Chapter Text
Part Two (Cont’d)
“Are you even listening to me?”
Jirel looked across the table at Sunek, who seemed to be otherwise distracted by something over at the bar area. After a second, the Trill’s glare finally got through to the Vulcan, who reluctantly switched his attention back to his drinking companion.
“Would it really hurt your feelings if I said no?”
Jirel sighed and shook his head, taking a sip of his drink.
If anything, the Treaty of Organia was even more busy tonight. They had just about managed to find a table, but the entire bar was swarming with a multitude of patrons, along with several tired waitresses in cheap mini-dresses being rushed off their high heels. Still, the drinks prices were as cheap as ever, so there had been very little time wasted by either of them with the idea that they should try somewhere else. Truth be told, Jirel had just wanted somewhere to sit and stew on his problems for a while.
Not that his distracted drinking buddy was helping him out with any of those.
“I was just saying,” he persisted, toying with his half-finished Andorian brandy, “What Denella said this morning…that’s not what everyone thinks, is it? About me, and Natasha, and the…looks?”
Sunek’s attention had partially drifted back over to the bar area, but he forced himself to at least glance back at the Trill, even if he looked entirely uninterested in what he was saying.
“Yeah,” he shrugged.
“Really?”
“Or…no? I dunno, Jirel, what do you want me to say?”
Jirel sighed in frustration as Sunek’s attention was once again diverted back to the bar, the Vulcan craning his neck to look through the crowds with fresh intrigue. “I want you to at least try to pay attention to—What are you looking at, anyway?”
At this, the Vulcan immediately perked up and turned back to him, his attention now entirely on their discussion. “The Caitian. She’s back!”
“Really?” Jirel replied, failing to catch his withering eye roll before it was already in progress, “You’re still on that?”
“Heh,” the Vulcan grinned with a glint in his eye, “Not yet, but—”
“Ok, really bad choice of words. But Natasha was right. There’s no way she’s interested in you, so can we please focus on something more important?”
“Like you pining over our doctor?”
“Like,” Jirel grimaced, “What we’re gonna do about Klath. I still have no idea where he is. I sent him a message telling him where we were going, but…nothing.”
Sunek made a valiant effort to feign interest in what his colleague was saying, but in truth it was clear that his focus was still elsewhere.
“Tell you what’ll make you feel better,” he said eventually, downing the rest of his drink, “Another round. My treat.”
His entirely surprising offer coincided with Natasha, who they had left behind back on the promenade to do some more shopping, slipping into one of the vacant seats at the table with a look of surprise. “Sunek offering to buy a round?” she smiled, “Have we fallen through an anomaly into another dimension?”
“Funny,” the Vulcan retorted, “You want a drink or not?”
Jirel leaned over to Natasha to clarify things, making extra sure not to do anything that anyone could misinterpret as a ‘look’ as he did so. “Our Caitian friend is back.”
“Ah,” Natasha sighed patiently at the Bounty’s pilot, “You have to understand that she’s really not into you, right?”
Even as she embarked on another round of gentle ribbing, she felt a little bit of trepidation about pushing things too far with Sunek on this particular subject, given what the Vulcan knew about her own past. Specifically, an incident some years ago on Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet when she had been on shore leave as a junior ensign. An incident involving her, a handsome Betazoid civilian negotiator, a bed with a predictive ergonomic mattress, and her best friend from the USS Tripoli, Ensign T’Vess.
And an incident that Sunek knew in lurid detail, thanks to a sequence of shared memories via a desperate mind meld to try and contact her after she had been incapacitated by a psychoactive plant venom some months ago.
After the crisis was over, the Vulcan had sworn himself to secrecy when it came to everything he had inadvertently seen of her past, and had even offered up an acutely embarrassing story from his own past to ensure that he couldn’t blackmail her. Which had reassured her slightly. Still, when it came to dealing with the Bounty’s laughing Vulcan, she struggled to feel entirely certain that his complicated emotional state wouldn’t prevent him from slipping up at some point. Especially if she insisted on goading him on the subject of Caitians.
Still, at least right now she had some backup, from a Trill that was entirely oblivious to that incident in her past.
“Yeah,” Jirel chimed in on cue, “I don’t know what to tell you, Sunek. But she is definitely not checking you out.”
“You don’t think I can get a date with her?”
“No,” Jirel added with a shake of his head, “I know you can’t get a date with her.”
“Yep,” Natasha added, “She’s at a bar, by herself, in the middle of a huge spaceport. You’re just gonna be one of dozens of creepy spacefaring weirdos who’ve tried it on with her tonight. Knowing Caitians, she’ll probably just claw your eyes out.”
