The marine blue sky prickled with starlight which competed with the sparkle of dress uniforms. Beneath billows of shimmering ice crystals, the Enterprise crew jostled to get inside the underground habitat. With a dignified air, Captain Kirk hung back. Commander Spock, despite his thin uniform and lack of thermal wear, remained by his side, doing his best to appear impervious to the cold.
"There's a downside to having a new Federation member as host," Dr. McCoy complained. "They can't understand that we don't all have fur from the day we hatch."
"Try to remain diplomatic, please, Doctor," Kirk said.
"Yeah, well." He rubbed his arms and turned to look back at Spock, as if remembering the Vulcan would be far worse off. He gave Spock a visual once over. Spock returned a raised brow. At least the freezing air hung in stillness between the hardened clay walls forming a pathway into the hillside sheltering the reception hall.
"I'll be diplomatic when I get warm again. And get a stiff drink."
Kirk faintly shook his head.
"It will be temporate by planetary noontime tomorrow, Doctor," Spock said.
"If I'm still alive by then."
The covered entry area emptied out. Kirk raised an arm in invitation. "Shall we?"
They stepped inside. Above them roots had been trained to form pillars and floors. The crew had dispersed to the upper area, their voices formed a clatter of conversation that washed down into the entry area.
Spock followed as Kirk walked straight inside and around a grand balcony bordered by a living railing of blue vine. Kirk surveyed the scene below where the officers of the Lexington and Alliance were gathered along with Commodore Olson and her staff. Glances rose their way and Spock overheard his own name in a context he could not understand laden as the phrasing was with idiom, but the tone sounded amused, provoking. Spock estimated it was far too quiet at this distance for Kirk to have heard it.
Kirk turned to Spock. "Moments like this make me proud to be in Starfleet."
The same low voice from below said, "What's funny is how James T. Kirk puts on such a show of romancing everything blonde too."
Spock, focussed as he was on his captain, could not turn to localize the voice without giving away that he overheard.
Another voice pitched lower yet and more drunken, said, "Always wondered which one, you know?"
"Get out with that. None of your business."
"Maybe that's why their such a good team. Gotta negotiate a lot more."
Kirk glanced upward to where the crew had gone. The balconies were much smaller as they rose upward and only shadows of moving figures could be seen. "Three ships' worth. Hopefully everyone behaves."
Spock clasped his hands behind his back, "According to the final planetary survey, the Jhuhjia are an easy going, broadly forgiving, and extremely rowdy race when the mood strikes."
"I saw that. Is that why there are only fourteen of them here? The least rowdiest?"
Mixing in the crowd below were a scattering of tall, long snouted, cream-furred Jhuhjia. They were passing through the crowd, making eye contact with each person to be sure each was welcomed as an individual.
"I do wonder how they keep it from affecting command," said a sterner voice from below.
"I'd be distracted all shift," said a lilting voice. "Every shift. Just saying."
Spock waited at his captain's side. If Kirk felt proud at this moment, he should be allowed to maximize that emotion.
Kirk accepted a drink from a passing robot waiter carrying an elaborately carved wooden tray. "Well, let's hope things keep going smoothly. Bored Starfleet members can get creative."
"According to the survey team's notes, the Jhuhjia are attempting to make as good an impression on us as we are on them. And there are no hidden motives for their actions on the whole. It is culturally almost unknown for them to engage in a group deception."
"I didn't have time to read the notes accompanying the report." Kirk took Spock by the arm, just above the elbow, and steered him while walking. "Stay with me for a bit while I circulate."
"Of course, Captain."
They rounded to the top of the grand staircase built of pinched living tree tendril. Kirk stopped there and finished his drink, looked around for a place to set it down.
"Dynamic duo incoming, ma'am," the commodore's aide said from the floor below.
The commodore looked up, then turned and handed her drink to another aide. "They could at least try and hide it."
With that additional data point, Spock adjusted significantly upward his estimate of how widespread this mistaken assumption was.
Indisputably, Spock and his captain were close, well acquainted with most aspects of each others personalities, loyal in the brotherly way of those who faced dangerous unknowns together. Spock had made allowances for that within his own adaptation of Vulcan logic. But this. These beings assumed Kirk was his intimate physical possession. And given their reaction to their arrival together, fully accepted it. Spock, who could never seem to completely escape the sting of having been rejected by the only mate he'd known, felt an unexpected warm buoying.
Kirk started down the stairs, and Spock fixed his emotional reserve as he went, kept himself just behind Kirk's right shoulder.
Heads turned and watched them descend and navigate through the crowd to the commodore. Faces shifted through recognition and greeting, to momentary keen attention and amusement. Some looked away as if to compose themselves before turning back and saying hello and Spock recognized one of the earlier voices as that of the first officer of the Lexington.
