Nobody seems to care about poor old Scotty. I thought he needed a little love, and then this story and pairing took over my life. This is a Scotty/OC, and the OC is my character Effie from my fic Acts of Courage. She just goes by a new nickname now... and happens to be a Starfleet chaplain.
Things you will find in this fic: asexual!Scotty, asexual!OC, fluff, a little angst, five chapters, awkwardness, some Gaelic, Scotty occasionally slumbering in a Jeffries tube, no sex (except for mentioning how Scotty really doesn't get it), and hopefully enjoyment.
Things you will not find in this fic: me owning Star Trek in any way.
Montgomery Scott had wanted to be an engineer on a starship for as long as he could remember. Scots have a long and storied history of engineering feats, and he wished more than anything to join their ranks. He was reading technical journals by the age of six, having mastered the basics of reading not long before, and anything he didn't understand, he would look up online. His father, Montgomery Scott, Sr., was more than happy to provide his eldest child and son whatever he wanted to read. Young Monty performed well in all subjects in primary school, but he excelled in mathematics and sciences, where he was proverbial light-years ahead of his peers. (It should be noted that his marks in art classes were less than stellar, as he was often chided by his instructors for being too technical in his art, as his work resembled schematics more than anything else.)
He graduated from secondary school and college at age fifteen after disproving a major theory on how Klingon shields worked and interacted with photon torpedoes. He took it upon himself to build, in his spare time, a working mock-up of a Klingon shield using seven separate shield generators and proved that firing torpedoes at the junctions of the shields caused no disruption of shield cohesion as the current theory stated. His work was quickly published in a leading journal and later in The Encyclopedia of Engineering Development and Design under 'The Aberdeen Solution'. His school advanced his matriculation, and he graduated in the spring of 2237, very near the top of his class.
His parents and grandparents were eager for him to attend university, but young Monty had other ideas. He procured himself some work on various freighters to acquaint himself with actual ship operations before he made any long-term decisions. He didn't want to become some uppity, full of himself engineer with lots of silly ideas and no experience to back them up or make them happen. The senior engineers tended to like him and were delighted to have someone to share their own knowledge and experience with, especially someone so bright and promising. Being engineers, they were also quite aware that he was the brain behind the Aberdeen Solution.
He enjoyed his time on the USS Deirdre the most, and it was where he met his favorite mentor, Murron Douglass. Murron was a fiery Scot, a black woman of just over middle age, who loved her ship more than anything in the world. She didn't take shit off anyone and had no tolerance for either ignorance or stupidity. Even the freighter's captain was sure to tread lightly around Murron Douglass. Monty wanted to be just like her, wanted to be respected and trusted, wanted people to look up to him the way he looked up to her.
"Listen here, laddie," she told him one day in early 2239, "I've got some associates in the Engineering Department at the University of Edinburgh. You've got promise, and I want to see ye succeed. Ye want to go into Starfleet, aye?"
"Aye, ma'am," he replied, now seventeen.
"Then that's where ye ought to go, Edinburgh. No engineering school is finer, no' in the whole Federation. You'll thank me, lad. I'll pop off a letter later this week so ye can go in the fall when they start."
"Thank you, ma'am."
"Don't call me ma'am. Call me Murron. Ma'am makes me feel old, an' I hate to feel old."
"Yes, thank you, Murron."
"Good lad. Get to work."
Monty was easily accepted into the university, and he dove headfirst into his work, flourishing with the coursework and theoretical discussions. He pushed himself to do his best in all his courses at university, especially his engineering, maths, and physics courses, and whenever someone asked him what his future plans were, he would happily tell them, "Starfleet Corps of Engineers!" and rattle off a list of ships he'd like to serve on. After the first year, however, his marked disinterest in any courses that were not specific to his majors showed in his less than average grades. This brought down his GPA slightly, but his marks in his major courses were near to perfect. He graduated the University of Edinburgh in 2243 summa cum laude at age twenty-one with some delightedly happy family in the audience.
