#crawfish étoufée | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

winterverses · 7 years

Text

Chapter Nine

The way Bones growled about Anne, you’d think she was dying. Kirk could tell that she was shaken-- the lines of her body were tense and she was just barely trembling. The phaser burn on her arm was only superficial, though, and she was otherwise uninjured. He’d come to the med bay after everything had settled; the two ships had fled, and the Enterprise was still in possession of the Sorte, the captives, the smugglers, and the cargo. Another small team of mercenaries had been captured on their way to the cargo bay, and the brig was so full that they had some of the captives two to a cell. Kirk had briefly considered pursuing the two ships, but in the end, the higher priority was getting back to Yorktown with what they had. The two ships would be taken care of later, along with any others they could find.

But they were able to stand down. The red alert was canceled, and the ship returned to normal activity, with the exception of Scotty, who was overseeing the hull repairs on deck 31. It stung a bit-- first hole in his new ship. Kirk knew he'd get over it, but it wasn't something he could brush off.

Bones had made Anne wait for treatment. There were others who were wounded more seriously and he had to prioritize them, which was why, as Kirk came up behind her, she was only just having her arm healed an hour or so after everything had cooled down. “It had to be the broken one,” Bones groused, running the dermal regenerator over her arm. “What in God’s name possessed you to go and join the fight anyway?”

“I had to,” Anne said simply. “I had to make sure the prisoners didn’t go free.”

Kirk could sympathize. After some of the things he’d heard the night before, he might have gone himself if he hadn’t been busy with the attacking ships. On the other hand, she’d ‘borrowed’ a phaser without authorization and possibly endangered the crew members in the brig. But it wasn’t as if he could officially reprimand her, and she had helped, after all. Reports were that she’d taken down at least one of them herself. Kirk decided to shelve the entire thing. It was such a tangle that it should probably just be glossed over, as it wasn’t likely to happen again. He waited in the background, not wanting to intrude when neither of them had noticed him yet. And eavesdropping, a little. Maybe.

“That was stupid and it could have gotten you killed. You should have left it to the security teams.” One edge of the burn didn’t seem to be responding well to the dermal regenerator, so Bones fiddled with some settings, and then went back to work.

“You don’t understand. If Tarenn had gotten free, he was planning to find me if he could, and I will fight to the death before I go back into that hell.” Anne’s tone was firm, but Kirk could hear a small tremble in her voice. “I had reasons to want a weapon.”

Shaking his head, Bones prodded the new skin. “Any feeling in that yet?” Kirk had the feeling that he didn’t want to pry into her implications about the phaser. She was off-balance enough already.

“It’s tender, but it’s all right.” She flexed her arm experimentally.

Kirk stepped up, and he must have made a small sound because Anne was instantly on the defensive, her head snapping around toward him, her hands clawed and her eyes so wary that they might have been feral. When she registered who it was, however, he saw her tension disappear, her body immediately relaxing and her expression warming into human relief. “Everything’s fine,” Kirk said, risking a little smile. “It’s all taken care of.”

He got an answering smile from her, although it was guilty, awkward. Her gaze flicked away from him, her eyelids lowering. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to you with that attack strategy of theirs before it happened. I only remembered what they were doing once we were in the situation.”

“But you got it to us in time to stop them. That’s what matters.” He felt her gaze come to rest on him again, the pressure of her scrutiny. “Of course, I’d like to know anything more that you have. I’m sure Spock explained it to you.”

Her lips tightened, and he could see the fear lurking beneath the surface of those misty grey eyes. “He did, yes.”

“As a medical professional, I have to protest. A mind meld with that green-blooded menace to mental stability would be more traumatic than useful.” Bones scowled, as if the force of his disapproval might cancel out the idea.

“It’s risky, yes. But it would help catch the people who hurt you. And we’re only asking you to consider it.” Kirk grinned again. “So no more pressure. We won’t bring it up again unless you do.”

Anne relaxed a little more. The idea of a mind meld must have spooked her badly. “All right. We’ll see.”

There was just something about her that made him want to see her smile. Made him want to make her smile. It was better than seeing her worried or frightened… or maybe it was just the way it lit her up, brightened her eyes and made her angular face striking. Maybe. “For now, it’s time to relax. Have something to eat, have some drinks, go see one of the movies playing in the rec rooms… There’s a lot to do on the ship. There has to be, or we’d all go nuts on long missions.”

Bones huffed in displeasure and packed up his tools. “Get out of my med bay. You’re cluttering up the place.” Bones disapproved of his involvement with Anne. Kirk wasn’t sure he cared-- he’d seen this sort of thing before. Bones was just being territorial about his patient, the way he was about his staff and his med bay.

Anne thanked Bones, and walked with Kirk out of the med bay. “I think I’ll just go to my room. This has been an interesting day. I’m not up to a crowd.”

“Do you want to be alone?” he asked, not sure if he liked the idea of her hiding away in her quarters all by herself after what had to have been an awful experience for her.

“Are you offering to stay with me?” she asked, turning those dangerous eyes on him. He almost felt like shivering under her gaze.

“Yes,” he said immediately. His logs and reports could wait a while. “Dinner or something? Nothing fancy.” He grinned down at her. “And nothing too heavy, I promise. If you want to talk, you can, but we can keep it light too.”

That smile of hers lit her face, the sight of it satisfying in a way he couldn’t define. “Light sounds good to me. And food. And music.”

Kirk laughed. “Good. I hope you like classical music.”

