Chapter Text
When Cadet James Kirk saved Earth by defeating the Romulan Nero, Starfleet Command found itself in a quandary. The public embraced Kirk as no captain had been since Archer was a young man. He was handsome, well-spoken, dashing, and, given his history for insubordination, surprisingly articulate in interviews. They couldn’t expect his legions of fans to calmly accept his rightful placement as a lieutenant aboard the ship he’d led so successfully. At the same time, there were more qualified officers waiting for commands who would be denied one if they placed their flagship in the hands of a hot-headed cadet, and there were those within the Academy who still wanted him expelled rather than honored for some of his antics while he was a student. The political ramifications were nearly overwhelming. In the end, the wishes of the newly christened Admiral Pike and the mysterious support of Starfleet’s head of human resources, Admiral Akino Matsuri, combined with the ride of public attention at a time when Starfleet desperately needed new recruits to replace the staggering numbers lost at Vulcan, and the inexplicable request of the Vulcan High Council, led to the decision that Kirk should be given command of the Enterprise. It was generally agreed that this would be a “test run,” consisting predominately of missions close to home with relatively easy oversight.
It was only after this decision was made and the crew being selected for the new ship – Kirk immediately requesting everyone who was aboard, including Lt. Commander Scott and Lt. Keenser – that Admiral Akino quietly dropped a bombshell on the proceedings. A number of captains were requesting crew members away from the Enterprise, with the most contested being Commander Spock and, somewhat to the surprise of those outside the medical faculty, Lt. Commander Leonard McCoy. McCoy had become something of a media darling himself, though he didn’t give interviews (the aforementioned medical faculty claimed to have no idea how the media had become interested in McCoy; everyone else at the Academy accepted this bald-faced lie with relatively little argument). Two captains other than Kirk were vying for McCoy: captains with more political pull and experience who traditionally would have gotten what they wanted. In this case, however, tiny Akino waved the requests away with a negligent hand.
“Of course McCoy is going on the Enterprise. He’s married to the captain.”
And so the meeting had erupted into surprised argument. Akino watched it all with sparkling amusement. “You didn’t know?” she asked innocently. “My, my. You should really spend a little more time reading the personnel files. They were married about, oh…thirty minutes before McCoy sneaked Kirk’s ass onto the Enterprise.” She smirked. “Young love, right? Wouldn’t want to screw that up. So, that’s the CMO’s position filled. We’ll need at least two more doctors aboard. McCoy’ll want to have a say, and we’ll need people willing to follow a man who just wrapped up his residency a year ago.”
Married starship captains, while unusual, were not unheard of in the Fleet. Most of them, however, ran stations or small rescue vessels. The big ships – Constitution, Bradbury, Ambassador class vessels that housed hundreds of souls and travelled deep space and into enemy territories – were captained almost exclusively by single men and women. The demands of the job made long-term relationships nearly impossible; these captains were truly married to their ships and crews. Anyone who married a large ship’s captain could expect to have very little of his or her spouse’s time. Those captains who did marry often did so in a serial fashion, leaving a string of divorces behind them.
Since they’d already offered Kirk the ship, the brass couldn’t back out. TheEnterprise’s young captain was well on his way to breaking yet another Fleet tradition.
~~~
A starship is a small place, even when it’s still floating in drydock undergoing extensive repairs. As with all conditions which crown humans together, human drama (also known as “unmitigated gossip”) quickly becomes a backbone of interaction among the crew. Officially, of course, such behavior is frowned upon; although the starship becomes home, it is also a 24-hour place of work. Therefore, official expectations demand that everyone stay out of everyone else’s business.
However, unofficially, there is no such thing as privacy aboard even the most sprawling and impressive of space-going vessels.
The youngest assembled crew in history, headed by a media darling who wanted to be hands-on throughout the entire ship, proved to be even nosier than seasoned crews. The information that the captain had been a truly-newlywed throughout that entire first mission spread like wildfire. That he was married to the doctor, whom everyone on board was simultaneously a little in love with and a little terrified by, only made their relationship more interesting.
As the crew got to know them, Kirk and McCoy were often asked how they “got together.” This seemingly simple question was simple if you asked the doctor, whose stock answer was, “It’s not as exciting as you think, and I’d just put you to sleep if I told you,” after which he would usually bug the asker about vaccine boosters or semi-annual physicals (senior staff and security officers on landing party rotations were put under the good doctor’s tricorder more often than other crew members). The question did become complicated, however, when directed at the ship’s captain. This was because no two people ever received the same answer, and each was more outlandish than the last.
