Extra-long chapter this time. In which Uhura still has a few psychological Issues, and Spock at least tries to address them. They're also both still getting used to the bond, especially Uhura.
I've also been railroaded into a second prompt, which, if it works out, I will also post here, along with the plot bunny onimosity gave me. Too many ideas, dammit.
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To her surprise, on the morning of her own damn ceremony, Uhura was nervous. More than nervous--her hands were actually shaking, sweat beading at her temples.
It wasn't the ceremony itself that disturbed her--she'd been given to understand that would be fairly straightforward. It wasn't even the idea of the press, who would almost certainly ask all kinds of questions she couldn't or wouldn't answer.
It was the uniform.
Spock had noticed, she knew, how carefully she avoided her Starfleet clothing. Until now there had been no reason for that avoidance to be noticed, no situation in which she might be expected to wear it. Now, though, she was of course meant to wear her full dress uniform, and the mere thought of putting it on filled her with near mind-numbing terror. Terror she hoped wasn't telegraphing to Spock through this newly-minted bond of theirs, though if it went on too long she didn't know how he could miss it. And it was so stupid. After everything, horror and healing, to be afraid of a uniform…why that, out of everything?
Red fabric parting like paper along the blade of a knife that was far too sharp, a dangerous, potentially deadly tickle against her skin. She never had found out what had happened to the shreds that had remained--all she knew was what had happened after she'd lost it, and she'd dealt with that, even if she wasn't and never would make true peace with it--
Uhura shook her head. It's just clothing, she thought, trying to convince herself. Nothing special, nothing awful. Just a dress and stockings and boots. She touched the fabric lightly--it wasn't the same as the fabric of ordinary uniforms, which helped. A little. Anyway, she had to get over this if she ever wanted to return to active duty, which naturally she did eventually. She'd be damned if one horrible experience would drive her out of Starfleet, out of something she'd worked so hard for--and she'd be damned if something so stupid as a uniform would make her fall apart. It was over; Nero was dead and gone--nothing could hurt her now.
So she told herself, but she still hesitated to actually put it on--all she could do was stare at it, laid out neatly on the bed. Not until the door opened did she look away, turning to find Spock behind her.
"Something distresses you," he said, taking her hand. "May I help?"
Uhura tried to smile. "It's…it should be nothing," she said. "Just this dumb uniform." She wasn't sure how to explain her problem with it to Spock--it was, after all, completely and utterly illogical. Unfortunately, that made it no less real.
To her surprise, he brushed the hair back from her forehead and said, "You have poor associations with your uniforms. I have noticed you look away whenever you see one in your closet, and your refusal to touch them when you put away your other clothes." There was an odd warmth in his touch that had nothing to do with physical sensation and everything to do with that odd mental communion that was definitely going to take some getting used to.
"Well, yeah," she said, rubbing the back of her neck. "I just…didn't think it would be this hard." If she had, she would have tried to deal with it before now, when she had so little time.
Spock seemed to think a moment. "Here," he said, adjusting the uniform on the bed with his good hand, and drawing her to stand closer. "As you have negative associations with the removal of your uniform, perhaps we might replace them with more positive connotations, this time with putting it on." He held out a questioning hand, fingers resting lightly on the buttons of her shirt, one of the innumerable plain black ones she'd been living in the last few days. With only a few inward misgivings, she nodded wordlessly, and did not flinch when he slowly unfastened the buttons. This was Spock; this was the person she could trust most in the world. She would not be afraid.
And she wasn't, even when he'd reached the last button at the bottom of her shirt, and eased the collar back over her shoulders. Warm air hit her skin--he didn't keep his rooms as hot as Vulcan, because he knew she wouldn't have been able to stand it, but they were rather warmer than Starfleet norm. The Narada had been hot, too, but this warmth was very different--this was a comfort, thinner and drier than the heavy miasma of that damned ship. She helped shrug the shirt down off her arms, tossing it on a nearby chair, and again, almost to her surprise, didn't flinch when he reached for her pants. Those too came off easily enough, leaving her barefoot in her underwear, and acutely conscious of that fact. Only now did she twitch, when she turned to regard her uniform, shivering in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
Spock touched her hand, warm skin on skin, fingers closing gently around her own. "Do not be afraid, Nyota," he said, his voice as gentle as his touch. "There is nothing here that may harm you."
