Chapter Two: Perfume
Disclaimer: I borrow but do not own.
Nyota Uhura does not bail on her girlfriends. She does not jump ship. Never.
Not even when she wants to.
She hates women who treat each other this way, like understudies always expecting to move on to a starring role in a play called My Boyfriend and Me. Or like apprentices merely passing time learning the art of friendship, waiting for real employment with someone else, someone usually more…male.
When she goes with a girlfriend to a club, to a dance, to a café, she expects to leave with her, too—and does not spend the evening scouring the crowd for someone better, someone else.
Too many times she's been dressed and ready, her clutch in her hand, when a girlfriend has called her and canceled.
"Oh, Ny," one might say, "the guy from my quantum mechanics class asked me to dinner….if you don't mind—"
And of course she does mind, and says so.
She's not one of those women.
But tonight she wishes she could be.
Parrises squares is the last thing she really wants to be doing, but she promised Gaila several days ago that she would play on her team at the rec center. Normally she would have welcomed the athletic challenge—and the camaraderie, too—but tonight she needs to look over her notes from Admiral Spaulding's last xenolinguistics lecture. The odds are high that he will spring a surprise quiz tomorrow morning in class….
As she settles herself behind the master console and begins the shut down procedures for the language lab, Nyota grins at how she has slid, unawares, into weighing the odds of everything, the way Spock habitually calculates the future.
The odds are high….
He would say that. The odds are high that Admiral Spaulding will give the class a quiz in the morning.
She smiles ruefully again in the empty room and finishes keying in the code that sets up the language acquisition algorithm. When the tutorial students pick up where they left off the next time they log in, the computer will have adjusted the rate of learning to account for today.
The odds are high that I will not do well on Admiral Spaulding's quiz if I play parrises squares tonight, she thinks.
But even as she turns off the master console and gathers up her backpack with a jerk, she knows it isn't true.
Her irritation isn't because she needs to study. Xenolinguistics is her forte. She will do well on any quiz Admiral Spaulding throws her way.
Her bad mood—and at last she acknowledges her annoyance—isn't because she is giving up an evening alone in her room studying, sprawled on top of the duvet of her single bed, her PADDs and books stacked precariously around her.
Given the opportunity to study for tomorrow's quiz—if Gaila for some unforeseen reason were to suddenly free her from her obligation to serve as the team's left forward defender—a position she dearly loves, by the way—Nyota knows, and finally admits, that she would not study at all.
At least, not xenolinguistics.
"If you are free tonight," Spock had said earlier in the afternoon as he was preparing to leave for his computer science class, "we could sample the cuisine at the new restaurant on Kober Street."
A meal with Spock—off campus, far from prying eyes! Her heart leapt up in excitement at the image of something almost normal, dinner and conversation, and then—well, they'd have to navigate the rest of the evening, wouldn't they? That was part of the fun of open-ended evenings—the almost exquisite agony of riding each moment forward to the next like a wave, trying to catch a glimpse of the horizon, trying to give the boat a gentle steer toward the shore.
And then, just as suddenly, her heart fell back into her chest. She had already promised Gaila that she would make up one of the four team members.
Backing out would be unthinkable. Or, not unthinkable, because she thought about it very long, very hard.
But unforgivable. Not that Gaila would be especially mad—Gaila, who has ditched Nyota more than once at some noisy occasion with an apologetic grin.
But Nyota does not bail on her girlfriends. Never. Even when she wants to.
And she really wants to.
Because she has to pass the computer science building on her way to the rec center, Nyota has agreed to meet Gaila there, in one of the labs near the office Spock shares with another professor. Since he teaches in both departments, Spock keeps office hours in both buildings—though more often than not, he works in the language building office.
As she locks the lab door and shifts her backpack to one shoulder, Nyota glances at the clock near the lift in the hall. Even if she hurries, she won't see him. Spock's computer science class has been over for half an hour, and he isn't one to linger after class chatting with his students.
All day the sky has been overcast, the clouds scudding fretfully across the gray sky. Nyota tucks her head into the wind and sighs, hurrying down the paved path until the computer science building looms large in her view.
Pushing open the outside door, Nyota looks reflexively down the hall to Spock's office. To her surprise, the light is on and the door open—and for a moment she is sure he must be there.
