On What Wings (Dare He Aspire) [1/2]
Title: On What Wings (Dare He Aspire) [1/2]
Wordcount: ~2,000
Pairing/Characters: Chekov/Sulu, Uhura/Spock (onesided), Kirk/Spock, Scotty, Bones, Chapel, Rand
Rating: PG-13? I guess?
Disclaimer: I don't own them!
Summary: ...It's a Circus!AU, set in the late 80s (around the fall of the Soviet Union) in Arizona.
Note: Part one of (I think) two. Been kicking around in my head for months, so. Title from The Tiger by William Blake.
Pavel can only barely remember the Moscow Circus School. He remembers the sharp crack of the master's stick on the ground, the chanting - onetwothreefouronetwothreefour - as the trapeze students practiced their routines. "There is nothing below you, nothing above, nothing but the rhythm and the song." The master (schoolmaster, ringmaster) would bark out. "The people watch you not because you twist yourselves and hurt yourselves and wake up with cracked skulls! They watch you because you are music. "
He remembers pretty Ronya, breaking her arm against a rhythm too fast for her. He remembers poor starving Valya, with her ribs sticking out like frosted branches, as she stretched and pushed herself against the silken ropes which suspended her.
He remembers the chaos which came after, when the State as dissolved, when they fled here, to far, strange America.
He thinks sometimes he misses it - not the barked orders, not the thin children made cruel by overwork, but the feel of it when you step upon the sand and let your shadow take over your motion, let your mind dissolve.
He lies curled in his bed in the trailer where they live, worn blanket tugged tight around slim shoulders, and dreams of an audience.
*
He gets a job in town, at the tiny, grimy convenience store. The man there is not nice, but he is not mean, either, a glum, sad sort of grouchy, fat and maybe a bit too greedy from the register but it is his store, and it is not as if Pavel is used to being paid much. He makes enough, though, to buy sugar and cinnamon and a little cracked mortar and pestle for his mama, for her to grind and sweeten her strong black tea. "Baba Jaga," he calls her, cheeky, and she tosses curses at him like darts.
He has been working there a month when she first comes in, the women with feet like a dancer. She sways up to him and orders a pack of cigarettes in a voice that says she has already had too many. Her money is worn and wrinkled, and when he hands her the pack she taps one out right there on the counter.
"You're new," she says, holding the cigarette between her third and fourth finger, white paper striking against her dark skin. She slides a match, sharp-snap, against the countertop.
"Yes," Pavel says, because he is. "So are you," he points out with the beginning of a smile, "to me."
She watches the smile grow and then fade on his face like the burst of flame sheltered in her palm, and then she smiles back. "Always new again," she says, and chuckles. "Traveler's curse."
Her name is Nyota, he learns, Nyota Uhura, and she is a dancer. "Of a sort," she says, "Of a sort." He learns that she has a tragic love, a man she pines for that will not see her. He learns she has many friends, old and new, all of whom have strange names and even stranger lives.
"So when do they come and see me, huh?" He asks her one day, draped across the counter. His shirt is sticking to his back, it is so hot, and her hair is curled dark and tangled at the base of her neck.
"They would, Pasha," she answers, "But they are wanted by the law, and dare not show their faces."
"All of them?" He laughs, but she nods, dark eyes sparkling and solemn at once. "Of course. After all, what are we, on our own? Nothing but men and women, Pasha. But together...together we're dangerous."
He raises his eyebrows. "What are you, a band of outlaws?"
"Worse." She says, and leans close. "We're a circus."
He has to juggle a carton of eggs, not dropping one, before she is convinced that his babbled half-memories are genuine. A few cartwheels in the dust outside and she has agreed to show him.
She drives him out into the desert in her old jeep, jazz piano in the tape deck, as the sky turns dusky pink. "Jazz was invented in Russia," he tells her, and she laughs.
The tent stands huge and lonely, trailers gathered beside it like piglets suckling at a mother sow.
Nyota cuts the engine a ways from the tent, towing Pavel by the wrist across the sand. At the flap of the tent she holds a long finger to her lips. He can hear a drum, pounding a heartbeat, and thinks, onetwothreefouronetwothreefour -
She lifts the flap of the tent.
