Captain's Log, Stardate 1437.6: First Officer Spock in Sickbay with flu-like alien virus, predicted to remain for approximately one earth-week. He is awake and alert, choosing not to use the Vulcan-healing-coma in order to remain of service. He seemed thoroughly unconcerned, but that is to be expected…meanwhile, the Bridge crew and I are more than concerned. It will not be easy to keep up our duties when we are down our First Officer…hopefully we can come up with something to help…

Smooth jazz from the early 2000s was no replacement for the usual music playing in the background of the Recreation Room. Sure, it was sometimes nice to relish in the harmonies of music from the past – the melodic dissonance of trumpet, piano, bass, saxophone – but it was nobody's first choice. It was pretty much a consensus among the Bridge Crew that the best music involved Spock playing his ka'athyra – his lute – and Uhura making up sometimes poetic, sometimes ridiculous lyrics to go along with it. The room was lackluster without it, really.

Lackluster, too, was Kirk, doing his absolute best to try and keep the chess game between himself and Sulu interesting. Though Spock often ragged him about his lack of strategy, Kirk was finding he was better at chess than Spock let on. Or perhaps it was that his opponent needed work. Maybe if he wanted a challenge, Kirk thought, he ought to challenge Sulu to a fencing match instead.

No, there was no way he was doing that. Bones would kill him if he had to try and patch both the Captain and First Officer up at the same time.

"Have you two eaten yet?" Uhura came over to them, a dinner tray in her hands. "Or have you just been staring into the abyss, moving chess pieces occasionally?"

"I ate a while ago," Sulu muttered. He moved his rook down a level on the board – not even the way it was supposed to go. Though, Kirk didn't dare correct him.

"What about you, Captain?"

Kirk sighed – that was Uhura's way of telling him to get up and eat. Thank goodness she was part of the Bridge Crew; without her, nothing would get done. Even less than was getting done without Spock.

"No, Lieutenant, I suppose I should get on that." Kirk stood from the table and pushed in his chair, gazing blankly at the board. "We'll pick this game up later, Sulu."

"Mmm-hmm, that's what I thought." Uhura gave him a knowing smile and went to sit down with a few of the other Communications officers.

Kirk went over to the Replicator and inserted his access card. Meatloaf – sometimes he wondered whether he ate that too much. But hailing from the middle of the United States, it was the most familiar food he could think of. Granted, Starfleet meatloaf tasted nothing like his mother's, or like any meatloaf he'd ever had back home. But it was better than nothing when home was thousands of light-years away.

Home. As he sat down at a table to eat, he wondered what Spock's people did with their sick. How did they care for them? Where? What was their equivalent of the American chicken noodle soup, their antiquated remedies that held little to no medical value but mothers insisted on administering nonetheless? Surely they had one – it wouldn't involve chicken, of course, since they were vegetarian and Vulcan had no chickens even if they weren't. But there had to be something.

"Does anyone know what they eat on Vulcan?" he wondered aloud.

"Leaves," quipped the new Ensign, coming in to get his own dinner tray. Immediately he received a sharp glare from Sulu. "Well, y'know, vegetarian stuff. Plants."

"They eat fruits and vegetables, like we do, Captain." Sulu corrected. "Plant life there is remarkably diverse, for such an arid environment. At least in certain areas of the planet."

"See? Plants." The Ensign seemed quite pleased with himself.

"Well, they also have animal products," Sulu continued. "Only meat is forbidden from the diet on Vulcan; animal products which can be harvested without harm to the animals are eaten readily. This includes eggs and milk, and their derivatives."

"So essentially what we eat, just from different species?"

"Exactly, Captain." Sulu stood from his table. "And no, Ensign, not exactly plants."

Kirk tossed all that around in his mind for a bit. Clearly either Sulu had paid more attention to Spock when he talked about his home planet, or he'd done better research than everyone else. Even if he was bad at chess, the Lieutenant Helm Officer certainly knew what he was talking about.

Perhaps, Kirk thought, they could try and make food that Spock would find familiar. Though Kirk didn't pretend to know what it was like to be forced to eat food from another planet, all day, every day, he could imagine, and it didn't sound pleasant. Especially not when you were under the weather. As a kid, the rule at his house had always been that when you didn't feel well, you got to eat what sounded good to you – why couldn't that also be true in space? Comfort food surely couldn't be just an Earth thing.

Then Kirk realized. Comfort. Preference. Did Vulcans even have those concepts? There was only one person on the ship that knew that, and Kirk didn't want to go bother him to ask.