Chapel's Log

TM: Catch-Up

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:54:25 GMT

Muse: Christine Chapel, PhD, RN, MD
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS
Challenge: Catch-Up What is the best present you have ever given someone else?
Word Count: 416 words

It took me a long time to let go. I know it seems stupid, because I stopped thinking I loved him long before I stopped acting like it. I know it seems wrong, because I'm not really that sort of person. I never was the type to chase after someone who didn't return my affections.

Before Roger, before the Enterprise, I had a sort of a reputation. As cold, as intellectual. And it was true. I was cold and intellectual. I was focused on my career, on my work, on my studies to the point of excluding all other aspects of my life.

I wanted to succeed, the way my mother had succeeded, and my sister had succeeded. I wanted to be respected and held in high esteem.

I'd never been really in love when I met Roger. Honestly. I'd dated, casually, but never that rock-in-your-stomach, doubled-over-with-emotion kind of love. I wasn't prepared for it, or for how such emotion would change me. I wasn't prepared for the dizzying realities of head over heels love, nor was I prepared for losing him.

I guess I went a little crazy for a while. Emotions are like a drug; you can't just quit them cold-turkey. When one emotion goes away, others pour in to fill up the gaping hole it has left. And when one love is ripped from your life, you tend to want to fill up that hole with another love again, quickly.

I fell in love with Mr. Spock in my mind, not because there was any real connection there, but because he was what I was. Torn between intellect and emotion, two people in one form, constantly struggling.

Eventually, the pain of Roger's death healed. Eventually, my natural nature began to reassert itself. Work, blessed work, was the best cure for me. I loved the research, I loved the patients, I loved the Enterprise.

I didn't love Spock. But I held onto it, irrational as it seemed, because I didn't want to lose that part of me that could love, stupidly and overtly and with gleeful abandon. I held onto it, because I thought love was what made me human.

The best gift I ever gave to anyone was the gift I gave myself when I allowed myself to stop loving Mr. Spock. When I allowed myself to be myself, my true self, once again. When I allowed myself to let go of this fear that, without love, I was not quite as human as other people.

When I did this, my life finally began.

Muse: Christine Chapel, PhD, RN, MD
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS
Challenge: Most people wish I...

I have no idea what most people wish I would or would not do. I know that different people have different expectations of me. My coworkers expect professionalism. My friends expect nurturing and warmth. My family always expected results.

I think the biggerquestion is what do I wish I would do? What do I expect of myself?

I used to think that expectations were a list you could write down, a set of goals that you worked out in fine detail, checking off items as you moved closer and closer to your final destination.

I realize now that my expectations for myself are quite different than they used to be.

I expect myself to be honest. No more game-playing, no pretending to be and feel and think something that isn't what I'm really experiencing.

I expect myself to be fair. Not only to other people, but to myself as well. There is no longer any situation in life where it is acceptable for me to kick myself.

I expect myself to be strong. Life is not easy, and I no longer allow myself the luxury of thinking "I can't." I can, and will, do what is needed to survive this life. I will be brave and strong and meet challenges as they come.

I expect myself to be happy. No longer will I allow myself to look only at what I don't have. I will focus on what I do have, on what is positive in myself and in my life.

I expect myself to die with grace. When the time comes to go, I will not weep or be afraid. I've seen death too many times, and what comes after. I will give myself the gift of courage, of knowing that death is a natural part of life, and that no life is ever truly wasted.

And finally, I expect myself to give, freely and often, to those around me. There is no need to hoard, because the universe is abundant. My time, my experience, my compassion, my love--these things are not meant to be bundled up and hidden in the shadows. I will give until I can give no longer, and then I will go happily on to the next great adventure.

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:38:18 GMT

OOC: RL has been a bit overwhelming lately. Will post August updates some time this week.

TM: Describe the place where you grew up

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 22:19:48 GMT

Muse: Christine Chapel, PhD, RN, MD
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS
Prompt: Describe the place where you grew up
Word Count: 453 words

Davenport, California, Earth
Mail Drop NA/CA/DAV2377

That's the official address for the old house. I still spend much of my time there when I can, when Jan and I can get away from work long enough to take a few days off to relax. It's a great house, the old place, now that I've exorcised the many and varied ghosts from its floors and walls and corridors. My sister slips in and out like a humming wraith between her ambassadorial duties, sending the cats into a fit of ecstatic frenzy everytime she arrives.

