Trek Fic: Component Parts, 2b.
Title: Component Parts
Fandom: Star Trek Reboot.
Notes: Livejournal hates the size of my chapters.
++
Four days and sleepless nights later Uhura sends Spock the revised draft of her first two chapters. When she returns to the office that afternoon, the door to the inner room is closed for the first time since the term began.
“Fine,” she mutters. “Be that way.” She sits at her desk and stares at the empty screen of her PADD. She has assignments to grade, but the room is swimming and her arms are weirdly heavy and it’s an effort just to pick up the stylus and open the right file. Her stomach makes a sound like a rabid, dying animal and when she looks at the clock on the wall she sees that somehow thirteen minutes have passed and it feels like she’s spent all that time trapped in one long, slow blink.
“Ms. Uhura,” a cool, even voice says from far away, “can you hear me?”
The blink ends, and the room is bright again. She looks up and sees Spock staring down at her. “I think,” she says, “that I either fell asleep sitting up or I just suffered my first psychotic episode.”
The thin line of his mouth relaxes somewhat; her exhaustion-fogged mind can’t help but wonder if he had been worried. “You have been remiss in your sleep schedule in recent days. You require rest.” Her stomach growls again. “And nourishment.”
She picks up her PADD, then tries to remember when she set it down. “I have work to do.”
He gently takes the PADD from her hands. “I would like to speak with you. I will be brief, and then you may return to your work.”
It’s an effort not to sway as she stands, but she manages to follow him into his office without falling over. He redecorated during the break, adding a bookshelf full of antiques and a high glass-topped table in the corner to hold a burner for incense and a self-warming teakettle. The walls are still an awful shade of beige but the light has changed, turned low and golden warm, and if he weren’t standing there staring at her she would curl up on the floor like a cat and be asleep in seconds.
Uhura takes her usual chair. The jar of lollipops sits on the edge of the desk, almost as full as it had been the day Commander Lee left it behind. Then Uhura looks again and says, “You’re out of the cherry-flavored ones. You should get more.”
Spock pauses mid-step, halfway to his chair. “Vulcan taste buds are ill-suited for sweets,” he says. “I have no need to replenish my supply.” He continues to his chair and sits, steepling his fingers. There is a short, still silence. “I have read your revised chapters.”
She nods and braces her ego for the bludgeoning to come. This time she’s prepared, and she has a plan - she’s going to sit quietly while he crushes her soul in his neatly-manicured fist, then finish her grading, re-rewrite her first chapter, do her laundry, and take a nap for the next thirty years. She might wake up sometime around year fifteen to eat a sandwich; she hasn’t decided yet.
Oh. Sandwiches.
Spock watches her, touching his steepled fingers to his mouth. “Do you play chess, Ms. Uhura?”
“What?” she says, horrified.
He almost frowns. “I said, ‘Do you-’”
“No, I don’t,” she says. “Not at all. I mean, I understand the basics of the game, but no - I don’t play.” She panics quietly for a moment, and then confesses: “I’ve tried, but I’m terrible. Really, really bad. And by bad, I mean awful; honestly, I still have nightmares about being attacked by a giant plastic horse head.” She pauses. “Though that might be about something else entirely, now that I think about it.”
Really, Spock’s eyebrow seems to say. For some reason, she takes this as an invitation to continue babbling.
“When I was in secondary school I dated a boy in the chess club. He broke up with me.” She leans forward. “Guys never break up with me. Not ever.”
Spock clears his throat. “You believe he terminated your association because you lacked skill as a chess player?”
“I can’t imagine any other reason,” she says. “Can you?”
He hesitates. “I do not think,” he says, “that I have the sufficient amount of data required to speculate.”
She sits back in her chair, satisfied. “Exactly.” Then she frowns. “Why’d you want to know if I played?”
He opens a drawer in his desk and removes a piece of folded cardboard and a small box. He unfolds the cardboard and lays it on the desk, revealing a cheap, battered chessboard. He slides it forward until it is evenly between them. “You are gifted in many disciplines, Ms. Uhura, but one should not restrict oneself to the areas in which one’s talents lie.” He opens the box and begins to arrange the pieces on the board. “I myself lack any sort of innate musical ability.”
Her frown deepens. “I’ve heard you play the lyre. You’re good.”