“Huh,” Jirel mused thoughtfully at this new information, “You know, I’m suddenly entirely onboard with this little experiment.”
Despite the double attack on his carefully cultivated charming personality from the two grinning co-conspirators at the table in front of him, Sunek remained cockily defiant.
He stood up, smoothed his unruly mop of hair down as best he could, wiggled his eyebrows knowingly, and fixed his best seductive smile onto his face. Which, both Natasha and Jirel noted, was some way short of what a seductive smile was supposed to look like.
“Think what you like,” the Vulcan in full flirtation mode offered back, “But I can be very charming when I want to be.”
“I find that…basically impossible to believe,” Natasha replied flatly.
“Yeah, well, you know what? You can buy your own round. Cos I’m gonna go over there, I’m gonna say hello, and then me and her are going to hit it off. Guaranteed.”
He took a moment to adjust his lurid, slightly creased Hawaiian shirt, then nodded in satisfaction.
“Don’t wait up…”
With that, he walked off confidently in the direction of the bar. Natasha turned to Jirel.
“Think he’ll do it?”
“I think it’ll be a miracle if he comes back here with his ears intact. But, knowing Sunek, he’s probably gonna get turned down, then spend a couple of hours hiding somewhere so he can pretend that he actually did hit it off with her.”
They shared a laugh, before a slightly awkward silence descended over proceedings.
“So,” Jirel managed eventually, “Then there were two, I guess. Here’s to those of us with nothing better to do tonight.”
He raised his glass in a toast and then downed the rest of his brandy, earning an amused smile from Natasha as she began to browse the drinks menu on the curious old tricorder arrangement in the middle of the table.
“You know, it’s kinda cute,” she mused as she browsed, “Denella’s off with her new friend, Klath’s trying his best to get married, Sunek’s…doing what he’s doing.”
“You jealous?” Jirel couldn’t help but ask, once again making sure he wasn’t doing anything that might be misconstrued as a ‘look’.
She snorted and shook her head, then offered a more noncommittal shrug. “I mean, I guess I was thinking when I was talking to Denella yesterday. It has been a while since someone took me out for dinner.”
“What about our old friend Mizar Bal?” Jirel asked somewhat candidly, referring to a handsome Ktarian that she had indulged in a liaison with recently.
A handsome Ktarian who had then gone on to tie the pair of them to a bomb in the Bounty’s cargo bay while he had forced the others to undertake a complicated latinum heist on the surface of a Ktarian colony.
“Well,” she offered back, “He didn’t take me out for dinner. That was just good, old-fashioned, hot, sweaty—”
“Ok. Good to hear.”
Jirel sank back in his chair as Natasha stifled a smile, recalling how much he had annoyed her during that whole Ktarian incident, as his jealous streak had made an unwelcome appearance.
Regardless of how often she had reiterated that their night together immediately after the Bounty had first rescued her had just been a one night thing, a need for companionship after three months marooned on a hostile planet following the destruction of the USS Navajo, that jealous streak had never entirely gone away. Even though, as she had put it at the time, she had just been scratching an itch. There was no deeper feeling there, certainly from her side. She was sure of that.
She continued to idly browse the drinks list, and reiterated to herself that she was definitely sure of that. No feelings at all.
“Well,” Jirel managed eventually, “I’m not gonna take you out for dinner, but I think I can stretch to a round of drinks. Deal?”
She looked up at him and smiled, the same smile that had caused Jirel’s insides to start doing backflips the first time he’d seen it. But he wasn’t about to spend any time thinking about that right now. And he definitely wasn’t about to give her any sort of ‘look’.
As the Trill started to look around for a passing waitress, Natasha leaned back in her chair and studied him for a moment. She had to admit that, when he wasn’t with the others, or he wasn’t trying to impress someone with his wannabe space captain routine, he was surprisingly good company. Not that she’d be telling him that any time soon.
Before she realised she was doing it, she also considered how, of all the unhappy romantic encounters she had had in her life to date, that one night in his cabin might have been the least unhappy of them all.
She certainly wouldn’t be telling him that.
Still, she thought, as Jirel finally and slightly clumsily caught the eye of a waitress, there were definitely worse ways to scratch an itch.
“So,” Jirel said with a grin, turning back to her and gesturing to the waitress who stood poised with an electronic clipboard, “What should we get?”