It's a beautiful place, now.

I hated it growing up. It was old-fashioned; we didn't have a replicator, or really any modern conveniences. My mother, accomplished as she was, had a real idea that there was something to "roughing it" that balanced out the human soul. It wasn't on the main routes, so we didn't have a lot of neighbors, although we were about a ten minute walk from one of the most beautiful beaches in California, a private stretch owned by a colleague of my mom's who always let me swim there.

Shayla was gone by the time I started swimming in the ocean. We didn't grow up together. I grew up alone, just me and my step-father and Mom. I won't say that living in this big, old-fashioned house on the beach with two over-educated academics did much for my social skills in school, but it certainly prepared me for a life in Starfleet.

I spent a lot of time exploring, even then. The land around the house. The road down to the beach, and then the nooks and crannies created by the Pacific Ocean. There was this one stand of rocks I loved. I would climb them in my little padded shoes, even as young as seven or eight, and look out at the ocean from that vantage point. I remember once, after reading about the Greek gods in a big book my step-father brought home for me from a trip back east, I stood on the rocks and called out a prayer of thanks to Mighty Poseidon. In no more time than it took for the waves to swallow my prayers, an enormous wave rose over the rocks, drenching me in chilly water!

Oh, Poseidon, you heard my call that day, and I've never passed that stand of rocks again without thinking of you. The hug of a god means a lot to a lonely little girl.

When the whale probes came, and the sea erupted around us, I prayed to you. You heard me then, too, didn't you? And although I didn't get drenched, I knew you were wrapping me in your arms, then, too.

TM: The Biggest Obstacle

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:01:26 GMT

Muse: Christine Chapel, PhD, RN, MD
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS
Challenge: What is the biggest obstacle you have overcome in your existance?
Word Count: 662 words

"I'm in love with you, Mr. Spock. The human Mr. Spock. The Vulcan Mr. Spock."

I'd love to say that was exaggerated, or that those particular words never actually left my mouth. As it was, I was under the effect of the same alien virus that had Sulu brandishing a sword, topless no less, through the corridors and Kevin Riley bellowing Irish love songs over the PA system. Nobody remembers that, do they? Nobody spent years judging everything they did through a filter of swashbuckling or tone-deafness?

Those words. Those three short sentences--well, one sentence and two connected fragments--haunted me throughout my tenure on the Enterprise. They followed me through the corridors, peered at me through sympathetic eyes, whispered to me in the not-so-subtle comments made by encouraging friends trying to set me up with available men, nudged me in the heart each and every time I stepped onto that transporter padd with him and he froze in my very presence.

There were times when I would have killed puppies or my own grandmother to have never said those words. Times when he looked at me with disdain, like I was some hyper-emotional bug crawling into his personal space, contaminating him with my woman-ness, luring him with some real or imagined offer of carnal bliss. Like I was Eve and Lilith and Mata Hara all rolled up into one slightly over-coiffed lieutenant.

I never really got a chance to talk to him. I don't know what I would have said, because my words and actions of the following years seemed to support what I said that day in Sickbay. What would I say? I love you, yes, but not the way you think. I love you because you remind me, in some small way, of my lost fiance. Your brilliance, his brilliance. I love you because you remind me, in a powerful way, of my lost sister. She was your XO, and she was stoic, controlled, unavailable to me. I love you because you remind me of me, forced into a role not quite right for you, trapped somewhere between your brain and your heart and doing a disservice to both of them. I love you because you are one person I can help, right here, right now, when nobody else I love is within my reach.

You are possible, even though the world says you're impossible. I don't want to fuck you. Fucking is nothing to me except sex. But helping you--one moment of peace, that moment I could never give to Roger, that moment of comfort my sister would never allow between us, that is something that maybe I could give you.

And at the time, it was true. I did love him, in the most unprofessional and seriously fucked-up way. And when I could, I forced comfort on him, when he was weakened, when he was vulnerable. Hyper-empathetic, maybe, but I could feel it underneath him, the rage and pain and crying need for touch of any kind.

It wasn't until long afterward that I realized the rage and pain and crying need for touch were my own. That the person I was trying to heal was myself, and Spock was merely a vehicle towards that recovery. I didn't want him, and he certainly didn't want me. It took some time, and a lot of introspection, to sort out my feelings for him. It took leaving the Enterprise to get me back on track, especially my reputation.

