Title: A Celebration in Infinite Combinations
Characters: (this chapter) OC Matthew Turner, Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, Dr. Helen Noel
Pairings: (this chapter) none
Rating: K+ for violence, etc.
Summary: The first year of the five-year mission is a critical time for the crew of the starship Enterprise. A new chain of command, a new crew; and a new captain who must prove himself to both - all must work together and learn to function, not as a crew, but as a family.
Warnings/Spoilers: Liberties with early TOS canon, nothing beyond the usual. Spoilers and specifics are footnoted.
A/N: Twelve mini story arcs revolving around twelve sets of characters, all converging in the last chapter. Holiday and gift-giving themed story; every even chapter containing main characters and odd containing minor characters with nods at main characters. This is definitely a character exploration piece, with a holiday flavor - because we all need more holiday fluff and hope this time of year. It's a fair deviation from my usual triumvirate-oriented fic, but then I believe that's what NaNo really should be; an exploration of ability and deepening of character development. It's not totally OCs, though, for anyone who is hitting the backspace button right now; every other chapter is our own favorites. :) Also, this is obviously not a final final draft.
Chapter One
"No, we are not going to expend half our daily allotment of recreation power in using the Atmospheric Control motherboard to create an ice skating rink on the floor of the shuttle bay. You and your friends stop bothering Mr. Scott about it, is that clear, Mr. Turner?"
The captain's eyes were laughing, belying the severity of his words but not the genuine order behind them, and the young man nodded regretfully, grinning. "Aye, sir."
"You want to plan anything out of the ordinary for the holidays, it needs to be cleared through Mr. Scott and Lieutenant Uhura before coming to me for final approval – and don't forget that we will be on yellow alert status during the two weeks prior to Christmas; nothing can interfere with the smooth workings of this ship. Understood?"
"Understood, sir."
"Dismissed, then."
The young man repossessed his datapadd and moved back to his group of fellow Engineering personnel, who were deep in a poker game three tables over from the tri-D chess board over which First Officer Spock was wiping the deck with his captain.
"Kids these days," Kirk muttered jokingly, as he edged a rook three spaces forward, hoping Spock wouldn't foresee what he had in mind.
He received an eyebrow of skepticism before his First calmly took the rook. "This, from Starfleet's youngest Captain?"
"Here here, watch it," he chuckled as he moved a pawn out of the way. "Even I was never green enough to ask to refurbish the floor of a shuttle bay for ice skating."
"And yet, you are even now envisioning how it might be done, for a short period of time at least, without endangering the ship."
"Just for that, I'm going to checkmate you in four," he declared, glaring accusatorily at the expressionless Vulcan.
"I believe the proper response is, I should like to see you try. Sir."
"If I win, you field Komack's call tomorrow about the data stream corruption from the third sensor array?"
"Done."
"Good." He smirked, and moved a bishop into position. "Mate in three."
Matthew Turner was of Northern British stock, a pleasant young man with an accent just barely perceptible in normal speech and highly pronounced when excited. At the age of eighteen he had entered Starfleet Academy with a major in Engineering, minoring in Temporal Physics. Having functioned for many years as something of an unaware hero, Montgomery Scott discovered him while on shore leave during the last months of Pike's captaincy and had recommended the young man for posting aboard the Enterprise under her new crew.
Turner adored Scott, and spent so much time at his work that he gathered the reputation of being something of a workaholic during the first six months aboard. Gradually, under the influence of the Enterprise's easygoing captain, he grew to understand that he was not under a trial period as some ships held their personnel, and that Kirk was the sort of commander who didn't much care how you got the job done so long as it got done.
The first week aboard, Kirk had done the unthinkable – fraternized each night with his crew in the lower decks. It was unheard-of for a ranking officer to really have much to do with the inner workings of the ship, and still less for such an officer to spend much time below decks.
And yet, the third night out of spacedock, Turner and a group of his Engineering and Bio-lab buddies had been playing poker in a half-deserted Rec Room Nine when the doors opened and in strolled Captain James T. Kirk, a cup of coffee in his hand.
They had all snapped to attention, of course, nearly knocking over the table in the process, but they'd barely left their seats when Kirk was waving them back with his free hand.
"Please," he said after finishing his drink. "As you were."
"Um," was the general reply, along with worried looks exchanged around the table. A commanding officer visiting below decks never was a good sign.
