#okay that 'woman on the bridge' quote can uhhhh choke so i'm declaring its death here and now

[competenceknowsnobounds]

When Chris was little and scared of the dark, his mother had taken his grandmother’s sewing form and placed it by the window. That way, she had explained, nightmares and monsters couldn’t get in because someone was always keeping watch. And since he was young and impressionable, it worked too.

These days, there’s another person in his room, in his bed really, that looks out the window and keeps the nightmares away.

Truth be told, their transition from colleagues to friends to bedmates wasn’t seamless at all. And it was his fault- he enjoyed messing with her. A talent he’d had since childhood, he kind of enjoyed finding a person’s push points. He couldn’t possibly get used to a woman on the bridge, he’d declared, and enjoyed watching her fume. She was the kind of person who avoided conflict, but was smart enough to know when to get out.

Exactly a week after that particular comment, he heard through the grapevine that she’d applied for a transfer back to her former posting, and Chris realized he should probably up his game.

Because he needed her! Chris wasn’t that dumb, he’d be the first to admit that he was a pretty boy with a penchant for action. Charisma had gotten him on the captain’s chair of the Enterprise, and without it he would be better suited for a small wartime craft on patrol. The Enterprise was a vessel of many talents, science among them, and Chris didn’t function like that. He needed someone who did.

Enter One. 

Chris the ruthless charmer had been just a tad busy with paperwork when the helmswoman, his new second officer, had introduced herself. 

And yes, he asked her name. And yes, he immediately forgot it.

When they didn’t interact so much, a “Commander” or “Helmsman” would suffice. And as a day became a week and a month, Chris became further embarrassed to ask her name. The personnel file was no help either- a long Illyrian name (more like a list of intellectual achievements) that sounded nothing like the name Chris vaguely remembered her telling him.

A month in, the first officer quits. He and Chris were both “big picture” people, which just wasn’t working out. Chris gave him a strong recommendation and set about picking a new first officer, and who better than the best micromanager he knew?

Lieutenant Commander Helmsman suddenly needed a new name, and Chris found one. A part of her file mentioned the name “Number One” for her leading intellect among their people, and since it matched with a nickname for first officers, Chris decided to put it to use.

Thusly, Lieutenant Commander Helmsman was Commander Number One after just a month onboard. Anyone with more modesty would probably suffer from a strong case of imposter syndrome, but as far as Chris could tell, One just threw herself at work and found that to be sufficient.

One laid it on the line pretty fast. At their first meeting as captain and first officer, she declared that she had no interest in human interaction or working the conn more than Chris saw fit. She would make the ship run in the nitty-gritty (no, she did not use that word, such colloquialisms were beneath her) and Chris could do the talking and the interacting. Chris agreed.

Of course, since he couldn’t possibly shut his mouth and even be polite to his new first officer, he set about messing with her. And so he screwed up, almost lost her, and almost had to deal with a call from Admiral Marcus about going through two first officers in as many weeks.

So he called One into his office, apologized, and that was that. It’s not like there was much of a cold shoulder for her to give him anyways, they saw each other about twice a day. Once in their morning briefing, and Chris factored in one random encounter per day, usually in passing, or occasionally doing repair work on a bit of machinery because an engineer had missed something.

It did occur to him that perhaps they could be friends. Yes, friends, not “friends” as in “can’t stand each other” or “friends” as in “fucking.”

“Kid, we don’t even bother trying to reprimand all the captains that sleep with their first officers,” Marcus told him offhand once. “God, off the top of my head I can list a bunch- Kos and Madeline, Pr’ait and Thompson, ah- what’s-his-face and Hewell, the like. It’s a whole thing.”

The best way to become friends, he decided, was to become more familiar. When his open invitation to eat lunch together went ignored, Chris took a more proactive approach and made sure to intercept her while she was taking her food back to her office to eat. Alone. One wasn’t very sociable.

So when they were together of her own volition, he tried to be friendlier. Started joking with her, switching up her name, trying to endear himself to her.

“Hey, Uno, where are we at on those reports?”

“What do you think, Ein?”

“Qu’est-ce que tu penses, Premier?”

