Comparative Linguistics
A Ficlet by Heist
o0o
James T. Kirk was a singularly fuckable man.
He was prettier than any man had any right to be, the happy recipient of the genetic lottery. His eyes were very very blue, and his face was pretty-boy rough-around-the-edges, and he had a damn sexual mouth. He could walk into a room and his mouth would say "come here, and I will do things to you which are illegal on seventeen Federation worlds and you will like it," and that was before he actually said anything. God help a body once he did say something though, because then actual words entered the equation and he was inventive and vulgar and hot.
All that might have been unforgivable enough, but damn him, Kirk had a brain behind the face and the charm. He was at the top of his class, but witty enough with his smarts; after a while, people started testing the rules so he could point out which Star Fleet regulation was being violated and how he could violate it better, faster, flashier than anyone else. And then he would, and then a few days later the pleasant alcoholic haze would burn off and someone would bail him out of jail and life would go on.
His body wasn't something to scoff at either, and she had seen him naked more times than she really cared to count. It was a damn pity and a shame, then, that Nyota Uhura couldn't be less interested.
She wasn't dead, or frigid. She had wants and needs, and just from an aesthetic (read: dirty, hot, complicated) perspective Uhura wasn't morally opposed to the concept of Jim Kirk. He was really very attractive, and attracting, and by all accounts he was incredibly good for scratching that particular itch. He wasn't a bad daydream, even, but inevitably he'd enter the room with that swinging confident swagger and open his mouth, and that would be it.
The fundamental problem, Uhura explained to him over friendly drinks several years later, was his total and complete lack of and inability to be subtle. By that point, he'd figured out that she and Spock seemed to be a Something (his words, and strangely specifically accurate at that), and he'd all but given up the chase anyway, but curiosity would ever be what almost killed the Captain.
He was so incredibly obvious in everything he did. He wore his intentions everywhere, like a second skin, and the set of his shoulders announced the outcome of his decisions well before he ever did. There was no mystery to Jim Kirk, no false advertising on the final product, no small print. He was a complete open book, and that, more than anything, was why Uhura wasn't interested.
Every person had their own little language, the nonverbal tics and tells and patois of silent communication. Uhura was a linguist before anything else, and she knew that only the smallest part of communicating was the actual choice of words. There were layers and levels of meaning, and so much could be read just from the syntax a person chose to use. She could extrapolate intent from which grammatical rules a person chose not to follow as much as the volume and force behind the sentiment conveyed.
Kirk wasn't the only one with an insatiable sense of curiosity. Uhura's hobby was decrypting human defenses, puzzling out the psychology behind the sentences. Why use "this" instead of "that," "admiration" instead of "love"? She believed intensely and unendingly that conflict was the result of poor communication, and if she could just learn enough of someone's language she could understand everything.
At the end of the day, Kirk was just too easy. He said what he meant, except when he didn't, and even then he still told all with his face. His language was finely tuned, and he spoke directly and straightforwardly with every part of his being, which was refreshing sometimes. Jim Kirk was a study in efficiency (regardless of the means), and he got things done, but he was still easy. Not a challenge. Not worth her time. Boring.
Spock, on the other hand...
Initially, Uhura had been fascinated by his inscrutability. Vulcans on the whole frustrated her, with their deification of logic and their cool clarity. There was something about an entire culture which suppressed emotion but still revered history and the arts that intrigued and confused her. At first (and second and fourteenth and fiftieth) glance, they seemed to be exactly as they claimed to be. Boring. And proud of it, but not too proud.
Every Vulcan she'd encountered before Spock had been perturbingly similar. The exact incidentals varied to account for bare personality and circumstances, but the gestures and idioms and overall cultural language were the same, and that was just creepy. Homogeneous cultures were prone to stagnation, and if not for some nice nitty gritty science and some salacious subtext the Vulcans would have given Hollywood's film studies a run for their money in blandness.
Spock was sarcastic. It didn't come out often, and when it did it was more with the way he presented his words than with the actual content of the words themselves, but it was there, damnit. He also had a wicked sense of humor, when he wasn't internally flagellating himself for not being Vulcan enough, and Uhura blamed and blessed his human mother for that. There was something to be said about a man who could walk into a Star Fleet High Command inquisition and calmly, politely, tell them all to Kindly Fuck Off.
She could easily spend years figuring Spock out, and the best part of it all was that he didn't seem to mind. He had his own deeply involved relationship with science, and he understood her need to understand. For that, she forgave him for never saying "I love you." He meant it in the quirk of his brows, the ever-so-slight tilt of his head when he listened to her rant about the most recent 'adventure' Kirk had dragged them headlong into, and in the easy way he agreed that getting naked and sweaty was the only logical solution for their respective and intense physical frustrations.
Spock couldn't help belonging to an emotionally constipated people, just like she couldn't help being human, and that would get them into trouble someday, but not today.
Jim Kirk wasn't the only one who enjoyed the thrill of the chase after all.
o0o
Notes: I have never written for Trek before, never ever, in spite of the clear understanding when I was growing up that Captains Kirk and Picard were stand-ins for Christ and the Holy Ghost in the Trinity. The impulse has never really come upon me. Weird, eh?
This was written for Norgbelulah, who requested a little bit of Spock/Uhura and a serving of Kirk on the side. Hope you enjoy, lovely, in spite of the extremely stream-of-consciousness style.