Title: Thursday's Child
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS & XII
Word count: 1516
Characters/Pairings: Uhura character study. Uhura/Chapel, Uhura/Gaila, Uhura/Spock/Kirk.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: institutional sexism.
Summary: What Uhura wants, what she needs, and what she gets.
When Nyota Uhura joined Starfleet, she'd had some idea of how things were going to be. She told herself, very firmly, that she must be sure to take advantage of any unexpected opportunities, and try to take unexpected setbacks in stride. It turned out there were a good deal more setbacks than opportunites. There were nights when she lay curled in her bed on the Enterprise and felt a hollow emptiness drift into her every cell; and then in the morning she would remember she had a job to do, and she would get up and go do it.
Uhura was born in what had once been called Tanzania. She'd shown unusual aptitude in school, and her parents had raised her with the belief that she could do anything. She could have done a lot of things, but there weren't many openings for a Terran linguist, and Uhura hadn't had any desire to moulder away in academia. She'd had a talent for singing, but her parents were getting old, and they needed a steady income, so Uhura had joined Starfleet. Her application had been accepted, and she'd passed the entrance competition exams with extremely high scores.
When she got to the Academy she found she'd been put into the Yeoman course track. It was sorted out. Eventually.
Uhura liked Spock. It was little things that endeared him to her; his soft voice, how curious he always seemed about the universe, how he never condemned any of the cultures they came into contact with for not conforming to the ideal of progress. For a while she'd thought that maybe she'd found something she was allowed to have. Every Friday night in the rec room she'd sing while Spock accompanied her on the Vulcan lute. Afterward she would engage him in conversation, which he seemed to enjoy. Uhura suspected she enjoyed them more than he did. He never underestimated her intelligence or tried to chat her up, which she appreciated a great deal.
One evening the discussion swung toward Vulcan. Uhura had always been fascinated by the Vulcan language family. She sensed Spock's discomfort and tried to steer away from personal topics. Somehow they ended up going back to Spock's quarters and consuming a bottle of Hazari ale. Spock showed her the IDIC symbol and explained its philosophical and cultural significance. She thought something might happen, but it didn't, and she went back to her own cabin and stared at her carefully placed sculptures and tasteful purple drapes and wondered how terrible it would actually be to never have sex with anyone ever again. At least it would cut down on potential embarrassment.
The next day she slipped into her seat on the bridge with a sense of impending doom. Spock was already at his station, precisely on time as ever. She kept her eyes on the screens in front of her, which were complicated enough, and anyway decoding the frequencies coming in through her ear pieces required one hundred and fifty percent of any one human's attention.
Still, she didn't miss the way the captain stopped by Spock before taking his place at the center of the contained universe of the bridge. Or how he leaned just a little too far over the science officer's shoulder. And she certainly caught the way Spock looked back at him, with a smile in his eyes that Uhura had never been able to draw out.
She did have one serious discussion with the captain once. She'd run into him in the crew mess hall; he liked to have a look around now and then, so he could feel in touch with the ship. He'd offered to carry her tray, in his kind gallant way, and she'd refused, and they'd ended up sitting and talking for a few minutes, about what should go into the latest mission report. He'd never asked her for such an opinion before, and she found herself tense, waiting for things to reveal themselves.
He looked tired- more than usual- and after he'd run out of polite things to say he asked her why she'd joined Starfleet.
"Same reasons as everyone else, I suppose, sir," she'd said.
"To see the stars and the beautiful women?" he'd quipped, quoting a much-satirized recruitment slogan. They'd both laughed a little.
"No," said Uhura, "I just wasn't patient enough to contribute through normal work and a fulfilled life. I wanted to help affect things more quickly."
It was the first and last time she'd ever say something to surprise James Kirk.
One time, Christine Chapel noticed her looking at Spock. He'd followed the captain into the crew mess hall, and was busy explaining how something urgently required the captain's attention. "You too?" Christine Chapel said, and then "hey, you look down. Let me get you a drink."
Over mugs of tea they discovered they had more in common than a shared interest in Vulcan culture. The next day Uhura sat down by Christine for lunch, and Christine smiled at her.
let's try that one more time again
Uhura liked San Francisco. She liked the beach, she liked her classes, she liked Gaila.
They'd had to go slow at first. Gaila had told her in whispers, one night alone in their dorm, about how she'd been sold to a Federation trader, and how his first mate had allowed her to escape. She hadn't had the book learning to apply to Starfleet, but she'd had an uncanny skill with computers. Technician was a good career path for a woman in Starfleet. One could rise to some height, out of sight of the bridge. It wasn't for Uhura, though, that course, that compromise.
She could have been a researcher, and stayed mostly out of harm's way; but though she was nothing of a warrior, she believed in the Federation, mostly, and her skills were needed.
Gaila was a good friend, of the sort she'd never had before and wasn't much likely to have again. Sometimes Uhura had considered proposing something more, but once she'd worked through her fears Gaila proceeded to fall in love with any pretty cadet who caught her eye. Uhura was always there with tissues and chocolate and being a friend with benefits was better than not getting any at all. Uhura was too busy for a relationship any way. So they both silently agreed not to expect more.
"Are you coming out tonight?" Gaila asked one time.
Uhura said nothing, just gestured to the piles of notes on Romulan grammar on all sides of her desk.
"You've been no fun at all lately," Gaila moaned, throwing a paper starship at her head. "You're just like my new instructor. He's a Vulcan. According to him, 'relaxation' involves a good game of three-D chess."
"mandaar, mandaareri, mandaaranh, imandaaredh," Uhura mumbled. "mandaar, mandaaruri, mandaarir, mandarrari, mandaarar."
"Well, I see you're busy," Gaila said. "I'll see if I can bring you back some fruity kind of drink, shall I?"
Uhura finished Romulan, and started Vulcan, and took the same class Gaila had taken, because any instructor who made Gaila drink that much had to be worth meeting.
He was.
They waited until she'd graduated his class before starting a relationship, as anything else would have been unprofessional and vaguely illegal. As it was, there was a tinge of illogic to the whole thing that Uhura thought Spock secretly liked. Spock was a virgin when they met but he didn't act like it. He was unembarrassed of asking her what to do in bed, and she really did enjoy being his teacher in that area. He was a very good student.
The whole dating aspect was a bit harder. They didn't hold hands, of course, but she did train Spock to the point where they could exchange meaningful looks during conversation, and go places together, and stay pretty monogamous. It wasn't the human definition of normal but Uhura had always suspected herself of xenophilia and she was almost as much into Spock's culture as she was into Spock himself.
Maybe she had less time to talk with Gaila. Her roommate never complained.
"Tonight," said Uhura, "I'm acting Captain. And if either of you wants to do anything, you have to ask me for permission first. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly," said Spock, the lines of his body tense as always but his skin beginning to flush green.
"Fuck yes," breathed Kirk, "just let's get started already."
"Fuck yes sir," Uhura corrected, and said, "Kiss Spock."
Kirk leaned over and obeyed his commands most thoroughly. Uhura watched. Spock's fingers rested lightly on her palm. When Kirk began to move lower on Spock's body, the dark eyes followed him, focused, intent, but those gentle fingers never stopped stroking a pattern into Uhura's skin.
Eventually Uhura got tired of watching the show, and asked for some attention for herself. She got it, in spades.
It's sometimes nice, she thought in the moment before pleasure whited out her endlessly busy mind, to get exactly what you want.