She wouldn't usually get so held up over a lost bit of jewelry but it was the ring her brother bought her in Versailles. She had to wring her hands through remembering the whole evening and asking around to make sure nobody would leave without her, trying to figure out: She had it at the burger dive where Michaels had asked who gave it to her, not at the bar when—oh yes. In the bathroom then when she was washing her hands, before she ran out to the lot to fix her hair, before she ran back in, before the blond, that blond kid, yes, the fight. (Good lord.) The manager says they didn't find anything and she's turning back for the door in disappointment, then sees that same young man standing next to a cleaning bucket with a wet scrub sponge in one hand and pinching out a pair of headphones to ask, with a gritting indifference now that the bar owner is keeping an eye on him, "Did you lose a ring? I put it in the shot glass on the last booth."
Instead of thanking him while she puts the ring on, she says, "You don't work here?" She can't quite remember his name. He's already tuned out again when she asks.
"You were around during the fight, right?" the manager intercedes. "It's shop policy—You get in a rumble, you clean up, or I call the authorities."
"From the looks of him you let him ring up quite a tab before you handed him the mop." She brushes a stray strand of hair off her forehead in something far from a shy gesture and adds, "And that's hardly fair, he wasn't the only one involved."
"I wasn't about to make Starfleet cadets polish up the place, ma'am."
"Why not?" she asks, but she doesn't press it, just turns to leave.
Later around dawn, sitting at the picnic table off the road while the cadets are buying sodas, she absorbs through a conversation with Pike that the man she met the night before was George Kirk's son. She shares the admiral's displeasure with the obvious lack of ambition and thinks it makes her like the man even less.
She's been warned already, in another conversation with a superior, that space has a way of only being exotic when you're not quite in the mood for the adventure, that on other days the planets start to all look the same, and she knows there are thousands upon thousands of bars and clubs on other planets not unlike the ones here. You have to want the movement and the mystery; you have to knuckle yourself through enough boredom until you stumble upon the things that will really be like nothing you could have imagined sitting on a comfy Earth porch drinking lemonade. She already knows this, and this is why she's going to make it into a major mission, this is why she's one of the best. Pike may think this kid has got it, but that kind of thing doesn't run through your blood. Everything is ordinary about him; he has no instinct for the journey itself, for what is between things in the black space, for what is even outside of this run-down yellowy country. She could go to a hundred other bars across the galaxy, and at every single one she'll find another Kirk who only cares about what she's called.
He's on the shuttle a couple hours later, and when he sees her he grins and says, "Never did get that first name." She feels herself smiling and doesn't quite know what kind of smile it is. Perhaps it's the first of many contradictions that begin with Jim Kirk.
.
.
.
.
She's one of the volunteers taking names and sorting through the new cadets, and you'd never guess—Jim thinks—that she was probably up for most of the night. Pressed formally into a uniform, earrings hanging in a utilitarian notion of beauty from her earlobes. Shining fingernails evenly glossed and nowhere chipped or cracked as the delicate knuckles pulse through PADD after PADD until she slips one towards him. She does everything with pointed motions, never once letting on as if she'd met him before through her tight business demeanor.
She has already filled his name into the entrance records, though, and hands over his name tag for the orientation program. Meaning, that she knows who he is. Meaning also that she has no idea at all.
.
.
.
.
Jim Kirk can't sing. She finds this out when he's probably a little beyond half drunk and barks out a bit of a serenade while leaning into a banister she's passing by in the smaller courtyard after May Kaja's birthday party. He's sneering expectantly and she just shakes her head, only speaking to him when he's looking at her back.
"'Ruby'?" Her mouth twists around the name. "Really?"
"Well, I know it's not Rumpelstiltskin. And according to the baby name census from my approximation of when you were born, trends suggest that there's a thirty-five percent chance you have a name that shows up in a pre-twenty-second century song."
"And I suppose you've acquired the entire library of songs featuring female names."
"I suppose you could just tell me what your name is to spare yourself the musical numbers."