But no. The odds are high that Professor Ott is there instead—the specialist in converting Riemann surface imagery into star diagrams who, according to Gaila, is one of the best instructors in the department.
Nyota turns left into the corridor leading to the lab where Gaila usually works.
From a distance she can see that the lights are off. That doesn't necessarily mean that the lab is empty, though—some students prefer no overhead lighting when working for long stretches on backlit computer screens—but as soon as she walks in, she can tell that no one is here. Indeed, all of the computers are off. The silence—and the darkness—are eerie.
Could she have gotten the date wrong?
For a moment Nyota feels a paradoxical rush of pleasure and worry—pleasure that she might be free after all, and worry that she might have gotten confused. Getting mixed up that way would be uncharacteristic—and troubling.
On the other hand, something could have delayed Gaila.
Or someone.
Without meaning to, Nyota thinks of Jim Kirk and his lopsided, goofy grin at breakfast this morning.
"Good morning, ladies," he had said, sliding into a seat beside Gaila. "Can I get you another cup of coffee?"
Before Gaila could answer, Nyota stood up, tray in hand, and frowned.
"I have to go, Gaila," she said, pointedly ignoring Kirk.
"Me, too," Kirk said, standing up. From the corner of her eye, Nyota saw him exchange a glance with Gaila.
Turning on her heel and taking her tray to the conveyor belt, Nyota could hear Kirk bobbing behind her.
"Hold up!" he said as she reached the outside door and started down the steps. "I need to ask you something! Hold up!"
The students entering the cafeteria eyed Nyota oddly, embarrassing her, and she swiveled around at the bottom of the steps and said, "Stop bothering me! I've already told you I'd do it."
"What? No—not that," Kirk said, his brow furrowed. "Yeah, I mean, thanks. When they reschedule the test I'll let you know. But no. I wanted to ask—I mean, Gaila and I wanted to ask you—to join us one evening for dinner."
At this Nyota was genuinely surprised. A dinner invitation from Gaila and Jim Kirk? Why hadn't Gaila said anything already? And why would they want her company anyway?
"No, thank you," she said, turning back around and heading across the pathway. "I have better things to do than to chaperone you and Gaila."
Feeling Kirk's fingers tapping her arm, Nyota slowed and looked back at him.
"No, no!" he said, laughing now. "I have a friend from home coming by this weekend. We thought you might want to double date—"
A jolt had juddered through her.
For a few seconds she couldn't think clearly. A date? With a friend of Jim Kirk's? A meal, a meeting—something so ordinary and gently pleasant, an evening with friends. Food and laughter—storytelling and flirting. Things she had enjoyed in the past.
She felt a little spasm of sorrow, of loss, in the pit of her stomach. Her footsteps faltered and she paused, looking quickly at Kirk's hopeful face, and then letting her gaze drift downward to her boots, noted idly a scuff she must have missed when she polished them last night.
"Thank you," she said slowly. "But, I….can't."
Bracing herself for a barrage of protests, Nyota was startled by Kirk's silence. Darting a glance at his face, she saw an odd look there, as if he was calculating something, or trying to recall something faint.
"Okay," he said at last, nodding quickly before turning and heading away.
If Gaila and Kirk are together now—well, parrises squares would be long forgotten. She might be on her own for real.
Nyota heads back down the hall and looks up in time to see her roommate standing at the end—and to her side, and slightly back, is Spock, his hands behind him in his professor's attitude, his expression carefully neutral.
Her own expression is harder to control.
"Commander," she says before giving Gaila her attention. "Fancy meeting both of you here."
"Thank you, Commander," Gaila says, looking up at Spock. Nyota raises her eyebrows—they've been talking? In her private conversations with her roommate, she skirts the topic of Spock—not that she wants to lie to Gaila, and not that she doesn't trust her to keep her secrets.
But Gaila's cheerful teasing for so many months when Nyota herself couldn't see what was happening—well, it seems more prudent now to go on with the fiction that she and Spock are instructor and aide only, nothing more. That way if anyone were to ask Gaila what she knows—
"Cadet Farlijah-Endef," Spock says, giving an almost imperceptible tilt of his head toward Gaila. "Cadet Uhura."
She feels his eyes on her as much as she sees them. A prickle of heat drifts from under her collar.
"We better hurry," Gaila says, stepping beside Nyota and hooking her arm through hers.
"Take care with your ankle," Spock calls after them as Gaila pulls her toward the door.