“Because the effort I expended to learn outweighed my initial disadvantage.” He places the white pieces first, the pawns and the rooks. His fingers hover over the first knight, and he looks up to meet her eyes. “A giant plastic horse head?”
“I think I’ll survive the trauma,” she says.
He nods and places the knight on the board. “When I was young-” He pauses, then begins again. “Every Vulcan child strives to distinguish him or herself academically, but my motivations were of another kind. I had, as you might say, something to prove. I excelled in every available area of study.” He sets the white king in its place. “Except for music.”
Just as everyone at the Academy knows how Uhura’s mother died, everyone knows that Spock is half-human. But he’s never mentioned it before; it makes her heart beat a little faster. “No one can be good at everything,” she says.
“That was my father’s position. He argued that the logical course would be to focus my energies on the subjects I wished to pursue in the future. The subjects in which I showed the most promise.”
She takes a black pawn from the box. “The sciences?”
“Indeed.” Spock pushes the box across the desk so she can reach it more easily. “My father’s argument was a rational one, but - as was often the case in these matters - my mother disagreed.” A slight smile touches his lips. “She is at times guided by a logic all her own.”
Uhura has watched him play, has heard him talk about her father’s music. She answers his small smile with one of her own. “She could see how much you loved it. She didn’t want you to give that up.”
This seems to surprise him. His expression remains as serene as always, but for the first time since she’s known him he seems to miss a beat, like the skip of a gramophone record. He recovers quickly. “‘Love’ is, unsurprisingly, not the term I would choose; even so, you are not incorrect - my fascination with music has always seemed inversely proportional to my talent for it.” He watches quietly for a moment while she places the black pieces one by one. “The Vulcan lyre is a difficult instrument. My mother suggested the piano she had brought with her from Earth as an alternative. With practice, my proficiency with both instruments grew.”
“You play the piano?”
“No,” he says. “Not for a very long time.” The black king is the last piece to find its place. Spock turns the chessboard until the white pieces rest on her side of the desk. “You will begin.”
She sits back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. “I appreciate the moral of the story, Mr. Spock, but I don’t play chess.”
He stands. “Contemplate your opening move. I will prepare tea.”
Uhura almost walks out of the room. She hates being ignored, or dismissed, or confronted with anyone as stubborn as she is. But walking out of room would require, well, walking, and her chair really is quite comfortable.
She stares at the chessboard, her vision fizzing white around the edges. I must be getting old, she thinks. In grad school I could survive a week on only a few hours of sleep and a Cup Noodles. Now I go without for four days and I nearly give myself a stroke.
Spock turns away from the high table in the corner. “Do you prefer a particular blend of tea?”
Uhura drinks coffee, usually black. She rubs her eyes. “Anything with caffeine in it will do, thanks.”
He turns back to the teakettle, a definite note of disapproval in his silence. She studies the slope of his back, the subtle movement of his shoulder blades beneath his uniform. As her eyes travel downward, she takes a moment to enjoy the wonders of Starfleet tailoring.
“Ms. Uhura,” Spock says, “I believe you will find that your ability to strategize improves considerably when the chessboard is the focus of your gaze.”
Which is when she realizes that he can see her reflection in the metallic sheen of the teakettle. Mortified, she ducks her head and tries very, very hard not to laugh. She manages to choke out a strained, “Sorry, sir.”
Spock returns to the desk with a mug of steaming tea in each hand. He sets the larger down in front of her and sits. “I accept your apology.” He sips his tea. “How long has it been since you last slept?”
She cups her hands around the mug and feels its heat like a gentle pulse in the joints of her fingers. She closes her eyes. “A while.”
“That is not an acceptably precise answer.”
She opens her eyes to find him watching her intently. She grips the mug a little tighter. “I last slept sixty-three point four hours ago.” She pauses. “I think.”
He sets his tea on the desk. “Because you have undertaken a massive revision of your first two chapters.” She nods, and he frowns. “You have six remaining months in which to complete your dissertation. That is sufficient time to make any necessary revisions. Your sudden urgency is self-destructive and illogical.”
She shrugs. “I was on a roll.” He stares at her, and she gives him a careless grin. “Are we going to talk about my revisions, or are we going to play chess?”
His frown fades. “You do not wish to do either,” he says, amused.
“Shucks. And I thought I was being so subtle.” She puckers her lips and exhales a long breath across the surface of her tea, dispersing steam. She takes a sip and shudders a little when it burns her tongue. “It’s good,” she says. “Hot.”
