Whether she's looking for him or not, she finds him sitting on a chair in the observation deck closest his quarters, where he's accustomed to spending his nights when he's not his cabin—or hers.

"Captain," she says, and it's a little different, a little more hesitant than all the other captains that came before.

He doesn't stand or turn, because—why would he, at this point? He just presses the heel of his hand against his temple and the pounding underneath.

"Why… Why is it that they didn't ask for a reference from your current commanding officer?"

From me, he means.

"I'm not sure. Maybe—" she starts, and then she breaks off, which makes Jim think that she actually quite sure. "The Antares had access to my service records and evaluations through Starfleet. It is… understood, that if a senior officer is initiating an application for an external position, the current current circumstances might be less than ideal, and the captain might not wish for them to leave, and perhaps even give…" She hesitates. "Misleading references."

It gives him pause. "You think that's what I'd have done."

"No." Her answer is immediate. He's not looking at her, but he bets she's shaking her head.

"That's not why you didn't tell me, then."

To that, she doesn't reply. But it's fine. The both know why she didn't tell him, which makes this meeting, and whatever conversation might come of it, useless. Utterly useless. A last, useless attempt, after months, years of equally useless, clumsy attempts, and it hasn't been fun, for sure, but before now he has never, ever wished he hadn't seen her in that stupid bar, or started hitting on her like the idiot kid he was, or decided to bring her on his ship.

A no-win, if he's ever seen one.

Although she would certainly think of this differently.

"Well." He gets on his feet and walks up to her until they're standing face to face, the distance between them perfectly appropriate for a captain and his soon-to-be former communication officer.

Not a month ago he was inside her, hands clutching the sheet while he pressed a kiss into the corner of her mouth.

He smiles his captain smile.

"Good luck, lieutenant. I hope your new assignment will be everything you wish for."

...

It becomes clear to Jim about thirty-five seconds after stepping on campus for the first time, that people at the Academy can be divided into two groups.

The ones who know that he's Jim Kirk, and the ones who try to pretend they don't.

"Your father still holds the record for highest accuracy in 0-G conditions," a white-haired men who looks way too old to still be an instructor whispers in his ear during his first space jump training.

"…and always remember, the transmission of the log is the very last thing you should secure before boarding the Kelvin pod." For what has to be tenth time during the presentation, the lieutenant's eyes dart towards Jim before sliding away just as quickly. If everyone else's lag behind, it's just by a few seconds.

"You were born for this," Archer tells him every other time they meet in the hallways, voice earnest and one arm thrown around Jim's shoulder, and even the times he doesn't speak it's still there, shiny in his eyes—and heavy, unfamiliar in Jim's chest.

He's annoyed and—maybe stupidly—somewhat surprised. Unlike half of the students in his class he was never a Starfleet brat, and the extent of the cult of George Kirk is news to him, a widespread tradition that amuses and repulses him at the same time. The comparison, the conflation of the two Kirks is just plain idiotic, especially when Jim cares so little about making his father proud, this abstract, distant man who made choices—a choice, in particular—that Jim can't even begin to conceive.

Sloppy, he thinks, as commemorative holos of the Kelvin disaster are shown all over campus, starting at six AM on his birthday and still playing when he returns to his room, sometime one or three hours past curfew, the comm number of a guy he will likely never see again scribbled on his forearm. There's always another option. There's always a way to win, and George Kirk wasn't able to find it. It brings him down a couple of notches, in Jim's book. It should in everyone else's, too.

"I'm not here to prove anything. And I'm not here for my parents, and for sure not for my father, who I've never even fucking spoken to. Or for Pike, or Archer, or that annoying chick who keeps asking me if I feel triggered in 'Fleet history class. I have zero interest in competing with anyone." But myself, he doesn't add.

Bones just stares at him, leaning back in his desk chair. "Right. How did we get to this topic, again?"

"I'm here 'cause this is fun." Bones' eyebrow rises to his hairline, and Jim ignores him, sinking deeper into his bed. "Well, some of it. It's something to do, at least." He stares at a black dot on the ceiling. Maybe a moth. They've been having a moth problem, fucking student dorms. "I just wish they stopped this whole predestined child crap, that's all. If I head the word 'legacy' one more time, I swear…"

Bones' laugh feels bitter. Which, Jim's starting to realize, it often does.