"Commodore," Kirk said, voice official but holding a friendly warmth.
Greetings were exchanged and conversation shifted to the status of the Enterprise. Attention on himself gradually eased and Spock used that opportunity to look down at the red ceramic tile floor to gain space to examine his emotions. The unexpected tranquility was the most confusing, followed by a sense of needing to defend Kirk, but from what it was not clear. He recomposed himself and resumed his attention on the conversation.
The Commodore continued to ask in detail about the ship.
Kirk laughed. "We are taking proper care of her, Commodore. If that is your concern."
Kirk's full charm broke through in that moment. He was a healthy, attractive being. Intelligent in ways a Vulcan could not always understand. He was capable of achieving anything, of seducing nearly anyone. And for unclear, illogical reasons, the myriad fellow officers around them believed Spock had succeeded in taking all of this exceptional human for his own.
"Everyone says we are an organization of beings," the Commodore was saying. "But I prefer to think we're an organization of equipment that can move those beings. Otherwise we would be only sending smoke signals to each other."
"Have you met my CMO?" Kirk looked around for McCoy. "I think you two would get on well." He glanced at Spock and pulled up short but recovered immediately.
Spock neutralized his expression. Pride was not an emotion Vulcans were taught to suppress except where it interfered directly with the exercise of logic. Pride was the emotion meant to carry one through the trials of childhood and out into a world where one must represent more than oneself at all times. Pride did indeed have a firm hold of Spock at that moment and perhaps Kirk had detected it, as aggravatingly familiar as he was with Spock's nuances of mood.
The commodore had been pulled aside by three of the locals who, through their translators, were making sure everything was "as it was needed to be."
"We should make the rounds of the ship captains," Kirk said.
He gave Spock a knowing half smile and tilted his head to indicate the direction he wanted to head. The Lexington's First watched their approach, likely also saw Kirk's glance. Spock estimated then that every normal behavior of Kirk's with regard to himself would only serve to reinforce their colleagues' assumptions.
Instead of bristling with annoyance, Spock fixated on the implicit acceptance the mistake represented. After this much time, this much finding his way in Starfleet, it was this simple group expression that was allowing him a deeper sense of belonging. As if he'd married into the clan only to find he had everyone's full blessing all along.
"My first officer, Mr. Spock."
Spock bowed in greeting to Captain Qeenloh and his officers. A Lieutenant's hand came out to shake and was retracted immediately. Eyes slid over to Kirk who was brushing Spock's arm even at that moment as if to buffer him from being touched by anyone else.
"Always good to see you, Kirk." Qeenloh was shorter than Kirk. A narrow shouldered humanoid with gray temples and faceted white eyes. "You're still much too young to captain the Enterprise."
"That's my secret. I like being underestimated."
Ribbing went back and forth interleaved with discussions about the increasing demands of an expanding Federation.
A drink later, Kirk eventually said, "We should keep circulating. At least the Captain of the Alliance won't immediately take me down a peg. Or three pegs."
"You're doing fine, Kirk." Qeenloh included Spock in the departing nods. "Keep the best people happy." He gave Spock a knowing wink.
They shuffled through the crowd around the tables so Kirk could pick up a skewer of food, then moved to an open area beside a broad fabric-wrapped pillar where Kirk resumed surveying the crowd.
"Keep the best people happy. You happy, Spock?" Kirk asked.
"If I were not, I would inform you first, Captain."
Kirk chewed thoughtfully. "This might be the very first time you've not simply denied that could be meaningful." With his teeth he neatly slid another bite off the skewer. "What am I to take from that?"
"That I have decided it is not a good use of one's energy to insist language between mixed cultures follow rules of philosophical and semantic purity. Especially when the underlying meaning can be estimated to an acceptable degree and the appropriateness translated to my own situation."
Kirk smiled to the extent his eyes wetted. "Why Spock. Listen to you."
Dr. McCoy sidled up with three skewers in hand. He had Ensign Chekov with him. "We're going to go up and do some babysitting. Also the drinks are too watered down but are less so upstairs. I hear."
Chekov nodded eagerly.
"Good idea," Kirk said. "Let me know if you need backup."
McCoy gave a sloppy salute and practically jogged up the stairs.
Kirk stuck the empty skewer down in a sand filled urn provided for them. "We should get back to mixing. I'm not cramping your style, am I?" He asked, as if immediately and intentionally testing Spock's new resolve on language.
"There will be ample time tomorrow to speak to Sciences aboard the other vessels, Captain."
"I see. Of course." But the words were in contrast to his brightly active eyes.