The mess hall was filled with the random group who had the time: Chekov, Scotty, Uhura, Gaila, Nurse Chapel (who had been pulled along by Uhura), Ensign Riley (pulled along by Gaila), and an engineering worker who had been invited with a shrug after giving Kara her new layered haircut. Kirk was attempting to keep order over the chatty enthusiasm, insisting, "for once," on "some level of propriety." Gaila and Kara, naturally, were wrecking this goal systematically, and there was increasingly less he could do about it.

While Kara was pouring champagne in one of the cheap glasses, Gaila said, "Did they even get you the skirt uniform?"

Kara snorted. "I can't get a jock suit over that."

"Oh, so on the off chance that you are needed in the viper on short notice, you have to wear pants all the time," Uhura said sarcastically.

Kara wrinkled her nose. "I think you can make up for it, Lieutenant, I've never seen you in the pants except when going planetside."

"I haven't either," Jim agreed enthusiastically.

Uhura shrugged. "I just don't like pants. I grew up in the heat."

"You...You don't like pants?" Kirk stammered.

"Kara, you've got such nice stems," Gaila was whining. "You should show them off."

"You're the one with the stems, babe," Kara teased, lightly slapping a green knee.

"Hey!"

"It's alright, you've got that red hair," Kara pacified, over-girlishly assuring, "You're like a great big rose."

"Aw, thank you!" Gaila cooed.

"Propriety..." Kirk warned, rolling his eyes at the whole show.

"What?" the two replied in innocent unison, and Kara pointed out, "It's my party, captain."

"You're right. You're right, it is your party, get over here." Kara came to stand at the front and Jim said, "Uhura, you wanted to..."

The communications officer excitedly stood up, coming over with a PADD to read off of. "Ooh, ooh, yes, I've never gotten to do this before. Alright, just hold your hand up..."

After Kara was sworn in rather informally, the little gathering felt like any other particularly good day in one of the rec rooms; at one point Kirk came over and apologized, promising, "I'll get some Admiral to pin a fancy thing on you next time we have an inspection, I know this isn't much..."

"Come on, Kirk, you know I don't care." Kara reached for his empty flute and reached to refill it for him. "By the way, Gaila and I and a couple others are going to continue tormenting you unless you let up on the ambassador's ball..."

"Oh, that's what...You're in on that?"

She shrugged. "I don't give a shit either way, I just owe Gaila one."

The fact that Kara was in on this battle of pranks and torturous teasing made Kirk realize he should just give up; with an aggravated gesture he sighed and dropped his hand to the table before beckoning Gaila over with a mock-saccharine smile.

"Yes, captain?"

"You may inform the masses of your victory," Jim hinted, allowing her hope to surge before he explained tersely. "Women may wear a conservative—conservative—garment of their own choosing in lieu of the usual uniform to the ball following the Babel conference..." A couple others had overheard and were laughing in the enthusiasm of spectators. "...Men will be wearing the standard dress uniform, sorry, but I don't even wanna know what Sulu would try to get away with."

Gaila was positively giddy as she thanked him, and when she went back to telling Riley a story Kara was just shaking her head in mild annoyance. She and Gaila really didn't get each other, and their friendship seemed solely based off the incredulous joke of not understanding how it had happened, but it worked somehow.

Kara's shoulders flinched in a shiver when a group of fingers spidered at the back of her neck, but she heard the deep chuckle before she turned and elbowed McCoy in the ribs behind her. "Hey, bird," he muttered casually as he gave her a lazy squeeze.

"Thought you were stitching and bitching."

"Yeah, well, I left somebody bleedin' on the floor so I could come and tell you congratulations and all that." They smirked at each other. "So, congratulations. And all that."

She gave him a cynical once-over, dryly charmed. "Thanks."

Kirk turned from his chatter with Scotty to greet Bones. "You ready for this today?"

"Christ. As ready as I'm gonna be..."

"Meta III," Jim explained flatly to Kara, regarding the away mission they'd be taking in several hours. "We have to beam in right in the middle of their damn jungle, which is, I shit you not, on record in one of the data books as the stickiest place in Federation space."

"Oh, it is not," McCoy disbelieved, while Kara started laughing in puzzlement.

"It's because...," Jim paused for emphasis, "these things, which are sort of like, I don't know, feathered big cats, lay their eggs in this swampy sticky wet mess. And there's no way to get around it without the possibility of alarming the inhabitants." He said this last with a dainty, annoyed gesture with his hands. He was in a good mood; respect for the authority of Starfleet rules was therefore hard to come by anywhere on the ship.