"Don't fool yourself, kid. Life's nothing but being held to unreasonable expectations. We're all compared against someone else, all the damn time. Your someone else just happens to be your dead father. At least people are upfront about it."

Jim presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I just want to go to space, see cool stuff, and be high enough in the chain of command that people can't order me around. And get laid often, possibly." He's had too much to drink. Again. He's drifting off already, wearing his leather jacket and boots, and tomorrow morning—hell, in two hours—he's going to regret it.

Bones snorts when Jim's almost asleep. "Yeah, well. I don't know that that's compatible with the 'Fleet's mission."

Fuck the 'Fleet's mission, he thinks before blacking out.

...

He reads her name on the sign right outside her room and immediately recognizes it—Cadet Uhura, typed in a red font with a small gold and silver IDIC symbol on the right; it looks serious and a little pretentious, probably because it clashes terribly with her roommates', who decorated hers with a bunch of hearts and stars and smily faces, and a couple of Saturn-like planets for good measure.

So he knows from the first night that the girl from the bar—who basically got him to join Starfleet, really—sleeps roughly thirty meters away from him. Still, he doesn't cross paths with her for several weeks, not even when her roommate reveals to be as fun and awesome as the name sign suggested and he starts spending considerable chunks of his free time in their room. Sitting on Cadet Uhura's very neat, ridiculously well-made bed while he waits for Gaila to finish whatever homework she has to turn in within the next three minutes so that they can finally start fucking. Feeling a little naughty for introducing what has to be five hundred percent more wrinkles into the painfully tight bedspread.

There are, apparently, people who make their bed every morning and change their sheets more than once a year. It might be Jim's first real cultural shock.

"She likes the library. And the linguistics labs. And the long-range observatory. And the—"

"Yeah, yeah. I get it."

"So that's why she's never around here. I like it when she is, though. Always lends me her socks when I'm out of clean ones. And she's nice. Terran people can sometimes be… you know." Gaila shrugs, and then looks at Jim from head to toe, as if realizing his species for the first time. "Well, maybe you don't know. Anyway, she's not like that. She's great."

Jim has been thinking along those lines, too. That she seemed great. She looks great. And not just the hair and legs and the smile and the—yeah, all of that, of course, but not that at all, actually.

It's the little shelf, the one right next to her bed, that's full of real, actual books, and as if that weren't rare enough, to find someone who doesn't think that old-style books are a waste of space and time and effort, it's the titles that give him pause.

There is a seventy-two percent overlap with the content of his own little shelf, the one next to his very messy, ridiculously unmade bed. He calculated it after being in her room for the the third time.

"Don't tell her you've been in here, though, if you meet her. We have a strict no sex policy. She once walked in on me and Anna and Kari and Sh'thai and had a minor freak out. I think she must have been raised in a very sheltered environment." Gaila shakes her head, but her voice is sympathetic. "Poor girl. Oh, Chaluth and Josh were there, too."

...

It's more than just the books.

There's that time he catches sight of her from across the gym while she's dropping a dude over twice her weight, collected and unwinded, hand brushing something—probably chunks of the guy's teeth—off her Starfleet t-shirt.

There's the fact that he sees her a lot around the quad, sometimes walking briskly by herself, more often with cadets from her department, sometimes laughing and other times talking somberly, and friendship is something he's never had a lot of and always admired.

There's that article she published in undergrad on a linguistics journal—N, her first name begins with an N. Nicole? Norah? Name? Gaila refuses to tell him for some reason Jim refuses to ask —, something full of stuff like neural pathways and machine learning algorithms and bound morphemes, which he reads three times before realizing that he needs at least twelve other papers and five book chapters worth of knowledge to understand. He trudges through all of it, and by the end he's a little dumbfounded by the brilliance of her research.

There's the way he can just picture her playing as hard as she works.

There's the fact that she turned him down after he told her his name. Yep, his last name, too.

There's her breasts, her eyes, her hips, her smile, her voice, and the way she moves, precise and graceful, which a better guy than he would pretend not to notice, which Jim—

Yeah. No.

He can't look away.

