The Scientist
After finishing another grueling week of classes, sleepless nights and sleep filled lectures, I strangely felt rather perky and alert, albeit lightheaded and the general feeling that I was floating weirdly outside my body as it operated on other things. I made no further useful observations of Specimen, and my valiant efforts to understand mankind came to no fruition thus far, and in fact were only further bewildered by Chekov's strange behavior in the girls' locker room. Wow, that sentence looks weird when written out in my PADD. Anyways, disregard personal comment. Commander Spock's behavior was irrelevant to my study due to his logical nature, and only served to confuse me as I pursued total understanding of masculine nature. Therefore, I decided to obtain a second opinion.
"You what?" Dr. Leonard McCoy incredulously snapped in his usual grumpy, ill mannered Southern drawl after I related the most significant events of the whole pool incident to him. I was perched on a white examining table in the Academy clinic, surrounded by other busy doctors and nurses and sick students as he cleaned and bandaged a cut on my arm from the scalpel I dropped in xenobiology. "I don't know what's more disturbing, you calling Jim 'Specimen' or that Russian kid's blatant…ugh! I have patients, Carly, people who are actually sick and need help."
"I am wounded," I snapped, feeling miffed at his disregard for my constant self-induced physical maladies, pointing at my scalpel cut that he had finished patching up a few minutes prior. Not to mention my wounded ego, due to Commander Spock. "I'm always wounded."
"Sorry, kid, I didn't think," Bones said, the closest I would ever get to an apology from him. "I can probably spare a few minutes."
"Besides, I'm your favorite quarter-Vulcan!" I brightly chirped, swinging my short, thin legs back and forth on the table. I heard him mutter "You're my only quarter-Vulcan," under his breath darkly. However, I was happy. Fourth-year cadets were allowed to wear civilian dress on Saturday if they planned to leave the Academy, and I was wearing jeans and a turquoise t-shirt. Bones grumbled under his breath about "damn cheerful people" as he whipped the curtain around the clinic diagnosis bed shut to give us a tiny degree of privacy. "I've been feeling lightheaded lately also. Isn't that quaint?"
McCoy glared at me in disbelief. "Quaint? I…never mind. Are you feeling faint right now?" he asked, and I shook my head. "You started feeling dizzy at lunch on Tuesday, correct?" I nodded. "Let me guess, you were really, really dizzy while you were with Chekov after your drill class?"
"Yes, but I don't see the object of these questions," I said. I thought I knew all possible questions Bones could ask me in a medical situation by now.
"Here's my advice," he said, scrawling something on his prescription pad, ripping it off, and throwing it at me with an irritated look as he left the room and slammed the door behind him. I looked at it, and my mouth opened in angry shock.
It read: OPEN YOUR EYES.
I hurled myself to my feet and snatched the curtain open so hard it practically banged off its hinges. "You're a doctor, not a psychologist!" I shouted at McCoy's back as he walked away from me. He waved his clipboard over his shoulder in disregard for me, and I stomped my foot angrily into the tile. I crossed the campus from the medical building to the dormitory for cadets and punched my code in so hard the little number keys got stuck and I had to punch the whole thing to get it to work a second time. I typed the code wrong too, I was so flustered. Who did he think he was, telling me something like that? I pressed the button to slide the door shut behind me, and turned around to be faced by Clarissa and Specimen, entangled on her bed.
"Carly!" Specimen blurted out, and I chucked McCoy's stupid diagnosis on my desk, scattering the mound of late homework and sticky notes from Chekov telling me to do it. I grabbed my standard issue white jacket and data pad, tucking the former into my considerably lighter bag; I had emptied it this morning. I needed to take notes on this occurrence, no matter how much it infuriated me.
"Oh, save it," I viciously snarled, not sure who exactly I was rather uncharacteristically yelling at, and stormed out. I couldn't get any peace, not even in my own freaking room! Clarissa being a general slut was nothing new, but for some reason Specimen's presence in her bed caused me particular offense. I had wanted to yell "He was my friend first!" The late afternoon air was fresh and clear compared to the stuffy confinement of the clinic, the musty scent of the library or my dormitory, and I decided to walk to the Golden Gate Park to sulk instead of stick around campus, waiting for Dr. McCoy to come and chide me about human relationships more. He said it was for my own good that he was a little mean, like I needed a parent at the school since I was so young and my alien Vulcan blood often muddled my human emotions and I was so far away from home and the Mars colony, but I was sick of it. It's my life anyway, isn't it? Not really any of his business.
Being angry was easy and felt good, but my storm lost its thunder the farther I got away from the Academy. Downtown San Francisco felt foreign and lonely, and I couldn't even bring myself to buy a doughnut from the street vendor. It even had white frosting and sprinkles. Now that's saying something.
