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"'Level with me, Doctor. He barely talks, and he's…spacey. Kirk's a lot of things, but not that.'"
Uhura rolled her eyes when Kirk slid into the first day of Basic Theoretical Analysis of Plasma Physics: not early, not late, just right on time. He sat two rows down from her and somehow managed to not make an ass of himself.
Captain Gruffud – she would later die on Vader at Vulcan – told them to read the syllabus on their own time and dove into a brief, overwhelmingly technical description of the subject matter of her class. At the end, she asked a question so methodological and involved that, for the first time, Uhura felt fear. Every teacher Uhura had ever had came with reputations, ones she ignored. So far, Gruffud's was on point, in a bad way.
Gruffud's eyes swept the classroom, packed full of first-year cadets and even ones pretending to be, and Uhura felt her cheeks burn.
Not me. Not me. Not yet.
"Kirk." Uhura relaxed her shoulders, wiped a sweaty palm on her skirt, and felt an immature twirl of morbid excitement. "What do you know?"
As it turned out, Kirk knew a lot. His answer wasn't from the textbook. It wasn't from any of the recommended reading for the course, which Uhura had already studied until her eyes blurred the words into a language even she couldn't learn. His voice was smooth and sure, respectful but assertive, and he calmly tapped his PADD on the desk, like discussing the scientific principles that made Starfleet possible was the easiest thing in the universe.
Whispers of "whoa," "wow," and even a louder-than-intended "he's totally bullshitting" filled the classroom. Some even turned to look, to see if they could find him. But Kirk wasn't a face, not yet.
"Chris wasn't kidding. See me after class." Gruffud turned and walked to her computer. "Cadet Kirk was, in fact, not 'totally bullshitting.' Some of you won't know that until next year, though. A lot of you will be back here. For now—"
Kirk never came back to that class. They had Intro to Warp Mechanics together, though, and when they became lab partners during week four, Uhura flat-out asked him, "What happened to you in Plasma Physics? Gruffud was up your ass."
Kirk smirked and adjusted a setting on the lab console, catastrophic overload averted. "If I tell you, will you tell me your first name?"
Uhura crossed her arms and set her jaw. Xenolinguistics wasn't just about learning words. It was about learning people and their language. Kirk's language screamed, "I already know, and I'm just fucking with you. This is so much fun." As though it was so difficult to read a class roster.
His body language changed, abruptly, and he leaned against the console, arms crossed. Amusement turned to concern.
"Wait. Do you not like her? Are you..." He backed down without explanation or reason (something he does a lot, in the years to come). "I got pushed into her second year Analysis section. It's boring. I wanted Experimental."
"'Boring,'" Uhura repeated, expression stone-cold. She hated him. She absolutely hated him. She had been up until 0313 doing a-little-harder-than-basic end-of-chapter equations, and he thought the second-year class was boring.
The console blipped red: it wanted to eject the warp core, to avert a catastrophic breach caused by a power surge. Uhura went to do so, when Kirk bumped her over and hit another string of keys, more complicated this time. Power drained through the deflector array, and the console flashed green.
Uhura glanced at the other consoles, all red, their classmates frustrated and angry.
"Ejecting the warp core to avert catastrophe is unreliable, at best," Lieutenant Commander Paris lectured. (Paris dies at Daystrom, the same day as Pike, the day before Kirk.) "Even if you're not going into the Engineering track, every crew member on board a starship should be fully versed in how all of its systems operate, so that the first thing the computer spits at you isn't always the first thing you do. Computers don't think. You do. Try it."
Commander Paris looked at Uhura and Kirk, inscrutable and silent, before repeating the simulation for the rest of their class. Their console remained green.
"So, tell me, Cadet Kirk," Uhura said. "How does an alcoholic hick from nowhere Iowa, with more brain damage than Starfleet knows what to do with, know all this?"
"Oh-h! Ouch!" Kirk exclaimed, sarcastic and smiling, but Uhura felt she'd gone too far, even with him. "I was going to offer to help you with Gruffud's class, but if that's how you feel, nevermind."
"And why would I need help with basic theories of Plasma Physics?" Uhura asked, getting in his face.
Kirk smirked, and he gave away nothing. She couldn't tell if he was defensive, angry, annoyed, or over her. She guessed defensive. "Because this shit has been bedtime reading for me since I can remember, and your roommate has a big mouth. Also, a nice mouth, with this really fucking amazing split-tongue. Sure beats farm animals."
(The roommate in question, Xaluandi, quit the following year, and Uhura was relieved to be assigned Gaila, even if she knew Kirk and Gaila would eventually...yeah.)