(Okay, the french was a bit much, but Chris swore it nearly, almost made her smile.)

As soon as Chris got her to smile, he knew he wanted to see it again.

He started to seek her out more actively- instead of dueling day-night shifts, she joined him for half a shift on the bridge, and the other half was spent however she pleased, usually in the form of more lurking.

They worked well together, even bonding occasionally. Chris’ lack of scientific expertise was obvious, so when an admiral visited to check up on their experiments, One skipped the middleman and fed him lines through an earpiece. Chris found it drop-dead hilarious. One gave him a Chem 101 textbook for his birthday, which Chris took to mean that she thought it was funny too.

As time went on, One opened up to him. The woman who used nearly as few contractions as Spock started to fade away, and in her place came an officer of greater intellect, but snark and humor too. Was it really just that One was... shy?

As she explained it, standing in an uncomfortable-looking parade rest while they were talking one day and it came up, the Talosians were ill-equipped to deal with the full spectrum of human emotion, and had presumably misconstrued her desire to connect with him as romantic desire.

“I suppose that my behavior didn’t help your wanting to come out of your shell,” he had replied.

“That is correct.”

“Made all the more illogical to them by me being a jerk.”

“‘Illogical’ is Spock’s department, not mine,” she said. “But yes. Good day, Captain.”

Without waiting for a dismissal (and she probably wouldn’t have gotten it, he wanted her to stay and chat), she left and went back to her lurking.

It didn’t shock him, really, that stoic One wouldn’t be into him like that. Or that she simply wanted him to be less of a jerk. And even having apologized already, Chris figured he could do better.

The next day, he preempted her departure for their morning meeting by showing up at her room five minutes early with a bag of breakfast foods in tow.

“I haven’t eaten yet, and I feel like we’re at the point in our friendship where we can eat together without it being an awkward mess. Plus, I brought a lot for you since I don’t know what you like.”

She neither objected to the ‘friends’ bit, nor the change of venue, only hesitantly stepping aside to let him in. He’d never seen One’s quarters before. She’d declined the move down the hall into the first officer’s quarters, claiming that they were exactly the same except that the windows in her room were on the left, and the other quarters had them on the right. She had strongly objected, and Chris had the plaque moved.

But now, being in the room itself, Chris could see why One didn’t want to move. It was- well, it wasn’t a hot mess. Everything was in perfect order. It was that the room was full. It seemed that One had spent her nearly four years on the ship making her quarters ideally suited to her needs, from acoustic paneling on the walls and non-regulation light filters, to nearly every diplomatic gift that Chris didn’t want, arranged in color order on a shelf. The crown jewel on the center table was a small food synthesizer unit, that seemed to nearly be on the verge of buckling with the amount of wires on top of it.

“It’s a prototype updated food synthesizer.” She stood back and let him look around her room.

“Do you really hate socializing in the cafeteria that much?” He circled the table, examining One’s creation. It had a touchscreen menu instead of a chip insert like the Enterprise’s normal ones. 

“No,” she seemed less defensive and more amused by his accusation. “This one allows you to adjust the portions and composition of its offerings.”

“...So it becomes more accessible for people with dietary restrictions,” He turned back around to face her. “That’s very resourceful, Number One. I imagine the final product will be well-received by many in Starfleet.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, sir, but you really need to let me finish my explanation,” One said. “I’m afraid my motivations are a little less altruistic- all of the burrito options have salsa. I hate salsa.”

After their first meeting, the prototype synthesizer was relegated to a side desk so that they could actually eat on the table, and a few days of weird looks from the swing shift officers in the cafeteria prompted him to bite the bullet and become a test subject for One’s “replicator.” Chris ate nearly every breakfast food under the sun during those first few months of meetings, with mixed results. Most of the human food was delicious, nearly comparable to real food, especially the strawberry pancakes. Others, like the Illyrian apple dumplings that One showed him, similar to the ones her brother made, prompted an off-the-record visit from Boyce to treat numbness in the left leg. A warning about which foods were poisonous was added soon after that.

