"Parallel Lines"
Sometimes she dreams of a time when she does not love him.
In these dreams, she is always on the Enterprise, always busy and always working. Her fingers slide over the familiar buttons with ease, turning, moving, translating words into commands and hails into cease fires as she fulfills the job that was always meant to be hers. There are no muted colors of nostalgia in these dreams; her subconscious wouldn't stand for it. Instead it paints the inside of her eyelids with waves of intense blues and red as she works her way through memories that are not even hers to own, feeling nothing but the fact of how achingly happy she is with the tasks that are presented to her and a rough pride at all that she has accomplished. In this way, dreams are no different from reality.
In this way, they are the same.
She teases him in these dreams, but there is nothing beneath it. No ulterior motives, no crashing of her heart when she manages to coax out that faint smile. She feels for him what she feels for most of the crew: respect bordering on adoration. But this is not love. Even in her sleep, Uhura knows the difference.
It is a difference she feels through her whole body upon waking.
Afterwards, she is always lost for several minutes. She will lie there and try to imagine that other place, that foreign universe where she doesn't know the meaning to his every vague facial gesture, that uncharted pocket of time where she doesn't even know the strength of his embrace to miss it. Reaching out to him on the nights when he is there (which, these days, is most nights) she finds she can anchor herself to the warmth of his body and slowly slide back to the universe in which she belongs, the place they have carved out for each other together from one million wounds in time.
On these nights, she thinks of her, that stranger that is herself, living her life somewhere happy and unknowing. She thinks of her and wonders as she drifts back to sleep, warm, loved.
Wonders if somewhere across time and space, there is a her that dreams of loving him, and cannot understand why. Wonders if there's a her that's missing him, when he's standing right in front of her only a few feet away.