All she could do was nod. Yes, she knew objectively that there wasn't anything dangerous here in Spock's tidy rooms, but try telling that to her instinctive memory. It was, she reminded herself for the thousandth time, just a uniform, just an outfit, nothing harmful or dangerous to anything save her mind.
-I am here.- Spock's voice in her mind was still like nothing she'd ever felt--not a voice, just a thought, a thought not her own that manifested over what she could only think of as an invisible length of spider silk. -You are not alone anymore, Nyota. Do not forget that.- And with that thought came a kind of peace, peace enough to still her shaking hands. When he picked up the smooth red dress, unzipping the zipper, she raised her arms almost like a child so he could pull it over her head. The material was cool, lined with some sort of faux silk, and she shuddered a little at the feel of it.
-I don't know what's wrong with me. I shouldn't be afraid of this.- She felt him reach behind her to zip up the zipper as she smoothed the sleeves, her fingers lingering at the hem of her cuffs.
-It has only been four days, however much it may seem longer. It is only logical that you have not yet recovered fully from such an ordeal, in so short a time. Do not deem it stupid, or ridiculous. The mind is a peculiar thing; there is no way of knowing how it might manifest reactions to such stress as you endured.- He picked up her stockings, filmy and black, and when she sat on the bed he took one foot in his hands. Warm fingers tickled her feet a little, making her smile in spite of herself, and once the stockings were on he helped her with her boots, too.
"See?" he said, drawing her to her feet. "It is only clothing, and I will be with you. If you wish I will face the press with you as well."
"I…definitely do wish." He was right, Uhura realized; it was only clothing, something she wore now because Spock had assisted her with it, had shown her it was all right. She drew a deep, calming breath. "Let's just get this over with."
----
This ceremony was being held outdoors, under a long pavilion in the sun--probably the only place that had enough room for all the press that were currently jostling for a better position. A temporary stage and podium had been rigged up, along with long conference tables for various dignitaries and upper-level Starfleet personnel. A great many cadets were sprinkled around as well, all dignified in their own dress uniforms--a little knot of Enterprise crew among them, having staked out a spot at the very front of the crowd. Chekov, still sporting his fantastic array of bruises; Sulu, looking very uncomfortable and too hot in that high-collared uniform; Scotty, who as always looked secretly amused by something; and the elder Spock, who projected such an air of 'of course I belong here' that nobody seemed about to question it.
They'd saved the younger Spock a seat as well, and he gave Uhura's hand a reassuring squeeze before he sat. -I am still with you,- he reminded her, and she gave him a small, fleeting smile before disappearing behind the stage to await her cue.
-I'm glad. I just want this to be over.-
-It will be soon enough. Perhaps Mister Scott will take us out to that pub of his again.-
-Oh God, I hope not. The last thing I need is another headache.- There was actual amusement in the thought, he could tell; good. Perhaps it would make this easier.
Admiral Michaelson, resplendent (and also looking too warm) in his dress uniform, took the stage and the podium, silencing the murmuring of the press. "This is a special sort of ceremony," he said, the microphone amplifying his voice all through the tent and grounds beyond. "Something we've never done before, but until now we've never had this special sort of circumstance. The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise have all distinguished themselves above and beyond the call of duty, but Lieutenant Nyota Uhura delivered the ultimate coup de grâce with the execution of the Romulan war criminal known as Nero."
Coup de grâce, Spock thought--what an apt turn of phrase, as he was given to understand the literal meaning of the term was 'blow of mercy'. Killing Nero--and sending his katra on--really was a strange sort of mercy, though neither Michaelson nor most others had any idea how fitting it was to call it 'mercy'. It would not, he knew, be lost on Nyota.
