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singularityTitle: Some Cupid Kills With Arrows, Some With Traps
Author:fringedwellerfic
Pairing: McCoy/Chapel
Rating: R, for swearing and bit of hinted naughtiness.
Disclaimer: Not mine, obviously.
Warnings: I really don't see Kirk acting like this, but it's what the OP wanted so, here you go!
Author's Note: For the kink meme prompt of 'trapped in tight spaces because Kirk thinks they should have sex'. Title taken from A Midsummer Night's Dream. All science is made up and is ridiculous to anyone who knows anything about it.
Summary: Chapel and McCoy's sexual tension is causing problems in sickbay. Lucky they've got a tactical genius to help them work it out, right?
She had reached the most delicate stage of the whole experiment. Two weeks’ worth of begged, borrowed and stolen lab time culminated in her adding precisely the right amount of azidothydamine to the compound already engineered in the test tube. If she made one mistake it would set her research back yet another month.
Visibly sweating, Christine began to apply the slightest touch of pressure to the pipette with her fingertips. Just a fraction more...
“CHAPEL! GET IN HERE, I NEED YOU!” The sound of her boss’s voice cut through the tense silence like a machete through marshmallow. Christine jumped, squeezed the pipette too hard and watched in horror as a flood of azidothydamine destroyed her carefully crafted compound.
Cursing, she threw down her equipment and ran back into the main sickbay, expecting bodies, pain and chaos. She slammed to a halt in the middle of an almost empty room. The captain sat perched on a biobed, swinging his feet like the giant child he was. McCoy stood with his back to the room, glaring at the readout from the bed on the wall panel. The equipment hummed gently in the background. Nurses murmured quietly as they completed data forms to be collated and sent back to Starfleet Medical. There were no patients other than the captain.
She felt the anger boil up inside her, pushing respect for rank and politeness out of the way in the rush to get out. Her face flushed red, and she clenched her fists tightly. She wasn’t about to show him how he affected her, though. Oh no. She was far too professional for that.
“What the hell do you want, you donkey brained halfwit?”
Well. Maybe not.
McCoy turned, frowning his lack of comprehension.
“Nurse?” he managed.
“What the hell was so important that you had to ruin an experiment that took two weeks to build? Where’s the fire? Where are the mangled bodies? In short, what the fuck do you want?”
His mouth tightened into a thin line, eyes flaring with heat.
“I need 50 ccs of hydracordizone methalte, to treat our captain, who is now apparently allergic to his own allergy medicine.” McCoy turned to spare a look of pure disbelief at his old friend. “Could you possibly assist me, nurse?”
Chapel’s eyes widened when she saw a loaded hypospray of the very medicine sitting innocently on the med unit about a metre from him. He ground her teeth as she stalked to it, grabbed it and slapped it with more force than was strictly necessary into his waiting palm.
“Here,” she managed. “If you need anything else that is clearly labelled and within reach, doctor, I will be in the medlab, trying to salvage the remnants of my PhD. Feel free to set me back another month.”
She turned and left, wishing the doors on the Enterprise were the sort you could slam. This kind of exit required a slamming door or two.
Kirk grinned, enjoying the sight of his best friend being so thoroughly put in his place.
“Having a few staff problems, Bones? Are the nurses rebelling against your dictatorial...ouch!”
He clasped his hand over his neck protectively, glaring at the doctor. “There is no way that had to hurt,” he accused.
“Oh shut up, Jim. Go and bother Spock. Try not to have an allergic reaction to the air while you’re doing it,” grouched the doctor as he put the empty hypospray back in the cabinet.
“If you’re like this with all your patients I understand why Chapel wants to have at you with a laser scalpel. There is such a thing as bedside manner, you know.”
The grin returned to his face. “Or is that the problem? Does she disapprove of your bedside manner?” He waggled his eyebrows in a lascivious way, earning him a none-too-friendly shove off the biobed.
“Go away, Jim,” McCoy warned. “I don’t want to see you accidently injected with that experimental penis-shrinking virus we lost around here the other day.” He selected a hypospray at random from the med unit and clicked it threateningly.
“I have urgent business on the bridge,” Jim said quickly, edging for the door. “Catch you later, Bones.”
With the giant pain in the ass that Starfleet liked to call Captain Kirk safely out of his hair, McCoy headed back to his office to sulk in privacy. Being reamed like that in front of his staff by Chapel was bad enough, but it happening in front of the captain meant that he had to do something about it. He should charge her with insubordination, but he loathed to mar her perfect record. Besides, if losing your temper was a chargeable offense then he should have done brig time by now.
He glanced at his data screen where the video feed from the med lab was displayed. Chapel was standing over the remnants of her ruined experiment, tapping a PADD with one hand and swabbing at her eyes with the other. He slid his feet up on his desk as he watched her collect up the discarded equipment, run it through the steriliser and lock it back into place in the cupboards. She cleared her area completely, took off her lab coat, folded it neatly and slid it into the drawer kept aside for her.
She paced back and forth for a few minutes, talking to herself. The feed didn’t provide audio, but it was clear that she was trying to talk herself into something. She wound a finger through the wisps of blonde hair that had slipped from her bun, then shook her hair loose to re-wind it back securely. She smoothed down her uniform tunic, and left the med lab.
McCoy heard a quiet knock at his door, and hastily sat upright before calling her in. She entered and stood in front of him tensely. Neither wanted to be the first to speak; McCoy merely quirked an eyebrow at her until she caved first.
“I’ve come to apologise,” she began, the words obviously causing her some trouble. “Even though you ruined hours of painstaking work, I shouldn’t have said what I did. Not in front of the captain.”
McCoy waited, silently. Chapel was starting to get annoyed again, he noticed. The flush was starting to turn her cheeks pink, and her fists clenched and unclenched rhythmically.
“Well?” She couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Why haven’t you said anything?”
“You said you were here to apologise, Chapel. I haven’t heard the magic words yet.”
Her eyes narrowed, and he couldn’t help but notice how gloriously her chest swelled and her blue eyes glistened with fury as she choked out “I’m sorry, Doctor McCoy.”
She sounded anything but, he noticed. He grinned.
“Apology accepted. I should write this up, but since there were extenuating circumstances surrounding your, ah, outburst, then I’m willing to let it slide. This time. Just don’t make a habit of calling me a donkey brained halfwit in front of company.”
“As long as you don’t make a habit of ruining complicated and important experiments,” she shot back, unafraid.
She turned and started for the door, only to be halted as he said “You have my permission to leave, Lieutenant.”
He couldn’t see her face, but he would have bet his life that she had a look of pure rage on it. She continued to walk out of the office, and made for the nurses’ station out of view from his office window. A slow smile of satisfaction spread across his face. God, but Chapel was gorgeous when she was pissed.
Ladies Night was in full swing by the time Christine made it there. She’d gone off-duty after her humiliating experience that afternoon and taken her frustration out on the self-defence dummies in the gym. It had taken a long hot shower and some breathing exercises before she felt calm enough to go to the weekly session with her friends.
It was Gaila’s turn to play hostess, so Christine had to pick her way carefully through discarded phaser power coils and dissected tricorder memory units to get to the unbelievably comfortable sofa that sat in the corner of the room. It was definitely non-regulation, but having the Chief Engineer wrapped around your little finger had some advantages in the transporter room.
Christine dropped herself down on the empty end, the force jarring Uhura’s arm and jostling her martini. Christine shifted about on her seat, reached behind her and pulled out what she devoutly hoped was a piece of Orion art work. It was either that or a particularly well endowed sex toy. With Orion art it wasn’t always easy to tell. She put it on the floor next to the vodka bottle, which she appropriated for a healthy swig.