She mutters her favorite Orion curse word, and since she gives him no other response she ends up with an earful of "Nadine" on the way to the mess hall the next day, followed by snatches of "My Mara," "Lovely Rita" and a particularly god-awful bellowing of "Layla" as he keeps a consistent few yards behind her on the track during her afternoon jog.
Of course she ponders disclosing that her name definitely doesn't come up in any songs. But no. It's too good a joke at his expense, especially when from the looks of it, it's starting to embarrass even his doctor friend. At the end of their class together the next day she hears McCoy grumble at him and start to head him off, something about "could just ask one of her friends, you know..."
.
.
.
.
Ever after she's managed to half-accidentally secure a reputation as a woman who says no thanks to any date ever, the Jim Kirk thing is still going on.
Still, and just barely excusable for the fact that it's never explicitly a date he's trying to get out of her.
"You're either a masochist or stupid or both," she says before he's barely gotten anything out, when she's seen him giving her that eager gleam of eyes he always greets her with.
"Whatever you say, Jo-Marie," he says, grinning and not in a mocking way, as if just about anything she has to say to him would be fine and dandy.
He's in a good mood. Then again, he's usually in a good mood. The image of him looking unhappy is actually sort of an obscure notion, something that she's realized might be almost disarming to see. So maybe she tries, sometimes, not to be callous, even if she doubts she's capable of really sullying his confidence.
"Maybe I just enjoy the fervor with which you reject me," he suggests flightily. "Anything to put a spring in your step, Persephonia."
She says nothing, but the empty drink cup she throws into the disposal just then goes clanging down the chute with loud agitation, hopefully not noticeably enough to prove his point.
.
.
.
.
The first time he sees Gaila's room they are just stopping in for her to change before they go out to watch a game on campus. Jim grins widely when he hears a sweet voice echoing in the shower, and after a moment incredulously asks, "Is your roomie singing in archaic Romulan?"
Gaila just rolls her eyes and offers, "She has to study even in the shower." She ducks into the bathroom yelling, "Nyota, I'll be back late..."
He will have forgotten the name when he later realizes he knows Gaila's roommate, but he wouldn't forget that voice.
.
.
.
.
There is something offsetting about discovering him in her room of all places, with a friend who brings in more than enough of her messes now and then. When she spits out a nonsensically accusing "You" it's only in response to the blaring voice in her mind saying, No, no, no, NO. She can't deal with him crawling up on her personal space, rudely and impossibly appearing in too many facets of it, seemingly on purpose even when she knows it can't be.
They've kept ending up with courses together, and even in the ones where Jim is actually too busy to flirt with her it gives her an itch up her spine, like she's still pretty sure the guy doesn't belong here and she's still waiting for something or somebody to prove it. He's going to fail the Kobayashi Maru again, and maybe that will at least peel off a bit of his ego, though she thinks probably not.
She's rattled off about this for several minutes when Gaila starts to give her a crooked smile that means Gee, but you sure can talk about him, can't you? Uhura rolls her eyes and doesn't bother explaining that it's the first time she's ever bothered venting about Kirk to anybody, just turns her chair back to what she's studying. But a second later she waves a hand out in a terse way. "That. See? He just has a way of sticking, wherever he goes. It's so irritating."
The comment rides only vaguely over Gaila, who's distracted trying to find her other stocking under the bed. "Hmm. You gotta admit, though, he isn't exactly ordinary."
And Nyota just gets up in a sharp motion from her desk, grabbing up her things and going to find somewhere, anywhere, where Jim Kirk has not been that day.
.
.
.
.
He knew just after he met her that maybe he didn't have much of a reason at all to think she was anything special. Just something about the way she owned herself, it made him feel she was beautifully controlled all over, gentle and pretty in places inside of her she didn't even let anybody get to. Exactly the right formula to drive him a little crazy, but only in the good way. Only in the way that made him tingle with suppressed laughter whenever he managed to get a rise out of her.
He's nearly exhausted his repertoire of name-centered love songs and has to start over with doubles. She sighs on the way to the library: "You already know that's not my name."
