Aaaaaay, hell yeah, I fucking live for Star Trek AU’s.

All right, so I’m going to take this to mean that one AU where the fair ship Revolution is out on her five-year mission under the command of Captain Lamarque, a steely-eyed woman with a reputation for even-handed care of her crew whether they support her or not.  Her first officer, Commander Enjolras is a communications specialist, beyond his command training, and everyone who knew him before his commission jokes that he chose it because he always wore bright red anyway.  Those jokes are mostly made by his two closest friends from the Academy, both of whom went out of their way to get assigned to the same ship—Combeferre, the youngest out of the three doctors on board (and half-Betazoid who will cut you if you ask about his species’ “sensuous nature”), and Courfeyrac, the ship’s counselor (technically a non-com, but still part of the crew).  

A quick overview of the crew of the Revolution:

• Ensign Joly, the navigator—he’s also a dab hand with medicine and can play field medic when necessary, but he has an almost uncanny ability to keep track of directions even in space (on Earth, he can always find true north)

• Lieutenant Lesgle, whom everyone calls Bousset, the very ill-fortuned helmsman—he and Joly share a brain, as far as the rest of the crew can tell, and he might have a habit of falling into holes on away missions, but he can steer through an asteroid field blindfolded

• Lieutenant Commander Musichetta, a half-Vulcan who rejected the Kolinahr and learned fourteen languages by the time she was eligible to join the Academy, communications officer and queen of all she surveys (according to Joly and Bousset)

• Lieutenant Feuilly, Romulan engineer and everyone’s go-to for repairs done in small spaces because…well, Romulans run a bit taller than humans, but Feuilly’s short even for a human—don’t let the small stature and whipcord build fool you, though, he’s been known to toss people invading Engineering like they’re made of paper mache

• Lieutenant Bahorel, part-blood Klingon security officer and the sweetest being any of them have ever had the pleasure of meeting—sure, he can tap that racial legacy of berserker rage and he loves a good fight, but he braids Cosette’s hair and helps Joly with his prosthetic leg when it’s giving him trouble and keeps a cat named Amie

• Ensign Prouvaire, Jehan to their friends, escaped Orion slave and boss of the ‘ponics bay—Jehan is gentle and fond of feeding their people, but they also have a very alarming ability to whip knives out of thin air and fillet an opponent if necessary

• Lieutenant Grantaire, one of the first astrometrics graduates of the Academy, who insists that he doesn’t do anything the ship’s computers can’t manage themselves and he only chose the major because it took advantage of his artistic abilities—he’s immoveable on this point, no matter how much the others argue

• Commander Euphrasie Faulchelevent, or rather Cosette, the half-Cardassian protégé and adopted daughter of Ambassador Valjean—a talented science officer and a brilliant tactical mind who often gets taken on away missions, she and the chief of security have spent several years reaching a détente, and later a proper friendship, despite the awkward details of their childhoods

• Lieutenant Commander Eponine Thenardier, chief of security—no one has any idea how she managed it and the captain isn’t telling, but she got the promotion not two years out of a wildly unusual Academy career

• Gavroche Thenardier, officially a passenger and unofficially the casual student of half the officers, who came as a package deal with Eponine because ‘if you think I’m leaving him alone on Earth for five years, you’re crazier than I am, Captain’

• Marius, no rank, not technically a crew member, the disgraced and only-barely-not-disowned grandson of a diplomat, sent along officially to ‘gain perspective’ and functionally to pick up even more radical ideas than the ones that landed him there in the first place—he’s also stupid in love with Cosette, which will go over a treat with his grandfather, who put up a terrible fight when the Cardassians were brought into the Federation after the war was over

So anyway.

They get out into deep space, everything is going swimmingly—as much as anything ever goes swimmingly on Federation starships, at least. They pass the six month mark, when most of the close friendships and personal rivalries have settled themselves, and the year mark, when tensions start to snap, and even the halfway mark, when people start to go stir-crazy on the ship.  Everything is still going well, smooth as silk save for the usual chaos.

And then they run into trouble, three and a half years into a five year mission.

Specifically, they run into an empire at the edge of space, which makes a very respectable attempt to annex the Revolution and strip it down to understand the hyper-advanced Federation technology on board.  

• (I am a strong believer that the reason Federation ships have so many issues is because humanity is entirely composed of devoted neophiles.  Everyone else’s new technology gets weeks upon months upon years of testing before they slap it on a ship and send the ship out to god-knows-where with no possible help, which is why Romulan and Vulcan and Klingon ships always work like a dream and you occasionally get Federation ships straight-up going rogue and trying to murder the crew.)
  

• (I feel that Voyager is proof positive of this theory—they wired a ship up with bioneural circuits and packed it off on a mission, and then the bioneural thing went tremendously awry like five separate times and precipitated a number of other disasters in a roundabout way.  To say nothing of the fact that, every time the Federation runs into the Borg, their solution is basically ‘better make our solution even more ridiculous than last time.’)
  

• (The Revolution also falls victim to this.  Part of the reason Feuilly does so excellently in her Engineering bay is because he’s the right kind of crazy to understand the wildly arbitrary modifications their chief engineer made to the warp core.)
  

This empire—which won’t negotiate and simply announces that ‘you are now a subject of the Monarchie, you will submit or suffer the consequences’ on loop over the comms—responds as most empires do, when its new ship resists: violently.  The attack on the Revolution is apocalyptic, but between the efforts down in Engineering and Astrometrics, and a truly stupid maneuver pulled off on the bridge (contrary to Bousset’s insistence, starships are not really designed for asteroid fields, and that double barrel roll they had to execute to evade a dual torpedo blast put quite a strain on the inertial dampeners), they scrape free and conceal themselves in a nebula.

And then the list of casualties starts rolling in.  Captain Lamarque, hurled into a bulkhead in the first strike and unconscious, comatose with pressure on her brain.  The chief engineer, killed forcing the impulse engines to double their output and get them away.  The chief medical officer and her immediate subordinate—two out of three doctors—dead on impact.  Dozens of others, sucked out hull breaches into the black, and even more injured. The Revolution is a mess of battlefield promotions, Acting Captain Enjolras and Acting First Officer Fauchelevent and Acting CMO Combeferre and Acting Chief of Engineering Feuilly.  

After two days, things are slightly more in order.  The captain is dead, as are a number of the injured, but those who will die have died, and those that will recover have begun to do so, and it is time to sort things out, beginning on what they’re going to do.  They can’t hide out in the Musain Nebula indefinitely, but they’re too far away to send a detailed request for reinforcements to Starfleet without a massive overhaul of their communications array.  They have to warn the Federation about the incoming Monarchie, but they can’t spare the time to go back themselves—the Monarchie is on the move and they’ll need to hold them back somehow.

Newly-minted Captain Enjolras calls a meeting of the senior staff—who are all much less senior than they were a week ago, but such is the consequence of a massacre—and they settle down to plan.