“Bad day?” Uhura asked, sucking the spilt liquid from her elegant fingers.
“The worst,” Christine confirmed as she took another gulp. “The utter pig of a man that I have the misfortune of working for ruined two weeks worth of work with a single pompous bellow. Fucker.”
They were suitably sympathetic as she explained her day. Gaila watched her with one eye as she ran her fingers through Janice’s long blonde hair. Janice sat with her eyes closed, blissed out by the scalp massage that Gaila was giving her, but chimed in with appropriate gasps and murmurs of shock. They kept the bottle of vodka circulating and passed her the tiny dark chocolate and raspberry truffles that were her favourite.
“You argue with Doctor McCoy a lot, Christine,” Gaila noted as she carefully wove Janice’s hair into a complicated braid. “Have you considered fucking him in order to relieve the tension?”
Christine had just taken a gulp from the vodka bottle, which came straight out of her nose as she spluttered in shock. Janice laughed, but Nyota just tutted at Gaila and helped to mop Christine up.
“Gaila, what the hell?” Christine managed once she regained the power of speech.
Gaila shrugged, unperturbed. “Your sexual chemistry is undeniable. Whenever I’m around the both of you I can smell it coming from you in waves. Your hormones are going crazy, the both of you. Doctor McCoy fits the popular Terran standard for acceptable masculinity. You should consider having sex with him. He has very nice shoulders.”
The other women laughed at Gaila’s typically frank analysis of the situation, but Nyota’s face had taken on the faint frown that accompanied serious thought.
“His hands aren’t bad, either,” she mused, taking a contemplative sip of her drink. “Big. Strong. Long fingers.”
Christine stared at her in disbelief as Janice piped up too.
“And his voice! All deep and growly. Very sexy, especially when his accent goes all thick.” Janice’s face took on a fleeting look of desire, then schooled itself.
“It’s considerably less sexy when it’s growling insults at you,” muttered Christine, but she was shushed by the others who had moved on to cataloguing his strong thighs, impressively toned arms and the thick shock of dark hair that Gaila confessed to wanting to run her fingers through.
“Do you all mind?” Christine eventually shouted. “Since when did this become the headquarters of the Leonard McCoy fan club? Shame on you, Nyota Uhura. What would Spock say if he heard you talking about another man like this?”
“He’d find it perfectly logical in the context of our social interaction, I’m sure,” Nyota said primly, smoothing her uniform over her long legs.
Christine rolled her eyes. She was probably right.
The bottle of vodka emptied, the truffles eaten and the men of the Enterprise ranked in order of the “popular Terran standard of acceptable masculinity”, the women said goodnight and wandered back to their own quarters.
Christine’s dreams were unusually vivid that night. She was glad that she spent the next day in one of the auxiliary sickbays taking inventory alone. It wasn’t that she’d never dreamed of McCoy, but usually she was pushing him off a cliff or making him walk the plank into shark infested waters. He’d never been naked before, and she’d never licked orange yoghurt off his abdominal muscles.
She blamed the vodka. And Gaila.
The rest of the week did not go well. Flustered by her increasingly graphic dreams, Christine was tired and bad tempered. She snapped at everyone around her, including the patients. Her bad mood was catching, as McCoy began to find faults in her work. Despite working together for three years, he suddenly began to criticise the way she organised the staff rota and stored treatment equipment. Everything she did seemed to be designed to cause him trouble, and he seemed to take pleasure in making her flush with anger and lose her temper.
The rest of the sickbay staff left them to it, organising themselves so that they did not have to deal with either of them. This, by default, forced Chapel and McCoy to spend more time to together which only fuelled the outbursts.
The situation had not gone unnoticed on the ship. Crew members were starting to avoid sickbay as much as possible, scared that they would end up caught in the crossfire between CMO and Head Nurse. The matter was brought up during the weekly meeting between captain and first officer. Spock suggested convening a formal hearing to discover the root of the problem and asked the captain to consider options such as reassignment within the fleet if Chapel and McCoy could not settle their differences amicably. Kirk would not even let Spock finish his sentence completely.
“Look Spock, it’s clear to everyone what the problem there is. To force Bones and Chapel into admitting it in a formal hearing would just be humiliating, and there’s no way that I’d consider reassigning either of them just because they’re not having sex with each other. “
Spock gave him a long look.
“Are you suggesting that the cause of the relationship problems between Doctor McCoy and Nurse Chapel are sexual in nature, captain?”
“I’m saying that they’d get along just fine if they’d work off some of their incredibly combustive sexual tension, but they’re not. If we want a happy sickbay we’re going to have to encourage them, Spock.”
Spock positively bristled with distaste.
“I do not believe that it is the purview of the first officer to encourage crew members to copulate, captain.”
Kirk smiled, and nodded.
“You are, of course, correct Mr Spock. This is too serious a situation for you to deal with. This is a case for the captain’s intervention if ever I heard it!” Kirk had a gleam in his eye and a look of determined intent on his face that usually preceded one of the Enterprise’s less than successful Away Team missions. Spock was far too Vulcan to scream and hide under the table in fear, but merely nodded and brought the meeting to a seemly if hurried close.
He left the captain ordering Scotty to his ready room, then scribbling something hurriedly onto his PADD. Spock was sure that the logical course of action would be to make sure that he was very far away from whatever his captain was planning.
With the help of Scotty for the technical side, Operation Love Doctor was born. It was a simple plan, but an effective one. Kirk planned to trap McCoy and Chapel in a turbolift together until they gave into their inner passion and ripped each others’ clothes off. There really didn’t seem to be anything that could go wrong.
“They’re still not answering?”
Chapel was sitting on the floor of the turbolift, legs pulled up close to her chest. The situation had been urgent when she had boarded the turbolift down to her quarters. An hour and a half later and things were getting desperate.
McCoy had prised the panel off the wall of the lift and was inexpertly poking among the wires. A loud crack accompanied a small electrical flash and he jumped back, sucking on his fingers. He slumped down next to Chapel, their thighs touching.
“I don’t get it. They should be able to hear us, there’s nothing wrong with the lift’s systems. There’s just silence from the communicator panel.”
Despite their week of arguing they had been managing quite well for the last hour or so, working together to get out of the lift. He’d boosted her up onto his admittedly broad shoulders so she could try crawling out of the access panel, but it had been mysteriously welded shut. He’d even refrained from making a snarky comment about her weight, or the fact that she had decided to wear the mini dress, today of all days, instead of her usual trouser and tunic combination. They’d tried to access the lift’s controls manually, but the emergency access panel was impossible to open. The comm system had been their last hope.
Christine groaned and wriggled around. McCoy looked at her dubiously.
“You ok, Chapel? Not getting claustrophobic?”
“No,” she said, trying to sound matter of fact and not embarrassed. “Just a little bladder pressure. No big deal.”
McCoy eyed her suspiciously. “How much pressure are we talking about?”
Christine found herself wilting under his stare.
“It’s pretty desperate. I needed to go badly before the lift stopped. Now it’s getting painful.”
Thankfully, McCoy was in doctor-mode, a fact that made her feel a little less embarrassed. Not much, admittedly, but a little.
“Chris, you’re going to have to let it out. Retaining urine can cause urinary tract infections, kidney stones , god, even sphincter damage.”
Chapel rolled her eyes.
“I’m not peeing in the turbolift Len, I’d never hear the end of it. I’d be known as the Slack-Bladdered Nurse forever. I can hold it.” She glanced sideways, expecting to see him laughing or at least smiling at her predicament. She was surprised to see him steely-eyed and unflinching.
