Uhura sat alone in Spock's kitchen. Though she'd used the evening meal as an excuse to escape the offices of the Vulcan High Council earlier than had been her wont, in truth there was little more she needed to do in the way of preparing the Terran-style dish she would be serving. It simply wanted a quick reheating once Spock and Sarek arrived.
She needed the time away from all the people who seemed to want something from her.
The Vulcans, she had believed, needed her to help design a communications system that was compatible with the colony's geology, geography and atmosphere. It was a challenge she'd found exciting enough to be worth contacting Scotty and requesting his thoughts and assistance. Now she knew they also wanted her to train the engineers and the technicians who would be building and operating it.
Ambassador had appeared to be offering her a chance to hide from her world and a place to lick her wounds. She was reasonably certain that this was still the case.
Ambassador Sarek's motives had been a mystery to her, but she'd accepted his felicity because to have done otherwise would not only have been churlish, but would also have failed to serve any purpose she could imagine. And, if she were being one hundred percent honest, a part of her had welcomed his apparent acceptance, even though she'd been convinced it was too little and too late. Her newly gained insight on the impetus for his behavior was disturbing. She thought she knew what he wanted, but had no clue about how wished that desire to manifest itself. She suspected he didn't care, either way.
Most disturbing of all, however, were Uhura's own thoughts.
She wasn't sure how much she disagreed with Spock's father.
____________________
By the time Sarek and Spock arrived later that evening, Uhura hadn't reached many conclusions, but she had an answer for the High Council's request and a plan to help her figure out the rest.
For the time being, she decided, she would allow herself to enjoy sharing a meal with two men she'd come to care for a great deal in a short space of time.
Sarek professed an interest in the traditional East African corn mush that accompanied the vegetable stew she'd provided.
"Its constituent parts are not complex, and yet the end result makes a pleasing accompaniment to the stew which served as your main course. Indeed, it would not be unpalatable alongside many Vulcan dishes," he remarked. "Considering the Wakufunzi family's commitment to preserving the cultures of your Africa, I am not surprised that you also excel in preparing your tradition foods."
"Ugali is ridiculously simple to make," she told him. "I'm amazed that it took me so long to learn." She quickly described the steps involved in its preparation. "We ate it as a supplement to many dishes in my parents' home, but I never prepared it before I joined Starfleet."
Though he didn't express his surprise through facial expression, Sarek clearly hadn't anticipated learning this about her.
"Is cooking a recently acquired skill for you then, ko-fu?" he asked, intrigued. "If that is the case, I must conjecture that it is something to which you applied a determination and capacity for study similar to that which you have given to designing our new communications system. I know that engineering is not your specialty, and yet you have suggested several improvements that even our Vulcan engineers had not considered. Was your experience in learning to prepare meals akin to this?"
Uhura laughed before she could stop herself.
"As I told the committee yesterday, you can thank Montgomery Scott for many of the suggestions I have made," she said, brushing off any praise that may or may not have been implied. "I merely presented him with the parameters within which we must work, and he helped me to understand what we can and cannot do at this point in time."
"And yet you showed yourself to be sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject as to be able to answer some of the more pointed queries the committee presented to you," Sarek said.
"Well, yes," she said. "I was not completely unfamiliar with the engineering behind communications systems. Starfleet requires understanding of the basic tenets from all who choose my field."
Sarek inclined his head.
"I would hardly call you knowledge basic," he said.
She nodded. The questions that committee had asked her as they vetted her suitability had been far from basic.
"I required more of myself," she explained pointedly. "And during my time on the Enterprise, Mr. Scott helped me to build a more thorough familiarity."
At Sarek's acknowledging nod, she continued.
"As for my knowledge of cooking, you can thank Spock for that. I rarely liked the foods offered in the mess halls at the Academy. He thought I should learn to cook," she told her companions. "He was right about that. As you observed earlier, he pointed out that my mama's family was dedicated to preserving indigenous African languages. That went hand-in-hand with culture, but I'd never really been interested in learning about the food while I had my parents and aunties and uncles to provide me with my meals. Eating at the Academy proved to be a bit of a shock."
She stopped and smiled at the memory of her baba's joyous shock when she first asked him for cooking lessons. Spock had willingly tasted her first independent attempts at simple ugali and sukuma wiki. He'd patiently eaten through her adaptations and experiments. They hadn't even been lovers yet, she thought with another smile.
With a start, she realized she had been thinking of the younger Spock without pain slicing through her. She'd actually smiled at a memory of him.
"As for the dishes I prepared tonight, I would be remiss if I allowed you to believe that it makes up a strictly a traditional East African meal," she said, forcing herself not to dwell on her thoughts of her k'diwa. "I substituted many Vulcan vegetables, as well as several from this planet, in making the stew, and I used Vulcan herbs to scent the ugali."
The elder Spock spoke up for the first time since the discourse on food had begun.
