Summary: Uhura has to deal with the consequences of her insistence that Spock undo his ship assignment alterations.
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"Uhura's Regret"
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'
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"You're gonna carry that weight..."
- Cowboy Bebop closing title card.
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Besides the planet itself and far too many of the Vulcan people, six Starfleet ships had been lost over Vulcan. Almost twenty-five hundred people had been on board, including three-quarters of the Starfleet Academy Class of 2258, but one name on the list of confirmed casualties was haunting Nyota Uhura. It wasn't just that she'd known Gaila Di'an personally or had roomed with her throughout their time at the Academy that troubled her.
It was the fact that Nero might have been the one to 'pull the trigger', as the old saying went, but Uhura herself had put Gaila in front of the gun, so to speak. It emphasised the reasoning for Starfleet's restrictions on relationships in the same chain of command in the most horrific way. If she hadn't let her emotions get the better of her, if she hadn't let herself be offended by Spock making decisions without discussing them with her, if she hadn't demanded he switched them back after he had changed her and Gaila's ship assignments - basically only to prove that he could detach himself as a Starfleet officer from his personal relationships when it came to command decisions - Gaila would still be alive. Oh, Uhura wasn't a fool. She realised that she herself would have died with the Farragut in Gaila's place and there was no way of knowing if the Orion cadet could have remembered and confirmed the report on the Klingon fleet's destruction for Kirk to support him in front of Pike... but Gaila would have had a chance to survive. She'd be alive and Uhura wouldn't be having to deal with the fact that she'd helped to kill a friend...