(no subject)
This is the next response to a prompt on startrek_crack. This is for Boz's first prompt. I don't think this is exactly what she had in mind, but this is where it went on me. I can tell you what it was this time, since it's not part of the gag. As the Enterprise heads off again for its five year tour, onboard ship shrinks are now a mandate -- in fact, head shrink counselor is now a recognized senior staff position, so there's nothing anyone on board can do about it.
PTSD as a way of life.
"This is Ensign Chekov, Bird of Prey sighted at mark..."
Sara looks out the observation deck window but only sees the vast black peppered with tiny moth holes. She hits her coms "Sickbay, this is Commander Mendez, I'm on my way."
"Roger that, Mendez," McCoy replies. Three months ago his annoyed tone would have made the muscles in her stomach clinch and her temper flare. Now, well, now she just laughs as she jogs down the corridor to prepare for battle stations.
The first torpedo hits the ship as she exits the lift. She braces herself on the doorjamb, and she can feel the stillness of battle come over her. She moves in efficient, automatic movements, no need for discussion as she hits Sickbay and takes up her place by the neuro-scanners.
McCoy's on the bridge and there are strategically placed medi-teams around the ship. Sickbay itself is stripped down into specialist pods--limb reattachment, spinal/neuro, xenobiological deep triage, the usual. Chapel locks an ampule of adrenaline into a hypospray--she's in civvies but battle stations means your duty status is irrelevant.
"Watching the Olympics?" Sara asks. She'd been on her way to catch the gymnastics finals herself when the general alert went out.
Chapel laughs, her Dutch Master cheeks bright pink and her hair done up messily in sticks. "Don't tell anyone but I might have been imbibing contraband beverages..."
"Who am I going to tell? McCoy?" Sara cuts back. Everyone in earshot laughs. The Sickbay doors sweep open as the ship's rocked again, this time about a 5.7 on the Kirk Scale. Hyposprays and bandages fly everywhere.
Suarez and Abbas run into the room with a heavy bleeder on a gurney. Everyone goes to work.
*
Sara takes her meals in the canteen designated The Cafe--by whom or when, no one knows, but Sara thinks, like most nicknames around the ship, it was probably the Captain. Who, incidentally, favors this mess as well.
"Mendez!"
Sara slides her try back before he starts eating her dinner. "Captain," she answers. He has McCoy in tow, so this is going to be a working dinner.
"Why so formal?" He makes the big shrugging gesture he does that on anyone else would be grating but on him comes off as comically charming.
"You are still the Captain, right? No one's fixed that and not sent out a memo?" She takes a bite of her chickpeas and looks him right in the eyes. He's got deep laugh lines grooved into his cheeks, marks right on the surface of his skin that he's full of buffoonery and liable to make a joke out of something you take very seriously. That combined with the scar on his cheek, Sara thinks, is the human equivalent of donning black and yellow stripes or a red carapace.
"Hey, now, watch the impertinence, doctor," McCoy snaps predictably. Sara has a marked fondness for McCoy's imprecations and nuclear temper.
"Don't make me address your shortcomings, McCoy," Sara waves her spoon at him and he clams up with his usual constipated frown. This is McCoy in his comfort zone, around people who he doesn't have to nurse or scold into the correct shape.
"I feel the need to make a dick joke, but I'll spare everyone." Kirk slaps the table with both palms. "So, the Diwali bash, how go the plans?"
Sara whips out her datapad and taps up the right file with her pinky, the only finger not covered in sauce from picking the peppers out of her dinner. The damned food machines keep adding huge chucks of green bell pepper to almost anything she orders. She'd think it was some kind of poisoning attempt, but the machines seem to hate each of the crew equally. She spins the pad around so he can look at the data.
"Did you actually talk to Reed about the assault?" McCoy regards her with his air of false aloofness. He's worried about Reed the same as she is, and he hates to admit that he can't medicate the trauma away.
"Yes, some. He's not really interested in catharsis at this stage." She cuts off when she sees that Kirk's as riveted as McCoy. Sara knows he blames himself for every single thing that goes wrong aboard ship--and that's why she likes him, because he is responsible.
"Speaking of which, the Court Martial will convene at oh eight hundred tomorrow." The Captain, snapped out of his play acting over the Diwali party pushes his chair back and walks away now that he's delivered the bit of information he actually stopped by to impart. The fact that he always chooses to give the hard news in person says pretty much all Sara needed to know about the guy. She'll admit to having serious reservations about James Kirk in charge of anything more than a pet turtle when she was assigned to the Enterprise, but pleasant surprises are, indeed, pleasant.
"Are you ready for this?" McCoy asks her. He's cut his usual routine and is stripped back to his essential self, like trees in winter, the bare frame of himself shivering in a wind that was expected but rude nonetheless.
"No, I'm not." She is as honest with McCoy as she can be and keep the fragile bits of herself inside her.
"Me, either," he sighs and rubs his chin.
*
Sara dons her formal wear like a little girl playing dress up. She sits in her seat as an Official Person and feels like someone will realize what a fraud she is any second.
"We are convened here today..." Kirk begins and no one appears to inform the room that she's not ready to stand in judgment over another person's life.
Lt. Anderson stands calmly before the senior officers of the USS Enterprise with the certainty of the profoundly insane.
