fic: accidents (star trek)
accidents
FOUR WAYS THIS NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED
also known as, four clichés to get you into bed
star trek. the problem with sex and love and every transgression in between is the simple lack of a step-by-step recipe to follow. christine chapel; christine/mccoy. rated nc-17. 8303 words.
notes: UGH. this fic! um, i can't even put into words as to how relieved i am to have finished this ridiculous, ridiculous story, haha. basically, one day i was surfing around the interwebs and LJ and apparently there is such a thing as a cliche_bingo and while i still don't even get what that means, i thought "oh hey, wouldn't it be awesome to jam a fic full of all those hilarious fic cliches"? so, um. i did that? and i'm sort of warring between extreme amusement and embarrassment of this and figured i'd post it in my bid to be rid of it, becuase ugh, be gone foul beast, haha. ummm, vague spoilers for the movie? and by movie, i mean the recent reboot since that's the only incarnation of Star Trek i am familiar with. i know, i know - fandom sacrilege. apologies. anyway, enjoy the cliche and the porn, yo!
i've got one friend, laying across from me
i did not choose him, he did not choose me
we’ve got no chance of recovery
sharing hospital
joy and misery
(HOSPITAL BEDS; cold war kids)
They say the shortest distance from Point A to Point B is a straight line.
When it comes to people, when it comes to crossing that bridge from stranger to acquaintance, from stranger to something more, it never works that way. People don’t just meet and fall in love. People don’t shake hands and in the same breath of an introduction also say: yes I would like to spend the rest of my life with you I love you. Christine is sure of this.
She is also sure that the terrain of relationships (such a dirty, dirty word for the flighty and the commitment-phobic, for those that curse monogamy and marriage with equal vehemence) it is never that easily navigated.
The unexpected and the unintended trump all.
It’s like this, she thinks: humans have inertia too, they gain momentum, they are subject to the same values and rules of physics as any other collection of atoms suspended in gravity. You travel in the same circles and you are bound to meet. You run about the same sphere of thought and influence and you’re bound to collide. These accidents of human interaction happen all the time.
This really isn’t all that different.
1.
THAT ONE TIME AT THE ACADEMY
The Academy had made sense.
She had been young and ambitious and the recruiter she met with had persuasively emphasized words like adventure! and space!, and she had liked that. So she enlisted.
This whole nurse thing though? That came as a bit of a surprise.
Christine had always excelled at the sciences, and while she herself wasn’t exactly patient (pun completely and utterly unintended) she was good with people. And it wasn’t that the idea of being elbow-deep in gore and ropes of intestines and parts you’re never supposed to see let alone touch exactly compelled or repelled her, but the nursing track just seemed more and more logical and likely for her. Over time she had convinced herself it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to have drive and ambition but with no goal to attach to the twin motivations, but now she had this, she had potential for something horribly adult like a career.
“That’s the thing that no one tells you,” her roommate says, cross-legged and Zen on the strip of floor between their two beds. “Being a grown-up and having a job and all that other…pedantic shit - it totally sucks.”
-
They meet in the library.
It is the midterm crunch and the entire library is packed. Christine squeezes herself between the shelves in the back corner, a small strip of wall with her back to it and a collection of books scattered at her feet. Anatomy. Physiology. One about a study involving rats and alien fetuses and humans and after two re-reads she still doesn't quite get what the point of it was.
It’s not that she’s a procrastinator per se, but rather that she likes to take things up to their limit. Her index finger runs over lines of text and she scribbles down notes in the margins and in a notebook balanced on a separate stack of books next to her.
“Planning on sharing?” a gruff voice asks above her.
Christine raises her head quickly and bangs the back of it against the wall, hard. “Agh,” is what she says, some odd jumbling of “ow” and “ah” and maybe “ugh.” The guy narrows his eyes and doesn’t even try to disguise the fact he sort of wants to laugh at her.
“You a med student?” he asks. “I think I would’ve remembered seeing a girl like you around.”
“No,” she grumbles. She rubs at the back of her head and lets the book in her lap slip closed. “Nursing.”
He snorts. At that, she raises her chin and she can already feel that defiant set of her mouth, the clenched teeth and she sort of glares, and right. Leonard McCoy.
Christine knows McCoy with the same familiarity she knows any other classmate - they’ve all been absorbed in the cult of medicine, and whereas she is to be a nurse, he is a doctor. But she’s heard of him, everyone has more or less heard of him. Rumor reports that at one point the good doctor had been married and now he’s broke and divorced and that’s why he’s here. Looking at him now, the low lighting of the back shelves of the library and the arrogant and vaguely annoyed lines of his face she decides it wouldn’t be all that surprising if it was true.
“That a problem?” she bites off, and she doesn’t really get it. She doesn’t get why her default reaction to this relative stranger is antagonism, but it is. Maybe it’s the way he’s standing over her. Maybe it’s the way his face twisted into something holier-than-thou the second she said nursing. Or maybe it’s the swelling bump on the back of her head and the pressure of things, like, passing exams and not failing and maybe it was just the smarmy way he looked her up and down when he first spoke to her.
He laughs lightly. “Not at all,” he says. “Though I’d consider working on that bedside manner of yours.” His smile this time is full-blown and he’s leaning against the shelves and her face softens, maybe a little.
Because here’s the thing: he’s hot. Like, exaggeration and hyperbole-free, he’s a good-looking son of a bitch. But it’s not like Jim Kirk, Academy Legend, where it’s glaringly obvious, almost to the point of being counter-productive. Christine has always been able to appreciate a fine specimen of the male population, and okay, McCoy is certainly one of them.
She clears her throat. “Was there something you needed?”
He arches on eyebrow and then he leans down. His right arm brushes against her left knee and he grabs the first book off the stack next to her.
“I’ll be sure to bring it back, Nurse…?”
“Chapel,” she says. “Christine. Christine Chapel. And it’s not nurse yet. I sort of have to pass the exams first.”
“Well,” and he looks on the verge of laughing again. “I’ll be sure to return this to you, Not-Quite-Nurse Chapel.”
Christine rolls her eyes.
-
People are like anything else - patterns inevitably emerge.
Christine sticks to her same study schedule and haunts the same corner of the library and McCoy picks up on this. A begrudging friendship forms, if only out of routine habit, out of the shared studying and the comparing of notes and diagrams.
It’s nice. It’s not that Christine has ever wanted for friends, it’s not that she walks alone or hides behind her studies, but it’s nice. McCoy’s different.
She’ll call him “old man” and he’ll feign offense. He’ll make sexist remarks and jabs she is never sure if he means or not, but she’ll school him in the basics of feminist theory all the same. They try and one-up each other with tales of past anecdotes and stupid, drunken decisions. They talk about the Old South and whether bourbon trumps whiskey and they talk about that boy she thought she was going to marry that one time and he talks about that woman he actually did marry, and her roommate mocks her.
“I’m going to come home some night and you’re going to have, like, a stethoscope hanging on the doorknob,” she said, once.
Christine had frowned.
“That doesn’t even make sense. Why would we have a stethoscope?”
The roommate waved her hand like some dead prophet or two-bit gypsy fortune teller.
“Wait and see. You wait and see.”
And of course she was right. She was always right.
-
It starts at the bar and it ends in her dorm room.
It is a Friday, it is the weekend, it is springtime and whatever that means for the majority of Starfleet. Somewhere between her second drink and her fourth, she runs into McCoy.
After that it goes a little fuzzy.
After that -
Oh God. She is drunk. Drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk. Drunk. Her tongue feels dry and sandpapery in her mouth and she can’t seem to stop licking at her lips.
“It’s a good thing your name isn’t Chris,” she hears herself saying. “Or Christopher. But it’d probably have to be Christopher in order for your name to be Chris. No one names their child just Chris. At least I don’t think they should. But I once knew a girl and her name was Shelly and it was just Shelly, it wasn’t, like, a nickname for anything. She was just Shelly. And I thought that was sort of cruel of her parents, right? To give their child a nickname instead of a name-name. Chris is a nickname, but Christopher is a name-name.”
McCoy is staring at her and her glass is sweating in her hand.
“What in the goddamn hell you even talking about?”
“Your name. It’s Leonard,” and oh Jesus Christ, her voice has taken on that sing-song lilt to it. She is drunk. She needs to put this glass down and never pick up a glass or a bottle or anything even vaguely alcoholic again in the future. “And I was just saying it’s a good thing it’s not Christopher. Because Christopher and Christine? Yuck.” She sticks out her tongue at that and her face twists into the kind of face a person would make if on the verge of vomiting. “Chris and Chris? Chris and Christine? We’d sound like some awful brother and sister singing duo. Or something. We’d probably sing about picnics or carnivals and only really, really old people would listen to us.”
McCoy smirks at this.
“You talk like we’re some kind of item or something. Christine,” he makes a point of saying. He takes a swig from his bottle.
She sneers. “And you talk like some sort of inbred redneck more often than not, but you don’t hear me complaining about it.”
He only scoffs at that.
“Besides, we are a partnership in a way. You’re a doctor, I’m a nurse. That sort of makes us a team. Right?”
He drinks to that.
-
It’s near closing time when she actually says it:
“I think we should probably have sex tonight.”
McCoy, to his credit, merely quirks an eyebrow up. “Blunt,” he says. “I like that.”
She narrows her eyes. “I don’t like you. I don’t like you much at all. I just want to make that clear.”
He smirks and polishes off the rest of his drink in one swallow. “Crystal.”
-
She discovers that when sex is planned, when it is spoken of as they more of less spoke of it - "I think we should probably have sex tonight," she had said, and it was never like he disagreed; his agreement was unspoken, his agreement with the plan was him sticking his tongue down her throat at the first available moment, not that she hadn't welcomed it, but still - it's strange. That's her point here. Sex with designs such as they had, sex with people you don't exactly care for, is odd. Almost like a business transaction, she thinks, except not at all.