"Different song this time, though." He smirks, but maybe something's missing this time. She doesn't miss it, and coldly steps around him down the steps.
"What's the point, Kirk?" she barks, cutting through the joke for good as her boots go slicing across the quad. He doesn't think about it again for hours.
But when he does think about it something starts to ache, just a little.
That's new.
.
.
.
.
It's strange, when they hand over all the authority, the captaincy, the promise of a grand voyage, that he's got a database laid open to look over where he can see all the scores and academic standings of the cadets he's been sitting next to in courses for a couple years. About a week ago he was still nervous about where his rank was going to stand, and now he's taxed with picking up the pursuits of a whole new crew.
He's up late, still temporarily boarded in the same modestly sized room he brought little parties and a couple dozen pretty girls home to over the course of the last couple years, with his legs crossed and coffee in hand like he sat over many all-night novel readings, but now poring over the information needed to determine the finest possible crew he wants to work with.
He puts off communications track as long as possible, but when he finally gets there, some ten minutes of reading has him letting out a long sigh, getting up to go fidget through a walk outside.
It does not surprise him at all that he doesn't have a good reason not to assign to his bridge crew the woman who's been casually dancing through the best of his idle fantasies for years now. Except that it seems like a terrible idea. Nyota, that was it. He remembers a long time back when McCoy didn't get why he didn't just ask somebody who knew her pretty well for her first name—He'd said something like "Way to spectacularly miss the point, Bones."
But it wasn't like even Bones could suspect it, that some self-annoyed voice at the back of Jim's mind had started singing, I repeat, what makes her so special? And as a captain, which he is, he sure as hell can answer that question now. But all he thinks he'd like to do now is forget her. It's like there was some kind of game, one that she bluntly called off a while back, and for some reason it wasn't until he saw her with Spock that he started to really get it. It wasn't that she didn't play. He'd just very badly lost.
He tells himself for the duration of a half-mile hike, he isn't going to take her. There are other sufficiently qualified officers if he looks hard enough. Personal conflicts, personal history. (That dream about her that actually made him wake up feeling restlessly sad.) It just doesn't seem like a good idea.
What he does is comm Spock for an opinion on Lieutenant Uhura's performance soon after the sun comes up.
"I believe you were present when I said that she is unmatched in xenolinguistics. Her achievements are certainly even greater by now..." His tone is curious; he knows that Jim knows she's the best there is. So Jim spends the rest of their conversation naming all his professional reasons (for the tenth time) that he thinks Spock needs to stick with Starfleet, not even daring to let something get into his mind like how in God's name could this lucky bastard for any logical end walk away from someone so unmatched, and he's in such a bad mood by the time Spock has restated his responsibilities to his species and ends the communication that instead of getting himself another coffee he immediately puts on a better shirt, says, "Fuck it" out loud, and punches in the code to comm Nyota Uhura and formally invite her to accept a position aboard his ship.
.
.
.
.
She is not the same woman she was when she met him.
She's not even the same person she was when she met Spock. Though in some ways, it's impossible to define if she is softening or hardening up. She remembers herself as a little naive and maybe even over-sensitive, soon out of graduation and finding most of the instructors sort of daunting and unpredictable; hearing her Vulcan professor's quick reprimands to students who hadn't studied hard enough was something that made her posture tighten up day after day. The day that Spock lost his mother and his entire planet, she wondered if it was possible at all she'd affected his limits the way he'd subtly affected hers.
One might have called it a kind of manageable passion. She would not have agreed. On a couple occasions, not even speaking on the romantic nature of it that was probably only halfway perceived or assumed by most, somebody would say something to the effect of relationships with Vulcans probably being "low maintenance." These remarks were never meant to imply anything about her, but she always took it in that itching way.
She was wanting more than she wanted before. After everything happened with Nero she was left feeling a little less young, excited to pull her life in the right direction, but also just wondering what she would have missed out on in her life if they hadn't made it out of that event horizon. Her career was shooting forward out of a canon and being the no longer as innocent but suddenly vulnerable person that she was, she wanted somebody around; she wanted to be held.