Kirk was disgusting. He was smug. He was intentionally annoying. And, outside of classes, he was the same mess he'd been in Iowa, or so she heard. (He was just lucky he knew a physician willing to put him back together before classes.)
Three days later, she messaged him anyway – "How do you find the electro-plasma coefficient when anti-matter/matter output is unknown?" – her thumb hovering over "send" for far longer than she would ever admit.
Five minutes later: "You look for it. 8-)"
What else she expected, she didn't really know. Every bit of Kirk was made of jackass.
And then: "Meet me at Starfilet in thirty."
He was already there with two PADDs and a Vintage Liberty. She sat across from him, distrustful, but he slid over the second PADD with verisimilitude. On it was three pages of work, in painstaking detail, with clickable notations that explained why and how certain steps needed to be taken. It made sense.
"Chapter five, right?"
Uhura nodded, silent. This was definitely it. She quickly synced his work onto her PADD, as if this was a prank and he was going to take it all back.
"It's a lot like language, only they don't teach it that way," Kirk said, eyes on his PADD. "They give you the framework and expect you to be able to fill in the rest. It doesn't work for everybody. Starfleet will take this as cheating, but if you want the other ones done, let me know. Or we can talk it out. Whatever."
Uhura set Kirk's PADD on the table and looked at him. This wasn't the Kirk she knew, only, admittedly, she'd only known him for less than five weeks. In those weeks, the only thing she really knew about him was that he didn't make any sense.
"How do you know how to do this?"
Kirk shrugged, eyes never leaving the PADD. "My mom's the chief engineer on DS3. It rubs off."
"And your father?"
She knew she'd said something wrong about a millisecond after it left her lips. His eyes went still, and he tensed, before shaking his head and laughing without any humor at all. He stood up, PADD in hand, and, when he leaned over to take the spare, he looked her directly in the eyes and said, "Fuck you."
"W-what? What is wrong with you?"
His smile was the same as the one he used when picking fights with four huge cadets. He looked like he had a lot he wanted to say. Instead, he walked off, leaving her alone and in complete mystification.
Xaluandi explained it: "You really asked him that? He's James Kirk. The Kelvin baby. The thing everyone knows and thinks about but doesn't say anything about, least of all to his face. Are you for real?"
Uhura sat on her bed, open mouthed and ashamed of herself, because of course. It wasn't that she didn't recognize the name; it's just that she'd never thought Jim Kirk, Bar Fight Loser Extraordinaire, was from that line of Kirks. Maybe a deranged distant cousin, but not the son of the George Kirk.
And that's what she messaged him: "I didn't realize. I thought you were a deranged distant cousin of those Kirks. I'm sorry."
It bounced back, blocked, and every worry she had of her apology being too blasé dissolved. In class, he was distant and cool, and Uhura learned that once Jim Kirk was done with you, he was done with you. Strangely, she felt like she'd lost something incredibly special. But so had he.
After the second semester of their first year, she had two more classes with him, both of which he coasted through and topped. Afterward, their paths almost never crossed, until he became treasurer of the Xenolinguistics Club ("Andorian, Tellarite, Modern Bajoran, Cardassian, Ferengi: is it still not good enough for you?"); when she thought of him after news of Deep Space 3's accidental destruction reached Earth; and when she was assigned to help him fail Kobayashi Maru two times (and apparently cheat the third time). By the second time, he wasn't as stony cold, and, before the third, he even asked her about her first name again. It felt good.
Then the world fell apart, and their lives permanently collided.
The Academy is only a year behind them, though it feels like lifetimes – and, for Kirk, it was a lifetime. The only thing is that, right now, she could be talking to the same person he was to her back then.
Kirk accepts the box of Relleian candy with a simple, "Thanks," and she has literally seen Kirk be more excited about administrative work. (She has also seen Kirk figuratively melt into emotionally compromised territory because of this candy.)
To be fair, Spock had warned her: "Jim does not appear to particularly care for visitors, Nyota. Perhaps, as it is often said, he simply 'needs time.' It would be prudent to give him that."
Uhura doesn't think Spock knows Kirk particularly well. She thinks he wants to, and she thinks he'll get there, but if there's one thing Uhura knows about Kirk, it's that he loves people: loves talking to them, loves being around them, loves being part of a crowd. Kirk, after all, was the life of (the worst part of) the Academy for three years.
"I hear the garden here shames that of the Academy," Uhura says in Modern Bajoran, just because.
It works. Kirk blinks and then smiles. "'Shame' is a plump word," he answers in kind, then covers his face with his hands, when he instantly realizes his pronunciation was off just enough to make a difference. "God," he groans. "Strong. It's a strong word."