His mouth is still hot and wet and right against her throat and she likes it, she likes it more than she really thought she would. Her hands grab at the muscles of his upper back, the chunk of hard flesh just above and connected to his shoulders, and dig in, sharp. He hisses somewhere under the hinge of her jaw and she bumps her hips against his. They're not the right height, she's too short, and her hips can't meet his the way she wants them too.
“This is stupid - this is so fucking stupid,” she mumbles into his mouth.
There is one breathy note of a chuckle from him before his teeth slide against the edge of her bottom lip and his tongue follows suit.
“Don’t look at me,” he says. “This was all your idea. I’m just playin’ my part.”
-
He casually eats her out. However it is one does that casually. He takes his shirt off halfway through. She watches the ripple to his back as his hands flex against her thighs, hold her hips, her legs open to him. He licks at her slowly.
She had not worn a bra that night (it’s almost like she planned this, she thinks) and he pulls the front of her top down and open as his tongue works her clit, as his tongue staggers down and plays with her entrance. Her knee bumps the wall and she moans, loud and plaintive. She grabs the side of his head.
He laughs straight into her.
He bites at her hipbone, her stomach as he crawls back up and his mouth is sloppy against her own. He thrusts fruitlessly against her, his cock hard against her thigh and she spreads her legs wider for him to fit between them.
McCoy slips a hand between them and brushes the head of his cock against her slit, teasing. Christine makes a small hiccup of a sound.
The lips of her cunt part for him. “Farther,” he says, and then, “yeah, that’s it, girl.” The muscles of her inner thighs ache a little as she stretches a little more, fit around the bracket of his hips a little more, a parenthesis for whatever idea he, this, represents.
He feels good inside of her. He moves fast, rough, and she pushes back with everything she’s got. Her heels skid on the sheets as she fights for purchase against him and McCoy bites at the curve of skin that connects jaw to ear and it’s then that she comes.
It’s a surprise and she wonders how much of this she’ll remember in the morning.
(When he comes, he says, “oh God Christine,” all on one stretched out breath and his body is heavy and limp on top of hers).
-
After:
“I still don’t like you very much,” she mutters into her pillow.
McCoy snorts. “Yeah, well that doesn’t really seem to be a problem, does it?”
His body is warm next to hers and it is impossible for the two of them to fit in the small bed without touching. Her body is still damp with sweat, and so is his, and the sheets tangle and cling to them both.
“I don't know how to make this work,” she confesses, mumbles.
“Make what work?” McCoy asks. His voice is already stained rough with sleep.
“This. You, me, whatever this is. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
He yawns.
“Don’t sweat it,” he says. “It’ll come.”
-
She can picture exactly how this conversation will go with her roommate come morning. They will both be hungover, there will be brunch, and Christine will push her mash of eggs or potatoes or whatever around her plate with the tines of her fork until guilt or embarrassment or the simple desperate need to confess an OH MY FUCKING GOD THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED moment to a friend or confidante gets the better of her and she will say:
“I fucked the hot doctor last night.”
“You fucked the hot doctor last night.”
Christine will scrape her fork against her plate on accident and wince at the resounding screech.
“Yeah. That actually happened. ‘I fucked the hot doctor,’” she parrots.
“Christine. What. Christine. You really fucked the hot doctor?”
“We were really drunk,” she will say by way of an answer. “Like. Really. Drunk.”
“This is such a big deal!” her roommate will squeal. “So, like, what now? What happens next? And - wait. I thought you said you didn’t even like him. Or was that a different hot doctor?” Her face will draw down in a frown that just as quickly disappears. “Who cares. This is such awesome news. This is the best brunch ever. Details. Spill.”
“I - I don’t know. I was drunk and so was he, and he’s hot, right? It just sort of happened and then it was sort of morning and then he was sort of gone and - ”
“Wait,” the roommate will say and hold up a hand. “He left? Asshole.”
Christine will shake her head. “It’s probably for the best, you know? We got that out of our system. This is a good thing. This is definitely a good thing.”
“Whatever. I still want details. I bet he has the biggest - ”
Actually, that is exactly how their conversation goes.
-
She wakes just before eight o’clock.
Next to the bed, McCoy rummages in the half-dark for his clothes and Christine keeps her eyes half-closed feigning sleep.
Later that week, there will be the library. Later they will talk but she doesn’t imagine it will ever be about this.
She’s right.
-
2.
THAT ONE TIME WITH THE TOXIN
She doesn’t die. She thinks that’s pretty important.
So, the Enterprise. They survive, and that’s all sorts of “beat the odds” awesome, but then, things go on. There is all that other shit to attend to and all other sorts of mundane disasters that require them.
It’s then she realizes that McCoy is sort of a big deal. For one thing, he becomes the Chief Medical Officer.
For another, she becomes Head Nurse. So, right. Maybe she’s sort of a big deal too.
Maybe she had been speaking the truth, way back when at the bar, completely sauced, when she spoke of a partnership between them.
Working side by side a tacit companionship is born whether wanted or wished. Her own hands mirror his own and she can predict his actions even before he can. She does not know if the same can be said of him.
She doesn’t like that the thought smarts more than it should.
-
It’s a normal day, and maybe that should have been the first indication of trouble.
Christine walks into sickbay, and it takes her a moment to realize this is the least professional moment of her professional career. There is a patient on the table and all that surround him are head-to-toe in Hazmat. Christine throws a bare hand over her bare mouth.
“Oh fuck,” she mumbles.
“Damnit, Nurse Chapel,” McCoy barks from behind his mask. Only his eyes are visible through the Plexiglas panel, and that’s really enough. “Get the hell out, woman!”
What happens next: she turns to leave, and that’s innocuous enough. What she had not planned on was the rookie nurse behind her and the tray of what she can only describe as green, gelatinous goo, and what she had planned on even less was the subsequent head-on collision with said rookie nurse and the splattering of said green, gelatinous goo all over her person.
No one speaks, but she’s pretty sure she heard McCoy say something involving the words “mother” and “fucker.” She chooses to ignore that and instead focuses on all the, well, green.
A nurse Christine cannot recognize, decked out in the same protective gear as everyone else, grabs her by the arm and hoists her up.
“Let’s go disinfect you,” she says.
-
“Am I going to die?” she finds herself asking as they walk. The green goo has left a film on her skin and it tingles in its wake. Not really a bad tingle, she thinks, and she shivers a little. “Am I going to die?” she repeats, because this is how it happens, right? One wrong turn, one stupid, ill-advised decision and that’s it - you’re dead.
“What was that green stuff? What was wrong with that guy? What’s he have? Is he dying? And what the fuck is all over me?”
The nurse clucks her tongue. “We don’t know. He was quarantined when we found him on his planet so we’re taking the appropriate precautionary measures.”
“So it could be nothing?” Christine asks in earnest. They stop in front of the shower stall and the nurse crosses her arms impatiently.
“It could be nothing.” The water turns on cold and full-blast and a faint green color collects at Christine’s feet.
It’s not nothing.
-
The first sign that should have indicated that things were far from the status quo was the fact that Christine was suddenly aware of just how good-looking the entire crew of the Enterprise was. Even Jasper, the custodian with the multiple missing teeth - he had his merits. He probably had really strong shoulders from pushing that mop around all day.
But it wasn’t just Jasper. It was everyone.
And the second sign. The second sign. She can’t really remember what the second sign was supposed to be and maybe that is the second sign, this whole distracted business. It’s like she has the attention-span of a small, small child, but the thoughts of some sex-craved pervert.
She doesn’t think there’s a third sign.
“Dr. McCoy would like to see you now,” the nurse says, and whoa. So, she doesn’t swing that way, but if she did? This chick’s got a hell of a rack. She wonders dimly if she is too old and any kind of lesbian-esque encounter can no longer be chalked up to just a heterosexual experimenting. She does like the penis though. Cock. Dick. Pecker. Fuck.
“What…” Christine drawls.
“Dr. McCoy, Nurse Chapel. He would like to see you.”
Christine smirks as she walks to his office. She bets he’d like to see her. She bets he’d like to -
“Oh, Christ on crutches,” he says. “Get in here.”
“What’s wrong?” she asks and does her voice always sound like that?
“You’re infected, damnit, that’s what’s wrong.”
She sobers for a second. “Wait. What? What - what is it?”
They like to say that doctors make the worst patients, and maybe the same can be said for nurses, who knows. Maybe it’s the curse to be carried of the medical profession. But McCoy stands there, all hands on hips and he stammers out things like “alien,” which isn’t that surprising, and “er, sex, ahem, drive,” and well, that sort of is, and then he just clears his throat, and then he’s spitting out:
“Son of bitch what I’m saying is that your…libido has been significantly…” and he trails off again, and finally ends with one word: “amplified.”
Christine stares for a moment. There’s half a smile trying at her teeth and the pads of her fingers are borderline electrified. She’s sure of that. She’s sure it’s taking way too long for these words to properly process. She’s sure -
“You’re basically saying I’m, like, bionically horny?”
She thinks he’s blushing. Which is sort of a feat in itself, but she’s not really in a state to appreciate it. Instead she thinks flushed, she thinks flushed skin, she thinks skin, no clothes -
“No,” he says, “that’s what you’re saying, sugar.” He takes a deep breath. “We need to talk practicality here. We don’t got a vaccine, though lord knows the pharmaceutical market would love to get their hands on you right now.” She thinks she’d like him to get his hands on her, but that’s a different story and she’s sort of impressed at her restraint for keeping the thought caged behind her teeth. Teeth. Bite. Fuck fuck fuck.
“I’ll be fine,” she insists.
He arches an eyebrow. “Get to your quarters,” he says. “Can’t have you tartin’ up the sickbay.”