She's in two of his classes, stupid stuff that is mandatory but both mind-numbingly easy and unlikely to ever be of use to anyone in the whole universe. She sits considerably closer to the podium than he does, and—as far as he can tell—attends far more regularly, actually arriving on time, listening intently and taking notes and raising her hand to make a very valid point, Cadet Uhura, and only leaving once the instructor is done droning on and on about the most self-evident shit. Jim can't bring himself to do any of it without wanting to chop off his own ears and maybe the entirety of his head, too, which means exactly zero chances of catching her before of after lecture.

Until about halfway through the semester, when they happen to be standing in line side by side to get their midterms back.

"Hey. Uhura, right?" he tells her, accepting his test from the RA with a nod.

Of course, it's right. Of course, it's a stupid questions. But it's not as if any of his usual openings are likely to work any better. He still has a slightly deviated nasal septum to prove it.

She barely spares his dazzling smile a glance, and keeps on walking, her nose buried in her test. "Yep."

"How's it going?"

"Marvelously," she says, scrolling down the PADD and frowning a little.

"Good. Hey. I was thinking, this is a tough class. Do you maybe want to… I don't know. Put together a study group? Or meet up to review the material? I could really use your help with the whole enthalpy thing—"

He arm darts out, and the fingers of her right hand grab the edge of his PADD, tipping it away from his chest and towards her.

It's there, at the very top of the the screen, typed in a very large, very easily readably font.

100/100.

Too easily readable, really. What the fuck, RA.

He dials up his smile and staunchly refuses to flush.

"Or I could help you with the whole enthalpy thing…"

She glares at him, a weird mix of contempt and amusement and condescension that is oddly familiar—from that night in Iowa, for sure.

Still, it's probably—surely—the longest she's ever looked at him. By far.

It's not unpleasant.

He could get used to this, really.

She pivots and leaves before he can scramble for another stupid-ass line. "Bye, Kirk."

It's probably not love at first sight.

But he likes her, a lot, from the very beginning.

...

"…main mistake people make when attempting these calculations without the aid of a dedicated software is failing to take into account the shifts in the gravitational field originated by the planet's orbital trajectory. Which of course can completely derail the approximation of the vectors, because underestimating the planet tilt by only point one degrees can lead to deficit in the trajectory of—"

Up to twenty-four degrees. Jim yawns, twice, a third time, and then leans towards his right. The seat closest to him is empty except for a Starfleet-issue messenger bag, but on the next one…

"Hey." He leans further. "Psst."

He might assume that she simply didn't hear him—if her lips didn't purse, just a little, just enough for him to notice. Her stylus continues sliding over her PADD, and Jim wonders what's to write down, anyway. It's all pretty self-explanatory, all in the formulas, all easy to derive, and all boring as fuck.

"Is this going to be on the test?" he whispers a little bit louder, but she's really, really good at ignoring him. "Hey! Uhura."

"Ssssh." She doesn't lift her eyes from her desk. "I'm trying to follow along."

Following along is overrated.

"What did you get on the Navigation test?"

"Shh. Not telling you," she whispers back.

"Ninety-three?"

She just smiles and keeps on writing.

"Higher? Ninety-five?"

"I'm not gonna tell you. And lower your voice."

"Ninety-eight?"

"Commander Larkin doesn't give higher than ninety-seven percent," Nyota murmurs, and suddenly Jim feels like smiling, too.

"Well, we know for a fact that it's just a rumor."

Uhura's finally looks up from her PADD, eyes focused on his from across the desk, and yep.

This is kind of the moment he started this whole conversation for.

"Drop the royal we, Kirk. You did not get ninety-eight percent."

He smiles at her. "You didn't get ninety-eight percent."

She narrows her eyes. "I'm not gonna tell you my grade."

"Well, then it seems we have reached an impa—"

"Cadet Kirk, Cadet Uhura." Commander Gordon's voice is suddenly louder across the classroom. "Anything you would like to share with the class?"

"Uh, nope." Jim smiles his most dashing smile. "Uhura here just asked me out on a date. Told her I'd have to think about it."

The commander raises both eyebrow.

Half of the cadets turn to stare at Jim.

Pretty much everyone giggles.

