Fic: I Knead You (A Bakery AU) Part 2 (Kirk/McCoy Rated: PG)
Series Title: I Knead You (A Bakery AU)
Chapter Title: Boxes, Dora & Accounting
Authors: wook77 and elanorofcastile
Pairings: Focus on Kirk/McCoy and contains side pairings of Spock/Uhura, Scotty/Gaila and Chekov/Sulu. Also, lots of Joanna McCoy
Rating: Still PG
WordCount: ~2400
Summary: Bones isn't a morning person. Joanna is far too inquisitive for her own good. Jim pipes Dora. Gaila and Scotty snipe. Spock and Uhura flirt in Accountant-ese. It's just another day at Chez Enterpríse.
Author's Note: Beta'd by djin7 and lauriegilbert. Things are starting to come together.
Part 1
"Daddy?" Joanna's voice wakes him early in the morning.
"What do you want?" he asks, though it comes out sounding more like "Mphwhrdduwan?". He's never claimed to be a morning person, after all.
"Can we go see Mister Jim, now?"
"Isn't it a little early?" Leonard struggles to get out from his bedcovers.
"But he said he'd have a cupcake for me," Joanna says pleadingly, then crawls into bed with him. He's barely shifted to make room for her when she wedges herself in under his arm.
"Can't have cupcakes for breakfast every day. You want to end up being as wide as you are tall?"
"No, Daddy, nooooo," she says.
"We'll go after lunch, promise. Until then, let's get a bit more sleep, kay?"
Leonard has just enough time to start drifting back to sleep before Joanna slips out of bed and scampers back to the guest room. Punching his pillow, he mutters to himself and tries once more. Unfortunately, loud banging interrupts his sleep a few, too-short moments later. As he punches his pillow again, he hears a crash and a plaintive cry of "Daddy!".
He's up and out of bed before he even realizes, running towards the guest room where his daughter lies trapped and crying underneath boxes from the closet. "Jojo? You all right?"
He tugs the boxes away from her and then checks her over completely. She keeps crying, quiet little sniffles as she burrows into his chest. Physically, she's all right and he suspects it's more out of embarrassment or being caught, but Leonard can't help the way that his heart continues to race as she finally quiets down
"What in blue blazes were you doing?"
"Wanted to see the pictures, Daddy."
"What pictures?"
"The ones of you and me when I was little." Joanna's thumb starts towards her mouth and then she stares at it before yanking it away violently from her mouth. Instead, she curls her fists into his damp t-shirt.
"Baby, you could've asked. I would've shown them to you." He doesn't say that he still thinks of her as little. She's getting too big for that, too big for pet names like 'baby'.
"But you were sleeping, and I know they're in one of these boxes."
"Jojo, you ever want to see anything like that, you tell me and I'll show it to you. Please don't ever scare me like that again."
Her voice is small as she says, "Alright, Daddy. Promise."
"Good," he says and then strokes his hand down her hair to rub soothingly along her back.
"I'm all right now, Daddy, you can let me go."
"I'm not all right, though. You scared me."
"Know what would make you feel better?"
Her voice goes impish and Leonard's instantly suspicious but he's just too happy that she's not hurt so he says, "Hugging you? Yeah, it makes me feel lots better."
"No, Daddy, I'd bet one of Mister Jim's cupcakes would make you feel better."
"Oh it will, will it?" he asks as he shifts his hands so he can tickle her. "I highly doubt that."
"Daddy, you gotta try it to find out! Experimentation!" she says through the giggles as he tickles her harder and harder. By the end, she's squirming and trying to both get closer to him and further away. Her little hands dig into his sides and he laughs, not because of the tickling, but because of the sheer joy of having his daughter with him. He silently thanks Jocelyn's poor timing once more. He hopes she's enjoying Spain.
Then, they're out of breath and she's lying on top of him by the end of the tickle war. "We'll go after lunch, baby. I thought maybe you'd want to see where your dad works."
"Are there going to be dead bodies?"
"Maybe."
"Cool!" She pauses for just a moment and then asks, "Can I touch one?"
"No."
"Dammit."