“I’ll be fine,” she repeats, and when she turns to leave she might cock her hip, she might sway a little more than necessary.
Whatever. She’s got great legs.
-
It’s the third time she brings herself off that she gets it: this is so not enough.
It’s too much, it’s just too much, and she’s left her room before she even really considered the action or more importantly, the consequences.
She walks the hallway and tries valiantly not to catch the eye of anyone who dares passes, because she’s not stupid. And she really doesn’t want to jump a stranger. It’s muscle memory that guides her more than anything, and she finds herself outside his office still formulating the greatest pick-up line in the history of sexual advances. She opens the door.
What she says is:
“I can’t take it anymore you need to fuck me right now. Please.”
McCoy takes a moment and his jaw clicks like maybe he’s clenching his teeth.
“You might want to close the door first,” he drawls.
The door clicks behind Christine. She takes a deep and steadying breath, and so much for whatever kama sutra seduction techniques she had been hatching in her head. “Look,” she says, “I am basically crawling out of my skin. You either need to fuck me or sedate me. Doctor.”
McCoy only gapes at her.
“Oh my God,” she says. “You’re seriously considering sedating me?”
“I got to admit, the idea does have its merits,” he grouses.
She waves a hand in the air furiously.
“Okay. Here’s the deal. It’s not like we haven’t done this before, and you managed to get me off then, and I was drunk, like, really, just wasted and you still managed to make me come, so that’s saying something, right? And whatever this…toxin is that has gotten into my system, it clearly has expedited that, at least based on my own experimentation, and that was just with my own hand - ”
“You need to stop talking,” McCoy grits out.
It's like this: she's practically liquid between her legs and her skin feels so tight and hot and flushed she's positive she looks like some tragic fever victim or porn star or some strange combination of the two. And she's standing there, in front of him, basically begging him to have sex with her. If she wasn't completely blown out of her mind right now - blown, the word blown makes her think cock makes her think mouth makes her think him makes her think his cock her mouth - she'd maybe, no she'd definitely, be humiliated, but whatever. She thinks she's about to fall over any minute or maybe just spontaneously combust and that would be bad, that would be gross. That would be a mess far more difficult and horrifying for him to clean up than whatever state it is she's in right now and whatever it is she needs from him.
"Do not make me beg," she says, but it sort of sounds like she's begging already.
The look McCoy gives her is full of something she doesn't understand or she's just choosing not to understand, but she thinks it's what they call "bedroom eyes" in all those god-awful novels her mother used to keep around the house.
"Get over here," he says, and his voice is kind of hoarse, his voice is the sort of thing they probably write about in those god-awful books her mother used to keep around the house.
She does. Her knees feel honest-to-god weak, but she walks around to his side of the desk and just stands there. He's still seated. There are still charts open on his desk and there are three empty mugs of what she imagines was once coffee. He places a hand just above the swell of her knee and she can't help it, she moans, just a little. And, okay. There's enough of her left in there to reason that this is embarrassing, embarrassing for the both of them, but it's not like he's the one pleading to be fucked.
She swallows hard and his hand just rests there, four fingers behind the concave curve of her knee and his thumb on her thigh. His hand is hot, her skin is hot and without thinking she spreads her legs, a little.
Christine watches his throat instead of his eyes. His Adam's apple bobs once, twice, and then he raises the hand on her leg and stands up.
He pushes her against the desk and his fingers toy with the elastic edge of her panties. And she's panting, isn't she? That's her? Her cheeks are already flushed so it's not like he'd notice her blushing, but it really, really suddenly doesn't matter when he presses his fingers against the crotch and makes this small, falling gasp noise. She's wet, like, soaking wet and maybe he's just getting that now. She had thought he was more knowledgeable of this toxin than she was, but maybe not. Maybe he hadn't really understood the word desperate when she said it, but she thinks he gets it now.
She knows he gets it now, if only based on the rush he adopts. He pulls at the damp crotch of her panties and just as quickly slides a finger inside of her. Her hips buck and her fingers curl white-knuckled onto the edge of the desk. His thumb brushes her clit and everything feels as though it's caught in her chest.
He fingers her - and okay, okay, she thinks as two more fingers join the first, this is what I was missing earlier. He pumps her steadily, his thumb still toying her clit, and it doesn’t take long. McCoy does not kiss her, but his mouth hovers close, just over the whorl of her ear and his breathing is amplified, hitching at some points and catching at others. He twists the fingers inside of her and her hands scramble over his chest, and it’s, “yeah, yeah, don’t stop, don’t,” she murmurs over and over again. He doesn’t. He pushes his fingers deeper inside of her and increases the speed and his mouth is wet next to her ear and she wants it over her mouth.
When she comes it’s on what sounds like a cry of anguish.
“Is that enough?” he asks and it sounds like his breath or his voice is lodged somewhere in the middle of his throat.
“No,” she whines, and what part of this does he not understand? She’s not even human right now, she just needs to be filled and stay filled, and she can feel him, hard against her leg, so it’s not like he doesn’t want this too. Everyone wants this. Everyone wants to be filled and remain full.
He undoes his pants fast, pulls his cock out and pumps it once then twice. She watches, she watches and then feels her mouth shaping around the word, "Please," and that's all it takes. His hands take to the back of her thighs and she wraps her legs around him. He grunts as he slicks himself with her and he grunts again but does not enter her.
"Stand up," he says.
She does.
He turns her around and fucks her over his desk.
He pushes in hard and easy and the muscles of her stomach clench. Paperwork sticks to the damp skin of her forearms as she sprawls forward. This, she thinks, this. There's the slow burn and the stretch and this is it, everything is almost clear and bright and normal, she's her again, she thinks, this is okay, she's going to be okay, they're all going to be okay -
-
The next morning she wakes up with what she can only describe as the worst hangover in the history of ever. Her head throbs and her mouth is dry, sandpapery and harsh.
She sticks her tongue out and reaches for the water bottle next to her bed. "Yuck," she mutters under her breath.
And actually, it's not just her head. It's all of her. All of her hurts and aches in a rough and used way, and -
"Oh," she whispers. "Oh, fuck."
-
She knocks first. It takes three times before he finally yells something that sounds like, "come in."
“Um, hey,” she says and, ugh. She sounds so small and hesitant, and is this what sex does to two people? And if so, how had she not ever noticed it before?
McCoy glances up at her, silent.
“I just wanted to thank you, and uh…” she stammers and trails off.
“Don’t mention it,” he says, all gruff and all “this subject is closed, now back away slowly.”
Christine doesn’t do that. Instead she clears her throat and says, “No. Really. I, um, appreciate - fuck it. Okay. I’m just trying to say thank you, alright?”
McCoy blinks. “And I’m just sayin’ don’t mention it. Ever.”
Their eyes meet and she is the first to look away. And wow, this is a level of awkward she herself had up until now never realized could be reached. And, besides - what had she expected? She doesn’t know, and maybe that’s the problem.
3.
THAT ONE TIME ALIENS MADE US DO IT
Things go wrong. Things go really, really, amazingly wrong.
What had started as a routine evacuation operation somehow ended in her lack of consciousness and awakening in a bright room of white. The walls are bare; there is no door. There is just her. And there is McCoy.
“You think there’s a way out?” she whispers. She idly pulls at the bindings that hold their hands together.
“I’m a doctor, not a secret agent,” he hisses back. “So, no. No, I don’t think there’s a way out.
Things like this aren't supposed to happen. She doesn't think they have contingency plans for things like this, at least not for her, not for him. For the captain, maybe, but for her? No way. The likelihood of abduction was always factored in as something small, something neglible, the same odds as getting struck by lightning twice or whatever else those old wives' tales like to spin.
Christine's throat is dry and her hands are still tied to his. McCoy doesn't fidget and for some reason that surprises her.
"Are you scared?" she hears herself asking. He doesn't answer, but maybe that is his answer - acquiesce in silence. She doesn't press it. She doesn't press it for the simple reason that the idea of him being scared sort of scares her even more.
They wait. There isn't much else to do but wait when you're tied together and left in a room made of little more than blank walls and seemingly no door. Christine starts to hum. McCoy bumps her with his shoulder. She stops.
Aliens, she thinks. Fucking aliens.
-
What happens first is this: a pair of aliens (and she still has no idea what species these creatures are supposed to be, and frankly, she doesn’t really care) enter the room. The wall slides to open and the two of them enter and stand before them.
The fear she had anticipated and fought to clamp down earlier is curiously absent. So, she thinks. This is it. This is really it.
His fingers twist with hers and she jumps a little. McCoy’s hands are sweaty and so are her own and her wrists ache and his index and middle finger wrap around her pinky and ring finger.
It takes about fifteen minutes for the two aliens to make their objective clear.
They wish to study human coitus.
McCoy blanches. “Lemme get this here straight,” he stammers. His face is pale, and Christine thinks she gets what the aliens mean and she’s not half as horrified as he is. She’s not sure what that means.
“You want me,” he says, “you want me and her to - you want us to - and you want to watch?”
The aliens want to watch. Christine almost laughs. It's just ridiculous. Like, of all the things. Here, she had been envisioning some sort of awful torture contraption involving lasers or electricity or just plain old barbarism, but instead, they want her to fuck him. There are worse things imaginable, she thinks, and once again she is tempted to laugh.
"That's...almost a relief," she says. McCoy doesn't answer at first but he does snarl something unintelligible under his breath.
“Maybe for you,” he grunts, and Christine chews her bottom lip.
"Well, you know. Just close your eyes and think of England or whatever," she snaps. She doesn't really mean it. She's not really mad, she really doesn't have a right to be. If anything he's made it clear in the past that he's at least mildly sexually attracted to her, but then again there's always that feminine fear that men really are the lust-addled animals popular culture makes them out to be and they'd fuck everything and anything in a decent pair of heels. She is digressing. She is distracting herself. She is fighting like hell against insecurity and that immature self-awareness she thought she kicked with her teenage years.