At the memorial for all the cadets they lost, Jim Kirk put on his indecipherable version of a brave face. He looked soberly melancholy about it all, but not exactly like there were so many dead rather than just one, not like most of them had been far too young. She supposed that dexterous kind of mourning would be good for a captain to have, though; the thought surprised her.
After the ceremony, she sat quite a few paces away from the dispersing crowds on a bench outside. A chamber group was still playing elegies and requiems inside the wide doors, and a flower she intended to place next to the photo collage in the library was hanging limply from a hand rested on her lap. She didn't look up when Kirk came walking alone down the walkway. She didn't look up when he sat next to her, or when he was next to her for minutes and minutes in a silence that between two people usually means that either they are strangers, or they know and care for each other very well. It didn't seem as if he just needed to be with someone who was familiar but wouldn't try to get him to say something, it's just that that was really the only explanation.
There is nothing stoic and unreadable in Kirk's actions; he instead resonates in all he does with many possible meanings, makes people grasp through the whiplash between his smugness and kindness for what the hell he is actually saying or thinking or feeling. Around that limbo time of waiting for rank evaluations to clear up, there was a kind of ambition in her that wanted to puzzle it out, but those urges belonged with her work, with a job she simply couldn't be taking under Kirk's command if he got the Enterprise.
Only now, a man that used to wink and sing her punch-drunk songs in the green California grass stands among sleek silver and white and asks her now about transmissions and dialects, compliments her work with professional approval, smirks at her after the craziest of missions in a way precisely unlike the way he used to. And she did not wait to accept the position after Spock did, but Spock accepted Jim too, and now, sometimes, Spock holds her, when they are close enough.
Her decisions have kept them both close, but it was never a choice between the two of them. Jim Kirk is just her captain now, and if she ever wonders why he seems a bit less himself when he talks to her on duty, she reminds herself that other people can change too.
And with Spock there is a lot of work, a lot of translation, a lot of bending and unscrewing through the mechanics to reap the reward of some emotion softly hidden under the coarseness.
If she ever feels like she had the parts right but put them all in the wrong spaces, she reminds herself that she never made that kind of choice.
.
.
.
.
"Do you think we were never right for each other?"
The second bar that looks like the one in Iowa is close to a Federation overhaul station on a day when everyone is a little too burned out on lack of sleep to enjoy it like a real shore leave. Kirk is next to her, his expression furrowed from where it's kind of an accident that they're sitting close to each other. She clears off a shot in a clean gulp while he struggles to say something back.
"I don't really know, you know," he finally says.
"You've got nothing. I thought you'd maybe have something. The two of you have become pretty good friends, considering. It's only been about half a year in space..."
"I'm really sorry," he says in a rumbling mutter of sincerity, and his eyes are too blue and too bright. "But that's all I can say, you know?"
After some consideration she makes a short knock on the bar for another drink. "Then I'm going to need you to leave me alone, or start being really mean to me or something, in a few minutes."
He seems to know that he should really get up and out of there, but he asks anyway. "Why?"
"Because. I haven't been this lonely in a really long time."
"...That's supposed to be an explanation?"
Her hands scrub down her cheeks and then her arms wrap down to hug herself into a tired lean onto the bar. In a way almost like the impatiently pacifying explanation one gives to a child, she emphasizes, "Because I'm attracted to you."
Jim Kirk has an expression she has never seen on him before, and he says, "No you're not," and she's not sure if he believes it or is trying to convince her.
"Oh, fuck off," she says, laughing bitterly in surprise.
"Do you really have to do that?" he's interrupting, something dazed and seemingly even angry in how he's still milling it over. She just looks at him with her thoughts all muddled now and he waves out some hand as if the words are right between them and they're looking at them. "You're just going to throw that out there."
"So what?" she mutters. "I was just—"
"Being honest? You could have just told me to go away cause you can't stand me and I wouldn't have blinked at it. And I mean, knowing what I'm like..."
A strangely challenging silence pervades the way they look straight at each other for the next several seconds. She has a feeling he almost is pleading with her to take it back.