Her ankle. She could have bailed on Gaila because of her ankle. How many weeks ago had she hurt it—playing parrises squares, too—calling down imprecations from Leonard McCoy when she had finally limped into the infirmary, two days later.
"Let that be a lesson to you," he had said, wrapping her ankle a fraction too tight, like an exclamation point. "The next time you need a doctor, remember you don't have a medical degree."
But she hadn't taken the lesson to heart—had, in fact, completely forgotten her injured ankle until Spock's words of caution.
What had she read recently about the human capacity to ignore the obvious, to hide something from one's own consciousness?
She thinks about her ankle now, as she and Gaila head into the wind whipping across the campus, thinks about how it had given way unexpectedly in Spock's office. As if she is reliving the scene, she feels herself tumbling to the floor, her fall broken as Spock catches her.
Nothing extraordinary had happened then—not to an observer, not to someone who might have been passing by. Except that she had fallen not only into his arms but into a corner of his unguarded mind, seeing an image of herself illuminated and clear, not as she was in real time, but as she was, as she is, in his fantasies.
A revelation….and he had known that she knew.
Like stepping into soft sand and feeling the earth shift beneath her.
For the first time, she dates their inevitable tumble towards each other as lovers to that instant when the bones and tendons of her ankle had given way.
That she hasn't traced the trajectory before now surprises her, makes her smile inwardly at the symbolism; falling in love, indeed. And all because her heart was as giddy as the ligaments of her foot.
She should have pleaded her weakness to Gaila—"Dr. McCoy warned me," she could have said"—but instead she is rushing headlong toward the rec center, laughing out loud at the pleasure of running arm-in-arm with her friend.
She doesn't bail on girlfriends.
Instead, she struggles to accept the wobble of certain muscles, their tilt off axis, the way they send her spinning in unexpected directions.
X X X X X X X
"Well, if it isn't the teacher's pet."
Gaila casts an evil look at the speaker, a tall, angular cadet sitting slumped in an almost threadbare chair in the corner of the student lounge. Setting her backpack on the ground, Gaila slides her hands beneath her cascade of hair and flips the stray curls from under her uniform collar.
In the periphery of her vision she sees two other cadets react to her motion—two quiet men—boys, really—who have never spoken to her directly but who seem to appear, with interesting regularity, in the cafeteria, the computer lounge, the lab, whenever Gaila is there.
She's never paid them much attention. Too young. Too inexperienced. Too…devoted. Not her type of conquest.
On the other hand—
The tall cadet is also watching her, though his gaze is not appreciative. More than once they have been head-to-head adversaries in programming competitions—and more than once Gaila has bested him, putting to rest the easy lie that she is beauty without brains.
No one makes that mistake anymore. Except perhaps the tall cadet, the one whose smoldering look is thinly disguised with a half smile.
Moving swiftly to the cooler and tugging open the door, Gaila dips and bobs, ostensibly looking for something on one of the lower shelves. After a moment, she shuts the door with an exaggerated sigh and turns around.
All three men are watching her, open-mouthed.
Even Cheers, her nemesis.
His real name isn't Cheers, of course. But it is the one Gaila has assigned him, refusing to grant him the favor of hearing the syllables of his name from her lips. "Cheers" she says to him whenever she leaves the room, her fingers waggling goodbye.
I am always telling you farewell—that's how much you offend me, she seems to be saying.
Of the three cadets, Cheers is the first to recover, his mouth closing suddenly with a snap.
"Didn't see anything you wanted?" he says, a leer in his voice.
"Not here," Gaila retorts and is rewarded with his frown.
"Then why don't you head back to the office," Cheers mutters, his eyes dark and hooded. "Professor Ott's there—and that Vulcan Commander was asking for you. You've been busy—"
In two steps Gaila crosses the distance and stands over the chair where Cheers still sits, slumped. He at least has the good grace to look startled.
"What did you say!"
It isn't a question. Cheers blinks twice before raising his hands slowly, as if in surrender.
"Sorry, sorry!" he says. "I'm not saying anything you haven't already heard."
If she were back home on the Orion ring colony at her uncle's house, she would have slapped anyone who insulted her this way.