**
The first thing he notices, high above like bats, are the trapeze artists.
There are three of them at first, flipping and swinging to the drumbeat, the gossamer of the net below making them shimmer like the air above the hot black roads of the town in summer. Pavel tries and tries again to blink it away before he realizes his mistake, and by then two of the three have caught onto the hanging silks and began winding their way down like spiders. As they come, they fade from illusions to women, both blonde and dressed in simple black leotards, flipping and unraveling the silk around them. The older woman spots them, and speeds up, past the drumbeat's loud tempo.
Pavel almost winces in memory. That would have been a beating, by the master.
The woman steps gracefully from the silks, greeting them both with a wide smile, just as the other reaches the ground, perfectly in tempo.
Nyota gestures to him. "Christine, Janice, this is Pavel Chekov, I've mentioned him before. Turns out he was actually trained in this shit, went to a school for circus and everything."
Uhura's lit another cigarette, and the smoke catches Pavel's eyes, brings them back up to the darkened peak of the tent, where the single trapeze artist is still dancing from bar to bar, tight, perfect somersaults arcing back and forth. He makes it look effortless in a way that the students never had, and looking at him, Pavel almost heard the melody and harmony soaring out and around the drum's rhythm.
They watch you because you are music.
A beat on the drum and then the figure is plummeting, falling straight onto the net.
Pavel sucks in a harsh breath, but the net stretches, stretches, bounces him back up onto the platform he must have started from, and he lands balanced perfectly on the balls of his feet, arms stretched upwards to the heights of the tent high above.
"Hey, Hikaru!" Nyota calls, blowing out another plume of smoke. "Stop fucking around."
Hikaru relaxed his posture and glanced down at them, half-smiling. "Someone's gotta test the net sometimes, Uhura," He calls back, and then turns to descend the ladder, lithe and somehow captivating in his own simple black costume.
Nyota beckons Pavel away with the hand holding the cigarette, and, somewhat reluctant, he goes.
***
He learns that the silk-dancers, Uhura's colleagues, are Christine Chapel and Janice Rand. They ask him about the School - most things he can't remember or never knew in the first place, like why it was started and what was it for, really, and how could a circus be state funded?
The trapeze artist is Hikaru Sulu, and Nyota's talked about him before, exasperated mostly, but also a little admiring.
He meets the ringmaster, a man with a quick, charming smile and an unmistakable air of command about him. "James Tiberius Kirk," he says his name is, with no small amount of flair, and really, it's a good name to put some flair into (certainly better than "Pavel", which his earliest American schoolmates were quick to point out rhymes with "hovel" and "grovel". Not that it does, pronounced correctly, and not that they knew what either of those words meant, but the point remains). At his side is a man with a juggler's long fingers and a sardonic, still sort of face. Nyota spends the least time on him, the cigarette trapped tight between her lips.
He meets Scotty, who was playing the drum, and who salutes him with a hip-flask of something suspiciously pungent. He meets Bones, briefly. "It's short for "sawbones", old American slang for a doctor," Nyota explains when he asks. "He's everyone's best friend."
Bones snorts at that. "No," he says, drawing out in a strange drawl, "I'm Jim's best friend. The rest of you love me for my drugs."
Nyota flashes him a winning smile and moves on.
She shows him the places, too - the great center ring, of course, but the side rings, too, where the jugglers juggle and Scotty clowns, when he isn't playing the drum for the main act. She shows him the animal cages, out the back, with the beautiful horses and the baby elephant and the huge, great lion, who looks at Pavel like a king upon a peasant.
Finally she leaves him by the center ring, vanishing off with the two blondes, and he finds himself staring at a shirtless Hikaru Sulu going through the movements of a sword-dance.
The children at the Moscow School had seemed broken when they weren't flying, like birds hopping about on claws they didn't really know how to use.
Hikaru Sulu does not look like a man that can ever be broken.