"Joanna Elizabeth McCoy! Where did you learn that sort of language?!" He picks her up, sitting up as he sets her down in one motion. He glares at her.
"You."
"Oh," he says and there isn't much else he can say in response. "Well, don't ever say that in front of your mother or your Gram, you hear me?"
"Okay, Daddy. Are you going to shower before we go? You have bristles." She rubs her hand along his chin to make her point.
"You're right. Can I trust you not to spill any more boxes on yourself?"
"I'll even clean this up, Daddy."
"All right, just no more climbing up and dragging more stuff on top of yourself. I'll only be a few minutes," he says, standing up to head to the door. "If anything's too heavy, you leave it for me."
"Duh! Now hurry up cause the sooner we finish at your work, sooner we can get Dora cupcakes!"
~*~
"You think this looks like Dora?" Jim asks as he stares at the cupcake in front of him. He's better at animals than people. Of course, Dora isn't really a person, but she looks like one. He'd really found Joanna adorable yesterday and, all right, it's rather unreasonable to expect her and her really smoking hot dad to come back today but, just in case fate has decided to be nice to him, he's going to have a Dora cupcake or three ready.
"Who's Dora?" his head baker, Scotty, asks.
"She's the little explorer. She's constantly picking up things that her monkey swipes. She does a wonderful job of teaching children to expand their limits, learn other languages and embrace diversity," Gaila answers instead from her perch at another table. One of her intricate wedding cakes sits on the table in front of her.
"Och, well then, ever so sorry I've not seen such a newfangled show. Back in my day -" Scotty begins saying but Gaila interrupts him.
"Yes, yes, back on Planet Scotland, they had black and white images of little men in kilts running around teaching kids how to say 'och' and eat intestines. It was great for putting hair on the chest and blue paint on the face," she interrupts him.
"Now, look here, Miss Sassy Pants New Age Hippie Wannabe," Scotty says, turning around to face her and waving a spatula threateningly in her direction, "I wasna going to say that. I was going to say that we didn't have Dora and as I have no wee ones, I haven't seen any of the shows."
"That's no excuse. You need to get to the toy section more often."
"I'll have you know - "
"For more than just your dolls."
"They're no' dolls! They're action figures."
"Whatever. 'Action figures' is just boyspeak for Barbies."
"Did you just say that Luke Skywalker is the same as Barbie?"
"Yep," she says, grinning at him around the elegant, four-layered, square cake.
Jim, forgotten in all their verbal tennis, just watched with a smile. From previous experience, he knows better than to interrupt his lead bakers as they go off like this. Instead, he sits, waiting, for a lull so he could interject.
"Since you're familiar with Dora, Gaila, do you mind taking a look?" Jim asks once they draw breath.
"Sure, Jim, just a moment," Gaila says as she puts another exact line down the side of the cake. Jim watched her finish her work, still always amazed that her wild, free-spirited temperament and appearance belied her meticulous and exacting skill as a decorator.
Once the piping's finished to her satisfaction, she sets aside her icing bag to come over and look over Jim's cupcakes.
Tilting her head, she says, "Her nose is off."
"That's what I thought."
He grabs another cupcake and tries again. He's using a source picture, and he knows that this cupcake will be acceptable, but he wants a perfect one to offer to Joanna, when she (hopefully) comes with her Dad to get her promised Dora the Explorer.
"That's the one," Gaila says at his last attempt.
"Great! I'll put it to the side. Don't let anyone sell this one, okay?" He grabs a box and then carefully sets the cupcake inside. "Scotty, any of the muffins ready yet?"
"Aye, aye, captain, just waiting and ready for you."
"You didn't make 'em all crazy, did you?"
"Butter pecan muffins, just as you asked." Scotty sounds offended and Jim grins in his direction.
"You're the best, Scotty." Jim hurries over to box up three of the muffins with the cupcake. "Make sure all of these stay right here, all right?"
"Aye, aye, captain," they both say with flippant salutes and then go back to what they've been doing.
Just then, Jim hears Pavel yelling about donuts once more and Jim's grin spreads further across his face.