“Just another day at the office,” she mutters.
McCoy’s fingers are still tight with her own.
-
And, right. So it’s not like they’ve never done this before. Granted, the first time she had been borderline blackout drunk and the second time, well, she was technically under the influence too, but still. This shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right? Just parts fitting together, just anatomy completing an expected biological function. Nothing to it. Nothing to it at all.
Except that there are a lot of somethings.
It's like this: Sex is a weapon.
She doesn't mean it in the whole Machiavelli, manipulative, hey let's advance my career or hey let's ruin your life sort of way. What she means is that it destroys things. It takes simple friendships and makes them that much more complicated. It takes lust and it adds something more, something tangible, something you can point to and say - there's my sign, there, that tells me that at some point you wanted me.
It's awful, she decides. She decides she will never have sex again. That she will be celibate. That she will be like those nuns she read about and she'll cover her head with that habit thing and walk around with a crucifix around her neck and call Jesus her man or however that works.
You know. After she lets the aliens watch.
-
He won’t look her in the eye. She’d ask him what’s wrong, but she sort of has an idea what the answer would be:
Well, darlin’. Aliens are making us fuck, and oh yeah, they like to watch.
It’s funny though. Despite her career and despite the handful of one night stands scattered throughout her adult existence, she has never looked at sex as something simple, as something scientific to be documented. If anything, it has always been on the other end of the scale, as far as possible from abstract principles like logic and reasoning and rationality. It’s the passion, it’s the lust, it’s the thing that thrums deep in the bloodstream that you couldn’t name even if you wanted to. It’s needy and it’s heady in all the ways a textbook and diagram never could be.
It makes sense then, she thinks, why this feels so off. They are on a glorified exam table and the room is bright, entirely white. Everything that makes them who they are (and is there even a they to speak of? she wonders) has been stripped away and all that’s left are the fundamentals that make this the same for everyone. She doesn’t want that. She doesn’t want that at all and he shouldn’t want that either.
So she kisses him.
-
It's not that the sex is bad. In fact, it almost feels sort of good. Christine has never considered herself an exhibitionist, and after this, she really doubts she ever would, but there's something to be said in the knowledge that the two of them, together, are worth watching.
It's simple missionary. Her knees are raised and she thinks the word gynecological and fights down a hysteric laugh and like the first time, McCoy fits right and firm between her legs. Her hands grab at his ass to pull him in deeper and she's not wet enough and it burns more than it should. Her breath catches once he is all the way in, once he pauses.
His breath moves the hair next to her ear. "You alright there?" he murmurs.
Christine squeezes her eyes shut and raises her hips to fight against his own. And there's her answer, she thinks. That's her answer. Because if anything he taught her that first - sometimes words won't do, sometimes there are too many words, sometimes words aren't all we've got - and she moves her hips first up and then down and his own mirror hers. The rhythm is shaky, choppy and she leaves her hands resting on his ass, light, barely touching. He has an arm wrapped around her waist and his face is buried in the crook of her neck. She buries her face in his, and from this angle all she sees is skin, all she sees is him. Her eyes flutter open and shut and open and shut and she can forget the wall of glass that surrounds them, she can forget the eyes and she can forget, almost, she can almost forget that they are not alone, that she is not alone.
She does not come but he does. She feels him hot, wet inside of her and when he does come the only sign of it is the tensing of his body, the tight set of his shoulders and upper back and the gasp of air that gets lost in the angles that connect her face and neck and shoulder. And then it’s, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she doesn’t know how to make him stop. She presses her lips to the underside of his chin once, twice, and again and he is silent.
Christine relaxes into the table. She takes a deep breath. That wasn't so bad, she thinks. That wasn't -
-
Jim Kirk always has impeccable timing. Or maybe it’s Scotty. Christine isn’t sure who to credit for the whole here one minute and gone the next thing, but she’ll take it.
When she looks up, the inside of the Enterprise has never been such a welcome sight. Well, it would be more welcome if she was clothed. And if McCoy was clothed. And if he wasn’t on top of her.
She hears his laugh before she sees him.
Kirk stands over them and his grin is huge. “Well, well, well, what have we here?”
Chekhov is backlit against the white light of the hall and he waves.
“Hello!”
McCoy gives them both the finger.
4.
THAT ONE TIME WE MEANT IT
The thing she forgets sometimes is that space is serious. The limitless black emptiness it presents can be terrifying, but sometimes she slips and she forgets.
Things go wrong all the time. It just seems more often than not, they - the doctors and the nurses, Christine, him - are left to reap and sort out the consequences.
Death and space go hand in hand. Of all the places to disappear, this is the most obvious. Science can fail and technology can backfire. Things meant to better the future can slip down and wreak havoc on the present. She handles burns on a daily basis and clucks her tongue and makes idle small talk with the revolving door of patients. That, she can deal with. The stitches, the small cuts and scrapes and minor breaks. That is normal.
But sometimes they come back in pieces. Sometimes they come back unrecognizable.
I get very tired, she confessed once.
McCoy only nodded.
It's a living, he said. It's a living.
She had frowned and thrown out her rubber gloves.
-
“Nurse,” he snarls.
“Yes, Doctor,” she hisses back.
It didn't use to be like this. If anyone notices these things, they don’t bother to say.
The thing is, behind the medical masks and the tools she passes his way, next to the sick and the ailing, with lasers and internal organs let out to air, they are usually fine.
Despite it all, they have still managed in a professional setting. But they don't seek each other out. They haven't really since the Academy. And she misses it. She misses it, she imagines, for multiple reasons. There is something to be said of the appeal of the possible, of the undiscovered, of all that's out there left to find and claim as one's own. And maybe that's what they're all doing here. Maybe that's the purpose of the Enterprise and maybe they're just a population of eternally curious beings who want more, who need more. But once upon a time there was the Academy and she still didn't have a grasp of space travel and she still didn't know what she wanted.
You forget it sometimes. The same way she can forget the fear in space she can forget that youthful idealism. That's sad, she thinks. She thinks of her roommate. Fucking grown-ups, she imagines she would say.
She wonders what happened to that girl.
“Nurse,” McCoy repeats.
-
The problem, of course, is that they’re both liars.
No worries. The truth has its way of making itself known.
-
At one point, the following occurs:
“What’s the matter with you?” she hisses. They smell of chemicals and the copper tang of blood. Her hair is in her face and there are lines drawn in the corners of his eyes and around his mouth.
“I love you,” he says. His tone is blunt and doesn’t really broker argument, she thinks.
She thinks, she thinks, she is always thinking.
“What? No. No, no, no,” she stammers. “You don’t get to use that as an answer. You don’t get to say that to me.” It doesn’t happen like this, is what she doesn’t say.
“I love you,” he repeats.
“You don’t just go around saying things like that to people - ”
“Baby, I hardly just go around saying that to people,” he spits.
She takes a deep breath and holds up her hand. It is quiet, the lights are dimmed, an energy-saving procedure. “First of all? Don’t call me baby. Not now, not ever. Secondly…”and she stalls. “Secondly. Secondly, that’s not fair.”
“That’s not fair at all,” she says.
What she means is: why now why wait so long why now why didn’t you ever mention it sooner?
-
What happens before:
He kisses her and it’s like the first time all over again. No, it’s not like first time at all. There is still that urgency, still that fear that one of them might just slip away and disappear, but it’s new, it’s fresh. He kisses her like he means it, and she thinks she means it too. She’s not sure exactly what it is the both of them mean, but she thinks it’s some terrifying hybrid of I want you, I need you, and those other three words that have always left her too skittish to even think them.
She kisses him back and his hands almost hurt as they press and grab at her neck, the nape, the sides of her face.
And there's the truth: she cares. She cares about him, and of all the stupid things she has done, this might be the worst.
-
What happens after:
He pulls her to the bed, an exam room. From behind he pulls her to him, he pulls her to the bed, and he wraps a lazy arm around her neck. He kisses her like that: the length of his forearm behind the arch of her neck, the back of her head resting against it. His fingers ghost against the bite of chin there and she reclines back, easy.
His other hand slips down her body and two fingers enter her, easy.
(First though he tested. First though he was careful and that part was the unexpected. His fingers found her and with the pads of fingertips he had pressed gently, four fingers, against the dampness of her cunt. Pink and wet and he pressed, felt rather than entered).
-
And after it all (after the Academy and after the booze and after everything toxic and everything alien and everything not their own, after that, after introductions and intervening years and black holes and dead bodies and the live - )
“Jesus, girl,” he says and runs a hand through his hair. “We’ve gone about this one all kinds of wrong.”
Christine is suddenly aware of her nudity. She doesn’t do anything about it.
“There’s a right way?” she asks weakly. He only frowns.
The truth is, she doesn’t think there is. She doesn’t think it’d be very fair of this universe or any other to make there a right and wrong way to go about things like this - whatever this is. There is no formula when it comes to love. That’s what this is after all, right? Love?
McCoy slumps against the wall and idly buttons his pants back up.
“I love you too, you know,” she hears herself saying. “You insufferable bastard,” she sighs.
McCoy cracks a small crooked smile. “You miserable harpy.”
She ducks her head and attempts to hide the matching grin on her face.
-
Tomorrow there will be more to deal with, there always is. The recruiter had not been lying when he threw words like adventure! in Christine’s face.
This is an adventure.
And they’ll go about it all wrong and they’ll stumble into walls they themselves had erected and maybe aliens will kidnap them (again) or there will be war (again) or maybe this world or that world will end (again) but they’ll pull through it.
After all, it’s what people do.
They’re really not any different.
-
I don't know how to make this work, she confessed, once.
She gets it now.
