Fic: They Actually Gave Us A Ship? (9/?)
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Summary: The USS Enterprise. Starfleet gave a flagship to a bunch of kids. Sequel to They Actually Recruited Us? Same ideas, but now everyone’s graduated and on the Enterprise.
“
Sometimes, being the captain of a starship was extremely hard work. Being the captain of a Federation flagship was even more so. Jim had known there were would be paperwork when he got started on the Command track, but he hadn’t anticipated the sheer amount of it all. There were mountains of PADDs to go through, hundreds of notices from Starfleet to read and sign. It was all some form of maddening torture, and he was growing suspicious that his yeoman Janice Rand was some sort of sadist. She liked hunting him down to sign forms far too much.
And then there was the matter of deaths on away missions. Some part of Jim’s mind had known that it would happen. Accidents happened, ambushes happened, betrayals happened. But Jim didn’t believe in no-win scenarios. He had thought that if he just did what he did best, his teams would remain intact throughout the entire five-years.
The first time one of his security personnel had been killed had been a real eye-opener. Before that, no one under his command had ever even been injured. Of course, he blamed himself. If he had been more aware, better at his job, then he wouldn’t have to send home a body to a grieving mother. Bones had pulled him out of the slump with no small amount of effort.
And although it was things like the deaths and the paperwork that were the most taxing, there was also the problem of Starfleet breathing down their necks. It was an odd system. Jim could get away with things like throwing massive parties in between missions or renting out a laser tag room—things that were so far off the charts of what was considered appropriate military behavior—but when it came time to do the real job, the job that his people had proven when they were more than capable of when they were still cadets—the admiralty questioned their capacity to handle things.
Jim’s crew had already done more—faced more—than people twice their age. Jim was the youngest captain in Federation history, and he hadn’t gotten that honor by sitting on his ass whistling Dixie.
Yeah, okay, they could be a little immature sometimes, but they were tough, smart, and determined. They were the best crew in the fleet, so far as Jim was concerned. Besides, if Spock, who was having a love affair with logic and rational thinking and was one of the biggest buzzkills Jim knew, could sanction the juvenile shenanigans that Jim led the crew on, then the admiralty could just stuff it.
Still, it could all lead a man to really need a drink. “Have you ever looked at the seven-hundred milliliter bottle of wine on the seat next to you knowing that it’s just not going to be enough,” he asked aloud on the bridge. It was a rhetorical question, not one he really expected anyone to answer, just to nod in agreement too.
But then, from the communications console, came the longsuffering answer. “Each and every day.”
