Uhura, though communications officer, was left to investigate the wildlife with Hikaru Sulu on Medusa II. It was a recently introduced planet, uninhabited by mammals but had some reptilian life forms, none of which were very large. The plant life was plentiful, and it ebbed somewhere between forest and jungle. She was putting a hand toward a plant, which looked much like a Venus Fly Trap, when the open mouth of it bit her. It was a sharp, sudden bite, and she quickly pulled her hand away. Small dots of blood formed on her two affected fingers, and she pulled out her small first aid kit to take care of the wounds. An alcohol wipe and applications of liquid bandage fixed the punctures, but she felt odd. Her hand now felt funny, and there was an ache in it.

What seemed like an hour to Uhura was 10 minutes after she had returned. Her eyes began to hurt, and she was having trouble seeing. Things were blurring right in front of her, and she had an awful headache. Maybe she had caught a fever from the plant? Uhura decided that was unlikely. She rubbed her brows at her station, and Kirk, who was walking around, looked at her concerned.

"You okay, Uhura?"

"Mh", she began, "feeling a little under the weather."

"Well, I definitely don't want any of my crew unwell on shift", he said as he leaned on the non-display part of her console. "Do you want to take a break?"

She nodded, and Kirk moved out of her way as she walked toward the turbolift. She felt a little wobbly, and Spock looked over in her direction. His expression flashed concern, but she smiled weakly to calm him.

Her room was right around a bend, and either way would be a long walk. She had just gotten off the turbolift when a group of crew people, mainly engineers, walked past her. She could hear the heartbeats of all of them, throbbing in her ears. The sound was somewhat intoxicating to her, and she closed her eyes as they walked away from one another, letting herself relish in it as if it was the beat of a song.

As she continued to ache, her mind questioned why that had even happen. It was unusual for her to hear the heartbeats of others, even when she was sick. Did she have a virus? She dismissed that as well, she was feeling weak but viruses wouldn't heighten your senses.

She kept walking, and more people began to pass her. The security officers shifts were changing, and there was another rush of red around her. The heartbeats all ran together, some in sync, and she rushed through them. The feeling of their blood in their bodies brought a new curiosity to her. She wanted to tap their veins. She blinked hard, finally out of the crowd as people wained farther down the hall. A tall man with a shaved head passed her suddenly. He had a cut on his hand, rudely wrapped in gauze with a line of blood on it, and the sudden sight of it put a fire in her. She suddenly wanted to suck the wound, to drink the coppery taste. She stopped dead in her tracks and rubbed her temples. What was that about?

She made it back to her room, making sure to lock the door behind her. Only a command override would get through from the hall.

"What am I?" She was thinking out loud. "Some kind of vampire?" She laughed, but it hurt her. She laid on her bed and closed her eyes. She felt empty on the inside, and her body cried for blood. She could remember the few times she stuck a wound on her hand in her mouth, and the memories of the metallic taste of her blood were filling her mouth again. She thought about biting into someone's throat, like in the old movies she watched, and the rush of liquid in her mouth…

There was a sudden knock on the door.

"Lieutenant Uhura! You in here?"

"Please leave, I'm not well." That was sort of Spock-ish, but she didn't care.

"We should go to sick bay. I'll come with you? I don't want you to be miserable."

Thinking it over, she got off the bed and unlocked the door. It immediately slid open and Uhura was greeted with Kirk's patented "concerned face". She looked up at him, her lips relaxed but her eyes heavily lidded.

"Uhura…your eyes...they're a different color." Kirk looked at her, investigating her face.

Uhura looked at him as if he was the sick one.

"Alright, you are coming down to medbay with me right now. You're obviously not well", he spoke, coming into her room and looking around frantically. "What do you need to bring with you?" He got on his communicator for McCoy, personally, to come up and help him bring Uhura down. He responded back quickly, but with an obviously annoyed voice about "probably a trivial disease".

"No, no…" She wasn't even sounding like herself anymore. Her voice teetered between weak and animal. The urge drove her more, her heart racing at the sound of Kirk's own. Being so close, it drew her in.

She locked the door again and followed Kirk into her bathroom.

"You have a lot of hair stuff. You might be there for a while, do you need…"

Uhura was looking at him with her head tilted slightly. It was as if she was a lioness, and he was the zebra she was going to eat. Carefully, he set down her shampoo and quickly walked away from her, but effectively trapped himself in the bathroom. She closed the door and slowly came to him.

"Jim."

A voice not her own, almost monstrous. The fear was evident in his bright eyes as he stroked his cheek.

"Let's just go to medbay," he urged, breathing heavily. "Bones will get you fixed up and…" He was shaking, and the racing of his heart brought her to a fever pitch. Her mind screamed to bite him, and draw that life from him. To drink his blood like wine.

She put a hand into his hair and another on his shoulder, spreading open the crook of his neck, and bit into it hard. Kirk screamed, and Uhura enjoyed the sudden burst of blood into her mouth. She moaned, as if she had just been caressed, and sucked up his rapidly draining blood out of his veins. The satisfaction she was getting from this was unbelievable, far from any human thing she could experience.

The door to her quarters was being pounded on, and before she knew it, the bathroom door was quickly sliding open. She turned around slowly to find a horrified McCoy, another science officer and a nurse she hadn't met before. She felt blood leaving her lips, and she licked them with a seductive joy on her face.

She turned back to finish, Kirk's golden shirt stained across the entire shoulder with red, and she felt a puncture in her own neck. She felt dizzy, closing her eyes as she fell backwards into a deep sleep.