Kirk reels through the charges--insubordination through to sexual assault of a fellow officer--and Anderson doesn't flinch or appear to even hear his voice. He's focused somewhere over their heads, his eyes darting around at what seems like random.
"What is your professional opinion, Dr. Mendez?" Kirk reads from the Court Martial script.
"In my professional opinion as the ship's designated Counselor, Lieutenant Anderson is unfit for duty due to a lack of mental facilities." The penalty for rape is capital while aboard a vessel during a state of war or emergency. Technically, Anderson committed his crime during a battle engagement marking it as committed during a state of war--regs are very straightforward on that. Sara cannot bring herself to put another officer to death--even if he committed a heinous crime.
McCoy, Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scott, and the heads of each of the other departments look at her with varying expressions of compassion or commiseration. They are of one mind on certain fundamental underpinnings as to how this ship is run--they do not execute their own.
"As the Captain of Starfleet vessel..." Kirk begins to read out his verdict.
Anderson will be placed into a medical coma until they can transfer him to another ship. When the drugs wear off and Anderson is back to his non-medication mental state, Starfleet will Court Martial him again and do as they see fit. That is not on Sara's conscience.
*
When Sara was in the Academy, she planned to do her allotted tour of duty then resign her commission to go to work for the Federation's civilian diplomatic and colonization wing. She ideally wanted to live off-world in a multispecies colony until she settled down back in Argentina. She always planned to retire in Argentina, home.
That was before the destruction of Vulcan. In the post-Vulcan reality of the Federation, officers like Lt. Commander Sara Mendez don't get to quietly join a Federation colony and live out the sort of meaningless, self-ordered quietude she'd always planned for herself. No. Lt. Commander Sara Mendez was stop-lossed and recommissioned in a totally different field than she'd previously served.
"You could be stuck on that old rust bucket the Venture bumpin' up against Klingon space all the live-long day, quit your bitchin'." McCoy speaks in parables and irony. He usually doesn't believe what he says, which causes many people to completely misunderstand him. McCoy is like a character in a novel but with all the explication done by a narrator absent.
"Yes, it's true, I also could have been born with my internal organs outside of my body, but I was not." She spends a lot of time in Sickbay, because her office is one of the pods that riddle off of the main Sickbay like tapioca pearls touching in clusters of sticky stars.
"Some thought experiments work better than others," he doesn't bother to look up from his charts nested one over the other on his computer screen.
"Granted. What do you think about the lotus pool, be honest." She projects the sketch of the pool into the air between them and McCoy bothers to look up and consider.
"I think as long as there's plenty of whiskey, I don't care if everyone dresses up like baboons and dances a jig."
Which means he likes it. "Ok, do you think you could keep Kirk from wearing a sari?"
McCoy begins to laugh. People are catacombs of unknowablity with a thin veneer of predictability. McCoy's laughter brushes her skin, but Sara can't mark the joke because there are too many possibilities.
*
Sara's hunched over the schematic for the repairs in Botany when her door opens. "Come in," she says without looking up.
"Doctor."
Sara wheels around at the sound of Spock's voice. He inclines his head minutely in greeting before clasping his hands behind his back.
"Is there something I can do for you?" This is, after all, why she's on this ship.
Spock's eyes drop to her face. "The finer points of human sarcasm and innuendo often escape my apprehension, doctor, I do not know if you jest at the unlikelihood that I would seek you out in your official capacity or if you query whether I have a request that you could fulfill that, while not for me strictly speaking, will still be of some benefit to my preferred mental state."
Sara leans back in her chair and folds her hands in her lap. She's had more than a passing experience with Vulcans. For example, she can easily ascertain how Spock is not completely Vulcan. "Spock, I know you're making fun of me, and I also know you'd never broach personal protocol to seek counseling from me, but I assume there's someone else you'd like me to talk to."
"Indeed. Your perceptions are...astute, and forgive me for saying this, for a human."
"I am a human, so I'm not insulted that you make that distinction." Sometimes she feels like talking to Spock is like engaging the tide.
He inclines his head to indicate he understands. "It has come to my attention that the Captain...is not functioning optimally since the Court Martial of Lieutenant Anderson."
"That's not surprising. It was traumatic for us all."
"Yourself and Doctor McCoy came to as logical and emotionally satisfying a conclusion as was possible in the circumstances."
High praise indeed. Yes, they had conspired in a way that would get them off the execution hook, true enough, but that is part of the trauma.
"He takes everything hard," Sara responds. Spock doesn't ask her to clarify, they both know she means Kirk. "I'll see what I can do, but it's not like he takes me seriously."
"If I may make a suggestion?" He pauses until she nods. "The Captain has...expectations of intimacy. Perhaps when you broach this topic with him it would be preferable if you were to address him by his given rather than his surname."
"He'll talk to me if I call him Jim?"
"Affirmative." Spock salutes and leaves.
"I could've told you THAT!" McCoy shouts from Sickbay.
"What did I tell you about eavesdropping!" Sara yells back, no real annoyance behind it, because McCoy's as tight-lipped as it gets about patients' medical info, and everyone on the ship is his patient.
