Chapter Two: Christine
Disclaimer: No money here, folks. Just free fun. Also, this story takes place after Season One Episode Seven: The Serene Squall. If you haven't seen it, you might want to before you read this chapter.
When the door chimes, Christine Chapel takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly before getting up to answer it. Erica, most likely, swinging by at the end of her shift, something Christine would normally welcome. In the three months since she shipped aboard the Enterprise, she's made no better friend than the witty helmsman. They share the same sense of humor, the same fondness for puns, the same willingness to pull a prank, the same exuberance that has led several of the crew to dub them Double Trouble. When she's in the mood for adventure, Erica's all in. When she needs a sympathetic ear, Erica's ready to listen.
Except tonight Christine doesn't want to talk. She needs time to think about what happened on the bridge—and just as importantly, what happened later when Spock came to sickbay to applaud her performance, as if they had been actors in a play. She'd been stung by his words, and embarrassed that he felt the need to say them. Is she so transparent that even a Vulcan can read her hopeless longing in her teasing, in her gestures? She feels herself blush at the idea.
She opens the door ready to beg off dinner or movie night or whatever it is Erica has come calling with, but to her astonishment Captain Pike stands in the doorway.
"May I come in?"
"Captain! Of course!" She steps back and he follows her to the sitting area. He waves away her offer of a drink and settles into a chair facing her.
"It's been a very long day," he says, "and I don't want to keep you, but Spock told me what happened—"
"It's nothing. I'm good!" Even to herself her voice sounds forced and dishonest. Captain Pike raises one eyebrow in an uncanny resemblance of his science officer.
"Still," he says, his voice low and—does she imagine it, unusually gentle?—"it's never a good feeling to be compelled to do something against your will, even when you know it's necessary."
"It wasn't against my—I mean, yeah. It was hard. For both of us. I hope T'Pring understands."
"She will. She's a reasonable person. I was more concerned about you—"
"I'm fine!"
"—and how you are adjusting to ship life. Dr. M'Benga sings your praises highly. He wants me to put a bug in your ear to get you to think about joining Starfleet. You don't really want to give all this up in a few months to go stateside again, do you? What does the Stanford-Morehouse Epigenetic Project have that you can't get on a starship?"
Captain Pike looks at her so intently, so earnestly, that for a moment she almost tells him the truth, that she's here now on the Enterprise because she's running away from the Stanford-Morehouse Epigenetic Project. She'd taken this temporary civilian posting to get some distance from her xenobiology professor, Roger Korby. They'd done nothing wrong, hadn't violated any academic ethics, but she'd been starstruck to be taught by someone called the Pasteur of archaeological medicine by his colleagues.
Erica once quipped that Christine had a type —super brainy unavailable men.
"You also have an allergy to commitment," Erica told her one night at a San Francisco bar where she was playing Christine's wingman. "That's why you keep chasing these losers."
"Lt. Dever's not a loser. He's just…ordinary."
"Like I said, loser."
But she knew that Erica was right, that as much as men like Roger Korby were appealing, as soon as they returned the interest, she skittered away.
That is, until she met Spock.
Super brainy and unavailable, check. So far, she's doing what she's always done.
What she can't tell Captain Pike, and certainly not Spock, is what she discovered when he kissed her: That the kiss was mortifying not because it was a sham and a subterfuge, but because it wasn't. Spock wasn't pretending.
The kiss should have been dry, perfunctory, awkwardly self-conscious. And it was, at first.
And then it wasn't. She felt Spock's arms snake around her back and she slipped her hand to cradle his neck. Although she knows that Vulcan body temperature runs hotter than humans, being swamped in his heat was…well, she kissed him back with a passion that wasn't feigned. When they pulled apart at last, she saw in his eyes that he knew that she had long imagined doing just that—and now that she had, she was not only not ready to run away, but was ready to do it again.
Later in sickbay she recognized what he was doing with his comment about applauding her performance. She knew a Vulcan apology when she heard it.
From the first time she'd ever spoken to him, she'd been wrong-footed when she was around him, confusing him into silence or misreading his unexpected humor. She still cringes when she remembers sounding like such a know-it-all at the Captain's table when Spock had remarked, quietly and sincerely, that humans seemed impolite to laugh at others' misfortunes.