No one does.
-
fin.
FOUR WAYS THIS NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED
also known as, four clichés to get you into bed
star trek. the problem with sex and love and every transgression in between is the simple lack of a step-by-step recipe to follow. christine chapel; christine/mccoy. rated nc-17. 8303 words.
notes: UGH. this fic! um, i can't even put into words as to how relieved i am to have finished this ridiculous, ridiculous story, haha. basically, one day i was surfing around the interwebs and LJ and apparently there is such a thing as a cliche_bingo and while i still don't even get what that means, i thought "oh hey, wouldn't it be awesome to jam a fic full of all those hilarious fic cliches"? so, um. i did that? and i'm sort of warring between extreme amusement and embarrassment of this and figured i'd post it in my bid to be rid of it, becuase ugh, be gone foul beast, haha. ummm, vague spoilers for the movie? and by movie, i mean the recent reboot since that's the only incarnation of Star Trek i am familiar with. i know, i know - fandom sacrilege. apologies. anyway, enjoy the cliche and the porn, yo!
i've got one friend, laying across from me
i did not choose him, he did not choose me
we’ve got no chance of recovery
sharing hospital
joy and misery
(HOSPITAL BEDS; cold war kids)
They say the shortest distance from Point A to Point B is a straight line.
When it comes to people, when it comes to crossing that bridge from stranger to acquaintance, from stranger to something more, it never works that way. People don’t just meet and fall in love. People don’t shake hands and in the same breath of an introduction also say: yes I would like to spend the rest of my life with you I love you. Christine is sure of this.
She is also sure that the terrain of relationships (such a dirty, dirty word for the flighty and the commitment-phobic, for those that curse monogamy and marriage with equal vehemence) it is never that easily navigated.
The unexpected and the unintended trump all.
It’s like this, she thinks: humans have inertia too, they gain momentum, they are subject to the same values and rules of physics as any other collection of atoms suspended in gravity. You travel in the same circles and you are bound to meet. You run about the same sphere of thought and influence and you’re bound to collide. These accidents of human interaction happen all the time.
This really isn’t all that different.
1.
THAT ONE TIME AT THE ACADEMY
The Academy had made sense.
She had been young and ambitious and the recruiter she met with had persuasively emphasized words like adventure! and space!, and she had liked that. So she enlisted.
This whole nurse thing though? That came as a bit of a surprise.
Christine had always excelled at the sciences, and while she herself wasn’t exactly patient (pun completely and utterly unintended) she was good with people. And it wasn’t that the idea of being elbow-deep in gore and ropes of intestines and parts you’re never supposed to see let alone touch exactly compelled or repelled her, but the nursing track just seemed more and more logical and likely for her. Over time she had convinced herself it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to have drive and ambition but with no goal to attach to the twin motivations, but now she had this, she had potential for something horribly adult like a career.
“That’s the thing that no one tells you,” her roommate says, cross-legged and Zen on the strip of floor between their two beds. “Being a grown-up and having a job and all that other…pedantic shit - it totally sucks.”
-
They meet in the library.
It is the midterm crunch and the entire library is packed. Christine squeezes herself between the shelves in the back corner, a small strip of wall with her back to it and a collection of books scattered at her feet. Anatomy. Physiology. One about a study involving rats and alien fetuses and humans and after two re-reads she still doesn't quite get what the point of it was.
It’s not that she’s a procrastinator per se, but rather that she likes to take things up to their limit. Her index finger runs over lines of text and she scribbles down notes in the margins and in a notebook balanced on a separate stack of books next to her.
“Planning on sharing?” a gruff voice asks above her.
Christine raises her head quickly and bangs the back of it against the wall, hard. “Agh,” is what she says, some odd jumbling of “ow” and “ah” and maybe “ugh.” The guy narrows his eyes and doesn’t even try to disguise the fact he sort of wants to laugh at her.
“You a med student?” he asks. “I think I would’ve remembered seeing a girl like you around.”
“No,” she grumbles. She rubs at the back of her head and lets the book in her lap slip closed. “Nursing.”
He snorts. At that, she raises her chin and she can already feel that defiant set of her mouth, the clenched teeth and she sort of glares, and right. Leonard McCoy.
Christine knows McCoy with the same familiarity she knows any other classmate - they’ve all been absorbed in the cult of medicine, and whereas she is to be a nurse, he is a doctor. But she’s heard of him, everyone has more or less heard of him. Rumor reports that at one point the good doctor had been married and now he’s broke and divorced and that’s why he’s here. Looking at him now, the low lighting of the back shelves of the library and the arrogant and vaguely annoyed lines of his face she decides it wouldn’t be all that surprising if it was true.
“That a problem?” she bites off, and she doesn’t really get it. She doesn’t get why her default reaction to this relative stranger is antagonism, but it is. Maybe it’s the way he’s standing over her. Maybe it’s the way his face twisted into something holier-than-thou the second she said nursing. Or maybe it’s the swelling bump on the back of her head and the pressure of things, like, passing exams and not failing and maybe it was just the smarmy way he looked her up and down when he first spoke to her.
He laughs lightly. “Not at all,” he says. “Though I’d consider working on that bedside manner of yours.” His smile this time is full-blown and he’s leaning against the shelves and her face softens, maybe a little.
Because here’s the thing: he’s hot. Like, exaggeration and hyperbole-free, he’s a good-looking son of a bitch. But it’s not like Jim Kirk, Academy Legend, where it’s glaringly obvious, almost to the point of being counter-productive. Christine has always been able to appreciate a fine specimen of the male population, and okay, McCoy is certainly one of them.
She clears her throat. “Was there something you needed?”
He arches on eyebrow and then he leans down. His right arm brushes against her left knee and he grabs the first book off the stack next to her.
“I’ll be sure to bring it back, Nurse…?”
“Chapel,” she says. “Christine. Christine Chapel. And it’s not nurse yet. I sort of have to pass the exams first.”
“Well,” and he looks on the verge of laughing again. “I’ll be sure to return this to you, Not-Quite-Nurse Chapel.”
Christine rolls her eyes.
-
People are like anything else - patterns inevitably emerge.
Christine sticks to her same study schedule and haunts the same corner of the library and McCoy picks up on this. A begrudging friendship forms, if only out of routine habit, out of the shared studying and the comparing of notes and diagrams.
It’s nice. It’s not that Christine has ever wanted for friends, it’s not that she walks alone or hides behind her studies, but it’s nice. McCoy’s different.
She’ll call him “old man” and he’ll feign offense. He’ll make sexist remarks and jabs she is never sure if he means or not, but she’ll school him in the basics of feminist theory all the same. They try and one-up each other with tales of past anecdotes and stupid, drunken decisions. They talk about the Old South and whether bourbon trumps whiskey and they talk about that boy she thought she was going to marry that one time and he talks about that woman he actually did marry, and her roommate mocks her.
“I’m going to come home some night and you’re going to have, like, a stethoscope hanging on the doorknob,” she said, once.
Christine had frowned.
“That doesn’t even make sense. Why would we have a stethoscope?”
The roommate waved her hand like some dead prophet or two-bit gypsy fortune teller.
“Wait and see. You wait and see.”
And of course she was right. She was always right.
-
It starts at the bar and it ends in her dorm room.
It is a Friday, it is the weekend, it is springtime and whatever that means for the majority of Starfleet. Somewhere between her second drink and her fourth, she runs into McCoy.
After that it goes a little fuzzy.
After that -
Oh God. She is drunk. Drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk. Drunk. Her tongue feels dry and sandpapery in her mouth and she can’t seem to stop licking at her lips.
“It’s a good thing your name isn’t Chris,” she hears herself saying. “Or Christopher. But it’d probably have to be Christopher in order for your name to be Chris. No one names their child just Chris. At least I don’t think they should. But I once knew a girl and her name was Shelly and it was just Shelly, it wasn’t, like, a nickname for anything. She was just Shelly. And I thought that was sort of cruel of her parents, right? To give their child a nickname instead of a name-name. Chris is a nickname, but Christopher is a name-name.”
McCoy is staring at her and her glass is sweating in her hand.
“What in the goddamn hell you even talking about?”
“Your name. It’s Leonard,” and oh Jesus Christ, her voice has taken on that sing-song lilt to it. She is drunk. She needs to put this glass down and never pick up a glass or a bottle or anything even vaguely alcoholic again in the future. “And I was just saying it’s a good thing it’s not Christopher. Because Christopher and Christine? Yuck.” She sticks out her tongue at that and her face twists into the kind of face a person would make if on the verge of vomiting. “Chris and Chris? Chris and Christine? We’d sound like some awful brother and sister singing duo. Or something. We’d probably sing about picnics or carnivals and only really, really old people would listen to us.”
McCoy smirks at this.
“You talk like we’re some kind of item or something. Christine,” he makes a point of saying. He takes a swig from his bottle.
She sneers. “And you talk like some sort of inbred redneck more often than not, but you don’t hear me complaining about it.”
He only scoffs at that.
“Besides, we are a partnership in a way. You’re a doctor, I’m a nurse. That sort of makes us a team. Right?”
He drinks to that.
-
It’s near closing time when she actually says it:
“I think we should probably have sex tonight.”
McCoy, to his credit, merely quirks an eyebrow up. “Blunt,” he says. “I like that.”
She narrows her eyes. “I don’t like you. I don’t like you much at all. I just want to make that clear.”
He smirks and polishes off the rest of his drink in one swallow. “Crystal.”
-
She discovers that when sex is planned, when it is spoken of as they more of less spoke of it - "I think we should probably have sex tonight," she had said, and it was never like he disagreed; his agreement was unspoken, his agreement with the plan was him sticking his tongue down her throat at the first available moment, not that she hadn't welcomed it, but still - it's strange. That's her point here. Sex with designs such as they had, sex with people you don't exactly care for, is odd. Almost like a business transaction, she thinks, except not at all.
