#zee randers

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Fluff #7 Zee & Jai (platonic)

(Featuring Zee Randers and Jai Lee, two smart talking, brilliant, troublemakers ensigns in Engineering. Seen throughout various fics in In the Bowels of the Ship, a series of short Engineering-centric fic)

"You're an idiot, Randers."

Zee grimaced, her movements tender and careful as she eased herself out from under the coupling that had collapsed moments earlier. She'd gotten lucky, the metal piping buckling upwards right above where she'd been standing and only slamming her on the way down rather than crushing her beneath it. "But you love me anyway, Lee," she panted, smoky air filling her lungs as Jai picked his way through the debris towards her, his usually cheerful face screwed up with concern.

"Remains to be--"

KZZZZZZZAT.

An electrical charge arced between two pieces of sparking wiring, and Jai froze, his face pale.

Zee licked her lips, taking stock of the situation. The red alert blared above them, the lights strobing and pulsing through the smoke, but the accompanying screech seemed to have been disabled. Her palms were scraped and bloody, and her bruised-- broken?-- leg throbbed in time with her racing heartbeat. Whatever had happened to her knee, it now felt weak and shaky, and she was pretty sure it wouldn't hold her weight. Her already-voluminous curls were sticking nearly straight out away from her head with the crackle of electricty in the air, and she probably had a concussion. Her laser wrench was crushed into a zillion pieces beneath the coupling that had sent her sprawling. Communications had been useless for nearly an hour, which meant something on the bridge was preventing Lieutenant Uhura from reparing them. It also meant that they had no way of communicating with anyone from Engineering-- or Security, or Medbay-- to call in reinforcements.

And there was a live wire between herself and Jai.

"Okay," she said, voice tight. "Okay, um, maybe if I--"

Jai dragged the back of his wrist across his face, smearing away grease and sweat and the residue of smoke, and he shook his head. His hair was always a little messy, usually sticking up with some kind of gel, but now it fell limp and sweaty and sticky across his forehead. "You need to stay where you are," he told her, firmly. "And I need to..." he turned slowly on his heel, his eyes scanning the curved chrome walls of the hallway.

"You need to shut down power on this hall so you can get to me." Zee fumbled to get the ash-smudged red of her shirt off and over her wild hair, leaving her in the black tanktop underneath. She had basic first aid training, courtesy Starfleet Academy, but who fucking knew what to do with a potentially broken knee? Splint it?

"I know." Jai picked his way back to where he'd started-- where he had tried and failed to grab the back of her shirt to keep her from flinging herself through the unstable hallway to reach the power relay that was about to blow and take the weapons systems down with it-- and started tearing into the broken access panel with the red-hot knifeblade of a laser multitool. "And I need to do it without attracting the attention of any enemy combatants, and without blowing your patch on the relay, which means I can't just reroute the juice through the nearest junction, which means--"

Zee found two of the straightest, least damaged (and therefore least full of sharp edges) pieces of debris she could and lined them up next tp her knee with shaking hands. "Scotty's gonna kill us when he finds out what you're about to do."

Jai grunted. "If we live long enough for Scotty to be the one to kill us, I'm calling that a fucking success."

"And you're usually the optimist," Zee muttered, as she attempted to tear her shirt into strips with her bare hands. Unfortunately, even already torn, it was harder than those fashion design shows made it look, and she gave up and scanned the ground around her for something sharp.

KZZZZZZZAT.

They both jumped as the wires jumped a second time, and Zee's vision nearly went white with the pain from her jostled knee. She gasped for breath, curling in on herself. Fuck, that hurt. Fuck, fuck, fuck--

"--ee? Zee?! Listen to me, Ensign Randers! You've gotta keep it together, bitch!" Jai's frantic goice cut through the white, and Zee blinked away tears as she forced herself to uncurl.

"Who are you calling a bitch, bitch?" she ground out.

Jai's sigh of relief was lost beneath the hiss and creak and spark of the damaged ship, but she could see the rise and fall of his shoulders as he yanked wiring free of the walls of the ship with his bare hands. The elegant solutions would take too long and require tools that he just didn't have; Jai was going for brute goddamn force.

Elegance was overrated anyway.

Zee clenched her teeth and wrapped the bottom edge of her tank top around her hand, protecting her palm as she grasped a sharp piece of metal and quickly tore her shirt into strips. "Almost done?" she asked Jai, panting. She tossed the metal aside and took a deep breath to prepare herself to move her leg so she could get the strips underneath it.

