Big Bang 2010 - If Wishes Were Horses 13/18
Title: If Wishes Were Horses
Author: fringedweller
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Primarily Kirk/Rand, with background McCoy/Chapel and Pike/One and others, het and slash
Warnings: None
Length: 4806
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything recognisable in this fic and I’m not making any money from it.
Notes: Beta by seren_ccd
Summary: All her life Janice Rand had wanted one thing - to figure out just what she was supposed to do with herself. She drifted into Starfleet on a whim, and to her surprise, found a niche to fill. But being assigned to the Enterprise brings with it a challenge to her neat and ordered way of life, and Janice is unsure as to how much she's willing to let James T. Kirk affect her. But since when has love ever been easy? And will Janice let her heart stand in the way of her career?
Janice was still staggering from the blow to her ego and self confidence when perhaps the very worst thing that happened to her when she was stationed on the Enterprise occurred; she ceased to exist.
The ship had rendezvoused with the Antares, a small survey ship that had been examining the planet Thasus. The crew of the Antares had not been able to communicate with any natives of Thasus, but they had found a human teenager, called Charlie Evans, living happily on the planet. He was the only survivor of a shuttlewreck, and had been raised by the mysterious Thasian people that had refused to show themselves to the Antares’ crew.
Charlie had living relatives in a colony a few day’s travel away, and the Enterprise was taking responsibility for seeing him home. In real terms, that means that Janice found herself the reluctant babysitter of a teenage boy who had never met another human being, had little to no knowledge of basic social etiquette and who was, in her grandmother’s words, handsy.
The first time that Charlie had grabbed hold of her and tried to kiss her, it had taken all of Janice’s effort not to use the self-defence lessons that she had recently started again and knock him unconscious. Instead, she had firmly removed herself from his embrace and tried to explain how it was unacceptable to just grab people and kiss them.
He had looked utterly perplexed at her retreat from him, and had said "If I had the whole universe, I'd give it to you. When I see you, I feel like I'm hungry all over. Hungry. Do you know how that feels?"
Oh yes, she thought, a stab of pity going through her heart. Oh yes, I know how that feels.
He had stormed off in a rage when she had told him that he needed to distance himself a little, but had seemed calmer later when they met in a rec room. Janice had been trying to build a house of cards, and invited him to help her. But when her attention wandered towards Uhura, who had convinced Spock to play his lute for the crowd as she sang, Charlie grew angry. At first he did some kind of trick where he replaced all of the cards Janice had been using for cards with her picture on them, and then when she recoiled in shock, he stormed out of the room in a rage.
“Captain, there’s something wrong with him,” she had protested. “He’s not right.”
“He’s been alone for years, raised by an alien culture,” Kirk protested. “He’s just finding it hard to deal with his first crush on a pretty girl.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Janice had protested, but her pleas had fallen on largely deaf ears. Kirk had agreed to spend more time with Charlie, but Janice wasn’t sure that it would do any good. Deep down, she knew that there was something really wrong with the boy, but she couldn’t explain what it was. He unsettled her.
She wasn’t entirely sure about the next sequence of events - after all, for a great proportion of them she had been vanished out of existence - but she remembered being in her quarters, alone, getting ready for bed. She had just pulled on a slinky nightgown (utterly ridiculous for interstellar travel but it did make her feel glamorous) when the door chime sounded. It was Charlie, and she invited him in, assuming that he was there to apologise for his behaviour earlier.
He had tried to kiss her again, and got angry when she pushed him away and told him firmly that it wasn’t right for him to touch her in that way. The last thing she remembered clearly was Charlie’s face made ugly by a vicious snarl, and his outstretched hand. Then, there was nothing. For the next forty three hours and twenty one minutes, Janice Rand did not exist. She wasn’t dead, or missing. She simply was not present in the universe any longer, the victim of the hormonal rage of an adolescent boy.
She was tired of being the victim of male frustration with the universe, she really was.
The next thing she remembered clearly was suddenly being on the bridge in her ridiculous pink nightgown, surrounded by tense faces and harsh voices. Kirk crossed the space to her immediately and grabbed her wrist with his hand, anchoring her to the present moment. Around her, other decks reported the sudden reappearance of missing crewmen and a disembodied voice that rippled through the ship apologised for the behaviour of Charlie.
Hauntingly, she could still hear an echo of his voice screaming “I want to stay!” as Kirk handed her, still bewildered by the turn of events, off to a nurse who had been summoned to the bridge to escort her down to sickbay. It was there, as she was being poked and prodded by a succession of medical officers, that she began to piece together what had happened in her absence.
Charlie’s behaviour had grown more and more erratic as he grew more jealous of anybody that occupied Kirk’s time, or who stopped him from having anything he wanted. It wasn’t until he made a crewman disappear in front of Kirk’s own eyes that anybody realised the strange powers the teen had, and by then it was too late to curb them. Communications with the Antares went down moments after they were hailed; the ship exploded, and Charlie nonchalently claimed responsibility for the deaths of all hands with the chilling words “It wasn’t very well constructed.”
Charlie then somehow took over control of the Enterprise, although such a large and complex ship took up most of his energy and all of his mental control. Kirk managed to break that control by overloading any ship’s systems his engineers were able to wrestle back from Charlie until the boy had to let go of them completely.
What Kirk would have done next, nobody knew; the crew of the Enterprise were saved by the sudden appearance of a Thasian vessel. In trying to raise the human child, they had gifted him with their own psychokinetic powers, but he was too emotionally unstable to handle their potential for evil acts. The Thasians removed Charlie from the Enterprise in order to return him to their planet and teach him how to control his powers so no innocents would be harmed. Kirk had been reluctant to separate the boy from his relatives in the nearby colony, but the Thasians had been correct in the reasoning that Charlie would be a danger to all humans without control over his abilities.