“Damnit woman, as your boss and as your doctor I’ m telling you to pee in the god damn lift! That’s an order!”
Suddenly, the lift lurched downwards taking them both by surprise. His hand shot out and grabbed her arm, then quickly dropped it again as the lift stopped and the doors opened revealing their original destination.
“Oh thank God,” Christine muttered as she dashed from the lift to her quarters. She didn’t notice McCoy standing in the doorway of the lift, hesitating as to whether or not he should follow her. He decided against it, and stalked off in the other direction.
“Well,” said Kirk, watching the feed from the turbolift in Scotty’s office on the main Engineering deck.
“Yes,” said Scotty, playing with his sonic screwdriver absently.
“Did you really have to override the shutdown then?” Kirk asked. “They were getting somewhere!”
“Yes I bloody well did, captain! I’m all for the cause of true love, don’t get me wrong, but when it means that my lady gets...” Scotty struggled for an appropriate word, “sullied in the process then I’m going to have to put my foot down.” He looked militant, and Kirk couldn’t really blame him.
Kirk shrugged. “I suppose you’re right. It does seem a bit...extreme, as a bonding exercise. It just means that we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board.”
Scotty smiled that devious smile of his that has Keenser climb the warp core and refuse to come down until he stops. “Ah, funny you should say that, because I’ve had one or two ideas myself...”
McCoy stood on the transporter pad, checking his med kit for the third time. He was scowling and tapping his foot, which is the first image Chapel had of him as she scurried through the door. She had been pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, so she was still a bit confused. She hopped up on the transporter pad, pulling her long blonde hair into a sloppy ponytail. It wasn’t her usual neat bun, but it was three o’clock in the morning and it would have to do.
“What’s the emergency?” she asked as she too started to rummage in her med kit.
“The captain says that the Denebrians sent an emergency message to the ship asking for medical assistance for their queen,” Scotty said, eyes narrowing as he adjusted the transporter controls. “You’re it,” he said helpfully.
“Just get this over with,” McCoy said, closing his eyes in anticipation of having his molecules scrambled and reassembled. Christine just nodded at Scotty, and was puzzled to see him wave a cheery goodbye and grin at them as the transport process began.
“Transporter room to captain. Phase two of Operation Love Doctor had begun, sir. “
“Come up to my quarters, you can patch the feed through there.”
“Will do. I’ll just swing by my room first, there’s a bottle of something strong and blue that’s just waiting to be used for a celebration.”
“See you soon, Kirk out.”
The first thing that Christine realised when she rematerialised was that this was not Denebria. The second thing she realised was that Len McCoy was exactly as solid as he looked. She moved desperately, rocking her body against his as she tried to free herself from his weight.
“Stop wriggling,” he gasped, a strange expression on his face.
“You’re heavy,” she complained as she continued to wriggle.
They both started to move, hindering each other as much as helping. Med kits were lodged in uncomfortable places, hands moved over body parts in a way that would usually require a Starfleet Sexual Harassment seminar afterwards. That, or a nice restaurant. Eventually McCoy managed to flip them so he was on the bottom and she was propped up on one elbow, half draped over him.
“This isn’t Denebria,” she said, pulling out the small torch in her medkit and flashing it around the small, enclosed metal space.
“No, it’s the fucking Enterprise,” McCoy growled, pointing to an embossed stamp on one of the metal panels. Sure enough, it identified them as being in Jefferies tube D, deck ten, section J. More scrambling for med kits led to them discovering their communicators were dead.
“We could try and crawl through the tube until we found an access shaft,” Chapel said dubiously, looking at the long, dark tunnel ahead of them. McCoy made a face and bounced a hypospray down the tube. It skittered along until it hit a solid wall with a clang.
“The tube seems to be mysteriously blocked,” said McCoy through gritted teeth. “I’m betting that if you did the same thing behind you, there’ll be a blockage there too.”
Chapel wriggled around so she was straddling his thighs, ducked so her head didn’t bang on the ceiling, reached behind her for a hypospray and repeated the action. Sure enough, the clanging noise reported that the tube was well and truly sealed off.
“Well, shit. What the hell are we going to do? What about the Denebrian queen?” Christine was angry. If someone’s life was at stake this transporter malfunction was more than just a damn inconvenience. McCoy shrugged his shoulders, which set off an interesting play of muscles which reminded her that she was straddling her boss in a dark and deserted part of the ship. She shifted around again as he moved too, this time ending up with her head pillowed on his shoulder and her body draped fully over his. It took her a moment to relax, but the tension soon left her body.
“What are we going to do?” she asked quietly, fighting back a yawn.
“I think that sooner or later someone will figure out what happened,” he said thoughtfully,” and when they do, they’ll get the communicators working again and pull us out of here. Until then we’ll just have to stay put.”
They lay there in a comfortable silence for a few minutes, before Christine couldn’t help but ask a question that was buzzing uncomfortably around her mind.
“How did you know the tube was blocked? Have you been down here before?”
“No,” he replied evenly. “I was just thinking, if the universe was going to strand us together in a Jeffries tube, it would have to be one we couldn’t get out of. Otherwise, where’s the fun in that?”
Christine looked at him strangely, or at least she would have if she had control of the torch. Instead she just aimed her look in the vague direction of his face and hoped it got through. Her eyes were getting heavy, and it was getting harder to stay awake.
“You think that there are forces in the universe that want us to be trapped in Jeffries tubes together?”
He took his time before replying. “I can think of one particular force of nature that would think that this is a hysterical thing to do,” he said at last. “And he tends to rub off on poor, impressionable people that would otherwise know better.”
Christine knew that there was something here that just didn’t seem to make sense, but she was so tired, and the steady thump of McCoy’s heartbeat was becoming the loudest noise she could hear. She closed her eyes, and drifted off to sleep. He let out a deep sigh, tightened his arm around her and closed his eyes as well.
Half an hour later their communicators crackled and woke them both. Scotty was extremely apologetic about the whole mix-up and promised to completely strip apart the whole transporter pad to find the fault. He managed to retrieve them from the tube and rematerialise them without any problems. As it turned out, the whole Denebrian queen medical emergency had been a mistranslation by the communications department. Lucky they hadn’t actually made it down there, eh?
If looks could kill, Scotty would have been cut down by McCoy’s glare. Christine, still groggy from waking up, just chalked it up as another weird experience in the incredibly strange life she had chosen for herself. At least she hadn’t had to pee this time, even if she had ended up, technically anyway, sleeping with her boss. She couldn’t tell the girls about this one, they’d never let her live it down.
“Hmm,” Kirk said afterwards, nose deep in his glass of what was clearly not Romulan Ale, because it was illegal to have that on Federation starships.
“Yeah,” Scotty admitted as he topped up his glass. “That could have gone better, I admit. Maybe gamma shift wasn’t the best time for it.”
“You’d better make sure Uhura doesn’t hear you badmouth communications,” Kirk warned. “She’s evil.”
Scotty paled a little. “Aye,” he said morosely. “And not in the good way, either.”
They sat and sipped. The video feed from the Jeffries tube now showed nothing but a dark, empty space.
“You don’t think McCoy is getting suspicious, do you?” Scotty asked as they reached the bottom of the bottle. Kirk waved him off dismissively.
“Nah. Bones is a great doctor, but he’s not clever enough to beat us. Don’t worry about it. What do we do next?”
“Haven’t got a bloody clue.”
“Me either.”