"You don't think those rumors about the still in Engineering are true, do you?" he whispered to his left. Leslie blinked and shrugged, shooting Kirk a worried look.
"Poker, gentlemen?" Kirk inquired, walking up to the table and looking down at the game. "Not for money, I hope?"
"No, sir!"
"Absolutely not, sir!"
"Of course not, sir!"
Gambling was forbidden aboard any starship vessel, they were all well aware. That didn't mean betting pools didn't circulate, and it didn't mean that gambling didn't take place – but no one who was smart enough to get posted on the Enterprise was stupid enough to blatantly break regulation in the middle of a public recreation area.
Kirk surveyed the board with a disapproving eye. "If you're not wagering anything, what's the fun in playing?"
Turner gaped until Ensign Sulu kicked him under the table, upon which he remembered to close his mouth. Sulu glanced cautiously at the figure looming over the table. "To be honest, Captain, it'd be a lot more interesting if we were allowed to," the young man said slowly, but watching shrewdly for Kirk's reaction to the daring statement.
The captain took another drink of his coffee. "I've no objections to your wagering over a friendly game, gentlemen, provided it's not money. There's nothing in the books against betting edibles, for instance."
Silence fell over the table.
"Seriously?" Ensign Marta, a petite redhead from Hydroponics (Turner had found that out the first time he'd seen her in department meetings) asked incredulously.
"Seriously," the captain responded dryly, grinning at their surprised expressions. The man hooked the empty chair at the table with one foot and yanked it out. "When I was serving on the Farragut we would bet potato chips against gingersnaps, or whatever we had on us," he informed them as he sat. He set down the coffee cup, carefully out of reach of the cards. "My cabin-mate had a grandmother who made the best brownies this side of Altair VI, let me tell you."
Turner eyed the others, who were all darting glances around the table, measuring up this unusual commander they'd been assigned to serve under.
"Well, ante up already; don't let me stop you," the captain encouraged, gesturing with his coffee cup.
Sulu grinned suddenly, and turned to Marta and Turner, the only others of the group who were still in. "I'll see whatever you've got and raise you two hours' science lab duty tomorrow, traded for your Maintenance checks."
"That's not much of a shift swap," Marta scoffed.
"Two hours just before Mr. Spock's weekly inspection," the young man qualified, smirking.
They all winced, and Kirk laughed. "That's more like it," the captain said, smiling. He stood, waving them back to their chairs when they made to follow. "I've no problem with friendly competition, gentlemen; just no money. Or clothes," he amended wryly as they all exchanged meaningful glances. "There will be no strip poker on my ship. Understood?"
"Understood, Captain."
Kirk turned to leave. "I'll leave you to it then."
"Would you like to stay for a game, sir?" Turner blurted, earning him six mildly appalled looks from his fellows and a small, playful smile from his captain.
"Ask me again when you know me better, Ensign," was the enigmatic reply, and the man disappeared through the doors without another word.
Three months later, they all knew the Kirk power of bluff well enough to be capable of asking him again, and well enough to know they would be decimated if they did.
On the one occasion Kirk was seen playing with a group of officers in Rec Room Two above decks, according to Lieutenant Sulu after his promotion, the captain had wiped out the entirety of the command chain, earning him some eighteen hours off-duty and an eclectic assortment of cookies, potato chips, alcohol (that bit was unsupported by official evidence, as it wasn't exactly regulation and no one could verify McCoy had really brought it), and kreyla (1). Sulu informed them, laughing hysterically while he did, that the captain had returned the off-duty hours to their losing owners, shared the snacks and alcohol around the table, and after tasting one of the kreyla and promptly choking on it, threw the biscuits back to his First, remarking that it really wasn't worth trying to out-bluff a Vulcan over something that awful.
But the poker game wasn't forgotten, nor the fact that the captain had taken not only that night, but many thereafter, to spend time with his lower decks. He would pop into various rec rooms and study corners just to chat with his crew, talking for a few minutes and then leaving before his presence could become awkward. Once he joined in a round-robin table-tennis game, twice he spent a few moments playing Altarian checkerboard or other games, and many times he simply strolled through, nodding and greeting his crew, all of which he knew by name.
As a result, the lower decks grew to look forward to seeing their commanding officer among them, instead of dreading the visits of authority as happened on many starships. Turner began using his free time in frequenting the recreation halls instead of working longer hours in Engineering, due to the amount of people he met while waiting for Kirk's nightly visits.