Down in sickbay, Janice had been given the all-clear from McCoy himself; “For somebody who had ceased to exist, yeoman, you’re doing a pretty good imitation of being alive and well. Go and get some sleep, and report to Dr Noel in the morning for a psych evaluation.”
Janice and Dr Noel were close to becoming good friends. She would have to check the ship’s records, but Janice was positive that she was the only member of support services who had been through the usual post-traumatic incident counselling usually offered to crew who had bad experiences while on away missions.
One of the orderlies had replicated a uniform for her to change into, and she was just pulling a brush through her hair when Kirk appeared around the side of the privacy partition.
“Are you alright?” he asked, blue eyes full of concern.
“I’m fine,” she said, wincing as the brush caught a tangle in her hair. “Not harmed at all.”
“Except for those hours when you were wiped out of existence,” he said, his voice aiming for lightness but missing it by light-years.
“Well, yes,” Janice agreed. “But as I remember nothing about it, I’ve decided not to let it worry me too much. I was affected more by suddenly appearing on the bridge in my night clothes.”
Kirk grinned, his mood lightening with her blithe tone.
“We were all affected by that, Janice,” he told her. “But seriously. How are you?”
Janice sighed. “In all honesty? I think I need a vacation. Somewhere where I can have some fun without having to worry about my captain’s evil twin, or hormonal telekinetic sociopaths, or the vast amount of paperwork I’m sure you’ve avoided for the last two days.”
Kirk started to protest his innocence, but he wasn’t able to pull it off in the face of Janice’s patented You’ve Been A Bad Captain Again, Haven’t You? look.
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” he promised, and she must truly have been feeling the strain of the experience because she didn’t protest or offer to do the organising for him. Instead, she thanked him for checking up on her and walked back to her quarters alone, because she was an adult and brave and not scared of teenage boys.
She’d keep this secret to her dying day, but before she went to sleep she checked the bathroom and the closet in case Charlie had escaped his Thasian babysitters. And she threw the pink nightgown into her recycling unit.
While she slept Kirk must have been incredibly busy, because in her inbox the next morning was a reservation confirmation for a four-person chalet on a nearby pleasure planet. Also in her inbox was the welcome news that the entire ship would enjoy a staggered shore-leave stay.
There was definitely a buzz in the air over breakfast in the mess that morning, and a squealing Gaila jumping in her lap to kiss her soundly on the lips was the living, breathing embodiment of it.
“How did you do it?” Gaila asked, using the sleeve of her uniform to rub her lipstick off Janice’s face.
“Good morning Gaila, how are you?” Janice asked rhetorically. “No, I don’t mind being used as your personal chair.”
Gaila pulled herself onto a spare chair and grinned at her.
“How did you manage it? That resort is always booked up for weeks!”
“What resort? What have I done?” Janice asked, desperately trying to translate Gaila’s bouncing and squealing into Standard.
“Gaila is assuming that you’re behind securing the four of us a luxury chalet at the most exclusive winter sport resort on the planet. A resort that’s always booked at least a year in advance, and is the preferred playground of the rich and famous.”
Uhura sat down, bearing her breakfast tray.
“If any of us could do it, it would be you,” Uhura finished. “So, thank you. I’ve always wanted to stay there!”
“Joseph Clooney has a house there,” Christine added as she hurried over, looking incredibly pleased. “And he’s been spotted there two days ago their time, enjoying the down-hill skiing slopes. Maybe we’ll meet him!”
Christine looked dreamy-eyed at the prospect.
“I didn’t do this,” Janice tried to explain, but it took a while for the message to sink in to her excited friends. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t even know we had shore leave coming up until I opened up my inbox this morning and found the message.”
“So who organised it then?” Gaila asked, confused. Christine and Uhura exchanged speculative looks, and then turned pointedly to Janice. She tried to stand up to their combined stare, but withered under its awesome combined power.
“I may have told him that I needed a holiday,” she confessed. “But I didn’t know he’d do this.”
“I think it’s sweet,” Christine said, still lost in the thought of Joseph Clooney.
“Very romantic,” Gaila teased.
“It could be trouble,” Uhura warned.
Janice sighed.
“When is anything on this ship not trouble?” she asked.
Organising shore leave rotations for the entire crew took up the rest of Janice’s day, and half of the next one, but with some judicious chopping and changing of duty shifts, everybody got a full four days worth of time on the planet below. Very few crew were actually staying on the planet, most choosing to save their credits and go back to the ship each evening to sleep.
Janice had protested the chalet booking as soon as she cornered Kirk in his ready room.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she told him, trying to sound firm and business-like. “It’s really not necessary, and it must have cost a fortune.”
“I think I did have to do it,” he argued, “as most of your time on board has been spent recovering from events that were my fault.” Before she could protest, he held up a hand to stop her.
“And don’t worry about the cost,” he went on. “This one’s on Starfleet Medical, believe it or not.”
“Really?” she asked, puzzled. Kirk nodded.
“You’ve had the amount of therapy time needed to qualify you for a mandatory rest break,” he told her. “I’ve got the report from Dr Noel and everything.”
“Enough therapy for a four-bedroom luxury chalet smack bang in the middle of the best resort in ten star systems?” she asked sceptically. Kirk shrugged.
“I may have fiddled the books slightly,” he admitted. “But tell me that Gaila and the others don’t love you right now.”
“Christine’s in seventh heaven,” Janice told him, smiling. “And it took Gaila five whole minutes to stop babbling about the resort this morning before Uhura could get a word in edgeways. So, thank you. I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful time.”
“Oh, we will,” Kirk agreed, beaming. “I love skiing. Not a lot of chance to do it in Iowa, but I got pretty good at it when I was at the academy. Do you ski?”
“A little. Not well,” Janice said, confused. “I’m sorry, sir, did you say ‘we’?”