"Almost done," he confirmed, voice muffled like he had his multitool clenched between his teeth.

She didn't have to move her knee much to get the fabric underneath it, but her vision went white again anyway. Zee didn't stop to let it pass this time, just let the tears fall and operated on proprioreception as she slid the torn up shirt through the gap between carpet and pant leg. "Fuck," she gasped.

"Hold it together, ZZ Top," Jai ordered.

Zee bared her teeth in a snarl. "You try splinting your own damn broken knee and then come talk to me about 'keeping it together', jackass." The first knot she tied, six inches above her knee, wasn't bad. Neither was the second, six inches below it. The third hurt. So did the fourth, and the fifth, and by the time she'd tied that many she was panting and crying harder and couldn't bring herself to tie another, so it was just going to have to be good enough. "If you aren't fucking done in the next sixty seconds, Jai, I swear to--"

KZZZZZZZAT.

It wasn't possible to murder an inanimate object, but by god, she was going to try.

"God." Jai grimaced, looking back over his shoulder at her. "You're grumpy when you're performing field medicine on yourself while in massive, debilitating pain." He yanked a few more wires out of the walls, a frownline carved between his eyebrows as he carefully peeled away an inch or so of two of their duraplastic sheaths, and then he carefully isolated those two wires from the rest, avoiding touching the stripped metal with his bare hands. "Alright--" he looked over at her, a wire held in each hand. "This is probably gonna hurt, Zee."

"Yeah." She folded over one of the remaining strips of her shirt and bit down on it, breathing in deep. And then-- on her shaky thumbs up-- Jai twisted the wires together.

A starship was a closed system; energy couldn't just be turned off. It had to be rerouted. Usually, that was a fairly straightforward process that resulted in a surge if energy that all parallel systems were designed to absorb and diffuse as far as possible-- but in avoiding the power relay and its jerry rigged patching, which would surely have failed under that surge of energy, Jai had elected to overwhelm a system that wasn't parallel. A system that really, really shouldn't ever be fucked with.

The force of the sudden increase of gravity yanking at what was certainly now a broken knee nearly made Zee pass out.

She was only dimly aware as Jai-- moving slowly and awkwardly beneath the press of a gravitational field exceeding even Vulcan's-- grabbed her under the armpits and hauled her to her feet, cursing and panting as his stupid skinny self propped up 200 pounds of muscle.

"You've gotta help me, Randers," he begged. "We've just gotta get back past the live wires and then we can reset the grav, but you're too goddamn buff--"

"Maybe next time you'll actually come to the gym with me when I ask," Zee muttered. She forced her good knee straight and-- leaning heavily on Jai's thin shoulders-- she took a staggering step forward.

"Grumpy, grumpy," he panted, hooking her arm more firmly over his shoulders and kicking sebris out of her way as best he could so she could focus on maintaining forward momentum.

An explosion rocked the ship from somewhere deep in Engineering, but Zee honestly did not have the energy to worry about anyone but herself and Jai at that moment. Either Scotty had it under control, or Lieutenants Givens and Singh did, or they were all fucked. No point worrying about it.

"Good enough," Jai panted, helping her to trade his support for the wall's, and then he rushed as quickly as he could over to the access panel he'd desecrated earlier.

Zee took a barely-controlled slide down the wall to sit against it, splinted knee straight out in front of her and her other knee tugged into her chest, her eyes closed tight. For a moment, the smoke of the air tasted deliriously of bonfire rather than ozone and burnt plastic, and she was slammed with the memory of hugging her knee to her chest, just like this, leaned up against her brother's knee as the fire crackled in front of them and their father told some stupid story about their baby sister the dragon slayer and her trusty steed, their geriatric labrador retriever. It had been cold in the mountains that time of year, the Blue Ridge stretching and rolling across the horizon, ancient and beautiful.

She could claim she'd never done stupid shit like this back home, but it would totally be a lie.

With a yelp, Jai undid his dirty deed, and suddenly Zee could breathe again as the weight lifted off of her chest. He sprinted over to her, grabbing her under the arms and sliding her quickly on her ass across the floor, further away from the live wires, just in time for--

KZZZZZZZAT.

"Come on, grumpy," he panted, and this time she was able to help him get herself back on her feet. "Let's go dodge some hostiles and find our way to Sickbay, huh?"

