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There were four hundred and twenty crew members on the USS Enterprise at the start of the ship’s five year exploration mission. As one could expect, a small-town mentality descended quickly over the gracefully floating metal city. There were hardly any unfamiliar faces, only a small number of unfamiliar names, and any one person could be connected to any other person in three degrees of separation or less: Lieutenant Garza played poker with Yeoman Rand gave the Captain back massages. Warrik from Engineering was married to the head of the botany department who treated Lieutenant Sulu like a precocious child. It was a place where few crew members bothered to lock their quarters, it was just easier to call ‘come in!’ to whomever was visiting their closet-like rooms if one wasn’t meeting in one of the larger recreation halls or observation decks.
The sort of place where people pick up the rope to help one another, because that’s just what you did when you were stuck among the same four hundred and twenty people for longer than it took to pass into and then back out of cabin fever.
And a good thing, it was, too, given that a large ship needs more than scientists and pilots and captains to survive.
Jim hadn’t known why there was an ‘other skills’ section on the application to Star Fleet, but he really should have guessed. He’d not wanted to brag, and ended up where most others with the same thought got assigned.
Janitorial.
And currently, the Captain’s janitorial rounds had him cleaning out the men’s restroom on deck twenty, and the perpetually stopped-up toilet in the far back corner. Yuck.
Sulu had been lucky, he’d listed ‘botany’. Sure, it was more than obvious, with his secondary degree in horticulture, and his obsessive trips to the botany lab to help out and smell at the exotic flowers in general, but the man was also head of the parks department that looked after all the vivarium-like recreation centers on the Enterprise. The man grew hedge mazes and tended flower beds in his secondary-duty time! That was just about a thousand times better than wiping up dust and snot and vomit off the floor of the transporter room. Yuck.
Uhura was the only hairdresser they had that specialized in the tightly-crimped locks of the African-descended. She had been nearly at loath to admit it, she was nothing if not a career woman, and the idea of appearing as a bubble-headed hair stylist turned her stomach…but she knew better than to trust anyone else with the job. Her people were vain, of that, she admitted to. She spent her secondary-duty days grumping nearly as badly as McCoy, while listening to every drop of fresh-off-the-grapevine gossip that passed through. Currently, she was teaching Bailey, a bottle blond from the engineering department, her end of the trade, while Bailey, another hair dresser, was teaching Uhura the art of hair coloring. It balanced out.
So much better than grease duty in Engineering. Yuck.
Spock spent his secondary duty time teaching a goddamn yoga class. Jim heard that he taught it in a tight v-neck tee shirt and loose martial arts pants –it was apparently how the crew found out that the half Vulcan was, in fact, quite hairy chested. Jim hadn’t even gotten to go. The supposedly legendary-just-not-yet pair had secondary duty shifts that overlapped, and anytime Jim might have had the chance to slip in and watch Spock bending over into downward dog (a particularly stunning position, according to Nurse Chapel, and Jim believed her,) he was called away to some god-awful task. Like scooping out the gunk from the air filters, or unclogging the enormous septic tanks down in the ship’s bowels that required the use of, no lie, a goddamn scuba suit. Yuck.
Scotty had been drafted onto the Enterprise in a rather unconventional manner but, being old hat at the workings of a ship in a way that a good majority of the Enterprises’ senior staff wasn’t, attached himself none-too-lightly to Cupcake and their, now shared, cook’s duty. On the rare occasion that the Enterprise found edibles or managed to harvest its own under Sulu’s careful guidance, DiGiotto, the head of security and more commonly known as Cupcake, and Scotty would take it upon themselves to make up whatever they liked and serve it to the crew. Often they worked with no plan, but the results were never really bad, and it gave Jim an excuse to throw every off-duty crew member into a park deck for a picnic whose weather would never turn bad, and whose temperature would never be too cold for ice cream, or too hot for hot tea.
Jim viciously plunged the toilet that was refusing to cooperate with him. Yuck!
Bones and Chekov, though, were a level apart.
Pavel was, of course, under the age of majority, and the law was being bent just to allow him on board before he turned twenty one. Extra duties were forbidden from him until then, so he’d have a grand total of six months doing whatever duty he chose. Chose, goddamn it, before the ship landed on Earth again. Jim could seethe at him for a good half-hour if it weren’t for Bones.
Bones was CMO. His regular-duty shifts were the most hellish of any department. Bar none. Life and death were held in his latex-gloved hands, the care of the physical well-being of the whole of four hundred and twenty souls, plus any others they deemed necessary of treatment, such as the colonists on YEI-03-2, a life-supporting moon nearly a thousand light years away from earth. McCoy had nearly single-handedly developed and distributed a cure and vaccine for a plague that had nearly halved their population. He’d become a hero on a planet he might never visit again, and spent nearly a week sick himself after going nearly four days on coffee, adrenaline shots, and two hours of deeply disturbed dreaming.
His shifts were never any shorter than thirty six hours, because he never let them, and more often than not, could exceed forty eight, simply due to the incredible stupidity of a ship full of young people, who all believed to some degree or the other that they were, in some way, invincible.
McCoy had no secondary duties. None of the full time doctors did, nor the nurses unless they chose otherwise. Their title as ‘emergency’ services disallowed it, as they could be called away at a moment’s notice. Jim would never refute it, either. He wouldn’t know how to survive for three days on only six hours of actual sleep.
But that didn’t mean that Jim wasn’t jealous. And he was.
Desperately.
The toilet came unclogged with a sucking SHLOOP! And Jim crowed his success, making quick work of sanitizing the bowl and hightailing it out of the restroom. He could clean the gossip-graffiti off the stall doors some other time. Yuck.
Six weeks later, Jim was wondering where to sign up for Pavel’s recently ‘discovered’ secondary-duty department. It really was a wonder that no one had thought of it, before, namely Jim.
McCoy had been beyond furious, of course, told the ensign that his med bay was a safe place, and that no one could get to him without the doctor’s permission, and that the other doctors and him really needed to know who had been touching Pavel inappropriately.
Quite red in the face himself, though this didn’t seem to be from embarrassment, Chekov had told the worried doctors none too gently that he was a teenager, not a saint, who’d been legal for sex since he was sixteen in his homeland of Russia, and that if he wanted to covertly advertise his services to others on board it really wasn’t any of their goddamn business, just fetch him the correct hypo, please. Gonorrhea wasn’t too terrible, and he’d make sure everyone came down for an STD panel in the future.
Uh…yes, please?
Though Jim seemed to be the only one of this mindset. At least, the only one to openly admit to it.
Thus, Jim came to the conclusion that ship prostitute was just about the top of the heap in regards to best secondary duty, it beat the pants (literally!) off of Janitorial duty. So very much not Yuck!