“As it happens, your chalet is in the grounds of another, larger building, which happens to be owned by a friend of Admiral Pike,” Kirk said, his grin growing so large it threatened to split his face in two. “For a nominal fee, the admiral’s friend has given the senior staff the run of the place. We’ll transfer in and out as the rota allows.”
“We’re going on leave together?”
“No,” he explained patiently. “And in a matter of speaking, yes.”
Janice sat down, unbidden.
“You know that I uphold Starfleet regulations on the Enterprise,” he said slowly, looking right at her.
“I do,” she said, still confused.
“And that as captain, if I were asked to give permission for any officers I suspected as having a relationship contrary to regulations to go on leave together, I’d have to deny it and open an investigation into their behaviour.”
“You would,” she replied, the true meaning behind his actions becoming apparent. “But if, say, your chief medical officer happened to be on leave at the same time as one of his staff, who was officially billeted in a separate building, that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Exactly,” Kirk said. “Or the first officer and the head of communications. Or my chief engineer and the head of the computer section. Or my helmsman and my navigator, which, by the way, I totally did not see coming.”
“I told you Chekov wasn’t blushing because of me,” Janice said airily. Neither of them added or the captain of the ship and his yeoman, although it was practically dancing in the air between them.
“I don’t think people realise just how kind you really are,” Janice said slowly. Kirk squirmed in his seat and turned his face away.
“So, no more fuss about not going on leave,” he said brusquely. “This is bigger than just you, yeoman.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, rising from her seat to head down to the main admin control room.
“Oh, and Janice?” he called, just as she reached the door
“Yes, sir?”
“No ‘sirs’ on leave. I’ll just be Jim then.”
Such an innocent sounding sentence, but Janice could sense the danger surrounding it. Somehow, though, she just couldn’t bring herself to really care that much.
“I understand,” she said softly, and smiled at him before slipping through the doors and away from temptation.
“This isn’t a chalet,” Uhura said in awe as they opened the door of their holiday home and explored the luxuriously appointed rooms. “I’ve been skiing, I’ve stayed in chalets. This is...this is a palace!”
Gaila, who had run on ahead of them, bounced excitedly out of a room.
“Come and see the bathtub! It’s huge!”” she squealed. “If we have an orgy, we definitely have to have it in there!”
She dashed off to explore the rest of the building as the other three exchanged weary looks.
“I’ll do it,” Uhura sighed, and chased after Gaila to explain the unofficial ‘no-orgy’ policy.
“So, which room do you want?” Janice asked Christine as they poked their heads into the sleeping areas that lay off the corridor.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Christine said a little too innocently for Janice. “How about that one?”
She pointed to the bedroom door closest to the main entrance to the chalet. Janice raised an eyebrow.
“Convenient for making quiet entrances and exits,” she grinned. “Planning on spending some time up at the main building, Christine?”
Christine tried her best, but the grin just forced itself out.
“All day, every day if I can manage it,” she sighed, looking the happiest Janice had ever seen her.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” Janice said, fighting a pang of jealousy. “How long?”
“A week,” Christine said, looking dreamy-eyed.
“Well, you enjoy yourself,” Janice told her. “Make sure you take advantage of any opportunity for some alone time.”
Christine did, and she wasn’t the only one. After a fun meal out celebrity-spotting at a local restaurant on their first night, the three other women soon disappeared to spend some quality time with their gentlemen of choice. Janice wasn’t upset, exactly, because that’s what the shore leave was really all about. But tugging on a snowsuit and selecting the latest technology in retractable ski-boots all alone wasn’t as much fun as it was in a group, and sitting alone in a chairlift designed for a group was just downright pathetic.
Still, Janice mused, as the chairlift glided effortlessly up the beautiful mountainside, there was something to be said for some peace and quiet. Living on board a space ship with the same faces day in and day out could be a little claustrophobic.
She got off the lift at the top without having to resort to the cheerful attendant whose job was to haul inexperienced skiers out before they were sent back down the mountain again. It had been a few years since she had last enjoyed a winter sports holiday, but it didn’t take her long to get back into the swing of things. She started out on the practice slopes, and then just before lunch decided to move onto one of the larger, faster runs. Just once, she decided, and then she’d look for somewhere to eat. Maybe she’d meet up with some people she knew from the ship and eat with them, although she knew that just about all the crew scheduled for leave on this rotation were staying kilometres away at another resort. Maybe, she thought recklessly, she’d bump into a handsome local man and start a whirlwind affair over the dessert course.
Truth be told, she was just about ready for both.
As it turned out, she did neither. She had just settled herself, alone again, into a chairlift when a familiar voice called out “Janice! Wait for me!”
The patient attendant held the lift as Kirk appeared from further down the line, smiling an apology at the people he had cut in front of to reach her. He settled himself into the chair and it glided forward and began its long, slow ascent to the summit of the new run.
“I called at the chalet for you, but you weren’t there,” he said, mildly annoyed.
“I’ve been here since breakfast time,” she told him, trying not to notice how his black knitted hat made the blue of his eyes more intense than usual. “This is supposed to be a sports resort, I wanted to make the most of it.”
“Alone?” he questioned.
Janice shrugged.
“I had dinner with the girls last night, but that’s the last I saw of them. I expect they’re all busy, and I didn’t want to be a third wheel.”
“It’s no fun when everybody else is partnered up,” Kirk agreed. “And as I’m technically not supposed to know anything about the flagrant violation of regulations that I helped organise, I’m at a loose end too. We’ll have to stick together.”
“Captain,” she began, but he leaned over and placed a gloved finger over her lips.
“It’s Jim,” he reminded her. “And you agreed to it.”