"Your adaptability is another admirable quality, Nyota," he said softly. "It is yet another reason why your endeavors during your short time with us have met with such success."
Uhura met his eyes and had to fight not to beam with pleasure at his compliment. As it was, she felt herself flush at the praise. His words were so… Spock-like, it was impossible for her not to be touched.
With some effort, she limited her response to, "Thank you, Spock."
_______________________________
Sarek departed for his own home only after the three had spent several hours discussing the plans for the comm network. Uhura found that she enjoyed bouncing her ideas off the two men. The whole evening, in fact, had been enjoyable.
Whereas she had once found her lover's father to be closed and somewhat forbidding, it appeared as if now that their connection was more tenuous – and now that he wanted to rectify that situation, or so it seemed to her – he was making an effort to both draw her out and bring her in. Whether it was due to the familiarity borne of constant use, of it was because she actually felt closer to the Vulcan, she realized she was no longer disturbed to hear him call her "ko-fu."
In spite of her long day, she didn't feel tired. When Spock invited her to watch the moon with him, she accepted readily.
Again, they sat on the small sofa in companionable silence, looking through the window at the moon.
"Tell me more about her," she said after a while.
Spock, to his credit, did not ask her to whom she referred.
"She is beautiful," he said. Then, with a wry smile, "But you already know that, of course.
"When we first met, she was less reserved than you have learned to be. Early on she asked why I did not tell her she was 'an attractive woman.' It was during that conversation that she first teased me about the Vulcan moon. She knew that Vulcan had no moon, but even then she knew, better than I, that we were well matched.
"Her patience with me, needless to say, was remarkable to the point that some would call heroic."
He turned to her and smiled as he took her hand and held it lightly in his.
"I wasted many years not recognizing what was before me. Yet, I made allowances for her behavior which I would not have tolerated from anyone else. She liked to touch me, even though she well knew that Vulcans are uncomfortable with casual touch. I did not protest.
"She has one of the most pleasing singing voices I have ever heard, and on more than one occasion, she used it against me in her teasing. I found I enjoyed being the object of her taunts.
"Many of the friends I made on the Enterprise took me to task for denying my human half. It annoyed me that they would not accept my choice to live a Vulcan life. They did not know the prejudice I had suffered on my homeworld because of my heritage, and I did not deign to share it with them. When she chastised me, however, I found I was disturbed in a way that protests from others failed to incite in me. I dismissed as illogical my desire to share my childhood with her.
"Eventually, I did, however. On the nights when she lay at my side, holding me through my most difficult moments, I allowed her to see what was inside of me, and in return she always gave me what I needed to hold the memories at bay.
"She did not wait for me," he told her. "Our relationship was not that cruel. She came close to falling in love with someone else once or twice, she told me later, but no one who she felt could be as right as I would have been.
"The day she almost died, I imagined that I was broken beyond repair. First there was an irrational desire to shake her and yell and make her see that a human woman in her nineties had no business serving on a mission that led into a poorly explored sector of the galaxy. It was as if whatever I held most dear had been ripped from my hands.
"It was in that moment that I realized that I loved her. Just when, or so I believed, she had been taken out of my reach forever, I understood that she was the other half of me.
"Before the events of the past two years, I never again knew devastation such as I felt when the word came that her ship had been destroyed."
Uhura laid her head on his shoulder and squeezed his hand as echoes of his pain translated themselves through their link.
"I spent many hours wrapped in my grief before I realized that I could still feel her inside me," he said. "We were not formally bonded, but we were linked in a way. You have a similar link with your Spock, do you not?"
Her answer was a choked, "I did. Once."
He caressed her cheek, a long thin finger sliding along her jawbone.
"No, Nyota," he whispered. "You are still a part of him. I can feel it when we touch."
He felt her instinctive denial, and knew when it was layered with a trace of hope.
"Through our similar link, I knew that my Nyota was still alive, although I did not understand how it could be possible.
"I arranged to travel to the sector where her ship had been destroyed. The trip took many weeks, and I had only her presence in my mind to guide me once I reached the area her crew had been mapping.
"I found her in the fifth week after my arrival. The planet that harbored her should have been inhospitable for a human woman her age, and yet she looked well. Better than well.
"She was as I have described her. Altered. Of course, I knew her immediately and our link assured me she was who she appeared to be. But she would not explain to me how she had survived beyond telling me that her life had come at great cost.
"And though I could finally admit my love for her, and she told me she had felt the same for nearly all the years of our acquaintance, she would not strengthen our link. She would not formalize our bond.
"It was enough, she said, that I finally knew that she was my t'hai'la and my k'diwa. She would not, she told me, force me to share her burden. Many years passed before I understood what she meant by that. And even after I better understood why she felt herself cursed, I would gladly have taken her 'burden' as my own."
A/N: I realize this one is kind of short and that it doesn't really move the story forward in a way all of you will appreciate, but it's needed.
Usual disclaimer: I own nothing.
