From inside of the Sickbay, the horrifying sounds of the ship's metallic screeching and whirring sirens were drowned out by the even more horrific sounds of panicked nurses and dying patients. The morning had started off slow enough, a decent amount of grumbling, a bit of singed flesh, nothing out of the ordinary for Doctor Leonard H. McCoy. In fact, he had been hoping to get in a nice long day of light drinking, but those plans never seem to work out.

Nothing could have prepared the doctor for the return of Captain James T. Kirk, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, and Chief Science Officer Spock. Their mission was simple enough - to beam down to the surface of Sanduri IV to investigate some strange censor readings. McCoy himself had done the preliminary on the crew. All, including the two ensigns in red shirts whose names he was now failing to remember, were healthy. It was to be another uneventful day in space.

Now, his ward was crawling with frantic personnel, vials of fluids, petri dishes filled with bizarre substances, severed limbs, and the smells of bile and phaser-blasted clothes. His head was aching, his eyebrows had arched to unimaginable heights, and he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Right when he thought he couldn't bare to watch these eukaryotic cells molecularly express themselves for one more moment, Nurse Chapel bustled into the room.

"It's the Captain, Leonard."

"Thank the gods, Chapel. Send him in." Doctor McCoy groaned, rubbing his eyes so forcibly, he caused little white stars to float around the room.

"No." Nurse Chapel stuttered, still trying to gain her breath and to avoid dripping blood onto the floor. "It's the Captain. He's causing this."

Doctor McCoy slowly turned to the disgruntled nurse, his swiveling chair making an almost silent but somehow insufferable squeak. Just when he thought his eyebrows could not navigate any closer to his hairline, there they were, nearly forming a single entity.

"I managed to get some information out of a young, blonde engineer." the nurse continued. "She informed me that Captain Kirk did this, he and Scott. It backs up the information we've been gathering. She said that he was insane, some sort of madness. Then she went mad. We've sedated most all of them but, more keep showing up. I think it's some sort of infection. Have you been able to work through the samples we've given you?"

Nurse Chapel then turned her attention to the desk at which Doctor McCoy was seated. The number of samples were stacked so precariously high, it looked to her like an exact replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She flashed the doctor and ephemeral smile and caught a bit of blood that was dripping from one palm into the other. Her face was sweaty, her hair was frazzled, and her day was, inexorably, ruined.

"Just let that simmer." She said, in regards to the information, and then left.

Doctor McCoy rubbed his eyes again, and reached out to pluck the top sample off of his leaning tower. He held it up to the light and then held it down beneath the table, trying to glean something from it. It appeared to be some sort of plant substance, from what he knew. Considering it to be rubbish, he chucked in into the trash.

—

The room was dark. Quiet and still. Only the soft breaths of the Vulcan scientist who lay beside me permeated the depth of this room, and of my mind. I lay with my eyes closed, focused on the image of the cut on his forehead. Green fungus, strange, moving and glowing, almost sentient - responding to my prying eye. I had to know what it was, what was happening. How to fix it.

Though the siren was silenced in here, the swirling red emergency light flashed in the darkness.

I turned to him, watched him sleep. Slanted eyebrows, relaxed in slumber. From his long nose, high cheekbones, and curling, cat-like mouth to his square jaw, masculine chin, and pointed ears, he was beautiful. Elven-like in his delicacy but purely masculine in his form. Those strong, sloping shoulders, bearing trained muscle that continued along the lean curve of his large arms, were draped above his head on the soft pillow.

I leaned in closer, to get a better look at his wound. The cut glowed green as my nose drew nearer, causing his face to twitch in threat of awakening him. I hadn't given myself much time, but I had enough to at least understand a little bit about what I was dealing with. A makeshift plan. I knew where I needed to go.

Slowly, I slid from the bed and slipped into my discarded uniform.

"Computer?" I whispered.

"Yes, Ensign Eveline Delesprit?" She whispered back.

"I need you to do a manual override on the door."

I held up Chief Science Officer Spock's tricorder, plugging in a bit of information to get what I needed. Connecting it to the computer mainframe in my room, the robotic voice of the Ship emitted a low gurgle, displeased by my unwelcome algorithm, but eventually subsided.

"Your door code has been modified and can only be opened from the outside beginning in…five…four…."

Her countdown was as good as gold. I took one final look over my shoulder, and sighed - goodnight, beautiful - before slipping through the sliding doors and into the danger of the hall.

Weem-Weem! The sound of the siren was like a slap to the face.

Luckily, the hallways had mostly remained clear. As I turned the corner, the slumped body of a security personnel lay against the wall. I checked his pulse. Nothing. Then I checked his face. Tuft of brown, crew-cut hair, big, sad, downturned eyes. It was Rob Nixon. Shit.

