TITLE: Uneasy Life of a Space Captain.
AUTHOR: Doqz
FANDOM: Star Trek
ARCHIVE: Please ask.
DISCLAIMER: Main characters mentioned belong to JJ Abrams . No profit is being made.
The ship's computers have been programmed against producing alcohol so Enterprise is a dry zone. Kirk's bootleg supply of the Klingon rotgut runs out by the third week of the deep space patrol. It's another two months before they make landfall so he implements the only possible, reasonable plan - he braces Scotty to build him a still.
Dr. Montgomery Scott holds several degrees from Terran universities and about a dozen from alien ones. He has the resources of the most advanced federation warship at his fingertips. He's also a Scotsman.
Thus it's inevitable that his numerous attempts to produce a moonshine apparatus, often built by Tennessee rednecks from leftover teeth and bicycle parts, end in abject and explosive failures.
It's not that he can't built a still. It's just that he can't resist tinkering with it, and making it better, and adding a dylithium powerpack into the design. He accidentally discovers a new form of shuttle fuel and the maintenance department declares a bounty on him after they have to rebuild the bulkhead on the Deck 12 for the 4th time.
Meanwhile Kirk slowly begins to go insane from sobriety and the chilly, courteous politeness that follows the spectacularly dramatic break-up between Uhura and Spock.
(Spock raises both eyebrows. It is very exciting.)
Uhura finds herself trapped on the bridge. She desperately wants to be friends with the Normality Caucus but neither Sulu nor Chekov are partial to the idea. She's been branded as one of the backseat circus of utter insanity and her attempts to switch teams result in amiable but horribly awkward disasters.
That's how she finds herself on Deck 12 and is almost decapitated by the latest still experiment. Kirk has long since lost patience and moved on to the next part of his plan- which largely consists of bullying Chekov into hacking the replicators. Chekov, of course, complies, but unfortunately he mistypes the chemical formula for bourbon (the dark secret of his life is that he only passed chemistry by cheating) and Kirk spends a week in sickbay. Worst of all, once McCoy finds out, he confiscates the Chekov Replicator Expansion Pack (TM) (Copyright 2234) and declares that the supplies of medicinal alcohol will henceforth be distributed solely through his office and if the fucking Ivan thinks he should be more afraid of the captain, he should consider that the medical exams are coming up.
Chekov does not think he should be more afraid of the captain and, considering the truly impressive collection of needles that Bones managed to accumulate in the last year, Kirk is not prone to disagree.
Not that he is in the position to do shit, considering that McCoy has a video of him battling hallucinatory goblins and trying to convince nurse Chapel that he couldn't go back to the bridge because the brain roaches were making Spock sexually harass him.
On the bright side, the bribes extorted by McCoy for the carefully doled-out alcohol portions are really very reasonable and most of the conflict that would later become known as the Khan Emergency is spent by Kirk in the state of relaxed inebriation and hazy contentment. (Sulu tweaks the formula. Rumor was that even Archer agrees that it was the best brandy he ever tasted. They send him a case before the court-martial. Spock strongly suspects it is the only reason they are all still flying. Most of the crew agree.)
None of which bothers or concerns Scotty very much as he proceeds in his quest for the Perfect Still. Almost assassinating Uhura in the process, about which he's very sorry and really it was all the engineering goblin's fault and how many bloody times did he tell him about putting up warning signs?
Uhura is not that upset, really. But Scotty is horrified to discover her back on his deck the next day. He tries to explain to her that he'd really rather be left alone. He's not interested in making any pals with the bridge crew because all of you people are fucking insane. Even the laughably optimistic 'normality caucus.' The damn Asian guy has a collapsible space saber for crying out loud. Space. Saber.
He's got his goblin, and his almost-finished still, and if the rest of the ship would just leave him be he might not push the wrong buttons the next time he has to transport people.
Uhura is undeterred. It's a novel experience for Scotty - he's never been bullied into being someone's friend before. But the goblin likes her, and she gets him a Romulan manual for a cold fusion reactor, and translates it, so he supposes it's all right.
He just wishes she'd stop telling people that as an accredited xenolinguist she can authoritatively declare Scottish language to be a drunken dream of the global consciousness with no conceivable internal logic or meaning.