He taps a finger against the desk; he seems to be considering something. “You should return to your quarters and rest.”
She takes another sip of the tea. “I have assignments to grade.”
“I will finish your grading.”
She bristles a little at that. “And laundry. I have lots of laundry. Hours and hours worth.” He opens his mouth to object, but she shakes her head. “The assignments are my responsibility. I don’t need you to do my work for me.”
He inclines his head slightly. “Very well.” He gestures to the chessboard. “The first move is yours.”
The game isn’t as brutal as she remembers. She’s still terrible, of course, second-guessing herself and strategizing piece by piece rather than seeing the board as a whole, but each time she finds herself in checkmate Spock returns the pieces to where they’d been five or six turns before and says, “And if I had chosen this move? How would you respond?” It transforms an uneven competition into a puzzle, something they solve together, and after a time she begins to see the patterns, the greater choreography of queen and bishop and rook, knight and pawn. Spock calls each pattern by its name - Philidor Defense, Queen’s Gambit, Alapin Variation, Ponzani Opening - and now she has a vocabulary to study, a language to learn and repeat and make her own.
She’s still losing, but at least now she understands why. It’s almost fun.
Spock moves one of his pawns into a somewhat delicate position. “Benoni Defense,” he murmurs. “Fianchetto Variation.”
Uhura bites her lip absently, staring at the board. “Benoni is Hebrew. It means son of my sorrow.”
“Referring, I think, to the current state of my pawn.”
She flashes him a brief smile, but it’s interrupted by the growl of her stomach. She winces. “Sorry.”
He reaches into his desk and pulls out a foil packet. He opens it with a snap and passes it to her. “This lacks the nutritional value of a complete meal, but I believe it will ease your discomfort.”
Inside the packet are large, flat crackers. Uhura frowns and breaks off a corner. She nibbles at it, then looks up at him in surprise. “You keep matza in your desk?”
“Most Human foods possess strong flavors that are incongruous with Vulcan tastes. Matza is an exception.” He reaches across the desk and snaps off half a piece of the flatbread. “Also, my maternal grandmother was Jewish. We visited her occasionally when I was a child, and I developed a taste for it.”
Uhura takes another bite and washes it down with the last of her tea. “Did you spend a lot of time on Earth when you were growing up?”
“Less as I grew older. But yes, when I was very young. My mother still keeps a house outside of Seattle. It belonged to my grandfather.” He looks away from her eyes, at the chessboard. “It has been many years since I have seen it.”
Not for the first time, she wants to push him, to ask questions until he gives voice to the words he is so carefully not saying. Instead, she follows his example and looks down at the chessboard. “You should go see the house,” she says softly. “If you miss it.”
He straightens slightly in his chair. “I believe it is your move, Ms. Uhura.”
She takes his pawn, and the game continues.
++
When Uhura was small, her father was a conductor for a symphony in Mombasa. They hired him because he was a genius, and fired him because he threatened to shove a French horn into one of the more remote parts of the symphony director’s anatomy. Most of her father’s jobs ended this way, with a lot of shouting and dramatic threats of violence from old men with artistic temperaments. Uhura was used to it; she spent the long nights of her childhood in the audience of a darkened rehearsal hall, finishing her schoolwork by the light of her PADD as her father railed against the three things that enraged him above all else: arrogance, stupidity, and wasted talent.
But what she remembers best about the Mombasa symphony is the day her father led her past her seat in the audience and brought her onto the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Hasan Uhura said to his orchestra, “this is my daughter. She has yet to begin formal musical training, she’s refused to eat anything other than tuna fish sandwiches for the last two weeks, and her idea of great theatre involves a man in a rabbit costume dancing a jig with his fellow cheery woodland creatures. She is six years old, and she is going to sit in this chair, listen to you as you play, and point to whichever of you numbskulls is ruining this piece.”
In the end she closed her eyes - not because it made it easier to focus, but because she didn’t want to see the sour expressions on the musicians’ faces when she pointed their way: the poorly tuned viola, the second chair violinist who couldn’t keep up the pace, the piccolo player with all the spark and life of a funeral dirge. Her arm shot out almost against her will, singling out musician after musician, many of them older and more famous and even more terrifying than her father, and she was right every time.
It is one of her father’s favorite stories, and when he tells it she is a hero, the pig-tailed child prodigy who saved the good name of the Mombasa Philharmonic with her remarkable ear and charming gap-toothed smile. It is her golden hour.