"Thank you," Zee mumbled, as she shuffled along at his side, just barely putting weight on her splinted leg and mostly using him as a human crutch. "Jai, I--"

"Hey, you probably saved the ship, patching that relay to keep the weapons systems online. Least I could do was save you."

Zee snorted. "Nothing to do with being my best friend or anything," she agreed.

"Obviously not," he retorted archly, as they found their way into a less smoky hallway of the ship. His voice dropped to a whisper automatically, as they left the sound of frying circuits behind them. "What am I, some over-emotional bitch or something?"

"Yes."

He burst into laughter and then quickly-- guiltily-- slapped a hand over his mouth as he shot her glare. "I hate you," he mouthed.

"I hate you more," she mouthed back.

(I'm taking prompts!)

#a tramp stamp original #zee randers #jai lee #I wrote this #which was my actualy fic tag apparently #haha was this supposed to be fluff? lmaooooo #zee and jai are mlm/wlw solidarity at its finest

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i wanna see you try and put 9, 19, and 56 together. maybe something with min sung (the botanist)?

9: Cabbage, 19: Elegant, 56: Ninja

Min Sung (the botanist, not the one in the security division) had been twenty-one, sporting an unfortunate haircut, and midway through a PhD before she even considered Starfleet as a possible career path.

It was embarrassing in retrospect; research had always been her passion, and there was nowhere on Earth even vaguely comparable to Starfleet in terms of research opportunities. How had it possibly taken her so long for the thought to even cross her mind?

Tunnel vision.

Min had always been prone to it; a hyperfocus on her current project at the expense of pursuing the next opportunity. She remembered sitting in her advisor’s office, talking casually but lengthily about her career goals, and Dr. Achebe had given her a strange, bemused sort of look as he asked, “Have you applied to the Academy yet?” like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

She’d been floored. She hadn’t caught her breath for a week.

For the last several days, she’d felt a similar epiphany lurking at the edges of her awareness. It was like every star hanging in the void outside of the viewscreen in her quarters was twinkling mockingly at her, in possession of some secret that she wasn’t allowed to know. It was infuriating.

She was the premiere botanist on Starfleet’s flagship, for fuck’s sake; there wasn’t much further for her career to go at this stage of the game--and more than that she was happy. Min had friends (ones outside of just the botany team, even, no matter how she counts Sulu), she participated in the occasional recreational activity (or shenanigan), and she’d even struck up a certain professional rapport with Commander Spock that he seemed to enjoy as much as she did (so far as she dared to assume he enjoyed anything).

He’d even gone so far as to make the somewhat stilted suggestion that she take the evening off, having noticed her recent distraction. Min usually stayed for a couple of hours past the end of her shift, but--well. If it had gotten to the point of Commander Spock being willing to broach the subject of her emotional wellbeing.

Min dropped heavily onto a couch in the rec room of the Enterprise, both hands curled around a bowl of the closest thing to a spicy Korean soup that she’d been able to convince the replicators to spit out. Steam rose around her, carrying the smell of something that vaguely resembled kimchi, and she closed her eyes and settled in to brood.

She was missing something; something that was probably right in front of her face.

When she finally opened her eyes once more, she wasn’t sure exactly how much time had passed--just that the familiarly unfamiliar form of Lieutenant Givens was before her, turned at an awkward angle as if they’d noticed her midstep.

“Hey,” she said.

They jolted with surprise as she spoke, then offered an embarrassed grin as they flopped down onto the other end of the couch. They sprawled with their usual casual confidence, propping one foot up on the edge of the coffee table, their long leg bent at the knee. “Lieutenant,” they greeted.

“I think that’s my line,” Min said dryly, and she took a sip of her soup. It had gone cold, but it almost tasted right. “Unless you’re finally ready to tell me your first name.”

Givens shrugged. Their arm was stretched along the back of the couch, and it was just long enough- the couch just short enough- for the back of their knuckles to brush her shoulder. There was something elegant about the arc their other hand traced through the air as they made a broad, teasing sort of gesture. “Maybe I just don’t have one.”

Min leaned in, a challenging glint to her eye as she asked, conspiratorially, “Is that your final answer?”

They grinned. “No.”

She snorted, slouching back into her seat, and tipped her head from side to side to crack her neck. “How was your basement shift with your little--” she released her soup with one hand to make a vague gesture-- “rabid Scotsman.”

