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Nyota Uhura has six brothers, four of them older and two of them younger. Her mother often joked that if only Uhura had been born a boy, there would have been enough of them to raise her own professional men's djenka team. They certainly all grew up big and brawny enough for it, a solid block of brothers with Uhura a slender sapling branch constantly looking out of place among them. She wonders if it ever occurred to her mother that the whole point of djenka is to strike with enough force to send the opponent's team scattering to the four winds, because that's what happened, regardless.
Her mother never got the chance to try for that last boy, or to give Uhura any sisters, because in the protracted summer of Uhura's fourth year, a drought on the fifth continent sparked a war for the waters of Mars, and Uhura's father was one of five hundred civilians on a managerial envoy vacuumed into the black of space before the fall's cracked, meager harvest even finished ripening on the vine on the planet below. Her mother, who worked as a fiberglass carpenter and whose hands, to Uhura, always smelled like raw honey and acetone, had been pregnant more or less constantly since the day she got married, and never expected to wind up alone with seven children under the age of ten. She never remarried.
Her brothers dealt with the loss in their own way, and Uhura grew up learning to translate one to another, so it wasn't really out of her way to join Starfleet and make a career out of it. In Jim Kirk, she sees almost every stage of grief her brothers ever displayed within five minutes of meeting him, like he's trying to use them all up at once, like he's oil in a deep well that's been lit with a match and won't stop burning.
But he doesn't have a monopoly on what it's like to lose a parent in a gruesome and senseless way, and neither, for that matter, does Spock.
Her eldest brother can't handle the slightest G-force on his body and has never managed to come off-planet and visit her: even taking the local train to the spaceport to pick her up makes him motion sick. Last she spoke to him, she didn't ask him where his life was going. They talked about their mother instead, her forays into fiberglass art, and about when the city was ever going to finish construction on that new parking garage by the Alturan bakery. They even talked about Spock, before he asked "does he really address you as Nyota?" with so much surprise that Uhura got embarrassed.
One of her younger brothers, the first one she was ever allowed to hold when she was deemed old enough, likes to draw eyes on every note he makes for himself. He's gotten really good at it. He drew on a paper placemat at a bar for her once, a dozen eyes, all of them different; some glittering with light, crinkled up and joyous, some wet with tears, one of them so darkly angry that Uhura thought of stars exploding, Vulcan collapsing, and had to look away. He says it makes him feel better to be watched, because people who think they're being watched are less likely to do something wrong or awful, like steal or cheat or stab someone through the neck. It's why religion is so popular, he tells her, before he takes her face between his hands and kisses the corner of her eye, and leaves her alone with her drink and her cyclopsian audience.
They're on a mission, sometime in Uhura's twenty-eighth year, in a sector of space that Starfleet simply calls "unchartered territory" and Scotty calls "who the buggering fuck even knows?" On Earth, it would be the height of summer on the fifth continent where her mother builds glass towers, and on Mars, the water harvest would just be starting. Her brother has a birthday in four days.
"Again?" goes Jim, peering owlishly over her shoulder and watching her make a reminder for herself. He's standing too close. She doesn't have to tolerate it. "How many birthdays does a guy need?"
She elbows him out of her way. "I have more than one brother, Captain."
"Really?" He dogs her steps. "How many?"
"Enough," she says dryly. Enough for Uhura to be able to stand in a room full of powerful men and not feel intimidated. Enough for her to have learned tolerance for bullshit at a very young age. "Excuse me, Captain."
(This isn't the last conversation she has with Captain James Kirk.
That one goes like this:)
He moves to step out of the lift, and she grabs his elbow with a, "Wait!"
He turns into the contact like he was expecting it, taking her shoulders in both his hands and leaning into her space. She thinks again that looking at him for too long is like looking at something burning. "I know," he says, and fixes her with a long, serious look.
Uhura is thrown. "Wait, you know?" she asks.
"Yeah," he lets go. "Weren't you going to tell me that you loved me?" Horrified, she grabs him by the back of the neck and propels him out of the lift. He pinwheels his hands at her defensively. "I didn't want you to have to make a whole awkward --"
"Go." He throws out a hand to stop the lift doors from closing on him, still looking guileless, so she gives him one last shove and says, "I was going to tell you to something important about our sensors and how they might not be equipped to recognize weapon signatures on older-model spaceships, but maybe I'll just let you find out on your own."
He ignores this, because Spock is probably already on it, and to be fair, he probably is. "I'm just saying -- you don't have to tell me!"
(Those are the last words he ever says to her. If he regrets them, that's a secret between himself and his conscience, because he never tells.)