"In doing so she and the entire crew of the Enterprise succeeded in preventing Nero from destroying the rest of the United Federation of Planets, a task he might easily have accomplished had no one succeeded in stopping him. And so it is our honor to present her with this award of merit not only from Starfleet, but from the entire Federation."
That must have been her cue, for Nyota mounted the steps and crossed the stage, her expression almost entirely composed--Spock was probably the only one who would really be able to read the signs of nervousness in her face. The sun glinted off all that shiny dark hair, smooth as silk, with a few errant strands caught by the mild ocean breeze. Admiral Michaelson opened a large, flat, black velvet box, and from it removed a gold medallion on a red silk ribbon. Spock watched her tense a very little at the sight of it, and sent a wordless sense of calm through their bond, causing her to look at him just a moment, something very like gratitude in her dark eyes.
No sooner had the medallion been lowered over her head than the applause started--punctilious and correct on the part of the media, loud and enthusiastic by the cadets. Nyota didn't manage a smile, but she at least bore it without grimacing, and when she sat to deal with the press and its questions, it wasn't only Spock who joined her; Kirk moved to her other side, clearly also wanting to give what the humans termed 'moral support', whatever that actually meant. His captain's dress uniform suited him well, and might help deflect some of the more disturbing personal questions. It was general if vague knowledge that Kirk and Spock in particular had been instrumental in rescuing the crew of the Enterprise, so their presence on either side of her could easily be logically explained.
Uhura leaned toward her microphone. "Before we start, you have to understand that there are a lot of questions I won't be able to answer. A lot of this is still classified, so please don't push if I say I can't comment." How composed she seemed, but Spock could sense the multiple motivations behind that statement--it was, so she hoped, a way to deflect any questions of a personal nature she would not want to answer, even if it wasn't classified.
An Andorian at the very front of the crowd raised a hand, speaking only when Uhura nodded at him. "This is really for all of you, but how is it you came to have any opportunity to escape in the first place?"
The three exchanged glances, silently, and it was Spock who finally answered.
"That is a…difficult question to answer. All we may really say is that not all the Romulans aboard the Narada remained loyal to Nero. At least two of them released us and gave us the opportunity to retake our ship. About that I believe I can say little more."
"Is that how you came to kill Nero, Lieutenant?" This from a human, a blonde woman with a vaguely Midwestern American accent.
Uhura swallowed, considering that for a long moment. "I…think so," she said at last. "You have to understand that everything happened so fast I don't even remember everything. I just…heard the fighting and went to find it."
Next was a Tellerite, a man with far too many PADDs than could possibly be useful. "You two were together in the hold--" a nod at Spock and Kirk "--but where were you, Lieutenant? Why weren't you with them?" There was a subtle nuance to his question that Nyota apparently completely ignored.
"The Romulans had separated us all over the ship," she said, quite matter-of-factly. "Usually in groups of four, sometimes less. I think they thought we'd have less chance of escape that way, and without the help we received from those few crew members, that strategy would probably have worked."
It was a perfectly logical and satisfactory answer, but the Tellerite didn't look satisfied. He was, Spock realized, one of the staff that worked for a very seedy tabloid, one that capitalized on existing scandals and made up what they couldn't really find. This one might be trouble.
"We were indeed held in so many different places it took two point five two hours to locate the majority of the crew. The Narada is over six miles long, and coupled with the need to evade the notice of any nearby Romulans, we were fortunate to gather as many of the crew in one place as we did." There, that added a little cement that Tellerite would have a problem undoing.
"And who were you with?" The cant of his questions was becoming a little more obvious now, and Spock found himself wondering why anyone's mind would go there, if they hadn't been there themselves. It must be the result of spending all your time as a scandal-monger--he didn't know how else anyone's instinctive thought pattern would wind its way thus without evidence or provocation.