She wasn’t sure exactly what made her say it. Whether it was a subconscious reaction to everything she was feeling. Whether it was a moment of thoughtless desperation. Or whether it was just a straightforward desire to be substantially less sober than she currently was. Either way, she said it.
“Shots?”
Jirel looked a little bit confused at this suggestion.
“Shots?” he echoed.
Having said it, she elected not to put too much effort into overthinking why she said it. After all, they were just two friends. Having a few drinks.
“Shots,” she nodded back, with certainty.
Just two lonely people. Having a few drinks.
Jirel shrugged and looked back up at the waitress with the clipboard.
“Shots,” he confirmed.
Natasha leaned back in her chair, and patiently waited for her first drink of the night.
This was fine.
* * * * *
Denella slowly came to, her vision coalescing back into a definable view.
At first, her surroundings seemed entirely alien. She certainly wasn’t in the storage area in the port anymore. Then, she realised. She was in the rear section of a Ferengi Na’Far-class shuttle. She was onboard the Kendra.
She forced herself to sit up, even as her dazed head cried out for more rest. She was lying on a simple single bed in what passed for the onboard accommodation of the small shuttle. There was little else in the room save for a small single table and chair, and a two-person sofa-style seat pushed up against the far wall.
The walls themselves were a dirty orange hue, much like the exterior of the vessel, and the air smelt vaguely musty, indicating that amongst her many other faults, the Kendra was also due a service of her filtration systems. The engineer’s sense in her also immediately picked up on the tell-tale hum of the shuttle’s warp core. A faint noise on such a small vessel, but still detectable. Which meant that the Kendra was back up and running at full power.
She checked herself over and was relieved to find that, aside from a sore head where she had been struck, she seemed otherwise unhurt. Although, having been as stupid as to turn her back on someone she had no reason to trust, her ego had taken a serious beating. She wondered what Klath would have had to say about that particular tactic of hers.
She forced herself off the bed and onto her feet and took in her wider situation. She was surprised to find that she still had her dagger on her belt.
Seconds later, she drew it with a single deft movement, as a figure entered the room.
“Morning,” Erami smiled, gesturing to the glinting blade of the dagger, “Hey, no need for all that.”
She appeared to be completely unarmed, and her manner was entirely casual, but nevertheless Denella kept the weapon drawn, not wanting to underestimate the Bajoran again. No matter how unthreatening she seemed to be.
“You hungry?” Erami continued, “The replicator on this crate isn’t the best, but I think I can rustle up something edible.”
Denella’s aching head swam with further confusion. Specifically as to why the Bajoran was reacting like nothing untoward had happened earlier. “What the hell did you do to me?” she replied sharply, “And why did you bring me back here?”
Erami saw that the dagger was going nowhere and sighed, holding her hands up in a show of good-natured surrender. “Hey, I’m sorry, ok? I didn’t want to hit you like that. But we really needed to get away from those Pakleds, and I didn’t have time to explain.”
“Get away from the unconscious Pakleds? Pretty sure you had time to explain.”
“There might have been more of them on the way, I had no idea,” Erami insisted, not entirely convincingly, “So I…had to do something.”
She tried an even warmer smile, a similar one to the smile that had so disarmed Denella earlier and caused her to make a tactical error. This time, the Orion kept her weapon raised, and her focus entirely on the other woman.
“You had to knock me out? And bring me back here? Really?”
Erami’s smile faltered slightly, as she gestured to the dagger again. “Come on, you’re making me nervous now. Put that away.”
Denella shook her head. “Not after what just happened,” she replied, “And I’m getting out of here now. Back to the Bounty. Alone.”
Erami watched her carefully manoeuvre her way to the exit, keeping herself facing towards the Bajoran at all times.
“Um,” she managed, “That might be a bit tricky right now…”
Denella looked confused at this comment. Then, her engineering senses picked up on something else as she stood on the deck plates of the Kendra. Not only was there the tell-tale hum from the reactivated warp core, there was something else there, another unmistakable sensation.
They were moving.
She turned and rushed the short distance to the Kendra’s cockpit, dagger still in her hand, hoping that she wasn’t making another crucial tactical mistake by turning her back on the seemingly unarmed Erami for a second time.
And she stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the view through the cockpit window. She wasn’t on Kervala Prime any more.
They were in space. At warp.
Not only had she allowed herself to be taken by surprise by Erami back in the storage area, it seemed that she had also allowed herself to be kidnapped.
Behind her, Erami stepped into the cockpit and peered over her shoulder.
“Like I said, we really needed to get away from those Pakleds…”
End of Part Two