Work Text:
It starts like this:
Mariner is teaching Tendi poker. Or well, Mariner is teaching Tendi her version of poker which involves no pants—for some reason—, various pointy objects that Sam is keeping his distance from and an abundance of multi-language profanity that is rather impressive for two women outside of the linguistics department.
Really though, Sam is impressed.
Tendi, who has absolutely no poker face, is somehow winning and Mariner is somewhere between proud mom friend™ and shoving her throwing stars at the first person who pokes fun at her losing streak. Somewhere in all of this, Mariner runs out of credits and contraband, so with a sigh and a characteristic half-smirk, she tosses her last chip on the table.
“I’m going all in.”
“Your all in would be scarier if it literally wasn’t your last credit,” Sam remarks sarcastically from where he’s nursing a beer.
Mariner flips him the bird. “Whaddya you got for me, D’Vana?”
Tendi, trying to hold back her shit-eating grin and failing—again no poker face—shoves her huge pile of chips into the center of the table.
“Oh, I’m all in, baby.”
“Good,” Mariner grins back.
“Good,” Tendi replies, crossing her arms.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“I’m glad you went all in.”
“So am I.”
“Please stop flirting and finish the game,” Sam mutters, rolling his eyes.
Mariner doesn’t flip him the bird this time but gives him a side-eye that would have been its usual level of pee-your-pants-terrifying if not for the light blush that dusts her cheeks.
Tendi giggles. “Wanna raise the stakes?”
“Have you met me?”
“That’s fair,” both Tendi and Sam say in the same voice. Mariner rolls her eyes but can’t suppress her smug grin.
“Loser has to ask out the next person who enters the room,” Tendi says, dramatically steepling her hands in front of her face.
Mariner snorts. Loudly. “What are we, fucking twelve?”
“You got a better idea?” Tendi taunts.
“Actually,” Mariner lets a smirk crawl across her face. “As long as we’re going with sleepover levels of dares…loser has to get the next person who walks through that door to date them for three weeks without cracking.”
Tendi cackles, throwing down her cards.
“Full house,” Sam absentmindedly notes. “Not bad, Tendi.”
“Yeah, not bad,” Mariner says, revealing her hand to be royal fucking flush. “Enjoy that date, D’Vana.”
Sam chokes on his drink, while Tendi groans. Mariner laughs psychotically. “Work on that poker face, baby girl. You’ll get it eventually.”
“Ugh, you were just letting me win.”
“Maybe,” Mariner grins innocently. Tendi scowls at her. “Oh, come on,” she laughs. “Whoever comes through that door next can’t be that bad.”
This was the exact moment that Sam realizes that the universe has a sense of humor, because Brad fucking Boimler walks through the door.
Tendi turns a little blue around the cheeks—the Orion equivalent to blushing, Sam guesses—and smiles at him, waving.
“Fuck,” Mariner hisses. “Abort mission!”
Sam and Tendi frown at her. “What?”
“D’Vana, you cannot date Boimler,” Mariner whispers furiously.
“That was the deal!” Tendi hisses back, throwing her hands up in the air.
“Babe I love you, but you can’t fuck with him like that.”
“And it’s okay to fuck with other people?”
“Yes!”
Sam slaps a hand to his face. “You fuck with Boimler every day of the week, Mariner.”
“That’s different!”
“How?” Tendi demands.
Mariner—the woman who had been promoted and demoted so many times that her file was longer than a goddamn Britannica, jumped head first into anything that remotely whispered of danger, fought with the Captain daily, snarked at superior officers, gave zero fucks about Starfleet protocol, and had probably, at some point, flipped off the devil—is rendered completely speechless.
Sam begins to rapidly connect some dots.
“It’s only for three weeks,” Tendi continues. “And Brad’s kinda cute, in like, an intense I have crippling anxiety way.”
“Brad?” Mariner repeats, looking horrified. “You call him Brad?”
“Yes?” Boimler says, coming up behind her. Mariner lets out an uncharacteristic shriek and jumps about a foot in the air.
“Dude what the fuck.”
Boimler looks very very confused. “What?”
“What?” Mariner repeats loudly, eyes widening.
“Brad, wanna go out?” Tendi chirps, smiling innocently at him.
Aw, and now Sam has two adorable friends who are blushing, well, adorably at each other and one friend who is having a complete mental breakdown in the background.
“What, really? I would love to—why aren’t you guys wearing any pants?” Boimler asks, exasperated.
Tendi lets out a snicker. “Mariner.”