Everyone, except for Uhura, that is.

"Cadet Uhura, this is not the time, nor the place. Please refrain yourself until after the lecture is over. As I was saying, the axis tilt adjustment cannot be factored in unless the relative coordinates of the planet are known…"

"Kirk. You know I'm going to end you, right?"

Jim sits back in his chair and just winks at her.

...

He does this thing, whenever he sees her in the mess at the Academy, sometimes chatting with Gaila or Christine or Bones, sometimes lost in thought while she methodically goes through her food, more often staring into a PADD and typing between bites.

He does this thing, which is stealing food from her plate.

It's usually walnuts, and the odd olive, because for some reason that probably has to do with calibrating macronutrients or maximizing metabolic intake she always makes herself the same exact salad—all that avocado, gross. It's kind of fun, because unlike Bones, or Sam, or most people Jim surrounds himself with, she has a pretty high level of basic decency and never tries to stab his hand with her fork.

Though it's in her eyes that she really, really wants to.

Which only makes Jim want to harass her more.

It's a vicious cycle, they're in.

"Kirk."

He chews with relish. The nut is meaty, and crunchy.

"Uhura."

"Just go get your own food, please. There's an entire salad bar at your disposal."

He shrugs, and steals another one. "Good stuff."

"They all taste the same, you know." She grabs her PADD and balances it on her salad bowl. It's a little precarious, but it's definitely blocking most access points.

Jim swallows and smiles. "Nah. Yours taste better."

"And they're all free."

"Is anything really free in this world, though?"

"Also, the mess is half empty. You don't haveto sit next to me and steal my food, you know? You could… I don't know." She cocks her head, pensive. He hair falls sleek and shiny on her shoulder. "Not."

He could. He could not steal her food. He could sit someplace else. He could get lunch from the other mess, the one closer to the side of campus where most command trek cadets hand out, which has way better soft serve options. Or he could be rolled up in fetal position in a corner of the room, minding his own business, trying to consume as little oxygen as possible, and she'd still find him crass and loud annoying and irritating—which, to be fair, he absolutely is—and ignore the shit out of him.

He know because he has tried. He has tried avoiding bragging about his grades, and he has tried parading them under her nose. He has played dumb, and he has turned on the genius act. He has spoken to her in Vulcan, Andorian and Tellarite, and he has not spoken to her at all. He has been, at different times, funny, polite, teasing, distant, sensitive, and just plain friendly.

Being obnoxious, at least, gets him what he wants.

The attention.

Hence, the walnuts.

"Are you comm people coming for the survival training in Oregon?"

"Of course."

He leans forward in his chair and takes a sip of her water. "Is that pretty blond girl you were having coffee with the other day coming, too?"

She rolls her eyes. "Kirk."

"Hey. Asking for a friend."

"I swear, if you fall into a ditch because you're too busy ogling her to look where you're going, I'm leaving you there to die."

"Ah, so she's coming."

"I didn't say that. Kirk, just leave her alone."

"Hey. I'm not gonna harass her or anything. I'm just gonna showcase my charming personality to her. People are usually into that."

"Are they."

He stands and grabs a cherry from her tray. "I'll make sure to bring my most dashing environmental suit." On his way out, he can feel her stare on him, narrow and hostile, but it's not quite unpleasant. Not at all, actually.

He stops by the salad bar to get a handful of nuts, and sure enough, they just don't taste as good.

...

He finds out mostly by chance, right after their second attempt at the Kobayashi Maru. Just a few months before Vulcan, before Nero, before everything, when he still figures that as soon as they graduate she'll probably end up on the Enterprise, which she seems to be a little obsessed with, while he's ready to grit his teeth and aim for a higher position—first-officer, oh well, better than nothing, he supposes—on one of the less coveted ships.

Not that he's not planning to end up on the Enterprise, sooner or later.

"This was my last time."

"What? No." He's busy aggressively stuffing the simulation uniform down the recycler bin, so that he doesn't register what she just said until she's almost out of the locker room. He waves goodbye to the rest of the team and immediately jogs after her. "Wait. Uhura—we have to do it again, until we can figure this out."

"Yeah, well. Good luck with it. I've got better, more productive things to do."