“I did,” she said, the gloved finger still against her lips. For a terrible second she was tempted to do something dangerous and tug at the glove with her teeth until his finger was exposed, then suck it into her mouth. By the look on his face, he was all for the idea.
Before either could say anything, the chair reached its destination at the top of the mountain. Kirk jumped up and extended a hand to her, and he manoeuvred them out onto the run. They bent over and tapped the button on their boots that activated the release of the skis that unfolded to become full length in a matter of seconds. They clicked the release on the small, pocket-sized handles of their poles and they too unfolded out.
“These are fancier than the ones at the Academy,” Kirk told her, grinning at the memory. “They were all banged up, and half the time the skis would retract when they felt like it. I once went down a training run on one ski when one of my boots played up.”
“What happened?” Janice asked, amused.
“I fell flat on my face and tumbled most of the way down, taking out three cadets and our instructor,” he said with pride. “Bones still has pictures, he says it made being dragged up a mountain a worthwhile experience.”
“It’s been a while since I tackled anything this big,” Janice said nervously, looking down at the white mountainside dotted with colourful ski suits. “I may well fall down myself.”
“You wouldn’t have come up here if you didn’t think you could handle it,” Kirk said with confidence. “Come on, I’ll race you. First one to the bottom gets to pick where we get lunch.”
And with that, he was off, black snowsuit standing out on the white snowfield like a trickle of black ink on a clean sheet of paper. Janice had no choice but to follow, and she soon picked up confidence with her speed. She never completely caught up with Kirk, but she was within a reasonable distance when they both swerved to a stop at the bottom of the run.
“That was exhilarating!” she told him, beaming. “Let’s do it again!”
And then, right on cue, her stomach rumbled loud enough for him to hear, which made him laugh.
“After lunch,” he said firmly. “And I get to pick. Come on.”
He sailed smoothly away and she followed, retracting her skis and pocketing her poles when they got off the run and down onto the resort.
“That place looks good,” Kirk told her, pointing to a busy restaurant.
Janice shrugged. It was, after all, his choice. They made their way there and didn’t have to wait very long for a table to open up for them. Just about everybody in the room was wearing a snowsuit and had a pair of goggles slung over the back of their chairs.
He surprised her by holding her chair for her, and his hands drifted to her shoulders in what she would have called a caress, if any other man had done it. She felt his fingers burn like a brand, even through the padding of her cold-weather clothing, and a pleasant shiver ran down her spine.
They talked about anything other than the ship over lunch, and it surprised Janice how easy it was for her to conveniently forget about the fact that what they were doing was breaking twenty different regulations. What it all boiled down to was the fact that an attractive man that she admired was paying attention to her, and she liked it. When he began his usual light-hearted flirtation she flirted right back instead of pulling away as she usually did. She called him Jim, not Captain, and found herself occasionally grazing his hand with hers as they laughed.
It was not the sensible thing to do, she knew, but the combination of being abandoned by her girlfriends and being off-ship and away from the prying eyes of the crew made her feel bold and reckless. When he suggested that they tackle another run, one quieter and less popular, she agreed immediately. Feeling incredibly daring, she hooked her arm through his as they made their way through the town back to the chairlifts. He looked at her, slightly shocked, and then smiled and pulled her slightly closer.
They got into the chairlift that would take them to their part of the mountain, a long, meandering run that took them almost to the very top. He hesitated slightly before sliding an arm around her waist; she smiled and shifted her weight so she leant closer into him. They didn’t speak, but it didn’t feel uncomfortable. In fact, for the first time in a long time, Janice felt nothing butcomfortable. When he had to move to step out of the chairlift, she actually missed the feeling of his arm around her. She shook herself and told herself firmly not to be so stupid, and looked around at the run he had chosen. It was designed to be taken at a leisurely pace, and there weren’t many other people on it. Those that were on the run were already half way down it. Janice looked up at the sky and frowned.
“I thought there weren’t supposed to be any snowstorms today,” she said, looking anxiously at the rapidly darkening sky.
“There weren’t,” Kirk said, staring up at the large, dark clouds that neither had noticed on their way up the slope. “I checked with the planet’s weather centre, all the snow was supposed to be fifty kilometres north of here.”
“We’d better start down,” Janice said nervously. “I don’t want to be caught in that.”
“We won’t be,” Kirk said confidently.
If Janice had ever been on any away team missions with him, she would have recognised that tone of voice and gone straight back to the chair lifts. It was the tone of voice that usually preceded something dangerous and violent happening. However, she had never been on an away mission and she trusted in his judgement.
They were maybe a quarter of the way through the run when the first snow started to fall; light flakes turned into denser ones, and a gentle sprinkling of flakes turned into a flurry, then a full-blown storm. Alert klaxons sounded from a carefully hidden speaker system, alerting them to the danger that was all too obvious around them. Somewhat more helpfully, it told them the location of a shelter built for just these occasions. Without needing to speak they picked up their pace and headed for the location of the emergency shelter.
It was a small building set back from the run slightly in a stand of tall trees. The door opened immediately, and a blast of warmth from the shelter’s heating system was very welcome indeed. A comm unit was set up in one corner of the room, and Kirk headed to it immediately to send a message to the resort alerting them of their presence. They were advised to stay inside the shelter until the storm passed, and either wait for permission to complete the rest of the run or wait for a rescue vehicle to be dispatched.
The shelter had a small food preparation unit including a food synthesiser, several chairs and couches in the main room and a small sleeping area with an even smaller bathroom off that. It was clearly not designed to be a holiday home.
“Well,” Kirk said, after he had finished talking to the resort. “It looks like we were the last to go up on the chairlift, so there shouldn’t be anyone else joining us.”
He looked around the sparsely-decorated room.
“We could see what the entertainment unit has stored,” he offered, “or...”
Janice would never know what he thought they could do in the small shelter, because it was at that point she went temporarily insane, stepped right up close to him and kissed him.