"Without asking them, I'm not sure I should say," Uhura answered smoothly, to his inward pleasure. "This isn't something any of us really wants to talk about. Most of us had never killed anyone before," she added, a little wistfully, and it was that which made the reporter subside, albeit reluctantly. That was apparently not the kind of scandal he was looking for, though Spock could see him already trying to regather his momentum. "It's…not an easy thing, to do or to live with afterward, even if it was in combat. Watching somebody die, even if they are your enemy…."
The distress in her voice was not feigned, as her calm had been, and though Spock could not publicly take her hand, he could lightly touch her mind, drawing out some of her inner trouble and replacing it with some of his own tranquility. "And to know that you're the one that killed them--it's really not something I think most of us have actually truly dealt with, yet. We were just…cadets, not officers, not soldiers. Without the officers I don't think we would have made it on our own."
Another Andorian this time, one whose expression was much less…hungry…than that of the Tellerite. "How afraid were you--all of you? Even you, Commander Spock--I believe this was your first true combat experience."
Again they all exchanged glances, and Kirk took his cue. "I don't know about everybody else, but I was damn terrified," he said candidly, earning a bit of a laugh. "There was so much that could have gone wrong that I just stopped thinking and started moving on instinct. A lot of it's still kind of fuzzy."
"Fuzzy, and too fast," Uhura put in. "I remember being more angry than afraid, too angry to really be cautious, but fortunately for me it took me a while to get to the main firefight. I had a little while to try to get some sort of…of coherent thought back." Spock really was amazed at how she could spin and twist the facts without telling a single outright lie. It was an attribute he had seen in humans before, but Nyota seemed to have a particular talent for it, at least at the moment. Evasive eloquence under pressure?
"I confess I felt a very little fear," Spock admitted--Vulcans weren't supposed to lie, after all. "My…emotional tranquility…was very much disturbed just then." And still was, though he had a much better handle on it now. Even the scandal-hungry Tellerite knew better than to ask why, too--news of Vulcan's destruction had reached every corner of the Federation within hours of its happening. Anybody incautious enough to bring up that point would probably find themselves without a job.
Unfortunately, the obnoxious scandal-sniffer wasn't done yet. "I understand the weapon you killed Captain Nero with is somewhere inside Starfleet Headquarters," he said, clearly smug that he even had this knowledge. "Did you bring it back as some kind of trophy?"
Uhura froze. Physically, mentally, everything--Spock felt it all lock down into place, her hands gripping the edge of the table. "I was not aware of that," she said, as evenly as she could. "I didn't bring it myself, and I'm not sure who would have. It's…not a thing that should exist anymore."
"Some kind of bladed thing, am I right? A Romulan sort of spear? How angry did you have to be to use something like that, and why?" Good grief, he was persistent, wasn't he? "How did you get ahold of it, anyway?"
Uhura's glare could have fried him on the spot. "First, I'm not at liberty to specify just what sort of weapon it is, though I can confirm it's of Romulan manufacture. My emotional state had very little to do with why I used it, too--it was simply all I had to hand. How I got ahold of it is…also classified, I believe." That really was a tidy way of refusing without lying, Spock thought. And for all any of them knew, it was true; Starfleet wouldn't want that part of the story coming out any more than Nyota herself. "And Nero was…dangerous. So long as he was alive, we were all in too much danger, too much trouble. Almost anyone would have done it in my place."
She was still shivering a little, though only Spock was aware of it. -It is all right,- he thought to her. -You need never see this thing. Remember all who matter know what truly happened, and this outsider is too ignorant to know a thing.-
"Mm hmm." It was a noise that managed--somehow--to be non-committal and skeptical all at once.
----
Uhura had thought she'd left all inclinations toward violence behind her on the Narada, but this son of a bitch was making her seriously reconsider the merits of leaping across a desk and choking someone. Bad enough he'd blindsided her with that damned whatever-it-was weapon--and anybody in Starfleet who'd known about it and hadn't told her was going to hear about it later--but this…this…thisness. How dare he? How dare he?
