Work Text:
On Report
She stood outside his office door, nervously checking the uniform she had already checked and rechecked back in her cabin. Her hands felt warm and sticky and she tried to dry them on her skirt, only to find herself trying to brush the imaginary sweat stains off with her hands.
”Oh, this is ridiculous”, she thought, her sense of humour finally coming to her aid, and she pressed the entry chime quickly before she lost her nerve.
She jumped as it swept open immediately, and disliked herself for doing so. She had come here for a reprimand; it was time for her to take it like ... like an officer and a lady. She smiled slightly to herself and let the amusement carry her into the room.
He was sitting at his desk, writing one of the old-fashioned, hold-in-the-hand, hard copy letters he wrote, once a week, regular as clockwork to his brother. One of the oddest parts of her duties as a Communications Officer had been finding ways and means of getting the letters to the isolated colony where Sam Kirk lived. Her record was twenty-two jumps from freighter to ferry to liner to private yacht to freighter and so on and on to Deneva. Heaven only knew how long it took each letter to arrive, heaven only knew what order they arrived in, Uhura knew how large a bite it took out of the Captain's salary every month. She wondered if she would ever know him well enough to ask why he didn't just send mailgrams like everyone else.
He looked up and smiled absently. "Take a seat, Lieutenant," he said. "I won't be a minute, just let me finish this."
She sat down and watched as he wrote a couple more sentences in his surprisingly neat hand and signed the letter with a flourish.Then he opened the desk drawer, put the letter in and took out a datablock. Her stomach lurched as she recognised it -- it was the report she had filed yesterday, her report on their visit to the Mirror Universe.
"I can't accept this," he said, and for a moment she almost protested. She had formally stated her acceptance of the expected reprimand in her report, what more did he want? Then she realised she was in no position to argue. She dropped her head to look at her hands and said nothing.
"Before we go any further, I think you should know, I've put everybody who went on that little trip in for a commendation,
including you."
That brought her head up. "You can't!" She was genuinely shocked by the suggestion.
He laughed, not unkindly and sat back in his chair. The overhead light picked up the gold in his hair and she felt once again the kick of attraction deep in her belly, sharp, warm and unwelcome. "That's not the usual reaction to that particular piece of news," he said gently. "Mind telling me why not?"
She looked down at her hands again, watching as they formed into fists, the knuckles white, and then relaxed. "I was so afraid. I told you. I was afraid."
"Did it stop you doing your duty?"
"No... but it could have." The last phrase rushed and too loud.
"But it didn't."
She was getting angry now. Why couldn't he see it? How much more plainly did she have to say it? "Don't you understand, sir? I nearly fouled up the entire mission just because I was scared." She started to drop her eyes again and forced herself to look him in the eye. "I was scared I was going to mess it up." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "We'd all be stuck in that terrible place and it would all be my fault. Because I was afraid."
She jumped as he jerked upright and leaned forward, his expression suddenly intent. "There we have it," he said, and she realised that this was what he had been waiting for, this was where he had been leading the conversation. "Don't you see? You weren't afraid of what might happen, Lieutenant. You were afraid of being afraid."
It made a sort of sense. She tried to think it out but she was beginning to feel trapped. Her shame was such a familiar thing, she had used it for so long to make sense of her actions, that she found she was unwilling to let it go. "Does it matter what I was afraid of?" she said. "I was afraid and I didn't even have the professionalism to keep it to myself." She felt herself start to redden. "I blurted it out in front of you all like a frightened child."
He waved the protest away. "That's nothing. You were just doing what Doctor McCoy does when he grumbles about the transporter or Mr Scott when he tells me I'm going to blow up the ship; you named your fear and you went past it." He smiled, obviously willing her to accept what he was saying. "It's a coping mechanism, that's all. We all have them.
And as for the fear... I'm not going to spin you the old line about courage being acting despite your fear -- although like all cliches there's more than a grain of truth in it. The truth is Uhura, out here we're all afraid and we all have to find our own way of dealing with it."
"Including you?"
She watched him pick up the tinge of resentment, of accusation, in the question and turn it aside with a laugh. "Hell yes. Don't go believing all that rubbish Starfleet PR puts out, I get just as scared as the rest of you, more so probably because I've got 430 of you to be scared about. I've just taught myself to postpone the reaction until later, when it can't do any harm."
He paused, considering her for a moment, apparently assessing her for something, trustworthiness perhaps or maturity, because eventually he said, "Did you do the Directed Dreaming course at the Academy?"
"No sir, it was elective for non-command officers."
"I still do the exercises every night." He shrugged, his lips compressing in an oddly expressive grimace, part rueful acknowledgement of his own frailties, part denial of their cost. "If I don't, the nightmares are... difficult to ignore."
He shook himself and looked her straight in the eye. "Everybody manages their fear in their own way, Lieutenant. Yours isn't the most dignified coping mechanism I've ever come across but that's all it is. If you wanted to, you could probably change it fairly easily. There are a number of techniques you can learn, and you wouldn't even have to go dirtside to do it. You'll certainly have to do something about it if you ever want your own command."
She stared at him, shocked and exhilarated. "Do you really think I could?"
He shrugged again, spreading his hands in an already familiar gesture. "I'm not going to tell you what's right for you. It isn't for everybody. If everyone who could have their own command, did, this ship would be light Commander Scott and Mr Spock for a
start. But I will tell you this - you're not one of those aboard this ship who couldn't."
He let her think about that for a few seconds and then pushed her report back over the desk to her. "So take this away and re-write it and bring it back tomorrow -- on a datablock -- Command still wants this kept quiet and off the logs."
She picked it up and waited while he put his letter in an envelope and wrote the address. She felt that she ought to say something but did not know what. Then, as he sealed the envelope, Yeoman Rand came in with supper on a tray and the end of shift reports, and the moment was lost.
"Thank you Lieutenant. That'll be all." He was already deep in the report, lips pursed as he read through the repair schedule, pausing to make the occasional note, impatient for the work to be done. He had already forgotten she was there.
She made for the door and paused, wanting to express her thanks, make some acknowledgement of what she had just been given. As the door swept open she turned. "Good night, Captain."
He looked up, almost startled.
"Sweet dreams," she said.
The End