Provided by website-hit-counters.com site.
Author: fringedweller
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Primarily Kirk/Rand, with background McCoy/Chapel and Pike/One and others, het and slash
Warnings: None
Length: 4806
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything recognisable in this fic and I’m not making any money from it.
Notes: Beta by seren_ccd
Summary: All her life Janice Rand had wanted one thing - to figure out just what she was supposed to do with herself. She drifted into Starfleet on a whim, and to her surprise, found a niche to fill. But being assigned to the Enterprise brings with it a challenge to her neat and ordered way of life, and Janice is unsure as to how much she's willing to let James T. Kirk affect her. But since when has love ever been easy? And will Janice let her heart stand in the way of her career?
Janice was still staggering from the blow to her ego and self confidence when perhaps the very worst thing that happened to her when she was stationed on the Enterprise occurred; she ceased to exist.
The ship had rendezvoused with the Antares, a small survey ship that had been examining the planet Thasus. The crew of the Antares had not been able to communicate with any natives of Thasus, but they had found a human teenager, called Charlie Evans, living happily on the planet. He was the only survivor of a shuttlewreck, and had been raised by the mysterious Thasian people that had refused to show themselves to the Antares’ crew.
Charlie had living relatives in a colony a few day’s travel away, and the Enterprise was taking responsibility for seeing him home. In real terms, that means that Janice found herself the reluctant babysitter of a teenage boy who had never met another human being, had little to no knowledge of basic social etiquette and who was, in her grandmother’s words, handsy.
The first time that Charlie had grabbed hold of her and tried to kiss her, it had taken all of Janice’s effort not to use the self-defence lessons that she had recently started again and knock him unconscious. Instead, she had firmly removed herself from his embrace and tried to explain how it was unacceptable to just grab people and kiss them.
He had looked utterly perplexed at her retreat from him, and had said "If I had the whole universe, I'd give it to you. When I see you, I feel like I'm hungry all over. Hungry. Do you know how that feels?"
Oh yes, she thought, a stab of pity going through her heart. Oh yes, I know how that feels.
He had stormed off in a rage when she had told him that he needed to distance himself a little, but had seemed calmer later when they met in a rec room. Janice had been trying to build a house of cards, and invited him to help her. But when her attention wandered towards Uhura, who had convinced Spock to play his lute for the crowd as she sang, Charlie grew angry. At first he did some kind of trick where he replaced all of the cards Janice had been using for cards with her picture on them, and then when she recoiled in shock, he stormed out of the room in a rage.
“Captain, there’s something wrong with him,” she had protested. “He’s not right.”
“He’s been alone for years, raised by an alien culture,” Kirk protested. “He’s just finding it hard to deal with his first crush on a pretty girl.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Janice had protested, but her pleas had fallen on largely deaf ears. Kirk had agreed to spend more time with Charlie, but Janice wasn’t sure that it would do any good. Deep down, she knew that there was something really wrong with the boy, but she couldn’t explain what it was. He unsettled her.
She wasn’t entirely sure about the next sequence of events - after all, for a great proportion of them she had been vanished out of existence - but she remembered being in her quarters, alone, getting ready for bed. She had just pulled on a slinky nightgown (utterly ridiculous for interstellar travel but it did make her feel glamorous) when the door chime sounded. It was Charlie, and she invited him in, assuming that he was there to apologise for his behaviour earlier.
He had tried to kiss her again, and got angry when she pushed him away and told him firmly that it wasn’t right for him to touch her in that way. The last thing she remembered clearly was Charlie’s face made ugly by a vicious snarl, and his outstretched hand. Then, there was nothing. For the next forty three hours and twenty one minutes, Janice Rand did not exist. She wasn’t dead, or missing. She simply was not present in the universe any longer, the victim of the hormonal rage of an adolescent boy.
She was tired of being the victim of male frustration with the universe, she really was.
The next thing she remembered clearly was suddenly being on the bridge in her ridiculous pink nightgown, surrounded by tense faces and harsh voices. Kirk crossed the space to her immediately and grabbed her wrist with his hand, anchoring her to the present moment. Around her, other decks reported the sudden reappearance of missing crewmen and a disembodied voice that rippled through the ship apologised for the behaviour of Charlie.
Hauntingly, she could still hear an echo of his voice screaming “I want to stay!” as Kirk handed her, still bewildered by the turn of events, off to a nurse who had been summoned to the bridge to escort her down to sickbay. It was there, as she was being poked and prodded by a succession of medical officers, that she began to piece together what had happened in her absence.
Charlie’s behaviour had grown more and more erratic as he grew more jealous of anybody that occupied Kirk’s time, or who stopped him from having anything he wanted. It wasn’t until he made a crewman disappear in front of Kirk’s own eyes that anybody realised the strange powers the teen had, and by then it was too late to curb them. Communications with the Antares went down moments after they were hailed; the ship exploded, and Charlie nonchalently claimed responsibility for the deaths of all hands with the chilling words “It wasn’t very well constructed.”
Charlie then somehow took over control of the Enterprise, although such a large and complex ship took up most of his energy and all of his mental control. Kirk managed to break that control by overloading any ship’s systems his engineers were able to wrestle back from Charlie until the boy had to let go of them completely.
What Kirk would have done next, nobody knew; the crew of the Enterprise were saved by the sudden appearance of a Thasian vessel. In trying to raise the human child, they had gifted him with their own psychokinetic powers, but he was too emotionally unstable to handle their potential for evil acts. The Thasians removed Charlie from the Enterprise in order to return him to their planet and teach him how to control his powers so no innocents would be harmed. Kirk had been reluctant to separate the boy from his relatives in the nearby colony, but the Thasians had been correct in the reasoning that Charlie would be a danger to all humans without control over his abilities.