But when she dreams about sitting on that stage, her father isn’t there. She’s alone in a heaving jungle of woodwinds and strings and brass, lost in a riot of sound, and every time she raises her hand and points to a discordant note the cacophony grows louder and more terrible. She claps her hands over her ears and the orchestra towers over her, timpani and tubas and great bass drums throbbing in time to their awful music. She grows smaller in her chair, curling in on herself as the sound rises, swallowing her whole.
“Cadet Uhura,” Spock says, “you are dreaming.”
He stands beside her on the stage, hands folded behind his back and impossibly tall in his grey uniform. She looks up at him, hands still over her ears. “I’m not a cadet. I’m six.”
“So I see.” His lips press together for a brief moment. “I assure you that this intrusion was unintentional. You are asleep, and I observed that you were experiencing some minor respiratory distress. When I took your hand to check your pulse I inadvertently initiated a telepathic connection.”
The music grows louder; her nose wrinkles. “Minor respiratory distress?”
“Caused by your nightmare. You were…” Spock pauses. “Agitated.” He steps back, looking up at the orchestral throng surrounding them. “I should leave. You would not wish me to see this.”
She grabs his hand. “No. Don’t go.”
He stops, going completely still. He looks down at her fingers curled around his. “This is a violation of your privacy,” he says slowly. “I cannot stay.”
Her grip tightens. “They’re doing everything wrong, and I can’t make them stop. You have to make them stop.”
Spock looks again at the orchestra, which has swelled to a menacing height. Polished metal gleams under the harsh stage lights and every note hurts her, makes her teeth ache and her eyes burn. After a moment he crouches by her chair. The muscles of his jaw tense. “I do not know how to help you.”
The music is terrible; she pulls her legs to her chest and presses her face against her kneecaps. “Everything’s wrong,” she moans. “Everything’s wrong and it’s all my fault.”
“It is not,” Spock says in Swahili, a language she is sure he does not speak. “I promise you, it is not your fault.” He touches her hand, slipping her child’s fingers inside his. “Uhura, you must look at me and listen to what I say.”
She looks up and meets his eyes.
“There are some things that, once broken, cannot be mended. Errors that cannot be corrected.” He squeezes her hand. “No matter how hard we may try.”
There is silence, and the stage is empty. She is herself again, twenty-seven years old and unafraid. She is still holding his hand. “Am I asleep in your office?” she asks.
“You said you only wished to lay your head down for a moment.” The corner of his mouth rises slightly. “It has been considerably longer than a moment since you did so.”
“Oh,” she says, and wakes up.
Her head is pillowed on something soft, but the edge of the desk digs painfully into her sternum. She reaches up to rub her sleep-heavy eyes and knocks the white bishop and the black queen across the chessboard. The skin of her wrist is still warm - the echo of a touch.
She looks down at her pillow. It’s made of Vulcan wool.
“I could be wrong,” she says, “but I think I drooled on your sweater.”
Spock stands by her side, his hands safely behind his back. “Excess saliva is an anticipated result of the human sleep cycle. I was aware of this fact when I chose the sweater to cushion your head from the hard wood of the desk.”
She slumps back in the chair. “I don’t remember that.”
“You were asleep at the time.” He pauses, delicately. “I did not wish to awaken you. Had I done so, you would have returned to your work without allowing yourself the rest you required.”
And here I thought Starfleet assigned you to be my advisor, not my nanny, Uhura thinks, biting back her irritation. Some must show on her face, however, because Spock turns abruptly and retreats behind his desk. He sits, his posture for once more rigid than refined, and it occurs to her that she’s being a little unfair. He is her instructor and she is his student, and in his mind that makes her very much his responsibility. Vulcans, she knows, are fond of responsibility; they have holidays and everything.
She reaches up and tightens her ponytail with a good, hard tug. “I don’t suffer from some sort of crazy orchestra phobia, you know. It’s just a dream I have every once in a while.”
“Dreams are, by their nature, irrational,” Spock says, his voice perfectly even. “It is not a phenomenon one can control.” He looks down, avoiding her eyes. “I wish to apologize again for my intrusion into your thoughts. It was an unintentional violation, but a violation nonetheless. I would understand if-”
“I’m not angry, Spock.”
He looks up. “I am aware that Humans often claim not to feel undesirable emotions, even when the most cursory observation of their emotional state would contradict this claim.”
