lucetilogs | .lunch with the captain and the vampire slayer.

.lunch with the captain and the vampire slayer.

Who:

a_slayer_slays
What: Lunchtime Antics
When: June 2nd, Tuesday.
Where: The Fountain then to 7th Heaven
Summary: Kirk and Buffy are going to spend some bonding time talking about childhoods, school, and just general chit chat.
Rating: PG-13? It's Kirk. There's going to be some kind of booze and swearing and sexual innuendo somewhere in here.

Usually Kirk wasn't one that would find himself early for many occasions. Sure he would always be on time, show up on his bike, and make a really good impression on the girl he was meeting. Though here on this planet that had no Federation Designation Number? He found himself wandering around most the time looking for something to do.

So he had ended up early for the meeting place for the lunch date. Well, it wasn't so much of a date. Kirk just liked to tease Buffy that it was. He could tell the girl was a bit uptight in her "save the world" mindset. The Captain couldn't blame her. He was like that much of the time as well back on the Enterprise. Though here he figured he might as well help her unwind.

He glanced around and sat on the edge of the fountain. Kirk considered it an off-duty meeting, thus decided not to wear his golden Captain uniform. Instead he just wore the black undershirt and the black pants. His arms crossed over his chest as he waited for the other part of the equation. It seemed like everything was getting back on it's feet after the crazy shit that had happened.

"Good going, Jim." he muttered to himself. "Get stranded on a planet right when global world ending paradoxes happen."

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Clearly, there was something more behind the curt explanation; Buffy was not going to pry. Even though the word 'friend' had been bandied around earlier, things weren't so entrenched that she could press for details. That would come later. Optimistically enough, she hoped for a later.

"Does it happen often, kids being born in space? Or are you a special case?"

"Sometimes it does, space stations and stuff. I wasn't supposed to be born in space. The Kelvin was attacked and sent Mom into labor even though she was on the proper drugs that would make the pregnancy last until they came back to Earth." he shrugged. "At least that was what Mom always told me."

"Sounds eventful. For her, I suppose. Well, and you. Big shiny bright and cold world, after all."

She tapped her palms against herself, a restless habit that filled up the spaces between mildly awkward comments. At least it was a different kind of awkward to the sort that grew and mated and multiplied in the house. At least, this awkward was just her fault. She didn't really have the words to respond to what he was saying.

"I just had your run of the mill hospital beginning. In L.A., where I lived a pretty run of the mill California girl life. And then I grew up and got responsibilities. Not necessarily in that order, of course."

He laughed. "I'm pretty sure Mom wanted me to be born that way. Having to give birth on a space shuttle while the ship you were on is being attacked must have sucked."

Oh, he knew he downplayed it. He knew how much it ripped his mother up. He saw it whenever she was drinking at home when she wasn't off-world. Or sometimes how she would look at him and expect someone else to be standing there. At least she had been there for his graduation and promotion to Captain.

"What is it like living in places like L.A.? I only really lived in San Fransisco for three years."

"It's sunny--fashionable. People wear pairs of sunglasses almost bigger than their heads, everyone crash diets and the streets are miserably dangerous after dark. I only lived in L.A. until I was sixteen. I was kicked out of my school there, and my mother and I moved to a teensy little town called Sunnydale, where everyone wore the overly big sunglasses three months too late and the after-dark was five times more dangerous."

She was simplifying things. Truthfully, she wasn't sure if she wanted to let Kirk in on her big secret identity. Making friends was hard enough without the "one girl in all the world" speech interfering. Not that she was the one, anymore. Now she was just one of many. Or, rather, one in charge of many.

"About a year ago, work took me out of the country. I was in Scotland before I was dragged here. But California will always be home."

He smiled as they reached the doors to 7th Heaven. Glancing over his shoulder and giving her a smile, he pulled the door open. The topic of home really made him wonder about this place.

"How many people do you think consider Luceti home, Buffy?"

Kirk never would find this place home. It wasn't where he felt at home. There were no ways to push himself, to make himself known to the universe here. In the end it was just a glorified prison planet in his mind. At least he wasn't mining coal.

"Some people have been here for a long time. More than a year, I think. A year can make a huge difference--even if a year never made Scotland my home, I certainly did get a homey feel from Sunnydale after just a few weeks there. It's the people around you, I think."

She followed him into the restaurant, fingers lingering on the door to make sure that it did not shut too loudly. A habit picked up from spending so much of her extra-curricular time in a library.