Pew! Brzzzt! A phaser blast shot down the hallway, nearly grazing my ear. I turned around and raised my own phaser to the figure. Dark hair, red shirt, green eyes glowing and flashing like a wild animal. Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig, still not showing any signs of letting up. Pew! Brzzzt! I dodged a second blast and took off. Sorry, Rob.

I pulled out the tricorder and input a few digits. It began to beep and whirr in my hands, the green, pixilated screen lighting up with the location of Pell's quarters and the code to unlock his door. Pleased, I took off running.

—

As the door slid open, a flash of blue light shot past my face. I ducked, then reprimanded the culprit.

"Pell! It's Eveline, come out. I've had enough phaser blasts shot at my head for one day."

"Eveline!" From behind the bed scrambled a mop of dirty blond hair and a blood-caked, impish face. Judging by the sweat stains on his uniform, he'd spent the last hour cowering.

"How'd you get in here?"

I held up Spock's tricorder with a sly smile, then tossed it on his unmade bed, quickly following behind. The teenager joined me, curling his long legs underneath his gangly form, and picked up the piece of equipment from the sheets, turning it over in his hands.

"This is nice. Where'd you get this?"

"Doesn't matter, Pell. I come to you with information about what's going on. And it's going to blow your seriously smart mind."

Pell didn't seem convinced. He continued to examine the tricorder, lifting it above his head to check out all of its angles and tapping his finger against the metal casing. The ones we used in the labs were older, this one was Federation-issued, brand new. So new, it must have been picked up at our last port stop but, it was certainly well used. There were little dings in the metal and scrapes along the side, as if it had been left out in a light hail or brushed against hard stone.

"This tricorder belongs to the Chief Science Officer." He deduced.

"It does, Pell. But, right now that is beyond the point. I need to talk to you about the experiment that you were doing in the lab. I actually need to know where your tricorder is, if we're going to be talking about tricorders."

"Did he hurt you?"

"Spock? No!" I scoffed, dismissing the thought with a wave of my hand.

"Did you hurt him?" Pell asked, his eyebrows were furrowed in confusion and his mouth hung half-open, revealing those large, too-white teeth.

"No, Mikey. We didn't hurt each other. He's asleep."

"Asleep?"

"Asleep. In my room. Are you okay?"

I was beginning to get worried that the blow to his head caused some sort of irreparable damage to his mind, which at this point at least, I was really kind of counting on. Suddenly, the young scientists eyes widened and he looked directly from the tricorder to my face. His confusion was replaced by a sort of mischievous glee, and I was forced to remember that he was only seventeen.

"No shit."

I nodded that indeed, it was shit. He laughed whole-heartedly and set the whirring electronic back down on the bed. After he had successfully gotten his laughs off, he seemed to rattle around in his brain for some more information. Realizing that he had moved on to the right track, I continued.

"It was, admittedly, the officer who got me to my conclusions. You see, he had a cut on his forehead and inside of it was trace material that reminded me exactly of the lichen that you were working on in the lab. But get this, it was moving. It was sentient, I think. It reacted to my touch, it even reacted to my movement, and I think it's controlling the Captain and Scotty as well."

"They're Spore Servants?"

"Spore Servants!" I exclaimed, exasperated. I knew that I knew what was going on. We had run into the same kind of problem on Talduri, three months prior. I cursed myself for letting any moment of that away mission slip my mind.

"Wait a minute, Eveline. You hooked up with the Chief Science Officer even though he was insane with fungus-brain?"

I flushed. I could feel my whole face getting hot and my palms beginning to sweat. In my typical fashion, instead of responding with words, I just snorted and moved on. I wiped my wet hands on my uniform and continued.

"So, how do we fix this?" I asked, hoping that somewhere in the giant abyss that was Pell's knowledge of plants he would be able to come up with a rational, scientific answer.

"How the fuck should I know?"

Perfect.

—

After too long of being berated with personal questions from the young scientist, and after the occasional phaser blast against the door had died down, we had managed to come up with the beginnings of a logical plan. Thankfully, Spock was secured in my bedroom. As for the Captain and the Chief Engineer, they were likely causing havoc somewhere else in the ship. At this time, all we needed to do was make it through the halls until we reached Sickbay.

Pell knew that there are several types of fungus in the known galaxy capable of spreading spores in this manner. Unfortunately, beyond that, the knowledge regarding the treatment of such conditions was generally placed upon the doctors, and not the botanists. Thus, we found ourselves once again scuttling through the heart of the ship like two rats awaiting extermination.

The ship was in a terrifying sate of absolute silence and stillness in some parts and horrifying screams of depravity in others. On numerous occasions, we stumbled through an area where it appeared that the Captain and Scotty had gotten ahold of some of the ships personnel and infected them as well. All manner of mischief was happening, and we didn't want to take part in it. I felt as if I were running through some sort of apocalyptic wasteland, and I tried my best to close out the sounds and focus in on maintaining quiet, inaudible breaths and footsteps. Thankfully, within a short amount of time, we reached our destination.