~*~
The first time he'd met Nyota, he'd been her instructor. Throughout the class on morality and accounting, Spock had watched her and the way that she'd brightened every time he'd helped her with a formula or showed her a new way to utilize Excel. He'd known her heart hadn't been in accounting but she'd still possessed such aptitude for it that he'd had to sing her praises on every exam, an unparalleled ability to identify accounting anomalies in GAAP-related assessments.
When he'd refused to recommend her to her chosen program (Linguistics? With that mind? She had deserved so much better than a fine arts degree. She deserved Business Administration), she'd burned him with her passion for her case. Eventually, however, she had acquiesced to his recommendation that he sponsor her into the Business Administration program with a focus on International Business and Relations and Linguistics. He'd only been too happy to do it. When she'd been accepted, she'd invited him to her apartment, cooked him dinner, and then stolen what little bit of his heart he'd been able to keep from her.
Spock found that he hadn't been able to regret that moment nor the thousand and one moments that have come since. If he were a man prone to smiling, he would not only be smiling, but whistling as he enters Nyota's office at Chez Enterpríse.
As it stands, however, he is not that sort of man and, thus, he walks in to her office and greets her with a sedate, "Good afternoon, Nyota."
"Good afternoon," she says in reply as she stands and circles around her desk to press a light kiss to his cheek. "Ready to go over the tax filings?"
"As ever."
The serenity of numbers quickly fills the room as they discuss the quarterly tax filings and then move on to a discussion of the current payroll budget. Spock understands that Kirk is under quite a bit of pressure to hire the best but, with the current demands, they would quickly outstrip the projected budget and cut too far into the profits for either Spock or Nyota's comfort.
They discuss the possibilities of adding additional staff to meet the needs, with fewer accoutrements and expertise, and therefore able to work for less. Perhaps students to work the counter for the summer. From there, it's easy to transition to other accounting details in the upcoming month that they need to budget for properly.
As they speak, Nyota gets passionate about the new marketing plan she's about to implement and instead of listening, he finds that his eyes track the flow of her fingers as she gestures grandly and delicately. He watches the way that she smiles at the website improvements. She looks down, her hair cascading to cover her face, then he watches as her beautiful fingers take hold of the hair and tug it lightly before tucking it behind one ear. She looks up at him as her finger plays with the shell of her ear and he realizes that she's asked for his input.
"I'm sorry, if you could please repeat your query?" he asks. "I'm not certain I have all the pertinent details."
"I was wondering if you could work up some numbers on the possibility of some television spots for me for the next meeting?" she asks and releases her ear only to have tendrils drift back across her face. Spock watches her huff a quick breath and then tuck the tendrils behind her ears once more. "I've worked up a tentative idea for a commercial, and would like to see if it's feasible within the budget."
"Are sales not satisfactory at this time?" It's a rhetorical question. Of course Kirk would like to improve his sales numbers. Spock asks only to keep her talking. She's so passionate about this marketing push that he is reminded once more of when they first met.
"They are, but there's always room for improvement, particularly in this market. We have a specialty to offer: Gaila's five-star cakes coupled with Scotty's old-style country baking, and we can exploit that. I was thinking we should focus our advertising in local television, which will lure people in with the visuals so much more than radio or newsprint." Nyota smiles, her eyes lit up with excitement. Spock can only stare while she continues, "So, if you could get me some predictions on the cost-benefit ratio and a prediction of the increase in sales versus increase in staff for the next meeting…" her voice trails off and he simply nods in response.
"Of course. It will be done," he says and then gestures towards the door. "If we are finished, would you care to take a break for a pastry? I understand that Chez Enterpríse has a delectable assortment of brioche," Spock says, as if he doesn't get the brioche every time he comes in to see her.
"I would be delighted." She stands before the words are finished and offers her arm. Spock takes it and, feeling daring, quickly busses her cheek. Her tone is teasing as she asks, "If only I could tell everyone that a little brioche is all it takes to soften you up."
"You would not dare," he says evenly. She smiles at him. "It is not the pastry, but the company," he says, holding the door open for her.
"You wonderful man," she responds and kisses his cheek as they head towards the bakery.
