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Chris couldn’t tell you when, exactly, the thoughts started. He was young, then. Maybe nine or ten. It was early enough that he didn’t really remember a life without.
He didn’t know, at first, that there was anything different about him, that other kids didn’t have the same worries as him. Child Chris thought it was normal to like some numbers better than others, and teen Chris didn’t consider that most atheists didn’t have panic attacks thinking that they’d go to hell just for touching themselves. After all, masturbation was wrong and he didn’t want to do it, but he couldn’t stop himself. The guilt, the assumption that he would suffer for his lack of discipline, just seemed to follow.
When he arrived at the Academy, he quickly found himself struggling to stay afloat. What had started as a preference for beginning things on the hour became a necessity, panic rising in his chest if he had to start something at 10:03 instead of right at 10:00. It reached the point where he was losing entire, long, hours, just waiting.
Late nights trended later as homework kept him up, and he eventually had to stop listening to music when he studied. A song would get stuck in his head and he would give into it, playing it on repeat for hours at a time, unable to go to sleep because he couldn’t stop listening.
Growing up in the desert, riding horses and playing in the forest, had left Chris with a sense of adventure that the Academy fulfilled instead with flight lessons. Most cadets received their pilots’ licenses during their first semester, but Chris didn’t manage it until his third. It wasn’t because he couldn’t do it, the controls feeling natural and easy under his fingers, but once again the thoughts were back. First, having to constantly check that he hadn’t caused an accident and killed another cadet while practicing formations. Then, later, more intensely and even more terrifying, a constant thought that he had died in a shuttle accident, that the reality he was experiencing was just an afterimage of his final moments. The last experience of his consciousness before his soul left his body.
His instructors never asked why he struggled with his flight certifications. There were plenty of cadets in Starfleet who didn’t like the small shuttles, after all, claustrophobia and aerophobia still common among Terran students in particular.
The thoughts didn’t stop, but they did become less frequent over time, eventually replaced with other thoughts about other topics, and Chris finally managed to pass his test. And then he took it a step further, taking a position as a test pilot after graduating.
Test piloting is a stressful, difficult job, but Chris found himself settling into a routine that worked for him, even if it gave him a reputation of being over-cautious. He’d show up an hour before everyone else, running flight checks once, twice, three times, before the rest of his team even arrived. It was tedious and time consuming, but the one time he’d skipped it, running late and only managing one extra pre-flight checks, an engine had gone offline a few minutes into the test and he’d nearly died in the resulting accident.
His methods, his thoughts, might be odd, but they worked. Nevermind that they exhausted him, and that he was still afraid of dying in a horrible accident. Images of his death, of his friends deaths, consumed him in his free moments.
What was he kidding? He was terrified of dying in general. Without homework, he now spent many nights running his fingers along his skin, finding bumps and blemishes to pick at. He’d then look them up, worrying himself with all sorts of self-diagnoses, from breast cancer to Vulcan influenza.
Vulcan flu couldn’t even cross the damn species barrier, but that didn’t stop Chris from worrying about it, researching symptoms and comparing them to his own body.
The offer for him to join the Enterprise was a welcome surprise, an opportunity for regularity and order that test piloting didn’t afford. Suddenly, he had his shifts laid out with regularity, starting at 08:00, 16:00, or 00:00. He still had to leave his quarters fifteen minutes beforehand, still spent too much time lingering in the corridor before taking the turbolift up to the bridge, but fifteen minutes was better than an hour.
And Robert April was one hell of a captain.
Chris wasn’t sure what he’d noticed first. Maybe it was the fact that Chris only ever ordered warp factor one, three, or five. Or maybe it was the dried skin of the backs of his hands, caused by too much hand-washing, or the distant look he got as the daydreams and thoughts took over during quiet moments on the bridge.
Or that every day, at exactly 10:00, Chris Pike walked through the door of his ready room, armed with something to talk about. Chris really couldn’t explain this one, the urgent need he felt every day at that specific time to speak to his captain, to hear his voice and see his face. That just seeing his CO calmed his mind, quieted the noise for just a second.
Whatever it was, April wasn’t going to do what Chris’s professors and previous COs had done. He didn’t leave it alone, didn’t ignore it, didn’t let Chris check three times to see if the door was locked. Most of all, he didn’t flinch when Chris snapped at him, increasingly anxious that his routine was interrupted and unable to put the feeling to words.
Instead, he let Chris work it out, let him pace and hyperventilate and cry, and when his Number One finally, finally sat down in the chair in front of his desk, April told Chris not to return to duty until he had a psych clearance from Dr. Boyce.
You can’t command a starship without having command of yourself Chris, and I hate to say it, but you’re slipping. You need help.
He’d never spoken to a doctor about his… symptoms. Never considered them symptoms, really, until the Captain made clear that what he was experiencing wasn’t the way everyone else experienced the world.
Chris also didn’t particularly like doctors, either, constantly worried that they would find something wrong with him, that they would confirm the fears that he had from all the research he’d done over the years. That mixed with the natural, small town attitude against modern medicine - he didn’t see a doctor at all between the ages of twelve and seventeen, and then only because Starfleet mandated that all cadets have current physicals and vaccinations - didn’t exactly inspire him to seek any sort of mental health help.
But he was stuck. See Boyce or be removed from duty, permanently. An ultimatum April knew he couldn’t refuse.
So he scheduled a meeting - 15:00, which was perfect because it was a multiple of one, three and five, and also the top of the hour - and then did what made the most sense to his brain. He made a list.
One after another, every painful thought he’d had, every urge he’d felt to check and recheck lights, volumes, and locks, every lingering fear he knew was unfounded but couldn’t stop thinking about anyway, and everything he did to make sure those fears never came to fruition.
Life got better, after.
There were good days and bad days, but more good than bad, for once. He met Boyce once a week to talk, and Boyce gave him medications that made him feel more in control of his thoughts.
Captain April left, and Chris was promoted, taking his own Number One, and trying to find a new normal with new people.
He wasn’t cured. Some days, especially after Talos IV, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that his life wasn’t real. Others, he was convinced that if he spoke, he would accidentally curse or insult someone or, on particularly hard days, that he’d order the Enterprise to self-destruct, killing everyone on board, including himself.
Despite all this, he found his functional, and he persisted. Boyce was on top of making corrections to his medications if he needed them and was insistent on keeping their Wednesday afternoon tea date, always at 15:00. They worked through Chris’s thoughts, practiced letting them go instead of hyperfocusing on them.
Chris, for the first time in his life, felt like he was learning how to fight his battles, and how to share them with others. Whether it was with his new Number One, explaining why, yes, we do need to use warp factor five today instead of six Number One, or to his new crew on Discovery, see that F I received in Astrophysics? Just one part of the larger story.
Things weren’t perfect, but they were good enough. He was good enough.