Fic - .001
He is fourteen when he is accepted into Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, California, after a year spent in the Astrophysics Conservatory in St. Petersburg, away from his parents in Moscow. He takes classes in the evenings mostly, when the high-level courses are offered in physics and theoretical math and temporal mechanics, and they're all he has; the beauty of numbers, the hardness and mystery of space, gravity, time, and stardust, in his fingernails, in his eyes, in him. Some of the cadets don't take so well to being shown up so easily by such a little boy, and Pavel ends up having his fair share of scrapes and bruises, most of which he stubbornly bears until the evidence is gone. Once, his nose gets broken by one of them, and the intern cadet at the infirmary only looks at him with what he supposes is pity when she runs the tricorder over his face, over dried and drying blood that coats those pouty lips like an obscene kind of cosmetic. He waits patiently for the damage to be fixed, and waves off the earnest suggestion that he should report the incident. He refuses to be seen as a child.
---
When he's working on a problem with a stylus held in those long, tapered fingers, he's as beautiful to watch as he is when he runs across campus and back with long, loping strides like a deer; not hurried, not anxious, but powerful and sleek and fast. Or when he dances, eyes shut to the world as his body does what the muscle memories tell it to, spinning him quick and graceful across the floor. His writing is narrow and the letters lean into one another when he's using Standard; it's like his brain hasn't entirely switched over from Cyrillic, but the answers are all there, unfolding in that jumble of foreign-looking symbols across the surface of the acrylic display board. His mind is wired for this: to think, to create, to consider, to calculate, to imagine the possibilities that unfold in the three dimensional eternity that unfurls beyond the Earth's gravity field. He's good at it, though no one ever expects it out of the Russian 'whiz-kid', as he comes to be called, all curls and an eager smile and big, blue-green eyes that remind everyone that sees him that the genius is only a kid.
---
He has a dormitory to himself for most of the time he's at the Academy. It was deemed appropriate that way; Pavel was seen as too young, too waiflike, too something to be tossed in with the rest of the soldier-students. He doesn't mind, it gives him an extra few minutes to shower that he wouldn't have had otherwise, he thinks, tipping his head into the spray. He counts the seconds that the water washes over his face; he counts the seconds for everything in the back of his mind, up to four hundred and forty-six million and change. He adds seventeen minutes' worth of seconds to that before he steps out, steam obscuring the reflection in his mirror. He's up early to take a run and get to the exam in his advanced transporter theory class; he's the only one who knows all the material already and if he can take the final, he can move up to the level three stellar cartography lab. He's given a week's leeway to catch up with the rest of that class before they reach their midterm. Pavel thinks with a soft grin that he'll manage it in about five days.
---
When he's working on a problem with a stylus held in those long, tapered fingers, he's as beautiful to watch as he is when he runs across campus and back with long, loping strides like a deer; not hurried, not anxious, but powerful and sleek and fast. Or when he dances, eyes shut to the world as his body does what the muscle memories tell it to, spinning him quick and graceful across the floor. His writing is narrow and the letters lean into one another when he's using Standard; it's like his brain hasn't entirely switched over from Cyrillic, but the answers are all there, unfolding in that jumble of foreign-looking symbols across the surface of the acrylic display board. His mind is wired for this: to think, to create, to consider, to calculate, to imagine the possibilities that unfold in the three dimensional eternity that unfurls beyond the Earth's gravity field. He's good at it, though no one ever expects it out of the Russian 'whiz-kid', as he comes to be called, all curls and an eager smile and big, blue-green eyes that remind everyone that sees him that the genius is only a kid.
---
He has a dormitory to himself for most of the time he's at the Academy. It was deemed appropriate that way; Pavel was seen as too young, too waiflike, too something to be tossed in with the rest of the soldier-students. He doesn't mind, it gives him an extra few minutes to shower that he wouldn't have had otherwise, he thinks, tipping his head into the spray. He counts the seconds that the water washes over his face; he counts the seconds for everything in the back of his mind, up to four hundred and forty-six million and change. He adds seventeen minutes' worth of seconds to that before he steps out, steam obscuring the reflection in his mirror. He's up early to take a run and get to the exam in his advanced transporter theory class; he's the only one who knows all the material already and if he can take the final, he can move up to the level three stellar cartography lab. He's given a week's leeway to catch up with the rest of that class before they reach their midterm. Pavel thinks with a soft grin that he'll manage it in about five days.