"I take it you disagree," she said evenly, somehow managing to keep the contempt out of her voice. "You think we should have left him alive? For what purpose?"
"Well, so we could have heard his side of the story." Now he was just smug, she thought.
Kirk leapt in to her rescue. "His side consisted of him destroying a planet and almost all six billion of its inhabitants, annihilating most of our secondary fleet, taking us all prisoner and killing close to half of us…you want me to go on? If he'd lived, we wouldn't have. Starfleet might be a peacekeeping force, but there wouldn't have been any peace to make with Nero. He would have just kept killing until someone else took him out."
"I agree," Spock interjected. "Nero was…not stable. There was little left in his mind to reason with, and he ignored what little there was."
Uhura was very still. That had all been so complicated that she wasn't sure she could have put it into words even if she'd wanted to--which she really didn't. "He was…broken," she said. "In a way I've never seen, and hope I never see again. He was out of his mind and he knew it, and I think--I think he was almost grateful when I killed him."
The tone in her voice made even her Tellerite interrogator pause; it was so terribly thoughtful, softly, unhappily contemplative. She was looking at her hands, the hands that had so spectacularly deprived a man of his life, as if she hadn't ever seen them before. "From what little I saw of him, Nero was irredeemable. I don't think those crewmen would have given us a chance if he wasn't--they knew it just as well as we did. He would have kept going until there was nothing left to destroy, and then even his own people didn't know what he would have done."
Nobody interrupted her now--not the Tellerite, not Kirk or Spock, nobody. This was almost a weird sort of…of therapy, getting all this out into the open, even in this broken, imperfect, secretive fashion. "He wasn't the same man they'd known before they all came back in time, before they destroyed Vulcan. You know they wanted revenge, right--twisted revenge against people who hadn't actually wronged them. After Romulus was destroyed in their future, he turned into this monster that everybody saw, but he hadn't always been that way and his crew knew it. I think…they regretted it, how much they all changed, even if they still saw what they did to Vulcan as justified."
She was still staring at her hands, her interlaced fingers with their neatly manicured nails. "There wasn't any going back for him, or for any of them, and there wasn't really anywhere forward for them to go, and they knew that, too. I think a lot of them wanted to die, not just Nero--they were just a little better at expressing it to themselves. He was so…surprised when I killed him, but just before I did it I swear he was grateful. And Ayel--I only saw him briefly, but I know he was one of the ones who first let some of us out, and then he died himself, and I think he did it on purpose, too. They'd gone so far over the line that there wasn't anywhere else to go."
Uhura shut her eyes, blocking out the sight of so many people. Strangely, she felt no urge to cry, no incipient tears; this was a purging of a different sort, quieter and more controlled than any bout of weeping. "Am I sorry it came to that? Of course I am. Not many people really truly want to kill someone else, but with Nero there was no alternative. If we'd left him alive he would only have tried to do something even worse."
She flexed her wrist a very little, the wrist Nero had cracked. All the little injuries he'd done her were covered by either her uniform or her hair; there was no outward way for anyone to know just how she'd come by all this information and these conclusions. No way to realize just how up close and personal they'd been, both before and after his death, or how she had come to realize so much about him and his crew.
Silence followed that, unbroken even by her tabloid pursuer. There was something in her voice, her expression, her everything, that precluded any more questions, however curious people might be as to how she had come to any of those conclusions. Some things were best left unasked, as even the Tellerite seemed to realize.
"I'm not sure there's much else I can say," she said, quietly. "There isn't a lot that isn't completely classified. Just…this is something that's behind us, and we'd all like to leave it there. There's too much worth doing in the future to dwell on what's done."
She shut her eyes briefly, knowing it was true, but still needing to consciously remind herself. It would probably be a long, long time yet before she could think to the future without having to tell herself to do so.
But they were all getting there.
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As always, thank you to all my lovely reviewers. I am honestly not entirely sure what is coming next, only that eventually we will indeed have some Spock/Uhura action. XD