pretends I've been here the entire time


If it was a boy, she could just name him after his father.

Of course, there was the pressure that went along with having such a namesake, but his genetic makeup would bring about plenty expectations, regardless.

Then again, she didn't want him or anyone else to think that she hadn't tried at all. "Jr."—she was more creative than that.

And what if she was having a girl?

Nyota had always liked the name Aziza, so much so that she'd wanted it for herself when she was a child, going so far as to write it on a nametag and wear it to school for an entire school year.

She could also name her after a family member: her late great-grandmother, Dofi; her grandmother, M'Umbha (or her late grandmother, Amanda); or she could dig into her arsenal of worldly knowledge and give her a foreign name, like Guiliana, as if she hailed from Italy, or Gege, as if she were Orion.

There were so many names that fit her mental image of the child she was carrying perfectly; she had no clue how her mother had decided on the perfect names for each of her children.

Nyota: Swahili, meaning "star"—Nyota liked to think that she was bright—metaphorically speaking, of course—considering her academic record, the highlight of which occurred when she was assigned to the U.S.S. Enterprise upon her graduation from Starfleet Academy; and, obviously, it was not lost on her that, as a Starfleet officer, she frequented the stars.

Makena: Kikuyu, meaning "happy one"—This was more or else self-explanatory. Makena was always smiling, always finding the good in everybody, always positive and optimistic. Nyota had rarely, if ever, seen her divert from character.

Then, there was Kamau—Eastern African, meaning "silent warrior." Indeed, Kamau had never been outspoken or boisterous, as many of his friends were, but he had always been strong, mentally and physically. He'd protected his sisters for most of their lives, with more silencing glances than the baring of his fists.

Nyota sighed.

Maybe she wasn't thinking as meaningfully as she could. But at least she was thinking about it, finally.

She let herself smile the faintest of smiles at that, and she adjusted her head on the cushioned headrest of the exam table.

The sonographer Galen had assigned to her—a meek little woman named Doctor Bridges—was one of the quietest people Nyota had ever come across. Dr. Bridges had entered the exam room with an introduction that was barely above a whisper and promptly set to work readying the ultrasound machine and gathering her materials. Her back had been turned to Nyota all throughout, and she hadn't attempted the casual small talk that most physicians engaged in—that even included Leonard, if Nyota counted his complaints about the average irritating patient's complaints and his teasing everyone else.

For maybe five minutes, then, Nyota and Dr. Bridges sat in what one would call a companionable silence, minus so much of the companionship. Nyota took it upon herself to fill it by working on Dr. Z's homework; she wouldn't see him again for another two weeks or so, but she wasn't one to wait until the last minute to start on any assignment.

When Dr. Bridges was all set, she snapped on a pair of gloves and rolled her chair closer to Nyota's side.

"Are you experiencing any pains or discomfort, Miss Uhura?"

Nyota got to look at the doctor—really look at her—for the first time. She had stringy red hair that was long enough to touch her back, even in the ponytail she'd messily thrown it in by the sink. She had cool, blue eyes, and tiny red lips that didn't curl into anything noteworthy very often. She was short, too, to the point where her feet seemed to float above the ground in her sitting position.

All things considered, however, Dr. Bridges certainly was no amateur. Not once while in her care did Nyota express any worry outside the norm for a new mother.

"Nope," Nyota answered, decidedly. "Everything's fine here."

Dr. Bridges merely nodded at this, and then, rather unceremoniously, she spread a warm gel onto Nyota's stomach. She moved away for a moment, and, when she scooted back to the bedside, there was a transducer in her hand. She rubbed it over Nyota's belly, gently, in a manner that directly contrasted the brusque nature of her earlier actions.

Instinctively, Nyota turned her head to look at the television monitor suspended above the ultrasound machine. There was an image, but she couldn't make out much in it, save for the light that illuminated a cylinder-shaped portion of the picture, like a UFO beaming down on the earth from overhead.

Nyota squinted and strained, but still, nothing.

Dr. Bridges made a noise, low in her throat, and Nyota glanced over at her, a mixture of question and concern painting her expression.

Oddly enough, the doctor was smiling—it was tight-lipped and inexperienced, and, really, it could be taken as a smirk, too, but it was something besides a blank face.

"Can't find it?" Dr. Bridges sounded amused, and Nyota didn't know whether to feel sheepish or a defensive.

In the end, she settled on the former. With an air of modesty at her own ignorance, Nyota shook her head. "Not to save my life."

Dr. Bridges nodded and moved the transducer around a bit more. A couple of seconds passed. Finally, the doctor sighed—except it was more of a dreamy sigh than one of exhaustion or irritation—and said, "Look."

Nyota looked at the screen again, and what she saw this time around made her breath catch in her throat.

He—or she—was perhaps the strangest little creature she'd ever seen, and she'd seen plenty. But he wasn't weird-looking in the sense that he scared her, or even worried her. It was the way that she felt when she watched the tiny figure on the screen—when she couldn't stop watching him, in black and white, and fuzzy and all. She knew she'd protect him from anyone and anything.

"He's just the most beautiful little thing," Nyota said, in a breathless whisper.

"It was the same way for me," Dr. Bridges admitted, in an uncharacteristically warm voice.

"That feeling doesn't go away, you know. It just keeps growing."


Doctor Z was with a patient when Nyota finished, so she didn't get a chance to drop by and see him. She walked right out of the door, her and her sonogram, and it was burning a hole in her hand—had been since Dr. Bridges put it there.

She needed to show someone.

Yes, she'd show her parents, and Makena, and Kamau. But that wasn't enough to satisfy the part of her that housed her humanity, her morality, her impending motherhood.

She needed him to see it, she realized, and she removed her PADD from her purse, snapped a photograph of the sonogram, and sent it off. She captioned it, but she hadn't said much. And she felt no need to: she'd done more than enough.


Bones' PADD was always buzzing like crazy—it came with the territory—so, naturally, he was always ignoring it until he had some idle time.

Today, like most days, that idle time had come at the very end of the night, after he'd finally taken a much-needed, well-deserved shower and changed out of his uniform. He settled onto his sofa, a cup of replicator joe in hand, and started filtering through his messages: some were kept, a few of those were flagged, but most of them were deleted. Once he hit the 12:00 mark on the timestamps, he usually shut his PADD off and went to bed. But he was using up his space with all of those unopened messages, and, sooner or later, that would come back to bite him in the ass, and he figured now was as good a time as any to take care of it, because when would he ever not be tired?

Most of them were either boring, redundant, irritating, or some combination of the aforementioned, so he deleted them rather indiscriminately.

Until a particular name caught his eye: Nyota Uhura.

It'd been a few weeks since he'd discussed her extended leave with Spock, and even longer since he'd spoken to or seen her. He missed Nyota dearly; she was one of the only other officers on the ship who had yet to give him a severe migraine. Still, it was ten times easier to keep his guilt at bay and continue misleading Spock when she didn't communicate with him often. Or at all.

Against his better judgement, Bones opened the message. There was a photograph attached. When he opened it, he was a bit taken back. He'd known she was pregnant beforehand, but this… This made it all the more real. And that meant that him keeping it from Spock was all the more real.

Fifteen weeks! Should know gender by next meeting.

Love, Uhura

While he was strangely overjoyed for the Lieutenant, something in Bones dearly hoped that she wouldn't do this kind of thing on a regular basis.

He was afraid that Vulcans could smell a lying son-of-a-gun five light years away.