"Because it's funny," she had quipped. At once she was ashamed to sound so callous, so flippant. Fortunately, Captain Pike had rescued the conversation.
Worse was the first—and last—time she attempted a sexual double entendre at his expense. Holding a hypospray that had already made Sam Kirk and Nyota Uhura wince, she grinned and asked Spock if he was ready.
"I am more than capable of managing any pain you can induce."
"Mr. Spock. Now you're just toying with me."
He flushed visibly as the double meanings caught up to him. "That was not my intention," he protested.
"I've noticed." As soon as she said it, she realized that her joke had landed with a thud. From the corner of her eye she saw Cadet Uhura's expression—the same knowing, slightly acerbic look she'd gotten from Salik, the one Vulcan student in Roger's xenobiology class. Whenever Roger showed her more attention than he did the other students—sitting down at her lab station to watch her procedural, for instance, after simply walking around the room to observe everyone else, or praising her research paper to the rest of the class—she'd look up and invariably see Salik watching her.
One day after class she confronted him about it.
"I did not mean to make you uncomfortable," Salik said, his voice even and almost mechanical. "I was trying to ascertain if you and Dr. Korby were sexual partners. Human behavior is an interest of mine. Now that I know you are mated, I will turn my attention elsewhere."
They were in a crowded hall or Christine would have shouted at him. As it was, she leaned so close that she saw him physically lean away.
"We are not mated! We are not in a relationship of any kind! I'm the same as you—a student in the class. Whatever you think you…saw…you're wrong!"
But even as she said it, she knew it was a lie. They might not be in a formal relationship, but they were heading into dangerous territory.
Of course she had to leave.
And that is what she almost tells Captain Pike as he looks at her with a gravitas that belies his age. She's seen that look once before, at the meal in his quarters. The conversation had been light and fun—everyone was agog at the wunderkind that was Cadet Uhura—and suddenly the captain had stumbled over his words and looked down, as if peering at a shadow only he could see. It lasted a moment and then he was back, the consummate host who took care to assemble his parties as carefully as he ran his ship.
He's here now because he knows—and she blushes to think this—that the kiss means something to her that she doesn't want it to mean. Perhaps she's given herself away the way she had in Roger's class, Captain Pike noticing how her attention pricks up when Spock is around, how she struggles mightily to keep her friendly discussions with him just that—a discussion between friends.
"You're really kind to check on me," she says. "You know I did a six-month stint on the Farragut after my second year of grad studies, don't you? I fell in love with ship life then, so this—" she says, gesturing to include her quarters—"is pretty familiar. And yes, sometimes I think about Starfleet. But I have to finish my degree first."
"So it's back to Stanford-Morehouse, huh? I can't convince you to stay?"
"I'll be here awhile. Don't worry. And I'm not sure where I'll finish up my studies. Hemmer says the academy on Andor has a xenomedical program that specializes in immunology. I might apply there."
"I'm sure you'll make the right decision." Captain Pike stands and crosses the distance to the door, pausing to say, "You can't keep running forever though. Let me know if you change your mind."
He's gone as suddenly as he appeared.
Christine sits down at her desk and pulls up a com-screen she's avoided looking at—the registration page with the course listings for next year's classes at Stanford-Morehouse.
"Pull it together, Chrissy," she says aloud. "Do what the captain says and stop running."
Until today—until the kiss—she thought she could run and dodge and be friends with and long for and never, ever suffer the consequences of unrequited love. She isn't used to being the one on this side of the pain. What was it Spock said? I am more than capable of managing any pain you can induce.
Not her. That's what she knows now that she didn't know when she woke up this morning.
She scrolls down the list of courses and finds the one Roger is teaching second semester.
"What the hell."
She pauses a second more and then hits the key, adding herself to the roster.
Author's Notes: Thanks to everyone for reading and leaving a review if you can! That's such a gift when you do! As for Christine in this chapter, I took parts of her story from TOS as well as SNW to fill out her story a bit. Her past experience with Roger Korby is from "What Are Little Girls Made Of" in TOS.