Chapter Text
Part One (Cont’d)
“It’s not a date.”
For the fifth or sixth time since Denella had returned to the Bounty, she found herself saying those exact words, as well as wishing that she hadn’t said anything to her colleague about her plans for the evening. As she stalked around her cabin, cleaning herself up after a long day of repairs on both the Bounty and the Kendra, the object of her frustrations sat at the small desk in the corner of the room, looking back at her excitedly.
“Sure, right,” Natasha Kinsen, the ex-Starfleet human doctor of the Bounty, nodded knowingly, “It’s not a date. You’re just meeting up with this Bajoran. Tonight. For dinner. Just the two of you. At a fancy restaurant.”
Denella stopped and stared at her, sighing with frustration. “I don’t think it’s all that fancy—Ok, it’s just that we need to discuss tomorrow’s repair schedule, and we’re both hungry. So Erami suggested we grab something to eat. That’s all.”
“Uh huh,” Natasha nodded again, her knowing look ratcheting up another notch, “Except…if you just wanted a bite to eat, we’ve got a perfectly good replicator right here?”
Denella went to counter this latest point from the increasingly irritating woman sitting at her desk, but couldn’t quite find a salient retort. In the end, she fell back on an old favourite.
“It’s not a date.”
For the sixth or seventh time, that did little to convince Natasha, who stood up and paced across the room towards Denella’s closet. “Well, agree to disagree,” she shrugged, “Either way, you still need to get ready for tonight. And I know it’s kinda super lame from an enlightened 24th century perspective, but I always used to love a bit of pre-date girly time.”
Denella couldn’t have offered a more nonplussed expression if she had tried.
“‘Girly time’?”
“Yeah,” Natasha nodded, as she reached the closet, “Back at the Academy, me and my friends used to have this whole pre-gaming ritual we’d go through whenever one of us had a hot date—”
“It’s not a date.”
“—We’d all meet up a couple of hours beforehand, then we’d replicate a few cocktails, paint her nails, do her hair, and help her pick out her best—”
She stopped herself as she swung open the closet door.
“Overalls.”
Staring back at her from inside the modest confines of the closet were a dozen or so identical sets of oversized engineering overalls, each one a slightly different hue or colour.
Entirely unabashed by her limited wardrobe, Denella called out as she grabbed a towel and made for the washbasin in her bathroom. “Dark blue ones’ll do if you wanna grab them for me. Got them on rotation.”
Natasha gently closed the doors and suppressed a frustrated sigh before turning back around to the Orion, refusing to let her pursuit of the memory of her heady, youthful days at the Academy be thwarted. In the bathroom, she heard water running into the sink. “Ok, new plan,” she persisted, “I was out shopping on the promenade earlier, and I grabbed a replicator pattern for this really cute dress. So how about we load that up and see if we can—”
“Make me look pretty?” Denella called back, stepping back out of the bathroom and towelling her face off.
Natasha felt the floor immediately give way underneath her feet, as everything about Denella’s actions, and her choice of wardrobe, made immediate sense to her.
All of her awkwardness and uncertainty about what was happening wasn’t just the sort of giddy naivety of someone getting ready for a first date with an Academy classmate, or a grumpy reaction from a workaholic engineer too tied up in her repair schedule to be able to unwind. It was something far less innocent than all that.
She looked back at the woman on the other side of the cabin, with her tousled hair pulled back behind her head and her dark grey baggy overalls on, and realised the horrible faux pas that she had made.
“Oh god,” she managed to gulp out as she squirmed under the sudden rush of guilt that enveloped her, “Denella, I—”
“Yeah, I spent a hell of a lot of my life dressing up for other people. And I didn't like it all that much. So, these days, I like to dress for myself. And I don't do dates. Sorry if that ruins…girly time.”
Natasha internally cringed at the sudden childishness of that phrase, grasping for an appropriate response as she now realised quite how big a hole she’d been obliviously digging for herself over the last few minutes.
She had never asked for any details about Denella’s past life in the Orion Syndicate, after she had been taken from the Orion Free Traders colony on Orpheus IV when barely an adult. And, understandably given what she had heard about life inside the Syndicate, Denella had never been forthcoming with any details either.