Aground, he is just as graceful as he was aflight. He moves smoothly, a tiger's raw, unthinking strength in the flex of the muscles under his skin. His sword is bright in his hand, flashing and bright, and Pavel almost wants to step in under it, join the dance, though it might draw blood, just to bend and sway in opposition and partnership with him.
He doesn't, though, because that is a ridiculous thought, and his mother will kill him if he comes home bloodied because he wished to dance with a beautiful man.
He doesn't, because when Hikaru Sulu notices him, he stops, thrusting the sword's point into the sand and sawdust at his feet. "Chekov," he says, "Right?"
Pavel ducks his head in a nod, wanting nothing so much as to be invisible and keep watching the martial dance. But Sulu steps forward, letting the sword stand like a marker in the center of the ring. "Where'd Uhura go?" He asked, peering at the shadows at Pavel's side like they will resolve themselves into a woman. "She was showing you around, right?"
Pavel nodded. "She and...Christine, was it? And Janice, the dancers. They are practicing."
"You didn't want to watch?" There is something dark and curious in Sulu's eyes.
"Sure," he says, "But I would rather - " watch you "- explore. I have had the...training, but not the atmosphere. It is..." He turns his eyes upwards, peering up through his curls to the peaked roof of the ten, to the shadowed billows and hushes curves of it, and then looks back at Sulu, who stands still and shirtless, slightly off-center, in the circle of light. "...beautiful, but I think perhaps a little scary."
Sulu smiles, lips tight over secrets. "You're a smart kid."
"I'm seventeen," Pavel protested. "Back home, that is adult enough."
It means nothing more, back home, than it does here, but he feels a sudden need to be strong, stand tall, opposite Sulu.
Sulu's smile breaks open white and laughing, and Pavel wants to be offended, but the whole tent feels breathless and surreal and then he is laughing, too, all of the tension rushing from him. He sags against the bright-painted wall of the ring and hangs his head with his laughter. When he looks up, Sulu is watching him, mirth swallowed down inside and only leaking from his eyes.
"They'll probably be a while," he says, nodding his head to the partition where Nyota disappeared. "Do you have a place to go back to? People who'll miss you, I mean? It is getting kind of late."
Pavel sucks his lip into his mouth. "I should probably go home, yes, I suppose," he says, slowly.
Sulu retrieves the sword from where it stands in the sand. "You want me to take you?" He asks, off-hand.
Pavel opens his mouth. "Yes," is what he finally settles on saying. He wonders if there is a word, in Russian or in English, that could say all the things he means.
****
The jeep is apparently communal circus property, or maybe Sulu just doesn't care, because Nyota left the keys in and he hops readily enough into the driver's seat. Pavel slides into the passenger side, feeling jittery and nervous. The stars are out and the desert is finally starting to cool. Sulu has slipped on a black, open shirt that flutters around his chest, drawing Pavel's eyes.
"You live in town?" Sulu asks him, running a hand through his hair, and he has the same sort of casual grace driving as he does everything else. Pavel stares upwards at the stars instead. "Just outside," he says, "In a trailer."
Sulu chuckles, and Pavel resists the urge to glance at him. "Jesus," Sulu says, "You really are a circus brat, huh?"
"What do you mean?" Pavel asks, frowning.
"Most people would be ashamed of living in a trailer." Sulu answers. "You sound almost proud."
Pavel blinks, and now he is looking Sulu. "It is a house that moves," he says. "What is there to be ashamed of?"
Sulu looks at him, glances at the road, and looks at him again, gaze measuring. "Nothing," he says. "Nothing at all."
They drive in silence for a while. Pavel thinks about putting in another jazz tape, but he likes this better - the silence is somehow warm between them, made so by stolen and open glances alike.
When they pull up in front of the park, there are lights on in his trailer. As he opens the door, his mother calls, "Pasha? Is that you?" from the steps.
Pavel stumbles from the jeep. He turns, face aflame, to face Sulu's grin. "Thank you, Mr. Sulu" he says, his sincerity somewhat strangled by his embarrassment.
Sulu holds out a hand. "Hikaru." He says, and his palm is cool and too-soft, fingers calloused by the trapeze bar. Pavel lets go a little too late and hurries into his trailer, losing himself in his mother's worried curses.