She almost rolls her eyes. “It’s pretty unusual, isn’t it, to form a telepathic connection just by touching someone’s wrist? Particularly for someone with your mental control.”
He pauses. “The connection was a superficial one,” he says. “It was not a true meld; I encountered only the surface level of your thoughts.”
“The dream.”
“Yes. The dream.” He shifts uneasily in his chair. “Cadet Uhura-”
“My father’s a bit of a bastard,” Uhura says, folding her hands in her lap. “He’s mellowed with age, but he was worse when I was little. I mean - we’ve always been close, he was a great father in a lot of ways, but he’s not very good with people and sometimes I think that I’m the same way. That I listen to other people’s voices and only hear the dissonant notes.” She swallows and makes herself meet his eyes. “I’m not angry with you because it wasn’t a violation. It was a nightmare and I was scared and I’m pretty sure I wanted you there with me, so it wasn’t a violation.” She looks down at her hands. “So.”
There is an almost painfully awkward silence. “I must admit,” Spock says, “that I found the giant pulsing French horn to be particularly disturbing.”
Uhura grins. “Welcome to my childhood trauma.” She stands, smoothing her uniform skirt. “I should probably finish my grading and then, you know, sleep in a bed like a normal person.”
“For no fewer than eight hours,” he says. “Uninterrupted.”
“Aye aye, sir.” She gestures to the chessboard. “Thank you for the game. You should make me play again, sometime.”
“Perhaps,” he says, and picks up his PADD and stylus, ready to continue his work. She turns to leave the office, but just as she reaches the door he says, “Ms. Uhura?”
She stops and looks over her shoulder, her hand on the doorframe. “Yes, Mr. Spock?”
He lowers the PADD. “The revisions you have made to the first two chapters of your dissertation are most impressive. I found the new evidence you presented unexpectedly convincing, and have little doubt that future revisions will prove my initial concerns unfounded.”
She exhales a long breath. “Thank you, sir.”
“I am merely giving my honest evaluation of your work. There is no need to thank me.”
Her grip on the doorframe tightens, and she feels an inexplicable rush of affection. She pictures him carefully lifting her head from the desk, trying not to wake her as he slides his sweater beneath her cheek. She was probably snoring.
Uhura smiles. “See you tomorrow, Commander.”
He inclines his head slightly in her direction, but his attention has already returned to his PADD. “Good evening, Cadet. Sleep well.”
Surprisingly enough, she does.
++
Fandom: Star Trek Reboot.
Notes: Livejournal hates the size of my chapters.
++
Four days and sleepless nights later Uhura sends Spock the revised draft of her first two chapters. When she returns to the office that afternoon, the door to the inner room is closed for the first time since the term began.
“Fine,” she mutters. “Be that way.” She sits at her desk and stares at the empty screen of her PADD. She has assignments to grade, but the room is swimming and her arms are weirdly heavy and it’s an effort just to pick up the stylus and open the right file. Her stomach makes a sound like a rabid, dying animal and when she looks at the clock on the wall she sees that somehow thirteen minutes have passed and it feels like she’s spent all that time trapped in one long, slow blink.
“Ms. Uhura,” a cool, even voice says from far away, “can you hear me?”
The blink ends, and the room is bright again. She looks up and sees Spock staring down at her. “I think,” she says, “that I either fell asleep sitting up or I just suffered my first psychotic episode.”
The thin line of his mouth relaxes somewhat; her exhaustion-fogged mind can’t help but wonder if he had been worried. “You have been remiss in your sleep schedule in recent days. You require rest.” Her stomach growls again. “And nourishment.”
She picks up her PADD, then tries to remember when she set it down. “I have work to do.”
He gently takes the PADD from her hands. “I would like to speak with you. I will be brief, and then you may return to your work.”
It’s an effort not to sway as she stands, but she manages to follow him into his office without falling over. He redecorated during the break, adding a bookshelf full of antiques and a high glass-topped table in the corner to hold a burner for incense and a self-warming teakettle. The walls are still an awful shade of beige but the light has changed, turned low and golden warm, and if he weren’t standing there staring at her she would curl up on the floor like a cat and be asleep in seconds.
Uhura takes her usual chair. The jar of lollipops sits on the edge of the desk, almost as full as it had been the day Commander Lee left it behind. Then Uhura looks again and says, “You’re out of the cherry-flavored ones. You should get more.”