"I have people here, of course. But Angel, and Spike, and Faith?" Buffy shook her head. "That's not so much a family as a recipe for major disaster--but, you? What do you consider home? Your ship or the place you lived before it? Can a ship be a home?"

"Really, I never thought I had a home." His voice dropped slightly to a softer tone. "I always wandered. Enlisting in Starfleet gave me a direction... but I didn't find a home until I had to save the Enterprise and the Federation. Sitting in the Captain's Chair is where home is. I can be me and know my crew understand me and my decisions. And if there was ever a problem with my judgment? I know they would take the helm for me."

He looked down at her with a small smile. "The Enterprise is home because of my crew. But even if all of them were here in this place... we aren't doing our mission. We're being held here unable to explore and be ourselves. That's why it'll never be home."

There was a small pause where he smiled a bit more. "Of course pleasant company like yours defiantly helps."

Buffy picked out a table, dragging a chair away from it in order to sit. His comments allowed her to reflect on their common ground. Sure, she wasn't a leader in the much of an official capacity, but Buffy was a leader. Well. Okay. Semi-official, with the creation of the Slayer Organization. But that was neither here nor there and certainly no where near the verbal component of this conversation.

"For your sake, then, I hope you don't have to have my pleasant company's help for long. If your chair of a home is where you'd rather be."

She sat, fingernails tapping the table-top once she was sitting. Buffy nodded in the direction of the empty seat across from her. "Grab a chair, Jim."

When she had said it, he was already pulling one over to sit across from her. He leaned forward on the table, looking at the small decorations. It reminded him of that night in the Riverside Bar where he had decided to join Starfleet. It seemed almost like a lifetime ago now. But now he was glad he got into that bar fight with Cupcake.

"Well if you don't mind me asking? I'd love to have your pleasant company as long as I'm here. Never know, with the two of us, maybe we can figure a way home."

"What a think-tank, we'd be. A--from what I can tell--headstrong, hotshot captain and an irrational California girl. We'll be up for all the best Nobel prizes. Believe me, I am much better at being the solution rather than thinking of one. I'm an action-girl."

The self-deprecation was thick, but not without a smile to soften it. After all, flattery makes for miles and all this insistence on the pleasantness of her company brought a warm, happy flush to her face.

"I think cleverer folks than me have been working on trying to get home for far longer than I've even been here. But then again, maybe they're thinking to hard on it. Maybe what they need is some action."

"You know, that's pretty much exactly, what I tell Spock."

Kirk placed the menu down and looked at her, his hands complimenting the scenario he was about to give her. "Alright, so you have this one bad guy ship who blows up six of your fellow ships. Your the First Officer on board, right?"

One of his hands moved to the side. "The bad guy ship is going this way. However, your Acting Captain wants to go back to the Federation." his other hand moved in the opposite direction. "He thinks that running back to the Federation to regroup will even the odds of the fight against this ship." he moved his first hand in a circle.

"So then, as the First Officer, what would you do? Would you stand by the Acting Captain's assessment and run back to regroup, or go after the other ship?"

A wedge of Buffy felt as though she was being tested. How would her answer influence Jim's opinion of her? She watched his hands, listened closely, and inched to the edge of her seat. But her answer was clear--ignoring all the conflicting factors about what might be right and what might be prudent, she presses one hand down on the table's surface and uses the other to point out the hand that Jim was using to stand in for the enemy ship.

"I'd have to try. Who knows what the lost opportunity would cost the group as a whole, and if the chance to try and take that one down was there, I'd have to try. Running away to fight another day only works if you actually can fight another day--and if you can fight another day, you may as well fight now."

She holds her position, still pointing stiffly at the bad-guy-hand. After all, how many impossible enemies had she pursued relentlessly, only to bag the victory anyway? It was not a case of being cocky, but a confidence in the fact that falling back to regroup can easily be just as fatal as giving chase.

He let himself grin. Kirk knew he liked her for a reason. Of course, Buffy was a very attractive woman. But she was smart and knew that sometimes you would have to throw the rules out the window to get something done. If Spock ever showed up it would drive him nuts having someone else that thought like Kirk.

"That was what I said to do."

Good. By his grin, she guessed that she passed the test. Buffy rapped her knuckles loudly against the tabletop in triumph. She liked triumph. Triumph was definitely her colour.

"What you said--so, you're telling me that's something that actually happened? And did you really go after the other ship?"