Wordcount: ~2,000
Pairing/Characters: Chekov/Sulu, Uhura/Spock (onesided), Kirk/Spock, Scotty, Bones, Chapel, Rand
Rating: PG-13? I guess?
Disclaimer: I don't own them!
Summary: ...It's a Circus!AU, set in the late 80s (around the fall of the Soviet Union) in Arizona.
Note: Part one of (I think) two. Been kicking around in my head for months, so. Title from The Tiger by William Blake.
Pavel can only barely remember the Moscow Circus School. He remembers the sharp crack of the master's stick on the ground, the chanting - onetwothreefouronetwothreefour - as the trapeze students practiced their routines. "There is nothing below you, nothing above, nothing but the rhythm and the song." The master (schoolmaster, ringmaster) would bark out. "The people watch you not because you twist yourselves and hurt yourselves and wake up with cracked skulls! They watch you because you are music. "
He remembers pretty Ronya, breaking her arm against a rhythm too fast for her. He remembers poor starving Valya, with her ribs sticking out like frosted branches, as she stretched and pushed herself against the silken ropes which suspended her.
He remembers the chaos which came after, when the State as dissolved, when they fled here, to far, strange America.
He thinks sometimes he misses it - not the barked orders, not the thin children made cruel by overwork, but the feel of it when you step upon the sand and let your shadow take over your motion, let your mind dissolve.
He lies curled in his bed in the trailer where they live, worn blanket tugged tight around slim shoulders, and dreams of an audience.
*
He gets a job in town, at the tiny, grimy convenience store. The man there is not nice, but he is not mean, either, a glum, sad sort of grouchy, fat and maybe a bit too greedy from the register but it is his store, and it is not as if Pavel is used to being paid much. He makes enough, though, to buy sugar and cinnamon and a little cracked mortar and pestle for his mama, for her to grind and sweeten her strong black tea. "Baba Jaga," he calls her, cheeky, and she tosses curses at him like darts.
He has been working there a month when she first comes in, the women with feet like a dancer. She sways up to him and orders a pack of cigarettes in a voice that says she has already had too many. Her money is worn and wrinkled, and when he hands her the pack she taps one out right there on the counter.
"You're new," she says, holding the cigarette between her third and fourth finger, white paper striking against her dark skin. She slides a match, sharp-snap, against the countertop.
"Yes," Pavel says, because he is. "So are you," he points out with the beginning of a smile, "to me."
She watches the smile grow and then fade on his face like the burst of flame sheltered in her palm, and then she smiles back. "Always new again," she says, and chuckles. "Traveler's curse."
Her name is Nyota, he learns, Nyota Uhura, and she is a dancer. "Of a sort," she says, "Of a sort." He learns that she has a tragic love, a man she pines for that will not see her. He learns she has many friends, old and new, all of whom have strange names and even stranger lives.
"So when do they come and see me, huh?" He asks her one day, draped across the counter. His shirt is sticking to his back, it is so hot, and her hair is curled dark and tangled at the base of her neck.
"They would, Pasha," she answers, "But they are wanted by the law, and dare not show their faces."
"All of them?" He laughs, but she nods, dark eyes sparkling and solemn at once. "Of course. After all, what are we, on our own? Nothing but men and women, Pasha. But together...together we're dangerous."
He raises his eyebrows. "What are you, a band of outlaws?"
"Worse." She says, and leans close. "We're a circus."
He has to juggle a carton of eggs, not dropping one, before she is convinced that his babbled half-memories are genuine. A few cartwheels in the dust outside and she has agreed to show him.
She drives him out into the desert in her old jeep, jazz piano in the tape deck, as the sky turns dusky pink. "Jazz was invented in Russia," he tells her, and she laughs.
The tent stands huge and lonely, trailers gathered beside it like piglets suckling at a mother sow.
Nyota cuts the engine a ways from the tent, towing Pavel by the wrist across the sand. At the flap of the tent she holds a long finger to her lips. He can hear a drum, pounding a heartbeat, and thinks, onetwothreefouronetwothreefour -
She lifts the flap of the tent.