"Come on. You know there's gotta be a way. I need you to—"

"What if there isn't one? Maybe we're missing the point. Maybe the point is what we can learn from this, not whether we can beat it—"

"What? No. Of course we can beat it!" He realizes that they're almost shouting when she stops in her tracks to look at him, and he lowers his tone. "Listen, I'm pretty sure one way or another I can beat everything—"

She lets out a humorless laugh. "Listen to yourself." She turns and starts walking, looking straight ahead. He follows, and apparently it's not a good idea. "Just—Go away, Kirk."

"What did I do? Why are you mad at me, now?"

"Just leave me alone, okay?"

"Wait. What did I do now? Why are you—why is your baseline just… hating me?!"

Her expression shift minutely, and suddenly she looks angry. Not irritated, like she usually is when he's around. She looks pissed, though whether it's due to the question Jim just asked or to the fact that the simulation has been bad this time, really bad, embarrassingly bad, even worse that than the first, he doesn't really know.

Talk about a learning curve.

"I don't have time to hate you, Kirk."

"Ok. Fair enough. You do find the time to dislike me in your busy schedule, though? Is it because of the TA position? Is it because last semester my GPA was higher than—"

"Oh, god. Of course you would bring up—"

"I'm just trying to figure out—"

"—that once in your life, when I was having a really busy semester because of my internship, you had a marginally higher GPA than I did—"

"—no, I—"

"—you are so conceited."

"I'm not—" He's laughing now. He's laughing, and it's making her madder, so he really should stop. "Why am I conceited? Because I did better than you at something? Once?"

"Kirk. You think you're better than everyone else. All the time."

"Well, I am better than lots of people at lots of things—where are you going? I didn't mean you!" He has to walk faster again to catch up with her. The quad is not crowded, but a few cadets have turned to stare at them, at the way she's walking, staring straight ahead and looking a little murderous while he buzzes around her. Jim takes a second to shoot a grin to a pretty girl he's almost sure he's made out with before.

"Listen, we can figure this out. There must be a way to solve the simulation—"

"Since you're having trouble counting, let me remind you that we have taken it twice. That's one hundred percent more times than people are allowed. We might not even be allowed to take it a third time."

"I'll talk to Pike."

She scoffs. "See? You think you're above the rules."

"The rules are stupid!"

She shakes her head without even looking at him.

"Listen, I'm fucking willing to work until I am better than anyone else, and so are you. And that's what bugs you, right? That we're the exact same, and that sometimes I'll do stuff a little bit better than you." She's going a little bit faster, still completely ignoring him, so he starts jogging until he's in front of her and walking backwards. "That, and, that even though this Academy is fucking hell for everybody and we're all miserable and don't even have time to brush out teeth some days at least I manage to have fun through it…" He stops in his tracks, and he's standing right in front of her, which means that she has to stop, too, unless she's okay with bumping her entire front into him. Which he'll bet she's not. "…At least I am getting laid."

She doesn't step around him. Doesn't roll her eyes or laugh, either. Instead, she pins him with one of her looks.

He feels a shiver running down his spine.

"Why are you like this, Kirk?"

He gives her his most rehearsed smile, the one that he used in Iowa, the one he knows she finds obnoxious. He regrets it immediately, just like everything that comes out of his mouth afterwards, and fuck the Kobayashi-Maru, because Jim's pretty sure that if his brain weren't fried from being shot at by fifteen different warbirds he'd know better than to say something like this to her.

Maybe.

"You know, I'm bringing it up cause I'm willing help. I'm not an asshole. You could be getting laid, too."

Her expression blanks, and she cocks her head and studies him contemplatively. For a moment, it almost looks like she's considering it.

For a moment.

Jim's heart starts beating faster, and faster yet when she takes a step closer to him and goes on her toes, so that they're—almost—the same height.

"First of all, you are an asshole." Her lips are millimeters from his ear. Something inside Jim whimpers silently. "Second, I am getting laid. And it's glorious."

She's back on her heels, walking around him and heading for the dorms before he can even parse what she just said, leaving him to stare at her retreating form with a frown.

...

"Exactly the person I was looking for."

"If McCoy has locked you out again I'm sure you deserve it and no, you can't sleep in my bathtub. Not again."