I saw Spock the other day. He was standing with his crewmates, solid in his maroon formal uniform, waiting to be sentenced. I sat with my new friends, with my darling Jan at my side, in my new life, no longer broken and shattered, and realized as I cheered with the rest of the gallery, that in some purely platonic and almost motherly ways, I still loved him.

But I loved myself and my own life even more.

TM: At What Point in Your Life Did You Feel Most Alone?

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 01:53:38 GMT

Muse: Christine Chapel, PhD, RN, MD
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS
Challenge: At what point in your life did you feel most alone?
Word Count: 474 words

I don't even want to write this, but I'm committed to doing these challenges.

When I was a second-year medical student, age 25 or so, my mother had a heart attack. To give you the family landscape at the time, my father had died when I was maybe three years old, and my stepfather had died when I was 18. My sister, who hated my stepfather, ran off to join Starfleet and got herself killed in action.

Anyway, my mom had a heart attack. You had to know my mom, you see. Larger than life. One of those women who just towered above the normal person, not just because she was almost six feet tall, but because she was just...enormous! Huge in spirit, huge in intellect, huge in life force. My mother was beloved by her peers, by her students, by pretty much everyone who ever knew her, including me.

I came home one night after a particularly gruesome day of classes and labs to find her sprawled out, all five-feet-eleven-and-a-half inches of her, across the floor.

I know I did what I could, everything by the book. I called for help and administered emergency CPR. When the ambulance arrived, she was still breathing. And she died before they got to the hospital.

I'm older now, a doctor in my own right. And my hands still tremble when I think of that moment. I know now, after decades of experience, that nothing I did would have saved her, that the complications would have required more medical skill and technology than anyone had at the time. Maybe today, with the advances we've made in cardiopathology, we could have stabilized her. But thirty years ago? No.

Less than six months after my mom died, I changed my focus from Med/Surg to biomedical research. Nobody knew me well enough to see how scared I was of holding another life in my hand. Nobody, not even my friends and teachers, saw the subtle change in my manner, the minute loss of confidence on the surface belying a major hole ripped in my personality.

I had been there when she died. I had watched this light go out in the universe, the last light in my personal sphere, and I had been incapable of doing anything to stop it.

They never asked me why, and I never volunteered. I just knew I couldn't hold a life in my hands again. Never again.

It wasn't until Roger disappeared that I found the courage to go back, once again, into medicine. He was missing, another light of enormous value in my life, and I had to do something. Research jobs are hard to come by on a deep space mission, but the Enterprise needed a nurse. I got my RN so fast your head would spin.

I had to do something.

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 01:22:30 GMT

gacked from kathryn_janeway, who should be working and not leading others down the path of not-goodness. :)

Love by ruby mae
Your name
Your partner
You two are	Inseperable
Your meeting was by	Answered prayer
They are your	Sweetheart
You are their	Best friend
Your love will	Be the epitome of what true love is

Quiz created with MemeGen!

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 19:03:37 GMT

Muse: Christine Chapel, PhD, RN, MD
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS
Challenge: Heart's Desire: Think about something you once wanted so badly but never acquired. Write about how you think your life would’ve been different if you had received what your heart desired.
Word Count: 485 words

I have to admit that at one point I wanted him. I know the rumors, both sordid and those closer to the actual truth, had me looking like a man-crazy fool. I've played them down over the years--no, over the decades. I smile now, and just let them think I think they're nuts.

But when I'm quiet with myself, I admit that at one point I wanted him.

But that's not right. I never wanted him in the way they think I did. I was not overcome with lurid fantasies of Ponn Farr sexual overdrive, nor did I think I was the woman who could break through that unemotional shell.

I was not so much a fool as foolhardy. He became a symbol to me, not of masculine desire which I really, if all truth be told, never felt so much for him, but of control.

When all is said and done, and I'm no longer lying to myself, the truth is much more gruesome. I didn't want to win his heart; I wanted to shatter his control. He was the symbol of all control, and on a subconscious level, I hated him for it.

I hated my own self-control. My own smiles, when I wanted to rage. My modulated tones, my polite responses to rude insinuations. My loyalty to a man who ultimately betrayed me. My good girl life, which when I met Spock, had led me to nothing but failure and humiliation.