When they stumbled upon a stray colonial ship, almost seventy years out of date and bearing absolutely no Federation licensing whatsoever, and upon hailing them received senseless audio-only jargon in return, that's when everybody turned to Uhura. Her brain is wired for translation. They rewind the transmission and play it again for her, and everybody on bridge pauses to watch her expectantly. Something inside of her settles when she realizes that they're waiting for her to get it -- there's no pressure to it, just a belief that Uhura has the answers and will deliver them presently.
She listens, parsing sounds in sequences and rearranging them, and on the third play, she does get it. A word, there, that she's heard sung before, on an old radio station that her mother piped into the workshop when she was crafting. "It's Mymmyso," she says. "They're speaking Mymmyso."
"Can you translate?" Spock asks, rounding the helm to address her directly.
She thinks about it, because she knows a few words, but you can't communicate with only vocabulary and no syntax, and shakes her head. "It's a dead language," she says. "The Mymmyso were classified as extinct a hundred and fifty years ago."
There's a pause, while everyone looks at the ship they've got maximized on the big screen, older even than the majority of the Federation's legislative branches and existing here on the fringe of charted space, where nobody has supposedly ever (officially) been. "Sulu," says the Captain thoughtfully. "Do they have warp capabilities?"
"… Negative, sir."
"Hmm." He rotates his chair around slowly, looking at all of them in turn, before craning his neck around to say to Spock, "What do you think? Should we go make friends?"
Spock blinks. There are a wealth of sarcastic replies considered and discarded in the space of that blink, and he settles on, "That might be difficult, Captain, if they are, in fact, Mymmyso, as we share neither history nor a language with a race considered until this day to be extinct."
"Oh, Uhura can find a way around that, can't you, Lieutenant?"
Reluctantly, because she doesn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that's exactly what she's trying to figure out, Uhura admits, "There are possible common languages I can try -- some of which were widely used a hundred and fifty years ago and might be recognizable."
They send Uhura with a skeleton crew over to parlay, partially because the Mymmyso, by all accounts, were always a little technology-shy and, because of their biology and the olfactory element embedded in their language, weren't comfortable with communicating via video transmission (the same way one of Uhura's older brothers hated the telephone, because talking to a person without seeing their face felt unnatural to him) and partially because Scotty is hankering to get a good look at a "classic beauty" from the inside out.
"That's not to say you shouldn't respect her privacy, like," he tells Uhura seriously, holding her vest for her as she straps in even though she doesn't require the assistance. "No lady likes a stranger prying around in her unmentionables, but I'm just saying, if you get the chance, I wouldn't be remiss of a good look."
So here she is, Lieutenant Nyota Uhura of her twenty-eighth year, standing in front of a representative sample of a race Starfleet has classified as extinct, if that tells you anything about the frequency with which Starfleet is wrong about things. She doesn't speak Mymmyso -- though she thinks, if there's a point where they all feel comfortable enough, she might sing some of the song she remembers from her childhood, to see if they know it too -- and they don't speak English, but there's a juvenile among them who can click inexpertly through Old Catharic, which Uhura once learned because somebody in Basic told her she couldn't do it. She clucks her tongue through a few rudimentary phrases, the Mymmyso clicks back in a formal manner she recognizes, and Uhura feels satisfaction warm her down to her toes. She thinks (but she could be wrong, it's not unheard of) that she sees something similar in the juvenile's expression, before the self-identified leader steps in and her newfound friend falls back into the role of interpreter.
"Name?" is the first thing asked of her.
"Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, of Starfleet," she answers.
A few clicks, and then again, "Name?"
"Uhura," she tries, less formally, because it's easier to remember and maybe they don't use honorifics in Mymmyso culture, she honestly has no idea. She's called Uhura among her friends, because people have a tendency to want to address girls by their first names, to make that claim, and Uhura wouldn't stand for it. If her brothers were called "Uhura" by their friends, then she would be, too. You call someone by their first names only when they are yours and you are theirs.
The Mymmyso's eyes bore into her, fierce and intense, and Uhura looks back.
(The last conversation she ever had with Spock had gone something like this:
"Be careful, Lieutenant," he says in the lift, a few shallow layers stripped off his voice. She knows what he's saying, and touches the tips of her fingers to his hand, tucked in the space between their bodies. She traces the edges of his fingers the way a dragonfly would skim over a pond surface in the hot of summer.
Jim answers, because she doesn't. "Relax," and he thumps his fist against Spock's back, jarring him out of his contact with Uhura and turning his expression into one of long-suffering patience. She smiles and faces front. "This isn't a dangerous mission. She's going to pop over there, make some friends, see if they need any help, and then we're going to skedaddle on our merry way. Easy-peasy."