As always, we'd love to hear what you thought.
Part 3
Chapter Title: Boxes, Dora & Accounting
Authors: wook77 and elanorofcastile
Pairings: Focus on Kirk/McCoy and contains side pairings of Spock/Uhura, Scotty/Gaila and Chekov/Sulu. Also, lots of Joanna McCoy
Rating: Still PG
WordCount: ~2400
Summary: Bones isn't a morning person. Joanna is far too inquisitive for her own good. Jim pipes Dora. Gaila and Scotty snipe. Spock and Uhura flirt in Accountant-ese. It's just another day at Chez Enterpríse.
Author's Note: Beta'd by djin7 and lauriegilbert. Things are starting to come together.
Part 1
"Daddy?" Joanna's voice wakes him early in the morning.
"What do you want?" he asks, though it comes out sounding more like "Mphwhrdduwan?". He's never claimed to be a morning person, after all.
"Can we go see Mister Jim, now?"
"Isn't it a little early?" Leonard struggles to get out from his bedcovers.
"But he said he'd have a cupcake for me," Joanna says pleadingly, then crawls into bed with him. He's barely shifted to make room for her when she wedges herself in under his arm.
"Can't have cupcakes for breakfast every day. You want to end up being as wide as you are tall?"
"No, Daddy, nooooo," she says.
"We'll go after lunch, promise. Until then, let's get a bit more sleep, kay?"
Leonard has just enough time to start drifting back to sleep before Joanna slips out of bed and scampers back to the guest room. Punching his pillow, he mutters to himself and tries once more. Unfortunately, loud banging interrupts his sleep a few, too-short moments later. As he punches his pillow again, he hears a crash and a plaintive cry of "Daddy!".
He's up and out of bed before he even realizes, running towards the guest room where his daughter lies trapped and crying underneath boxes from the closet. "Jojo? You all right?"
He tugs the boxes away from her and then checks her over completely. She keeps crying, quiet little sniffles as she burrows into his chest. Physically, she's all right and he suspects it's more out of embarrassment or being caught, but Leonard can't help the way that his heart continues to race as she finally quiets down
"What in blue blazes were you doing?"
"Wanted to see the pictures, Daddy."
"What pictures?"
"The ones of you and me when I was little." Joanna's thumb starts towards her mouth and then she stares at it before yanking it away violently from her mouth. Instead, she curls her fists into his damp t-shirt.
"Baby, you could've asked. I would've shown them to you." He doesn't say that he still thinks of her as little. She's getting too big for that, too big for pet names like 'baby'.
"But you were sleeping, and I know they're in one of these boxes."
"Jojo, you ever want to see anything like that, you tell me and I'll show it to you. Please don't ever scare me like that again."
Her voice is small as she says, "Alright, Daddy. Promise."
"Good," he says and then strokes his hand down her hair to rub soothingly along her back.
"I'm all right now, Daddy, you can let me go."
"I'm not all right, though. You scared me."
"Know what would make you feel better?"
Her voice goes impish and Leonard's instantly suspicious but he's just too happy that she's not hurt so he says, "Hugging you? Yeah, it makes me feel lots better."
"No, Daddy, I'd bet one of Mister Jim's cupcakes would make you feel better."
"Oh it will, will it?" he asks as he shifts his hands so he can tickle her. "I highly doubt that."
"Daddy, you gotta try it to find out! Experimentation!" she says through the giggles as he tickles her harder and harder. By the end, she's squirming and trying to both get closer to him and further away. Her little hands dig into his sides and he laughs, not because of the tickling, but because of the sheer joy of having his daughter with him. He silently thanks Jocelyn's poor timing once more. He hopes she's enjoying Spain.
Then, they're out of breath and she's lying on top of him by the end of the tickle war. "We'll go after lunch, baby. I thought maybe you'd want to see where your dad works."
"Are there going to be dead bodies?"
"Maybe."
"Cool!" She pauses for just a moment and then asks, "Can I touch one?"
"No."
"Dammit."
"Joanna Elizabeth McCoy! Where did you learn that sort of language?!" He picks her up, sitting up as he sets her down in one motion. He glares at her.
