Chapter Text
Here's a tip. When beginning an affair on a starship, a few options should be considered off limits:
1) The captain of your ship
2) The first officer of your ship
Unfortunately, the chain of command on the starship Enterprise lacked knowledge of these very basic rules, resulting in what could only be described as a catastrophic example of why such rules should be followed.
Linguists aren't often considered scientists, but this assumption forgets just how much this field depends on studying human nature. This includes developing hypotheses on behaviors resulting in the creation of words. For example, Uhura had previously observed that a lack of emotions exhibited direct correlation to a lack of emotional intelligence. This hypothesis had been given support when she caught her boyfriend, Spock, the wonderful boyfriend who would never cheat because it wouldn't be rational, engaged in a very elegant game of tonsil hockey with the captain. It was almost funny that in the end Spock, and not the ever infamous James T. Kirk, was the whore in this situation. She hypothesized in that very moment that the 20th century Terran phrase "Fuck you" had originated to address situations just like this.
When she cleared her throat, the captain turned around and began to stutter very rapidly, she made note of another fact. The phrase "This isn't what it looks like" is usually in direct contradiction with the tone of the speaker. The heightened pitch of the voice, along with tense,closed in body language itself clearly indicated that the speaker was very much afraid of the situation: common indication of guilt. Spock, however, was far better at displaying a neutral response, and simply told Uhura that the only rational thing to do would be to “officially end their relationship”.
To keep herself from screaming, Uhura had to shove her rage so far down that her eyes began to water from the concentration it required. But she was successful, so successful that Kirk seemed to think she was crying out of sadness rather than anger. He reached out towards her, but Uhura carefully stepped back. If he touched her now she didn’t trust herself not to shove Spock's lyre up his ass.
Instead, she turned and walked away, ignoring Kirk’s calls after her. As she walks she began to think of how she would take her revenge for this betrayal.
When Sulu answered the door and promptly reached out to hug her upon seeing her tears, she couldn’t help but share news of the romantic treachery of the command crew with her now-closest friend on the ship.
“Spock and Kirk. They, I saw them—”. She tried, choking on the words. For once in her life, Nyota Uhura didn’t know how to complete a sentence.
The look of anger on Sulu’s face told her that he didn’t need her to finish.“Those bastards”, he muttered, pulling her further into his room and guiding her to sit. “After all you’ve done for them.”
She just let the tears stream down her face, and continued to do so as multiple crew members swung by to see what was wrong. She let Sulu tell them the tale, and witnessed how angry they all were on her behalf. They all cried, “and after all that she didn’t even say a word to them! How could they be so unfeeling?! Spock we expected, but not the Captain”
Uhura knew very well that this anger by the crew would lead to a break in communication, something that would be egged further by the fact that the communications officer was the victim of the crime and she certainly would not try to halt it. It was then she realized that the best way to get revenge would be to do nothing. Words spoken behind their backs, words that would grow the worse by the day, words that would break cooperation. That was the most poetic revenge she could think of. Her mother was wrong about her never getting a chance to use her degree in poetry.