But she and the rest of the crew had run afoul of her former owner some months back, a cruel and ruthless Orion slaver called Rilen Dar. And while Denella had managed to rescue them before things had gotten too bad, and save her childhood friend in the process, even that glimpse had been enough for Natasha to realise the horrible mistake she had made.
“I am so, so, sorry,” she managed, “I really, honestly, didn’t mean to—”
“I know you didn’t,” the Orion replied with a hint of sadness, “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. It’s—I’m an idiot. Ok? I guess it’s just been so long since I’ve had a nice…dinner with someone, that I started trying to live vicariously through you. Because—”
“You’re an idiot?”
She looked over at the now-smiling face of the Orion engineer, and accepted the charges with a humble nod. “Ok,” she added with a hint of optimism, “Tell me to go throw myself into the warp core if you want, but…how about a do-over?”
“A do-over?”
Natasha nodded, then walked back over to the closet. “Yeah, let’s start this whole thing all over again. So: It’s not a date, we’ll skip over the whole hair and nails thing, and…”
She reached into the closet and extracted a specific pair of overalls, before turning back and handing them over.
“…the dark blue ones’ll be perfect.”
Denella nodded thankfully and accepted the overalls. Then, she decided to offer an olive branch in return.
“Tell you what, I’ll take one of those cocktails, if you’re making them.”
Natasha smiled wider and nodded excitedly, before rushing off in the direction of the replicator in the Bounty’s dining area.
As she exited Denella’s cabin, she paused for a second, wondering what the racket was that was coming from Klath’s own cabin. But she elected not to worry too much about that. Truth be told, she didn’t much care what the boys were up to right now.
Because girly time was back on.
* * * * *
Jirel Vincent, the unjoined Trill captain of the Bounty, considered himself a fairly tolerant man.
It was one of the traits you needed in abundance when you had a job like his, endlessly travelling around the cosmos looking for deliveries and odd jobs to drum up some latinum. Not to mention when dealing with the sort of unsavoury individuals that were willing to offer him those jobs.
But even Jirel’s tolerance had a limit. And as the speakers in Klath’s cabin began to thunder out the main aria of Act II of Kretath and Fa’vora, he realised that he’d reached that limit.
The Trill stomped over to the computer terminal on the cabin’s desk and silenced the playback, earning himself an angry glare from the Klingon, where he sat on his bare metal slab of a bed, and a look of relief from Sunek, the Bounty’s wiry and emotional Vulcan pilot.
“I was listening to that,” Klath pointed out with a growl.
“Yeah, you know who else was?” Sunek chimed in, rubbing his pointed ears with irritation, “My parents. Back on Vulcan. Eleventy bajillion light years away.”
Klath shot the Vulcan an even darker scowl, before he leaned back on the wall behind his bed and took another long slug from the bottle of bloodwine he was working his way through.
He hadn’t offered his two guests any. Mainly because he hadn’t asked them to come here. They had shown up entirely unannounced, as far as he was concerned. Firstly to complain about the volume of his music, even after he had tried to get them to see how important sound levels were to truly appreciate Klingon opera. And then, in that irritating way that the rest of the crew tended to do when he wanted to be alone, they had stuck around in the misguided belief that he needed help.
Even though, as he had repeatedly made clear to them, he was fine.
“Ok,” Jirel sighed, glad of the respite from another wave of Klingon mezzo-soprano, “Just…help me to understand all this, buddy. So, the nice Klingon lady you’ve been seeing for, what, five days? You proposed to her?”
Klath growled with irritation. He felt as though he had spent far too much of his time recently trying to explain the intricacies of Klingon culture. “I did not…propose,” he countered, “I merely suggested to K’Veth that, given the manner in which our circumstances had progressed together, it would only be appropriate for us to be joined. As is the tradition of our people.”
Jirel considered this response and shrugged. “Ok, so you kinda proposed…Klath-style. Light on the romance, heavy on the practicality.”
“Some girls like that,” Sunek offered from the other side of the cabin.
“So, what?” Jirel persisted, ignoring the Vulcan, “You’re gonna get married, and then…you stay here on Kervala Prime? Get a job at the port? Have yourself some little baby Klaths? Or are you planning on knocking through to the spare cabin and making this your marital home?”
Klath didn’t reply immediately. Because he didn’t really have any answers. Despite Jirel’s earlier jibe about his practical nature, par’Mach had meant that he had rushed headlong into this particular plan without thinking anywhere near that far ahead.
