Ensign Channing realized that he should by this point in their mission probably be used to his command crew, even if they were some of the most famous members of Starfleet and, you know, heroic, bad-ass world savers.
He did see them all the time, after all. They weren't the kind of officers to command from afar or spend all of their off shifts in their own feted company. He was sure that they knew every crew member's name and had spoken with all of them. Personally, he'd talked to them all at least once.
Pretty much, they weren't like any other officers he had ever known, which granted, weren't very many, but still, he'd polled his other friends in the service and they had all agreed that their behavior was out-of-the-ordinary. According to his polls, it seemed like everything aboard the USS Enterprise was out of the ordinary.
The Chief Engineer had a fondness for sandwiches and had anthropomorphized the ship.
The Chief Medical Officer could cuss the air blue and produced miracles with regularity.
The Chief Communications Officer (his personal commander) had a velvet tongue that could charm and cut with equal measure and little warning.
The Science Officer and First Officer was, quite frankly, one of the scariest beings he had ever interacted with, but the ensign had also seen him handle plants with the gentlest of touches.
The Captain was, well, the captain.
And in the current shift alone, this was the third time Ensign Channing had seen him running down the hall, the FO close at his heels. But this time, he was joined by the CMO, who was looking slightly winded, and his own Lt. Uhura, who scowled at everyone in her path.
Remembering that he was supposed to be at the communications station and not gawking, Ensign Channing scurried down the hall, hoping to escape her sharp notice.
He went quickly, shaking his head. Yeah, he should get used to them, but he still didn't think he ever would.
Uhura took note of one of her people aimlessly meandering through the halls during a time of elevated risk, but was too swept up in the captain's drama to reprimand the man presently. God, couldn't anyone be trusted around this place?
Kirk felt her irritation like a physical sensation across his back. Well, it wasn't his fault she was pissed. She was the one who saw them in the hall and demanded to come along to the holding cells, citing a need to examine the source of the mysterious babbling crewmembers.
Privately, it was his suspicion that she wanted to keep an eye on her boyfriend or remind him forcefully of her (angry) existence, but he wisely kept the thought to himself. Neither Spock nor McCoy had said anything after his revelation about the Venus drug, instead following him silently as he took off towards their detainees.
Not yet breathing heavily (because he did keep in shape – space wouldn't make him soft) he burst into the holding deck at top speed. Spock was beside him and everyone else trailed behind in a staggered line. He didn't pause to give commands, but rather roared for Security to open Cell Three for his admittance. The two officers at the control station scrambled to obey him. He did not like how it looked suspiciously understaffed down here.
Thundering up to the door, he looked through the rapidly widening opening, making a cursory visual survey of the place. What he saw beyond made him stop cold and suck in an involuntary gasp of air. His First Officer halted just behind him, near enough so that Jim could feel the heat of him, which suggested to the captain that were it not for his Vulcan reflexes, Spock would have collided with him.
Within seconds Bones and Uhura came up to them.
"What?" demanded the doctor, "You ran all the way here, and you stop now? Almost hit ya."
He stopped and looked into the cell. Kirk didn't turn to watch him, but he would have bet his next two free shifts that McCoy was a nice shade of puce.
"God damn it, Jim! What're we gonna do now?"
Yep, definitely puce.
"Doctor McCoy," Spock began in his smooth way, "naturally, the Captain will see to this matter. Most logically, we shall begin swiftly by examining the cell itself and then security footage to determine to whence the detainees have absconded."
It was sweet how Spock thought that Jim's logic would follow his own. But Spock had never been outside the law. Jim had. He knew exactly what he would do were he Harry Mudd.
"Thanks, Spock, but I've already got this. We're going to have to haul ass though."
He turned to the poorly manned booth, "Tate! X'hau! Get up a party to collect a bunch of unconscious personnel. Tell them to search the route from this deck to the Shuttle Bay. And tell the bridge to lock down the Bay. We'll be discussing how it is criminals escaped when you were supposed to be watching the monitors later." He hardened his voice at the end, letting the officers know that even in the confusion their substandard performance had been noticed.