"I'll be fine," Uhura adds, simply.
"Besides," Jim continues, because he never does anything simply. "Technically, every mission we go on has the potential for disaster. Any day could be our last, who are we kidding, this ship has a hundred thousand ways of killing us if we bump a button wrong. I'm just saying, Spock, don't treat every mission like a suicide mission," his voice turns a little too brittle at the end there, and he clears his throat quickly to cover it.
"If I thought it was a suicide mission, I wouldn't go," Uhura says, very pointedly. She still hasn't forgiven them. Either one of them, the bastards. There's no nobility in death -- not for her father, not for his, not for Spock's mother. There's nobility in doing your job and coming back to the people who love you, especially when that's the more difficult of the two options.
Spock stays silent, staring at the side of her face until she meets his eyes again, questioning.
"Do not underestimate the desperation of a people for whom devastation and loss of life is imminent," he tells her, and at her back, she feels Jim stiffen.
"You're referring to the Romulans."
"And Vulcan," Spock says quietly. The lift glides to a stop, and the doors open, but for a beat, nobody moves. Then Uhura lifts all the way up onto her tiptoes and presses a kiss to the corner of Spock's eye, lingering for the space of one heartbeat, then two.
Vulcans are touch telepaths. It's the easiest language Uhura ever spoke.)
"Name?" the Mymmyso asks, one last time.
"Nyota," she says, very softly. Nyota was her father's name -- a girl's name, even then, but by all accounts, he'd worn it with pride, because what shame was there in a girl's name? Why were women expected to take men's names, but at the same time shameful for a man to take a woman's name? They'd had another name picked out for Uhura when she was born, their first and (though they didn't know it then) only girl, but they say her mother took one look at her and reached out with her other hand, touching the place where the pulse beat in her husband's neck and said, Let's name her after you. And they did.
It is the only thing of her father's that she got to keep, after the war.
Her mother calls her Nyota, her brothers call her Nyota, and no one else. No one else until Spock, much to her brothers' continual surprise, and -- once or twice -- Jim.
The Mymmyso clicks, satisfied with that, and then returns in like, "Ymmn."
From Ymmn and the careful interpreter, she learns that there are 102 Mymmyso on board, a number that -- she knows but won't tell them, because they probably know the reality more than she -- their race will never recover from. For a technologically-shy people, they love their ship, they treat it like it's the only home they'll ever need, and maybe it is. She learns that they have no use for the Federation, no use for contact from other species, and no use for any of Starfleet's assistance. They want to be left alone, so that the dying of their culture is theirs alone to experience.
Ymmn has offspring, and asks if she does, too. It seems like a polite sort of question, something you'd ask.
"I don't," she answers. She thinks about mentioning Spock, but she doesn't know how to phrase it in Old Catharic: they don't really have the vocabulary for it, and to be honest, Uhura isn't sure there are many languages that do. All the tongues she knows, she isn't sure if she can express what Spock is to her in any of them.
"What do you have, then?" Ymmn continues pleasantly. "Whose safety do you place above all others?"
Nyota Uhura has six brothers. The oldest is Bones, the youngest Chekov. Sulu has a significant other he left behind on Earth -- Uhura met zher once, and quite liked the enthusiastic way zhe and Sulu finished each other's sentences, tripping over one another in their haste to communicate everything at once -- and zhe came from a species that needed to hibernate at periodic points in their lives, so if they timed it right, zhe should be waking up from one such session just as Sulu returned. Scotty likes eating egg yolks raw -- good for his hair and nails, he claims stoutly. He never washes his hands before he eats, and somehow manages to complain that everything on board this ship tastes like petrol.
There are jokes Jim won't laugh at, she's learned -- the ones about his people, mostly, the farmhands and the earthbred folk from the shipyards, the kind of jokes that come from people who've never considered Iowa and its surrounding land a real place, unless they need to make a quick crack about the availability of farm animals. To those, Jim just smiles his flytrap smile, the smile of someone about to break glass.
Of them, Spock is the one she thinks she would touch at the place where his pulse beats in his neck.
"I have my ship," she settles for in the end, and Ymmn clicks contentedly.
When it's time for her to leave, she's thinking about the birthday four days from now, about where she could gain access to Mymmyso language primers, or if there's a way for her to make her own, about the seam in her nylon that doesn't feel straight. Ymmn is thinking about the Enterprise, about its warp capabilities and how much further they could go if it was theirs, further than they could ever be found, about its sick bay and its science, how maybe there's a way to chemically alter their fertility. Ymmn is picking up a weapon. Ymmn is aiming.
It's a point-blank shot, and she never sees it coming.
On the bridge of the Enterprise, someone starts screaming.
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fin