Spock pauses mid-step, halfway to his chair. “Vulcan taste buds are ill-suited for sweets,” he says. “I have no need to replenish my supply.” He continues to his chair and sits, steepling his fingers. There is a short, still silence. “I have read your revised chapters.”
She nods and braces her ego for the bludgeoning to come. This time she’s prepared, and she has a plan - she’s going to sit quietly while he crushes her soul in his neatly-manicured fist, then finish her grading, re-rewrite her first chapter, do her laundry, and take a nap for the next thirty years. She might wake up sometime around year fifteen to eat a sandwich; she hasn’t decided yet.
Oh. Sandwiches.
Spock watches her, touching his steepled fingers to his mouth. “Do you play chess, Ms. Uhura?”
“What?” she says, horrified.
He almost frowns. “I said, ‘Do you-’”
“No, I don’t,” she says. “Not at all. I mean, I understand the basics of the game, but no - I don’t play.” She panics quietly for a moment, and then confesses: “I’ve tried, but I’m terrible. Really, really bad. And by bad, I mean awful; honestly, I still have nightmares about being attacked by a giant plastic horse head.” She pauses. “Though that might be about something else entirely, now that I think about it.”
Really, Spock’s eyebrow seems to say. For some reason, she takes this as an invitation to continue babbling.
“When I was in secondary school I dated a boy in the chess club. He broke up with me.” She leans forward. “Guys never break up with me. Not ever.”
Spock clears his throat. “You believe he terminated your association because you lacked skill as a chess player?”
“I can’t imagine any other reason,” she says. “Can you?”
He hesitates. “I do not think,” he says, “that I have the sufficient amount of data required to speculate.”
She sits back in her chair, satisfied. “Exactly.” Then she frowns. “Why’d you want to know if I played?”
He opens a drawer in his desk and removes a piece of folded cardboard and a small box. He unfolds the cardboard and lays it on the desk, revealing a cheap, battered chessboard. He slides it forward until it is evenly between them. “You are gifted in many disciplines, Ms. Uhura, but one should not restrict oneself to the areas in which one’s talents lie.” He opens the box and begins to arrange the pieces on the board. “I myself lack any sort of innate musical ability.”
Her frown deepens. “I’ve heard you play the lyre. You’re good.”
“Because the effort I expended to learn outweighed my initial disadvantage.” He places the white pieces first, the pawns and the rooks. His fingers hover over the first knight, and he looks up to meet her eyes. “A giant plastic horse head?”
“I think I’ll survive the trauma,” she says.
He nods and places the knight on the board. “When I was young-” He pauses, then begins again. “Every Vulcan child strives to distinguish him or herself academically, but my motivations were of another kind. I had, as you might say, something to prove. I excelled in every available area of study.” He sets the white king in its place. “Except for music.”
Just as everyone at the Academy knows how Uhura’s mother died, everyone knows that Spock is half-human. But he’s never mentioned it before; it makes her heart beat a little faster. “No one can be good at everything,” she says.
“That was my father’s position. He argued that the logical course would be to focus my energies on the subjects I wished to pursue in the future. The subjects in which I showed the most promise.”
She takes a black pawn from the box. “The sciences?”
“Indeed.” Spock pushes the box across the desk so she can reach it more easily. “My father’s argument was a rational one, but - as was often the case in these matters - my mother disagreed.” A slight smile touches his lips. “She is at times guided by a logic all her own.”
Uhura has watched him play, has heard him talk about her father’s music. She answers his small smile with one of her own. “She could see how much you loved it. She didn’t want you to give that up.”
This seems to surprise him. His expression remains as serene as always, but for the first time since she’s known him he seems to miss a beat, like the skip of a gramophone record. He recovers quickly. “‘Love’ is, unsurprisingly, not the term I would choose; even so, you are not incorrect - my fascination with music has always seemed inversely proportional to my talent for it.” He watches quietly for a moment while she places the black pieces one by one. “The Vulcan lyre is a difficult instrument. My mother suggested the piano she had brought with her from Earth as an alternative. With practice, my proficiency with both instruments grew.”
“You play the piano?”
“No,” he says. “Not for a very long time.” The black king is the last piece to find its place. Spock turns the chessboard until the white pieces rest on her side of the desk. “You will begin.”