Givens tipped their head back with a laugh. “Mad as a hatter,” they told her cheerily. “We rebuilt the entire auxiliary systems from scratch--again. I’d insult your XO right back, but the man has a small yet vicious fanbase and I value my internal organs.”

“I’d disembowel someone for him if he asked,” she agreed easily.

“Luckily, he’d never ask.”

“Unless it was the only logical recourse.”

“Oh, naturally.” Givens laughed again, and they turned away from her--studying the movement and vibrancy of the rest of the rec, full to the brim of laughing and talking officers in varying degrees of uniform versus civvies. Their leg jogged, twice, and they cut their gaze back to her as their grin dimmed and then slipped away entirely. “Are you alright?” they asked quietly.

She blinked, stupidly, over the rim of her soup bowl. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s not that I’m not thrilled to have you around, you know? It’s just that it’s barely--” They gestured to the chronometer on the other side of the room. “It’s not like you to be out of the labs already.”

Min considered this for a moment, taking another sip of her soup. There were several answers she could give; some more honest than others.

“I'm just trying to figure something out,” she settled on. A sour sort of spice had taken up residence on her tongue, and she ran it along the backs of her teeth, jaw tight with frustration.

“Hm,” Givens said.

“I think I think too much,” Min said. She searched their gaze for--something. She could never even agree on their eye color from one moment to the next, so what answers did she honestly think she could get from them? She looked away, adding bitterly, “At the same time as I think too little.”

They shrugged, nudging her lightly with the backs of their knuckles. “You’ll figure it out,” they told her confidently, and Min groaned, setting her bowl on the coffee table so she could drape herself dramatically across the couch with her head on their thigh.

“It’s right in front of my face,” she muttered, pressing the heels of her palms almost painfully against her eyes as she squeezed them shut. “It’s pissing me off.”

Their fingers had found her hair, stroking gently through it as they listened. “Like I said; you’ll figure it out. You’re the smartest woman I know.” They paused, then added, grinning, “Not the smartest person, obviously; that’s Commander Spock, but--”

“Shut the fuck up.” She dropped her hands and opened her eyes to glare up at them, draping one arm across her stomach and letting the other dangle loosely towards the ground.

They were laughing again, leaned over slightly to look at her with their nose just a handful of centimeters from her own. Something caught in her throat--

Right in front of her, right? she thought dazedly. “G,” she said, voice shaky. “Do you ever wonder...”

Their smile softened. “Yeah.” Givens trailed their fingers through her hair again. “Yeah, I--”

Reet. Reet. Reet went the red alert, with its usual impeccable timing, and they both scrambled to their feet--soup and ennui alike forgotten in the face of their duty.

Two ensigns in red were fighting through the stream of officers already surging for the door, clattering to a halt in front of Givens. The skinny one threw up a sloppy, sarcastic salute, and his friend with the big hair elbowed him, hard, in the side.

“Lieutenant!” she said. “The chief wants us in the Sector Four jeffries tubes ASAP!”

Leaning over, Min muttered, “Your mad hatter beckons.”

She was rewarded with the flash of a smile over one brilliant red shoulder as Givens ushered the ensigns back out of the room. “Why is it always you two?” they were asking. “Tell Scotty to send the troublemakers Singh’s way next time, would you?”

Min took a moment to catch her breath as the three engineers disappeared from sight--just a moment. She may be Min Sung the botanist, not Min Sung the security officer, but at a time like this every hand was needed on deck.

She shoved her way through the crowd towards her battle station.

#a tramp stamp original #min sung #lieutenant givens #with brief cameos by #zee randers #jai lee #I wrote this #I didn't really hit ninja on this one sorry :(

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2, 32, 84, Cat: gen Characters: anyone you please :)

2: Arson, 32: Hammock, 84: Team

“You’re blocking my sunlight,” Janice Rand says, without even opening her eyes behind her massive, pink-tinted sunglasses. She’s sprawled lazily across a hammock, dressed comfortably in an ankle-length dress in a shimmering, lightweight metallic fabric. There’s a coconut shell cocktail cradled loosely in one hand; it has a tiny purple umbrella and smells strongly of tequila.

“How is she always the coolest person on this ship?” Lee whispers. Givens shoots him a glare, and Randers obligingly reaches out to jab him sharply in the side with her elbow. He gasps, his hand flying to his ribs. “Traitor!” he hisses.