"It isn't eavesdropping if you leave the damned door open!" he shouts back. Her com beeps to life and she engages it. "I hate to say this, but if you can work some therapy mumbo-jumbo on him, it wouldn't hurt about right now," McCoy says in a concerned tone over the link.
*
The fact of the matter is that Sara is grossly, grossly ill-trained for this job. She is, in fact, a xenobiologist.
"Get out!" Jim Kirk says when she mentions this to him over dinner in The Cafe. "You are not."
She can't help but laugh at his theatrics. "Believe it or not, it's true."
"So, you're like a PhD doctor, not like a doctor doctor?" he asks before sipping his juice.
"No, technically, I am a doctor doctor, just not so much for you. I can take care of you, of course, I mean, I'm getting the swing of it..."
"Remind me to request Suarez the next time I get my ass blasted off..."
"...but mostly I'm an alien doctor as you would say."
"Huh," he pokes at his jello. "So you're an alien shrink." His smile slides around his face like he's not sure which kind of happiness he wants to express.
"No. I passed the Deep Space Counseling segment at the Academy and sat the board." She rubs her eyelids and wonders if she's going to admit this to him, but if she offers intimacy maybe he'll return it--that's the way lives entangle, one secret for another until people are so wrapped up in each other they don't know which bits originally belonged to themselves or to the other person. "I was seeing someone who was specializing in psyche and I took all his classes with him, as a togetherness experiment."
Kirk bounces the back of his fork against his plate a few times as he watches her with narrowed eyes. "What you're saying is that you took the classes that lead you to this post to get laid?"
She knows him well enough to know that he will approve of that angle, but that's not exactly the case. "No, worse, I was disgustingly in love."
"Oh!" Kirk laughs with his entire body, an object with enough gravity to cause the entire room to bend to him, to alter their own orbits to spin his way. "That's just sad! You want to play house and end up on a five year mission in fuck-all sector. Starfleet strikes again." He settles back down, leans on his elbows and cracks his neck. "Where's Romeo now? Writing prescriptions in San Fran while sipping vintage Pinot?"
This is another moment where she can bury her truths and hide them behind her breast bone, where she can be a discrete self--Sara Beatrice Mendez--and keep the riot and calamity that is Jim Kirk outside of her.
"He was on the Farragut." Sara chooses to let Jim in. She believes everyone on the Enterprise makes that choice at one time or another, literally or figuratively or both.
*
The Diwali party is a fiasco. Considering the normal state of affairs aboard the Enterprise it takes a lot for something to be considered such.
It's when Jim catches himself on fire that shit begins to get really out of hand.
Sara is chatting with Fatima...ok, she's gossiping like crazy with Fatima about McCoy, which is a hobby for most of the medical staff, when Jim knocks over one of the lamps. He decides slapping the oil fire out with his hand is an excellent course of action and pretty soon the veil of his sari is ablaze and Pavel is screaming in Russian and Hikaru comes to the rescue with pineapple juice and about then Sara loses sight of the action since she's not getting up unless the ship's attacked.
"How do you think he got the scar?" Fatima asks. She's also clearly not running over to get involved in the Kirk madness, she sips her bright green drink and regards Sara over the rim. Fatima has her hair down for once, thick black roiling down her shoulders and over her back. She's also wearing a sari, cerise overlaid with gold against her glowing amber skin.
"That is a question," Sara muses. She knows, though. Jim told her in off-handed confidence, speaking in his late night coal ember voice, the weariness of a minor god in his body as he shook out supplement tablets into his palm because of a few more missed meals. He flew face first through a glass window at ten. He had tried to repair the damage himself with polymer so he wouldn't have to deal with his stepfather's wrath. One of the pock marks in Jim Kirk's life, one of the many petty tragedies that he mostly caused himself when looked at straight on, but that Starfleet is deeply responsible for on a certain level.
When they hear the requisite "DAMMIT JIM!" bellowed from inside the scrum, both women light up with laughter to match the lamps burning all around them.
*
Deep space is boring. They hammer that into you at the Academy. There're a whole battery of classes and seminars to prepare you for this--what to take aboard ship, workshops on taking up music, art, calligraphy, endless admonitions to save leisure reading until you're off-planet.
No one listens to this.
Sara had thought she was going to get aboard ship and be woefully inadequate at her job. She lived in terror that an entire starship crew would swiftly spiral down into madness and unresolved emotions because the sum total of her clinical experience was the simulations she'd undergone in the Academy.
The truth of the matter is that Sara is a typical Enterprise crew member.
Also, she soon learns, that being Ship's Counselor pretty much consists of running interference between the other senior officers who always seem to be in the middle of some kind of sibling-esque power struggle.
"Help, help, sanctuary!" Jim sweeps into her office and locks the door, bounds over to the door to Sickbay and locks it too. He dramatically presses his back to the wall and points a finger at her. "SANCTUARY!"
"Are you guys playing laser tag again?" Sara turns back to her Saturnalia planning.
"I feel that your attitude lacks the adequate level of concern a request for sanctuary should elicit." Jim crosses his arms over his chest.
"My office isn't a medieval church, Jim, it's a medpod." So if they go with the ancient Rome theme, unfortunate phalluses might appear all over the ship...she knows this crew.
"Are we having a trivia night this week?" Jim peers over her shoulder. "Oh damn, Saturnalia? Have I told you lately that I love you?"