She sits back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. “I appreciate the moral of the story, Mr. Spock, but I don’t play chess.”
He stands. “Contemplate your opening move. I will prepare tea.”
Uhura almost walks out of the room. She hates being ignored, or dismissed, or confronted with anyone as stubborn as she is. But walking out of room would require, well, walking, and her chair really is quite comfortable.
She stares at the chessboard, her vision fizzing white around the edges. I must be getting old, she thinks. In grad school I could survive a week on only a few hours of sleep and a Cup Noodles. Now I go without for four days and I nearly give myself a stroke.
Spock turns away from the high table in the corner. “Do you prefer a particular blend of tea?”
Uhura drinks coffee, usually black. She rubs her eyes. “Anything with caffeine in it will do, thanks.”
He turns back to the teakettle, a definite note of disapproval in his silence. She studies the slope of his back, the subtle movement of his shoulder blades beneath his uniform. As her eyes travel downward, she takes a moment to enjoy the wonders of Starfleet tailoring.
“Ms. Uhura,” Spock says, “I believe you will find that your ability to strategize improves considerably when the chessboard is the focus of your gaze.”
Which is when she realizes that he can see her reflection in the metallic sheen of the teakettle. Mortified, she ducks her head and tries very, very hard not to laugh. She manages to choke out a strained, “Sorry, sir.”
Spock returns to the desk with a mug of steaming tea in each hand. He sets the larger down in front of her and sits. “I accept your apology.” He sips his tea. “How long has it been since you last slept?”
She cups her hands around the mug and feels its heat like a gentle pulse in the joints of her fingers. She closes her eyes. “A while.”
“That is not an acceptably precise answer.”
She opens her eyes to find him watching her intently. She grips the mug a little tighter. “I last slept sixty-three point four hours ago.” She pauses. “I think.”
He sets his tea on the desk. “Because you have undertaken a massive revision of your first two chapters.” She nods, and he frowns. “You have six remaining months in which to complete your dissertation. That is sufficient time to make any necessary revisions. Your sudden urgency is self-destructive and illogical.”
She shrugs. “I was on a roll.” He stares at her, and she gives him a careless grin. “Are we going to talk about my revisions, or are we going to play chess?”
His frown fades. “You do not wish to do either,” he says, amused.
“Shucks. And I thought I was being so subtle.” She puckers her lips and exhales a long breath across the surface of her tea, dispersing steam. She takes a sip and shudders a little when it burns her tongue. “It’s good,” she says. “Hot.”
He taps a finger against the desk; he seems to be considering something. “You should return to your quarters and rest.”
She takes another sip of the tea. “I have assignments to grade.”
“I will finish your grading.”
She bristles a little at that. “And laundry. I have lots of laundry. Hours and hours worth.” He opens his mouth to object, but she shakes her head. “The assignments are my responsibility. I don’t need you to do my work for me.”
He inclines his head slightly. “Very well.” He gestures to the chessboard. “The first move is yours.”
The game isn’t as brutal as she remembers. She’s still terrible, of course, second-guessing herself and strategizing piece by piece rather than seeing the board as a whole, but each time she finds herself in checkmate Spock returns the pieces to where they’d been five or six turns before and says, “And if I had chosen this move? How would you respond?” It transforms an uneven competition into a puzzle, something they solve together, and after a time she begins to see the patterns, the greater choreography of queen and bishop and rook, knight and pawn. Spock calls each pattern by its name - Philidor Defense, Queen’s Gambit, Alapin Variation, Ponzani Opening - and now she has a vocabulary to study, a language to learn and repeat and make her own.
She’s still losing, but at least now she understands why. It’s almost fun.
Spock moves one of his pawns into a somewhat delicate position. “Benoni Defense,” he murmurs. “Fianchetto Variation.”
Uhura bites her lip absently, staring at the board. “Benoni is Hebrew. It means son of my sorrow.”
“Referring, I think, to the current state of my pawn.”
She flashes him a brief smile, but it’s interrupted by the growl of her stomach. She winces. “Sorry.”
He reaches into his desk and pulls out a foil packet. He opens it with a snap and passes it to her. “This lacks the nutritional value of a complete meal, but I believe it will ease your discomfort.”
Inside the packet are large, flat crackers. Uhura frowns and breaks off a corner. She nibbles at it, then looks up at him in surprise. “You keep matza in your desk?”