Uhura watches him slide his legs over the edge of the bed and pull on red sneakers. He's wearing shorts and a dark blue sweater with the Academy logo on it, and he looks every bit their twenty-six years. His left sleeve pulls back just enough to show the medical identification bracelet around his wrist, the final holdover from the last harrowing twenty-seven days.
He hops down, as lithe as ever, and walks with her in comfortable silence to the turbolift down the hall. Harrison's blood hadn't left even the smallest gap, between what Kirk was before and what he is now.
Uhura reminds herself to do something very, very nice for McCoy, and then to thank him profusely. The world without Kirk would be an even emptier place than it already is, although that's not as unimaginable as it used to be.
She steals a glance at Kirk on the way down, only she's at no risk at all of being caught. He's in his own little world, zoned out, unblinking. It's reminiscent of Engineering, the warp core, and the second or two it had taken her to interpret his open-eye stare for what it was: he's dead; this is what death looks like. And then to process that, as Spock screamed, honest to god tear tracks on a Vulcan's cheeks, the world in every way wrong.
The turbolift hisses to a soft stop on the ground floor, and she disembarks first.
"Which direction?" she asks, this time in Klingon.
The trick with Kirk is to keep him engaged, or else he'll fly right by at full-on warp. There's a reason he knows so much about so many different subjects; why he knows so many languages when he doesn't have a reason to; and why, according to Janice, Enterprise is the smoothest running ship, from an administrative standpoint. Kirk likes people to think he's lazy, when the truth is he doesn't know how to turn himself off. The entire bridge crew knows that.
Kirk gives her a look, and she rolls her eyes at him.
"You don't know enough to make conversation, but I know you've studied Klingon."
"I can understand some."
"Good," Uhura says, back to Klingon. "Which direction, HoD?"
"Kirk. Just Kirk. And..." He looks to the hospital's main entrance, a grand display of clean, shining glass. "Isn't that one place down the street?"
Uhura lifts an eyebrow. "Leaving the hospital is not part of the agreement."
Kirk looks at her and narrows his eyes, mouth half-open. Uhura holds back a laugh. He's making a good effort to pick out the words he knows, and she's torn between proud and exasperated when he argues, "We didn't have an agreement."
Before she can respond, Kirk is already striding toward the hospital's exit, like he owns the place. Uhura calms herself down a few notches, summoning every bit of the cool, calm communications officer in her, before trotting to catch up to him.
She smiles tightly at the nurses and other staff she passes on her way—the way they turn back to look at Kirk tells her that he isn't getting away with this, at all—all the while thinking that she could kill him for making her complicit.
When she catches up, she hisses, "I swear to god, Kirk, you were so much easier to be around when you were asleep," but she wraps both hands around his right elbow and escapes with him anyway. If he answers, she doesn't hear it.
It's cold for September, has been for days. It's a brisk 15˚ with just enough wind to bite. The sky is deep blue with puffy, white clouds that only have a little dark gray shadow on their undersides.
The near-perfect day drains tension (that Uhura hadn't even noticed) from Kirk's shoulders. Uhura wonders how many times he's thought about doing this by himself, and she wonders if he's even realized that he could probably get McCoy—or any of them, really—to do just about anything for him right now. The Kirk she's used to would have sensed the blood in the water days ago and wrung every ounce of good will out of them.
Kirk definitely has a place in mind, though he hasn't thought to let her in on the secret. They pass strings of restaurants with eyeroll-worthy names like "Starsips" and "Feederation"(in the past, Uhura has been left unimpressed by both), until they come to one about two blocks from the hospital. It's the simply-named Westbank, and it's one of her absolute favorites.
Inside, Uhura closes her eyes and breathes the scent of warm bread, simmering soups, and freshly sliced ingredients from all over the quadrant. It reminds her of short weekends at the Academy, gathered around too-small tables with her cozy group of friends, all the future ahead of them except none at all.
When she opens her eyes, Kirk has just finished entering credit information, and his fingers find the option for Ardanan tacos like he knows the menu well. He steps off to the side and looks at her expectantly. She doesn't argue about him paying and orders the Andorian-Belariun fusion on rye and Trarakian meket soup.
"Is it too cold to sit outside?" he asks.
Uhura thinks that sounds great, and they settle in at a tiny table along the sidewalk, surrounded by the chatter of a half dozen other patrons. It occurs to Uhura that they can't speak openly here, not with so many ears.
"Are you at all worried about Dr. McCoy kicking your ass for this?"
Kirk shrugs and, before cleanly devouring half a taco with one bite, offers, "He's been waiting for it."