Slipping in through the sliding doors, we came face-to-face with several of the ship's nurses, sporting masks and gloves. Before we had the opportunity to speak, they had grappled us and were pressing us down against an old-fashion cot, attempted to administer a shot. In a scramble of limbs and cross words, I managed to free my left arm from the grasp of a thankfully, small nurse, and use my free hand to cover my shoulder, where a considerably larger medical student was readying a hypospray for injection.

"Please," I cooed, attempting to sound less frantic than I felt. "We're here to speak to Doctor McCoy, I believe we've come up with the solution to what's happening on the ship."

I strained my green eyes to look down on the tricolor, which hung around my neck and now dangled over the side of the vintage medical implement.

I wish that I could say that as quickly as we had been captured, we had been released. Unfortunately, that just wasn't the case. It wasn't until, echoing from inside of the doctor's office, came a disgruntled wail and the sound of shattering glass, that we were able to convince the exhausted medical personnel that we were indeed, here to help. It looked to me that they could use all of the help that anyone was willing to offer.

I felt the same way when Pell and I had slipped into the doctor's office to find him slumped over his desk in a mix of rage and exasperation. Calmly, I reach my hand down to press against his shoulder. He didn't lift his head, he simply grumbled.

"What is it this time?"

Within a half an hour, we had managed to bring a slight smile to the doctor's face and fill him in on what we had gathered thus far about the crisis at hand. Though at times I could feel that same pang of annoyance towards Pell in the doctor that I felt when I realized how young the botanist was, he listened politely and intently, and eventually grew to be a bit excited by the whole endeavor.

"I know a little bit about it." Pell was saying. "The fungus will infect lifeforms with their spores, and over time those spores will sort of, well, they sort of eat the thing's brain and then turn them into zombies." He watched me attempt to hide the cringe and shutter that spanned over my limbs, and fail. In an attempt at comfort, he continued.

"It's actually not all that uncommon, you know. Back on Earth, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis will infect carpenter ants, and the ants will climb to the top of the forest canopy to die, and from their corpses one of these little mushrooms will sprout and it will then be in the perfect place to rain more spores down on more carpenter ants. So, what the ants are doing, and this is really interesting, so what the ants are doing is -."

I cut him off.

"Is this going to kill them? The Captain and Spock, I mean. Not the ants."

"Definitely. I also suspect that it's causing these strange behaviors in the officers. What do you make of these psychological behaviors, doctor?"

"I'm a doctor, Ensign, not a psychologist."

Pell furrowed his eyebrows and sucked on his bottom lip, possibly trying to figure out where the doctor drew the line.

"I'm a psychologist." I announced.

"No, Eveline. You're a herpetologist. Are you sure that you're not infected?" Pell said in his traditional sneering voice.

"No. Stop it, Pell. I got my minor in philosophy and psychology, and it's come in handy on more occasions than I would have ever though necessary on this crazy ship. It's like no one here understands the human condition."

I rubbed my face in my hands.

"Captain Kirk is sexually aggressive, Scott is just aggressive, and Spock is…Spock is human? Emotional? I suppose. They're all suffering from irrationality, memory loss, and emotional duress. Likely, it's being brought on by some deep-seeded desires, magnified by stress, and warped by this parasite to become a sort of, it's sort of like an anxiety disorder. Where everyday stresses become amplified and distorted by the brain and turn into something monstrous."

"Sounds limbic." Pell said, offhandedly.

"Sounds like the amygdala!" The doctor slammed his fist down on the desk, rattling and then collapsing the piles of stacked specimens, and then rising from his seat. "Brilliant! Brilliant. We have the what, we have the where, and now all we need is the how."

"I have the how!" Pell exclaimed, gleefully. "A simple, non-lethal, hydrochloric solution! I whipped it up in the lab this morning."

Something was coming over me, some sort of inexplicable excitement either drawn on by the flurry of giddiness in the room or something beyond that, something I couldn't understand, but I was surprisingly enthusiastic about the process at hand. I reached out a hand and gave Pell a high five. A huge smile was playing across my face.

"Excellent! Good work, Ensign. Now, where did I put that damned dish with the mushrooms in it?" The doctor began shuffling through his desk.

Pell plucked the specimen from the wastebasket and handed it to me. Excitedly, I slid it across the table. Doctor McCoy snatched it from my hand and opened it feverously. Seeming to have regretted his actions, he quickly closed it again. Then, he gave up and opened it once more.

"Ensign…" He addressed me. "Ensign…" He was fishing for my name. His face was sweaty and his hair was disheveled.

"Eveline Delesprit." I finished for him.

