Work Text:
Late for the Party
By Kelthammer
Nyota Uhura shielded her eyes from the glare of the African sun and looked forward the sweep of red plains ringed by a distant black clump of forest that made up the game preserve. The air was so dry and clear one could see travellers from long aways--but most of the visitors would be beaming in. It was in the middle of nowhere, after all, and this was an important party.
A party that would start inside the next hour.
The captain said he would driving in by flitter, but so far she hadn't seen him--or his entourage. Nyota felt a little bit of worry at that, but had been squelching her concerns for about two hours now. It wasn't like James T. Kirk to show up behind his appointments. Not unless there was a reason--and reasons, oft-disastrous ones, tended to follow the man around.
Still, Nyota knew he would do everything in his power to make it to Phillip Boyce's retirement.
Men like Phillip Boyce were all too rare, and he was ENTERPRISE. Officers near and far were already filing in for his unofficial, informal, let's-poke-fun dinner in his honor. Meeting some of his former compatriots had been thrilling--who would have thought Number One was related to their very own Christine Chapel? Scotty was buried deep in the bowels of conversation with two previous engineers, and a man who had helped draw the original plans for the Baffle Plate Portals. They probably wouldn't see him for hours. Inside the rented villa, things were large and joyous.
What worried her was who hadn't yet shown up--the current ENTERPRISE captain, the First Officer who had served with Phillip in his salad days, and the current CMO. Knowing James T. Kirk, to be on time was to be unforgivably late, so this lack of presence was completely against his character...
A faint plume of dust was forming in the sky. She tracked it with her eyes, encouraged by its presence. It could very well be the captain. And if it was the captain, then Spock and McCoy were with him.
***
With a familiar lurch in her chest, somewhere to the left of her sternum, Nyota took in the tableau. Spock, whom she could see the clearest, was wearing his most stone-faced expression--the kind he wore when he was trying not to show the world he was shaken up by something. Jim Kirk was looking as absolutely official as his Officer's medals would allow. Nyota hadn't seen that particular demeanor from him in a long, long time--not since he'd first beamed aboard fully conscious of the spanking new gold braid on his sleeves. There was something about his photogenic sternness that just made her think the worst. Sitting in the back of the flitter, arms folded across his chest in a method of stubbornness Nyota's mother swore she had adopted just so they could name her breech birth after her, was Leonard McCoy. If the other two were opting to pretend nothing at all was wrong, Leonard wasn't going to even try. No, Nyota read clearly the stormclouds that had firmly settled to stay over the doctor's firmly knit eyebrows.
And that looked like--was that--?
The captain parked the flitter with a tight, taut SCRICH of hydrogears meshing with the hovermagnetics. All three men shifted forward from momentum, then wobbled back in place.
"Good evening, Lieutenant," Kirk said without looking at her. "I trust we're not late."
"Um, no, sir, not at all, sir..." Nyota's eyes fell upon what she had been hoping was a strange shadow on Leonard, and she quite forgot how to talk. His shining dress tunic gleaming from what looked like fresh blood, McCoy gripped the side of the door and swung out without waiting for it to open for him.
"Thank God," he said to--well, to God. "Terra Firma, Home Sweet Home, Praise the Lord, Sweet Jesus and John the Baptist, too."
"That's enough, Bones." Kirk said, ineffectually, as it turned out.
"Guardian of the Forests, and Keeper of the Game Animals, thank you for seeing us to our destination safely against the laws of physics which our esteemed and most beloved captain plyed against us..." McCoy was striding to the back of the flitter, his field kit hanging from his hip. Spock was slowly unkinking his long legs and politely waiting for his captain to unlock the door. Unlike the doctor, he would not be so human as to move impatiently. Uhura saw him reach up, and finger his IDIC badge almost subconsciously. McCoy was standing by the trunk and fishing in his kit. "And hear us, O Gods of Murphy, that you hear our supplicant cries and ask your Gremlins not to create any more glitches in the mechanical contraptions that see to our safety whilst traveling, our frail and defenseless carbon-based sacks of matter that must be manipulated by..."