But she's not. She's a Starfleet cadet, lucky to have escaped the dreary servitude of colonial life—not slavery, or even sexual service—but something almost as limited, adoption by an uncle who treats her as a housemaid—a custom from the time when Orion women were routinely sold and bartered throughout the quadrant.
Gaila's siblings are content to stay behind, working the household chores and helping their uncle run his commercial interests.
She can think of few things worse.
Unless it is having to constantly defend herself against what people think they know about Orions. About her.
Cheers is right—she has heard it before—the suggestion that she sleeps her way to good grades, that she manipulates her professors with shameless abandon.
Not that she couldn't. She has great faith in her sexual prowess—no apologies about that, no secret desire to be something other than she is, to be human.
But she wouldn't. However she might tease and pleasure a fellow cadet, she would never approach a professor. Her career is on the line, her place here. She would not do anything to jeopardize her future as an officer. Or to play to stereotype.
Until recently, this was one of the things she had in common with Nyota—their fierce commitment to a vision of themselves in Starfleet.
Not that Nyota's vision has wavered—not exactly—but her path certainly has.
This is Commander Spock's fault, Gaila thinks.
For months Gaila has been a distant observer, like someone consigned to the edge of a dance floor. At first she had not been certain that Nyota felt anything more than admiration for the Vulcan teacher—though she certainly talked about him more often than was normal, recounting the debates from his class in exasperating detail.
When Nyota decided to apply as his teaching assistant, Gaila was mildly alarmed, commenting that her roommie was obsessed with Spock. Nyota had laughed at the time and said, "He probably won't hire me anyway," but he had—without much deliberation, apparently, or at least with great speed.
Still, those first weeks as his assistant were reassuring—Nyota's exhaustion and odd silences good omens that the Commander was as difficult to work for as his reputation suggested.
At times, in fact, Gaila felt anger on Nyota's behalf—the work load was exceptional, the hours long.
So when had the relationship started sliding into something else? Or rather, why had it? Gaila already knew when.
Rain had been falling on and off that day in February—the redolence of the new oak leaves and the wet pine making someone as sensitive to smells as an Orion positively jubilant. Although Nyota had been scheduled to work in the language lab until 1700, she was late returning to the dorm, and at first Gaila wondered if she were waiting out the rain.
Gaila remembers this because she was forced to entertain Jarrod while they waited.
He had shown up at their dorm without any warning—a handsome human who introduced himself as Nyota's boyfriend.
"Well, not the current one," he said, flashing the kind of grin at Gaila that she was used to flashing at other people.
This might prove interesting, Gaila thought. A human aphorism came to mind: Finders keepers.
However, within a few minutes she was bored—not that Jarrod wasn't attractive, and certainly not that he wasn't attracted to her—but he was on a mission to see Nyota for some reason, and any ardor Gaila might have felt was cooled by his obvious intentions.
When Nyota was more than an hour late, Gaila began signaling her comm.
"I can't figure out why she's not answering," Gaila said, frowning slightly. "Unless she's left her comm in the Commander's office while they are working in the lab."
"The Commander?" Jarrod asked, and Gaila nodded. Something in Jarrod's tone nagged at the edge of her consciousness, but she dismissed it a few minutes later when Nyota finally arrived, drenched in rain, her clothes bedraggled, her hair completely undone.
And wafting the aroma of sex.
Gaila was so shocked that for a moment she couldn't speak.
There was Nyota's normal scent—faint citrus and floral. But underneath that, the rich muskiness of bodies pressed together, the tang of salt and saliva, the pollen-like perfume of semen.
And most surprising of all, the aroma Gaila knows is Commander Spock's, the metallic odor of copper, the perplexing scent of some unidentifiable earthy spice used to preserve fruit. In the past she's caught his fragrance on Nyota's clothes, in her hair—like smoke clinging to the molecules of skin and fabric.
But that night—
They'd crossed over.
"Look who's here!" she said, frantically covering her distress. Nyota looked as flabbergasted as Gaila felt, though if Jarrod was aware, he didn't show it.
This had to stop. She had to help them end this.
Here was an opportunity to set things right, to get Nyota back on track. With a rush, Gaila dressed and prepared to leave her with her former boyfriend—her extremely alluring, attentive former boyfriend—for the evening.
The attempt was futile.
Gaila knew this a morning or two later, when she had and Nyota were exiting the cafeteria after breakfast and ran into the Commander unexpectedly.