Down in sickbay, Janice had been given the all-clear from McCoy himself; “For somebody who had ceased to exist, yeoman, you’re doing a pretty good imitation of being alive and well. Go and get some sleep, and report to Dr Noel in the morning for a psych evaluation.”
Janice and Dr Noel were close to becoming good friends. She would have to check the ship’s records, but Janice was positive that she was the only member of support services who had been through the usual post-traumatic incident counselling usually offered to crew who had bad experiences while on away missions.
One of the orderlies had replicated a uniform for her to change into, and she was just pulling a brush through her hair when Kirk appeared around the side of the privacy partition.
“Are you alright?” he asked, blue eyes full of concern.
“I’m fine,” she said, wincing as the brush caught a tangle in her hair. “Not harmed at all.”
“Except for those hours when you were wiped out of existence,” he said, his voice aiming for lightness but missing it by light-years.
“Well, yes,” Janice agreed. “But as I remember nothing about it, I’ve decided not to let it worry me too much. I was affected more by suddenly appearing on the bridge in my night clothes.”
Kirk grinned, his mood lightening with her blithe tone.
“We were all affected by that, Janice,” he told her. “But seriously. How are you?”
Janice sighed. “In all honesty? I think I need a vacation. Somewhere where I can have some fun without having to worry about my captain’s evil twin, or hormonal telekinetic sociopaths, or the vast amount of paperwork I’m sure you’ve avoided for the last two days.”
Kirk started to protest his innocence, but he wasn’t able to pull it off in the face of Janice’s patented You’ve Been A Bad Captain Again, Haven’t You? look.
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” he promised, and she must truly have been feeling the strain of the experience because she didn’t protest or offer to do the organising for him. Instead, she thanked him for checking up on her and walked back to her quarters alone, because she was an adult and brave and not scared of teenage boys.
She’d keep this secret to her dying day, but before she went to sleep she checked the bathroom and the closet in case Charlie had escaped his Thasian babysitters. And she threw the pink nightgown into her recycling unit.
While she slept Kirk must have been incredibly busy, because in her inbox the next morning was a reservation confirmation for a four-person chalet on a nearby pleasure planet. Also in her inbox was the welcome news that the entire ship would enjoy a staggered shore-leave stay.
There was definitely a buzz in the air over breakfast in the mess that morning, and a squealing Gaila jumping in her lap to kiss her soundly on the lips was the living, breathing embodiment of it.
“How did you do it?” Gaila asked, using the sleeve of her uniform to rub her lipstick off Janice’s face.
“Good morning Gaila, how are you?” Janice asked rhetorically. “No, I don’t mind being used as your personal chair.”
Gaila pulled herself onto a spare chair and grinned at her.
“How did you manage it? That resort is always booked up for weeks!”
“What resort? What have I done?” Janice asked, desperately trying to translate Gaila’s bouncing and squealing into Standard.
“Gaila is assuming that you’re behind securing the four of us a luxury chalet at the most exclusive winter sport resort on the planet. A resort that’s always booked at least a year in advance, and is the preferred playground of the rich and famous.”
Uhura sat down, bearing her breakfast tray.
“If any of us could do it, it would be you,” Uhura finished. “So, thank you. I’ve always wanted to stay there!”
“Joseph Clooney has a house there,” Christine added as she hurried over, looking incredibly pleased. “And he’s been spotted there two days ago their time, enjoying the down-hill skiing slopes. Maybe we’ll meet him!”
Christine looked dreamy-eyed at the prospect.
“I didn’t do this,” Janice tried to explain, but it took a while for the message to sink in to her excited friends. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t even know we had shore leave coming up until I opened up my inbox this morning and found the message.”
“So who organised it then?” Gaila asked, confused. Christine and Uhura exchanged speculative looks, and then turned pointedly to Janice. She tried to stand up to their combined stare, but withered under its awesome combined power.
“I may have told him that I needed a holiday,” she confessed. “But I didn’t know he’d do this.”
“I think it’s sweet,” Christine said, still lost in the thought of Joseph Clooney.
“Very romantic,” Gaila teased.
“It could be trouble,” Uhura warned.
Janice sighed.
“When is anything on this ship not trouble?” she asked.
Organising shore leave rotations for the entire crew took up the rest of Janice’s day, and half of the next one, but with some judicious chopping and changing of duty shifts, everybody got a full four days worth of time on the planet below. Very few crew were actually staying on the planet, most choosing to save their credits and go back to the ship each evening to sleep.
Janice had protested the chalet booking as soon as she cornered Kirk in his ready room.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she told him, trying to sound firm and business-like. “It’s really not necessary, and it must have cost a fortune.”
“I think I did have to do it,” he argued, “as most of your time on board has been spent recovering from events that were my fault.” Before she could protest, he held up a hand to stop her.
“And don’t worry about the cost,” he went on. “This one’s on Starfleet Medical, believe it or not.”
“Really?” she asked, puzzled. Kirk nodded.
“You’ve had the amount of therapy time needed to qualify you for a mandatory rest break,” he told her. “I’ve got the report from Dr Noel and everything.”
“Enough therapy for a four-bedroom luxury chalet smack bang in the middle of the best resort in ten star systems?” she asked sceptically. Kirk shrugged.
“I may have fiddled the books slightly,” he admitted. “But tell me that Gaila and the others don’t love you right now.”
“Christine’s in seventh heaven,” Janice told him, smiling. “And it took Gaila five whole minutes to stop babbling about the resort this morning before Uhura could get a word in edgeways. So, thank you. I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful time.”
“Oh, we will,” Kirk agreed, beaming. “I love skiing. Not a lot of chance to do it in Iowa, but I got pretty good at it when I was at the academy. Do you ski?”
“A little. Not well,” Janice said, confused. “I’m sorry, sir, did you say ‘we’?”