Eventually he grew confident enough to ask the man regarding the ice skating rink in question, and though he carried the disappointment of denial back to his comrades he was the object of much congratulatory back-slapping for having made the attempt.
Besides, it was worth being shot down over the ice-skating rink, just to be able to watch Commander Spock's face when the captain pulled a victory out of thin air and then spent five minutes crowing with glee over being able to beat a Vulcan at a game of logic.
Life was good.
Until the week they had to spend patrolling a semi-charted area of space, looking for space scavengers – pirates, in other words – which Starfleet suspected had been waylaying small Starfleet freighters and relieving them of their cargo before blowing the ship into the next quadrant.
For three days, nothing happened, and then on the fourth all hell exploded (literally, in the case of the Engineering deck), and he got to meet the Enterprise's resident irascible country doctor up front and personal. Granted, he was trapped under a partially-fallen bulkhead, bleeding out from both legs, at the time, and so wasn't overly concerned with getting to see their infamous Chief Medical Officer in all his glory, screeching orders right and left and somehow managing to be gentle with him and Lieutenant Shomari at the same time. Shomari had been right under the bulkhead when it malfunctioned under the pirate fire, and he didn't want to think about how long a woman could survive with three feet of solid durasteel pinning half her chest and shoulder to the floor.
McCoy was as gentle as possible, and she still screamed.
He heard it for hours, long after they'd been extricated and taken to Sickbay, long after he'd been sedated and surgery done to the frayed ligaments in his legs and neural regeneration to the damaged nerves, long after the Captain had brought Lieutenant Uhura down with severe burns to her hands from an exploding console and stayed, white-faced, to hear McCoy's casualty report, long after his room-mate had come in to slap him commiseratingly on the shoulder and bring him something that tasted better than the Sickbay nutrient drinks.
Long after McCoy told him, when he woke up and asked, that Shomari was dead; there'd been nothing anyone could do for someone with a crushed left ribcage.
Shomari's death haunted him for a long time; she'd been a brilliant engineer, and a darn good friend. He didn't know her as well as he knew some of his co-workers, but in the three weeks their shifts had coincided he had begun to think of her as just one of those generally great people. Shomari had saved three computer techs the day she died, by overriding the malfunctioning emergency bulkhead programming long enough for them to escape their smoke-filled computer control room.
Turner had never really believed in karma, but when he went to his terminal a week later to draw his name for the Captain's Christmas gift exchange (or whatever they were calling it), he thought twice about believing in it.
Because he drew the name of Lieutenant Lisa West; Ardia Shomari's roommate.
West hadn't been seen much of in the week since Shomari's funeral; she and Shomari had known each other through the Academy, had served first on the U.S.S. Constellation as ensigns before being assigned to the Enterprise's Engineering staff. West was a quiet, intelligent girl – brilliant but not really the type to attract a wide circle of friends – and everyone knew below decks that she'd been taking the loss of her friend and roommate really hard. Turner couldn't imagine how awkward it would be to be accustomed to sharing space with someone and then suddenly finding that they're never coming back, and having to deal with their personal belongings.
Ship gossip told the story that there had been talk of reassigning many after that disastrous battle with Huraon pirates, but the captain had overruled Commander Spock's recommendation, saying that they weren't going to fill empty holes left by their deceased crew for several weeks yet, that he wasn't about to rearrange personnel and stick crewmen into the rooms of the dead without thought to their friends and, for all intents and purposes, their family – for this ship was a family.
Now, Turner had three weeks left before the Solstice/Christmas party, and he knew next to nothing about Lieutenant Lisa West. What sort of gift would be appropriate, and would she even feel like receiving one?
He seized the opportunity to ask advice of the ship's counselor, Dr. Helen Noel, when he was undergoing physical therapy at the same time as an informal psychiatric evaluation after the trauma of injury and their first real space battle. (2)
Dr. Noel was a very attractive woman, one who he quite studiously avoided indicating such to as she was all business and very much not interested in anything besides her work; as it should be, and yet it made him feel a little uncomfortable discussing such a thing as death with someone who could detach herself well enough from the horror to discuss it clinically. Nonetheless, he finally asked her what she knew about Lisa West.