"I say we skip it," McCoy joked bluntly. "You can write up a bogus log."

With a grin Kirk asked, "Hey, Kara, you wanna fill in for my fragile CMO?"

"No way, man, I'll kill you if my first away mission is that lame..." To McCoy she grinned and said, "Don't throw up on anybody."

She was rough on the teasing today. He shook his head tightly. "Girl, you are gonna get it next time you land yourself in sick bay..."

The conference was the next day, marking the first shore time taken by the entire crew since Jim had taken command. He and Bones got into their dress gold and blue and to the bar pretty fast and were able to leisurely watch the crowds thicken, picking out members of their own crew as they appeared among the myriad of species. McCoy was leaning in to order his second drink when the captain's glance was caught back and to the left, gaping.

"...Jim. Uh..."

"What?" he was shooting back unapologetically. "You can't sneak up on people when you look like that, Kara."

They'd both probably assumed she'd just opt for the women's skirted dress uniform like a few of the other female crewmembers, but here she was in a deep green and black gown, simple but forming to her in all the right places, and her hair...

"Jesus fuck." McCoy didn't miss a beat. "You wanna dance?"

Coming up next to him at the bar, she gave the doctor a shove of mock-distaste. "Nah, you're too tall." She took a sip of what he'd just ordered, flinching and giggling before she had the glass back down as he dug an irritated tickle into her side. "Stop—okay I'm kidding I'm kidding, stop stop...But later. I've been wanting a drink for hours."

Jim was leaning in. "...You gotta dance with me first, you know."

Already mildly irritated that she couldn't spot the bartender, Kara cocked an eyebrow at him, wondering how he'd already managed to get more drunk than he'd probably intended. "Why?"

"Cause the alternative is dancing with me after Bones, who is not the type to dance more than once throughout the evening."

"You are such an adolescent for thinking that out," she informed him. With a sigh she took a sample of the captain's drink and after setting it down muttered, "Alright, let's go."

The band had picked up into playing a stuttering sort of lounge music that Kara kinda liked. Jim was pretty good at faking the old-fashioned ballroom gusto, considering the cocktails were already going to his head. On his way to the bar Scotty only looked at them long enough to intone, "Magnificent." Jim assured her it had something to do with the dress.

"So, um..." He looked directly at her now, and then he pointed a finger over her shoulder, towards the bar. "When is that gonna happen?"

She just slowly reacted by rolling her eyes, pacifying, "It's happening, Jim."

"Oh, is it really?"

She just shrugged, her usual defensively indifferent response.

"Does he refer to you as his girlfriend to his daughter?"

"I...have no idea."

"Listen. I do get it. I mean, you're still adjusting to this new life, it's a bad idea to get into a relationship now because you don't want to define your life on the basis of that relationship, etcetera—whatever..."

He gave a lofty wave of his hand while Kara attempted to digest the sound of him talking like a self-help lecture.

He slowly cocked an eyebrow, gave a come-on-you-can-trust-me kind of tilt of his head. "You, um. Been with anybody else since you got back?"

"No." After a second she glared. "Try not to look so impressed."

"Kara...Let me tell you a secret, okay?"

"Ugh..."

"Now, listen. I am...just a little bit in love with you—"

She immediately cut him off, trying not to laugh, "Right, first of all, I'm pretty sure everybody knows that..."

"Nah—Shut up, that's not it, that's not it. Look." They were more loosely even dancing at all now that the music had gone to a slower number, and his expression grew into more emphasis. "You are magnificent, and I somewhat feel the need to say? If you're not on the market, get the hell off the fence. Cause oh, my iGod/i..." This last exclamation was him looking back towards the bar again with raised eyebrows, now hushing his voice down just slightly as he evenly confided, "The guy would wait forever for you."

With a small smile that averted his glance, she brushed a couple nonexistent crumbs off of Jim's jacket, then lifted an eyebrow at him.

"Don't make him?"

"I will take it into consideration, Captain."

"I'm glad we had this talk. Now if you'll excuse me..." Jim gave a mixture of a cringe and a smile off to the far corner of the ballroom. "I need to go convince my first officer he's having a good time."

"And good luck with that."

About as soon as Jim took off she looked around to see McCoy coming up behind, grinning with a happily flushed Nurse Chapel. He quickly grabbed Kara's hand. "Come on, you gotta watch this."

"Not so fast. If somebody's getting drunk under the table, it's nothing I haven't seen before," Kara promised sardonically, gripping his hand to make him stop heading back the other way. She pulled up to him and slid her arms high around his neck, her expression playfully insistent.

He gave Chapel a shrug, took up with the swaying. "So what did Jim want?"

