Remainder Challenge
Title: Snow
Prompt: Remainder Challenge #230, Challenge #223 - Snow
Fandom: Star Trek 2009
Pairing: Uhura/Gaila
Rating: PG
Word Count: 250
Warnings: Non-explicit background of slavery
Gaila spends the first two decades of her life without seeing snow. The Syndicate-owned pleasure station where she grows up has constant atmosphere, light, temperature and pressure, all things controlled and in their place. She knows of seasons the same way she knows of stars, distant and named in books she is forbidden to touch, and when she escapes, variable weather is newer, stranger to her than freedom. Freedom she had dreamed of, after all, touched and tasted it in her mind a thousand times over. Winter, she has never considered.
Her first year in Starfleet, she learns the nature of ice and snow, bare branches, sere brown hills. She learns how the world can change overnight from revealed to concealed, and she dons winter clothes like armor, layer after layer to keep out the cold.
Now, she learns how the world changes again. She watches the slow thaw, the tentative unfurling of new roots and leaves, a landscape reawakening to warmth. She sits beside her roommate Nyota outside the dorms, on evenings when light stays longer than it had the day before. They talk in all the languages of Gaila's childhood, and they study, and sometimes they argue about things that never matter much. And that is all. No leering entitlement in her actions or her eyes, no heat without light.
Nyota's smile is the brilliance of sun on snow, and Gaila learns friendship on equal terms. And another possibility opens for her, gradually, gentle and unexpected, entirely new.
Title: Heart
Prompt: Remainder Challenge #230, Challenge #226 - Heart
Fandom: Star Trek 2009
Pairing: Uhura/Gaila
Rating: PG-13 for language
Word Count: 250
Uhura finds Gaila sitting alone in one of the auxiliary engineering labs, bathed in dim blue light. The room is empty for the night, no sound in the air except for the low hum of dormant machinery, and Gaila leans back with eyes half-closed, bare arms wrapped around her knees. Uhura knows why she's here. And if she could she would personally beat some decency into every cadet who ever watched her friend walk across campus and whispered or shouted the words “whore,” or “slut,” or “hey, green girl!”
“Hey,” she says. “Found you.”
Gaila looks up, smiles tightly.
“I passed that simulation,” she says. “I did. No one else. And now they're saying I fucked the teacher to do it.”
“I know,” Uhura says. She remembers weeks when Gaila stayed overnight at the labs in preparation, running through schematics, tests, equations, remembers her exhaustion and her pride.
She offers Gaila a hand and pulls her to her feet, and Gaila leans into her arms, tense with hurt and anger. Uhura breathes in the scent of her, floral shampoo and cotton and clean sweat, feels the press of Gaila's body against her own. And her heartbeat, strong and steady, the drumbeat pulse of life undefeated.
“I know the truth,” she whispers. “And so do you.”
And she runs a hand through Gaila's hair, tilts her head back and kisses her, slow and fierce, holds her and doesn't let her go.
Title: Spring
Prompt: Remainder Challenge #230, Challenge #228 - Spring
Fandom: Star Trek 2009 or TOS
Pairing: T'Pring/Amanda, one-sided/unrequited
Rating: PG
Word Count: 250
A/N: Um, yeah. I swear it makes sense in my head.
Warnings: Alluded-to consent issues
Vulcan comes to life in springtime, when storms sweep down through the desert in temporary, sacred reprieve. T'Sai Amanda kneels among her flower beds, up to her elbows in red dirt, and tends her roses as raindrops scatter across the greenhouse roof.
A young Vulcan woman watches from the sidelines, dark, serious, her hands clenched on the edges of a PADD she has long ago stopped trying to read. Her name is T'Pring, and she is the Lady's daughter-in-law, though she does not want to be. She is here, now, because she does not know where else to be. There was a social function she slipped away from, seeking solitude, but the main house is too vast and still, too full of echoes, to be comfortable. Being in those halls is like being trapped underground. So she came here, to a place where she knows she might find welcome without duty, if only for a while.
T'Pring is nineteen years old, and already weary of many things. But she is not yet weary of this woman and her roses, nor the sound of rain on glass windows, marking the season's return.
Amanda's planet has a long history of stories about girls who pick flowers. T'Pring has read them all, and knows how they end. The knowledge is not enough. She is hungry for something that stories hint at and do not offer, that exists unnamed beyond the strictures of logic and myth. For roses and thorns, and love, given freely.
