TITLE: "E" is for Enterprise!

AUTHOR: Doqz
FANDOM: Star Trek
ARCHIVE: Please ask.
DISCLAIMER: Main characters mentioned belong to JJ Abrams . No profit is being made.

Deep blacks are worst. Warp or not, you are still out in the middle nowhere for weeks at a time. And most of the planets out here remind Kirk a lot of Deliverance.

He understands the rationale, no problem. With a good percentage of the Federation's Home Fleet wiped out, the workload on the surviving crews was going to go up one way or another. Which is fine. And he's not even all that bitter that some brown-nosing, kiss-ass, Admiralty's pet wussies (cough-Nelson-cough) get to patrol the Romulan border.

The sugary fuck he isn't!

The Romulans are puppydogs compared to the Klingons. Nice civilized assholes with plenty of planets that can support more than a glorified liquor drive-through with delusions of bar-hood, and some weird-ass Shakespeare translation scribbled on the wall.

Usually from Macbeth. Because it's the goddamn Klingons.

And everyone keeps warning Kirk to hold his temper around them. Which is nicely ironic because when one of the Planetary Governors tries to play a little slap and tickle with Uhura it's Spock who slugs him right in the unmentionables.

Kirk still emits an involuntary reaction in a form of a twinge and an aborted motion to shield his procreative organs every time Bones quotes A Midsummer's Night's Dream. Which the head doctor of the Good Ship has taken to doing every time he sees Kirk's xenolinguist.

Apart from the fact that he has to juggle scheduling of the entire bridge crew, so as to prevent even more paperwork (connected with some sort of grisly double homicide) Kirk actually feels it's kinda fair.

There probably wouldn't have been the need to skirt a minor interplanetary incident at all if Uhura hadn't gotten pissy about Spock fighting her fight and went off on the rest of Klingons. Also there was really no need for her to call them space fairies. That's clearly going overboard, Kirk thinks.

Still, all's well that ends well. At least it provided some excitement.

Kirk has learned a valuable lesson in his first year as the captain.
Being a beacon of Earth spacefaring line of defense is boring as shit most of the time.

Unless you are some people who get to hob-nob with the Romulans, who by all accounts are fucking party animals.

Motherfucking Nelson.

Not that Kirk is bitter. The Klingon border is way more important. And it's the Navy way to stick the guy who saved the goddamn Federation with the job of patrolling the galactic equivalent of West Virginia. "Because your crew demonstrated competence and valor, they were the clear choice for such a difficult job."

They promised him space pirates!

And it sounds so logical, too. Except nobody realizes that even with the half of their warbirds gone, no pirate in his right mind is going to fuck with the Klingons.

So instead of space pirates he is stuck running a Kirk's Floating School for Wayward Boys and Young Ladies of Questionable Character and Impulse Control.

Competence and Valor, his extremely well-defined ass.

Kirk remembers fondly when he'd still entertained the illusion that his job was to protect the Federation and his crew from the vast dangers of known and unknown space.

God, what a sucker.

His job is clearly to protect the unsuspecting space from his crew. Which had also been promised space pirates.

Instead they are quietly going around the bend from the sheer boredom, and are inevitably making their own fun.

Kirk has been drinking a lot lately. But only as a way to break the persistent tendency he's developing in recent weeks to moan quietly as he looks at his com-screen and rock in the dark for a while with his head between his knees, breathing deeply.

This is what they call command responsibility, apparently.

He does NOT like it.

The Diversity Twins are the worst. Because no one ever sees them coming. They always manage to project this air of earnest professionalism, somehow. Like a couple of very eager puppies.

Makes him want to smack them with a newspaper right on the nose.

He still has trouble believing that Pike actually heard about it before Kirk did. The whole thing had gone viral on the galactic scale in the time it took him to get coffee, apparently.

The first inkling he has of anything being out of the ordinary is Nelson's captain contacting him and yammering about conduct unbecoming the officers of the Federation, libel suits, and something about a court martial.

Kirk can't really remember, frankly, he is fairly well lubricated that evening due to a small incident with his Engineering Section, a blow torch, two space hippies, and a misunderstanding of the local Salvage Laws.

He really needs a drink that day. That is really a bad, bad day. He really misses the space pirates on that day.

Bad, bad day.

But he should have paid attention.

When Pike contacts him it's way, way too late.

Pretty much by the 3rd minute of the video that the admiral plays for him (with his expression never changing from the mask of blank, curious politeness) Kirk narrows down his choices to only a few, albeit very violent options.

Thinking about the situation since hasn't really changed his mind in any way. The only thing that's keeping him from putting his carefully thought out program of controlled genocide in action is his continuing vacillation as to where to start.

Mom always said to begin at the beginning, he remembers, But he sees no clear way of ascertaining who the FUCKITY FUCKING FUCK taught Chekhov about rap.

He has been thinking about this ever since his first glimpse of his astrogation officer prancing around in front of the camera throwing out gang-signs ("E" is for Enterprise! apparently) and informing the galaxy at large about the comparative defects of the Klingon physiology, the Romulan brain capacity, and the intestinal fortitude of the rest of the Fed Navy.

All this, with the occasional cameos from Kirk's pilot who would pop into the frame behind Chekhov with metronomic regularity (every 7.3 seconds, exactly. Kirk times it) to do his level best for insuring inter-Fleet harmony.

Kirk has taken to finding small bright spots in his life. He reads it in a book that advises on how to deal with ongoing stressful situations without losing one's temper.

The only thing that strikes him as extremely fortunate about this particular episode is that it was Sulu that was relegated to providing the refrain. Kirk is frankly not sure whether he could have handled 'Fuck the Nelson' in regular intervals for 4.42 minutes in a Russian accent, with his current rather admirable (if he does say so himself) equilibrium.

Kirk knows exactly where the Ivan got the thick gold chain he kept brandishing ("E" is for Enterprise!) however. And there will be retribution

They are all going to pay. All of them.

He's just going sit here in the dark for a while first. Maybe rock himself a little.