They sat there sipping their illegal drinks, brainstorming further ways to get Chapel and McCoy alone together. Scotty was on the verge of hinting that maybe the tight spaces idea wasn’t the best one in the universe when the lock on the door was overridden and McCoy stomped in, his face a picture of fury and righteous indignation.
“Run, Scotty, save yourself,” whispered Kirk, noble to the end. Scotty, far less noble, made a break for it.
McCoy watched Scotty disappear with a glare that promised revenge. He turned back to his old friend, who was trying to brazen his way out of trouble with his trademark grin.
“A problem, Bones?”
“I think you and I need a little talk, Jim. Man to moron.”
The tension in sickbay abated a little in the next few days. They still clashed, but McCoy was making a noticeable effort not to antagonise Chapel in the way that he had previously. She was trying not to take her frustration out on the people that crossed her path, saving it for its proper target instead. The crew relaxed and began to cautiously visit sickbay again.
Things came to a head with the war game.
The Enterprise received orders to find a nice, quiet, boring patch of space and stay there while they ran a simulated war game. A percentage of the crew were to take on the role of Klingon warriors who had invaded the ship. Their target was to acquire and secure the most important areas of the ship – the bridge, Engineering and the secondary bridge, the armoury, the shuttle bays – and force the leader of the Federation side to surrender. As captain, Kirk was to abstain himself from the war game and be one of the important ‘areas’ to be captured. Spock would lead the Federation crew, and Scotty the ‘Klingons’. Only the ‘Klingon’ crew knew the time the war game started; the ship was to run normally until the signal went for the chaos to begin.
It was lunch hour for the majority of alpha shift, and Christine was starving. She had pulled the short straw on the duty roster and had to wait, though. Sickbay emptied out, leaving just one other nurse and McCoy to deal with anything that came up. It was typical then, that Scotty chose that time to stagger into sickbay holding his bloodied arm and screaming for help. Christine dropped the supplies she had been stocking the supply cupboard with and ran to him, reaching him seconds before McCoy emerged from his office.
She was shocked when Scotty suddenly dropped his arm, reached out, whirled her around and dragged her backwards towards him. His arm tightened around her throat, and she felt the unmistakable press of a phaser into the side of her skull.
“taHvlp jIH!” yelled Scotty, mangling Klingon with his broad accent. “I claim this area for the Klingon Engineering Empire!”
McCoy skidded to a halt. “Oh hell. This is today?”
“Into the supply cupboard, Terran scum!” yelled Scotty, aiming his phaser at McCoy and tugging Christine towards the small room. McCoy turned to look at Nurse Allen, who had whipped out a phaser from under her skirt and was aiming it at him with unholy glee.
Muttering dire threats under his breath, McCoy walked into the cupboard. Scotty gently pushed Christine in after him, causing her to stumble slightly. McCoy shot out a supportive arm, and pulled her behind him.
“For the good of the Empire!” Scotty howled, shutting the door firmly and locking it. There was the thumping of footsteps, the swish of the doors and then silence.
The supply cupboard was small, really only comfortable for one person at a time. Two people proved to be problematic. They were a lot closer to each other than was strictly proper, but Christine found herself relaxing quickly. After all, this wasn’t the first time she’d been trapped in close quarters with McCoy. She couldn’t hide the grin on her face.
“Something funny?” McCoy asked.
“I was just thinking that if I had to be trapped in a small space with someone, I’m glad it’s you.”
“Really?” He arched an expressive eyebrow. His voice dropped into a deeper register. “How so?”
“Well, I’ve had the practice,” Christine explained, inexplicably moving closer towards him in the cramped space. “In the last five days I’ve been trapped in a turbolift, a Jeffries tube and now a supply cupboard.” She laughed, and said “If I didn’t know better...”
She trailed off, thinking hard. She looked at McCoy again, noting the grim look on his handsome face. “If I didn’t know better,” she began again, more harshly, “I’d think that someone was planning this.”
“You wouldn’t be far wrong,” he admitted, moving so close to her that she could smell the spicy scent of his cologne. “If by ‘someone’ you mean a godforsaken idiot that needs to be blasted out of an airlock.”
“Kirk,” she said.
“Kirk,” he agreed. “Scotty, too, for reasons yet to be determined.”
Christine frowned, clearly puzzled.
“But why? I know why he’d play a practical joke on you, you’re old friends, but why drag me into this? I barely know him unless I’m stitching him up.”
McCoy coughed, suddenly nervous. “I’m led to believe that this is his juvenile attempt to stop us arguing so much,” he admitted.
“He wants to lock us in a cupboard until we kill each other?” Christine asked in confusion.
“He wants to lock us in a cupboard until we screw each other,” he answered bluntly.
There was silence in the cupboard. Christine could feel the hairs on the back of her neck raise, and her heartbeat increase. She looked away at the neat boxes, the racks of hypospray canisters, anything that wasn’t the tall man standing so close she could feel his body heat radiating from him. He stepped away from her, as far as he could in the confined space, anyway.
“I’ll be sure to tell him that it’s a mistake,” he said, regret souring the rich tones of his voice. “It shouldn’t take long for Spock to round up Scotty’s idiots, we should be out of here in a few...”
He was interrupted by Christine shooting a hand out, grabbing him by the uniform collar and kissing him like he was the last man alive. Never slow to appreciate a good thing he pulled her close to him, swiped the surface of a storage unit clear of boxes and lifted her onto it. She wrapped her legs around his waist and rolled her hips suggestively against his. Her hands ran through his hair and came to rest on his shoulders. They broke for air, panting heavily.
“I thought you’d be mad,” he said, pulling her earlobe into his mouth and nibbling gently on it.
“I’m furious,” she gasped, pulling his head down so he could kiss along the length of her neck. “As soon as I get out of this cupboard I’m going to hunt our captain down and make his life hell.”
She moaned as his hands travelled further, palming her breasts and pulling not-so-gently on her nipples.
“Ok,” she amended, breathless, “As soon as we’ve had sex in a proper bed, then I’m going to make his life hell.”
“Want some help?” McCoy offered, running his hands up the length of her bare legs and tugging on her underwear. “I’m all for inter-departmental cooperation.”
They were interrupted by a frantic scrambling on the lock of the door. It was the only warning they had before it was opened by a harried-looking Kirk, glancing anxiously back over his shoulder.
“Bones, you’ve got to hide me,“ he started, before noticing the compromising position his friend was in. “Hey!” he grinned. “It worked!”
“Yes, captain, it worked,” Chapel said with an evil grin on her face. “You truly are the tactical genius you claim to be.” Kirk visibly inflated with pride.
“So you can take your tactical genius and find another hiding place,” Chapel continued, the grin still in place. McCoy gave him a cheery wave and shut the door, locking it securely with his impenetrable CMO code. They could hear Jim’s howl of despair before his footsteps took off again.
They burst into laughter, clinging to each other for a completely different reason now.
“I’m sorry, Chris,” McCoy said when they got their breath back.
“For what?” she asked, linking her hands behind his neck.
“For ruining your experiment,” he admitted. “I should have remembered what you were doing and not bothered you for something so stupid. I never apologised, and it’s been eating at me. “
Christine smiled. “I’m sorry for calling you a donkey brained halfwit in front of company,” she said. “That’ll be a strictly private insult from now on.”
“Fair enough,” he said, brushing his lips over hers. “Forgiven?” he asked.
Christine frowned. “I’m not sure there’s been enough grovelling,” she said, pulling his hands back into position on her legs, sliding them up under her skirt. “On your knees, McCoy.”
“Yes, ma’am” he breathed before sinking down and proving that broad shoulders, long fingers and a sexy voice paled in comparison to a thoroughly talented tongue.
Author:
fringedwellerficPairing: McCoy/Chapel
Rating: R, for swearing and bit of hinted naughtiness.
Disclaimer: Not mine, obviously.
Warnings: I really don't see Kirk acting like this, but it's what the OP wanted so, here you go!
Author's Note: For the kink meme prompt of 'trapped in tight spaces because Kirk thinks they should have sex'. Title taken from A Midsummer Night's Dream. All science is made up and is ridiculous to anyone who knows anything about it.
Summary: Chapel and McCoy's sexual tension is causing problems in sickbay. Lucky they've got a tactical genius to help them work it out, right?
She had reached the most delicate stage of the whole experiment. Two weeks’ worth of begged, borrowed and stolen lab time culminated in her adding precisely the right amount of azidothydamine to the compound already engineered in the test tube. If she made one mistake it would set her research back yet another month.
Visibly sweating, Christine began to apply the slightest touch of pressure to the pipette with her fingertips. Just a fraction more...
“CHAPEL! GET IN HERE, I NEED YOU!” The sound of her boss’s voice cut through the tense silence like a machete through marshmallow. Christine jumped, squeezed the pipette too hard and watched in horror as a flood of azidothydamine destroyed her carefully crafted compound.
Cursing, she threw down her equipment and ran back into the main sickbay, expecting bodies, pain and chaos. She slammed to a halt in the middle of an almost empty room. The captain sat perched on a biobed, swinging his feet like the giant child he was. McCoy stood with his back to the room, glaring at the readout from the bed on the wall panel. The equipment hummed gently in the background. Nurses murmured quietly as they completed data forms to be collated and sent back to Starfleet Medical. There were no patients other than the captain.
She felt the anger boil up inside her, pushing respect for rank and politeness out of the way in the rush to get out. Her face flushed red, and she clenched her fists tightly. She wasn’t about to show him how he affected her, though. Oh no. She was far too professional for that.
“What the hell do you want, you donkey brained halfwit?”
Well. Maybe not.
McCoy turned, frowning his lack of comprehension.
“Nurse?” he managed.
“What the hell was so important that you had to ruin an experiment that took two weeks to build? Where’s the fire? Where are the mangled bodies? In short, what the fuck do you want?”
His mouth tightened into a thin line, eyes flaring with heat.
“I need 50 ccs of hydracordizone methalte, to treat our captain, who is now apparently allergic to his own allergy medicine.” McCoy turned to spare a look of pure disbelief at his old friend. “Could you possibly assist me, nurse?”
Chapel’s eyes widened when she saw a loaded hypospray of the very medicine sitting innocently on the med unit about a metre from him. He ground her teeth as she stalked to it, grabbed it and slapped it with more force than was strictly necessary into his waiting palm.
“Here,” she managed. “If you need anything else that is clearly labelled and within reach, doctor, I will be in the medlab, trying to salvage the remnants of my PhD. Feel free to set me back another month.”
She turned and left, wishing the doors on the Enterprise were the sort you could slam. This kind of exit required a slamming door or two.
Kirk grinned, enjoying the sight of his best friend being so thoroughly put in his place.
“Having a few staff problems, Bones? Are the nurses rebelling against your dictatorial...ouch!”
He clasped his hand over his neck protectively, glaring at the doctor. “There is no way that had to hurt,” he accused.
“Oh shut up, Jim. Go and bother Spock. Try not to have an allergic reaction to the air while you’re doing it,” grouched the doctor as he put the empty hypospray back in the cabinet.
“If you’re like this with all your patients I understand why Chapel wants to have at you with a laser scalpel. There is such a thing as bedside manner, you know.”
The grin returned to his face. “Or is that the problem? Does she disapprove of your bedside manner?” He waggled his eyebrows in a lascivious way, earning him a none-too-friendly shove off the biobed.
“Go away, Jim,” McCoy warned. “I don’t want to see you accidently injected with that experimental penis-shrinking virus we lost around here the other day.” He selected a hypospray at random from the med unit and clicked it threateningly.
“I have urgent business on the bridge,” Jim said quickly, edging for the door. “Catch you later, Bones.”
With the giant pain in the ass that Starfleet liked to call Captain Kirk safely out of his hair, McCoy headed back to his office to sulk in privacy. Being reamed like that in front of his staff by Chapel was bad enough, but it happening in front of the captain meant that he had to do something about it. He should charge her with insubordination, but he loathed to mar her perfect record. Besides, if losing your temper was a chargeable offense then he should have done brig time by now.
He glanced at his data screen where the video feed from the med lab was displayed. Chapel was standing over the remnants of her ruined experiment, tapping a PADD with one hand and swabbing at her eyes with the other. He slid his feet up on his desk as he watched her collect up the discarded equipment, run it through the steriliser and lock it back into place in the cupboards. She cleared her area completely, took off her lab coat, folded it neatly and slid it into the drawer kept aside for her.
She paced back and forth for a few minutes, talking to herself. The feed didn’t provide audio, but it was clear that she was trying to talk herself into something. She wound a finger through the wisps of blonde hair that had slipped from her bun, then shook her hair loose to re-wind it back securely. She smoothed down her uniform tunic, and left the med lab.
McCoy heard a quiet knock at his door, and hastily sat upright before calling her in. She entered and stood in front of him tensely. Neither wanted to be the first to speak; McCoy merely quirked an eyebrow at her until she caved first.
“I’ve come to apologise,” she began, the words obviously causing her some trouble. “Even though you ruined hours of painstaking work, I shouldn’t have said what I did. Not in front of the captain.”
McCoy waited, silently. Chapel was starting to get annoyed again, he noticed. The flush was starting to turn her cheeks pink, and her fists clenched and unclenched rhythmically.
“Well?” She couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Why haven’t you said anything?”
“You said you were here to apologise, Chapel. I haven’t heard the magic words yet.”
Her eyes narrowed, and he couldn’t help but notice how gloriously her chest swelled and her blue eyes glistened with fury as she choked out “I’m sorry, Doctor McCoy.”
She sounded anything but, he noticed. He grinned.
“Apology accepted. I should write this up, but since there were extenuating circumstances surrounding your, ah, outburst, then I’m willing to let it slide. This time. Just don’t make a habit of calling me a donkey brained halfwit in front of company.”
“As long as you don’t make a habit of ruining complicated and important experiments,” she shot back, unafraid.
She turned and started for the door, only to be halted as he said “You have my permission to leave, Lieutenant.”
He couldn’t see her face, but he would have bet his life that she had a look of pure rage on it. She continued to walk out of the office, and made for the nurses’ station out of view from his office window. A slow smile of satisfaction spread across his face. God, but Chapel was gorgeous when she was pissed.
Ladies Night was in full swing by the time Christine made it there. She’d gone off-duty after her humiliating experience that afternoon and taken her frustration out on the self-defence dummies in the gym. It had taken a long hot shower and some breathing exercises before she felt calm enough to go to the weekly session with her friends.
It was Gaila’s turn to play hostess, so Christine had to pick her way carefully through discarded phaser power coils and dissected tricorder memory units to get to the unbelievably comfortable sofa that sat in the corner of the room. It was definitely non-regulation, but having the Chief Engineer wrapped around your little finger had some advantages in the transporter room.
Christine dropped herself down on the empty end, the force jarring Uhura’s arm and jostling her martini. Christine shifted about on her seat, reached behind her and pulled out what she devoutly hoped was a piece of Orion art work. It was either that or a particularly well endowed sex toy. With Orion art it wasn’t always easy to tell. She put it on the floor next to the vodka bottle, which she appropriated for a healthy swig.
“Bad day?” Uhura asked, sucking the spilt liquid from her elegant fingers.
“The worst,” Christine confirmed as she took another gulp. “The utter pig of a man that I have the misfortune of working for ruined two weeks worth of work with a single pompous bellow. Fucker.”
They were suitably sympathetic as she explained her day. Gaila watched her with one eye as she ran her fingers through Janice’s long blonde hair. Janice sat with her eyes closed, blissed out by the scalp massage that Gaila was giving her, but chimed in with appropriate gasps and murmurs of shock. They kept the bottle of vodka circulating and passed her the tiny dark chocolate and raspberry truffles that were her favourite.
“You argue with Doctor McCoy a lot, Christine,” Gaila noted as she carefully wove Janice’s hair into a complicated braid. “Have you considered fucking him in order to relieve the tension?”
Christine had just taken a gulp from the vodka bottle, which came straight out of her nose as she spluttered in shock. Janice laughed, but Nyota just tutted at Gaila and helped to mop Christine up.
“Gaila, what the hell?” Christine managed once she regained the power of speech.
Gaila shrugged, unperturbed. “Your sexual chemistry is undeniable. Whenever I’m around the both of you I can smell it coming from you in waves. Your hormones are going crazy, the both of you. Doctor McCoy fits the popular Terran standard for acceptable masculinity. You should consider having sex with him. He has very nice shoulders.”
The other women laughed at Gaila’s typically frank analysis of the situation, but Nyota’s face had taken on the faint frown that accompanied serious thought.
“His hands aren’t bad, either,” she mused, taking a contemplative sip of her drink. “Big. Strong. Long fingers.”
Christine stared at her in disbelief as Janice piped up too.
“And his voice! All deep and growly. Very sexy, especially when his accent goes all thick.” Janice’s face took on a fleeting look of desire, then schooled itself.
“It’s considerably less sexy when it’s growling insults at you,” muttered Christine, but she was shushed by the others who had moved on to cataloguing his strong thighs, impressively toned arms and the thick shock of dark hair that Gaila confessed to wanting to run her fingers through.
“Do you all mind?” Christine eventually shouted. “Since when did this become the headquarters of the Leonard McCoy fan club? Shame on you, Nyota Uhura. What would Spock say if he heard you talking about another man like this?”
“He’d find it perfectly logical in the context of our social interaction, I’m sure,” Nyota said primly, smoothing her uniform over her long legs.
Christine rolled her eyes. She was probably right.
The bottle of vodka emptied, the truffles eaten and the men of the Enterprise ranked in order of the “popular Terran standard of acceptable masculinity”, the women said goodnight and wandered back to their own quarters.
Christine’s dreams were unusually vivid that night. She was glad that she spent the next day in one of the auxiliary sickbays taking inventory alone. It wasn’t that she’d never dreamed of McCoy, but usually she was pushing him off a cliff or making him walk the plank into shark infested waters. He’d never been naked before, and she’d never licked orange yoghurt off his abdominal muscles.
She blamed the vodka. And Gaila.
The rest of the week did not go well. Flustered by her increasingly graphic dreams, Christine was tired and bad tempered. She snapped at everyone around her, including the patients. Her bad mood was catching, as McCoy began to find faults in her work. Despite working together for three years, he suddenly began to criticise the way she organised the staff rota and stored treatment equipment. Everything she did seemed to be designed to cause him trouble, and he seemed to take pleasure in making her flush with anger and lose her temper.
The rest of the sickbay staff left them to it, organising themselves so that they did not have to deal with either of them. This, by default, forced Chapel and McCoy to spend more time to together which only fuelled the outbursts.
The situation had not gone unnoticed on the ship. Crew members were starting to avoid sickbay as much as possible, scared that they would end up caught in the crossfire between CMO and Head Nurse. The matter was brought up during the weekly meeting between captain and first officer. Spock suggested convening a formal hearing to discover the root of the problem and asked the captain to consider options such as reassignment within the fleet if Chapel and McCoy could not settle their differences amicably. Kirk would not even let Spock finish his sentence completely.
“Look Spock, it’s clear to everyone what the problem there is. To force Bones and Chapel into admitting it in a formal hearing would just be humiliating, and there’s no way that I’d consider reassigning either of them just because they’re not having sex with each other. “
Spock gave him a long look.
“Are you suggesting that the cause of the relationship problems between Doctor McCoy and Nurse Chapel are sexual in nature, captain?”
“I’m saying that they’d get along just fine if they’d work off some of their incredibly combustive sexual tension, but they’re not. If we want a happy sickbay we’re going to have to encourage them, Spock.”
Spock positively bristled with distaste.
“I do not believe that it is the purview of the first officer to encourage crew members to copulate, captain.”
Kirk smiled, and nodded.
“You are, of course, correct Mr Spock. This is too serious a situation for you to deal with. This is a case for the captain’s intervention if ever I heard it!” Kirk had a gleam in his eye and a look of determined intent on his face that usually preceded one of the Enterprise’s less than successful Away Team missions. Spock was far too Vulcan to scream and hide under the table in fear, but merely nodded and brought the meeting to a seemly if hurried close.
He left the captain ordering Scotty to his ready room, then scribbling something hurriedly onto his PADD. Spock was sure that the logical course of action would be to make sure that he was very far away from whatever his captain was planning.
With the help of Scotty for the technical side, Operation Love Doctor was born. It was a simple plan, but an effective one. Kirk planned to trap McCoy and Chapel in a turbolift together until they gave into their inner passion and ripped each others’ clothes off. There really didn’t seem to be anything that could go wrong.
“They’re still not answering?”
Chapel was sitting on the floor of the turbolift, legs pulled up close to her chest. The situation had been urgent when she had boarded the turbolift down to her quarters. An hour and a half later and things were getting desperate.
McCoy had prised the panel off the wall of the lift and was inexpertly poking among the wires. A loud crack accompanied a small electrical flash and he jumped back, sucking on his fingers. He slumped down next to Chapel, their thighs touching.
“I don’t get it. They should be able to hear us, there’s nothing wrong with the lift’s systems. There’s just silence from the communicator panel.”
Despite their week of arguing they had been managing quite well for the last hour or so, working together to get out of the lift. He’d boosted her up onto his admittedly broad shoulders so she could try crawling out of the access panel, but it had been mysteriously welded shut. He’d even refrained from making a snarky comment about her weight, or the fact that she had decided to wear the mini dress, today of all days, instead of her usual trouser and tunic combination. They’d tried to access the lift’s controls manually, but the emergency access panel was impossible to open. The comm system had been their last hope.
Christine groaned and wriggled around. McCoy looked at her dubiously.
“You ok, Chapel? Not getting claustrophobic?”
“No,” she said, trying to sound matter of fact and not embarrassed. “Just a little bladder pressure. No big deal.”
McCoy eyed her suspiciously. “How much pressure are we talking about?”
Christine found herself wilting under his stare.
“It’s pretty desperate. I needed to go badly before the lift stopped. Now it’s getting painful.”
Thankfully, McCoy was in doctor-mode, a fact that made her feel a little less embarrassed. Not much, admittedly, but a little.
“Chris, you’re going to have to let it out. Retaining urine can cause urinary tract infections, kidney stones , god, even sphincter damage.”
Chapel rolled her eyes.
“I’m not peeing in the turbolift Len, I’d never hear the end of it. I’d be known as the Slack-Bladdered Nurse forever. I can hold it.” She glanced sideways, expecting to see him laughing or at least smiling at her predicament. She was surprised to see him steely-eyed and unflinching.
“Damnit woman, as your boss and as your doctor I’ m telling you to pee in the god damn lift! That’s an order!”
Suddenly, the lift lurched downwards taking them both by surprise. His hand shot out and grabbed her arm, then quickly dropped it again as the lift stopped and the doors opened revealing their original destination.
“Oh thank God,” Christine muttered as she dashed from the lift to her quarters. She didn’t notice McCoy standing in the doorway of the lift, hesitating as to whether or not he should follow her. He decided against it, and stalked off in the other direction.
“Well,” said Kirk, watching the feed from the turbolift in Scotty’s office on the main Engineering deck.
“Yes,” said Scotty, playing with his sonic screwdriver absently.
“Did you really have to override the shutdown then?” Kirk asked. “They were getting somewhere!”
“Yes I bloody well did, captain! I’m all for the cause of true love, don’t get me wrong, but when it means that my lady gets...” Scotty struggled for an appropriate word, “sullied in the process then I’m going to have to put my foot down.” He looked militant, and Kirk couldn’t really blame him.
Kirk shrugged. “I suppose you’re right. It does seem a bit...extreme, as a bonding exercise. It just means that we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board.”
Scotty smiled that devious smile of his that has Keenser climb the warp core and refuse to come down until he stops. “Ah, funny you should say that, because I’ve had one or two ideas myself...”
McCoy stood on the transporter pad, checking his med kit for the third time. He was scowling and tapping his foot, which is the first image Chapel had of him as she scurried through the door. She had been pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, so she was still a bit confused. She hopped up on the transporter pad, pulling her long blonde hair into a sloppy ponytail. It wasn’t her usual neat bun, but it was three o’clock in the morning and it would have to do.
“What’s the emergency?” she asked as she too started to rummage in her med kit.
“The captain says that the Denebrians sent an emergency message to the ship asking for medical assistance for their queen,” Scotty said, eyes narrowing as he adjusted the transporter controls. “You’re it,” he said helpfully.
“Just get this over with,” McCoy said, closing his eyes in anticipation of having his molecules scrambled and reassembled. Christine just nodded at Scotty, and was puzzled to see him wave a cheery goodbye and grin at them as the transport process began.
“Transporter room to captain. Phase two of Operation Love Doctor had begun, sir. “
“Come up to my quarters, you can patch the feed through there.”
“Will do. I’ll just swing by my room first, there’s a bottle of something strong and blue that’s just waiting to be used for a celebration.”
“See you soon, Kirk out.”
The first thing that Christine realised when she rematerialised was that this was not Denebria. The second thing she realised was that Len McCoy was exactly as solid as he looked. She moved desperately, rocking her body against his as she tried to free herself from his weight.
“Stop wriggling,” he gasped, a strange expression on his face.
“You’re heavy,” she complained as she continued to wriggle.
They both started to move, hindering each other as much as helping. Med kits were lodged in uncomfortable places, hands moved over body parts in a way that would usually require a Starfleet Sexual Harassment seminar afterwards. That, or a nice restaurant. Eventually McCoy managed to flip them so he was on the bottom and she was propped up on one elbow, half draped over him.
“This isn’t Denebria,” she said, pulling out the small torch in her medkit and flashing it around the small, enclosed metal space.
“No, it’s the fucking Enterprise,” McCoy growled, pointing to an embossed stamp on one of the metal panels. Sure enough, it identified them as being in Jefferies tube D, deck ten, section J. More scrambling for med kits led to them discovering their communicators were dead.
“We could try and crawl through the tube until we found an access shaft,” Chapel said dubiously, looking at the long, dark tunnel ahead of them. McCoy made a face and bounced a hypospray down the tube. It skittered along until it hit a solid wall with a clang.
“The tube seems to be mysteriously blocked,” said McCoy through gritted teeth. “I’m betting that if you did the same thing behind you, there’ll be a blockage there too.”
Chapel wriggled around so she was straddling his thighs, ducked so her head didn’t bang on the ceiling, reached behind her for a hypospray and repeated the action. Sure enough, the clanging noise reported that the tube was well and truly sealed off.
“Well, shit. What the hell are we going to do? What about the Denebrian queen?” Christine was angry. If someone’s life was at stake this transporter malfunction was more than just a damn inconvenience. McCoy shrugged his shoulders, which set off an interesting play of muscles which reminded her that she was straddling her boss in a dark and deserted part of the ship. She shifted around again as he moved too, this time ending up with her head pillowed on his shoulder and her body draped fully over his. It took her a moment to relax, but the tension soon left her body.
“What are we going to do?” she asked quietly, fighting back a yawn.
“I think that sooner or later someone will figure out what happened,” he said thoughtfully,” and when they do, they’ll get the communicators working again and pull us out of here. Until then we’ll just have to stay put.”
They lay there in a comfortable silence for a few minutes, before Christine couldn’t help but ask a question that was buzzing uncomfortably around her mind.
“How did you know the tube was blocked? Have you been down here before?”
“No,” he replied evenly. “I was just thinking, if the universe was going to strand us together in a Jeffries tube, it would have to be one we couldn’t get out of. Otherwise, where’s the fun in that?”
Christine looked at him strangely, or at least she would have if she had control of the torch. Instead she just aimed her look in the vague direction of his face and hoped it got through. Her eyes were getting heavy, and it was getting harder to stay awake.
“You think that there are forces in the universe that want us to be trapped in Jeffries tubes together?”
He took his time before replying. “I can think of one particular force of nature that would think that this is a hysterical thing to do,” he said at last. “And he tends to rub off on poor, impressionable people that would otherwise know better.”
Christine knew that there was something here that just didn’t seem to make sense, but she was so tired, and the steady thump of McCoy’s heartbeat was becoming the loudest noise she could hear. She closed her eyes, and drifted off to sleep. He let out a deep sigh, tightened his arm around her and closed his eyes as well.
Half an hour later their communicators crackled and woke them both. Scotty was extremely apologetic about the whole mix-up and promised to completely strip apart the whole transporter pad to find the fault. He managed to retrieve them from the tube and rematerialise them without any problems. As it turned out, the whole Denebrian queen medical emergency had been a mistranslation by the communications department. Lucky they hadn’t actually made it down there, eh?
If looks could kill, Scotty would have been cut down by McCoy’s glare. Christine, still groggy from waking up, just chalked it up as another weird experience in the incredibly strange life she had chosen for herself. At least she hadn’t had to pee this time, even if she had ended up, technically anyway, sleeping with her boss. She couldn’t tell the girls about this one, they’d never let her live it down.
“Hmm,” Kirk said afterwards, nose deep in his glass of what was clearly not Romulan Ale, because it was illegal to have that on Federation starships.
“Yeah,” Scotty admitted as he topped up his glass. “That could have gone better, I admit. Maybe gamma shift wasn’t the best time for it.”
“You’d better make sure Uhura doesn’t hear you badmouth communications,” Kirk warned. “She’s evil.”
Scotty paled a little. “Aye,” he said morosely. “And not in the good way, either.”
They sat and sipped. The video feed from the Jeffries tube now showed nothing but a dark, empty space.
“You don’t think McCoy is getting suspicious, do you?” Scotty asked as they reached the bottom of the bottle. Kirk waved him off dismissively.
“Nah. Bones is a great doctor, but he’s not clever enough to beat us. Don’t worry about it. What do we do next?”
“Haven’t got a bloody clue.”
“Me either.”
They sat there sipping their illegal drinks, brainstorming further ways to get Chapel and McCoy alone together. Scotty was on the verge of hinting that maybe the tight spaces idea wasn’t the best one in the universe when the lock on the door was overridden and McCoy stomped in, his face a picture of fury and righteous indignation.
“Run, Scotty, save yourself,” whispered Kirk, noble to the end. Scotty, far less noble, made a break for it.
McCoy watched Scotty disappear with a glare that promised revenge. He turned back to his old friend, who was trying to brazen his way out of trouble with his trademark grin.
“A problem, Bones?”
“I think you and I need a little talk, Jim. Man to moron.”
The tension in sickbay abated a little in the next few days. They still clashed, but McCoy was making a noticeable effort not to antagonise Chapel in the way that he had previously. She was trying not to take her frustration out on the people that crossed her path, saving it for its proper target instead. The crew relaxed and began to cautiously visit sickbay again.
Things came to a head with the war game.
The Enterprise received orders to find a nice, quiet, boring patch of space and stay there while they ran a simulated war game. A percentage of the crew were to take on the role of Klingon warriors who had invaded the ship. Their target was to acquire and secure the most important areas of the ship – the bridge, Engineering and the secondary bridge, the armoury, the shuttle bays – and force the leader of the Federation side to surrender. As captain, Kirk was to abstain himself from the war game and be one of the important ‘areas’ to be captured. Spock would lead the Federation crew, and Scotty the ‘Klingons’. Only the ‘Klingon’ crew knew the time the war game started; the ship was to run normally until the signal went for the chaos to begin.
It was lunch hour for the majority of alpha shift, and Christine was starving. She had pulled the short straw on the duty roster and had to wait, though. Sickbay emptied out, leaving just one other nurse and McCoy to deal with anything that came up. It was typical then, that Scotty chose that time to stagger into sickbay holding his bloodied arm and screaming for help. Christine dropped the supplies she had been stocking the supply cupboard with and ran to him, reaching him seconds before McCoy emerged from his office.
She was shocked when Scotty suddenly dropped his arm, reached out, whirled her around and dragged her backwards towards him. His arm tightened around her throat, and she felt the unmistakable press of a phaser into the side of her skull.
“taHvlp jIH!” yelled Scotty, mangling Klingon with his broad accent. “I claim this area for the Klingon Engineering Empire!”
McCoy skidded to a halt. “Oh hell. This is today?”
“Into the supply cupboard, Terran scum!” yelled Scotty, aiming his phaser at McCoy and tugging Christine towards the small room. McCoy turned to look at Nurse Allen, who had whipped out a phaser from under her skirt and was aiming it at him with unholy glee.
Muttering dire threats under his breath, McCoy walked into the cupboard. Scotty gently pushed Christine in after him, causing her to stumble slightly. McCoy shot out a supportive arm, and pulled her behind him.
“For the good of the Empire!” Scotty howled, shutting the door firmly and locking it. There was the thumping of footsteps, the swish of the doors and then silence.
The supply cupboard was small, really only comfortable for one person at a time. Two people proved to be problematic. They were a lot closer to each other than was strictly proper, but Christine found herself relaxing quickly. After all, this wasn’t the first time she’d been trapped in close quarters with McCoy. She couldn’t hide the grin on her face.
“Something funny?” McCoy asked.
“I was just thinking that if I had to be trapped in a small space with someone, I’m glad it’s you.”
“Really?” He arched an expressive eyebrow. His voice dropped into a deeper register. “How so?”
“Well, I’ve had the practice,” Christine explained, inexplicably moving closer towards him in the cramped space. “In the last five days I’ve been trapped in a turbolift, a Jeffries tube and now a supply cupboard.” She laughed, and said “If I didn’t know better...”
She trailed off, thinking hard. She looked at McCoy again, noting the grim look on his handsome face. “If I didn’t know better,” she began again, more harshly, “I’d think that someone was planning this.”
“You wouldn’t be far wrong,” he admitted, moving so close to her that she could smell the spicy scent of his cologne. “If by ‘someone’ you mean a godforsaken idiot that needs to be blasted out of an airlock.”
“Kirk,” she said.
“Kirk,” he agreed. “Scotty, too, for reasons yet to be determined.”
Christine frowned, clearly puzzled.
“But why? I know why he’d play a practical joke on you, you’re old friends, but why drag me into this? I barely know him unless I’m stitching him up.”
McCoy coughed, suddenly nervous. “I’m led to believe that this is his juvenile attempt to stop us arguing so much,” he admitted.
“He wants to lock us in a cupboard until we kill each other?” Christine asked in confusion.
“He wants to lock us in a cupboard until we screw each other,” he answered bluntly.
There was silence in the cupboard. Christine could feel the hairs on the back of her neck raise, and her heartbeat increase. She looked away at the neat boxes, the racks of hypospray canisters, anything that wasn’t the tall man standing so close she could feel his body heat radiating from him. He stepped away from her, as far as he could in the confined space, anyway.
“I’ll be sure to tell him that it’s a mistake,” he said, regret souring the rich tones of his voice. “It shouldn’t take long for Spock to round up Scotty’s idiots, we should be out of here in a few...”
He was interrupted by Christine shooting a hand out, grabbing him by the uniform collar and kissing him like he was the last man alive. Never slow to appreciate a good thing he pulled her close to him, swiped the surface of a storage unit clear of boxes and lifted her onto it. She wrapped her legs around his waist and rolled her hips suggestively against his. Her hands ran through his hair and came to rest on his shoulders. They broke for air, panting heavily.
“I thought you’d be mad,” he said, pulling her earlobe into his mouth and nibbling gently on it.
“I’m furious,” she gasped, pulling his head down so he could kiss along the length of her neck. “As soon as I get out of this cupboard I’m going to hunt our captain down and make his life hell.”
She moaned as his hands travelled further, palming her breasts and pulling not-so-gently on her nipples.
“Ok,” she amended, breathless, “As soon as we’ve had sex in a proper bed, then I’m going to make his life hell.”
“Want some help?” McCoy offered, running his hands up the length of her bare legs and tugging on her underwear. “I’m all for inter-departmental cooperation.”
They were interrupted by a frantic scrambling on the lock of the door. It was the only warning they had before it was opened by a harried-looking Kirk, glancing anxiously back over his shoulder.
“Bones, you’ve got to hide me,“ he started, before noticing the compromising position his friend was in. “Hey!” he grinned. “It worked!”
“Yes, captain, it worked,” Chapel said with an evil grin on her face. “You truly are the tactical genius you claim to be.” Kirk visibly inflated with pride.
“So you can take your tactical genius and find another hiding place,” Chapel continued, the grin still in place. McCoy gave him a cheery wave and shut the door, locking it securely with his impenetrable CMO code. They could hear Jim’s howl of despair before his footsteps took off again.
They burst into laughter, clinging to each other for a completely different reason now.
“I’m sorry, Chris,” McCoy said when they got their breath back.
“For what?” she asked, linking her hands behind his neck.
“For ruining your experiment,” he admitted. “I should have remembered what you were doing and not bothered you for something so stupid. I never apologised, and it’s been eating at me. “
Christine smiled. “I’m sorry for calling you a donkey brained halfwit in front of company,” she said. “That’ll be a strictly private insult from now on.”
“Fair enough,” he said, brushing his lips over hers. “Forgiven?” he asked.
Christine frowned. “I’m not sure there’s been enough grovelling,” she said, pulling his hands back into position on her legs, sliding them up under her skirt. “On your knees, McCoy.”
“Yes, ma’am” he breathed before sinking down and proving that broad shoulders, long fingers and a sexy voice paled in comparison to a thoroughly talented tongue.