The corridors of the Enterprise were filled with the hustle and bustle of day-to-day ship life as Captain James T. Kirk made his way purposefully en-route to a personal mission. Specifically, a pit-stop in the men's room. Even decorated heroes had bladders, after all, and somehow breakfast that morning had turned into a contest to see if he could out-chug Scotty with several bottles of the ship's bland 'orange juice'.

It turns out he could, so his captainly honour remained impressively untarnished, but he'd been forced to deal with the subsequent discomfort for most of the morning afterwards while he attended to ship's duties. Now he finally had the chance to break free for a minute, and he was taking that minute fully by the horns.

Bathrooms on the Enterprise were pretty nice, and state-of-the-art, like most of the ship's features. A lot of the fixtures were self-cleaning, but the walls and floor still had to be taken care of manually by the ship's maintenance staff. Considering that, and the tension which tended to spike up on their missions like the lines of some demented heart-monitor, Jim was frankly surprised that there wasn't more bathroom graffiti. He certainly didn't balk at the few dirty limericks and one-liners which caught his eye as he attended to his business. But there was one particular bit of vandalism which caused his whistled tune to taper off in consternation as he looked at it.

In rather hasty red pen, someone had scrawled out the words 'Spock loves Kirk'. He blinked at the fairly bold, simplistic message. It certainly wasn't the worst thing he'd ever read to feature himself. Especially not off of a bathroom wall. In fact, like the majority of scribbles, it was pretty tame. Jim was sure that he'd been the partial subject of more offensive, lewd, and mature commentary in kindergarten, for crying out loud. He scoffed at the amateurish nature of the message. Spock 'loves' Kirk? Jeez, that was pathetic. No wonder Starfleet cadets had a reputation for being such wads in his hometown. Clearly, years of getting near-perfect grades and studying for aptitude tests hadn't helped any of them when it came to the more important things in life.

Jim decided to take pity on the author of the laughable 'rumour'. After all, he was captain now – he had a responsibility to his crewmembers to try and keep them from embarrassing themselves too often. So, once his more pressing matters had been attended to, he pulled a pen from one of his uniform's very narrow pockets, and added three little words of his own to the message. Then he stood back and admired his handiwork.

There. Now that was bathroom graffiti.

Satisfied, he nodded to himself, and with a spring in his step got ready to return to the bridge. A captain's job was never done.

- - -

Immediately following his lunch, Spock made his way towards the male bathroom facilities nearest to the bridge, as was part of his normal schedule in order to make certain that he was fit and ready for duty by the time his allotted break had ended. The ship was currently at warp, and so, for the moment, there was a refreshing lack of disasters requiring his attention.

Entering the bathroom, Spock's eyes drifted towards the squiggles and scrawls which humans seemed so inclined to 'decorate' the walls with. Really. It was quite an illogical practice. Any message placed in such a location would be gone by the time the maintenance crew came in, and besides which none of the writing ever seemed to hold any information of verifiable certainty. In fact, the bathroom wall seemed to be a place for wild speculation, insult, and accusation.

Having never been in the female facilities – for obvious reasons – Spock wondered if it were a species-wide phenomenon, or if it were limited to the males.

Despite his distaste for such inappropriate and pointless commentary, however, he found his gaze going over the markings, more for lack of a better distraction to occupy his attention than anything else. With his notable intellect and perhaps somewhat... 'potent' curiosity, he found that he was rarely able to see a line of words and not read them. He mused on the flawed logic or even sheer physical impossibilities of several comments before his eyes came to rest on one which had been done in two parts.

The first part was written out shakily in red. The second was done in black, and was more neatly scripted. Spock felt his eyebrows rise slowly to his hairline as he took the entirety of the six-word message in.

'Spock loves Kirk' said the somewhat misinformed first half.

'in the ass' added the badly misinformed second.

It wasn't that he hadn't read anything like it before, so he was marginally surprised when the words provoked an almost irrational response from his subconscious. For the first time, he found himself regretting that his knowledge of various skills and studies was as near-encyclopedic as most of his shipmates believed. It was a somewhat illogical response, considering that his understanding of a thing would not have changed the facts of it, and yet there it was.

Specifically, he wished that he hadn't taken that handwriting analysis course at the academy.