~~~
Scotty asked first.
He and Kirk had really hit it off while stowing away on board ship with the help of a time travelling Vulcan. While Scotty fully accepted Jim as his captain – Scotty certainly didn’t want the job – off-duty they were friends. It took six months to prepare his bonny lass to head out with her new crew, and Jim had spent almost as much time aboard, poking around, as Scotty did. You had to appreciate a captain like that.
They also both liked to drink, though really, the stories of their drunken escapades were (largely) exaggerated. They were grown men with responsible jobs, after all, and Scotty never engineered under the influence.
So, when Scotty learned that he’d somehow been assigned the first officer’s quarters, then connected the dots to find this was because the as-yet-undetermined first officer would receive the captain’s quarters while the captain was bunking down with the CMO, he felt plenty comfortable enough to ask how Jim had come by such an interesting spouse. (Scotty, of course, turned down the first officer’s quarters because he wanted to be closer to engineering, where he belonged. This led to yet more shuffling, with Lt. Sulu as the lucky bastard in the first officer’s quarters, which cleared up an extra set of lieutenant’s quarters that eventually went to a pair of married enlisted engineers who otherwise would’ve been sharing a studio one step up from a closet. This action endeared Jim even more to his new chief engineer. Honestly, Scotty’s only disappointment in the lad was that Jim had come up through the piloting and navigation program, when clearly engineering was vastly superior. But no man is perfect.)
“It’s a weird story, and you’ve gotta have some background,” Jim answered from his position upside-down in a Jefferies Tube. His face was turning a bit pink, but he didn’t seem to mind it. “I was in a serious car accident a few years before I came to the Academy.”
“That why you started so late, then?” Scotty asked as he passed up a spanner, then wiggled in the tube right-side up. There was barely room to breathe.
He could hear Jim’s grin. “Not as late as Bones, but he had to do that whole double-doctorate thing first. No. See, I was in this bad car accident, and I had brain damage. It totally screwed up my short-term memory.” There was a faint klunk. “Did that on purpose, Scotty, no worries. There’ll be another.” Klunk.
Scotty fought down a shudder. He hated klunks on board his ship.
“Every morning I woke up and thought it was the day after the accident – or so I’ve been told, I don’t remember any of this, of course.” Jim’s voice bounced cheerfully off the metal walls. “I always went to this café downtown for breakfast, and one day this hot guy decides to hit on me. Apparently, we hit it off, talked for a few hours, and then parted ways with plans to meet the next day for breakfast. Except, of course, that the next day I had no idea who this idiot was and totally shot him down as a stalker when he came over to talk to me.”
Scotty was so mesmerized by the story that his hands actually stopped moving for a moment. “So that was-?”
“The owner of the café was like my aunt – my Mom’s best friend, not REALLY my aunt – so she set this guy straight,” Jim continued blithely. “Only he decided to take it as a challenge instead of a turn-off. So every morning, right? He goes to the café and he tries to strike up a conversation. Some days it worked, and some days it didn’t. My brother about had kittens when he heard about it, but then he realized that I had fun on the days I ran into him, so Sam let it slide. Meanwhile, my ‘beau,’” Jim snorted at the word, “started coming up with more and more intricate plans to make sure I’d fall for him every day. He even asked me to marry him once…though I forgot about it the next day. The whole time I was keeping this diary, though, and I’d read it every morning.”
“….Ye still have that?”
“Sure. Shame to lose it. I mean, sure, I was cured later through this whole new neuro-grafting technique, but that diary’s the only link I have to those days. It went on for about seventeen months before they decided to use me as a guinea pig for brain surgery.”
Scotty was not a romantic man at heart, and he could spot blarney from twenty paces…but Jim’s matter-of-fact delivery sucked him in enough that he couldn’t call the captain on it. “And so…that guy from the café was the doctor?”
“Bones? Hell, no! Bones isn’t some creeper who hits on people with traumatic brain injuries! Bones has ethics.” Jim squirmed past Scotty and executed a sort of backflip to land feet-first on the floor below the tube. He grinned up at Scotty, flushed from hanging upside down for so long. “Nah. Bones was the brilliant intern who fixed my brain and then called the police on that guy.”