Disclaimer: Nobody in this is real. Everybody is extremely fictional.
Disclaimer 2: I don't own the Enterprise-D. Or the ideas I borrowed from West Side Story.
A/N: This is where it gets horribly depressing. Implied suicide and other terribleness. I actually cried writing part of it...
I'm probably going to change the genre.
After Julie and Jonathan finished eating dinner, their chaperone whisked Julie away without a proper goodbye. Oh well...
Jonathan slowly made his way back to his room. With no reason to hurry, he might as well enjoy wandering around one of the four starships he'd obsessed over nearly his entire life. He'd never thought in his wildest dreams that he'd ever be on this ship.
Especially in such strange circumstances.
When he got back to his room, he found a note just inside the door. To his surprise, it was written in Julie's handwriting.
It read:
Dearest Jonathan,
Meet me in Cargo bay 11 as soon as possible
Something seemed… wrong about the note. Like it was a trick, a joke. But the handwriting looked exactly like the handwriting of that letter she'd given him a few days ago. He wasn't sure how Julie managed to get away from Ms. Tacitus.
Was I really wandering around for that long?
Who cared! He'd get to see Julie again.
In the back of his mind he wondered how she knew where Cargo Bay 11 was. Or what a cargo bay even was!
She probably read through some floor plans or whatever.
Grinning, he left his quarters.
"Security to Sick Bay."
"Sick Bay here."
"We were doing routine scans of the ship… and twelve unfamiliar life forms just appeared in Cargo Bay. All human, we believe."
"Isn't that your department?"
"Eight of them left the cargo bay and are wandering the hallways- just after one of them began… fading. I think that person is dying"
"We're sending someone over right away."
(about 20 minutes earlier)
It was 7:45 in the evening. The sun had hardly finished setting.
Both fan clubs had gathered on a street they, regrettably, shared. As soon as each side's respective leader gave the signal, it would begin.
Just as Mark was about to shout 'now!' something happened. The world around them all changed into something unfamiliar… at first. They were, Patrick realized, in a cargo bay on the Enterprise-D.
At that moment Mark pulled the trigger on the water pistol in his hand... But, too his absolute horror, it had turned into a phaser. He'd accidentally shot Patrick in the stomach with a real weapon. A real, proper, extremely dangerous, easily fatal weapon. The Captain of the Star Trek club was currently a crumbled heap on the floor.
Nearly everyone else fled the room at that point.
At that incredibly inconvenient moment, Jonathan wandered into the room. The second he saw Patrick lying limply on the floor, only one coherent thought existed in his sorrow-addled heart: I must destroy that twisted bastard who freaking murdered him.
And then he saw Mark holding a phaser.
"What have you done?" Jonathan cried.
Mark just stared into space… clearly in dull, blank shock.
Without thinking, Jonathan ran over to Mark and tried to wrestle the phaser out of his grip. "Give that weapon to me, Mark... NOW!"
"So you can kill me?" Mark asked, his voice completely emotionless.
Not to kill again. To avoid another sickening tragedy…
Jonathan kept trying to tear the weapon away from Mark... But it somehow went off again. Mark crumpled to the floor. Now Jonathan couldn't move... Mark's eyes were still open. They blamed him, hated him, watched him...
Ensign Michael, who'd been hiding behind some boxes, grabbed Mark by the arm. "Run, Jonathan. Get away..."
"I..."
"You didn't do anything. It was suicide. Just run!"
Those words triggered something in Jonathan grief-numbed mind. He dashed out of the cargo bay, his eyes burning with tears. A moment later, Michael followed.
"This poor kid's dead. And they said he's no older than 17."
"So both of them are dead? And security just says they just showed up out of nowhere? This is horrible."
"According to the autopsies, one died of a phaser wound to the stomach and the other got shot in the left side."
"I heard the Doc say that she would've called that second one a suicide if the security had managed to find the weapon."
"Suicide is really rare these days, I always thought. This makes no sense."
"You know what? I thought that people only ever died on away missions. It's really quite scary, people dying on the ship. It makes it more real. Too real."
"But they're aren't from around here, remember. They're practically aliens."
"No. They are both completely human. I'm never done an autopsy on a normal human before. I've never done an autopsy on a kid before. So much for that perfect Federation everybody talks about…"
A/N: I know this chapter is a bit shorter than the others, but I thought that any more story would be too weird. Also, I hope this isn't too horribly depressing.
As usual, please review!