One simply ate her long-sought burrito sans salsa and took notes. Lots of notes. Not just on what foods sent Chris running to the wastebin, but on which alterations worked and which ones didn’t. How much caffeine could you condense into a shot of espresso before it altered the taste? What temperature should the scrambled eggs be? What colors make the cantaloupe taste best?

Chris learned that One was a born engineer. When Engineering had gotten too cramped and claustrophobic, she’d finangeled her way onto the bridge and became the helmsman. After that, it was a clean jump to first officer, even though she admitted to liking the helm. Chris made sure to give her a shift after she told him that.

As their morning meetings went on, he decided he liked her quarters as a workroom better. Hers had an actual window view, the food was objectively better, and the lights and sound were more calming. The company wasn’t too bad either, though Chris justified it as having someone who actually understood all the scientific paperwork that passed through his desk. One was a paperwork enthusiast by her own admission, so he let her handle that and he would sign off on whatever she put in front of him.

He started joining her after their now-joint shift, too. 

“Captain,” she said one day as he worked on the cramped desk with the replicator, patting the space next to her on the couch, “You can sit down. Don’t be a stranger.”

Even in such a private space, he felt uncomfortable being in such close proximity to One. It wasn’t that there was some sort of mythic ‘tension’ between them, it was nearly the exact opposite. Their relationship had been so purely platonic that there wasn’t anything else going on, even if he had solidly been giving that impression by disappearing into her room at odd hours each day. He was irrationally afraid that someone would bust in and see them... sitting a meter apart, doing work? Yeah, irrational.

“Don’t stress it, sir,” she added, as if sensing his discomfort. “After all, you made it perfectly clear that you don’t see me as a woman.”

He choked on air for a few seconds and eventually formulated something that could possibly be thought of as a ‘defense.’

“I didn’t- It’s not that I don’t see you as ‘female,’ it’s that I don’t see you as a purely sexual ob-”

He stopped when he noticed her laughter.

“You have blue nails,” he said, as if to explain her femininity.

One laughed so hard that she fell off the couch, while Chris stood there dumbly, realizing he’d been set up.

“I’ll try not to tell your yeoman that you said that,” she assured him between fits of laughter.

He wanted to snap at her, pull rank and shut up his embarrassment, but he realized that he couldn’t. If he became defensive, he would lose just a little bit of their friendship, and that simply couldn’t happen.

Thankfully he would have been saved from causing any real changes to the nature of their relationship by the shift change chime, which usually meant that they would part ways and go to sleep, but Chris felt the need to clear the air.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and One stood back up.

“No stress,” she replied. “It’s rude of me to bring up stuff you said years ago, since you’ve been so much better since then.”

One had said so plainly that she didn’t actually have romantic feelings for him, and that reminder made it a little more difficult when he wondered what it would be like to stay when the shift bell rang. To curl up next to her, to see her view out the window every night.

Somehow, Chris didn’t realize how deep he was ‘till he was drowning.

Somehow, in the next two months, they became more... tactile?

A mission gone terribly wrong meant that when he turned up after they got back, he found her crying on the couch, which was something that even a salsa-less burrito couldn’t fix. He’d sat down next to her, and they’d stayed there for the next hour as she’d sobbed her eyes out.

Even when she wasn’t crying, that meter between them on the couch shortened to fifty centimeters, then twenty, and then they found themselves next to each other on the middle of the couch. Chris didn’t know why he was measuring, but the fact that he watched it happen (by both of them) and said nothing seemed very telling.

That she didn’t either seemed telling too.

They ran the gamut of shitty missions during those few months. Sometimes it was his turn to be the sobbing wreck, while she sat next to him and tried to tempt him with the replicator’s latest recipe- chocolate bread pudding. It was delicious, even slightly seasoned with tears.

In spite of their new-found contact (or perhaps because of it), he found himself thinking about her more and more. Not just in the biblical sense, but he was seeking out her company more and more, the comfort of someone familiar, even touch sometimes.

On one occasion, he’s woken up by the chime of his comm unit, a faint “One to --ce.” 

He answered with drowsiness, but not irritation- it’s pleasant to hear her voice, almost thinking it was part of his dream.