Janice groans, reaching up to lower her sunglasses, her blue eyes glaring sharply out at the three of them. “To what do I owe the pleasure of the company of three of Engineering’s finest?”

“Jan,” Givens says. They offer her a charming grin.

Her eyes narrow. “I’m on vacation.”

Givens crouches at eye level next to her, hands folded together and hanging casually from the wrists where their elbows are propped on their knees. “Jan,” they repeat winningly.

“We’re all on vacation,” she says, eyebrows raised. “Whatever your little team needs me for, I am not interested.”

“There’s arson involved,” Givens offers.

Janice looks at them for a moment. She turns her gaze up to Randers and Lee, who nod solemnly back at her. “Alright,” she says, settling her sunglasses back properly onto her nose, and takes a sip of her drink through its bright yellow straw. “Talk to me, Lieutenant.”

#a tramp stamp original #I wrote this #lieutenant givens #janice rand #zee randers #jai lee #love my engineering ocs

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"does anyone have a spare blowtorch?" janice rand

Janice slides down the wall of engineering to sit, legs demurely settled at her side, and flutters her eyelashes as she summons her flirtiest smile. “How’s my favorite lieutenant today, Mx. Givens?”

The engineer in question looks over at her from where they’re cross-legged on the floor, two elbows deep in a control panel, and an amused smile tugs at the corners of their lips. Their voice, however, is drily sarcastic as they retort, “I don’t know, Ms. Rand; wouldn’t you need to be on the bridge or in sickbay to get that answer?”

“Aw, G,” Janice croons, reaching over to cup their cheek with one hand. “You know our love is as true as the ones I share with Ny and Chris.”

“I also know that you only ever bring up our love when you want something,” Givens informs her with a snort, pulling one hand out of the panel to scribble a note on the PADD resting on their knee.

“I bring up our love every time we talk!” Janice protests, snatching back her hand.

Givens makes an aborted move, as if they’d have thrown their hands in the air in exasperation if they weren’t full of wiring. “And you always want something!”

Janice opens her mouth to retort and then clicks it shut with a huff of annoyance. “Well, alright, fair enough.” She walks her fingers up the sleeve of their uniform, smiling winningly. “Can you get me into Scotty’s office?”

They eye her warily, fingers slowing in their deft ministrations. “Why?”

“Well, you see. Our resident Scotsman and Min Sung--”

“The botanist?”

“The very one. They’ve been having a rather prolific memo war regarding the temperature controls in the greenhouses, and their yeomen have gone on strike until they agree to work out their differences in person. So of course, because being the captain’s yeoman--“ Janice’s nostrils flare as she adds, more sourly than she means to-- “and this captain’s yeoman on top of that--isn’t enough work, I’m having to do their jobs as well for the next few days.”

Givens blinks at her. “Scotty replaced his yeoman with a robot.”

“Eustace 2.3; I know.” Janice squints. “Relevance, G?”

They roll their eyes, an edge of annoyance in their voice as they ask, “How can a robot go on strike, Jan?”

“Scotty may not have figured out how to program sentience yet, but he’s certainly managed to achieve ‘attitude’.” Janice clicks her tongue. “Can you let me in or not?”

“You better not be pulling my leg,” they caution, even as they pull their hands back out of the machinery and insert a pinky into each corner of their mouth to whistle sharply. “RANDERS!” they bark, and Janice flinches. (Lieutenant Givens didn’t earn the title of “Best Set of Lungs in the Engineering Department” for nothing.) “LET YEOMAN RAND INTO THE CHIEF’S OFFICE, WOULD YOU?”

Janice hears the slide of fabric on metal, and looks up just in time to see a young woman (with a truly extraordinary head of hair) drop suddenly from the jeffries tube to her left. The ensign straightens out of the crouch she’d landed in, flipping on the safety of her multipurpose laser wrench before tucking it behind her ear and snapping off a mocking salute.

“Follow me,” she says cheerfully, and sets off with a long-legged stride that leaves Janice scrambling to her feet to catch up.

“I ask you for a favor, G, and you pawn me off on an ensign?” she hisses, walking backwards to keep her gaze fixed angrily on the back of their head.

“The Enterprise is my one true love, and you’ve known that from the start,” Givens tells her solemnly. There’s a teasing glint in their eye as they glance back at her. “Don’t worry, Jan; you’re still a distant second.”