“Well, great,” Jirel continued, correctly taking Klath’s silence for what it implied, “Sounds like you’ve really got this all figured out.”
“Also,” Sunek added, gesturing to the still-present wound on his cheek, “What the hell happened to your face?”
“That is none of your concern,” Klath responded quickly.
“Huh,” Sunek nodded, immediately putting two and two together, “You Klingons don’t even do hickeys by halves, do you?”
Klath growled quietly to himself, resisting the sudden urge he had to leap across the cabin, grab Sunek where he was slouching against the wall and tear his head clean off his shoulders.
He put that urge down to the par’Mach as well.
“Whatever I said to her is irrelevant,” he said to Jirel, eager to end the discussion that he had not asked to happen, “She declined my offer. The matter is settled.”
“And you’re fine with that?” Jirel asked with a pointed look.
“Yes.”
The Trill sighed and gestured to the clearly sulking Klingon where he sat, holding what was clearly the latest of several bottles of bloodwine he had worked his way through so far this evening. “Ok. Right. You’re fine with it. Even though, after she turned you down, you came back here, locked yourself in your cabin, drank three bottles of bloodwine and started playing Klingon opera loud enough to wake someone from cryosleep?”
Klath remained defiant, sitting up a little straighter on his bare metal bed. “Yes,” he repeated, “I am fine.”
Jirel whirled away in exasperation at his friend’s continued stubbornness, and despite his better judgement, gestured over to Sunek. “I give up. I’m tagging you in.”
The tousle-haired Vulcan in the unnecessarily loud Hawaiian shirt shrugged and stepped closer to where the Klingon lay, entirely unaware of the ongoing potential threat to his current head/shoulder arrangement.
“Ok, Klath, brace yourself, cos what I’m about to say might shock you. I have also, on occasion, been dumped.”
Sunek paused to allow that bombshell of a statement to sink in, and was a little bit hurt when neither of his colleagues expressed any visible signs of surprise. Still, he kept his focus on trying to help the morose Klingon in front of him.
“So, yeah, I know how much it can hurt. And believe me when I say that I am here for you. Whatever you wanna do to get over this. You wanna get blackout drunk? I am buying the first round. You wanna pick up a friendly local on the rebound? I will be the best goddamn wingman you’ve ever seen. You wanna eat your bodyweight in frozen dessert? Just point me to that replicator and hand me a spoon! So, come on, pal. Name it. What do you want to do, right now?”
To the surprise of both Sunek and Jirel, Klath suddenly looked thoughtful, as he considered the Vulcan’s offer and tried to accurately translate the writhing tumult of par'Mach-based feelings inside him into a concrete list of real-world needs.
“I want to…hunt a wild meK’lar beast, with my bare hands. And then feast on its flesh. Then, I want to recreate the ancient, four-day battle between Karg the Unyielding and Korath the Merciless. With live painstiks.”
The Vulcan responsible for the genesis of this plan suddenly looked a lot less sure of himself, as he heard what he seemed to have let himself in for.
“Ok,” he managed eventually, “Or, counterproposal: This spaceport has holosuites. We could go see if they’ve got any nude-y lady programmes—?”
“Right, I’m tagging you back out,” Jirel jumped in quickly, “Klath, come on, I know you’re just saying all that to try and get us to leave you alone. But can you please just…talk to us? What do you really want?”
Klath knew what he really wanted. Or more specifically, who he wanted. Who every atom of his being was currently yearning for. But he knew he would never be able to explain that to the Trill and the Vulcan. All they knew was love. They knew nothing of par’Mach.
So, instead, he took a long swig from his bloodwine, and gestured at the door of his cabin.
“I want to be left alone.”
Jirel looked over from Klath to Sunek, the Vulcan shrugging in acceptance that they weren’t going to get anything more out of their colleague.
“Ok,” the Trill sighed, “If that’s really what you—”
“That is what I want.”
Jirel cast one more concerned look at his troubled friend, before he and Sunek walked back out of the cabin.
“What the hell is a meK’lar beast?“ Sunek asked, as the door closed behind them.
Seconds later, the unmistakable sound of the main aria of Act II of Kretath and Fa’vora being played at full volume thundered out from behind the door.