"Right, I had forgotten about the sexual harassment seminar I need to wedge in before we rendezvous with the next supply ship..."
"Boob groping is not sexual harassment..."
"Excellent example for me to employ in the seminar. I think I'll also use the example of your unbirthday spankings."
"Hey, I didn't get any complaints!"
"Because everyone complained to me, James."
He shuts up. Thr formal name quelling tactic Sara picked up from McCoy. Along with her recently acquired taste for minty alcoholic beverages.
"Who were you running away from, anyway?" Sara looks up at Jim who is lounging against her desk with his arms crossed over his chest.
"Spock."
Sara pushes her stool back and looks up at him. "Really?"
"I might have shoved him into a lift and sent him up several decks for no reason." He shrugs one shoulder.
"No reason being that you were bored." She grabs the spare stool and rolls it back and forth in invitation. "Sit down, querido, help me with these plans."
"Didn't know you spoke non-Standard dialects," Jim rolls his stool up and starts screwing with the screen.
Sara thinks about explaining to Jim that xenobiology called to her because she spoke Spanish at home and Standard elsewhere, that she was always fully aware of difference and similarity, of seeing the world in terms of them-us and always wanting to not have to, to get to see the universe as Us like Jim probably did. Sara became a xenologist to understand the us of other species like she always wanted to be part of the us of Jim's world. She wonders if Jim would understand if she explained to him that in ways that thread through her body like veins and arteries that Jim is as much them as Spock is.
"Yeah, of course, my family are traditionalists. Don't get my dad started on the Federation." She makes the disapproving tongue click she learned from her grandmother. Jim laughs appropriately, but he also catalogs her face in a way that says I know you're not saying something important, it's ok, I'm ready when you want to tell me.
"It seems like you could have picked a less penis-filled holiday if you wanted to keep the sexual harassment in check, babe." Suddenly a huge penis floats across the computer screen. She thinks he only hit one button to make it happen which means it's a pre-programmed subroutine. She laughs--who wouldn't?
*
Sara didn't become the Enterprise Activities Director overnight. She kind of stumbled into it. It's her version of a hobby, really. She brought her datasticks and her violin instructional vids and the instrument she's had since she was eight nestled in the worn velvet that's been its home for more than two hundred years. She brought her grief and her sharp, surprising homesickness.
She recognizes after her third huge bout of mucus and tears and constricted throat that maybe her tears weren't for La Plata but for her one Vulcan death. She experienced the staggering loss of colleagues and acquaintances along with the entire Fleet. But just like every death is the same, each one is unique. In the overwhelming loss of so many individuals, Sara's loss was directed, specific--the loss of the focal point of her world. Space had been less of a decision and more of a way of allowing others to direct her post-Vulcan life, the one she neither chose nor anticipated.
She learned through her own grief how to touch other people's grief. They all shared the Vulcan experience, and this bound them, the eggs in the dough of the Enterprise, of Starfleet. Through this revelation, when she allowed it to creep up on her and force her to take three personal days in a row, she stumbled over her future role in the crew.
Sara sent out a memo to invite crew members to say Kaddish with her while in the throes of three too many drinks and self-indulgent viewing of holovids from her last vacation. People came. All of the senior staff came, Jim sporting a kippah in a way that looked natural, experienced. Hebrew slid out of Nyota's mouth with an ease that brought Sara's tears. Crying with others turns out to be cathartic for everyone involved.
The rash act of inviting others into her grieving spiraled. She decided that if she organized one religious event, she should instigate others. This lead from prayer meetings to Friday night social activities, to becoming the de facto event planner on the ship.
All of this, as it turns out, is opportune since no one comes to her for direct counseling unless mandated for their annual evaluation. She interacts with the crew in a manner they find more organic--over cocktails between Romulan attacks and warping away from hostile planets.
*
"I'm registering my official complaint about this right now." Doctor Leonard McCoy taps violently on his datapad and scowls.
"What do you think I'm going to do besides sign off on the standard fit for duty form?" Sara cuts McCoy a look to quell him.
"Oh, I don't know, ask me about my shitty childhood and scrape me over a grater about my divorce."
"I already know about your divorce, and your secrets are you own, don't worry." He has very few secrets, but she doesn't like to deconstruct other people's self-delusions for them. "Are you coming to the show on Friday night?"
She hands him her datapad and he endorses it with his thumb print and retinal scan. "Why would I do a damned fool thing like that? Fridays are the only day I can guarantee that Jim will leave me the hell alone."
"So you'll MC the poetry slam, then?"
"Oh, alright, but I'm gonna have a few drinks on board by then." He pulls his flask out of his pocket.
"How do you think Crewman Singh is doing with the post-traumatic shock?" She figures they could get at least a little work in before he starts rattling out his litany of complaints--it amuses Sara that of all the officers on the Enterprise the one she comes closest to being a real therapist for is the one who claims to hate psychiatry.
"Like hell, that's how. That kid's rattled like a steel drum. I thought about forcing him to take the drugs as his superior officer, but I realized that ethically it crossed a line." He looks up at her with a face that's laid bare of artifice, this is the face of a man who came to medicine to ease pain and sit by death beds. McCoy is the modern version of the doctor on horseback in the snow moving from battlefield to battlefield with the troops, weeping with the survivors and never saying die.
