Day of the Dead {Star Trek Enterprise Fan Fiction}

Spooky

"In the cool of the evening when ev'rything is gettin' kind of groovy,
I call you up and ask you if you want to go and meet and see a movie,
First you say no, you've got some plans for the night,
And then you stop, and say, 'All right.'
Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you."

The Classics IV – Spooky

=/\=

For Commander Charles Tucker III, Halloween was the most wonderful time of the year.

Better than Christmas or Thanksgiving, it was the epitome of everything he loved – horror, pretending to be someone he was not, and rigging elaborate pranks. It was a holiday that, to him, had everything.

And so in 2161, he worked as hard as he could to make it the best Halloween ever on the NX-01.

He arranged with Chip Masterson, the guy in charge of Movie Night, to show a horror film every single night. There were some amazing pictures, like Hitchcock's Psycho, and some gore fests like Friday the Thirteenth, the 1980 slash fest. Rosemary's Baby made an appearance, as did his favorite, the old James Whale Frankenstein. It was all leading up to October thirty-first itself and the corker, John Carpenter's Halloween.

Much of the time, it seemed, there weren't too many takers for these films. Psycho drew a crowd, and so did Rosemary's Baby. Frankenstein had its fans. But the nastier and bloodier tales, like Child's Play from 1988, were only sparsely attended, and he could not figure out why.

For the thirty-first, he had done his best to line up a date. There were women he could approach and there were others where it was just not a good idea.

He had two exes on board – T'Pol, the Vulcan Science Officer – she was also the First Officer – and the Communications Officer, Ensign Hoshi Sato. There had been less time with Hoshi, but he had become overwhelmed and had proposed. She had, as politely and as firmly as possible, turned him down. As for T'Pol, she had wed another, and then that marriage had dissolved, but their lives had been turned upside-down by a movement called Terra Prime. The movement had created a cloned child, a combination of his and T'Pol's DNA. When the infant, named Elizabeth, died, that also effectively killed whatever was left of that relationship, along with any slender hopes for reconciliation.

It was, perhaps, for the best, as the Romulan War had intervened. The Enterprise had been called away to fight, and some of the battles had been truly nasty. The Armory Officer, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, had been particularly affected, and had suffered some shell shock. In some ways he was lucky, as there were crew members who had made the ultimate sacrifice. And now Reed was on a charming little planet called Lafa II. Reed's recovery had been facilitated by his great love, and she was expecting their son. The boy was scheduled to be born via Cesarean, on Halloween itself. Reed was gone to that planet and would be out for a while and then back again afterwards, for a few years of paternity leave.

The captain, Jonathan Archer, was affected by the Romulan War but not overly so. Without a love to help him recover, he had taken to studying laws and legislation and diplomacy. Others had coped in their own ways. Charles – Tripp to his friends – had retreated into the fiction of horror films.

=/\=

"You think we'll get a crowd tonight?" he asked Chip as the latter, a tall Communications Ensign, stood in front of him at the lunch chow line.

"I dunno. That film's pretty nasty in terms of frights. I am thinking the ladies might not like it." He eyed the new Science Ensign, Lucy Stone, when he said that. She looked back for just a second, brown eyes flashing, before she got a seat with the Botanist, Shelby Pike. The two women looked again and then pretended to study their lunches.