her hands over her shoulders, down her arms, and caught her fingers and brought them to her mouth, one hand at a time. Dana gasped as Ally scraped her teeth over the center of her palm, and flicked her tongue between each of her fingers, ending by curling her tongue around the pads of her fingers. Dana was moaning even before she finished one hand, and when Ally kissed her way up one forearm to lick the crease of her elbow, her voice caught and she cried out.
"Shit, that's my elbow," she said a moment later.
"Mm-hm," Ally said, mirroring her actions on the other side.
"I'm going to die," Dana said fervently.
"It's only the little death," Ally said, and dotted kisses up Dana's bicep to her shoulder. "Mmm, your skin is so soft. I'm glad I didn't find this out until now, or I wouldn't have been able to keep my hands off of you."
Dana laughed. "Please, keep your hands on me."
"Only if you keep your hands on me."
Dana's hands immediately flew to Ally's shoulders, and Ally laughed. She buried her face in the side of Dana's neck and inhaled. God. She smelled good, she tasted good, she felt amazing, she looked amazing-now to get her to sound amazing. Ally slid down a few inches and cupped one of Dana's breasts in her hand. Rolling her eyes up, she watched Dana's face as she took her breast into her mouth, and was rewarded by Dana's eyes closing and her mouth falling open in a soft sigh. It's a good start. However, the ultimate reward was a couple feet lower, and damn she couldn't wait to get there.
After sucking both of Dana's breasts into wet brown peaks, she chased kisses all over her ribs, poked her tongue into Dana's navel, eliciting a laugh, and licked stripes into the hollows just inside her hipbones. Settling herself between Dana's thighs, she looked up and said, "If you want me to stop, or move, or change anything, just say so. And you're more than welcome to grab my head or hair. In fact-" She pushed up and pulled her ponytail holder out of her hair, shaking it around her shoulders. "Better?"
Dana nodded, eyes wide. She reached down to touch Ally's hair with gentle fingers, and Ally leaned into her hand for a moment, eyes closed. "Mmm," she said. After a moment or so, though, she shifted down and blew a cool stream right between Dana's legs, and Dana curled up to watch. "I love this part," Ally said, and traced a finger down the seam of her labia.
Dana was so wet that Ally's finger came away dripping, and she spared a moment for a brief feeling of smugness before delving that same finger down to circle her entrance and then back up to ghost over Dana's clit. She repeated the movement until Dana gasped, and then parted her folds gently and used her tongue to follow the same path. "God, you taste good," she said, looking up for a moment.
"Ah!" Dana twisted her head from side to side. "Damnit, Ally, please."
There it was, that note of desperation she'd been waiting for. "Yes," she breathed, and stroked the flat of her tongue over Dana's clit.
Dana cried out again, spreading her legs wider, and clutched handfuls of Ally's hair, plainly trying not to shove her around, but Ally took the hint, pressed closer, and started sucking.
If there was one thing Ally knew how to do, it was this, and she had Dana shuddering and moaning and finally screaming her name as she hit the edge and tumbled over in a relatively-short period of time. "Oh, God, Ally!" She clenched her thighs around Ally's neck briefly, and then relaxed, boneless, against the mattress. "Fuck."
Ally crawled up the bed and kissed Dana deeply. "Mm," Dana said. "Is that what I taste like?"
"Maybe a little," Ally said. She settled on Dana's right side, between her arm and her body, and rubbed her first two fingers between Dana's legs. Dana jumped, and when Ally lifted her fingers to Dana's mouth, Dana sucked on them for a moment, mimicking Ally's earlier motions with her tongue. It was Ally's turn to shudder. Removing her fingers from Dana's mouth, she replaced them between Dana's legs and stroked in slow circles. "Again?" she asked.
"I-don't know-"
"Oh, but you can," Ally said, settling in to murmur in her ear. "It's still fresh in your mind, how it felt when I tasted you, when I used my tongue on you." She sped her hand up somewhat. "How it felt when you had your hands in my hair, and when you were pulling me against you because you couldn't get enough of my mouth." She sped up her movements again. "Come for me, Dana. Come with my fingers on your clit."
Dana jerked, stiffened, and cried out. "Fuck, Ally!" She shuddered against Ally's hand, and pulled her over for a kiss with significantly more strength than she probably should have had.
A few moments later, she asked, "Are you always this-talkative? And dominant?"
Ally shrugged. "Yeah." No sense pretending otherwise.
"God, that's hot," Dana breathed.
Ally blinked, and working entirely on instinct, grabbed Dana's wrists, pinned them above her head, and hovered over her, lips only an inch away from the other woman's. "Believe me; I may be almost a foot shorter than you are, but I damn well can lead."
Dana went limp under her and moaned. "That is the hottest thing that anyone has ever said to me. Ever."
"Yeah?" Ally said, and something inside of her grew warm.
"And not just because your breasts are so close to my face," Dana added with a smile.
Ally snorted, and scooted up to rub her chest on Dana's face. Dana laughed, pulled her wrists out of Ally's hands, and cupped her breasts, squeezing gently.