"I'll talk to him." She reaches out and grips McCoy's hand for a second.
**
Obviously, the sexual harassment seminar is an outtake of this. Which will eventually happen.
PTSD as a way of life.
"This is Ensign Chekov, Bird of Prey sighted at mark..."
Sara looks out the observation deck window but only sees the vast black peppered with tiny moth holes. She hits her coms "Sickbay, this is Commander Mendez, I'm on my way."
"Roger that, Mendez," McCoy replies. Three months ago his annoyed tone would have made the muscles in her stomach clinch and her temper flare. Now, well, now she just laughs as she jogs down the corridor to prepare for battle stations.
The first torpedo hits the ship as she exits the lift. She braces herself on the doorjamb, and she can feel the stillness of battle come over her. She moves in efficient, automatic movements, no need for discussion as she hits Sickbay and takes up her place by the neuro-scanners.
McCoy's on the bridge and there are strategically placed medi-teams around the ship. Sickbay itself is stripped down into specialist pods--limb reattachment, spinal/neuro, xenobiological deep triage, the usual. Chapel locks an ampule of adrenaline into a hypospray--she's in civvies but battle stations means your duty status is irrelevant.
"Watching the Olympics?" Sara asks. She'd been on her way to catch the gymnastics finals herself when the general alert went out.
Chapel laughs, her Dutch Master cheeks bright pink and her hair done up messily in sticks. "Don't tell anyone but I might have been imbibing contraband beverages..."
"Who am I going to tell? McCoy?" Sara cuts back. Everyone in earshot laughs. The Sickbay doors sweep open as the ship's rocked again, this time about a 5.7 on the Kirk Scale. Hyposprays and bandages fly everywhere.
Suarez and Abbas run into the room with a heavy bleeder on a gurney. Everyone goes to work.
*
Sara takes her meals in the canteen designated The Cafe--by whom or when, no one knows, but Sara thinks, like most nicknames around the ship, it was probably the Captain. Who, incidentally, favors this mess as well.
"Mendez!"
Sara slides her try back before he starts eating her dinner. "Captain," she answers. He has McCoy in tow, so this is going to be a working dinner.
"Why so formal?" He makes the big shrugging gesture he does that on anyone else would be grating but on him comes off as comically charming.
"You are still the Captain, right? No one's fixed that and not sent out a memo?" She takes a bite of her chickpeas and looks him right in the eyes. He's got deep laugh lines grooved into his cheeks, marks right on the surface of his skin that he's full of buffoonery and liable to make a joke out of something you take very seriously. That combined with the scar on his cheek, Sara thinks, is the human equivalent of donning black and yellow stripes or a red carapace.
"Hey, now, watch the impertinence, doctor," McCoy snaps predictably. Sara has a marked fondness for McCoy's imprecations and nuclear temper.
"Don't make me address your shortcomings, McCoy," Sara waves her spoon at him and he clams up with his usual constipated frown. This is McCoy in his comfort zone, around people who he doesn't have to nurse or scold into the correct shape.
"I feel the need to make a dick joke, but I'll spare everyone." Kirk slaps the table with both palms. "So, the Diwali bash, how go the plans?"
Sara whips out her datapad and taps up the right file with her pinky, the only finger not covered in sauce from picking the peppers out of her dinner. The damned food machines keep adding huge chucks of green bell pepper to almost anything she orders. She'd think it was some kind of poisoning attempt, but the machines seem to hate each of the crew equally. She spins the pad around so he can look at the data.
"Did you actually talk to Reed about the assault?" McCoy regards her with his air of false aloofness. He's worried about Reed the same as she is, and he hates to admit that he can't medicate the trauma away.
"Yes, some. He's not really interested in catharsis at this stage." She cuts off when she sees that Kirk's as riveted as McCoy. Sara knows he blames himself for every single thing that goes wrong aboard ship--and that's why she likes him, because he is responsible.
"Speaking of which, the Court Martial will convene at oh eight hundred tomorrow." The Captain, snapped out of his play acting over the Diwali party pushes his chair back and walks away now that he's delivered the bit of information he actually stopped by to impart. The fact that he always chooses to give the hard news in person says pretty much all Sara needed to know about the guy. She'll admit to having serious reservations about James Kirk in charge of anything more than a pet turtle when she was assigned to the Enterprise, but pleasant surprises are, indeed, pleasant.
"Are you ready for this?" McCoy asks her. He's cut his usual routine and is stripped back to his essential self, like trees in winter, the bare frame of himself shivering in a wind that was expected but rude nonetheless.
"No, I'm not." She is as honest with McCoy as she can be and keep the fragile bits of herself inside her.
"Me, either," he sighs and rubs his chin.
*
Sara dons her formal wear like a little girl playing dress up. She sits in her seat as an Official Person and feels like someone will realize what a fraud she is any second.
"We are convened here today..." Kirk begins and no one appears to inform the room that she's not ready to stand in judgment over another person's life.
Lt. Anderson stands calmly before the senior officers of the USS Enterprise with the certainty of the profoundly insane.
Kirk reels through the charges--insubordination through to sexual assault of a fellow officer--and Anderson doesn't flinch or appear to even hear his voice. He's focused somewhere over their heads, his eyes darting around at what seems like random.