When she just gives a shrugging tilt of her head and retorts, "I don't really know a lot about what you're like," it is realized in Jim's expression as the throwing down of a gauntlet, the way he straightens up, his expression gone defiant. He sets his glass down and gets up, and for that night he leaves her alone.
.
.
.
.
The tension he left with after her half-confession seems to altogether disappear, and when she sees him next she gets the idea he's given himself some tight resolution and is walking through it on a very straight line.
To her gradual consternation, Jim Kirk's next move is to throw himself away from her and into an almost reckless string of one-night stands whenever they've got a few days off, managing a number that McCoy comments, with offhanded neutrality on the subject, borders on self-parody.
"I haven't picked up on him doing this ever since he had that terrible argument with Dina Staley, and even then it wasn't nearly as," McCoy thoughtfully licks his teeth for the word, "athletic."
She squints. "Is this something you should really be sharing with me?"
"I don't know, I figure it'd be fine with him. I mean, the two of you are becoming good friends, right?"
Yes, that's the other thing. In the several months since Uhura and Spock's relationship ended Jim has begun, also in some kind of essential maneuver of self-defense, to become her friend.
He is far better at this than he ever was at flirting with her. When he makes the first few attempts at conversation during more idle shifts on the bridge she finds that they have an effortless exchange of humor, something that she does realize after some reminiscing of their academy days shouldn't surprise her as much as it does. That reflex of suspicion she used to feel every single time he said or did something nice for her fades quickly, supplanted with the realization that those nice things do come her way quite a lot. She thinks of a good prank gift for his upcoming birthday, and then later of a real gift too. They meet up with Scotty and Keenser once a week for a game of cards and always split their ration winnings on lunch the next day. You would think they'd both forgotten whatever fueled tension used to flare her up in various unnameable ways, that this had become all there was to the two of them. But she wore a dress one night to an awards banquet that made him smile politely and then frown at his drink instead of responding to the flattering joke she made about his dinner jacket, and she knew it wasn't over.
At the club a lot of the officers went to later that odd distance was much the same, but she went up to him at the bar and grabbed him up by the elbow, and he was drunk enough by then to laugh nervously when he realized she was getting him to dance with her, once and for all.
.
.
.
.
"My favorite guess was 'Ruby'," he says, nearly shouting over the music when they are reminiscing at yet another bar, a bar that is every bar at once including the one where he met her. "Not because I liked it but because you turned your nose up at it so hard I thought maybe you were trying to throw me off."
She's grinning. "It was actually the name of our neighbor's dog when I was growing up. An obnoxious dog too."
"Well, that ruins it for me, thank you."
"You know what I never understood...It's not like there was more than one Uhura at Starfleet Academy; all you had to do was get your hands on a course roster, so why didn't—"
"Come on," he interrupts. "You know the answer to that."
They look at each other; that opportune silence between songs playing on the speakers butts in and is let go with neither of them saying anything.
A couple minutes after the noise has buzzed up again, he sits a tiny bit closer. "You know, when I first came in here I thought about pretending I didn't know you and offering to get you a drink. To show you if my game has changed and all that."
She looks like she's contemplating finishing what's at the bottom of his glass. "Why'd you change your mind about it?"
"I guess if I could get a clean slate with you I wouldn't take it." He watches her down the last half-inch of whiskey before she looks at him questioningly, hesitating now. "It's lazy to wish I'd given you a better first impression. It's a paradox. I tripped over a lot of people on my way to the first bad impression that actually made me want to be better."
She puts the glass down and looks at him, emotions turning in her face. He leans in closer.
"I wanted to earn your name," he says. "I wanted you to give it to me."
"...Yeah. I guess I knew that." Another song is over; their faces are too close for that silence. Her intimate toughness is in her voice and she says, "All this dancing around and you never really asked. I don't think you're ready to deserve it."
A small twitch of smirk, more happy than cocky, pulls at Jim's mouth. He says, "Hey. I'm Jim Kirk."
She waits, pulls in a breath, and even as she firmly decides she knows from where his eyes are going that it's already done. "My name's—"
He kisses her.