"You."
"Oh," he says and there isn't much else he can say in response. "Well, don't ever say that in front of your mother or your Gram, you hear me?"
"Okay, Daddy. Are you going to shower before we go? You have bristles." She rubs her hand along his chin to make her point.
"You're right. Can I trust you not to spill any more boxes on yourself?"
"I'll even clean this up, Daddy."
"All right, just no more climbing up and dragging more stuff on top of yourself. I'll only be a few minutes," he says, standing up to head to the door. "If anything's too heavy, you leave it for me."
"Duh! Now hurry up cause the sooner we finish at your work, sooner we can get Dora cupcakes!"
~*~
"You think this looks like Dora?" Jim asks as he stares at the cupcake in front of him. He's better at animals than people. Of course, Dora isn't really a person, but she looks like one. He'd really found Joanna adorable yesterday and, all right, it's rather unreasonable to expect her and her really smoking hot dad to come back today but, just in case fate has decided to be nice to him, he's going to have a Dora cupcake or three ready.
"Who's Dora?" his head baker, Scotty, asks.
"She's the little explorer. She's constantly picking up things that her monkey swipes. She does a wonderful job of teaching children to expand their limits, learn other languages and embrace diversity," Gaila answers instead from her perch at another table. One of her intricate wedding cakes sits on the table in front of her.
"Och, well then, ever so sorry I've not seen such a newfangled show. Back in my day -" Scotty begins saying but Gaila interrupts him.
"Yes, yes, back on Planet Scotland, they had black and white images of little men in kilts running around teaching kids how to say 'och' and eat intestines. It was great for putting hair on the chest and blue paint on the face," she interrupts him.
"Now, look here, Miss Sassy Pants New Age Hippie Wannabe," Scotty says, turning around to face her and waving a spatula threateningly in her direction, "I wasna going to say that. I was going to say that we didn't have Dora and as I have no wee ones, I haven't seen any of the shows."
"That's no excuse. You need to get to the toy section more often."
"I'll have you know - "
"For more than just your dolls."
"They're no' dolls! They're action figures."
"Whatever. 'Action figures' is just boyspeak for Barbies."
"Did you just say that Luke Skywalker is the same as Barbie?"
"Yep," she says, grinning at him around the elegant, four-layered, square cake.
Jim, forgotten in all their verbal tennis, just watched with a smile. From previous experience, he knows better than to interrupt his lead bakers as they go off like this. Instead, he sits, waiting, for a lull so he could interject.
"Since you're familiar with Dora, Gaila, do you mind taking a look?" Jim asks once they draw breath.
"Sure, Jim, just a moment," Gaila says as she puts another exact line down the side of the cake. Jim watched her finish her work, still always amazed that her wild, free-spirited temperament and appearance belied her meticulous and exacting skill as a decorator.
Once the piping's finished to her satisfaction, she sets aside her icing bag to come over and look over Jim's cupcakes.
Tilting her head, she says, "Her nose is off."
"That's what I thought."
He grabs another cupcake and tries again. He's using a source picture, and he knows that this cupcake will be acceptable, but he wants a perfect one to offer to Joanna, when she (hopefully) comes with her Dad to get her promised Dora the Explorer.
"That's the one," Gaila says at his last attempt.
"Great! I'll put it to the side. Don't let anyone sell this one, okay?" He grabs a box and then carefully sets the cupcake inside. "Scotty, any of the muffins ready yet?"
"Aye, aye, captain, just waiting and ready for you."
"You didn't make 'em all crazy, did you?"
"Butter pecan muffins, just as you asked." Scotty sounds offended and Jim grins in his direction.
"You're the best, Scotty." Jim hurries over to box up three of the muffins with the cupcake. "Make sure all of these stay right here, all right?"
"Aye, aye, captain," they both say with flippant salutes and then go back to what they've been doing.
Just then, Jim hears Pavel yelling about donuts once more and Jim's grin spreads further across his face.