"What is your professional opinion, Dr. Mendez?" Kirk reads from the Court Martial script.
"In my professional opinion as the ship's designated Counselor, Lieutenant Anderson is unfit for duty due to a lack of mental facilities." The penalty for rape is capital while aboard a vessel during a state of war or emergency. Technically, Anderson committed his crime during a battle engagement marking it as committed during a state of war--regs are very straightforward on that. Sara cannot bring herself to put another officer to death--even if he committed a heinous crime.
McCoy, Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scott, and the heads of each of the other departments look at her with varying expressions of compassion or commiseration. They are of one mind on certain fundamental underpinnings as to how this ship is run--they do not execute their own.
"As the Captain of Starfleet vessel..." Kirk begins to read out his verdict.
Anderson will be placed into a medical coma until they can transfer him to another ship. When the drugs wear off and Anderson is back to his non-medication mental state, Starfleet will Court Martial him again and do as they see fit. That is not on Sara's conscience.
*
When Sara was in the Academy, she planned to do her allotted tour of duty then resign her commission to go to work for the Federation's civilian diplomatic and colonization wing. She ideally wanted to live off-world in a multispecies colony until she settled down back in Argentina. She always planned to retire in Argentina, home.
That was before the destruction of Vulcan. In the post-Vulcan reality of the Federation, officers like Lt. Commander Sara Mendez don't get to quietly join a Federation colony and live out the sort of meaningless, self-ordered quietude she'd always planned for herself. No. Lt. Commander Sara Mendez was stop-lossed and recommissioned in a totally different field than she'd previously served.
"You could be stuck on that old rust bucket the Venture bumpin' up against Klingon space all the live-long day, quit your bitchin'." McCoy speaks in parables and irony. He usually doesn't believe what he says, which causes many people to completely misunderstand him. McCoy is like a character in a novel but with all the explication done by a narrator absent.
"Yes, it's true, I also could have been born with my internal organs outside of my body, but I was not." She spends a lot of time in Sickbay, because her office is one of the pods that riddle off of the main Sickbay like tapioca pearls touching in clusters of sticky stars.
"Some thought experiments work better than others," he doesn't bother to look up from his charts nested one over the other on his computer screen.
"Granted. What do you think about the lotus pool, be honest." She projects the sketch of the pool into the air between them and McCoy bothers to look up and consider.
"I think as long as there's plenty of whiskey, I don't care if everyone dresses up like baboons and dances a jig."
Which means he likes it. "Ok, do you think you could keep Kirk from wearing a sari?"
McCoy begins to laugh. People are catacombs of unknowablity with a thin veneer of predictability. McCoy's laughter brushes her skin, but Sara can't mark the joke because there are too many possibilities.
*
Sara's hunched over the schematic for the repairs in Botany when her door opens. "Come in," she says without looking up.
"Doctor."
Sara wheels around at the sound of Spock's voice. He inclines his head minutely in greeting before clasping his hands behind his back.
"Is there something I can do for you?" This is, after all, why she's on this ship.
Spock's eyes drop to her face. "The finer points of human sarcasm and innuendo often escape my apprehension, doctor, I do not know if you jest at the unlikelihood that I would seek you out in your official capacity or if you query whether I have a request that you could fulfill that, while not for me strictly speaking, will still be of some benefit to my preferred mental state."
Sara leans back in her chair and folds her hands in her lap. She's had more than a passing experience with Vulcans. For example, she can easily ascertain how Spock is not completely Vulcan. "Spock, I know you're making fun of me, and I also know you'd never broach personal protocol to seek counseling from me, but I assume there's someone else you'd like me to talk to."
"Indeed. Your perceptions are...astute, and forgive me for saying this, for a human."
"I am a human, so I'm not insulted that you make that distinction." Sometimes she feels like talking to Spock is like engaging the tide.
He inclines his head to indicate he understands. "It has come to my attention that the Captain...is not functioning optimally since the Court Martial of Lieutenant Anderson."
"That's not surprising. It was traumatic for us all."
"Yourself and Doctor McCoy came to as logical and emotionally satisfying a conclusion as was possible in the circumstances."
High praise indeed. Yes, they had conspired in a way that would get them off the execution hook, true enough, but that is part of the trauma.
"He takes everything hard," Sara responds. Spock doesn't ask her to clarify, they both know she means Kirk. "I'll see what I can do, but it's not like he takes me seriously."
"If I may make a suggestion?" He pauses until she nods. "The Captain has...expectations of intimacy. Perhaps when you broach this topic with him it would be preferable if you were to address him by his given rather than his surname."
"He'll talk to me if I call him Jim?"
"Affirmative." Spock salutes and leaves.
"I could've told you THAT!" McCoy shouts from Sickbay.
"What did I tell you about eavesdropping!" Sara yells back, no real annoyance behind it, because McCoy's as tight-lipped as it gets about patients' medical info, and everyone on the ship is his patient.
"It isn't eavesdropping if you leave the damned door open!" he shouts back. Her com beeps to life and she engages it. "I hate to say this, but if you can work some therapy mumbo-jumbo on him, it wouldn't hurt about right now," McCoy says in a concerned tone over the link.
*
The fact of the matter is that Sara is grossly, grossly ill-trained for this job. She is, in fact, a xenobiologist.