Flirting with Spock, coming on to him, gave me some sick sense of power, I think. It made me feel that maybe I wasn't such a doormat who always stood back, and was polite, considered his culture, considered his feelings. If I was to be the jilted lover, the dumb blonde who gave up everything for a man, maybe I should just go all the way. Play the role for all it was worth.

He kissed me, once. It was the most gruesome experience of my life, something I will never repeat. I will die before I'm put in a similar situation again.

Funny, it was the kiss that broke the spell. "I've wanted you for so long," I told him as we sat there in that psychotic tableau. "Now all I want to do is die."

I wanted to die. I wanted Christine Chapel to die, and release me from the life she'd crawled into.

I stopped chasing Spock soon after that. I don't know what would have happened if I'd ever caught him. I'd probably be miserable right now, instead of content. I'd probably be some Vulcan version of property, instead of a woman in my own right, with a life, a lover, a career, a home. I'd probably be wondering what on Earth I'd done to wind up where I was, instead of thanking the Goddess each and every day that I didn't get my heart's desire.

What is your weapon of choice?

Tue, 31 May 2005 07:47:17 GMT

Muse: Christine Chapel, PhD, RN, MD
Fandom: Star Trek, TOS
A/N: I ship Chapel/Janice Rand.

Catch-Up

First Five Year Mission

She was trained, as all officers were, in firearms and hand-to-hand combat. A three-day seminar, at the beginning of her commission, with refreshers ever year.

You never knew what would happen in deep space.

But Christine Chapel never fired a weapon in her entire Starfleet career, nor did she have to engage in brawling of any level.

Her weapon was her wit, and she used it as often as she could. She used it on days when the strain got too much. She used it on days when she forgot about the PhD and the career she'd left behind and the pride that no longer seemed a major player in her personality.

She kept it light, and that was good. She smiled through the day, and ignored the little comments that came every so often.

Comments about pointed ears.

V'Ger Era

It was a struggle keeping her tongue. She'd grown crotchety in medical school, and crotchety didn't sit well with her old new boss.

Served him right, the dog, for caving in to Kirk like that. When you retire, Leonard, stay retired. Not a hard trick, you know.

But nobody said no to James Kirk for long, and Leonard McCoy had never had much practice at defying the man. So he was back, and Kirk was back, and she was figthing tooth and nail to keep from falling back into the familiar "yes, Doctor, no, Doctor" routine.

Her staff, the one she'd assembled, had the good graces to be sullen on her behalf. They treated McCoy as an interloper who'd taken their boss's rightful job, and their just-below-insubordinate resentment of him was touching if completely unprofessional.

She loved them so much.

The Whale Probe Arrives

The rain was pounding apocolypse against the windows of Fleet HQ. Jan was there, finding a reason to be near, and she was grateful for it.

Janice was the one who never let her hide behind the joke, and right now she was scared enough to do a one-woman vaudeville show. It was controlled chaos in the command center, but Chapel didn't let bother her. She kept her tones light and reassuring.

No one really bought it, but it made her feel better.

There was a ship coming to Earth. It was heading here to offer rescue support.

It felt so odd, at this point in her career, to be the Planet in Danger(TM). How many hours had she spent on strange worlds, up to her hips in chaos, doling out medical supplies, pitching in with emergency medical treatments, reassuring the natives that, yes, they would get through this.

She never thought the world would end in thunder. One big explosion, maybe, but not rain.

Janice was looking at her, asking for a decision. Oh, yeah. It was her call. She wasn't Nurse Chapel anymore. She wasn't "yes, Doctor, no, Doctor" anymore. She could see the regret in Jan's eyes. She didn't want her to have to make this decision; she knew what it would take to do the right thing.

Jan was good about that. She always knew what Christine was feeling, even when Christine wasn't all that sure anymore.

Jan always looked behind the smile, and loved her still for her sometimes lack of niceness.

"Send them away," she said. Her voice was hoarse against the noise in HQ.

Janice nodded, paling as she grasped fully the reality of what Chapel had ordered.

Chapel felt a rock hard calm in the pit of her stomach. She felt the finality of the act, and for the first time in a long time, she was okay with it. There was no reason left to joke, now. It was done.

She just never thought it would end in rain.