A librarian walks by, carrying a stack of actual books and shushing them with a stern look. Jim takes a moment to give him an apologetic grin and a wink and then sits across from Uhura. There are a least six PADDs between them, as well as the empty wrap of a protein bar and the remains of a salad.

He needs her to be as non-irritated with him as possible for this, so he tries to keep his voice low. "You can say that all you want, I know you'd never let me to sleep in the hallway. With the spiders. And the moths."

She doesn't lift her eyes from her work. "Do you, now."

"Listen, I need a favor."

Silence.

"I need a date."

"I told you, Kirk, the Academy doesn't have a prom."

"No, I'm serious." He waits for her stop typing, but she doesn't show any sign of slowing down. "I have to go to Pike's for a dinner thing. Tonight. Semi-formal. And he said I should bring a date."

"Can't." She smiles. "Actually, scratch that. Won't."

"Why?"

"I have plans. I need to finish my computer science homework, and then go for a forty-five minute run, and then shower, and then have a meal, blissfully without you stealing half of it from me since you'll be fed elsewhere, and after that I—"

"Jesus. How in advance do you have your life planned?"

"Ten years, give or take."

Jim is mildly horrified, though he's not sure why he's surprised. "Why do you plan all this shit, anyway? Why can't you just…live?"

"Because," she says, forcefully, and the typing stops for a second or two. "I have actual goals, unlike you, who appear to be driven the sole purpose of annoying your peers."

"Listen, you can run whenever, and you can eat with me at Pike's. And I'll code the homework for you if you go out for dinner with me. Hey, I'll do the whole assignment for you, if you give me a kiss when I take you home. Cheek's fine." He winks, but it's a waste, because she's still staring at the PADD.

"Mmm." She cocks her head, and her hair slips down her shoulder, reminding him, forcefully, of how beautiful she is. It's been years by now, and truth be told, he doesn't really notice that much anymore. When he does it takes him by surprise, and it's a little unwelcome. "The dullness of spending three hours optimizing an inner loop versus the excruciating pain of going out with you and watch you eat off my plate and bamboozle Pike into thinking you're a well-socialized human being—"

"Bamboozle!"

"It's a tough choice. But I'm gonna have to pass on the dinner."

"C'mon Uhura."

"No."

"Please?"

"You do know what no means, right?"

"I will—I don't know. Do your laundry for like, six months."

"First of all, there's no way you're getting anywhere near my underwear. Second, I just can't come out with you. I told you, I'm seeing someone—"

He ignores the bite in his belly. "It doesn't matter. You're not married to this—"

"—and while I know that notions like commitment, and honesty, and faithfulness are quite foreign to you, it still would not be appropriate because I'm pretty sure that Captain Pike knows."

Jim freezes.

"I'm pretty sure he doesn't. Why would he?"

Her answering smile is not directed at him. It's faint, private.

Secret.

He tells himself he doesn't care, but it only works half-way. One third, tops.

"He would."

He narrows his eyes. "Who is it exactly that you're—"

"So no, I can't."

Jim hesitates for a heartbeat.

"Didn't you say that dating is a waste of time? Loss of productivity, or whatever?"

The smile is still lingering, and though it's absolutely irrational, it makes Jim feel…alone. All the more excluded from her life, which he apparently knows so little about. "Maybe I changed my mind."

Jim snorts. "I didn't know you could do that." He regrets it immediately.

She sighs. "Kirk, I can't help you, sorry. There are other people you can ask. Gaila would love to go, I'm sure. Or Janice. Or Gary, though he's super busy with thesis lately so maybe it's better if you don't go there. Christine is back in town, so she's a good option, too."

Right, he tells himself. Right.

There's lots of other people.

Tons.

"See, this is why I come to you." He pastes a grin on his face, which of course is completely pointless, since she's not really looking at him. Or listening to him. He comm just buzzed, and she's flipping it open, eyes sliding left to right as she corners of her mouth shift upwards again."'Cause you're good at helping me figure out stuff."

She's still smiling faintly when he stands to leave, and doesn't notice him throwing away the wrap, or pushing further on the table a PADD that's about to fall down, or walking out of the study room trying to trick himself into thinking that in the end he doesn't really care.