Throwing her hands in the air, she spins on her heel and stalks away. “I thought you Lieutenants were the only ones with the code, anyway!”

“Scotty has a ‘hacked door policy’--it’s like an open door policy, except you have to earn it!” Givens calls after her. “I’m busy, but Randers has the magic touch; you’re in good hands.”

“You’re a lackadaisical, teetotaling buffoon, Lieutenant!” Janice shouts back, and Ensign Randers stifles a laugh into her shoulder as she dismantles the keypad for Scotty’s office door.

“Whatever you say, Jan,” Givens agrees distractedly. “Just let me know if Eustace is still AWOL by the end of shift today, and I’ll either crack its housing and fix the programming or code the door to Scotty’s office to your biosignal.”

“I knew they loved me,” Janice tells Randers with a smirk of satisfaction as she drops her shoulder against the wall next to the door and crosses one leg over the other. She watches the ensign, her long fingers picking delicately through the wiring, for a long moment before asking curiously, “How long is this going to take?”

“Not even another minute,” comes the muttered response.

Janice beams, an expression that reaches all the way to her sparkling blue eyes, and declares, “I hope that whatever god or omnipotent creature happens to be out there in the universe smiles kindly on your soul, Ensign.”

The door hisses open; Randers turns a crooked grin on Janice. “Kind of you, ma’am. Need any help sorting through the chief’s files?”

Janice straightens, shoving up her sleeves with the single-minded determination that makes her so very effective at her job, and her grin turns feral as she calls for the lights. “If I needed a little help just to tackle Scotty’s woefully inadequate filing system, I wouldn’t be Captain Kirk’s yeoman, now, would I?”

And then Janice actually looks at the office laid out in front of her, and she feels, first, a thrum of confusion. On its heels follows foreboding.

Scotty’s office is... surprisingly neat. His in-tray (while full) isn’t overflowing, and there’s enough shelf and table space crammed into the room to keep separate what are obviously several different projects being worked on concurrently. With all of Eustace’s complaining- the original, human Eustace, who was Scotty’s yeoman until he weaseled his way into a transfer and after whom the robot was named- she’d been expecting a war zone; this is barely even as messy as Captain Kirk’s gets after several back to back missions with no time to tidy up in between.

But if not his organization, then...

“The problem isn’t the chief’s filing,” Randers tells her, sounding torn between amusement and sympathy. “It’s that he refuses to use manual input for anything, and the computer’s really bad at transcribing his accent.”

Janice sets her hand on her hips and narrows her eyes. This is not what she signed up for when she joined Starfleet, and it certainly shouldn’t be her problem now. She claps her hands together decisively, turning neatly on her heel. “New plan; anybody got a spare blowtorch?”

Randers’s eyebrows climb sharply towards her hairline. “Do I want to know?”

Janice throws her a pitying glance as she sets off across the department floor. “Not unless you want to give up your plausible deniability.”

#janice rand #I wrote this #a tramp stamp original #zee randers #lieutenant givens #honestly most of this has been written for ages #I just didn't know where to go with it #so this prompt gave me the opportunity to just slap on a vague but entertaining conclusion #wristwatch6minslow #everybody thank xkit for me having an ask tag

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6. Zee Randers

Zee Randers and Jai Lee have previously appeared in siren song; Zee also appeared, very briefly, in best of the best

Jai tumbles into the seat next to her in the rec room, beaming from ear to ear and slinging one long, skinny leg over the arm of the chair. He’s leaning his elbow on the other, shoulder pressed against hers and nose extraordinarily close to her cheek.

“What’s goin’ on, ZZ Top?” he asks, wiggling his eyebrows.

Zee rolls her eyes, grinning, as she places her hand (fingers spread wide) over his face and gives him a friendly shove. “Don’t you have other friends?” she teases. “Am I not allowed three minutes to myself while they keep you entertained?”

“Nope,” he tells her cheerfully, stealing the laser wrench- safety enabled- out from its permanent position behind her ear and spinning it between his fingers. “You’re stuck with me, baby. I’m a high maintenance bi–fuck.”

Jai fumbles the wrench; his attempts to catch it send it flying, and it hits the floor with a loud clack and rolls away with an impressive amount of speed as he scrambles to his feet to chase after it.

“You’re a mess, Lee,” Zee informs him with a laugh, unfolding herself from her chair to help.

