It's two in the morning when Nyota wakes up to the sound of James Tiberius Fucking Kirk pounding on the window to her bedroom like the hero of one of the cheesy romcoms he makes her watch sometimes.

She pulls a shirt and pair of pants on in the dark. She walks over to him and pull up the window but not the screen, and says, "What the fuck are you doing?"
He's scrambled up the tree which leans dangerously over the roof, he says. "Look," he continues, and there's an odd mix of fear and wonder in his face that she doesn't think she's seen in him in a long, long time, "I need to show you something."
"There's a front door, you know," Nyota says. "Mom and dad are both working tonight."

She understands intellectually that as brilliant doctors its a blessing to the tiny local hospital that her parents are on call twenty-four/seven, but there's a part of her that wishes that they were here to stop her getting on the back of Jim's motorcycle and speeding down the down dirt path to his house.

Like every house out here, it's in the middle of someone else's cornfield.

The lights are off in his house- obviously his mother is either asleep or continuing her pattern of benevolent neglect. He doesn't go that far up the driveway.

He instead stops the motorcycle by the barn which Nyota is sure had some purpose beyond half built radios and supposedly the occasional lay (who, she wonders, would Jim want to fuck in this town?) a long time ago, but now mostly looks like a delapidated treehouse sans tree.

"I swear I haven't been smoking anything," Jim reassures her as he creaks open the door to the barn, which only makes her more nervous. He's telling the truth, of course, but it means whatever's about to happen is going to be weird.

Sitting besides a vehicle is a guy whose notable mostly because his ears are pointy.

"This is Spock," Jim says. He's biting at his lip. "Spock's an alien."

Nyota, and she's not proud to admit this later, bursts out laughing. "Of course," she says, doubling over. She staggers into a bench. "Of course you get an alien crash-landed in your backyard."

"I assure you, Nyota Uhura, I did not crash my vehicle."

There's a delay between his mouth and his words that's just suble enough to catch Nyota's attention.

"I thought you'd be more skeptical," Jim confesses.

"Oh, honey," Nyota says. She places a hand on his arm, "it's you."

He is, after all, the son of two former astronauts.

"So you're Spock?" she asks the alien. He stands and gives her a slight bow.

"Yes," he says, "I- I mistook a prank of Jim's as a communication from my father." The admission seems to pain him.

"Wait," she says, turning back to Jim, "those crop circles actually turned out to be some kind of script?"
Jim shrugs. "Yeah," he says, with a kind of dumbfounded enthusiasm.

"Why did you tell me?" Nyota asks.

"You can help me, can't you?" he asks. "You're the only other person I trust to drive the Enterprise, anyway."

Oh, fuck. The Enterprise is a VW Bus that Jim's been painstakingly rebuilding for ten years, now, or something, named after a shuttle Nyota's pretty sure blew up at some point.

"You're going on a roadtrip, aren't you," Nyota says.

"Yup!" Jim says. "Just as soon as Spock here's rested up, and done some final repairs," he makes a thumbs up motion at Spock, who merely goes back to what Nyota only now realizes isn't an iPad, but something which looks like an iPad but is probably spacetech (Space! Space! a part of her brain that is shaped like a ball with an eye happily informs her).

"Oh great," Nyota says.

She's going to have to go with them. Not only that, but this is the out she's been looking for. Possibly. The out she's actually been looking for is either eventually the navy or some miraculous discovery by a university her parents actually approve of, but barring that, a roadtrip across the country with an alien sounds... not as bad as it could be, all things considered.

"You're being really chill about this," Jim says. "Are you sure you're okay?"

Nyota starts laughing again. "I'd be skeptical if you were saying he was from the moon," Nyota says, "but you know. I've always kind of assumed there were aliens."

"Nyota Uhura," Spock says, looking up from his device, "I apologize if we have interrupted your sleep. I assured Jim that I am able to wait."
"It's alright," Nyota says automatically. "Wait, Jim's letting you work on the Enterprise?"

Spock nods.

"Christ, then I really do have to trust you, don't I?" she says. She refuses to clarify to his quizzical look.

She asks her parents, and they immediately get the wrong idea. Well, it's not as though she's telling them the truth- Vulcan is not, to her knowledge, a planet known to anyone other than a few NASA scientists, and probably to them as a numbered dot on a faraway sun- but it's still amusing how they immediately jump to 'Jim's found himself a boyfriend."
"There are stranger ways of finding oneself," her mother reasons to her father.

They are both very well dressed, well put together people. Their teeth are shiny enough for commercials.