“Were you calling for Doctor Boyce, One?” He was wide awake at the realization that she sounded ill.

“Yeah- but you’ll work too.”

“Work for what?”

“Can you come to my quarters?”

So, naturally, he got out of bed at a normal pace, put on something more decent, and walked calmly over to her quarters.

Absolutely the fuck not. This is Christopher Goddamn Pike we’re talking about, and he busts out the door and runs down the hall shirtless, to where his first officer may or may not be in distress. Or need furniture moved, it’s not yet entirely certain.

She was hardly visible, curled up in fetal position on the bed, and he was unused to the lack of light without those pretty yellow ones on.

“Number One?” He asked softly, as if they hadn’t had a conversation just a minute ago. “Is something wrong?”

She let out a soft moan in response, and he crept over to her bed. It was the middle of the night, and he’d never had great impulse control around her anyways, and so he slowly got onto the mattress and touched her softly. Soft was the theme there, with the mattress that was far and away too soft to be regulation, and the touch of her pyjamas to his. He could’ve fallen asleep right then and there, and happier than he’d ever been.

But her blue-nailed hand closed around his wrist, and “soft” was no longer the name of the game.

“Chris,” she said calmly, and he realized that it was the first time she’d called him that, “If you don’t get that hypospray from my desk, I’ll rip you to shreds and use you to fuel the replicator.”

Having never particularly been one to say no to a strong lady, he got up and retrieved it for her. Once it was injected and she was starting to uncurl, he lay down beside her and started to drift off.

The next morning, he woke up with her lying partway on top of him (it might be soft, but her bed isn’t very spacious), and her staring at him.

“Good morning,” he said with no particular affliction, as if waking up in your XO’s bed was something that happened all the time. “Feeling better?”

“Well enough, thank you,” she replied. Some little, possibly desperate part of Chris jumped on the fact that she didn’t use ‘sir,’ but that was mostly just a good situational choice on her part. “I get really bad cramps sometimes, and I couldn’t get up to get the hypo myself.”

“I’m glad,” he pushed himself up, looking at the now-normally-lit room, that somehow felt different after spending half a night in its occupant’s bed. “I should probably get going.”

“You have about three minutes before this hallway usually gets busy,” she offered. “I’d hurry.”

As he moved to stand, she backed up as well. To an outside observer, it would seem as if she was mirroring his movements, but in reality he was mirroring her. They moved together until they got to the door, and suddenly they were closer together. Much closer. He leaned down to kiss her, and-

Someone was coming. She nearly pushed him out the door, with a single word of advice.

“Run.”

He still doesn’t know her name.

The thought occurs to him the first time they tumble into bed together for real, that he has no idea what to call her. But since he wants this- their relationship- to last, he tries to put at least a little emotion into it, even if she’s doing what she calls “all the heavy lifting ‘round here.”

“I adore you,” he tells her, and she smiles. “You are the light of my world. A city that is set on a hill shall never be hid-” 

“Don’t quote the Bible right now,” she insists. “Or really any time. I’m Zoroastrian.” 

“I thought that was an Abrahamic religion.”

“You would be wrong.”

“Are you really Zoroastrian?”

“No.”

“How’d you know, then?”

“Met one, once. Guy ran away from law school to find Jesus, or some shit. Found another monotheistic religion instead.”

“Huh,” is all he has to say. “Well, you’re pretty. And smart. That’s what I was getting at.”

“You have a way with words, Captain Pike,” she says.

“Now it’s my turn to object,” he replies. “I think you know you can call me ‘Chris.’”

“Only when you stop calling me ‘One.’”

“False equivalence, much?”

“I have a name that’s not just a title, you know.”

“Would you prefer ‘une’? ‘m? Yksi? Odyn?” He’s kissing up and down her throat now in a rather desperate attempt to distract her. She turns to face him, and if he wasn’t so blissed-out right now he’d be incredibly nervous.

“Chris...”

“Beautiful? Intelligente? Pragtige? Schlau? Bonica? Aande?”

“Chris, is this all some bold coverup for the fact that you don’t know my name?”

“...No?”