After a few moments, Ally lowered herself to the mattress beside Dana. "Good morning?" she said.
"Yes, very good morning. Although I think we're well into the afternoon by now." Dana frowned. "But what about you?"
"What about me?" Ally said, although she knew full well what Dana was asking.
"What do you taste like?" Dana asked, tracing a line down Ally's neck and chest to the point of one nipple.
"You can find out," Ally said, struggling to remain nonchalant in the face of the image that Dana's words had invoked, "or you can find out what I feel like, or you can watch while I get myself off."
Dana sucked in a breath. "As hot as that last one sounds, no. I want to be the one to do it." She threaded one arm under Ally's neck, pushed her onto her back, and stroked one hand down her body until her fingers rested on Ally's pubic hair. "Are you wet?"
Ally spread her legs slightly. "Why don't you find out?"
Dana dipped her fingers down. "Oh, yes. Just from getting me off?"
"And seeing you naked, and you touching me-oh!" Dana found her clit with ease-well, yeah, Ally, she's got a degree or two in the female anatomy-and rubbed. "God, just a little to the left-yes, fuck, right there."
Dana's inexperience in getting other women off showed only briefly, when she slowed down at a moderately-inconvenient moment, but Ally ordered her to speed up and, above all, not to stop, and soon she was shaking and swearing her way through her own orgasm. "Fuck, Dana, fuck that's good."
"Was it?" Dana asked, shy but obviously pleased with herself.
"Yes," Ally said, panting.
Dana withdrew her fingers from between Ally's legs and sucked on them for a moment. "Mm," she said. "My new favorite vintage."
Your only favorite vintage, Ally thought, but didn't say anything. She'd shared before, and as much as she absolutely wasn't interested in sharing Dana with anyone, well, she didn't want to jinx it by getting possessive. Not yet, at least.
"Ugh, we're sticky," Dana said.
"That's half the fun," Ally said. "But if you want to move to the shower, I will pin you against the wall, sling your leg over my shoulder and fuck you with my tongue."
"That would be so much more fun in a water shower," Dana said, but her breath hitched.
Ally shrugged. "Well, yeah, but those are hard to come by shipboard, and you'd be surprised how fun a sonic shower can be."
"Oh, yeah?" Dana said, one eyebrow arched. "Show me."
So Ally did. Twice.
* * *
A couple days later-days in which Ally and Dana barely left the bed, let alone Dana's quarters-their idyll came to an end when Lt. Zel called Ally in for a meeting.
"I'm sorry I don't have my report done yet," Ally said. "I was on forty-eight hours' sick leave. I'll have it done this afternoon."
"That's not a problem," Lt. Zel said. "I actually wanted to ask you about your evaluations prior to me. They seem, well, inconsistent with what I've observed."
That's a nice way to put it. "I, um." Ally stopped, swallowed, and started again. "I was mostly in medical?"
"Yes," Lt. Zel said encouragingly.
"I'm kind of a lousy EMT? I mean, I had the training and passed all the tests and stuff but any time there's a medical emergency I get flustered and screw things up."
Lt. Zel frowned. "But you just took charge in a medical emergency, came up with the right treatment, administered it, and, from what I observed and from what Lt. Commander Barry has told me, you were completely level-headed the entire time."
"That wasn't a medical emergency, it was a scientific puzzle," Ally said. "I know it's the same thing, but I don't want to jinx it?"
"All right," Lt. Zel said, amused. "Well, you continue solving your scientific puzzles, and if you keep this up, I'll be recommending you for a promotion at the end of the year."
Ally looked up, floored. "Really?" she squeaked, and coughed.
"Yes, really," Lt. Zel said, with a gentle smile.
* * *
". . . And she said that if I don't fuck up in the next year-well, that's not exactly what she said but close enough-then she'll be recommending me for a promotion!" Unfortunately, her voice squeaked again, but even that couldn't dampen Ally's excitement.
"That's amazing!" Dana said, beaming. She swung Ally into her arms and kissed her soundly. "You're halfway to transferring to the Enterprise."
"Well, not quite halfway," she said, then paused. "Um."
"Um?"
"I know it's been maybe three days, but-maybe do you think if we're still together you'd want to go to the Enterprise, too? I mean, you can think about it? Or we can talk about it then?" Ally felt her face turning bright red.
"Ally, love, it's been a lot more than three days," Dana said. "And I don't suppose I ever told you this, but I'm pretty much on the Yorktown because Captain Pike reassured me it was the best way to spend the next three years, if I want to end up on the Enterprise."
"Oh," Ally said. "Oh, awesome." She still had one more question, though. "And I know it's been however-much-longer-than-three days, and my history as far as you know it doesn't support this, but, um . . . are we exclusive? 'Cause I'd like to be."
Dana looked at her, one eyebrow raised. "What on earth makes you think I'd share you with anyone?"
"Oh, good," Ally said, relief all out of proportion for the length of the relationship. "And I am not sharing you with anyone, either, just so that's clear. Especially not Dr. Boyce."
Dana grinned. "I don't know, Ally. He's pretty hot."
Ally just groaned.
Master Post