“As it happens, your chalet is in the grounds of another, larger building, which happens to be owned by a friend of Admiral Pike,” Kirk said, his grin growing so large it threatened to split his face in two. “For a nominal fee, the admiral’s friend has given the senior staff the run of the place. We’ll transfer in and out as the rota allows.”
“We’re going on leave together?”
“No,” he explained patiently. “And in a matter of speaking, yes.”
Janice sat down, unbidden.
“You know that I uphold Starfleet regulations on the Enterprise,” he said slowly, looking right at her.
“I do,” she said, still confused.
“And that as captain, if I were asked to give permission for any officers I suspected as having a relationship contrary to regulations to go on leave together, I’d have to deny it and open an investigation into their behaviour.”
“You would,” she replied, the true meaning behind his actions becoming apparent. “But if, say, your chief medical officer happened to be on leave at the same time as one of his staff, who was officially billeted in a separate building, that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Exactly,” Kirk said. “Or the first officer and the head of communications. Or my chief engineer and the head of the computer section. Or my helmsman and my navigator, which, by the way, I totally did not see coming.”
“I told you Chekov wasn’t blushing because of me,” Janice said airily. Neither of them added or the captain of the ship and his yeoman, although it was practically dancing in the air between them.
“I don’t think people realise just how kind you really are,” Janice said slowly. Kirk squirmed in his seat and turned his face away.
“So, no more fuss about not going on leave,” he said brusquely. “This is bigger than just you, yeoman.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, rising from her seat to head down to the main admin control room.
“Oh, and Janice?” he called, just as she reached the door
“Yes, sir?”
“No ‘sirs’ on leave. I’ll just be Jim then.”
Such an innocent sounding sentence, but Janice could sense the danger surrounding it. Somehow, though, she just couldn’t bring herself to really care that much.
“I understand,” she said softly, and smiled at him before slipping through the doors and away from temptation.
“This isn’t a chalet,” Uhura said in awe as they opened the door of their holiday home and explored the luxuriously appointed rooms. “I’ve been skiing, I’ve stayed in chalets. This is...this is a palace!”
Gaila, who had run on ahead of them, bounced excitedly out of a room.
“Come and see the bathtub! It’s huge!”” she squealed. “If we have an orgy, we definitely have to have it in there!”
She dashed off to explore the rest of the building as the other three exchanged weary looks.
“I’ll do it,” Uhura sighed, and chased after Gaila to explain the unofficial ‘no-orgy’ policy.
“So, which room do you want?” Janice asked Christine as they poked their heads into the sleeping areas that lay off the corridor.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Christine said a little too innocently for Janice. “How about that one?”
She pointed to the bedroom door closest to the main entrance to the chalet. Janice raised an eyebrow.
“Convenient for making quiet entrances and exits,” she grinned. “Planning on spending some time up at the main building, Christine?”
Christine tried her best, but the grin just forced itself out.
“All day, every day if I can manage it,” she sighed, looking the happiest Janice had ever seen her.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” Janice said, fighting a pang of jealousy. “How long?”
“A week,” Christine said, looking dreamy-eyed.
“Well, you enjoy yourself,” Janice told her. “Make sure you take advantage of any opportunity for some alone time.”
Christine did, and she wasn’t the only one. After a fun meal out celebrity-spotting at a local restaurant on their first night, the three other women soon disappeared to spend some quality time with their gentlemen of choice. Janice wasn’t upset, exactly, because that’s what the shore leave was really all about. But tugging on a snowsuit and selecting the latest technology in retractable ski-boots all alone wasn’t as much fun as it was in a group, and sitting alone in a chairlift designed for a group was just downright pathetic.
Still, Janice mused, as the chairlift glided effortlessly up the beautiful mountainside, there was something to be said for some peace and quiet. Living on board a space ship with the same faces day in and day out could be a little claustrophobic.
She got off the lift at the top without having to resort to the cheerful attendant whose job was to haul inexperienced skiers out before they were sent back down the mountain again. It had been a few years since she had last enjoyed a winter sports holiday, but it didn’t take her long to get back into the swing of things. She started out on the practice slopes, and then just before lunch decided to move onto one of the larger, faster runs. Just once, she decided, and then she’d look for somewhere to eat. Maybe she’d meet up with some people she knew from the ship and eat with them, although she knew that just about all the crew scheduled for leave on this rotation were staying kilometres away at another resort. Maybe, she thought recklessly, she’d bump into a handsome local man and start a whirlwind affair over the dessert course.
Truth be told, she was just about ready for both.
As it turned out, she did neither. She had just settled herself, alone again, into a chairlift when a familiar voice called out “Janice! Wait for me!”
The patient attendant held the lift as Kirk appeared from further down the line, smiling an apology at the people he had cut in front of to reach her. He settled himself into the chair and it glided forward and began its long, slow ascent to the summit of the new run.
“I called at the chalet for you, but you weren’t there,” he said, mildly annoyed.
“I’ve been here since breakfast time,” she told him, trying not to notice how his black knitted hat made the blue of his eyes more intense than usual. “This is supposed to be a sports resort, I wanted to make the most of it.”
“Alone?” he questioned.
Janice shrugged.
“I had dinner with the girls last night, but that’s the last I saw of them. I expect they’re all busy, and I didn’t want to be a third wheel.”
“It’s no fun when everybody else is partnered up,” Kirk agreed. “And as I’m technically not supposed to know anything about the flagrant violation of regulations that I helped organise, I’m at a loose end too. We’ll have to stick together.”
“Captain,” she began, but he leaned over and placed a gloved finger over her lips.
“It’s Jim,” he reminded her. “And you agreed to it.”
“I did,” she said, the gloved finger still against her lips. For a terrible second she was tempted to do something dangerous and tug at the glove with her teeth until his finger was exposed, then suck it into her mouth. By the look on his face, he was all for the idea.
