Chapter Text
Day 1 - Baking || Vanilla, sprinkles, and chocolate flavored kisses.
“Here’s the thing that annoys me,” Nyota Uhura said without any preamble, sitting down abruptly across from Scotty.
The engineer startled violently and nearly spilled his tea on his padd. “Um. What’s that?” he said cautiously. Uhura was not a woman to be trifled with, and Scotty very much hoped that he wasn’t the thing annoying her this time. It had happened before; he wasn’t always the most observant when it came to such things. Especially when he was buried in plans for a radical recalibration of the dilithium chamber.
“There is nowhere on this ship to cook anything,” Uhura continued.
Ah. She was just here to talk shite at him. Scotty’s gaze and attention wandered to his padd, the complex equations flowing back into his mind. Exasperated, Uhura kicked him under the mess hall table. “Synthesizer will make whatever you’d like,” he muttered vaguely.
“So, I can just walk up to the synthesizer and ask it to make Maandazi, can I?” she asked him archly.
Chekov stepped over the back of a chair and settled next to the engineer, his face innocent and cherubic. He rested his elbows on the table. “Or Baklava?” he sighed.
“Purin?” Sulu asked hopefully, plopping down on Chekov’s other side.
McCoy slid in next to Scotty. “Sweet. Potato. Pie,” he whispered into Scott’s ear, popping the alliteration.
Scotty scowled down at his padd. “What the hell is this?” he asked crossly.
McCoy poked at Scotty’s half-eaten plate of dinner. The food jiggled unnaturally. “What is this Scotty?” McCoy asked, as though he was speaking to a child.
“Food,” Scott answered in exasperation.
“Is that so?” McCoy leaned back and crossed his arms. “What kind of food?”
Scott gestured helplessly; heaven alone knew. “Brown.”
“We’ve been out here almost three damn years,” McCoy sighed in long suffering. “Three years of jello with flavor bits, or whatever the hell Starfleet calls synthesized rations. In case you haven’t noticed, it is revolting. Every bite of it.” McCoy gave him a calculated smile. “Except for chocolate ice cream , which you wrote a new formula for last year. And chicken pot pie, which Jim blackmailed you into writing to stop him from telling me that you were the chocolate ice cream bandit. Which he immediately told me anyway, by the way.”
Scott closed his eyes and wearily rubbed the bridge of his nose. “And so the reason the lot of you are sitting here bothering me is …?”
“I want vanilla!” McCoy exploded. “Sprinkles! Chocolate-covered kisses!”
“We would like an oven,” Chekov explained reasonably.
“Or, even better—the synthesizer to make baked desserts,” Uhura said. “Since we don’t actually have ingredients to cook anything in an oven.”
“And we are all terrible cooks,” Sulu interjected. “Except for you.”
The Chief Engineer of the Enterprise boggled at them, and lifted his padd in the air. “This is … this is the recalibration of the dilithium chambers I’m workin’ on here. So we dinnae explode and die . And you’re talking tae me about pudding?!” His crewmates looked sheepishly down at the table.
“It’s the holidays. Back home,” Chekov sighed, tracing his thumbnail through a groove in the table before standing. “Third one we’ve missed.” Sulu followed the young navigator, and Uhura reached across the table to squeeze Scotty’s hand before heading out herself.
Scott watched her go, a puzzled look on his face. “Leonard …” the Engineer started, but McCoy just shook his head. “This is the first time you’ve been in the mess hall all week,” McCoy said gently. “I’m pretty sure it’s the first time you’ve been out of Engineering in the last twelve shifts.” He leaned forward and ghosted his thumb across Scotty’s cheek. “We miss you when you get like this.” Scott smiled ruefully, but his eyes drifted to the padd, and the maths pulled him back in.
A week later, McCoy had to confess he wasn’t feeling the cheer of the season. There was a two-week subspace communications lag, so he’d already sent a Christmas message to his daughter and arranged for some gifts to be delivered. Here on the Enterprise, literally half a galaxy away from home, there wouldn’t be much in the way of holiday merrymaking. The human celebration days were spread all over the end-year calendar, much less any of the high days of any other species in the galaxy, and so each of the holidays would largely pass unmarked. Jim would probably be up for an evening of drinking one of these nights, which was at least something to look forward to.
The junior officers club had made their play on Scotty, hoping to draw him out of his head and maybe convince the man to come up with something that might make things special. In the right mood, Scotty could jumpstart a party, but as sometimes happened, he wasn’t reachable just now.
At this point, McCoy would just take Scotty walking into their quarters at the end of a shift and giving him a kiss, much less a part of a day for a quiet holiday celebration. But when Scotty went like this, trivial things like his partner slipped his mind. McCoy just had to ride it out; it was part of the price of loving Scotty. Somewhere on the other side the engineer would apologize and make it up to him, but that didn’t stop it from hurting. McCoy shoved his hands into his pockets and headed to the mess. Dinner sounded terrible, and coffee was an awful idea this late—so coffee it was. But when McCoy arrived outside the mess hall …
“Something smells good,” McCoy said out loud to himself in astonishment, and walked through the door. “ Cookies …?!”
“Biscuits,” Scotty corrected jovially, catching his elbow. “There you are, Leonard. I thought I was going tae have tae fetch you.”
McCoy looked around the mess hall in wonder. The entire off-shift crew was positively wallowing in dessert. And it was Christmas cookies . Red frosting and green sprinkles, warm vanilla and rich chocolate, the spice of gingerbread and heady weight of fruit and brandy, music playing through the speakers that McCoy could barely hear over the laughter.
“Hey Bones!” the Captain called happily, munching his way through an enormous frosted sugar cookie. “Look at what Scotty made!”
“The raisin spice is fascinating,” Spock said, and Chekov and Sulu beamed at him on their way by, each carrying about two dozen cookies.
“How ..?!” McCoy boggled.
“I’m a miracle worker,” Scotty answered happily, just possibly slightly drunk, and wrapped an arm around McCoy’s waist.
“Very much,” Nyota said, brushing by them for seconds, or thirds. She kissed Scotty’s cheek on the way by, and then McCoy’s. “I’ll grab you a brandy, Leonard. Unless you’d rather milk?” she teased.
“Better make it brandy,” McCoy answered her, and then quietly breathed into Scotty’s ear. “You are in the middle of a manic episode.”
“Evidently,” Scotty shrugged, glancing around at the piles of dessert.
“This isn’t dilithium.”
“Isnae it?” Scott asked in mock surprise.
“You programmed these. All of these.”
Scott tilted his head in thought. “Sugar, C12H22O11,” he said. “Gluten, C29H41N7O9. Sodium hydrogen carbonate, NaHCO3. Sodium chloride, NaCl. Lactose, C12H22O11…”
“Alright, alright. Damn show off,” McCoy said with a laugh, and finally snagged a cookie for himself.
“Good choice, chocolate,” Scotty said approvingly. “Just right for …”
“Chocolate covered kisses,” McCoy breathed, and let his lips prove it.