by Jane Carnall
"Jim.... He's dead, Spock."
The Vulcan remembered McCoy turning round from Kirk's broken body to tell him, and adding, with a tear in his eye, "I told him he should never have worn that red shirt."
"Aye," Scott had confirmed. "Aye, laddie, I warned him to stay on the floor and not put his head up if he must wear the gear."
//That possibly explains why he was shot in the posterior muscles,// Spock thought. Vulcan control could not prevent an invisible wince as Scott started to play My Love Is Like A Red, Red Rose, which for some reason the engineer had deemed appropriate at this funeral. Uhura buried her face in her hands; he could see her shoulders shaking. //I hope she will manage not to laugh out loud,// he thought.
Chekov and Sulu were standing with their arms wrapped around each other, having finally admitted to being silly-in-love in front of the cameras that kept following Enterprise bridge crew all over the galaxy, no one quite knew why but suspected some fiendish plot of Admiral Nogura's. Everyone on the Enterprise had known about the pair of them for twenty years, but no-one would have dreamt of telling Starfleet Command anything they didn't know already. That tradition, Spock considered, had probably saved the whales, the Earth, the Federation, the galaxy, and this universe, approximately 37 times in the past twenty years alone; he happened to know, through his illustrious family connections (Spock was rather the blue sehlat of the clan, or in human terms, the mess on the escutcheon) that the rumours about Starfleet Command being run by rogue scriptwriters were unfortunately not true. The truth was that it was run by rogue producers, and worse, roguish company directors.
For some reason that Spock emphatically did not want to know about, Christine Chapel was standing beside the pessary-shaped coffin with a large gleeful grin on her face. Spock preferred not to plumb the depths of human medical personnel's minds, believing that (a) there were some insanitary things that were meant to remain insanitary and unplumbed, (b) there were in any case some things that Vulcans were not meant to know, and (c) he might find out where the medical staff kept their library of human/Vulcan erotica and discover, not that McCoy read them, which he knew but preferred not to think about, but that McCoy actually wrote some of them. In any case, the reasons why Chapel would be smiling like that at the Captain's coffin were entirely unsuitable for a well-brought up Vulcan to admit he knew anything about. Non-telepathic heterosexuality was something no decent Vulcan admitted to thinking about.
It was time for the funeral oration. "Of all the souls I have ever known...his was the least Vulcan."
end
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