There they stood, the three of them at the foot of the stairs, Nyota's orange and lavender fragrance deepening into something richly purple as the Commander greeted them. Shifting her weight onto her left foot, Gaila had leaned forward, catching a whiff of the Commander's usual faint smell of winter apples blooming into something spicier, something more…erotic.
For an hour after they parted Gaila had puzzled over the change—their unconscious pheromones drifting to each other, speaking of desire and sex, but of something else, too—something rarely sensed this way.
And at last she had understood that the scent was something more, something beyond.
What humans call affection, or attachment, or love.
Since then she has said less than she probably should have, uncertain if she has any right, or even any desire, to interrupt what might be a genuine relationship.
What would that feel like, she wonders. To love someone—to say the words and mean more than a brief transaction of the flesh? She rolls the syllables in her mouth and says them softly from time to time, imagining saying them to someone in earnest, someone like Jim Kirk, for instance.
She stares down at the cruel, good-looking face of Cheers. Stepping away from his chair, she says, "Excuse me."
Later tonight after parrises squares she will come to the computer lab and slip in a worm. Nothing really evil, just a program that searches out Cheers' course transcript and changes his posted grades.
Or maybe erases his course work altogether. Erasing him, so to speak, from the cadet corps.
He'll track it down eventually and accuse her—and she might even draw a reprimand—but the time he will waste, the desperate irritation he will feel—
In public she won't dignify him with interest, with a response. Leaning down to pick up her backpack, she hears him say, "Commander Spock was asking for you earlier. I guess your roommate isn't enough woman for him—"
Forget her resolution to walk away, to ignore his provocation, to seek payback quietly, privately. In an instant Gaila is at her uncle's compound again, one of many children living there, her mother working off-world, her father unknown. The pecking order was vicious—the older children hazing the younger ones into submission, and Gaila, one of the youngest, harangued and occasionally physically beaten when she lagged in her duties.
Until she had learned to lead with her left.
Slight as she was, she was athletic and spry—and when she jumped forward, her fist leading the way, she could knock someone twice her size off balance.
Once she had broken a cousin's nose.
With a sickening crunch, her knuckle makes contact with Cheers' spongy cheek. Nothing breaks—she's pretty sure—but he will definitely have a mark there for a day or two.
Outraged, he leaps to his feet and bounces on his heels like a street brawler.
"You fucking whore!" he shouts. "You Orion whore!"
Crouching, her fists raised, Gaila waits.
For a moment she hears nothing but her own labored breathing. In the distance she sees the two young cadets, watching her warily.
At last Cheers rubs his cheek with the back of his hand and ducks past her, into the hall. For a moment longer Gaila waits, and then she stands upright and straightens her bag on her shoulders.
"May I see you?"
Jumping visibly, Gaila sees Commander Spock standing in the doorway, his expression impossible to read. Did he see that? Did he hear what Cheers had said about her, about Nyota?
Her heart beats an irregular tattoo as she follows him to the office he shares with Professor Ott.
"Please sit," he says, motioning to a black plastic chair. He lowers himself into the chair behind the desk and opens a folder there.
Perhaps this isn't about the fight. Perhaps he didn't hear anything after all.
"Professor Ott says you are the most talented programmer he has ever taught," Commander Spock says without preamble, and Gaila is momentarily thrown off. Professor Ott? Why is Professor Ott talking to Spock about her work? She's never had the Commander for a course. Could he have been curious for some reason?
She nods once and folds her hands in her lap.
Looking down, she notices a scrape across two of her knuckles.
"You may not be aware," Spock continues, "that one of my chief responsibilities for this department is the annual upgrade of the Kobayashi Maru program."
Again Gaila nods, dumbly. Why is he telling her this?
"The visual editor I worked with last year graduated, and I am looking for a replacement. Professor Ott recommended you, Cadet. If you are interested."
Unable to make her brain work for a minute, Gaila sits, stupidly, silently. Work on the Kobayashi Maru programming team? A third year cadet? For the most demanding professor in the department?
Her face splits into a smile.
"Yes," she says, "I'd be interested!"
This is what she needs—a validation of her ability, an affirmation of who she is. She gives Spock what she hopes he knows is a look of gratitude. Without a word, he stands and she does, too. The interview is obviously over.
They make their way into the hall just as Nyota comes from the other end.