His mouth is still hot and wet and right against her throat and she likes it, she likes it more than she really thought she would. Her hands grab at the muscles of his upper back, the chunk of hard flesh just above and connected to his shoulders, and dig in, sharp. He hisses somewhere under the hinge of her jaw and she bumps her hips against his. They're not the right height, she's too short, and her hips can't meet his the way she wants them too.
“This is stupid - this is so fucking stupid,” she mumbles into his mouth.
There is one breathy note of a chuckle from him before his teeth slide against the edge of her bottom lip and his tongue follows suit.
“Don’t look at me,” he says. “This was all your idea. I’m just playin’ my part.”
-
He casually eats her out. However it is one does that casually. He takes his shirt off halfway through. She watches the ripple to his back as his hands flex against her thighs, hold her hips, her legs open to him. He licks at her slowly.
She had not worn a bra that night (it’s almost like she planned this, she thinks) and he pulls the front of her top down and open as his tongue works her clit, as his tongue staggers down and plays with her entrance. Her knee bumps the wall and she moans, loud and plaintive. She grabs the side of his head.
He laughs straight into her.
He bites at her hipbone, her stomach as he crawls back up and his mouth is sloppy against her own. He thrusts fruitlessly against her, his cock hard against her thigh and she spreads her legs wider for him to fit between them.
McCoy slips a hand between them and brushes the head of his cock against her slit, teasing. Christine makes a small hiccup of a sound.
The lips of her cunt part for him. “Farther,” he says, and then, “yeah, that’s it, girl.” The muscles of her inner thighs ache a little as she stretches a little more, fit around the bracket of his hips a little more, a parenthesis for whatever idea he, this, represents.
He feels good inside of her. He moves fast, rough, and she pushes back with everything she’s got. Her heels skid on the sheets as she fights for purchase against him and McCoy bites at the curve of skin that connects jaw to ear and it’s then that she comes.
It’s a surprise and she wonders how much of this she’ll remember in the morning.
(When he comes, he says, “oh God Christine,” all on one stretched out breath and his body is heavy and limp on top of hers).
-
After:
“I still don’t like you very much,” she mutters into her pillow.
McCoy snorts. “Yeah, well that doesn’t really seem to be a problem, does it?”
His body is warm next to hers and it is impossible for the two of them to fit in the small bed without touching. Her body is still damp with sweat, and so is his, and the sheets tangle and cling to them both.
“I don't know how to make this work,” she confesses, mumbles.
“Make what work?” McCoy asks. His voice is already stained rough with sleep.
“This. You, me, whatever this is. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
He yawns.
“Don’t sweat it,” he says. “It’ll come.”
-
She can picture exactly how this conversation will go with her roommate come morning. They will both be hungover, there will be brunch, and Christine will push her mash of eggs or potatoes or whatever around her plate with the tines of her fork until guilt or embarrassment or the simple desperate need to confess an OH MY FUCKING GOD THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED moment to a friend or confidante gets the better of her and she will say:
“I fucked the hot doctor last night.”
“You fucked the hot doctor last night.”
Christine will scrape her fork against her plate on accident and wince at the resounding screech.
“Yeah. That actually happened. ‘I fucked the hot doctor,’” she parrots.
“Christine. What. Christine. You really fucked the hot doctor?”
“We were really drunk,” she will say by way of an answer. “Like. Really. Drunk.”
“This is such a big deal!” her roommate will squeal. “So, like, what now? What happens next? And - wait. I thought you said you didn’t even like him. Or was that a different hot doctor?” Her face will draw down in a frown that just as quickly disappears. “Who cares. This is such awesome news. This is the best brunch ever. Details. Spill.”
“I - I don’t know. I was drunk and so was he, and he’s hot, right? It just sort of happened and then it was sort of morning and then he was sort of gone and - ”
“Wait,” the roommate will say and hold up a hand. “He left? Asshole.”
Christine will shake her head. “It’s probably for the best, you know? We got that out of our system. This is a good thing. This is definitely a good thing.”
“Whatever. I still want details. I bet he has the biggest - ”
Actually, that is exactly how their conversation goes.
-
She wakes just before eight o’clock.
Next to the bed, McCoy rummages in the half-dark for his clothes and Christine keeps her eyes half-closed feigning sleep.
Later that week, there will be the library. Later they will talk but she doesn’t imagine it will ever be about this.
She’s right.
-
2.
THAT ONE TIME WITH THE TOXIN
She doesn’t die. She thinks that’s pretty important.
So, the Enterprise. They survive, and that’s all sorts of “beat the odds” awesome, but then, things go on. There is all that other shit to attend to and all other sorts of mundane disasters that require them.
It’s then she realizes that McCoy is sort of a big deal. For one thing, he becomes the Chief Medical Officer.
For another, she becomes Head Nurse. So, right. Maybe she’s sort of a big deal too.
Maybe she had been speaking the truth, way back when at the bar, completely sauced, when she spoke of a partnership between them.
Working side by side a tacit companionship is born whether wanted or wished. Her own hands mirror his own and she can predict his actions even before he can. She does not know if the same can be said of him.
She doesn’t like that the thought smarts more than it should.
-
It’s a normal day, and maybe that should have been the first indication of trouble.
Christine walks into sickbay, and it takes her a moment to realize this is the least professional moment of her professional career. There is a patient on the table and all that surround him are head-to-toe in Hazmat. Christine throws a bare hand over her bare mouth.
“Oh fuck,” she mumbles.
“Damnit, Nurse Chapel,” McCoy barks from behind his mask. Only his eyes are visible through the Plexiglas panel, and that’s really enough. “Get the hell out, woman!”
What happens next: she turns to leave, and that’s innocuous enough. What she had not planned on was the rookie nurse behind her and the tray of what she can only describe as green, gelatinous goo, and what she had planned on even less was the subsequent head-on collision with said rookie nurse and the splattering of said green, gelatinous goo all over her person.
No one speaks, but she’s pretty sure she heard McCoy say something involving the words “mother” and “fucker.” She chooses to ignore that and instead focuses on all the, well, green.
A nurse Christine cannot recognize, decked out in the same protective gear as everyone else, grabs her by the arm and hoists her up.
“Let’s go disinfect you,” she says.
-
“Am I going to die?” she finds herself asking as they walk. The green goo has left a film on her skin and it tingles in its wake. Not really a bad tingle, she thinks, and she shivers a little. “Am I going to die?” she repeats, because this is how it happens, right? One wrong turn, one stupid, ill-advised decision and that’s it - you’re dead.
“What was that green stuff? What was wrong with that guy? What’s he have? Is he dying? And what the fuck is all over me?”
The nurse clucks her tongue. “We don’t know. He was quarantined when we found him on his planet so we’re taking the appropriate precautionary measures.”
“So it could be nothing?” Christine asks in earnest. They stop in front of the shower stall and the nurse crosses her arms impatiently.
“It could be nothing.” The water turns on cold and full-blast and a faint green color collects at Christine’s feet.
It’s not nothing.
-
The first sign that should have indicated that things were far from the status quo was the fact that Christine was suddenly aware of just how good-looking the entire crew of the Enterprise was. Even Jasper, the custodian with the multiple missing teeth - he had his merits. He probably had really strong shoulders from pushing that mop around all day.
But it wasn’t just Jasper. It was everyone.
And the second sign. The second sign. She can’t really remember what the second sign was supposed to be and maybe that is the second sign, this whole distracted business. It’s like she has the attention-span of a small, small child, but the thoughts of some sex-craved pervert.
She doesn’t think there’s a third sign.
“Dr. McCoy would like to see you now,” the nurse says, and whoa. So, she doesn’t swing that way, but if she did? This chick’s got a hell of a rack. She wonders dimly if she is too old and any kind of lesbian-esque encounter can no longer be chalked up to just a heterosexual experimenting. She does like the penis though. Cock. Dick. Pecker. Fuck.
“What…” Christine drawls.
“Dr. McCoy, Nurse Chapel. He would like to see you.”
Christine smirks as she walks to his office. She bets he’d like to see her. She bets he’d like to -
“Oh, Christ on crutches,” he says. “Get in here.”
“What’s wrong?” she asks and does her voice always sound like that?
“You’re infected, damnit, that’s what’s wrong.”
She sobers for a second. “Wait. What? What - what is it?”
They like to say that doctors make the worst patients, and maybe the same can be said for nurses, who knows. Maybe it’s the curse to be carried of the medical profession. But McCoy stands there, all hands on hips and he stammers out things like “alien,” which isn’t that surprising, and “er, sex, ahem, drive,” and well, that sort of is, and then he just clears his throat, and then he’s spitting out:
“Son of bitch what I’m saying is that your…libido has been significantly…” and he trails off again, and finally ends with one word: “amplified.”
Christine stares for a moment. There’s half a smile trying at her teeth and the pads of her fingers are borderline electrified. She’s sure of that. She’s sure it’s taking way too long for these words to properly process. She’s sure -
“You’re basically saying I’m, like, bionically horny?”
She thinks he’s blushing. Which is sort of a feat in itself, but she’s not really in a state to appreciate it. Instead she thinks flushed, she thinks flushed skin, she thinks skin, no clothes -
“No,” he says, “that’s what you’re saying, sugar.” He takes a deep breath. “We need to talk practicality here. We don’t got a vaccine, though lord knows the pharmaceutical market would love to get their hands on you right now.” She thinks she’d like him to get his hands on her, but that’s a different story and she’s sort of impressed at her restraint for keeping the thought caged behind her teeth. Teeth. Bite. Fuck fuck fuck.
“I’ll be fine,” she insists.
He arches an eyebrow. “Get to your quarters,” he says. “Can’t have you tartin’ up the sickbay.”