Boimler gives Mariner an unimpressed look. Mariner tries to glare back, but it’s weak for her standards.
“I actually just finished my shift,” he says, turning back to Tendi. “Do you want to hang out?”
While Tendi cheers enthusiastically, Sam discreetly eyes his other friend. Mariner is kind of hyperventilating in the background, hands twitching toward the half-filled bottle of vodka she and Tendi had been chugging earlier. Sam carefully inches it away, unsure if she’s going to chug the rest of it or attack someone with it.
She makes a wounded noise at Tendi, who grabs Boimler by the arm and drags him out of the room, unreservedly talking a mile a minute about something that Sam’s already lost track of.
“What the fuck just happened.”
“I think Tendi asked Boimler on a date,” Sam replies, calmly. Mariner whips her head around and stares at him. The look behind her eyes is deranged.
“We have to break them up.”
Sun, moon and stars, the next three weeks were going to be a Mariner sized nightmare.
“I don’t get it, she’s completely out of his league—”
“Not true.”
“—they have nothing in common—”
“Sometimes opposites attract.”
“—and she’s just stringing him along! She’s going to dump him in two weeks!”
Sam sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. They were about a week into Mariner’s dare and he already was ready to throw Mariner, Tendi and Boimler—poor, clueless Boimler—out of an airlock. Mariner had already tried to break the two up somewhere around two dozen times and had only succeeded in bringing them closer together.
This of course made Mariner even more determined to sabotage her friends.
“It’s not the end of the world, Mariner.”
“Of course, it is!” she hisses at him. “They break up and then I have to deal with Boimler being sad forever while also not shit-talking my best friend and not letting him know that I was the person who set them up!”
“Or they have an amicable break up and go back to being friends. Dude, they haven’t even progressed past basic hand holding. I don’t think it’s going to be a huge heart wrenching dumping.”
Boimler and Tendi enter the room, holding hands. “I feel like you’re the only one who understands me, sometimes,” Boimler says.
Mariner’s eye twitches.
“What should I get Brad for Valentines Day?” Tendi asks five days later, apropos to nothing. Mariner sits up so fast that she hits her head on the top of her bunk.
“WHAT.”
Tendi frowns over at her, looking up from her data padd. “Valentines Day? It’s a Terra Prime holiday that humans generally celebrate yearly around the Terra season of—”
“I KNOW WHAT VALENTINES DAY IS.”
Sam winces, along with the few unfortunate ensigns who happen to be in the cabin, at the volume. “You and Boimler are celebrating Valentines Day?” he weakly asks.
Tendi grins, her tongue sticking out between her teeth adorably. “He told me about it last night and asked if we could exchange gifts!”
There’s a dull thunk as Mariner repeatedly hits her head against the wall.
“Do we need to talk about this?” Sam asks, watching Mariner chug half her weight in alcohol at the bar.
“My liver, my rules.”
“Not your alcoholic diet,” Sam sighs, taking a seat and signaling to the barman. “Although I would lay off the tequila if you want to be functional tomorrow morning.”
Mariner scowls and raises the bottle to her lips again.
“I’m talking about your feelings for Boimler.”
Mariner chokes. “My fucking what.”
Sam rolls his eyes. He had hoped—for about a millisecond—that when Tendi had joined their group that someone else would finally, perhaps, have some braincells to go around, but no, it seems that Sam Rutherford is the only rational fucking person in their dysfunctional foursome.
“Don’t be the idiot you pretend to be,” he replies, calmly taking a sip of his own drink.
Mariner narrows her eyes at him. “I don’t have feelings for—”
“I’m not an idiot either, Mariner.”
“Look,” she snaps, “I’m vaguely attracted to almost everyone, it’s just who I am. I do not have feelings for Boimler, I’m just aware that he’s. Aesthetically pleasing and nice to be around.”
“Then stop acting like a crazy person whenever he tries to date anyone,” Sam snaps back. “If you’re not interested, then you need to back off.”
Mariner is quiet for a long moment. “Do you think he and D’Vana—”
“I think they enjoy each other’s company and that they’re both kind of lonely,” Sam replies, before she can finish. “If you want to know more, talk to Tendi.”
His friend nods, soberly. Sam feels kind of bad for snapping at her, but also knows that she appreciates his honesty.
“There’s worse things then falling for Boimler,” he says, nudging her encouragingly. “Even if he is a complete spaz.”
This coaxes a weak grin out of her. “He is so fucking awkward.”
“You should tell him.”