**
The first thing he notices, high above like bats, are the trapeze artists.
There are three of them at first, flipping and swinging to the drumbeat, the gossamer of the net below making them shimmer like the air above the hot black roads of the town in summer. Pavel tries and tries again to blink it away before he realizes his mistake, and by then two of the three have caught onto the hanging silks and began winding their way down like spiders. As they come, they fade from illusions to women, both blonde and dressed in simple black leotards, flipping and unraveling the silk around them. The older woman spots them, and speeds up, past the drumbeat's loud tempo.
Pavel almost winces in memory. That would have been a beating, by the master.
The woman steps gracefully from the silks, greeting them both with a wide smile, just as the other reaches the ground, perfectly in tempo.
Nyota gestures to him. "Christine, Janice, this is Pavel Chekov, I've mentioned him before. Turns out he was actually trained in this shit, went to a school for circus and everything."
Uhura's lit another cigarette, and the smoke catches Pavel's eyes, brings them back up to the darkened peak of the tent, where the single trapeze artist is still dancing from bar to bar, tight, perfect somersaults arcing back and forth. He makes it look effortless in a way that the students never had, and looking at him, Pavel almost heard the melody and harmony soaring out and around the drum's rhythm.
They watch you because you are music.
A beat on the drum and then the figure is plummeting, falling straight onto the net.
Pavel sucks in a harsh breath, but the net stretches, stretches, bounces him back up onto the platform he must have started from, and he lands balanced perfectly on the balls of his feet, arms stretched upwards to the heights of the tent high above.
"Hey, Hikaru!" Nyota calls, blowing out another plume of smoke. "Stop fucking around."
Hikaru relaxed his posture and glanced down at them, half-smiling. "Someone's gotta test the net sometimes, Uhura," He calls back, and then turns to descend the ladder, lithe and somehow captivating in his own simple black costume.
Nyota beckons Pavel away with the hand holding the cigarette, and, somewhat reluctant, he goes.
***
He learns that the silk-dancers, Uhura's colleagues, are Christine Chapel and Janice Rand. They ask him about the School - most things he can't remember or never knew in the first place, like why it was started and what was it for, really, and how could a circus be state funded?
The trapeze artist is Hikaru Sulu, and Nyota's talked about him before, exasperated mostly, but also a little admiring.
He meets the ringmaster, a man with a quick, charming smile and an unmistakable air of command about him. "James Tiberius Kirk," he says his name is, with no small amount of flair, and really, it's a good name to put some flair into (certainly better than "Pavel", which his earliest American schoolmates were quick to point out rhymes with "hovel" and "grovel". Not that it does, pronounced correctly, and not that they knew what either of those words meant, but the point remains). At his side is a man with a juggler's long fingers and a sardonic, still sort of face. Nyota spends the least time on him, the cigarette trapped tight between her lips.
He meets Scotty, who was playing the drum, and who salutes him with a hip-flask of something suspiciously pungent. He meets Bones, briefly. "It's short for "sawbones", old American slang for a doctor," Nyota explains when he asks. "He's everyone's best friend."
Bones snorts at that. "No," he says, drawing out in a strange drawl, "I'm Jim's best friend. The rest of you love me for my drugs."
Nyota flashes him a winning smile and moves on.
She shows him the places, too - the great center ring, of course, but the side rings, too, where the jugglers juggle and Scotty clowns, when he isn't playing the drum for the main act. She shows him the animal cages, out the back, with the beautiful horses and the baby elephant and the huge, great lion, who looks at Pavel like a king upon a peasant.
Finally she leaves him by the center ring, vanishing off with the two blondes, and he finds himself staring at a shirtless Hikaru Sulu going through the movements of a sword-dance.
The children at the Moscow School had seemed broken when they weren't flying, like birds hopping about on claws they didn't really know how to use.
Hikaru Sulu does not look like a man that can ever be broken.
Aground, he is just as graceful as he was aflight. He moves smoothly, a tiger's raw, unthinking strength in the flex of the muscles under his skin. His sword is bright in his hand, flashing and bright, and Pavel almost wants to step in under it, join the dance, though it might draw blood, just to bend and sway in opposition and partnership with him.