The next year he was accepted to Starfleet Academy, and it felt like coming home. He thrived at the Academy, where everyone was (almost) as interested in transwarp theory and relativistic physics and the best ways to handle warp core damage as he was. He cared not a whit for ethical arguments, xenobiology, xenolinguistics, or diplomacy. In those courses, Monty did just well enough to receive good marks from the advisors, and it worked. The Academy instructors seemed to like not only him but his attitude, though they and his family wondered why he wasn't interested in the Command track and captaining his own ship one day. Monty took the Kobayashi Maru to placate them, but he skewed it in his favor by using an obscure an engineering trick that would never work in real life to stalemate the test, thereby ensuring they would leave him in engineering where he belonged. It was there in the Engineering Department that Monty earned a new moniker: Scotty.
Scotty's peers at Starfleet found him to be both a good coworker and formidable opponent. His arguments for his side in any debate were always well thought out, logical to a fault, and technically sound. He was rarely, if ever, out-argued, and no one could deny his passion for starship engineering and transporter theory or his extensive knowledge thereof. He found himself handpicked by Adm. Archer to be his aide for his Advanced Relativistic Mechanics course in his final year at the Academy, a position he kept after his graduation in 2248 and while he worked at the San Francisco Shipyards.
In the early months of 2255, he got into a heated, weeks long argument with Archer over transporter capabilities and transwarp beaming that ended with when he absconded with one of Archer's beagles and attempted to transport it to the adjacent system; the keyword was attempted. The dog vanished. Archer flew into a rage, bellowing at Scotty until he was red in the face and then yelled some more. Scotty took his chastisement quietly and stoically, refusing to outright admit that he was wrong in anything other than using the dog for the experiment. He didn't care. He would not say he was wrong when he wasn't. So it was, in the late spring of 2255, he was sent to Starfleet outpost on Delta Vega with a Roylan called Keenser. Scotty knew why he was being sent to the icy hellhole. He wondered why poor Keenser was there.
Life on Delta Vega was awful. It was not the lack of people that bothered Scotty. He'd never been a highly sociable person, choosing a few close friends over many acquaintances and looking for a single person to cleave to in a crowd or at a party. No, the thing that bothered him most about life on Delta Vega was the utterly mundane nature of the work. It was all the same, day in and day out. His mind was ready to rot from stagnation. He only managed to keep it sharp through continual reading of technical journals and tweaking his precious transwarp beaming theory, though he couldn't quite perfect it. During the nights, he would listen to the wind and strange beasts howling outside and wonder when Adm. Archer would forgive him enough to send him somewhere… warmer.
Montgomery Scott went about his duties on Delta Vega with little of the zeal he exhibited at the Academy, no longer feeling challenged by the work he was given by Starfleet and wondering if he really wanted to remain in the 'Fleet anymore, though he refused to burden anyone else with such thoughts. He was in one of these black moods when Keenser came into the main hangar with an ancient Vulcan and a young Terran called Jim Kirk. The Vulcan handed him his transwarp theory and a ticket off the frozen hellhole right to a Federation ship… and she was the brand new Enterprise! Kirk took command of the ship from a young Vulcan and sent Scotty to Engineering and destroyed a Romulan ship with red matter that shouldn't scientifically exist and made a black hole they would have been sucked into if Scotty didn't eject their warp cores into the anomaly to blow them to safety. Things happened quickly on the Enterprise. He liked this ship, and that was good, because without warp, it took them three weeks to limp back to Earth for repairs.
It was there, in the Engineering bay of the USS Enterprise, that Scotty fell in love for only the third time in his life. His first love was engineering. The second was the Enterprise.
Now, it should be stated that one of Scotty's defining characteristics was obliviousness. His social skills were slightly lacking, especially when it came to romantic pursuits. He was notoriously bad not only at flirting but also at knowing when someone was flirting with him. This had never really bothered him, largely because he didn't realize it was happening. He had never, even during puberty, had any crushes on or interest in sexual relations with anyone, be they male, female, or any variant thereof. Listening to the sexual exploits of his friends and colleagues merely fueled his apathy for the activity. This is not to say that he could not recognize if someone was attractive or good-looking, but he typically stayed away from people who expressed any sort of sexual interest in him (once it was explained to him that's what it was).