"Nevermind." She looked closely at him, amused. "Every time I start to wonder what I could possibly do to get you in a good mood somebody else does the job."

"Well, I could think of a couple things you could do..."

She snickered a little. "And you're not even drunk."

"I gotta work at 0600, what do you expect?"

They were quiet for a moment, and he looked her over again, still a little incredulous.

"You really do look...like..." He laughed at his own incoherence. "Like anyone who's going home with you is a lucky son of a bitch, is what you look like."

"You're not the one who needs to make an event out of it. Everyone else here should get more than one look cause they're not gonna see these legs again for a long time."

"Yeah. Still..." When his voice trailed off, she gave him an inquisitive look. He leaned and pressed his cheek to her head. "I gotta take what I can get of you."

She slowly pulled back and looked at him, eyes narrowing a bit. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Yeah, I know." He quietly said, "There are some days, though, you're not all here."

She had a just faintly sad smile that turned sweet. She pulled closer into him again. Her tone was stronger, a little sultry, when she tiptoed and intoned up next to his ear, "How much can you get of me before 0600?"

Kirk's confusion on the matter of them was not altogether uncalled for: Not that he knew this specifically, but the relationship had so far staggered forward from where it began not without meaning but in the same vein of Kara only telling McCoy she loved him because it was true. She'd been up to her neck in training since getting back from Earth and they hadn't had that much time to be around each other, but she had invited herself into his quarters on more than one occasion of basic intuition: Sometimes he'd complain about his day so that she didn't have to talk at all before he began unswervingly to make love to her, sometimes she'd come right in and sit down to talk for over an hour without them ever touching, and there had been the night after Ensign Jakes bled to death right in sick bay after beaming back a couple minutes too late when she'd come in to bluntly finish off his scotch for him and make him go to bed. Even if Jim didn't get what the hold-up was on calling it what it was becoming, there had been something steady and reassuring in watching all the gaps slowly fill up as if they had all the time in the world.

And then there were the days when he was calmed up on post-mission mirth and if he found her by herself he'd sneak up and grab her around the shoulders and mutter some stupid shit against the back of her neck, when she got tired of needing an excuse. And McCoy's answer now was kind of like that; his eyes glazed over the crowd around them for just a second before he leaned down and kissed her, purposefully, somewhat inappropriately, until she was too impressed not to start chuckling and break it off.

McCoy then saw something behind her that made him shake his head in annoyance, and she didn't need him to explain who was most likely directing some overenthusiastic gesture at them. "I'm gonna kick his ass."

Instead of kicking Jim's ass and in fact instead of leaving the party as quickly as possible with Kara, he wound up seated in the grass in a courtyard outside on the far left next to her; on her right was Jim and then Spock, who apparently had perpetrated wandering outdoors in order to satisfy his curiosity about the slightly luminescent flowers kept in the garden.

"No, that...Is that Remus?"

Kirk leaned over to position his sight in line with hers, and he reached to gently knock her pointing hand up a couple notches. "Yep. And we are about to go..that-a-way."

She cocked a brow at where he repositioned her. "Where was Vulcan?" she asked quietly.

Jim blinked up hesitantly. It was a lot harder to point out a black space. Finally Spock interjected, "It would form a rough triangle with the two that appear red close to Remus."

After a moment she sighed and muttered, "Hope I get to kick some Romulan ass some time."

"That would be an inadvisable venture, considering the superior physical strength of the species."

Jim slowly looked over and narrowed his eyes at Spock, like reminding him he'd left something out.

"...And it would possibly be based on a prejudice."

Kara snickered. Jim felt the need to say to Kara, "You know you can't say things like that around—"

"Yeah, yeah. Gods, you and the admirals. It sounds to me like they're a bunch of—"

"They are, they are," McCoy cut in, laughing. "Well, sometimes. Who knows, Jim, maybe one of these days you'll be—"

"Hell no." Jim shook his head, his glance relaxed upwards. "No. Not me. I'm staying out here."

Kara slowly grinned at that.

"...What?"

"Nothing."

After a moment, she suddenly shifted and leaned back, resting her back to the grass to gaze lazily up at the sky.

Jim was the first to follow, smirking at the slight silliness of it, then McCoy with a smile and a scoff. Spock looked back as if to protest, said nothing and sat up stiffly for another moment. Then he looked back again, furtive, and slowly rested his back onto the ground with his hands rested primly over his abdomen.

They lay in silence below space. Kara felt time pressed into her grasp like a hurried gift from nobody, and in her mind she promised to a hundred ghosts, I'm okay.