“I’ll be fine,” she repeats, and when she turns to leave she might cock her hip, she might sway a little more than necessary.
Whatever. She’s got great legs.
-
It’s the third time she brings herself off that she gets it: this is so not enough.
It’s too much, it’s just too much, and she’s left her room before she even really considered the action or more importantly, the consequences.
She walks the hallway and tries valiantly not to catch the eye of anyone who dares passes, because she’s not stupid. And she really doesn’t want to jump a stranger. It’s muscle memory that guides her more than anything, and she finds herself outside his office still formulating the greatest pick-up line in the history of sexual advances. She opens the door.
What she says is:
“I can’t take it anymore you need to fuck me right now. Please.”
McCoy takes a moment and his jaw clicks like maybe he’s clenching his teeth.
“You might want to close the door first,” he drawls.
The door clicks behind Christine. She takes a deep and steadying breath, and so much for whatever kama sutra seduction techniques she had been hatching in her head. “Look,” she says, “I am basically crawling out of my skin. You either need to fuck me or sedate me. Doctor.”
McCoy only gapes at her.
“Oh my God,” she says. “You’re seriously considering sedating me?”
“I got to admit, the idea does have its merits,” he grouses.
She waves a hand in the air furiously.
“Okay. Here’s the deal. It’s not like we haven’t done this before, and you managed to get me off then, and I was drunk, like, really, just wasted and you still managed to make me come, so that’s saying something, right? And whatever this…toxin is that has gotten into my system, it clearly has expedited that, at least based on my own experimentation, and that was just with my own hand - ”
“You need to stop talking,” McCoy grits out.
It's like this: she's practically liquid between her legs and her skin feels so tight and hot and flushed she's positive she looks like some tragic fever victim or porn star or some strange combination of the two. And she's standing there, in front of him, basically begging him to have sex with her. If she wasn't completely blown out of her mind right now - blown, the word blown makes her think cock makes her think mouth makes her think him makes her think his cock her mouth - she'd maybe, no she'd definitely, be humiliated, but whatever. She thinks she's about to fall over any minute or maybe just spontaneously combust and that would be bad, that would be gross. That would be a mess far more difficult and horrifying for him to clean up than whatever state it is she's in right now and whatever it is she needs from him.
"Do not make me beg," she says, but it sort of sounds like she's begging already.
The look McCoy gives her is full of something she doesn't understand or she's just choosing not to understand, but she thinks it's what they call "bedroom eyes" in all those god-awful novels her mother used to keep around the house.
"Get over here," he says, and his voice is kind of hoarse, his voice is the sort of thing they probably write about in those god-awful books her mother used to keep around the house.
She does. Her knees feel honest-to-god weak, but she walks around to his side of the desk and just stands there. He's still seated. There are still charts open on his desk and there are three empty mugs of what she imagines was once coffee. He places a hand just above the swell of her knee and she can't help it, she moans, just a little. And, okay. There's enough of her left in there to reason that this is embarrassing, embarrassing for the both of them, but it's not like he's the one pleading to be fucked.
She swallows hard and his hand just rests there, four fingers behind the concave curve of her knee and his thumb on her thigh. His hand is hot, her skin is hot and without thinking she spreads her legs, a little.
Christine watches his throat instead of his eyes. His Adam's apple bobs once, twice, and then he raises the hand on her leg and stands up.
He pushes her against the desk and his fingers toy with the elastic edge of her panties. And she's panting, isn't she? That's her? Her cheeks are already flushed so it's not like he'd notice her blushing, but it really, really suddenly doesn't matter when he presses his fingers against the crotch and makes this small, falling gasp noise. She's wet, like, soaking wet and maybe he's just getting that now. She had thought he was more knowledgeable of this toxin than she was, but maybe not. Maybe he hadn't really understood the word desperate when she said it, but she thinks he gets it now.
She knows he gets it now, if only based on the rush he adopts. He pulls at the damp crotch of her panties and just as quickly slides a finger inside of her. Her hips buck and her fingers curl white-knuckled onto the edge of the desk. His thumb brushes her clit and everything feels as though it's caught in her chest.
He fingers her - and okay, okay, she thinks as two more fingers join the first, this is what I was missing earlier. He pumps her steadily, his thumb still toying her clit, and it doesn’t take long. McCoy does not kiss her, but his mouth hovers close, just over the whorl of her ear and his breathing is amplified, hitching at some points and catching at others. He twists the fingers inside of her and her hands scramble over his chest, and it’s, “yeah, yeah, don’t stop, don’t,” she murmurs over and over again. He doesn’t. He pushes his fingers deeper inside of her and increases the speed and his mouth is wet next to her ear and she wants it over her mouth.
When she comes it’s on what sounds like a cry of anguish.
“Is that enough?” he asks and it sounds like his breath or his voice is lodged somewhere in the middle of his throat.
“No,” she whines, and what part of this does he not understand? She’s not even human right now, she just needs to be filled and stay filled, and she can feel him, hard against her leg, so it’s not like he doesn’t want this too. Everyone wants this. Everyone wants to be filled and remain full.
He undoes his pants fast, pulls his cock out and pumps it once then twice. She watches, she watches and then feels her mouth shaping around the word, "Please," and that's all it takes. His hands take to the back of her thighs and she wraps her legs around him. He grunts as he slicks himself with her and he grunts again but does not enter her.
"Stand up," he says.
She does.
He turns her around and fucks her over his desk.
He pushes in hard and easy and the muscles of her stomach clench. Paperwork sticks to the damp skin of her forearms as she sprawls forward. This, she thinks, this. There's the slow burn and the stretch and this is it, everything is almost clear and bright and normal, she's her again, she thinks, this is okay, she's going to be okay, they're all going to be okay -
-
The next morning she wakes up with what she can only describe as the worst hangover in the history of ever. Her head throbs and her mouth is dry, sandpapery and harsh.
She sticks her tongue out and reaches for the water bottle next to her bed. "Yuck," she mutters under her breath.
And actually, it's not just her head. It's all of her. All of her hurts and aches in a rough and used way, and -
"Oh," she whispers. "Oh, fuck."
-
She knocks first. It takes three times before he finally yells something that sounds like, "come in."
“Um, hey,” she says and, ugh. She sounds so small and hesitant, and is this what sex does to two people? And if so, how had she not ever noticed it before?
McCoy glances up at her, silent.
“I just wanted to thank you, and uh…” she stammers and trails off.
“Don’t mention it,” he says, all gruff and all “this subject is closed, now back away slowly.”
Christine doesn’t do that. Instead she clears her throat and says, “No. Really. I, um, appreciate - fuck it. Okay. I’m just trying to say thank you, alright?”
McCoy blinks. “And I’m just sayin’ don’t mention it. Ever.”
Their eyes meet and she is the first to look away. And wow, this is a level of awkward she herself had up until now never realized could be reached. And, besides - what had she expected? She doesn’t know, and maybe that’s the problem.
3.
THAT ONE TIME ALIENS MADE US DO IT
Things go wrong. Things go really, really, amazingly wrong.
What had started as a routine evacuation operation somehow ended in her lack of consciousness and awakening in a bright room of white. The walls are bare; there is no door. There is just her. And there is McCoy.
“You think there’s a way out?” she whispers. She idly pulls at the bindings that hold their hands together.
“I’m a doctor, not a secret agent,” he hisses back. “So, no. No, I don’t think there’s a way out.
Things like this aren't supposed to happen. She doesn't think they have contingency plans for things like this, at least not for her, not for him. For the captain, maybe, but for her? No way. The likelihood of abduction was always factored in as something small, something neglible, the same odds as getting struck by lightning twice or whatever else those old wives' tales like to spin.
Christine's throat is dry and her hands are still tied to his. McCoy doesn't fidget and for some reason that surprises her.
"Are you scared?" she hears herself asking. He doesn't answer, but maybe that is his answer - acquiesce in silence. She doesn't press it. She doesn't press it for the simple reason that the idea of him being scared sort of scares her even more.
They wait. There isn't much else to do but wait when you're tied together and left in a room made of little more than blank walls and seemingly no door. Christine starts to hum. McCoy bumps her with his shoulder. She stops.
Aliens, she thinks. Fucking aliens.
-
What happens first is this: a pair of aliens (and she still has no idea what species these creatures are supposed to be, and frankly, she doesn’t really care) enter the room. The wall slides to open and the two of them enter and stand before them.
The fear she had anticipated and fought to clamp down earlier is curiously absent. So, she thinks. This is it. This is really it.
His fingers twist with hers and she jumps a little. McCoy’s hands are sweaty and so are her own and her wrists ache and his index and middle finger wrap around her pinky and ring finger.
It takes about fifteen minutes for the two aliens to make their objective clear.
They wish to study human coitus.
McCoy blanches. “Lemme get this here straight,” he stammers. His face is pale, and Christine thinks she gets what the aliens mean and she’s not half as horrified as he is. She’s not sure what that means.
“You want me,” he says, “you want me and her to - you want us to - and you want to watch?”
The aliens want to watch. Christine almost laughs. It's just ridiculous. Like, of all the things. Here, she had been envisioning some sort of awful torture contraption involving lasers or electricity or just plain old barbarism, but instead, they want her to fuck him. There are worse things imaginable, she thinks, and once again she is tempted to laugh.
"That's...almost a relief," she says. McCoy doesn't answer at first but he does snarl something unintelligible under his breath.
“Maybe for you,” he grunts, and Christine chews her bottom lip.
"Well, you know. Just close your eyes and think of England or whatever," she snaps. She doesn't really mean it. She's not really mad, she really doesn't have a right to be. If anything he's made it clear in the past that he's at least mildly sexually attracted to her, but then again there's always that feminine fear that men really are the lust-addled animals popular culture makes them out to be and they'd fuck everything and anything in a decent pair of heels. She is digressing. She is distracting herself. She is fighting like hell against insecurity and that immature self-awareness she thought she kicked with her teenage years.