Even in this day an age, a complete disinterest in sex was extremely rare and usually mocked. His friends at university and at the Academy would offer up subtle jibes at him for his lack of experience, but after a while it just became another thing that made Scotty who he was. In the rare event of a sexual urge cropping up, which was only natural, Scotty would just handle it himself and get on with his life. After all, his interests laid in warp cores and transporters, not people.
That's why he was so confused when he felt his heart flutter and his stomach flip upon meeting her for the first time. It was near the beginning of their slow limp back to Earth when she came into Engineering. A petty officer second class led her over to Scotty, though he had his attention focused on a wall panel, and told him, "Sir, she asked to speak with the head of Engineering. With Chief Engineer Olsen gone, you're the highest-ranking officer and have the most authority. I believe acting Cpt. Kirk named you chief engineer?"
"Aye, that he did. Thank ye, petty officer," he said, then turned to their guest, "And what can I do for you?"
She stood before him in a science blue dress with long sleeves, the lieutenant's bars on the cuffs catching the light. Her dark hair was up in a messy bun. Her face was kind. The young lieutenant extends a slim hand, saying, "Hello there. PO Sedna tells me you're the head of Engineering?"
"For the time being, anyway. Name's Montgomery Scott, though most just call me Scotty."
"Good to meet you, Scotty," she tells him cheerfully, "I'm Winifred Mulcahy, the ship's chaplain. I just wanted to come down and meet you and ask you to remind your department of where my office is. I'm right by the main medical bay. So, if anyone needs to speak with me, my door is open 24/7, for the most part. I know the crew suffered a lot of losses, so I'm just asking all the department heads to remind their crews where I am."
"I certainly will, Lt. Mulcahy."
"Oh please, it's Winifred, or Freddey."
"Of course, Freddey. I'll send out a notice to the entire department quick as."
"Wonderful. Thank you, Scotty. I've gotta go. I'm on my way to the Communication department."
"I could escort you out, if you'd like," Scotty offered.
"That's awfully nice of you, but I'm sure you have way more important things to do than show me out. See ya later, Scotty," she said, offering him a wave on her way out.
Scotty, however, could not think of a single thing more important than escorting Winifred Mulcahy out of Engineering, her dainty hand resting on his arm. He watched her until she was out of sight, a strange weight settling on his heart that he'd never known before. If anyone noticed, they said nothing. He slept in a Jeffries tube that night, having no quarters of his own and wanting to be near the hum of the engines. He could see the lovely face in his mind's eye, the grey eyes smiling and sparkling with her grin. Light freckles were dotted across her nose and cheeks, and she was laughing about something he'd said.
This is insane!, he thought to himself, curling up a bit more in the tube, Why is this happening to me? I only spoke to the lass for a moment, so I can't understand why I can't get her out of my head. I've seen plenty of pretty lasses before, but this never went on. Perhaps tomorrow it won't be so bad.
He woke the next day to Jim Kirk prodding him and asking, "Why the hell were you sleeping in here? You shoulda told me you needed quarters approved! I'll see to it later today. Now, come on, I wanna ask you some questions about the engines. I need to know more about the ship."
"Of course, laddie," Scotty replied, quickly exiting the Jeffries tube, "What would ye like to know?"
He spent the whole morning showing the captain (acting captain, he reminded himself) around the Engineering deck, and Scotty managed to forget the pretty chaplain while explaining his wonderful engines.
Also, I want to thank tumblr users arthurpoo, icelsa, and phaserbeams for helping me out. I oscillated so much on what division to have Freddey in before settling on Sciences/Medical because she acts sort of as another counselor.
Please review, not for my ego, but to let me know what you think so far and if it needs anything else to help your understanding.