He needed everyone performing to the best of their ability, especially in a time like this. But Kirk did not have time to dwell on it, and took off towards the deck where all of the smaller vessels aboard the Enterprise were housed.
"You think they're just going to go straight to an escape ship? What if they're hiding, planning on taking over the Enterprise?"
Despite her pissy-ness today, Uhura thought quickly, he would give her that. Her idea was not an impossible one, but rather one that Kirk found to be –
"Implausible, Lt. Uhura. Four against the entire crew would be a highly disadvantaged struggle for Harcourt Mudd. He would want to remove himself from Starfleet custody and evade capture far more than he would wish to acquire a starship, particularly this one, which he would have no hope of keeping."
Jim shot a small grin at Spock, who raised an eyebrow slightly in response.
"My thoughts exactly. He wants to make some money, not come into direct conflict with us. And the only way off the ship is with another ship."
As the group continued to run, Uhura fairly crackled with annoyance behind the captain and the first officer, but she couldn't fault their reasoning. It only made everything that much worse to watch them think and run in tandem, a perfectly matched pair in front of her.
Her earlier conversation with Spock flashed in her mind, stabbing her with every fall of her foot against the echoing floors.
"The Captain is fascinating. Do you not think so Nyota?"
The way captain always had a capital "C" when he said it.
The expression that he didn't even realize he had on his face.
Excitement.
Hope.
Love.
A way that he had never managed to look at her.
She'd known it all along, but figured that if she ignored it, it couldn't be true. He couldn't do it. Couldn't forget about her. Couldn't be giving his heart away to another.
But he was. He had been ever since that fucking academic hearing.
Everything about James T. Kirk drew his focus. His attention. His thoughts. His emotions.
She knew that Kirk thought that Spock didn't trust him or disliked him, with the way that he was always fighting about regulations and protocols.
Spock wouldn't have reacted that way with anyone else though. If he disagreed with his captain, his superior officer, he would have calmly addressed the issue in privacy. Just as she'd seen him do with the Xenolinguistics Dean or Christopher Pike. Instead, he blazed at Kirk, running himself to the borders of his control, fighting to be heard by the stubborn, wayward kid.
He thought about him constantly, bringing him up in conversation with Nyota – in the Mess Hall, when they played music, during private time in her rooms (never his).
Captain Kirk trampled into every corner of their time together, until it seemed to Uhura that he loomed larger in their relationship than either of them did. A titanic statue with a silly pose that planted itself between she and Spock.
Today though, when he came by her room to call her to the command meeting, he hadn't been angry or frustrated. He'd brought up the captain in a calm way, asking her that dratted question.
"Do you not think so, Nyota?"
And suddenly, she couldn't pretend anymore. Couldn't accept it with passive grace. She'd exploded, flooding out her anger with a simple statement.
"Spock, I can't be in a romantic relationship with you," she told him, her words chipped like pieces of glass.
She'd closed the door in his blinking face and then raged around the room, mad at him for not fighting for her, mad he was not pounding down the door, mad at the world for being so damn cruel, mad at the captain for his stupid fucking charisma, but mostly mad at herself.
Mad that she had pursued him so blindly in the first place, when it was clear he wasn't for her. Mad that even now, she loved him.
It was enough to make her scream. It was certainly enough to make her follow him down the halls like a silly, sick puppy dog, watching him parade around with the captain, like he hadn't just lost his first girlfriend today. Like she'd never mattered anyway.
God, she was a masochist.
They burst into the Shuttle Bay, where the alert lights were flashing and the flight doors were being sealed, but they were too late.
One of the small ships at the far corner was already gone. The one that had carried four fugitives hours before.
Kirk swore viciously, earning him a look of grudging respect from McCoy.
Done with his outburst, the captain sighed resignedly. "There's only one place for them to go with their craft in that condition. Mr. Spock, speed up those projected calculations - we're going to Rygell. Now."
Uhura is one of those characters that just takes over my writing sometimes. I love writing from her perspective.
And I think it adds to the story. Now we all know why she was sooo pissed at the command meeting...
How about a review for my masterful handling of plot threads? ;P
(Modesty must pay the price when review panning is the game.)