"Commander," Nyota says, and Gaila inhales deeply. Warmth and anticipation—and desire—fill the air.
Oh, Ny, Gaila thinks, a pang squeezing her heart, this can't end well.
"Thank you, Commander," Gaila says, looking up at Spock, watching his face struggle to hide the feelings his aroma freely acknowledges.
"Cadet Farlijah-Endef," Spock says, giving an almost imperceptible tilt of his head toward Gaila. "Cadet Uhura."
When his eyes travel to Nyota, the intensity of their arousal almost overwhelms Gaila.
"We better hurry," she says, stepping beside Nyota and hooking her arm through hers.
"Take care with your ankle," she hears Spock call, his voice a distant echo of the fragrance eddying around them.
X X X X X X X
He's been watching the construction at the gutted building for weeks now, measuring the progress against the stated opening date.
Coming Soon, the sign proclaims in letters large enough to be seen by passing motorists—a typical marketing ploy, Spock notes. Vegetarian Cuisine.
In smaller letters, a placard propped in the window promises Off-World Delicacies and Flavors From Across the Galaxy.
Hyperbole, certainly.
But interesting, nevertheless.
The construction site caught his eye because it is across the street from the art gallery where he bought his asenoi—and where, to his surprise, Nyota had later bought him a tea mug made by the same potter.
Something his mother said to him recently sent him back to the gallery with an idea of buying a gift for Nyota—a vague notion not typical for him, the planner, a person not given to impulse buys….or to impulsive behavior of any kind.
And yet…and yet—
His relationship with Nyota is a contradiction of that assessment of himself, proof positive of his ability to step into an abyss without consideration of the inevitable fall.
He isn't quite sure why his subspace video conversation with his mother led him to the gallery on Kober Street—except that he had commented off-handedly about a scarf she was wearing, one he had never seen before, and she remarked, equally off-handedly, that Sarek had given it to her.
"I don't know why," she said when Spock asked her the reason. "Sometimes he does that—just brings me a sursy."
At his quizzical frown, Amanda had laughed.
"That's what my Great Aunt Matilda always called it," she said. "You know, a little gift. A little something that shows—"
"I remember the term," Spock said, still frowning. "I…wasn't aware that Father often gave them to you."
Instead of answering, Amanda had laughed again.
Until he found himself examining the pottery on display at the front of the gallery, Spock had not fully realized that he was looking for a sursy for Nyota, and further, that he knew exactly what it should be.
A mug of her own, made by the same potter who made his.
Not a matching mug—nothing so sentimental as that. But the idea that a potter can connect them through clay touched and fired—
He finds the idea strangely satisfying. Symmetrical. Even territorial—an image of their tea cups sitting side by side in his cupboard bringing him a measure of—if not pleasure, then contentment.
His plan had been to present the mug at dinner after his computer science class. The new restaurant across from the gallery would be ideal, a table at one of the large glass windows along the front of the building affording an opportunity to point to the place of origin.
"A sursy for you," he imagined saying, "from the gallery."
The odds were high Nyota would not know the term sursy—a regionalism of the Southern United States—and she would enjoy learning what it meant.
Later they would take the mug back to his apartment to try out a cup of tea.
Or not.
That she might already have a commitment for the evening had not occurred to him.
Not that he doesn't have commitments of his own. The Kobayashi Maru scenario, for instance. Although cadets have always had the option of retaking the test, Spock can't recall any such requests—until now.
And because someone wants to retake it, the test parameters have to change. Not just the normal updates Spock oversees, but a re-imaging of the entire simulation.
He really should spend this evening working on the Kobayashi Maru. Or better yet, finding someone to help him with it.
Gaila Farlijah-Endef is the clear front runner. Professor Ott can't sing her praises high enough, though as far as Spock can tell, humans are notoriously unreliable where Orions are concerned.
Squirming, he thinks about his cousin Chris' onetime girlfriend, C'rina, whose mother was Orion. Spock hadn't thought he was drawn to her—until he suddenly was. If Chris hadn't interrupted them one day—
But that was years ago, before Spock had come to Starfleet. He's been in Cadet Farlijah-Endef's presence many times and has never felt anything at all for her. Or from her. And her programming skills are exceptional—
Or instead of working, he could go on to his apartment and spend an extra hour in meditation. A light supper and then some time practicing his ka'athyra—he hasn't touched it lately.
