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Chekov was woken up suddenly by a flash of bright, white light. He sat up, groggily rubbing his eyes and wondering what the flash was. There weren't any klaxons blaring, so it wasn't an all-hands-on-deck situation.
"Lights up, twenty-percent," Chekov grumbled. He shot out his bed when the lights brightened and revealed that he was not alone in his room. He screamed, but nothing came out. It was as if someone had muted him, somehow. The figure was standing in the middle of the room with a finger held up to smirking lips, which he lowered once recognition flickered in Chekov’s eyes.
“Q,” Chekov sneered, able to make sounds again. “What do you want? Why are you here?”
Q grinned at him in a way that infuriated Chekov. “I have something to show you,” he said coyly.
“What could you possibly want to show me at-” Chekov glanced at his alarm clock, “-three AM?”
Q just smirked and raised a hand, fingers poised to snap.
“Wait-” Chekov said, but too late. Q snapped his fingers, and suddenly Chekov was standing beside Q in a much brighter room. After his eyes had a moment to adjust, Chekov recognized where they were. It was the ready room. And it wasn’t empty. Seeing the Captain and First Officer in the room with them, Chekov turned to Q in a panic.
Q held up a hand. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he said in a sing-song voice. “They can’t hear or see us.”
“What is this?” Chekov hissed, his voice low despite Q’s assurances that they couldn’t be detected.
“The past,” Q answered. “Watch.”
Chekov turned back to the other occupants of the room. Spock and Kirk were talking, but not to each other. Following their gazes, Chekov startled, finally noticing the shadowy figure in the corner. He tuned into the conversation between the three.
“So tell me if I have this right,” the Captain said, skeptically. “You’re going to turn everyone on this ship into spaghetti, one by one, unless we provide a sacrifice… And that sacrifice involves making sure Chekov has a rough time every single day for a whole month.”
“That is correct,” the entity said.
“But… why?” Kirk asked.
The entity shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“I guess not,” Kirk said uneasily.
“So, do we have a deal?” The entity asked.
Kirk and Spock looked at each other for a moment. Spock nodded and addressed the entity. “We will agree to your terms if you’ll accept one condition.”
“Oh?”
“As taking it upon ourselves to ensure that Chekov encounters misfortune every day for the next month would simply require more effort towards Chekov than he is worth, we propose that you curse him with bad luck for the month so that misfortune may befall him without direct interference from us,” Spock requested.
The entity considered, seeming to not be entirely convinced.
“Honestly I’d rather deal with the spaghetti problem than have to actually come up with ways to mildly torture Chekov for an entire month.” Kirk added, shrugging.
“Fine, I’ll accept your condition” the entity said. “But he must not be allowed to believe that anything supernatural is affecting him.”
“Sure, that should be easy enough. This is Chekov we're talking about, after all,” Kirk said, and Spock nodded beside him.
“Good,” the entity nodded. Then, it looked past Kirk and Spock, directly at Chekov. A grotesquely wide sharp-toothed grin emerged on its face.
There was a flash of light, and Chekov was back in his quarters. Q wasn’t there. Chekov sat down on his bed, wondering if any of that had actually happened, or if it was just a strange dream. No, something had definitely been off over the last couple of weeks. And it was time to put a stop to it.
Chekov left his quarters and marched to D deck. He strode up to the Captain’s door and without pausing, kicked the door as hard as he could, heel first. The force of the impact was strong enough to warp the door, which would have surprised Chekov if he wasn’t so pissed-off. He grabbed the buckled edge of the door and forced it open.
“You motherfucker!” Chekov yelled, walking into the room and setting the lights to one hundred percent. “I know what you did, you sack of shit!”
The Captain struggled to his feet, eyes squinted against the light. “Chekov, what the fuck-”
“You know exactly what this is about! Don’t play dumb with me,” Chekov interrupted. He then noticed Spock also getting up, and looked back and forth between the captain and commander for a confused moment. “What- No, you know what, I don’t even care. How dare-” he stopped when he saw Spock pick up a strange device and aim it at him. “What is that, some sort of Men in Black neuralyzer?”
“Yes,” Spock replied. He put on a pair of tinted safety glasses, and after Kirk covered his own eyes to protect himself, Spock activated the Men in Black neuralyzer, briefly blinding and stunning Chekov. “Nothing strange has happened this month. You are not the victim of a month-long-fic-writing challenge. You are going to realize that you are sleepwalking, and will return to your quarters. You will forget everything that occurred tonight when you wake in the morning,” Spock instructed, pushing Chekov out the door and down the hallway, depositing him in the turbo-lift.
Chekov came to when the turbo-lift chirped at him. “What the-” he looked around, wondering how he got there. “Huh. Must have been sleepwalking. Weird.” He returned to his quarters, fell asleep, and remembered nothing.