I paid the dumb fee to get into the park, and shambled along the water's edge by the rocks under the bridge for a long time. It was cool and windy, but my thoughts remained as tangled as my windblown hair long after I missed dinner. I hauled my freezing ass back up the rocky hill, then stood by the legal part of the shore on the smooth grass. It was just as windy, and I could see the stars opening up like diamonds scattered across a black velvet blanket in front of me. Words cannot describe how breathtaking the night sky is, one must simply experience it for themselves.
"I thought I vould find ju here!" Chekov exclaimed from behind me, walking up behind me. McCoy, I bitterly thought. No one else knew I came here sometimes. Then again, Chekov had a talent for finding out or guessing every little secret about me. He was even smiling my smile, the crooked one.
"Hey," I replied quietly, halfheartedly attempting to return the favor. I failed, and Chekov's smile slid sideways to the left at a thirty degree angle off his face.
"Oh, now zat is not a smile," he chided playfully, standing beside me and pulling his hands out of his pockets to try and fix it by turning the corners of my mouth upwards with his fingers. Eventually, he got a laugh out of me. "Ah, much better."
The laugh faded, and a small smile remained on my face. Chekov has this happy-go-lucky aura around him, and he kind of infects even the gloomiest of gloom-balls, such as myself. I couldn't see his expression, it was too dark. "How'd you know where to find me?" I asked, my fondness for him burning away my dark mood.
"Lucky guess," he offhandedly answered, and I saw his shoulders move in a shrug against the shimmering light of the city reflected off the water. He took my arm and wrapped it securely through his and started to walk. Apparently we were going for a walk. "Let's go for a valk."
Really? Never would have guessed. "Hopefully not a trip," I remarked, turning to playfully smile at him. Pavel chuckled, and pulled me against him with a one-armed hug. It was the only one I've gotten since Tuesday. Nobody hugs me except him. Gloom.
"Not if I have anything to say about eet," he teased, and to prove his point picked me up by the waist and set me down on the other side of a crack in the sidewalk before crossing the dangerous chasm himself. I laughed loudly, willing myself to be happy for him, even though I was probably going to make an ass of myself in the process.
"Oh thank you, brave sir knight," I sarcastically gushed. He repeated the procedure when we encountered a puddle on the side of a road. "For I would not know how to survive without your gallant selflessness, honor, and…" I had run out of adjectives. Pavel waved a hand expectantly. "Erm…chastity."
"Vhat?" he choked out before we looked at each other in the background light of the headlights and burst out laughing.
"I don't know!" I snorted, practically dying with hysterical giggles as we leaned on each other as we staggered back to the Academy. He tripped on a curb when we crossed the street, and I actually fell to my knees on the sidewalk cackling, and he joined me, despite the fact that we were surrounded by regular people giving us very strange looks. Our walk back to the Academy was full of many more spills, inappropriate remarks, and we actually rolled down a hill together at one point. I actually tripped over myself trying to run down it, and Pavel purposely threw himself on the ground and followed to make me feel better.
"Oh my God, stop making me laugh," I gasped before collapsing in a heap of giggles on top of my breathless friend as we stopped to rest at the edge of the Academy property under a familiar tree I had passed many times on the way to quantum mechanics but never stopped to appreciate. It was too good of a night to end here, but the laughter eventually subsided.
"Come," Pavel said in his silly Russian accent I loved so dearly, and I scooted to sit next to him under the tree. "Look at ze stars."
I turned my eyes to the heavens, and my breath was taken away. The sky was clearer than before, and I could see not just every planet and star but the Milky Way, spiraling beautifully across the sky like a chandelier made of the most precious crystal known to the universe. I don't remember ever really looking at the stars before, and I must have sat there for an hour in open mouthed wonder. Maybe I had looked at them before, but without really seeing them.
"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," I finally whispered, leaning against the tree beside my friend and tilting my head back, eyes and mind overwhelmed with all of their logic thrown out the window.
"Almost," Pavel softly said beside me, and I could feel his eyes on me in the darkness for a second before he turned his attention to the sky, and started pointing out constellations. "Look, zat's Orion. And zat ees Lyra."
"I don't see it," I curiously said, eager to learn and understand. I was at a heavy disadvantage having no knowledge of these earthly constellations and being at a strange angle from Chekov I couldn't see exactly where he was pointing. I only knew the stars as seen from the orientation of the Mars colony.
"Here," he quietly said, laughing at my distress, and he pulled me across the grass to sit in front of him, then wrapped an arm around my waist to pull me back to sit between his legs. My cheeks burned in the darkness, and I pulled my knees to my chest, my body tense. He pulled one arm from around my waist to point to the stars over my shoulder, and whispered their names and stories about them I had never heard in my ear. Some of them he only knew in Russian, but I liked those the best, and I relaxed into him, and our bodies curled together like they had been meant to be that way since the beginning of time. Pavel's voice was like a lullaby, and his funny Russian stories like an exotic drug that banished every worry from my mind as he held me beneath the night sky until dawn broke.