"Get out!" Jim Kirk says when she mentions this to him over dinner in The Cafe. "You are not."
She can't help but laugh at his theatrics. "Believe it or not, it's true."
"So, you're like a PhD doctor, not like a doctor doctor?" he asks before sipping his juice.
"No, technically, I am a doctor doctor, just not so much for you. I can take care of you, of course, I mean, I'm getting the swing of it..."
"Remind me to request Suarez the next time I get my ass blasted off..."
"...but mostly I'm an alien doctor as you would say."
"Huh," he pokes at his jello. "So you're an alien shrink." His smile slides around his face like he's not sure which kind of happiness he wants to express.
"No. I passed the Deep Space Counseling segment at the Academy and sat the board." She rubs her eyelids and wonders if she's going to admit this to him, but if she offers intimacy maybe he'll return it--that's the way lives entangle, one secret for another until people are so wrapped up in each other they don't know which bits originally belonged to themselves or to the other person. "I was seeing someone who was specializing in psyche and I took all his classes with him, as a togetherness experiment."
Kirk bounces the back of his fork against his plate a few times as he watches her with narrowed eyes. "What you're saying is that you took the classes that lead you to this post to get laid?"
She knows him well enough to know that he will approve of that angle, but that's not exactly the case. "No, worse, I was disgustingly in love."
"Oh!" Kirk laughs with his entire body, an object with enough gravity to cause the entire room to bend to him, to alter their own orbits to spin his way. "That's just sad! You want to play house and end up on a five year mission in fuck-all sector. Starfleet strikes again." He settles back down, leans on his elbows and cracks his neck. "Where's Romeo now? Writing prescriptions in San Fran while sipping vintage Pinot?"
This is another moment where she can bury her truths and hide them behind her breast bone, where she can be a discrete self--Sara Beatrice Mendez--and keep the riot and calamity that is Jim Kirk outside of her.
"He was on the Farragut." Sara chooses to let Jim in. She believes everyone on the Enterprise makes that choice at one time or another, literally or figuratively or both.
*
The Diwali party is a fiasco. Considering the normal state of affairs aboard the Enterprise it takes a lot for something to be considered such.
It's when Jim catches himself on fire that shit begins to get really out of hand.
Sara is chatting with Fatima...ok, she's gossiping like crazy with Fatima about McCoy, which is a hobby for most of the medical staff, when Jim knocks over one of the lamps. He decides slapping the oil fire out with his hand is an excellent course of action and pretty soon the veil of his sari is ablaze and Pavel is screaming in Russian and Hikaru comes to the rescue with pineapple juice and about then Sara loses sight of the action since she's not getting up unless the ship's attacked.
"How do you think he got the scar?" Fatima asks. She's also clearly not running over to get involved in the Kirk madness, she sips her bright green drink and regards Sara over the rim. Fatima has her hair down for once, thick black roiling down her shoulders and over her back. She's also wearing a sari, cerise overlaid with gold against her glowing amber skin.
"That is a question," Sara muses. She knows, though. Jim told her in off-handed confidence, speaking in his late night coal ember voice, the weariness of a minor god in his body as he shook out supplement tablets into his palm because of a few more missed meals. He flew face first through a glass window at ten. He had tried to repair the damage himself with polymer so he wouldn't have to deal with his stepfather's wrath. One of the pock marks in Jim Kirk's life, one of the many petty tragedies that he mostly caused himself when looked at straight on, but that Starfleet is deeply responsible for on a certain level.
When they hear the requisite "DAMMIT JIM!" bellowed from inside the scrum, both women light up with laughter to match the lamps burning all around them.
*
Deep space is boring. They hammer that into you at the Academy. There're a whole battery of classes and seminars to prepare you for this--what to take aboard ship, workshops on taking up music, art, calligraphy, endless admonitions to save leisure reading until you're off-planet.
No one listens to this.
Sara had thought she was going to get aboard ship and be woefully inadequate at her job. She lived in terror that an entire starship crew would swiftly spiral down into madness and unresolved emotions because the sum total of her clinical experience was the simulations she'd undergone in the Academy.
The truth of the matter is that Sara is a typical Enterprise crew member.
Also, she soon learns, that being Ship's Counselor pretty much consists of running interference between the other senior officers who always seem to be in the middle of some kind of sibling-esque power struggle.
"Help, help, sanctuary!" Jim sweeps into her office and locks the door, bounds over to the door to Sickbay and locks it too. He dramatically presses his back to the wall and points a finger at her. "SANCTUARY!"
"Are you guys playing laser tag again?" Sara turns back to her Saturnalia planning.
"I feel that your attitude lacks the adequate level of concern a request for sanctuary should elicit." Jim crosses his arms over his chest.
"My office isn't a medieval church, Jim, it's a medpod." So if they go with the ancient Rome theme, unfortunate phalluses might appear all over the ship...she knows this crew.
"Are we having a trivia night this week?" Jim peers over her shoulder. "Oh damn, Saturnalia? Have I told you lately that I love you?"
"Right, I had forgotten about the sexual harassment seminar I need to wedge in before we rendezvous with the next supply ship..."
"Boob groping is not sexual harassment..."
