#engineering department

Zee isn’t on duty for several hours yet, having dropped (still half-dressed) into bed after a double shift, and she can almost hear the med staff’s inevitable grumbles of disapproval as she scrambles for the wrinkled uniform shirt discarded on the floor of her miniscule room. She zips up the pants she’d never bothered to take off, shoves her feet into her boots and doesn’t bother to lace them up before bolting to the door--

On the other side, a pale faced Jai Lee has one hand poised to knock. “You heard it, too?” he asks, and Zee yanks him along after her, her mass of wiry curls bouncing as she breaks into a sprint.

Engineering is only a deck down- ensigns have the worst room assignments- and the ship finally shifts into red alert almost the moment they skid into the room, a handful of other red shirts on their heels. Scotty, the folds of his pillow still visible in red lines on his cheek, is already elbow deep in a control panel, lips pressed into a thin line.

“Where do you need us?” Jai asks Givens, their immediate commanding officer, while Zee yanks her hair back into a ponytail with quick, efficient fingers and the ponytail holder perpetually hidden beneath her uniform sleeve.

They open their mouth to respond, in the process of rolling up their own sleeves, when something on the other end of the ship gives a particularly ominous groan and a series of alarms shriek into existence. Everyone not currently with their hands occupied spins to look over the relay board and the damage reports it’s flashing from half a dozen locations on the ship; Scotty lets loose a volley of swears that could curdle milk.

“Singh, Givens!” He barks. “Round up the ensigns an’ get ‘em in the tubes, we need t’ start damage control on the shields, as well ‘s the panels ‘at jus’ overloaded!”

“You heard the man!” Givens bellows, spinning on their heel and motioning sharply; red shirts and grim faces swarm towards them, and Zee bumps her shoulder into Jai’s for luck as the jostling crowd shoves them forward.

“Three of you with me!” Singh calls, turning to jog towards the jeffries tubes. “Three of you with Bailey-” the ensign in question, one of those who hadn’t just transferred onto the ship a week before, raises a swarthy hand- “and the rest follow G!”

The next hour is a blur, and the ones following it are little better--the battle’s completion means damage control simply morphs into actual repairs, and Zee’s wedged into a maintenance shaft, allen wrench between her teeth, when her communicator crackles to life.

“Lieutenant Givens to Ensign Randers, requesting status report.”

Zee spits her wrench out into one palm, grimacing as she twists somewhat awkwardly so she can grab her communicator with her other hand. She’s only slightly breathless when she finally gets it open. “I’m nearly on the last of these blown capacitors, G. Nothing’s been in too bad of shape; the fail safes all kicked in the way they were supposed to. I doubt the labs lost more than a few seconds of data.”

“The science blues’ll be happy to hear it,” her lieutenant says, an audible grin in their voice. “I’ll be sending your buddy Lee your way to help you wrap up, alright? Get those capacitors replaced, make your logs, and then consider yourselves off duty till beta; I know neither of you can be running on more than a few hours of sleep.”

“Who could sleep with that flutter in the engines?” Zee quips, and Givens makes a noise of fervent agreement.

“Here, here. I think I was halfway to the turbolift before I even figured out I was awake. She’s got one hell of a siren song, the Enterprise.”

“A-fucking-men,” Zee agrees, briefly forgetting all sense of decorum; luckily Givens just barks out a sharp laugh.

“A-fucking-men, indeed, Randers. Givens out.”

Zee flicks her communicator shut, and before she returns to work she takes a moment to close her eyes and breathe in the not-silence of a working starship. Whatever that flutter had been, it’s long since been smoothed away by Scotty’s skilled ministrations; the engines have returned to their normal omnipresent hum.

An access panel a few yards down hisses open, and Zee scrambles to return to work as Jai gracelessly tumbles in to join her. “This is our life now,” he grunts at her, flat on his back with one foot still sticking out into the hallway. “Scrambling out of bed in the middle of the night to crawl around in the walls and slap bandaids on minor electrical fires.”

He sounds disgruntled, but when Zee shoots him a bemused glance, there’s a little grin curling around the corners of his lips. “And we wouldn’t have it any other way,” she adds, nudging his shoulder with the toe of one still-loose boot.