jackwabbit | New Fic: Favor

Favor

Fandom: Star Trek Discovery
Rated: G
Category: Vignette. Tracy Pollard Focus. Culmets.
Word Count: 442.
Season: Post-Two, Pre-Three (Inter-season Speculation/Rendered AU by Season Three.)
Spoilers: Nothing Specific.
Summary: Tracy needs a favor from Hugh. But maybe she’s actually doing one for him?
Note: Occurs somewhere between “Sometimes It Be Like That” and “Recheck”.

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Tracy Pollard was tired.

It had been a quiet shift. Things had finally settled down after Discovery’s jump to the future.

But that didn’t mean it hadn’t been long, and without the adrenaline of a crisis to keep her going, she was dragging. But she only had an hour to go, and if nothing changed in that time, she could turn sickbay over to the overnight nursing staff, so that was something.

Still, she needed to fill that hour or she’d go crazy.

So she picked up a PADD and checked over her schedule, trying to occupy her mind so she wouldn’t pass out at her desk. When she saw she was on again the next day, she groaned. It wasn’t uncommon for her to work many days in a row, but something about this one was just too much. Then, as she looked at the overnight schedule, she got an idea.

She quickly typed out a message on the PADD.

Hey, Hugh. I’ll take your on-call overnight tonight if you take my shift tomorrow. What do you think?

After just a moment, she received a response.

Are you sure? You’ve been on all day.

I’ll be okay. Not much going on today. I’d rather be on call tonight than work tomorrow.

As she waited for a response, Tracy checked the appointments for the next day. Appointments were rare in sickbay, but they did happen, and she was curious if anything was coming in that she’d want or need to see. She’d barely opened the file when a new message came in.

You know how much I hate getting up overnight. I’ll trade. If you’re sure.

Tracy saw that she only had one appointment scheduled for the next day and grinned as she answered.

I’m sure.

And she meant it. She’d rather just stay on for another twelve hours and be done with it. With so little staff on the ship, sickbay was staffed by a doctor during the ship’s day and nurses overnight for triage and minor issues with a doctor on call for more serious cases. She’d rather take her chances overnight than have to come back first in thing in the morning.

The fact that her only appointment the next day was a recheck on a certain astroymycologist’s chest wound had absolutely nothing to do with it – really.

And if she forgot to reschedule that, if she maybe even sent a reminder about it, well, it had been a long shift. No one would suspect it hadn’t been a simple oversight.

No one except Hugh Culber, that is, and as it turned out, he was too grateful to care.