"Doctor-patient confidentiality, Mr. Turner; you know that as well as I do," was the not unexpected answer, delivered in a curtly professional tone.
"I don't mean any medical details, Doctor," he clarified quickly. "I've…well, I've drawn her name for the gift exchange, and I don't want to give her something that she'd find…insensitive."
The woman's eyes warmed, and she relaxed. "That's different," Noel replied, smiling. "It's a good thing you're thoughtful enough about her to ask someone who would know, Mr. Turner."
"Lieutenant Shomari was a wonderful person," he replied quietly. "She's a loss to everyone."
"But you are dealing with that loss as you should, Mr. Turner," Noel answered gently. "By thinking of others. That is really one of the best ways to help absolve the pain of grief, to care for another person. Now," she continued, seeing his discomfort at the personal revelation of his psyche, "about Lieutenant West."
"Yes?"
"She is a rather quiet woman, Mr. Turner; I believe you already know that. Very simple in tastes, very calm, very intelligent, very feminine. She's not the type to really want impersonal expressions of sympathy, or the usual useless gifts and propaganda with which the commercial half of this Terran holiday is flooded."
"That's not really all that helpful, Doctor," he interjected dryly.
Noel smiled at him. "You're going to have to think about it a bit, Mr. Turner. Put your mind to it, and think. You can do something for her, possibly about Lieutenant Shomari. But I'm not going to tell you what to get her – you will have to get to know her yourself, even if it's just a shallow, short-lived relationship. It will be good for both of you."
He bit back the "gee, thanks" that rose to his lips, and instead only nodded and returned to the psyche scan she was finishing. Once released, he spent the evening lounging about Rec Room Three in his hoverchair (he had still not regained full mobility; dermal and neural regenerators could only do so much, and it would be another two weeks before he would be back on full duty), watching the new Russian whiz kid beat the pants off an entire combined Engineering team at speed-Sudoku.
He wasn't expecting to see Captain Kirk that evening, but the man picked that rec room and that hour to pop in, surprising everyone with his appearance. The man smiled, waved them all back to their stations, casually pointed out a wrong number in Chekov's eighteenth s-S, and then plopped down beside Turner in a vacant chair.
"How're you coming along, Ensign?" the man asked, turning his full attention to the young man.
"Well enough," he answered, ruefully regarding the soft plasticast around both his legs. "Dr. McCoy says I should be back on half-duty in another five days, full duty in two weeks. If I obey his orders, that is."
The captain's grin lit up the room. "Giving you trouble, is he?"
Turner smiled thinly, his mind on the patient even McCoy's expertise couldn't save.
"You should have seen him after the mission on Jairus II," Kirk reminisced, smiling, and he leaned back in the chair, eyes fixed in the distance.
"Was that the one where Mr. Spock dragged you out from under a seven-foot-long panther?"
"It wasn't exactly a panther, strictly speaking, but yes," the man agreed, face twisting in remembrance. "Bones literally wouldn't let me move a finger for five days after he stitched up my stomach cavity. Had my bio-bed programmed to sound an alarm if I so much as rolled over in my sleep. I tried disconnecting it halfway through the seventh night. I think he woke the entire recovery ward up when he caught me in the act."
Turner chuckled, the suddenness of the sound startling him. He blinked as his mind processed the rawness of amusement, for the first time in a week.
Kirk smiled and leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees and hands loosely clasped before him. "And you should have seen his face the next day, Turner. Commander Spock tried to sneak strawberry waffles in to me for breakfast, only to have the change in my blood sugar set off a klaxon loud enough to give a man a heart attack. Bones was so mad, I think even Spock was scared of him; he certainly retreated fast enough, left me to face the music all by myself!"
Turner was laughing outright now at the very thought, the utter weirdness of the idea of their severe Commander Spock sneaking anything anywhere, and then running from McCoy's ranting…it was hysterical, and he leaned back in his chair, just letting the warmth of laughter flood through him and banish some of the chill that seemed to always linger now.
He only realized just what he was doing when Kirk rose, and laid a hand on his shoulder. "You looked like you needed that," the man said simply, by way of explanation, and then left the rec room with only a smile and a nod of farewell.
Turner stared after him, lost in thought.
(1) Kreyla – a Vulcan breakfast biscuit
(2) Dr. Noel is not of my creation; she's seen in only one episode, Dagger of the Mind.