A pang of something – regret, maybe – flickers through her.
These days, it's rare to have friends left who know you so well. For Kirk to have someone like McCoy, who gave every bit of himself to pull Kirk back. For McCoy to have someone like Kirk, who has always seemed to galvanize McCoy, despite all the obligatory eye rolls and over-the-top objections. For her to have Spock, even if the changes she's seen in him over the past year–even in the past month–don't completely make sense.
Uhura remembers well scrolling through the list of the dead. Nearly one thousand classmates, close friends, acquaintances—some, just names she'd never heard; others, names she only vaguely recognized from a class—but all the third years, fourth years, and those few in-between, like herself, Kirk, and McCoy. After the initial shock and grief lifted, all that remained was the stifling regret of all the time wasted.
"I wish we'd been friends at the Academy," Uhura says, unapologetic and assertive. Starfleet doesn't employ communication officers who blurt words they shouldn't.
An expression actually happens on Kirk's face. She decides it's reflective, if not contrite. "Yeah, that was a rough year. It wasn't you. I'm sorry."
Uhura accepts that, even if it's far less than what she had ever envisioned. She decides to take a chance and see where their friendship really is now. "Did everything that happened with Nero change it at all?"
It isn't her best-constructed sentence—there is no good way to ask, really—but Kirk would absolutely know what she means.
He's no longer one of the few whose life was irrevocably altered by Nero; he was just one of the first. Her own perception is that most people have stopped seeing Kirk as his father's son, even Kirk himself. That poorly contained rawness of his disappeared months and months ago.
The longer Kirk stays silent, the more shame and doubt she feels for asking.
Kirk's eventual answer is an indifferent shrug. Not angry. Not upset. Not interested. As neutral as it gets. She's losing him, like Spock warned, the change in his attitude abrupt and alarming.
"When did McCoy say you could leave?" she asks, pushing on, because it's all she knows how to do.
"Hasn't."
Uhura nods, lips pressed thin. She's a communications officer; her entire being is about communicating. And he's all about knowing what to say and when to say it; what to hold back and what to give up. He doesn't usually use that particular skill set on his friends.
It's deceptive here, on this quiet street. Just a few blocks over, there are still mounds of broken buildings and bodies, their world on fire—again.
Through everything that happened at and after Vulcan, Kirk was the one, unfailing constant, coming through it all with fire in his eyes. Never blinking. Never stumbling. It's less than fair to expect the same sort of resolve now.
Uhura leans forward, elbows on the table, and catches him off guard.
"What can I do?"
Kirk swallows and coughs. "Mm?"
"What can I do?" she repeats, eyebrow raised and eyes perfectly still on his, because even as much as she respects Kirk, she knows exactly what kind of walls of bullshit he can toss up.
He shakes his head. "Nothing. I'm fine."
Kirk is so far from fine, he probably doesn't even remember what it feels like to be fine. Only, he isn't even trying, when everyone else—
She stops herself right there. His bad mood or whatever it is, is contagious. She can't let it be.
"What does McCoy like from here?" Uhura asks, pushing her empty plate and bowl to the side.
He hears that question just fine. "Any kind of sandwich and the hazelnut coffee. Why?"
"I'll be back" is all she says.
Inside the restaurant, she stabs at the credit and menu screen, unsure if she's mad at Kirk or circumstance or both. Maybe she's tired of being cool and logical, because god knows that's not Spock anymore. Maybe she's tired of catastrophes and death and being in the middle of it all.
When Uhura turns, coffee and sandwich to go in hand, Kirk is waiting for her at the entrance, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and eyes faraway gone. She swallows away a gasp and absolutely knows that it's going to be a long while before she'll be able to forget that moment by the warp core. Maybe longer, if there isn't a way to bring him back.
They walk in silence the short distance back to the hospital, and Uhura squeezes his arm before they go their separate ways.
It's as she watches his retreating back that she wonders how little she actually knows him and more the person he's always wanted people to see. Maybe this is him, and she's wasting her time longing for an imaginary person.
"McCoy's in his lab, 23rd floor, room 22," Kirk says over his shoulder, because of course he knows, and of course he's right.
The talk with McCoy is good but less than helpful, and Uhura leaves the hospital feeling empty and directionless. The world has changed, and there isn't a way to bring it back.
She's halfway home, when she feels her PADD vibrate. She pulls it out of her bag with a small trickle of dread, which turns to surprised relief when she sees it's a message from Kirk.
"By the way, thanks for shooting the fuck out of Harrison. 8-)"
That's worth a smile, and she gives it one.
-end