"That's enough, doctor." Kirk reluctantly tore his gaze from his quietly, lunatic-raving-madman of a CMO, and remembered Spock needed assistance. "Sorry, Spock." Spock did not quite vacate the car at warp speed. But it was a safe description to say, "impulse power." The trunk popped open and McCoy leaned forward, briefly vanishing from view. A long brown object with a hoof attached to it waved in front of Nyota's wide eyes. Kirk sighed, embarassed and exasperated and trying to be calmly aloof without the presence of his normally staunch First Officer. Nyota's mouth opened in the process of asking a *really* stupid question, but shut it again when a good six inches of antler emerged. McCoy grunted and a fully grown white-tail deer tumbled to the dust at his feet. That is, a deer that was missing much of its major organs and a good bit of hair where it had impacted with the front of the flitter on its way to cross the road.
"That's a white-tail deer," Nyota said. Leonard glanced up, his eyes round and blue and innocent.
"Do tell." He said calmly. "Isn't that what I said, Jim? Huh? Didn't I say that? 'Slow down, that looks like a deer?'"
"But...North American deer are...are only in the Game Preserve." Nyota decided she wasn't being an idiot for stating the obvious--somebody had to speak for the record.
"Usually." Kirk told her. "Usually, Lieutenant. Officer Kobota told us that occasionally one or two will escape the fence during a lightning storm..."
"Too bad we hadda pass through the preserve on the way here," McCoy busted in. "But JIM was afraid we'd be late. Are we late, lieutenant?"
"Um, no, sir, not at all. You're...early by half an hour."
McCoy's resonse was a short laugh, but it was the kind of laugh that would have gotten a junior officer keelhauled under a galleon in shark-infested waters. Kirk sighed. Through his teeth.
"Doctor, don't you have some cleaning up to do before the party?"
"Cleaning up?" McCoy was bending and sloping the carcass over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. "I've gotta take care of this baby first, y'know."
"Doctor, are you going to embarass the entire complement of the ENTERPRISE, past, present and future, by your unbecoming conduct and lack of decorum?"
"Well, since you put it that way...I guess Phil will be glad to give me a hand."
McCoy shut the trunk with a well-placed kick of his boot. "Bones,"
Jim Kirk had abandoned military persona as a lost cause. What came next sounded close to pleading. "Don't you dare arrive at Phillip's party looking like that. Don't you THINK of it."
"Did you know Phil's favorite dish is smoke-bar-q'd venison?" McCoy wanted to know. "He was killed instantly, there's no fear-hormones tainting the meat, he wasn't in rut, he's not old enough to be tough..." the doctor waved his hands at the victim below. The tongue was hanging out from between the square teeth, eyes glazed with death that still somehow managed to convey an expression of ruminant astonishment.
"Jim, there's gotta be an inch of fat on those ribs! LOOK at him! Phillip spent most of last winter trying to track down one of these babies up in Whitehorse!"
"Bones," Jim had his head in his hands.
"--We delivered him right TO Phil! Come on, Jim, you CANNOT get fresher than that, and we've already paid the fine!"
"Bones..."
"I bet Phil's gonna take one look at this baby and yank out his jar of homemade sauce!"
"Bones..." Jim was barely whispering.
"Jim." McCoy stopped. His expression turned pleading. "Please. Come on. He won't give me the recipe."
"So you're going to steal a sample?" Jim asked in a strained voice.
"Wouldn't you? I've tried for YEARS. So far I've only figured out he uses apple cider as an enzyme-tenderizer. On top of the cedar AND juniper berries, the red rock salt, and stewed vanilla bean in black Jamacian rum."
"I'm surprised you didn't figure out the rum first off."
"I did, Captain Knowitall. Its tracking down the brand he uses. It's either Black Bat Killbelly, or Bacardi B--"
"BONES."
"I'll clean up as soon as we get him cut up and squared away! Blast it, Jim! This is an opportunity of a lifetime!"
"It's certainly the retirement party of a lifetime." Nyota muttered before she could catch herself.
"I know exactly what I'll say to Phillip. Had a little EMS serivce on the way over here, Boyce. The operation was a success but the patient died..." McCoy's smile remained pleasant, but deep in the irises, Nyota could see a glint that would have made the devil proud. "Nyota, would you be so kind as to get the gate for me?"
Nyota moved to obey--she figured the captain could always order her to cease, but he didn't. He stood there with his hands at his sides, embarassment mixing with just a shade of amusement.
"I'm ah...I'll be paying my respects to Dr. Boyce, Bones. You, ah...you go on and...have...fun."
"Yeah, sure--I'll be in the kitchen if anybody needs me--and they'd better not!"
"I doubt it, Bones. There's over twenty doctors here. What would acquire your presence?"
"A golf tournament?"
Nyota snickered quietly, and decided to go looking for Pavel or Hikaru. They would just love to hear about this...
END