She was still leaning forward, but with the utility of pointing out her actions no longer needed, now she was sitting like this to hang off of his words.

"What happened?"

"Nero had attacked the other Starfleet ships and a planet named Vulcan, Spock's homeworld. Spock was Acting Captain because Captain Pike had been taken by Nero. Spock wanted to regroup with the fleet and try to take on Nero that way. I told him it wouldn't work, that we should take the opportunity and go after Nero ourselves. One heated argument later and I was thrown off for mutiny."

He loved telling people the stories of what had happened on the Enterprise. Their eyes lit up in to such a state of wonder and amazement that it was hard not to smile back. And Buffy was willing to listen.

Willing, she was. She listened carefully. "Thrown off? Like, out of the ship? Did they throw you into space? How did you survive in space? In the future, can people breath in space?"

She seemed to be working herself into a panic--a playful panic. Engaged in the conversation, she wanted to show that engagement to Kirk. It was refreshing to meet someone with a life more wild, more strange, more removed from her own brand of strangeness.

"Stuck me in a pod and ejected me to a planet neighboring Vulcan. It is called Delta Vega. Class M planet - means it can sustain life. One big giant ice rock filled with big bugs."

Clearly Kirk was not fond of the planet. He hated the planet, but the people he met were going to become his lifetime friends. Keenser, Mr. Scott, Ambassador Spock... what Kirk would do just to talk with the Ambassador again. With his head spinning about Warp 4, he had really no direction to go at the moment.

Though talking with the woman across from him was certainly help ease his mind. He always enjoyed the company of women. He grinned at her excitement.

"Right, so that's how you ended up on that planet of icy doom that you mentioned the other day. I did wonder--I wondered to myself, like, 'Buffy, how do you think one gets stuck on a planet of ice, anyway?' and now I know."

She sat back with a shock of chuckling, tucking hair behind her ears in that obvious tell of self-consciousness. "So the whole thing's ice, but things can still live there? That's insanity. Did these bugs wear big furry parkas and keep hot chocolate stands? Because that's about the only way I could survive a planet of ice, if I were a planet-of-ice-inhabiting bug."

Kirk laughed. "They probably had some kind of exoskeleton that allowed them to do it. They came up out of the snow so who the hell knows? I didn't really bother to stick around and find out. I was sort of busy running for my life."

Though he paused as the waitress came over and gave them a glass of water first. He nodded in thanks to her then looked back at Buffy. "I met someone though that would become one of my best friends on that planet. So it wasn't all that bad."

Buffy gladly took the water, drinking deeply from the glass while she listened. The water here was better than residential water in Sunnydale, but not quite as good as the water they had access to in the Scottish highlands. It was a difference that she noted quietly in her mind, leaving the rest of her head-space open to listen.

"So, how did that person end up on the planet of icy doom? Were they exile-podded there, too?"

"He was captured by Nero's ship, the Narada. Marooned him on Delta Vega so that he could watch the attack on Vulcan."

"You know, for a doom planet? This place is starting to sound fairly happening."

She clinked her nails quietly against the rim of the glass, tilting her head to the left and offering Kirk a slow growing, sly grin. "You are being on the total up and up with me, right? Because you spin some mighty tall tales and I'd hate to think you were taking advantage of a girl's trust by stretching the truth. Like, say, if it was really just a planet of frosty doom, rather than ice. Or maybe just the planet of slightly moist, condensationy doom."

"I slid down a slope of pure ice and nearly got skewered. Come on now. If I was going to spin a tale it'd be about how Spock was nice enough to maroon me on a paradise planet with babes in bikinis."

He flashed her a grin. "Well you tell me about your crazy adventures in Sunnydale. I'd like to hear them."

"If I start sounding like too much of a loony, stop me early enough that I don't loose any face, okay?" She sat back in her chair, forcing herself to keep the tips of her fingers away from the glass. There were certain nervous habits that she should avoid when trying to maintain a positive impression. Fidgeting was probably one of them.

"Alright, here's and oldie-but-a-goodie. You had crazy alien bugs, right? Well, we had our fair share of buggy folks, too. Only in Sunnydale it was less an alien problem and more of a demony problem." Here, she sucked in a deep breath, like a tight rope walker testing the tension of the wire. "It was years go, high school. This substitute teacher totally turned out to be some crazy giant praying mantis...thing. There were pheromones, and everything. Sort of icky, all over."

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