Before either could say anything, the chair reached its destination at the top of the mountain. Kirk jumped up and extended a hand to her, and he manoeuvred them out onto the run. They bent over and tapped the button on their boots that activated the release of the skis that unfolded to become full length in a matter of seconds. They clicked the release on the small, pocket-sized handles of their poles and they too unfolded out.
“These are fancier than the ones at the Academy,” Kirk told her, grinning at the memory. “They were all banged up, and half the time the skis would retract when they felt like it. I once went down a training run on one ski when one of my boots played up.”
“What happened?” Janice asked, amused.
“I fell flat on my face and tumbled most of the way down, taking out three cadets and our instructor,” he said with pride. “Bones still has pictures, he says it made being dragged up a mountain a worthwhile experience.”
“It’s been a while since I tackled anything this big,” Janice said nervously, looking down at the white mountainside dotted with colourful ski suits. “I may well fall down myself.”
“You wouldn’t have come up here if you didn’t think you could handle it,” Kirk said with confidence. “Come on, I’ll race you. First one to the bottom gets to pick where we get lunch.”
And with that, he was off, black snowsuit standing out on the white snowfield like a trickle of black ink on a clean sheet of paper. Janice had no choice but to follow, and she soon picked up confidence with her speed. She never completely caught up with Kirk, but she was within a reasonable distance when they both swerved to a stop at the bottom of the run.
“That was exhilarating!” she told him, beaming. “Let’s do it again!”
And then, right on cue, her stomach rumbled loud enough for him to hear, which made him laugh.
“After lunch,” he said firmly. “And I get to pick. Come on.”
He sailed smoothly away and she followed, retracting her skis and pocketing her poles when they got off the run and down onto the resort.
“That place looks good,” Kirk told her, pointing to a busy restaurant.
Janice shrugged. It was, after all, his choice. They made their way there and didn’t have to wait very long for a table to open up for them. Just about everybody in the room was wearing a snowsuit and had a pair of goggles slung over the back of their chairs.
He surprised her by holding her chair for her, and his hands drifted to her shoulders in what she would have called a caress, if any other man had done it. She felt his fingers burn like a brand, even through the padding of her cold-weather clothing, and a pleasant shiver ran down her spine.
They talked about anything other than the ship over lunch, and it surprised Janice how easy it was for her to conveniently forget about the fact that what they were doing was breaking twenty different regulations. What it all boiled down to was the fact that an attractive man that she admired was paying attention to her, and she liked it. When he began his usual light-hearted flirtation she flirted right back instead of pulling away as she usually did. She called him Jim, not Captain, and found herself occasionally grazing his hand with hers as they laughed.
It was not the sensible thing to do, she knew, but the combination of being abandoned by her girlfriends and being off-ship and away from the prying eyes of the crew made her feel bold and reckless. When he suggested that they tackle another run, one quieter and less popular, she agreed immediately. Feeling incredibly daring, she hooked her arm through his as they made their way through the town back to the chairlifts. He looked at her, slightly shocked, and then smiled and pulled her slightly closer.
They got into the chairlift that would take them to their part of the mountain, a long, meandering run that took them almost to the very top. He hesitated slightly before sliding an arm around her waist; she smiled and shifted her weight so she leant closer into him. They didn’t speak, but it didn’t feel uncomfortable. In fact, for the first time in a long time, Janice felt nothing butcomfortable. When he had to move to step out of the chairlift, she actually missed the feeling of his arm around her. She shook herself and told herself firmly not to be so stupid, and looked around at the run he had chosen. It was designed to be taken at a leisurely pace, and there weren’t many other people on it. Those that were on the run were already half way down it. Janice looked up at the sky and frowned.
“I thought there weren’t supposed to be any snowstorms today,” she said, looking anxiously at the rapidly darkening sky.
“There weren’t,” Kirk said, staring up at the large, dark clouds that neither had noticed on their way up the slope. “I checked with the planet’s weather centre, all the snow was supposed to be fifty kilometres north of here.”
“We’d better start down,” Janice said nervously. “I don’t want to be caught in that.”
“We won’t be,” Kirk said confidently.
If Janice had ever been on any away team missions with him, she would have recognised that tone of voice and gone straight back to the chair lifts. It was the tone of voice that usually preceded something dangerous and violent happening. However, she had never been on an away mission and she trusted in his judgement.
They were maybe a quarter of the way through the run when the first snow started to fall; light flakes turned into denser ones, and a gentle sprinkling of flakes turned into a flurry, then a full-blown storm. Alert klaxons sounded from a carefully hidden speaker system, alerting them to the danger that was all too obvious around them. Somewhat more helpfully, it told them the location of a shelter built for just these occasions. Without needing to speak they picked up their pace and headed for the location of the emergency shelter.
It was a small building set back from the run slightly in a stand of tall trees. The door opened immediately, and a blast of warmth from the shelter’s heating system was very welcome indeed. A comm unit was set up in one corner of the room, and Kirk headed to it immediately to send a message to the resort alerting them of their presence. They were advised to stay inside the shelter until the storm passed, and either wait for permission to complete the rest of the run or wait for a rescue vehicle to be dispatched.
The shelter had a small food preparation unit including a food synthesiser, several chairs and couches in the main room and a small sleeping area with an even smaller bathroom off that. It was clearly not designed to be a holiday home.
“Well,” Kirk said, after he had finished talking to the resort. “It looks like we were the last to go up on the chairlift, so there shouldn’t be anyone else joining us.”
He looked around the sparsely-decorated room.
“We could see what the entertainment unit has stored,” he offered, “or...”
Janice would never know what he thought they could do in the small shelter, because it was at that point she went temporarily insane, stepped right up close to him and kissed him.
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