Stardate 2236.265
Sitting in her bedroom, ten-year-old Christine Chapel was bored. Bored, bored, bored. But boredom wasn't her problem. Well, not her only problem.
The biggest problem she was facing was that her eleventh birthday was less than a month away - the cutoff age if she seriously wanted to pursue a profession in the Empire. That was a two-edged sword. If she declared an interest, that was it. You couldn't decide a few years down the road that you'd made a mistake. That meant you would be charged with wasting the Empire's resources and, unless your family had the money or clout, you became a literal slave to the Empire, working for a set period to pay the Empire back for the wasted education. If a girl was found attractive enough, that meant she would become someone's sex toy. If unattractive, she would find herself a servant of a powerful household. Very few that entered a household as a slave servant lived long enough to work off their debt and regain their freedom.
Boys didn't have that problem but, as Christine's mother had pointed out to her, girls didn't have to worry about press gangs, so in a way, it all evened out. Besides, fair or not, it was the way it was and complaining about it certainly wouldn't change it.
The windows rattled as her entire house shook. Eyes wide, Christine went to the window in time to see the fireball still in the air. Without hesitation, she ran from her room to she what had happened.
Whether the incident was an assassination made to look like an accident or an actual accident was something Christine never learned as she got close enough to see the remains of the shuttle that had crashed. The responders were short handed and one of them spotted her watching. Despite her age, he called the girl over to help move the bodies - well, more like body parts - out of the way. Knowing better than to disobey, she quickly moved to help, flinching at the heat coming from the wreckage.
She was in the process of pulling away a torso when it dawned on her that the excitement she was feeling wasn't from the proximity to the wreck. It was the bodies. They fascinated her and drew her in as nothing ever had before. She wanted to continue to touch them, explore them. See how they were put together. By the time the accident was cleared, Christine had a career goal. She simply needed to figure out what profession the Empire needed that would give her access to more bodies.
In the end, requesting to train as a nurse was a given. Christine had always been an excellent, but unmotivated, student. Once given the preliminary materials to study in order to access aptitude, she literally memorized all of it and passed the entrance exams with flying colors. Choosing nursing increased the odds that she would eventually be enlisted into Imperial Starfleet, but that thought didn't deter her. In fact, the possibility of dealing with the corpses of non-humanoid races practically made her mouth water.
Christine exceled in her classes and, as expected, was called to serve in Imperial Starfleet. At the hospital located on the Academy grounds, she worked diligently and keep her ears open. When she learned that Doctor Puri was destined for the CMO position of what was to be the jewel of the Imperial Fleet, she quickly took steps to come favorably to the notice of Nurse Scyber - Doctor Puri's favorite nurse who was bound to become the Head Nurse on the Enterprise and, as such, would doubtless have input as to who should be part of the nursing staff.
It was a good thing that Christine had taken pains to keep up her class rankings because it quickly became obvious that Puri was only picking the best for his Sickbay. Between her grades, her work ethics and the approval of Nurse Scyber, Christine made the cut.
Her elation was short-lived as the Enterprise left far sooner than expected and barely avoided the trap that decimated the rest of the fleet. Worse, both Doctor Puri and Nurse Scyber were killed when Sickbay took a hit.
She began to hope again when Doctor Leonard McCoy was told to take over and she, by simply having been at the right place at the right time, became his second in command and eventually, his Head Nurse. He even gifted her with a pendant that some women might have taken as an insult as it was a mark saying that she belonged to him, but Christine knew what he meant by that gift. As long as she wore it, no-one else on the ship could demand sexual favors from her, even if they outranked her, without being given permission by the Doctor.
As they had waded through the bodies of the dead and dying, he noticed her tendencies and smiled, promising her that she would be the one to assist him with the autopsies when things had calmed back down. Not long after, she was assisting him in an actual surgery, helping as he removed an alien creature from the spine of Captain Pike. The sure and steady way McCoy sliced into flesh gave her goose bumps and Christine could scarcely wait until she could witness those hands performing an autopsy.
Things became steadily better after Kirk took over command of the ship and McCoy began to shift the Sickbay to his own preferred methods. He interviewed each nurse individually and encouraged them to pursue their own interests as he provided the materials for them to work with - normally those who had displeased their new Captain. If Captain Kirk wanted someone punished off-the-books, a visit to Sickbay either brought them into line or brought them into Christine's eager hands.
As Head Nurse, Christine Chapel and the nurses under her command were rightly feared. By mutual agreement, they guarded their CMO and their kingdom with a fervor that Kirk often wished the Security forces would emulate. Unlike the rest of the ship, their first loyalty was to Doctor McCoy, then Captain Kirk with the Empire falling a distant third. There was a slight disruption when Pike stole the ship and threatened McCoy, but that only lasted a year before order was restored.
Smiling as she assisted in the skinning and autopsy of some salt-sucking creature that the Captain had recently killed, Christine hummed to herself. She had definitely made the right career decision.