Chapter Text
Day 27 - Roasting Marshmallows || Roaring bonfires, laughter of friends, and gooey marshmallows.
Jim had arranged it, and it certainly took some arranging. A summer reservation for a camping and climbing spot at Yosemite Planetary Park usually took years. But he’d managed it, somehow, probably with nothing more than his name. They were mere weeks from deploying again, a third five year mission, and probably shouldn’t have been Earthside at all; there was far more to do than they had time for. But here they were, all together in one of the most extraordinary places on the planet.
“Here’s your antigrav harness, Bones,” Kirk said cheerfully. McCoy looked mournfully up at the vast wall of El Capitan, which the Captain apparently expected him to climb, at least for a while. Sulu and Chekov were already ready, and Spock had strapped into antigrav boots.
“How come Scotty and Nyota get to stay behind?” McCoy complained.
Jim shrugged. “Scotty threatened to resign, and he may have been bluffing, but I couldn’t risk it since he is literally irreplaceable. And Nyota is … not to be trifled with. Have you met her?”
Scotty patted him in the shoulder. “Dinnae worry, Leonard, we’ll have dinner for you when you get back tae camp.”
“Assuming I survive that long,” McCoy grumbled, and followed Jim, always and as ever. And he’d never admit it, but the view, even from the relatively modest height he’d achieved, was breathtaking.
“That’s something, isn’t it Spock?” he murmured to the Vulcan, who was hovering sedately beside him with his hands behind his back.
“The aesthetics are impressive,” Spock replied, and then glanced upwards. “But if you will excuse me, I believe the Captain is about to fall, and has turned off his antigravity protection.”
McCoy kissed the ground gratefully when his feet were safely back in it, and pretended to complain all the way back to camp. Jim’s indulgent smile said he wasn’t buying any of it, but McCoy had a reputation to uphold.
As promised, dinner was bubbling deliciously over a fire when they arrived. And, not unexpectedly, Scotty was dozing with his head in Nyota’s lap, the casual intimacy of a relationship that McCoy didn’t quite have a part of, but which never gave him pause. It was the same one that McCoy had with Kirk and, yes, Spock. Something inexplicable, something wonderful. It was love, but—not soulmates; that was something else. Soultravelers.
Leonard threw himself down beside Scotty, and kissed him like a man who had escaped death. Scotty levered up on an elbow, first meeting Leonard’s need, and then bringing him down gently.
“How was the view?” Scotty asked when Leonard came up for air.
“I have no idea,” McCoy lied. “I was just hanging on for dear life by my fingertips.” Scotty exchanged a glance with Uhura, neither of them believing a word of it either, then kissed Leonard again and climbed to his feet to finish the food.
Dinner was devoured and cleaned up before the sun set, and the stars of the Milky Way blazed across the sky in a way that they did in few other places. The dark skies here were carefully protected as a part of the exquisite value of this extraordinary place. The seven of them lounged around the fire, which had started as a roaring bonfire but had finally burned low enough for roasting marshmallows in the glowing coals.
McCoy had carefully propped a Graham cracker against a rock facing the flames, and was waiting for a slab of chocolate to melt across it. He’d steal a marshmallow from the row that Scotty was idly crisping to golden perfection.
“Jim, you can’t just burn them,” McCoy lectured from his place reclined against Scotty, who was idly tracing patterns against his hip with one hand, fingers dipping below the band of his trousers just often enough to be wickedlydistracting.
“I like them that way!” Kirk argued, blowing out the flames on another one.
“We need a song,” Pavel suggested, and before anyone else could chime in, Kirk and McCoy burst into a truly terrible round of “Row Row Row Your Boat,” to much laughter, before Uhura took over. They had spent many evenings together in the rec room, a tiny bubble of home in the vastness of space, listening to her extraordinary voice. And although they were less trained, Spock’s baritone and Scotty’s tenor were true, and easily weaved the harmony in the song, as they had so many times.
The fire was nearly gone when their Captain spoke again, quoting into the quiet dark:
The stars are with the voyager
Wherever he may sail;
The moon is constant to her time;
The sun will never fail;
But follow, follow round the world,
The green earth and the sea,
So love is with the lover’s heart,
Wherever he may be.
Wherever he may be, the stars
Must daily lose their light;
The moon will veil her in the shade;
The sun will set at night.
The sun may set, but constant love
Will shine when he’s away;
So that dull night is never night,
And day is brighter day.
“There’s our signal, friends,” McCoy said, standing, and trailed his fingers up Scotty’s neck as he went. The group climbed to their feet, yawning, heading toward their tents. McCoy took Scotty’s arm, and tilted his head back as they walked. “I do like the stars from this angle,” he said fondly. “But I’ll walk in them, one more time, if it means being beside you.”
“Just once more?” Scotty asked wistfully, looking at Leonard, not the stars.
McCoy pulled him closer. “Once more above the stars for me. And then I’ll be content to stand below them, and look up and wait for you.”