let's blame John Cho for this, shall we? /o\
Aaaahhhh how am I writing Sulu this week? Every week for months now, karmic_fic posts inspiration pics in the kirk_sulu comm and every week I look at them and think: I could fic the shit out of those prompts, I should do that. And then I write HP crossgen porn or I disappear into chatzy or I kick the fics I already owe and I make sad faces at MacBook which can only be expressed digitally through Andrew Garfield gifs. Because I have the attention span of a nut-addled squirrel.
Anyway, karmic_fic posted the lovely Cho!pic below and I got inspired and I have absolutely no idea how it turned into gen but the Tellarite taco porn from a few weeks ago just is not happening for me and la, I finished a thing. So here. We shall pretend it ends in smoking hot Sulu/Kirkery, yes? Yes! For karmic-fic, because you do such fabulous work and I am a horrible lurker who appreciates it from the bottom of my Choverlord-loving heart. Thank you so much, bb, one day I will comment, I promise. ♥
Er. Sulu-gen, 2k, pg
There’s got to be a rule or something that every talk show host Starfleet sends them to has to bore the fuck out of them with small talk and fake smiles, because seriously, they’ve been at this for weeks already and this shit doesn’t change. Every show, every show, Hikaru gets stuck in a chair with cameras on him, making him behave, while whoever’s playing the resident talking head gets all dopey-smiles on Kirk, and it’s awful, damn it, it’s just so, so boring.
Hikaru can’t even laugh properly when Spock starts, though it’s been fantastic to watch that sharp logic mess with the show’s production crew.
Thing is, Hikaru’s not even really sure why he’s there most of the time, because yeah, he totally helped save Earth and the whole of flight track should be getting his name tattooed somewhere, he was amazing out there, but none of that translates well to the media. Actually, as far as Hikaru can tell, they’ve decided it’s totally the Kirk-and-Spock show, and if Hikaru has to listen to one more anchor ask if they’re an item, he is not holding Nyota back, man, she can start clawing out eyes.
He, uh, he actually might help.
Anyway, whatever, Starfleet doesn’t just send Kirk and Spock out on the big publicity tour, they send the whole damned Enterprise primary crew, which means Hikaru loses weeks of his shore leave on Earth-time he could totally be spending getting drunk and hanging out with the friends he won’t see for years once he ships out-shuttling between major urban centers, sharing quarters with Chekov and sitting gamely on a stage, mute and ignored.
On the up side, it means he doesn’t have to actively listen to the idiot questions they get-Were you scared? How did you feel? Should Starfleet declare war on Romulus now?whatever-and he gets time to work a polite smile, leave his mama lots of footage of him looking all sharp and professional and awesome just in case he doesn’t…Uh. Just in case.
Five years is a long time, man, especially in deep space. So it’s good there’s so much b-roll of him. Probably. She’ll appreciate that, he thinks.
On the downside, well. It’s just all fucking downside, isn’t it? Starfleet’s been really fucking clear that the standard code of ethics applies, which means no booze, no drugs, no sex. No going out in public without a chaperone, which pretty much guarantees they’re all stuck in whatever hotel room Starfleet’s arranged, tripping over each other and slowly going nuts. Scotty keeps trying to tell him it could be worse, Starfleet could have stationed them anywhere at all, and Kirk keeps saying it’s good practice for when they’re in space, and Hikaru wants to point out that at least on the Enterprise, he’d be flying and not just kicking around like human ballast.
Maybe Kirk doesn’t know it’s boring. It’s not like Kirk’s ever the one shoved aside, stuck in the furthest chair going to fill out the stage.
Everyone else gets the spotlight temporarily when the Enterprise tour hits their hometown, only Hikaru’s a San Francisco native and that’s totally a company town, man, the daily newsfeed doesn’t even spell his name right, and it’s not that Hikaru necessarily wants the attention-mostly he doesn’t-but he’s getting tired of feeling like an extra in his own life.
He can’t even order anything interesting from room service, man, because Starfleet’s going to get the expense report and he really, really doesn’t want to explain later to some bureaucrat somewhere that yeah, he totally and sincerely considers that 1,000-credit synthol order to be a business expense.
Even though it totally is.
So mostly he hangs out on the periphery, doesn’t say much of anything at all, sits quietly in his damned chair at the far end of the stage and plasters on a smile. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s what he’s got.