~*~
The first time he'd met Nyota, he'd been her instructor. Throughout the class on morality and accounting, Spock had watched her and the way that she'd brightened every time he'd helped her with a formula or showed her a new way to utilize Excel. He'd known her heart hadn't been in accounting but she'd still possessed such aptitude for it that he'd had to sing her praises on every exam, an unparalleled ability to identify accounting anomalies in GAAP-related assessments.
When he'd refused to recommend her to her chosen program (Linguistics? With that mind? She had deserved so much better than a fine arts degree. She deserved Business Administration), she'd burned him with her passion for her case. Eventually, however, she had acquiesced to his recommendation that he sponsor her into the Business Administration program with a focus on International Business and Relations and Linguistics. He'd only been too happy to do it. When she'd been accepted, she'd invited him to her apartment, cooked him dinner, and then stolen what little bit of his heart he'd been able to keep from her.
Spock found that he hadn't been able to regret that moment nor the thousand and one moments that have come since. If he were a man prone to smiling, he would not only be smiling, but whistling as he enters Nyota's office at Chez Enterpríse.
As it stands, however, he is not that sort of man and, thus, he walks in to her office and greets her with a sedate, "Good afternoon, Nyota."
"Good afternoon," she says in reply as she stands and circles around her desk to press a light kiss to his cheek. "Ready to go over the tax filings?"
"As ever."
The serenity of numbers quickly fills the room as they discuss the quarterly tax filings and then move on to a discussion of the current payroll budget. Spock understands that Kirk is under quite a bit of pressure to hire the best but, with the current demands, they would quickly outstrip the projected budget and cut too far into the profits for either Spock or Nyota's comfort.
They discuss the possibilities of adding additional staff to meet the needs, with fewer accoutrements and expertise, and therefore able to work for less. Perhaps students to work the counter for the summer. From there, it's easy to transition to other accounting details in the upcoming month that they need to budget for properly.
As they speak, Nyota gets passionate about the new marketing plan she's about to implement and instead of listening, he finds that his eyes track the flow of her fingers as she gestures grandly and delicately. He watches the way that she smiles at the website improvements. She looks down, her hair cascading to cover her face, then he watches as her beautiful fingers take hold of the hair and tug it lightly before tucking it behind one ear. She looks up at him as her finger plays with the shell of her ear and he realizes that she's asked for his input.
"I'm sorry, if you could please repeat your query?" he asks. "I'm not certain I have all the pertinent details."
"I was wondering if you could work up some numbers on the possibility of some television spots for me for the next meeting?" she asks and releases her ear only to have tendrils drift back across her face. Spock watches her huff a quick breath and then tuck the tendrils behind her ears once more. "I've worked up a tentative idea for a commercial, and would like to see if it's feasible within the budget."
"Are sales not satisfactory at this time?" It's a rhetorical question. Of course Kirk would like to improve his sales numbers. Spock asks only to keep her talking. She's so passionate about this marketing push that he is reminded once more of when they first met.
"They are, but there's always room for improvement, particularly in this market. We have a specialty to offer: Gaila's five-star cakes coupled with Scotty's old-style country baking, and we can exploit that. I was thinking we should focus our advertising in local television, which will lure people in with the visuals so much more than radio or newsprint." Nyota smiles, her eyes lit up with excitement. Spock can only stare while she continues, "So, if you could get me some predictions on the cost-benefit ratio and a prediction of the increase in sales versus increase in staff for the next meeting…" her voice trails off and he simply nods in response.
"Of course. It will be done," he says and then gestures towards the door. "If we are finished, would you care to take a break for a pastry? I understand that Chez Enterpríse has a delectable assortment of brioche," Spock says, as if he doesn't get the brioche every time he comes in to see her.
"I would be delighted." She stands before the words are finished and offers her arm. Spock takes it and, feeling daring, quickly busses her cheek. Her tone is teasing as she asks, "If only I could tell everyone that a little brioche is all it takes to soften you up."
"You would not dare," he says evenly. She smiles at him. "It is not the pastry, but the company," he says, holding the door open for her.
"You wonderful man," she responds and kisses his cheek as they head towards the bakery.
As always, we'd love to hear what you thought.
Part 3