It is 2257, a year before James T. Kirk will take the helm of the Enterprise during a clash with Nero.

Callista DeChangy had always been the sparky, confident one among the nurses. She could hold her own in any situation with any dissenting patient, or keep the good graces of an overseeing doctor with a smile and a joke. She was unflappable, scoffing, amusing and inarguably well-intentioned.

It is 2257, and Leonard McCoy is waiting for his Academy days to end, so his life's work can begin.

She was the cheeky, popular nurse who got what she wanted with a hair flick and a few well-timed, incontrovertible facts – something which people laughingly called 'a deadly combination'.

It is 2257, and Callista DeChangy, recently of Riverside, Iowa, thinks she has this and every other world at her feet.

It had came as something of a surprise when she discovered that on top of all of these positive, acceptable, workable traits, she was also, unexpectedly, a coward.

It is 2257. And the Farragut is a ship in flames.

Years of Starfleet training had somehow not prepared her for this. As the ship juddered in a way entirely new to her beneath the study black boots which had seen her through so much, Cally found herself shamefully pressed to the wall, unable to bring herself to answer a call to arms or to simply run to any perceived safety. She was simply – stuck. Crew members whose faces she knew well were running past her down the corridor, not stopping to shame her for her weakness, or to drag her along on their tide of desperation. She stared at them as they ran past, her mouth dry and her heart rattling in her ribcage like a ringing alarm clock.

'There's a fire! FIRE!' someone was screaming down the corridor; species, age, and sex indeterminable beneath the soot and rips and blood. A fire? What was happening? How had the ship gone from 0 to catastrophe in so short a space of time? With supreme effort, Cally peeled an arm from the wall and her stomach lurched sickeningly at the thoughts of her future.

Sweat was damp in her tawny hair , down her back and making her hands slick and useless.

'We need a doctor!' someone else called down the hall, their voice faint among the rest of the noise, but she still heard it. She was trained to hear it. The rest of her body shrugged itself from the wall with a graceless lunge and she stood on shaky calves legs, eyes massive with fear in a sweat-streaked face. Being a nurse in Star Fleet had never meant disaster to her before. It had meant injuries and panic at times, but never casualties and flames. Wards and most importantly, order.

Go, Cally, go, this is your job, a voice was urging her in her head but something squeamish had seized hold of her at this crucial moment and it wasn't until she heard an agonized plea for help that her stumbling legs could regain some strength and propel her towards the scene. It was just as awful as she had expected.

Engineering looked like a war zone, full of electrical fires and wires hanging like streamers from every battered console. People were either running or bleeding, and there didn't seem to be room for anyone who wasn't engaged in one or the other. It was with a sense of wonder that Cally found herself beginning to tremble, and could just find enough control over her mind to hate herself for it.

'Please,' someone moaned and there it was – the blissful switch into autopilot which she had been waiting for since the emergency began. There wasn't a single thought skittering across her brain unrelated to her task at hand, binding limbs, giving medication, barking orders at orderlies and spreading whatever burn lotion she could find on the worst victims. Nurse Cally would complete her task as capably as she always did. The private loathing would come later, she promised herself.

An empty promise, as it turned out. Cally would remember the scene every day of her life, but she could never be quite sure about it. Had this been the moment her adult life had begun, or simply the moment that she began living it? A voice croaking her name, the endless seconds as she dropped a bundle of bandages and cast desperately about to find the man whose voice urged her closer. The new, cold sweat springing up on her neck and face and torso. The noise of the disaster dimming in her ears, and then, the moment – pure, blind, screaming fear when she finally found him. Her Jack.

Broken glass cut her knees as she dropped to the ground at his side, which would leave scars for good. Her hands swept gentle as butterflies across his chest, the evidently crushed sternum, the chalky face. The humming, inconceivably massive realisation that even with her years of training, the best technology they had and whatever steely resolve she could muster, she couldn't fix him. The thought spun dizzily in her mind as she looked at him, his familiar brown eyes and shaggy hair, a face aged years by this pain.

'Cally,' he managed again, with an edge of relief, even as she saw blood awash on his teeth and her breathing began to stutter along with his. She remembered his baby teeth, if that could make any kind of desperate difference.

'I'm here, Jack,' she returned, her voice choked up to its highest pitch, her hands gently roving his face, his shoulders, a scream building inside her all the while. Jack opened his mouth again and gurgled his final words, with his sweet, tired eyes grateful for hers.

'Thank you,' he managed, blinking up at her, even as something in them began to dull and a shuddery, final breath was in and out, for good, before she could fully make sense of it.

'Jack?' she tried, blankly.

'Jack?' she tried again, shaking his shoulders as much as she dared, eliciting no response. She drew back just a fraction, to look at his face and feel his pulse and convince herself that before her was the dead body of Jack Mahony. The air was acrid in her lungs, the noise unending and everywhere, but she neither saw nor heard a single thing over the gasps that were her breath or the pumping which was still her heart and not his. She was conscious, looking at him, of the scream still growing inside her, and as it finally burst out of her, taking form in his name, she reached the edge of the cliff in her mind, and felt herself slip over without a whisper of argument or complaint.

Cally DeChangy was 21, and her first taste of death would colour the rest of her life. It was the first time that she realised that she was a nurse who had failed, when it mattered the most.

It is 2257, and Callista DeChangy is declared Unfit for Duty. Other lives go on, but not hers. It will be 2259 before life begins again.

She waits.

A/N: Just putting this out as a bit of a test to see how it goes down. This chapter is set one year before the Enterprise encounters the Romulans; an episode which will shoot James T. Kirk to fame. Cally, a nurse on the Farragut is about to discover a revelation which will send her spinning back to Iowa, where people expect less from her. She'll be dragged back to action however soon enough, by the entreaties of her idiot brother and curiosity about the strange new people present in her Star Fleet. And then there's that thing with McCoy, and of course, they're all about to blast Into Darkness ... well. No such thing as a boring workday, anyway.