“Shut it, Randers,” he snaps back, without heat; he bends down to grab the wrench–and someone’s boot sends it skidding past him, back towards Zee. He hangs his head with a dramatic sigh.

Zee’s so busy laughing at him that the someone- a yellow shirt with an unfortunate haircut- who’d kicked the wrench reaches it before she can.

“Does ‘zis belong to you?” he asks Jai, holding out a hand to help him up. “I’m wery sorry; I didn’t see it until I’d already kicked it.”

“It’s mine, actually.” Zee grins, slinging an arm over her friend’s shoulders as she holds out her hand. “Butterfingers here is just the one who managed to throw it across the room by accident.”

Bowlcut glances over her, his eternal smile widening. He puffs out his chest a bit, presenting the wrench with a flourish. “I am Chekov,” he tells her, “and it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“I’m Zee Randers,” she tells him, choking back a laugh as she accepts the wrench, “and I’m also very gay.”

Chekov shrugs, hooking his thumbs in the waist of his uniform pants and turning his grin on Jai instead. “And you?” he asks, wiggling his eyebrows.

Jai splutters, face turning bright red, but a passing lieutenant saves him from having to answer by smacking Chekov upside the head. “Leave the engineers alone, Pavel; they’re all married to the ship.”

“I don’t mind being a side piece, Hikaru,” Chekov argues, but he falls into step next to the other man anyway, only sparing a moment to throw a wink back at them.

Zee takes one glance at the shocked look on Jai’s face and bursts into laughter. “Get it, Lee!” she claps him on the rear and wolf whistles. “He’s cute; can I be best man at your wedding?”

“Fuck you, Randers!” Jai shoves her off, but he’s laughing too. “Tell me, how much time have you been spending with the interstellar communications array, trying to work up the nerve to talk to the gamma shift?”

Zee scoffs, tucking her laser wrench back behind her ear. “I’m not– I don’t– shut up, Lee.” She looks up at the ceiling, her cheeks hot.

“No, dude, wait–” Jai’s lanky limbs wrap around her as he coos. “I was kidding, do you really like a girl?”

“Shut up, Jai!”

She’s not sure how he manages it, but somehow he’s got his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck, clinging like a koala to her back. “Tell me everything,” he demands, and Zee grabs his thighs, hitching him more firmly into place.

“You’re a dick,” she snarls, heading back towards their armchairs on the other side of the rec room.

“No, I’m--” he chokes. “Jesus, Zee, how do you have so much hair?” he lets go with one hand, carefully collecting her mass of black curls to move to the other side of her neck.

“I dunno, Jai,” she taunts, “how come yours does that weird spiky thing?”

He scoffs. “Rude, ZZ. Rude. Now, you’re my best friend, and you’ve been holding back on me, which is very painful, but I’m willing to forgive you. So, tell me all about--”

“I’m dropping you if you finish that sentence, ensign,” Zee growls playfully, and Jai squeezes his knees with a scoff.

“Like I’d even fall if you let go. Now, are you crushing on the one with the blonde hair or the other one?”

Zee licks her lips, feeling her cheeks heat once more. “The other one,” she admits with a mutter.

Jai hums. “Oh, she’s cute--and smart, too, I heard Lieutenant Uhura talking the other day and...”

#zee randers #jai lee #a tramp stamp original #I wrote this #wristwatch6minslow #everybody thank xkit for me having an ask tag #zee randers is my favorite lesbian engineer #other than like.......... my irl friend who's a lesbian engineer

[enterprisetrampstamp]

siren song

also on ao3

Zee Randers opens her eyes to an inky darkness, and she knows in her bones that something’s wrong. It takes her a long moment, holding her breath in the quiet of late gamma shift, to understand why the hair on her arms and neck is prickling, why a heavy weight has taken the place of her stomach--

She’s only been on the Enterprise for a week, but she’s spent most of that time in the bowels of the ship, where the hum of the engines is most present, and that-

there it is again-

that flutter was enough to draw her out of a homesick dream, warm with the scent of her mother’s home cooking and cool with the mountain air of the Blue Ridge.

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.

Jai sighs his agreement. “The Enterprise called; how  could we not answer?”

#engineering department #montgomery scott #tos #really scotty's only in this for like a line but shhhhhhh #hashtag oc central #I wrote this #a tramp stamp original