He doesn't, though, because that is a ridiculous thought, and his mother will kill him if he comes home bloodied because he wished to dance with a beautiful man.
He doesn't, because when Hikaru Sulu notices him, he stops, thrusting the sword's point into the sand and sawdust at his feet. "Chekov," he says, "Right?"
Pavel ducks his head in a nod, wanting nothing so much as to be invisible and keep watching the martial dance. But Sulu steps forward, letting the sword stand like a marker in the center of the ring. "Where'd Uhura go?" He asked, peering at the shadows at Pavel's side like they will resolve themselves into a woman. "She was showing you around, right?"
Pavel nodded. "She and...Christine, was it? And Janice, the dancers. They are practicing."
"You didn't want to watch?" There is something dark and curious in Sulu's eyes.
"Sure," he says, "But I would rather - " watch you "- explore. I have had the...training, but not the atmosphere. It is..." He turns his eyes upwards, peering up through his curls to the peaked roof of the ten, to the shadowed billows and hushes curves of it, and then looks back at Sulu, who stands still and shirtless, slightly off-center, in the circle of light. "...beautiful, but I think perhaps a little scary."
Sulu smiles, lips tight over secrets. "You're a smart kid."
"I'm seventeen," Pavel protested. "Back home, that is adult enough."
It means nothing more, back home, than it does here, but he feels a sudden need to be strong, stand tall, opposite Sulu.
Sulu's smile breaks open white and laughing, and Pavel wants to be offended, but the whole tent feels breathless and surreal and then he is laughing, too, all of the tension rushing from him. He sags against the bright-painted wall of the ring and hangs his head with his laughter. When he looks up, Sulu is watching him, mirth swallowed down inside and only leaking from his eyes.
"They'll probably be a while," he says, nodding his head to the partition where Nyota disappeared. "Do you have a place to go back to? People who'll miss you, I mean? It is getting kind of late."
Pavel sucks his lip into his mouth. "I should probably go home, yes, I suppose," he says, slowly.
Sulu retrieves the sword from where it stands in the sand. "You want me to take you?" He asks, off-hand.
Pavel opens his mouth. "Yes," is what he finally settles on saying. He wonders if there is a word, in Russian or in English, that could say all the things he means.
****
The jeep is apparently communal circus property, or maybe Sulu just doesn't care, because Nyota left the keys in and he hops readily enough into the driver's seat. Pavel slides into the passenger side, feeling jittery and nervous. The stars are out and the desert is finally starting to cool. Sulu has slipped on a black, open shirt that flutters around his chest, drawing Pavel's eyes.
"You live in town?" Sulu asks him, running a hand through his hair, and he has the same sort of casual grace driving as he does everything else. Pavel stares upwards at the stars instead. "Just outside," he says, "In a trailer."
Sulu chuckles, and Pavel resists the urge to glance at him. "Jesus," Sulu says, "You really are a circus brat, huh?"
"What do you mean?" Pavel asks, frowning.
"Most people would be ashamed of living in a trailer." Sulu answers. "You sound almost proud."
Pavel blinks, and now he is looking Sulu. "It is a house that moves," he says. "What is there to be ashamed of?"
Sulu looks at him, glances at the road, and looks at him again, gaze measuring. "Nothing," he says. "Nothing at all."
They drive in silence for a while. Pavel thinks about putting in another jazz tape, but he likes this better - the silence is somehow warm between them, made so by stolen and open glances alike.
When they pull up in front of the park, there are lights on in his trailer. As he opens the door, his mother calls, "Pasha? Is that you?" from the steps.
Pavel stumbles from the jeep. He turns, face aflame, to face Sulu's grin. "Thank you, Mr. Sulu" he says, his sincerity somewhat strangled by his embarrassment.
Sulu holds out a hand. "Hikaru." He says, and his palm is cool and too-soft, fingers calloused by the trapeze bar. Pavel lets go a little too late and hurries into his trailer, losing himself in his mother's worried curses.