Or he could read instead. Vulcan poetry, perhaps. The book he unwittingly gave Nyota that she keeps at his apartment, ancient erotica, the pages careworn where they have read them to each other.
The idea of being in his apartment tonight without Nyota is gloomy, like watching the fog rolling across the bay at twilight. No light supper then, nor meditation nor music nor poetry.
If he stays a few minutes longer now that his computer science class is over, he can catch Cadet Farlijah-Endef before she heads to the rec center and her game of parrises squares.
The lab at the end of the hall across from the student lounge is the largest and the one most students prefer, so Spock heads there. His footsteps echo on the linoleum, though not so loud that he can't hear voices from the lounge.
"You fucking whore! You Orion whore!"
Spock recognizes the voice immediately, a gifted cadet whose erratic personal behavior threatens to derail him from Starfleet. At Spock's insistence, a counselor has met with him twice, both times to caution him about pejorative comments he has made towards women—one to Nyota outside Spock's office where she was waiting for Gaila to finish up a lab.
Tipping his head into the room, he sees Gaila there now, her aggressive stance obvious, her fists raised in the air.
Two cadets sit across the room, immobile. The third—the one Spock had heard yelling earlier—rushes past him into the hall.
"May I see you?"
When Nyota's roommate jumps, Spock realizes belatedly that he has startled her. There's no help for it now. He ducks back into the hall and hears her following him to his office.
"Please sit," he says, moving behind his desk and picking up the folder Professor Ott has left for him to look over.
"Professor Ott says you are the most talented programmer he has ever taught," Spock says. Although he doesn't expect the cadet to speak, he is surprised that she is so subdued—almost as if she is injured, or upset.
The argument in the lounge.
Spock knows more about Orions than many of his colleagues, yet what he knows doesn't come close to helping him sort out what the cadet needs now.
"You Orion whore!"
An insult, surely, particularly for the social classes that have eschewed the slave trade Orions are known for.
Nyota would know how to interpret the cadet's downcast gaze, the sheen of sweat across her brow.
The odds are high that she is upset. What to do about it, however, is a mystery.
"You may not be aware," Spock continues, "that one of my chief responsibilities for this department is the annual upgrade of the Kobayashi Maru program."
He waits for a beat but she doesn't look up.
"The visual editor I worked with last year graduated, and I am looking for a replacement. Professor Ott recommended you, Cadet. If you are interested."
She must not be. For 27 seconds she does nothing at all. Already, Spock is composing a new request to Professor Ott.
The cadet you recommended was not amenable to my proposal, he will say.
Before he can imagine anything else, her face splits into a smile.
"Yes," she says, "I'd be interested!"
A tendril of uneasiness snakes its way into Spock's consciousness. Will she always be this difficult to read? He was certain she was going to turn him down—and then this. He stands and she does, too.
They make their way into the hall just as Nyota comes from the other end.
"Commander," Nyota says, and her roommate finally looks up at him.
"Thank you, Commander," she says, though he isn't certain why. The job, after all, will be a demanding one, perhaps even unpleasant. Thanking him with such limited data is premature at best.
"Cadet Farlijah-Endef," Spock says, giving an almost imperceptible tilt of his head toward Gaila. "Cadet Uhura."
He feels a stab of disappointment and tamps down the longing he always feels when he sees Nyota. At moments like this, he is grateful for his Vulcan training.
"We better hurry," Gaila says, pulling Nyota away from him, their arms hooked together.
A worry for their safety—parrises squares has a high injury rate—prompts him to call out a warning.
Nyota looks over her shoulder at him, sending him a mildly sorrowful, apologetic note—I don't want to leave you, she seems to be saying—but as she faces forward he hears her laughter.
He watches the two women as they hurry to the door, Nyota's warm brown arm laced through Gaila's dusky green one.
Something in that image—a human and an off-worlder—lifts his spirits, makes him feel hopeful.
Another night will work better for the sursy. He doesn't have to hurry.
They have all the time in the world.
A/N: Reviews are like sursies!
This story occasionally makes references to the other stories in my timeline. I hope that's not too confusing! C'rina appears in "What We Think We Know." Jarrod is a character in "The Word You Mean."
Thanks as always to StarTrekFanWriter. Her "Vulcan's Don't Share" and "By Definition" have been nominated for prizes on the S/U site at LJ. Check them out!