They ended up having creole food and listening to ancient jazz. He’d picked a safe genre since he didn’t know anything about her musical tastes, but her reaction when he’d suggested jazz had been to immediately suggest a recording by one of the most influential jazz artists of all time without even thinking about it. He couldn’t help but like that. Instrumentals made a good background to the talk about their past lives-- hers before the kidnapping, his before the Narada’s return. She’d traveled extensively for a civilian, having been to several planets that Kirk had passed by, and many that he had stopped on for whatever reasons. “I really spend all my time traveling,” she had said, her lashes lowering as if she were embarrassed.

Kirk set his beer glass down. It had seemed a bit wrong to have beer with oysters en brochette and crawfish étoufée, as if he should have been drinking something classier, but Anne had insisted that this was how it was done in New Orleans. He’d never been there, never had the time, but he decided during his next shore leave on Earth he would check it out. The food was amazing. “Did you ever think of joining Starfleet?” he asked, curious. She was intelligent enough, and he suspected that once she’d gotten to a healthier weight she’d be fit enough. Even as underfed as she was, she had some muscle, lean and toned, as if she were no stranger to physical activity.

“I thought about it. I took the aptitude tests. It was a very strong possibility, but before I’d made up my mind to apply, my first book found a publisher. Suddenly I had the means to travel-- the book was a runaway success. So I had too much to do then, writing the next book and arranging for passage to different worlds. The Academy would have had me in a science or tactical track, but… I chose just being free to write, and to see things.” Her eyes were dreamy with pleasant remembrance. “I would have suited Starfleet, I think, but I’m not sure it would have suited me, even now.”

“That’s fair enough. If you’d been an officer on a ship, you’d be stuck with the same people doing the same thing for years at a time. That can get… tedious.” Kirk flashed her another grin. “If you forget that what you’re doing is just going out into the unknown and learning it for the first time, every time.”

Anne picked delicately at her étoufée, looking down at her plate. “It sounds like you really enjoy it, although you might not have, once.”

Nailed it on the first try. Didn’t even watch him to make sure. Kirk felt his smile turn self-deprecating. “What can I say? I’ve forgotten that, in the past. Not anymore. And my crew is my family; I’ve done a lot of crazy things for them, and they’ve done the same for me.”

“What made you decide on Starfleet?” Anne asked, looking back up at him.

That open gaze made it impossible to consider embellishing to make himself look better. She deserved the unvarnished truth. “It was a dare. I got into a bar fight with three Starfleet cadets and their captain broke it up. Asked me if I liked being ‘the only genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest.’ He knew my files and aptitudes because of my father. He’s dead now.” Kirk looked away from her, wondering if this was too far, too intimate. Anne would see exactly what this all meant to him, he was sure of it. But… it didn’t feel wrong. It felt all right, as if letting her see that would put them on more equal footing after all he knew about her. “Both of them are dead, actually. Admiral Pike died in the line of duty, a victim of a terrorist attack that I couldn’t prevent. My father died saving the lives of everyone on his ship, the Kelvin. He was Captain for exactly twelve minutes, while he evacuated it and then crashed the ship into their attacker.” Kirk laughed humorlessly. “I was born in one of the escaping shuttlecraft just before he died.”

Instead of the gush of sympathy he usually got when a woman found out about that part of his past, he saw only calm consideration in her eyes. “I’ve heard of you. It’s a lot to live with, and to live up to. From my point of view, you’re doing it admirably.” Those perilous eyes warmed. “But you know I’m biased.”

“I can handle that kind of bias,” he laughed. It was sort of a relief to have that out and not to get sympathy that he didn’t need. The shadow of his father’s deeds hung over him, yes, and Admiral Pike’s death had hit him hard, but those weren’t things he wanted to be pitied for.

Anne laughed too, and sipped her beer. It was a light, crisp raspberry beer that she claimed was originally native to New Orleans, and it complemented the meal nicely. Kirk suspected that she had programmed it into the food synthesizer herself, even though she hadn't been given access. Someone who travelled habitually would pick up things like that. He couldn't bring himself to worry about it; the synthesizers had safeguards to prevent anything harmful being programmed in. “I think you get a lot of bias,” Anne said, the corners of her eyes crinkling with humor. “And I don’t think you mind it one bit. In fact, I think you enjoy it.”

Kirk found himself carefully looking her over, unable to entirely hide smile playing on his lips. “Let me just ask you this, because I don’t want to get it wrong. Are you flirting with me?” She definitely was, and she’d fallen so naturally into it that he suspected it was habit. One she enjoyed, too. A flirt who liked it for its own sake was his favorite kind of flirt.

Her eyes widened in surprise, and she looked down, thinking for a moment before she answered. “Yes, I guess I am,” she said, seeming to marvel at the idea. Looking earnestly back up at him, she asked, “Is that all right?”

He could have said no, kept his professional distance. He knew intellectually that he should. Leaning back in his chair, he gave her his most devilishly charming grin. “It’s fine by me.”

For the first time he saw faint color rise to her cheeks, that pale skin delicately touched with pink. “Good,” she said, and her lips curved in a smile he had never seen before, a half-mysterious, half-demure expression that was more an invitation than a statement of feeling. “Good. Because I don’t want to stop.”

Something about that expression suddenly had all of his attention. Kirk had to remind himself that pulling her over the table and kissing her was completely out of the question. Way too far, way too fast, way too aggressive for her mental state. Flirting only. Well, if she wanted to flirt, he was definitely going to respond. “And I don’t want you to stop. By all means, keep going.”

A/N: If you can guess the recording I mention, put it in the comments here and I’ll send you a chapter early, whether that's the next one or one further along down the line. :)

#James T. Kirk/OC #Jim Kirk/OC #Star Trek Fanfiction #fanfic #Star Trek #ST:WW #Star Trek: Walking Wounded #dark romance

0 notes