“Just another day at the office,” she mutters.
McCoy’s fingers are still tight with her own.
-
And, right. So it’s not like they’ve never done this before. Granted, the first time she had been borderline blackout drunk and the second time, well, she was technically under the influence too, but still. This shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right? Just parts fitting together, just anatomy completing an expected biological function. Nothing to it. Nothing to it at all.
Except that there are a lot of somethings.
It's like this: Sex is a weapon.
She doesn't mean it in the whole Machiavelli, manipulative, hey let's advance my career or hey let's ruin your life sort of way. What she means is that it destroys things. It takes simple friendships and makes them that much more complicated. It takes lust and it adds something more, something tangible, something you can point to and say - there's my sign, there, that tells me that at some point you wanted me.
It's awful, she decides. She decides she will never have sex again. That she will be celibate. That she will be like those nuns she read about and she'll cover her head with that habit thing and walk around with a crucifix around her neck and call Jesus her man or however that works.
You know. After she lets the aliens watch.
-
He won’t look her in the eye. She’d ask him what’s wrong, but she sort of has an idea what the answer would be:
Well, darlin’. Aliens are making us fuck, and oh yeah, they like to watch.
It’s funny though. Despite her career and despite the handful of one night stands scattered throughout her adult existence, she has never looked at sex as something simple, as something scientific to be documented. If anything, it has always been on the other end of the scale, as far as possible from abstract principles like logic and reasoning and rationality. It’s the passion, it’s the lust, it’s the thing that thrums deep in the bloodstream that you couldn’t name even if you wanted to. It’s needy and it’s heady in all the ways a textbook and diagram never could be.
It makes sense then, she thinks, why this feels so off. They are on a glorified exam table and the room is bright, entirely white. Everything that makes them who they are (and is there even a they to speak of? she wonders) has been stripped away and all that’s left are the fundamentals that make this the same for everyone. She doesn’t want that. She doesn’t want that at all and he shouldn’t want that either.
So she kisses him.
-
It's not that the sex is bad. In fact, it almost feels sort of good. Christine has never considered herself an exhibitionist, and after this, she really doubts she ever would, but there's something to be said in the knowledge that the two of them, together, are worth watching.
It's simple missionary. Her knees are raised and she thinks the word gynecological and fights down a hysteric laugh and like the first time, McCoy fits right and firm between her legs. Her hands grab at his ass to pull him in deeper and she's not wet enough and it burns more than it should. Her breath catches once he is all the way in, once he pauses.
His breath moves the hair next to her ear. "You alright there?" he murmurs.
Christine squeezes her eyes shut and raises her hips to fight against his own. And there's her answer, she thinks. That's her answer. Because if anything he taught her that first - sometimes words won't do, sometimes there are too many words, sometimes words aren't all we've got - and she moves her hips first up and then down and his own mirror hers. The rhythm is shaky, choppy and she leaves her hands resting on his ass, light, barely touching. He has an arm wrapped around her waist and his face is buried in the crook of her neck. She buries her face in his, and from this angle all she sees is skin, all she sees is him. Her eyes flutter open and shut and open and shut and she can forget the wall of glass that surrounds them, she can forget the eyes and she can forget, almost, she can almost forget that they are not alone, that she is not alone.
She does not come but he does. She feels him hot, wet inside of her and when he does come the only sign of it is the tensing of his body, the tight set of his shoulders and upper back and the gasp of air that gets lost in the angles that connect her face and neck and shoulder. And then it’s, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she doesn’t know how to make him stop. She presses her lips to the underside of his chin once, twice, and again and he is silent.
Christine relaxes into the table. She takes a deep breath. That wasn't so bad, she thinks. That wasn't -
-
Jim Kirk always has impeccable timing. Or maybe it’s Scotty. Christine isn’t sure who to credit for the whole here one minute and gone the next thing, but she’ll take it.
When she looks up, the inside of the Enterprise has never been such a welcome sight. Well, it would be more welcome if she was clothed. And if McCoy was clothed. And if he wasn’t on top of her.
She hears his laugh before she sees him.
Kirk stands over them and his grin is huge. “Well, well, well, what have we here?”
Chekhov is backlit against the white light of the hall and he waves.
“Hello!”
McCoy gives them both the finger.
4.
THAT ONE TIME WE MEANT IT
The thing she forgets sometimes is that space is serious. The limitless black emptiness it presents can be terrifying, but sometimes she slips and she forgets.
Things go wrong all the time. It just seems more often than not, they - the doctors and the nurses, Christine, him - are left to reap and sort out the consequences.
Death and space go hand in hand. Of all the places to disappear, this is the most obvious. Science can fail and technology can backfire. Things meant to better the future can slip down and wreak havoc on the present. She handles burns on a daily basis and clucks her tongue and makes idle small talk with the revolving door of patients. That, she can deal with. The stitches, the small cuts and scrapes and minor breaks. That is normal.
But sometimes they come back in pieces. Sometimes they come back unrecognizable.
I get very tired, she confessed once.
McCoy only nodded.
It's a living, he said. It's a living.
She had frowned and thrown out her rubber gloves.
-
“Nurse,” he snarls.
“Yes, Doctor,” she hisses back.
It didn't use to be like this. If anyone notices these things, they don’t bother to say.
The thing is, behind the medical masks and the tools she passes his way, next to the sick and the ailing, with lasers and internal organs let out to air, they are usually fine.
Despite it all, they have still managed in a professional setting. But they don't seek each other out. They haven't really since the Academy. And she misses it. She misses it, she imagines, for multiple reasons. There is something to be said of the appeal of the possible, of the undiscovered, of all that's out there left to find and claim as one's own. And maybe that's what they're all doing here. Maybe that's the purpose of the Enterprise and maybe they're just a population of eternally curious beings who want more, who need more. But once upon a time there was the Academy and she still didn't have a grasp of space travel and she still didn't know what she wanted.
You forget it sometimes. The same way she can forget the fear in space she can forget that youthful idealism. That's sad, she thinks. She thinks of her roommate. Fucking grown-ups, she imagines she would say.
She wonders what happened to that girl.
“Nurse,” McCoy repeats.
-
The problem, of course, is that they’re both liars.
No worries. The truth has its way of making itself known.
-
At one point, the following occurs:
“What’s the matter with you?” she hisses. They smell of chemicals and the copper tang of blood. Her hair is in her face and there are lines drawn in the corners of his eyes and around his mouth.
“I love you,” he says. His tone is blunt and doesn’t really broker argument, she thinks.
She thinks, she thinks, she is always thinking.
“What? No. No, no, no,” she stammers. “You don’t get to use that as an answer. You don’t get to say that to me.” It doesn’t happen like this, is what she doesn’t say.
“I love you,” he repeats.
“You don’t just go around saying things like that to people - ”
“Baby, I hardly just go around saying that to people,” he spits.
She takes a deep breath and holds up her hand. It is quiet, the lights are dimmed, an energy-saving procedure. “First of all? Don’t call me baby. Not now, not ever. Secondly…”and she stalls. “Secondly. Secondly, that’s not fair.”
“That’s not fair at all,” she says.
What she means is: why now why wait so long why now why didn’t you ever mention it sooner?
-
What happens before:
He kisses her and it’s like the first time all over again. No, it’s not like first time at all. There is still that urgency, still that fear that one of them might just slip away and disappear, but it’s new, it’s fresh. He kisses her like he means it, and she thinks she means it too. She’s not sure exactly what it is the both of them mean, but she thinks it’s some terrifying hybrid of I want you, I need you, and those other three words that have always left her too skittish to even think them.
She kisses him back and his hands almost hurt as they press and grab at her neck, the nape, the sides of her face.
And there's the truth: she cares. She cares about him, and of all the stupid things she has done, this might be the worst.
-
What happens after:
He pulls her to the bed, an exam room. From behind he pulls her to him, he pulls her to the bed, and he wraps a lazy arm around her neck. He kisses her like that: the length of his forearm behind the arch of her neck, the back of her head resting against it. His fingers ghost against the bite of chin there and she reclines back, easy.
His other hand slips down her body and two fingers enter her, easy.
(First though he tested. First though he was careful and that part was the unexpected. His fingers found her and with the pads of fingertips he had pressed gently, four fingers, against the dampness of her cunt. Pink and wet and he pressed, felt rather than entered).
-
And after it all (after the Academy and after the booze and after everything toxic and everything alien and everything not their own, after that, after introductions and intervening years and black holes and dead bodies and the live - )
“Jesus, girl,” he says and runs a hand through his hair. “We’ve gone about this one all kinds of wrong.”
Christine is suddenly aware of her nudity. She doesn’t do anything about it.
“There’s a right way?” she asks weakly. He only frowns.
The truth is, she doesn’t think there is. She doesn’t think it’d be very fair of this universe or any other to make there a right and wrong way to go about things like this - whatever this is. There is no formula when it comes to love. That’s what this is after all, right? Love?
McCoy slumps against the wall and idly buttons his pants back up.
“I love you too, you know,” she hears herself saying. “You insufferable bastard,” she sighs.
McCoy cracks a small crooked smile. “You miserable harpy.”
She ducks her head and attempts to hide the matching grin on her face.
-
Tomorrow there will be more to deal with, there always is. The recruiter had not been lying when he threw words like adventure! in Christine’s face.
This is an adventure.
And they’ll go about it all wrong and they’ll stumble into walls they themselves had erected and maybe aliens will kidnap them (again) or there will be war (again) or maybe this world or that world will end (again) but they’ll pull through it.
After all, it’s what people do.
They’re really not any different.
-
I don't know how to make this work, she confessed, once.
She gets it now.
No one does.
-
fin.