Then, out of nowhere at all, they find themselves on the set of Midday with Dasik, like the Dasik, and someone must have screwed up her information feed or something because the biggest talk show host on this side of the world seems to think he’s the first-chair guest.
The, uh, the production crew are really clear before they send the Enterprise crew out, actually. It’s bizarre. Hikaru tries to explain he’s not Kirk or Spock or McCoy or Scotty, he’s the pilot, man, but they wave him off happily like he’s speaking some different dialect of Standard and when Dasik comes back from break, they send Hikaru out first.
Alone.
Spock looks twitchy. McCoy looks concerned. Kirk looks…huh. Kirk looks the exact opposite of surprised.
Dasik, as it turns out, has a younger brother heading into flight track this year and apparently, he made her promise she’d talk to the Hikaru Sulu for him. Like Hikaru’s actually a the.
It’s not that Starfleet hasn’t prepped them all the hell, had them spend time with media people precisely so they’d know how to respond, it’s that there’s so much else on his mind. Starfleet’s taught him how to respond to journalists and anchors and hosts and interviewers, but he has no way to deal with worried big sisters except his gut.
She tells him about her brother when he sits down, probably trying to make a connection with him or whatever, get him comfortable and shit, and he relaxes faster than he expects he will, just basically forgets the cameras are there. He can see it, is the thing, because he’s been that kid, and he thinks about how much worse it would be to try to have that conversation now, when Starfleet’s lost most of a graduating class.
Because what she’s really asking is how safe it is, how worried she should be, and it’s easy to answer that because he’s got a big sister of his own, who’s probably waiting for him to get back to San Francisco so she can grill him, too.
He tells her what he’d tell Megumi, what he will tell her when she asks. That it’s a risk, sure, but it always was and Starfleet makes damned sure you know exactly what that means before they let you graduate.
She points out there’s no way to prepare for that kind of devastation, not really, and he finds himself talking about flight track and their version of the Kobayashi Maru, the hours of simulations of flights gone wrong, shuttle “missions” he spends thinking he’s lost half his team. Then he breaks message-breaks protocol-entirely and tells her about The Wall.
It’s, he doesn’t even know, man, it’s not an official Starfleet thing, but every cadet to pass through flight track learns all about it by the end of their third month. It’s a flight track legend, really, and someday it’s going to be his legacy, probably, his name and rank and details up under his picture, another cautionary tale for the flight cadets. He thinks about all the names and pictures added in the past few weeks, how that’s going to be his fucking reunion because he’s pretty much all that’s left of his graduating class, and he tries to tell her it’s his privilege to have known them all, to remember things about them probably no one else could.
He. Uh. Gets wordy in there, probably a bit too worked up considering where he is, but he’s thought a lot about it. When he remembers he’s got cameras pointing at him all over the place, he has a horrible moment where he just stops dead mid-thought, turns back to his crew just off-stage for some kind of help.
The only one not staring at him like they’ve never seen him before is McCoy, who just looks sad, his own special brand of mother hen.
Then Dasik clears her throat and he looks back at her and she says, “It sounds like you expect to die,” in this really awkward tone.
Hikaru waves that off with both hands and a head-shake, that’s how wrong it is. He’s not suicidal, Starfleet wouldn’t let him fly the ship, but he is prepared. He knows the risks and accepts them, and he trusts his team and his equipment and himself, or he couldn’t do his job. Everybody does their best, which is all anyone can ever ask, and shit works out however it’s going to. Sometimes it’s awesome and you save the world, sometimes you get caught by things you don’t expect, things you can’t control.
It’s, uh, it’s not for everyone, obviously, and you really can’t get out there expecting it to be like the vids, but if that’s your thing…Well. It’s his thing, obviously, and he’s always known it is, and he’s known his whole life that’s where he needs to be. Nothing like it in the world, man, nothing even close.
And that’s pretty much all he has to say, really. Dasik cuts to commercial again and promises the rest of the Enterprise crew when she’s back, and while his team’s coming in from the wings she says her brother wants to know how it feels to fly warp speed, which electives he should take at the Academy, and Hikaru’s talking about the benefits of having advanced engineering and combat training when the production staffer waves Kirk into the seat at his right.