"Delesprit! Right, French name. From Taldurin." He trailed off. I smiled brightly that he remembered me.

"I'm going to need you to round up the officers and bring them back to Sickbay. It's not going to be easy, but you're going to have to do it on your own. Mostly, I just need Spock. His damned green blood can put up with anything. You bring him here and I'll take care of him first, then we can work on the others, once we know this is safe."

Normally, I would have been appalled at the doctor's proclamation to try a risky treatment out on Spock. All simply based off of the assumption that he was non-human and therefore somehow more suited to untested diagnoses. But, I was worked up from the ebbing and flowing tensions in the room. Instead of scoffing, huffing, or any other manner of immaturities that I resort to when my morals are questioned, I clapped my hands together and announced,

"That, doctor, I most certainly can do."

—

Beneath the fluorescent lights of Sickbay, Captain James T. Kirk fluttered delicate, blonde eyelashes. His strong neck tilted and cracked, and he furrowed his eyebrows in a moment of pain and confusion. From every corner of the room, he could hear the mummer of collected voices. Was this the afterlife? He flashed back to that faithful moment on Sanduri IV, where despite his best efforts to keep his crew safe, Spock, Scotty, and himself had been overtaken. The memory was painful, but not nearly as painful as the crink in his neck. If this was death, he imagined that everything should feel less stiff. Hesitantly, he opened one eye and scanned the room, quickly met by the smiling face of Doctor Leonard H. McCoy.

"We thought you were dead, Jim. At least that you would be dead." McCoy said. His voice was slathered with pride at his triumph in saving the captain, and at this point, damn near half of the crewmen of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

The captain stretched out his aching limbs, letting them quiver with the tension, and then rubbed the back of his neck. Between himself and the next cot over stood two Ensigns, one unfamiliar and facing him, a young man, and the other with a beautiful cascade of red hair, facing away. When he managed to grumble out a small response, the redhead turned. She had been standing over the unconscious body of Mr. Spock. Her face was filled with concern, but she smiled at the Captain nonetheless.

"Ensign Eveline Delesprit." The Captain barked, his voice still an unfamiliar gravel. "And…"

"Ensign Mikey Pell, sir."

"How?" He asked, and as he did, the doctor began going into the details of the last two days in full.

I turned away from the now-hazel eyes of the Captain and continued to furrow my eyebrows at the pallid face of Chief Science Officer Spock. Wake up, I begged. My motives were a conflicting diffusion of fear and selfishness. Each time my brain hungrily pleaded with the Vulcan to regain consciousness, it also silently hoped that he would wake with the memories of the moments we had shared. But, I'm not foolish. I knew better. And when the scientist finally flickered open those rich, chocolate brown eyes, they met my own with only the faintest glimmer of familiarity - hidden, perhaps - under the guise of duty. I smiled a closed-mouth smile, relived and bittersweet.

"Hello, Ensign Delesprit." The Vulcan cleared his throat, eyebrows arching as he examined his surroundings. "What happened?"

"You were infected by a parasitic fungus in the family Sordariomycetes, on Sanduri IV. The doctor has…" I glanced over my shoulder to where Doctor McCoy was gesturing wildly to the Captain, in a mostly fabricated tale, and then glanced back at the scientist. "heroically, found a cure. You'll be back to normal in no time, if you are not already."

"You look most unnecessarily worried, Ensign. I feel quite like myself."

I smiled and let out a single syllable laugh. I nodded, smiled again, and then bit my bottom lip, unsure of what to say next. Beginning to blush, I concluded our brief conversation.

"I am glad to hear it officer, and I shall be delighted for my next opportunity to work alongside you."

"As will I…" The Vulcan trailed.

As I turned away form the scientist, the captain, the engineer, and the doctor and found myself presently at the automatic doors of the Sickbay. I thought, for a brief moment, that I heard Spock conclude his thought with my name. An almost silent, mellifluous, Eveline.

—

After I had gone, Pell approached Spock. He had grown quite fond of me in our short time together, and even long after this day I was pleased to call him a friend. The impish, blonde scientist excused himself from the bedside tale of Doctor McCoy and approached the sullen Vulcan in his bed. His slanted eyebrows were still and his face was as stoic as cut stone. He appeared, to Pell, to be lost in thought. Quietly clearing his throat, he caught the attention of the Chief Science Officer, and they greeted one another on the appropriate terms, exchanging thanks.

"She has been by your side for over twenty-four hours, officer. If you'd pardon my frankness. I believe she's quiet fond of you." He articulated his thoughts into the most mature possible response, in an attempt to not sound idiotic to a man who was, undoubtedly, the most brilliant mind on the ship and someone Pell had looked up to in secret, for some time.

The Vulcan scientist turned to Pell and spoke somberly, and yet not without his usual conviction.

"After a time, she may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting."