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“Fuck this,” says Lieutenant Michael Jones, second officer of engineering aboard the U.S.S. Achievement, and grabs the wire with his bare hand. He doesn’t get electrocuted, which gives him enough information to start untangling the fucking mess he’s looking at. “Fucking bullshit,” he mutters around the pair of pliers he’s holding in his mouth.
He takes the interior panel he’d unscrewed from the inside of the power transfer conduit and kicks it out of his way, ignoring the loud clanging noise it makes when it falls out of the wall hatch he’d climbed through and into the hallway outside. Lying flat on his back, he looks up at the snare of exposed wiring he needs to fix, the fifth he’s tackled today. He’s glad he took off his regulation red shirt between the third and fourth one; the insides of these conduits are claustrophobic and hot as balls, and he’s sweating through his undershirt as is. Instead, his shirt is balled up under his head as a makeshift pillow while he glares at the absolute clusterfuck someone apparently thought was good enough to install on his goddamn ship.
Okay, maybe it’s not technically his ship; Lieutenant Commander Sorola is the chief engineering officer, not him. Sorola’s the one who’s been with the Achievement ever since her maiden voyage. Michael’s caught his CO talking to the dilithium crystals more than once. But Michael’s been on the Achievement since he graduated from Starfleet Academy, and that counts for something.
Civilians would probably say that the ship “belongs” to the captain and the bridge staff, which proves how fucking little civilians know. Michael takes the pliers out of his mouth and starts angrily stripping a cable of its wiring. Fucking command staff don’t give a shit about the ship, never have. How many goddamn times have they nearly had to jettison their warp core because Captain Burns was about to get them all killed with his goddamn heroics? How many times has Michael had to cobble together materials to patch up the casings on warp nacelles that were blown to shit because engineering wasn’t given adequate shields during a firefight? How many goddamn ensigns have been lost—
His hand brushes the wrong wire and a shock of pain runs down his right arm. “Fuck,” he shouts, snatching his hand back. “Fuck fuck fuck, motherfucker.” He kicks hard against the metal above him, the loudness of it helping him feel a little less impotent.
“Lieutenant!” a sharp voice says from outside. Michael cranes his neck to look down his body and sees Lieutenant Commander Sorola’s head poking in through the hatch. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Rerouting these power transfer conduits, sir,” Michael says. “Pardon my Klingon, but they’re a bitch and a half.”
Sorola heaves a sigh. “Jones, get the hell out of the wall.” Michael rests his head back against his crumpled shirt for a minute, closing his eyes and counting his breaths, and then scrambles out of the unit, landing lightly on his feet in the hallway. He draws himself to attention as best as he can, given that he’s covered in sweat and out of uniform.
“Sir,” he says. Sorola has his hands on his hips. That usually doesn’t bode well.
“You want to explain to me why, exactly, you’ve spent two days ripping the insides of my ship apart when you’re supposed to be on rest?”
“Sir, the wiring in these PTCs is a goddamn mess, half the connections have been put in backwards and only work because other link-ups were done wrong too. It’s like looking at someone trying to fix a plasma burn with ten thousand band-aids.”
“Jones, the PTCs work fine,” Sorola says, furrowing his brow. “They’ve been working fine for months. There’s nothing wrong with them that can’t wait for the next time we dock for repairs.”
“Maybe they work now, sir, but they could go to shit at any time, and you won’t be saying that repairs can wait if the magnetic constrictors lose alignment and we’re up to our ass in antimatter because it can’t get through to the reaction—”
“Jones,” Sorola snaps, and it’s enough to make Michael go silent. “You’re scheduled for three days of rest, and you don’t get to ignore goddamn protocol just because you’re an officer. Three days of mandatory rest every sixty days. That’s how it works. Speaking of being an officer, I’ve got ensigns coming to me telling me that they need orders from you, but they’re too goddamn terrified to ask for them because you’ve spent two straight days tearing apart the walls and mumbling to yourself for no goddamn reason.”
Michael feels a rush of anger, but pushes it down. “Sir—,” he starts, but the Lieutenant Commander cuts him off again.
“Ensign Free is going to be fine, Jones,” he says, and Michael’s mouth goes dry. “It’s a routine mission, and he was the best one for the job. I don’t know what your issue is, or why you care so much, since as far as I know you don’t even like the kid.” He pauses, maybe waiting for Michael to answer; when Michael says nothing, he continues, rolling his eyes. “I don’t care, frankly. But I do care about you doing your job like a professional, or at least keeping your fuck-ups to yourself.”
Michael fixes his eyes on the floor. “Sir.”
“Close this PTC up and go to your quarters. Eat some food. Get some sleep. Rub one out. I don’t give a shit, as long as you do it where you’re not scaring the shit out of your subordinates. We clear?”
Lifting his eyes, Michael nods. Sorola seems satisfied with that. “Good. And I’m putting an order into Personnel that you should take another rest day. Don’t make me recommend you for a psych eval if I don’t have to.” He turns on his heel and walks away.
Michael watches him leave, steps echoing on the metallic floor of the hallway until he’s out of sight. When he’s finally alone, he exhales, letting his shoulders slump from where he’d held them at attention, and reaches down to pick the PTC panel off the floor.
—
Normally Michael likes his quarters just fine, but as it stands he feels like he’s going to crawl out of his own skin. The walls are aggressively beige, providing exactly zero distractions from his own thoughts. He really should have put in that request for a personal holosuite during his last evaluation. At least then he’d have something to watch.
He’d gotten some food from the replicator, but most of it is still sitting uneaten on his desk. He lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling, and tries very, very hard not to think.
Normally, when he’s too wired or worried to sleep, he has a go-to distraction. He reaches over to his bedside table and grabs his PADD from where it’s been charging. It whistles cheerfully at him when he turns it on, and he flicks through menus until he reaches the gaming dashboard.
He hasn’t logged on in a few days, and he has a backlog of notifications to skim through. Most are just basic game updates and invitations, but there’s one from three days ago that catches his eye.
Personal message from user FreeG24.9 to user JonesM65.3:
I know you’re cheating you prick!!! I’ll catch you yet. Tosspot. Rook-loving bastard.
Apparently Gavin hadn’t appreciated being beaten in six moves during their last game of Jokarian chess. Michael taps the dialogue box to send a reply on instinct; they’ve exchanged nearly ten thousand messages like that over the past few months, trash-talk and barbs and demands for rematches in pretty much every game available standard on the PADD. He can’t remember the last time he’d gone to sleep without beating Gavin at something. Not until the last two days, anyway.
His fingers hover over the keypad for a moment, then two. Frustrated, he exits out of the entire gaming menu with a few swipes and tosses the PADD to the foot of his bed. “Balls,” he says quietly to himself, rolling onto his side and curling in on himself. He’s going to be fine, he thinks, repeating Sorola’s words. The away team hasn’t lost anyone in over a month. They’re not even on a hostile planet. There’s half a fucking platoon with them. He’s going to be fine. He doesn’t think about the memorial wall in the engineering locker room, or all the familiar faces he’s had to make room for on it. They’re running out of space.
In the quiet of his room it’s easy to hear the low hum that’s ever-present on the ship. All the clever insulation in the world can’t quite silence the sound of a warp core at work, not when you know what to listen for. Normally Michael likes the sound, likes the reassurance that his ship is still running. Tonight all he can think of is the light-years between them and anything like safety; it makes him want to grab everything that matters to him and keep it close. That hum reminds him of how thin the shell is between the Achievement’s crew and the rest of the universe; outside, there be dragons.
He falls asleep fully clothed on top of his bed, hand fisted in the standard-issue comforter, and dreams of playing chess with Death.
—
When he blinks awake hours later, his first thought is that he can’t remember the last time he woke up without an alarm. His second thought is that the inside of his mouth tastes like ass. He strips down and fumbles his way to his bathroom, brushing his teeth quickly before stepping into the sonic shower. The soothing pulses help him relax as he works out the cramps in his neck and shoulders, and he feels almost human when he steps back into his room.
He grabs his PADD off the foot of his bed and checks the time. It’s 0500, nearly time for the first shift to start. He’s not sure when he fell asleep the night before; must have been early if he’s waking up now. He notices a few new messages on his work dash, and thumbs them open. The second the first one registers, he drops the PADD and immediately runs to his closet to get pants.
Message from user SorolaG13.5 to JonesM65.3:
Away team evac’d. Currently in med pavillion. Status unclear. Thought you’d want to know.
He doesn’t bother with underwear, just pulls on his regulation slacks and shirt before tearing out of his quarters. No time for socks. No time for shoes. No time for anything but the concerted effort of not thinking about what might be waiting for him on the other side of the ship.
The halls are fairly crowded as the shifts change, and he shoulders his way through knots of people as quickly as he can. “Excuse me, excuse me, fucking excuse me,” he mutters as he jogs from one sector to another, bare feet slapping against the floor. He barrels past a goldshirt with the double stripes of a lieutenant commander, not even bothering to look back at him as he shouts in alarm. Not today.
He careens around the corner to the entrance of the medical deck, only to see that the sliding doors have been barred shut. Blinds have been drawn down on all the glass walls. One half of his mind starts running through all the other times that has happened—it’s a grim list—and the other half is full of nothing but static. He steps up to the doors and starts pounding on them with a raised fist. It takes less than thirty seconds for someone to come to the door, though thirty seconds is more than enough time for him to get several confused looks from various ensigns walking by.
A young woman slides the door open, looking harried. “Yes...lieutenant?” she says, looking at the single stripe on his sleeve that denotes his rank. “Can I help you?”
“What’s the status of the away team that was evacuated?” he says, sliding his foot into the doorframe in case she tries to shut it in his face.
“Why—who are you?” she asks, looking suspicious. To be fair, he’d be less than friendly to anyone who showed up on his deck without shoes, too.
“One of my men was down there, an engineering ensign,” he says. It’s not strictly true—Gavin isn’t under his direct supervision. He works with the software monitoring the reaction core more than anything else; probably couldn’t wire an injector coil with a phaser to his head. But he doubts a medical officer will know the difference. “Gavin Free. Ensign. Do you know his status?”
She frowns and looks down at her PADD, scrolling through records. “Free, Free… yep, got him. Looks like he got hit with the same contaminant as everyone else, but he’s not in the hyperbarics, so his respiration’s probably fine. My guess is they’re holding him for observation and quarantine, he’ll probably be out inside three shifts.”
The steel that had run through Michael’s spine the moment he’d read Sorola’s message melts away now, and he sags inward on himself, relief hitting him like a punch in the gut. He blinks back the sudden burning in his eyes.
“Thank you,” he says. “Thanks very much. I don’t—I can’t go in, right?” She shakes her head, and he nods and backs away, letting her slide the door closed again.
He barely remembers the trip from his quarters to the med deck, passed in a flash of adrenaline, but walking back feels like it takes hours. He zones out and walks on auto-pilot, the bright lights of the corridors flaring at the edges of his suddenly-blurry vision. He feels a little like he’s going to be sick, which seems like a strange reaction to what is, for all intents and purposes, good news.
When he gets back to his room, he sits down on his bed and puts his head between his knees until his stomach stops churning. Then he grabs his PADD from where he’d dropped it before and types out a quick message.
Message from user JonesM65.3 to SorolaG13.5:
Please let me work.
He gets a glass of water from the replicator. By the time he’s drained it dry, a response has pinged back.
Message from user SorolaG13.5 to JonesM65.3:
Some panels in the steam tunnels under the core are warping loose. I’ve attached the schematics. You didn’t get them from me.
Michael takes a few deep breaths, grateful, and then goes to put on some goddamn underwear.
—
Half an hour later he’s in the steam tunnels, visor in one hand and a blowtorch in the other. It’s long been his opinion that there’s nothing that a stint of welding can’t make better, and this proves to be no exception. There’s no one in the steam tunnels but him, and he can put his visor down and focus on nothing but bending metal into the shape he wants. He goes through the panels one by one, finding their dents and cracks and doing what he can to put them back into place.
He’s nearly done when he hears someone coming down the metal ladder that leads up to the main reaction chamber. “Almost finished, sir,” he calls out, not taking his eyes off the panel he’s working on. “Not going to fuck off into the PTCs again, I promise.”
“Er, that’s good, I guess?” a voice says back, and Michael is so startled he drops the blowtorch onto his foot.
“Fuck,” he yelps, grateful that at least it turned off automatically when he let go of it. “Jesus Christ,” he says, lifting the visor up and looking left. “You’re a sneaky piece of shit, you know that?”
His voice is light, but his eyes are running all over Gavin, checking him for damage. He’s got a scrape under one eye and a bandaged wrist, and he’s walking a little gingerly, but all his limbs are accounted for, so Michael is calling it a win. Gavin looks down at him, grinning a little sheepishly; Michael’s never seen a better view in his life, and Michael’s seen the stars.
“Not stealthy enough, apparently,” Gavin says, waving his wrist back and forth. “S’what I get for trusting the life-signs detector. Forgot they don’t detect bloody sentient fungi or whatever the hell that was.”
“Idiot,” Michael murmurs, getting to his feet and taking off his visor and gloves. It’s taking every bit of his self-control not to swaddle Gavin in bubble-wrap and never let him out of his sight again. “Sorola tell you I was down here?”
“Might’ve mentioned it,” Gavin says, only a little smug. “Might’ve mentioned you were worried about me."
“Somebody fucking has to, not like you’re gonna do it,” Michael says. He drops the visor and gloves to the side and moves into Gavin’s space. “So he sent you down here to check on me?”
“No, I just, you know,” Gavin says, trailing off and reaching out to fiddle with the hem of Michael’s uniform shirt. Michael feels it like a phantom limb, feels the warmth radiating off of Gavin’s body and wants to live in it. “Felt like seeing you. When I got out.”
“That so,” Michael says quietly, leaning forward to rest his forehead against Gavin’s.
“Yeah, that’s so, you bloody tease, I almost died, now would you fucking get on with mmph-” Gavin says, cut off when Michael tilts his head to press their lips together. It’s soft and sweet but deadly serious, Michael reaching up to cup the back of Gavin’s skull carefully. Gavin’s hands fist in Michael’s shirt and he lets out a soft whine as Michael pulls away.
“You okay?” Michael says, and Gavin nods quickly. “Good. I’m glad.” Michael presses another quick kiss to Gavin’s mouth. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he says, voice rougher than he means it to be.
Gavin covers for him, kissing him hard and winding his arms around his neck. He walks backwards, pulling Michael with him until they’re pressed against the ladder. Michael leans his weight against Gavin, reveling in the solid feel of him, the way he can feel his rib cage expand with every breath. They kiss hushed and careful and quiet, too desperate and tired for anything else. Michael slides his hands up under Gavin’s red shirt, less to cop a feel and more for the sake of checking him over, grabbing greedy handfuls of warm skin, whole and barely even bruised.
Biting at Michael’s lower lip, Gavin pulls back just enough to mumble against his mouth. “So does this mean you’ll let me bloody win at chess every once in a while?”
Michael snickers and reaches down to grab at Gavin’s ass. “Not a chance.”
“Hmm,” Gavin says, sliding a hand up into Michael’s hair. “Bollocks.”
Grinning, Michael bites back, laughing at the squeak Gavin makes. “Does the fact that I have two days of mandatory rest with no reason to leave my room make it up to you?”
Gavin raises his eyebrows. “Well. I, er—well, I can certainly think of a few places to start.” He smirks down at Michael. “Might have to volunteer for more away missions if this is the reception I get.”
The look Michael gives him must be exactly as furious as he’d aimed for, because Gavin quails immediately. “Kidding! Kidding. No more away missions. Never again. Haven’t even heard of them. What are we talking about?”
“Damn right,” Michael says, nipping at Gavin’s neck and memorizing the way it makes him squirm. “You stay right here on my ship where you’re safe from now on.”
Gavin snorts. “Your ship? Our ship, you great big toddler.”
“Our ship,” Michael repeats back. He can still hear it humming around them, like the beat of a living heart.