Kirk brushes their arms as he sits, catches Hikaru’s quick glance and lifts his eyebrows.
While Dasik’s being swarmed by make-up people and updated by her production assistant, Kirk leans over a little and asks if that’s how Hikaru really feels.
It’s not that fucking off-message, really, so Hikaru fires back a dubious look. “No,” he says, “I’m out there for my health.”
Kirk laughs out loud.
The whole rest of the interview goes pretty much as normal, Kirk promising it’s really safe out there, Spock talking about the good Starfleet does, Scotty and McCoy and Nyota and Chekov sitting quietly until Dasik calls on them. Hikaru doesn’t say much-or, really, anything else-but when it’s over, Dasik comes around the desk and hugs him hard, asks if he’d mind meeting her brother if he’s going to be in town tonight and yeah, fuck yeah, he’s looking forward to it.
He’s not much good with cameras but he’s not bad one-on-one.
On their way back to the hotel the Starfleet handler tries to chew him out for breaking protocol. Hikaru claps a hand on the guy’s arm gamely and promises not to ever speak again. He’s aware he’s still getting strange looks from his crewmates, initial assessments being revised, and he knows he’ll have to handle them at some point but not yet.
He’s climbing into the transport back to the hotel before he thinks to check his comm and yeah, huge surprise, he’s missed a few calls. He plays Megumi’s first. The first three consist entirely of “Hikaru, you asshole” and his sister sniffling before she cuts the call. The fourth one’s his favourite, though, because she glares, red-eyed, and says he made her cry at work. Then she makes him promise on pain of retribution that he’ll keep his ass off The Wall.
Unsurprisingly, Starfleet doesn’t really let him talk again, which is funny because after that, the show crews seem to want him near the hosts, probably hoping he’ll go off-message again and give them something new. Something that doesn’t feel as practiced and measured as the Kirk-and-Spock Show highlight reels.
Hikaru’s never going to be a fan of getting shipped out on the Starfleet media tour, because most of it is boring and a total waste of his time, but he finds he can’t hate all of it because apparently, he’s done some good. He’s six months out of space dock with the first official Enterprise mission when his former instructor sends the message about the change to orientation, and when Hikaru plays it, he nods.
Seems the new class of recruits wants to start at The Wall. All things considered, that’s i-fucking-deal.
~f~
...and now back to hds_beltane and comment-replying. ♥
Anyway, karmic_fic posted the lovely Cho!pic below and I got inspired and I have absolutely no idea how it turned into gen but the Tellarite taco porn from a few weeks ago just is not happening for me and la, I finished a thing. So here. We shall pretend it ends in smoking hot Sulu/Kirkery, yes? Yes! For karmic-fic, because you do such fabulous work and I am a horrible lurker who appreciates it from the bottom of my Choverlord-loving heart. Thank you so much, bb, one day I will comment, I promise. ♥
Er. Sulu-gen, 2k, pg
There’s got to be a rule or something that every talk show host Starfleet sends them to has to bore the fuck out of them with small talk and fake smiles, because seriously, they’ve been at this for weeks already and this shit doesn’t change. Every show, every show, Hikaru gets stuck in a chair with cameras on him, making him behave, while whoever’s playing the resident talking head gets all dopey-smiles on Kirk, and it’s awful, damn it, it’s just so, so boring.
Hikaru can’t even laugh properly when Spock starts, though it’s been fantastic to watch that sharp logic mess with the show’s production crew.
Thing is, Hikaru’s not even really sure why he’s there most of the time, because yeah, he totally helped save Earth and the whole of flight track should be getting his name tattooed somewhere, he was amazing out there, but none of that translates well to the media. Actually, as far as Hikaru can tell, they’ve decided it’s totally the Kirk-and-Spock show, and if Hikaru has to listen to one more anchor ask if they’re an item, he is not holding Nyota back, man, she can start clawing out eyes.
He, uh, he actually might help.
Anyway, whatever, Starfleet doesn’t just send Kirk and Spock out on the big publicity tour, they send the whole damned Enterprise primary crew, which means Hikaru loses weeks of his shore leave on Earth-time he could totally be spending getting drunk and hanging out with the friends he won’t see for years once he ships out-shuttling between major urban centers, sharing quarters with Chekov and sitting gamely on a stage, mute and ignored.