"We'll send you money every few weeks," her father assures her.

It would be nice, she thinks, if they put up some kind of argument. Then, at least, it would be different.

Their first day on the Enterprise, which is loaded up with provisions (read: canned everything) and has a wifi connection thanks to Spock's impressive monkeying ("I do not understand the expression," he tells her, "in any case, I am surprised there is not universal data access." She replies that he will probably be surprised by a lot on Earth if he keeps this up.), is not eventful in the traditional sense.

Jim, who is sitting with Spock in the first row of the benchlike seats, discovers by accident that apparently Vulcan hands are super super sensitive.

It would be funny if not for Spock's obvious discomfort, which Jim reacts to with a combinatin of fascinated interest and genuine distress.

"Fascinating," is said by Spock about ten times an hour, at such things as aboveground electrical wires and computers that don't always automatically reply to speach.

Vulcans, she discovers, can get tired, and the two of them fall asleep on top of each other.

Jim takes the morning shift and Nyota can't help herself but ask Spock to turn off his translation devise.

Vulcan, she disovers, sounds absolutely horrifying, in the same way that makes her want to learn Ancient Sumerian.

When he turns the device back on Nyota tells him and that she is learning Vulcan, or at least his language of Vulcan.

It's not a question to her that there are thousands of others. There have to be.

The task of picturing an entire other planet is a little daunting, but you know. It has to be like Earth somehow, especially since Spock isn't sentient goop or the like.

"You know Vulcan is a god of smiths and volcanoes," she tells him. "It's interesting that your translator picked that word for you."

Spock admits that it was his father that gave their home planet that designation, at least in English, which he says he assumes is not the only language on the Earth, only the most spoken. "Ours is a desert planet," he tells her, "mostly due to our own folly."

"Oh," is all she has to say to that.

Their second night in the Enterprise Nyota is behind the wheel, blinking sleep out of her eyes as dawn rises. Their current (very vague) plan is to make their way first to Cincinnati via Springfield, Illinois (it's a very vague plan, depending mostly on their single functioning GPS), avoiding most states below the Mason-Dixie line and looking around the major cities up the East Coast.

Part of Nyota's personal plan is to extend this ridiculous road trip as long as possible, if only so she has a concrete excuse not to go back home for a while.

Home is fine, but home is still Riverside, Iowa, where she is part of multiple demographics which barely rate above a percentage point in the census. Home is still a town where nothing happens, where an alien showing up in Jim Kirk's backyard is something that brings relief instead of terror.

Home is. Home is complicated.

She's keeping herself awake listening to Spock and Jim talk to each other in sleepy mumbles.

Well Jim is talking to Spock in sleepy mumbles while Spock replies with an already fond exasperation.

Nyota can see how her parents can assume the two of them are dating, or fucking at least. For a spaceman and a chaos entity they've gotten closer than Nyota assumed possible for Jim.

She only knows everything about him because they've known each other since she shoved worms down the back of his shirt in second grade for touching her hair without permission.

This is nice, she thinks again. The road has yet to change.

There's not much to find in Cincinatti.

At this point, both Nyota and Jim have heard the spiel about how Vulcans are a very logical people, and how it would be illogical anyway for Surek (Vulcans, apparently, have a thing for S-names, considering there have also been mentioned Stonn, Sarek, Silak, and a few others) to go there, as it is not exactly a great population center.

So they go south. Nyota's head fills with visions of Confederate flags (which she sees anyway) and trucks, and she's both disappointed and not.

The only city they're even going to for now is Atlanta, and that's partly because Jim kind of wants to see Atlanta and it's enough of a city to count for Spock's purposes.

He has yet to explain why he's so fixated on cities. Nyota assumes because they're the most obvious population centers, and the best place to hide if you're a literal man from outerspace.

Nyota is more impressed than she lets on by the Doctor they pick up. He reminds her more of the veteran regulars at the restaurant she worked at through high school than any kind of medical professional, but that's more for her to think and not talk about.

Jim takes a liking to him instantly, and so when he offers to come along of course he comes along.

She can kill him, anyway, if he tries anything funny.

He's quiet, the first few days on the Enterprise, and then he and Spock start bickering and frankly it's just on this side of adorable.


Hey, sorry for the long delay in updating again. This is also not being updated on AO3, so basically I'm just catching up the crossposting. Right now I'm focusing on some of my RWBY stuff, most of which hasn't been put up here because what is energy, and I probably won't be doing that much writing until after finals end in about a month. But for those of you who have commented, thank you so much! It really brightens my day to see that, along with favorites and follows, of course.
Please review!