Prompt: Remainder Challenge #230, Challenge #223 - Snow
Fandom: Star Trek 2009
Pairing: Uhura/Gaila
Rating: PG
Word Count: 250
Warnings: Non-explicit background of slavery
Gaila spends the first two decades of her life without seeing snow. The Syndicate-owned pleasure station where she grows up has constant atmosphere, light, temperature and pressure, all things controlled and in their place. She knows of seasons the same way she knows of stars, distant and named in books she is forbidden to touch, and when she escapes, variable weather is newer, stranger to her than freedom. Freedom she had dreamed of, after all, touched and tasted it in her mind a thousand times over. Winter, she has never considered.
Her first year in Starfleet, she learns the nature of ice and snow, bare branches, sere brown hills. She learns how the world can change overnight from revealed to concealed, and she dons winter clothes like armor, layer after layer to keep out the cold.
Now, she learns how the world changes again. She watches the slow thaw, the tentative unfurling of new roots and leaves, a landscape reawakening to warmth. She sits beside her roommate Nyota outside the dorms, on evenings when light stays longer than it had the day before. They talk in all the languages of Gaila's childhood, and they study, and sometimes they argue about things that never matter much. And that is all. No leering entitlement in her actions or her eyes, no heat without light.
Nyota's smile is the brilliance of sun on snow, and Gaila learns friendship on equal terms. And another possibility opens for her, gradually, gentle and unexpected, entirely new.
Title: Heart
Prompt: Remainder Challenge #230, Challenge #226 - Heart
Fandom: Star Trek 2009
Pairing: Uhura/Gaila
Rating: PG-13 for language
Word Count: 250
Uhura finds Gaila sitting alone in one of the auxiliary engineering labs, bathed in dim blue light. The room is empty for the night, no sound in the air except for the low hum of dormant machinery, and Gaila leans back with eyes half-closed, bare arms wrapped around her knees. Uhura knows why she's here. And if she could she would personally beat some decency into every cadet who ever watched her friend walk across campus and whispered or shouted the words “whore,” or “slut,” or “hey, green girl!”
“Hey,” she says. “Found you.”
Gaila looks up, smiles tightly.
“I passed that simulation,” she says. “I did. No one else. And now they're saying I fucked the teacher to do it.”
“I know,” Uhura says. She remembers weeks when Gaila stayed overnight at the labs in preparation, running through schematics, tests, equations, remembers her exhaustion and her pride.
She offers Gaila a hand and pulls her to her feet, and Gaila leans into her arms, tense with hurt and anger. Uhura breathes in the scent of her, floral shampoo and cotton and clean sweat, feels the press of Gaila's body against her own. And her heartbeat, strong and steady, the drumbeat pulse of life undefeated.
“I know the truth,” she whispers. “And so do you.”
And she runs a hand through Gaila's hair, tilts her head back and kisses her, slow and fierce, holds her and doesn't let her go.
Title: Spring
Prompt: Remainder Challenge #230, Challenge #228 - Spring
Fandom: Star Trek 2009 or TOS
Pairing: T'Pring/Amanda, one-sided/unrequited
Rating: PG
Word Count: 250
A/N: Um, yeah. I swear it makes sense in my head.
Warnings: Alluded-to consent issues
Vulcan comes to life in springtime, when storms sweep down through the desert in temporary, sacred reprieve. T'Sai Amanda kneels among her flower beds, up to her elbows in red dirt, and tends her roses as raindrops scatter across the greenhouse roof.
A young Vulcan woman watches from the sidelines, dark, serious, her hands clenched on the edges of a PADD she has long ago stopped trying to read. Her name is T'Pring, and she is the Lady's daughter-in-law, though she does not want to be. She is here, now, because she does not know where else to be. There was a social function she slipped away from, seeking solitude, but the main house is too vast and still, too full of echoes, to be comfortable. Being in those halls is like being trapped underground. So she came here, to a place where she knows she might find welcome without duty, if only for a while.
T'Pring is nineteen years old, and already weary of many things. But she is not yet weary of this woman and her roses, nor the sound of rain on glass windows, marking the season's return.
Amanda's planet has a long history of stories about girls who pick flowers. T'Pring has read them all, and knows how they end. The knowledge is not enough. She is hungry for something that stories hint at and do not offer, that exists unnamed beyond the strictures of logic and myth. For roses and thorns, and love, given freely.