On the up side, it means he doesn’t have to actively listen to the idiot questions they get-Were you scared? How did you feel? Should Starfleet declare war on Romulus now?whatever-and he gets time to work a polite smile, leave his mama lots of footage of him looking all sharp and professional and awesome just in case he doesn’t…Uh. Just in case.
Five years is a long time, man, especially in deep space. So it’s good there’s so much b-roll of him. Probably. She’ll appreciate that, he thinks.
On the downside, well. It’s just all fucking downside, isn’t it? Starfleet’s been really fucking clear that the standard code of ethics applies, which means no booze, no drugs, no sex. No going out in public without a chaperone, which pretty much guarantees they’re all stuck in whatever hotel room Starfleet’s arranged, tripping over each other and slowly going nuts. Scotty keeps trying to tell him it could be worse, Starfleet could have stationed them anywhere at all, and Kirk keeps saying it’s good practice for when they’re in space, and Hikaru wants to point out that at least on the Enterprise, he’d be flying and not just kicking around like human ballast.
Maybe Kirk doesn’t know it’s boring. It’s not like Kirk’s ever the one shoved aside, stuck in the furthest chair going to fill out the stage.
Everyone else gets the spotlight temporarily when the Enterprise tour hits their hometown, only Hikaru’s a San Francisco native and that’s totally a company town, man, the daily newsfeed doesn’t even spell his name right, and it’s not that Hikaru necessarily wants the attention-mostly he doesn’t-but he’s getting tired of feeling like an extra in his own life.
He can’t even order anything interesting from room service, man, because Starfleet’s going to get the expense report and he really, really doesn’t want to explain later to some bureaucrat somewhere that yeah, he totally and sincerely considers that 1,000-credit synthol order to be a business expense.
Even though it totally is.
So mostly he hangs out on the periphery, doesn’t say much of anything at all, sits quietly in his damned chair at the far end of the stage and plasters on a smile. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s what he’s got.
Then, out of nowhere at all, they find themselves on the set of Midday with Dasik, like the Dasik, and someone must have screwed up her information feed or something because the biggest talk show host on this side of the world seems to think he’s the first-chair guest.
The, uh, the production crew are really clear before they send the Enterprise crew out, actually. It’s bizarre. Hikaru tries to explain he’s not Kirk or Spock or McCoy or Scotty, he’s the pilot, man, but they wave him off happily like he’s speaking some different dialect of Standard and when Dasik comes back from break, they send Hikaru out first.
Alone.
Spock looks twitchy. McCoy looks concerned. Kirk looks…huh. Kirk looks the exact opposite of surprised.
Dasik, as it turns out, has a younger brother heading into flight track this year and apparently, he made her promise she’d talk to the Hikaru Sulu for him. Like Hikaru’s actually a the.
It’s not that Starfleet hasn’t prepped them all the hell, had them spend time with media people precisely so they’d know how to respond, it’s that there’s so much else on his mind. Starfleet’s taught him how to respond to journalists and anchors and hosts and interviewers, but he has no way to deal with worried big sisters except his gut.
She tells him about her brother when he sits down, probably trying to make a connection with him or whatever, get him comfortable and shit, and he relaxes faster than he expects he will, just basically forgets the cameras are there. He can see it, is the thing, because he’s been that kid, and he thinks about how much worse it would be to try to have that conversation now, when Starfleet’s lost most of a graduating class.
Because what she’s really asking is how safe it is, how worried she should be, and it’s easy to answer that because he’s got a big sister of his own, who’s probably waiting for him to get back to San Francisco so she can grill him, too.
He tells her what he’d tell Megumi, what he will tell her when she asks. That it’s a risk, sure, but it always was and Starfleet makes damned sure you know exactly what that means before they let you graduate.
She points out there’s no way to prepare for that kind of devastation, not really, and he finds himself talking about flight track and their version of the Kobayashi Maru, the hours of simulations of flights gone wrong, shuttle “missions” he spends thinking he’s lost half his team. Then he breaks message-breaks protocol-entirely and tells her about The Wall.