"Excellent example for me to employ in the seminar. I think I'll also use the example of your unbirthday spankings."
"Hey, I didn't get any complaints!"
"Because everyone complained to me, James."
He shuts up. Thr formal name quelling tactic Sara picked up from McCoy. Along with her recently acquired taste for minty alcoholic beverages.
"Who were you running away from, anyway?" Sara looks up at Jim who is lounging against her desk with his arms crossed over his chest.
"Spock."
Sara pushes her stool back and looks up at him. "Really?"
"I might have shoved him into a lift and sent him up several decks for no reason." He shrugs one shoulder.
"No reason being that you were bored." She grabs the spare stool and rolls it back and forth in invitation. "Sit down, querido, help me with these plans."
"Didn't know you spoke non-Standard dialects," Jim rolls his stool up and starts screwing with the screen.
Sara thinks about explaining to Jim that xenobiology called to her because she spoke Spanish at home and Standard elsewhere, that she was always fully aware of difference and similarity, of seeing the world in terms of them-us and always wanting to not have to, to get to see the universe as Us like Jim probably did. Sara became a xenologist to understand the us of other species like she always wanted to be part of the us of Jim's world. She wonders if Jim would understand if she explained to him that in ways that thread through her body like veins and arteries that Jim is as much them as Spock is.
"Yeah, of course, my family are traditionalists. Don't get my dad started on the Federation." She makes the disapproving tongue click she learned from her grandmother. Jim laughs appropriately, but he also catalogs her face in a way that says I know you're not saying something important, it's ok, I'm ready when you want to tell me.
"It seems like you could have picked a less penis-filled holiday if you wanted to keep the sexual harassment in check, babe." Suddenly a huge penis floats across the computer screen. She thinks he only hit one button to make it happen which means it's a pre-programmed subroutine. She laughs--who wouldn't?
*
Sara didn't become the Enterprise Activities Director overnight. She kind of stumbled into it. It's her version of a hobby, really. She brought her datasticks and her violin instructional vids and the instrument she's had since she was eight nestled in the worn velvet that's been its home for more than two hundred years. She brought her grief and her sharp, surprising homesickness.
She recognizes after her third huge bout of mucus and tears and constricted throat that maybe her tears weren't for La Plata but for her one Vulcan death. She experienced the staggering loss of colleagues and acquaintances along with the entire Fleet. But just like every death is the same, each one is unique. In the overwhelming loss of so many individuals, Sara's loss was directed, specific--the loss of the focal point of her world. Space had been less of a decision and more of a way of allowing others to direct her post-Vulcan life, the one she neither chose nor anticipated.
She learned through her own grief how to touch other people's grief. They all shared the Vulcan experience, and this bound them, the eggs in the dough of the Enterprise, of Starfleet. Through this revelation, when she allowed it to creep up on her and force her to take three personal days in a row, she stumbled over her future role in the crew.
Sara sent out a memo to invite crew members to say Kaddish with her while in the throes of three too many drinks and self-indulgent viewing of holovids from her last vacation. People came. All of the senior staff came, Jim sporting a kippah in a way that looked natural, experienced. Hebrew slid out of Nyota's mouth with an ease that brought Sara's tears. Crying with others turns out to be cathartic for everyone involved.
The rash act of inviting others into her grieving spiraled. She decided that if she organized one religious event, she should instigate others. This lead from prayer meetings to Friday night social activities, to becoming the de facto event planner on the ship.
All of this, as it turns out, is opportune since no one comes to her for direct counseling unless mandated for their annual evaluation. She interacts with the crew in a manner they find more organic--over cocktails between Romulan attacks and warping away from hostile planets.
*
"I'm registering my official complaint about this right now." Doctor Leonard McCoy taps violently on his datapad and scowls.
"What do you think I'm going to do besides sign off on the standard fit for duty form?" Sara cuts McCoy a look to quell him.
"Oh, I don't know, ask me about my shitty childhood and scrape me over a grater about my divorce."
"I already know about your divorce, and your secrets are you own, don't worry." He has very few secrets, but she doesn't like to deconstruct other people's self-delusions for them. "Are you coming to the show on Friday night?"
She hands him her datapad and he endorses it with his thumb print and retinal scan. "Why would I do a damned fool thing like that? Fridays are the only day I can guarantee that Jim will leave me the hell alone."
"So you'll MC the poetry slam, then?"
"Oh, alright, but I'm gonna have a few drinks on board by then." He pulls his flask out of his pocket.
"How do you think Crewman Singh is doing with the post-traumatic shock?" She figures they could get at least a little work in before he starts rattling out his litany of complaints--it amuses Sara that of all the officers on the Enterprise the one she comes closest to being a real therapist for is the one who claims to hate psychiatry.
"Like hell, that's how. That kid's rattled like a steel drum. I thought about forcing him to take the drugs as his superior officer, but I realized that ethically it crossed a line." He looks up at her with a face that's laid bare of artifice, this is the face of a man who came to medicine to ease pain and sit by death beds. McCoy is the modern version of the doctor on horseback in the snow moving from battlefield to battlefield with the troops, weeping with the survivors and never saying die.
"I'll talk to him." She reaches out and grips McCoy's hand for a second.
**
Obviously, the sexual harassment seminar is an outtake of this. Which will eventually happen.