“That he’s awkward? I have, he got all fussed up and started—”
“That you like him,” Sam specifies, grinning.
Mariner, seemingly forgetting that she had just been denying her crush on their friend, protests, “He’s dating Tendi, dumbass, I’m not going to—”
“Hey, trust me on this one,” Sam says. “Just follow your instincts.”
“My instincts are telling me to desert him on an alien planet before I become too attached.”
“Follow my instincts.”
To absolutely no one’s surprise, Mariner does not, in fact, follow Sam’s instincts.
He isn’t there for what happens next, but hears about it from an amused Tendi who swings up into his bunk that evening to give him the lowdown.
“So, Beckett has a crush on Brad,” she says, hugging his pillow to her midsection.
Sam puts down his data padd and watches Tendi very carefully. “Oh?”
“Yep. She cornered him in the cafeteria, told him his eyes were pretty and that she liked him and then left, screeching something about sitcom-b plots and Starfleet alumni. I think she has inside jokes with herself? I’m not sure what that was about.”
Sam can’t suppress the laugh that bubbles out of him. “God, she’s crazy. Are you okay?”
Tendi frowns, confused, at him. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“Your best friend has a crush on your boyfriend?”
“My—my what? Wait, oh nine hells YOU GUYS THINK BRAD AND I ARE DATING?”
Sam has a sudden moment of clarity where he realizes that he does not, in fact, have all the braincells in their group.
“You aren’t?” he dumbly asks.
Tendi starts laughing. She laughs so hard she almost falls out of his bunk—he thankfully catches her in time, but it’s a close one. “Rutherford. Sam,” she wipes a tear away from her eyes. “I’m aromatic, you absolute complete dumbass.”
“You are?” Probably not the best reaction to his friend coming out, but Sam hardly has time to apologize, before Tendi is laughing at him again.
“Brad—well, I probably shouldn’t tell you, it’s his thing—but he kind of understands where I’m coming from. We were having friend dates.”
“But…Valentines Day,” he stresses.
Tendi rolls her eyes. “I asked Brad about Terra traditions and holidays and he gave me a fucking history lecture it was so boring. I did like the idea of Valentines Day and asked if I could partake in it with him. He suggested gift giving.”
Sam stares at her. “I am a dumbass.”
“You are,” she agrees. “But I need your dumbass brain to help me get Brad and Beckett together.”
“Oh, so you do have all the braincells,” he says, grinning.
Tendi’s smile is sharp. “I have no idea what you’re on about, but yes. Yes I do.”
Getting Mariner and Boimler together is way easier said than done. Mariner is avoiding everyone like a goddamn plague and Boimler is fluctuating between literally vibrating with anxiety and being depressed as shit.
“Well they definitely don’t have the braincells,” Sam says, after another failed attempt to trap the two of them in a room together.
“You need to stop talking about braincells,” Tendi sighs. “Why don’t we just tell them that they like each other?”
“We can’t do that!”
“Why?”
“It’s too easy that way!”
Tendi stares at him.
Sam stares back.
“I’m telling Brad that Beckett has squishy feelings for him,” she deadpans. “And you’re going to try to catch Beckett and tell her that I don’t have squishy feelings for him. And then we’re going to lock them in a goddamn turbolift until they get their freak on.”
Tendi either has all of the braincells or none of them.
Their plan surprisingly takes a whole lot less subterfuge than Sam was expecting and a lot more—well—emotions. He did manage to find Mariner and after guiltily admitting that he may have been a bit wrong about the nature of Boimler and Tendi’s relationship, she was off in a shot, shrieking some nonsense about “third-act bullshit” and how she didn’t sign up to be the “pawn in a romantic subplot.”
Mariner might, actually, be certifiably crazy.
Rutherford hears about one of the turbolifts breaking from another ensign in his department. He and Tendi subtly high-five.
Six hours later—“if there was ever a time for buffer time, that time is now, Tendi”—a grinning Mariner and a mildly disheveled Boimler, exit the turbolift.
It ends like this:
Tendi is attempting to teach Sam poker. Well. It’s not actual poker, more like a hybrid of Mariner’s version of poker and a card game from Tendi’s home world, but it’s close enough and they’re having fun, so it really doesn’t matter.
Mariner is drunk as fuck, alternating between casually hitting on a flustered Boimler and insulting the shit out of anyone who even looks in their direction.
Tendi lays down her cards. Straight flush. Sam moans in despair. Boimler lets out a shriek of stop doing that we’re in public you moron and Mariner cackles in that unhinged way of hers.
None of them have the braincells.