It’s, he doesn’t even know, man, it’s not an official Starfleet thing, but every cadet to pass through flight track learns all about it by the end of their third month. It’s a flight track legend, really, and someday it’s going to be his legacy, probably, his name and rank and details up under his picture, another cautionary tale for the flight cadets. He thinks about all the names and pictures added in the past few weeks, how that’s going to be his fucking reunion because he’s pretty much all that’s left of his graduating class, and he tries to tell her it’s his privilege to have known them all, to remember things about them probably no one else could.
He. Uh. Gets wordy in there, probably a bit too worked up considering where he is, but he’s thought a lot about it. When he remembers he’s got cameras pointing at him all over the place, he has a horrible moment where he just stops dead mid-thought, turns back to his crew just off-stage for some kind of help.
The only one not staring at him like they’ve never seen him before is McCoy, who just looks sad, his own special brand of mother hen.
Then Dasik clears her throat and he looks back at her and she says, “It sounds like you expect to die,” in this really awkward tone.
Hikaru waves that off with both hands and a head-shake, that’s how wrong it is. He’s not suicidal, Starfleet wouldn’t let him fly the ship, but he is prepared. He knows the risks and accepts them, and he trusts his team and his equipment and himself, or he couldn’t do his job. Everybody does their best, which is all anyone can ever ask, and shit works out however it’s going to. Sometimes it’s awesome and you save the world, sometimes you get caught by things you don’t expect, things you can’t control.
It’s, uh, it’s not for everyone, obviously, and you really can’t get out there expecting it to be like the vids, but if that’s your thing…Well. It’s his thing, obviously, and he’s always known it is, and he’s known his whole life that’s where he needs to be. Nothing like it in the world, man, nothing even close.
And that’s pretty much all he has to say, really. Dasik cuts to commercial again and promises the rest of the Enterprise crew when she’s back, and while his team’s coming in from the wings she says her brother wants to know how it feels to fly warp speed, which electives he should take at the Academy, and Hikaru’s talking about the benefits of having advanced engineering and combat training when the production staffer waves Kirk into the seat at his right.
Kirk brushes their arms as he sits, catches Hikaru’s quick glance and lifts his eyebrows.
While Dasik’s being swarmed by make-up people and updated by her production assistant, Kirk leans over a little and asks if that’s how Hikaru really feels.
It’s not that fucking off-message, really, so Hikaru fires back a dubious look. “No,” he says, “I’m out there for my health.”
Kirk laughs out loud.
The whole rest of the interview goes pretty much as normal, Kirk promising it’s really safe out there, Spock talking about the good Starfleet does, Scotty and McCoy and Nyota and Chekov sitting quietly until Dasik calls on them. Hikaru doesn’t say much-or, really, anything else-but when it’s over, Dasik comes around the desk and hugs him hard, asks if he’d mind meeting her brother if he’s going to be in town tonight and yeah, fuck yeah, he’s looking forward to it.
He’s not much good with cameras but he’s not bad one-on-one.
On their way back to the hotel the Starfleet handler tries to chew him out for breaking protocol. Hikaru claps a hand on the guy’s arm gamely and promises not to ever speak again. He’s aware he’s still getting strange looks from his crewmates, initial assessments being revised, and he knows he’ll have to handle them at some point but not yet.
He’s climbing into the transport back to the hotel before he thinks to check his comm and yeah, huge surprise, he’s missed a few calls. He plays Megumi’s first. The first three consist entirely of “Hikaru, you asshole” and his sister sniffling before she cuts the call. The fourth one’s his favourite, though, because she glares, red-eyed, and says he made her cry at work. Then she makes him promise on pain of retribution that he’ll keep his ass off The Wall.
Unsurprisingly, Starfleet doesn’t really let him talk again, which is funny because after that, the show crews seem to want him near the hosts, probably hoping he’ll go off-message again and give them something new. Something that doesn’t feel as practiced and measured as the Kirk-and-Spock Show highlight reels.
Hikaru’s never going to be a fan of getting shipped out on the Starfleet media tour, because most of it is boring and a total waste of his time, but he finds he can’t hate all of it because apparently, he’s done some good. He’s six months out of space dock with the first official Enterprise mission when his former instructor sends the message about the change to orientation, and when Hikaru plays it, he nods.
Seems the new class of recruits wants to start at The Wall. All things considered, that’s i-fucking-deal.
~f~
...and now back to hds_beltane and comment-replying. ♥