“Most Human foods possess strong flavors that are incongruous with Vulcan tastes. Matza is an exception.” He reaches across the desk and snaps off half a piece of the flatbread. “Also, my maternal grandmother was Jewish. We visited her occasionally when I was a child, and I developed a taste for it.”
Uhura takes another bite and washes it down with the last of her tea. “Did you spend a lot of time on Earth when you were growing up?”
“Less as I grew older. But yes, when I was very young. My mother still keeps a house outside of Seattle. It belonged to my grandfather.” He looks away from her eyes, at the chessboard. “It has been many years since I have seen it.”
Not for the first time, she wants to push him, to ask questions until he gives voice to the words he is so carefully not saying. Instead, she follows his example and looks down at the chessboard. “You should go see the house,” she says softly. “If you miss it.”
He straightens slightly in his chair. “I believe it is your move, Ms. Uhura.”
She takes his pawn, and the game continues.
++
When Uhura was small, her father was a conductor for a symphony in Mombasa. They hired him because he was a genius, and fired him because he threatened to shove a French horn into one of the more remote parts of the symphony director’s anatomy. Most of her father’s jobs ended this way, with a lot of shouting and dramatic threats of violence from old men with artistic temperaments. Uhura was used to it; she spent the long nights of her childhood in the audience of a darkened rehearsal hall, finishing her schoolwork by the light of her PADD as her father railed against the three things that enraged him above all else: arrogance, stupidity, and wasted talent.
But what she remembers best about the Mombasa symphony is the day her father led her past her seat in the audience and brought her onto the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Hasan Uhura said to his orchestra, “this is my daughter. She has yet to begin formal musical training, she’s refused to eat anything other than tuna fish sandwiches for the last two weeks, and her idea of great theatre involves a man in a rabbit costume dancing a jig with his fellow cheery woodland creatures. She is six years old, and she is going to sit in this chair, listen to you as you play, and point to whichever of you numbskulls is ruining this piece.”
In the end she closed her eyes - not because it made it easier to focus, but because she didn’t want to see the sour expressions on the musicians’ faces when she pointed their way: the poorly tuned viola, the second chair violinist who couldn’t keep up the pace, the piccolo player with all the spark and life of a funeral dirge. Her arm shot out almost against her will, singling out musician after musician, many of them older and more famous and even more terrifying than her father, and she was right every time.
It is one of her father’s favorite stories, and when he tells it she is a hero, the pig-tailed child prodigy who saved the good name of the Mombasa Philharmonic with her remarkable ear and charming gap-toothed smile. It is her golden hour.
But when she dreams about sitting on that stage, her father isn’t there. She’s alone in a heaving jungle of woodwinds and strings and brass, lost in a riot of sound, and every time she raises her hand and points to a discordant note the cacophony grows louder and more terrible. She claps her hands over her ears and the orchestra towers over her, timpani and tubas and great bass drums throbbing in time to their awful music. She grows smaller in her chair, curling in on herself as the sound rises, swallowing her whole.
“Cadet Uhura,” Spock says, “you are dreaming.”
He stands beside her on the stage, hands folded behind his back and impossibly tall in his grey uniform. She looks up at him, hands still over her ears. “I’m not a cadet. I’m six.”
“So I see.” His lips press together for a brief moment. “I assure you that this intrusion was unintentional. You are asleep, and I observed that you were experiencing some minor respiratory distress. When I took your hand to check your pulse I inadvertently initiated a telepathic connection.”
The music grows louder; her nose wrinkles. “Minor respiratory distress?”
“Caused by your nightmare. You were…” Spock pauses. “Agitated.” He steps back, looking up at the orchestral throng surrounding them. “I should leave. You would not wish me to see this.”
She grabs his hand. “No. Don’t go.”
He stops, going completely still. He looks down at her fingers curled around his. “This is a violation of your privacy,” he says slowly. “I cannot stay.”
Her grip tightens. “They’re doing everything wrong, and I can’t make them stop. You have to make them stop.”
Spock looks again at the orchestra, which has swelled to a menacing height. Polished metal gleams under the harsh stage lights and every note hurts her, makes her teeth ache and her eyes burn. After a moment he crouches by her chair. The muscles of his jaw tense. “I do not know how to help you.”
The music is terrible; she pulls her legs to her chest and presses her face against her kneecaps. “Everything’s wrong,” she moans. “Everything’s wrong and it’s all my fault.”
“It is not,” Spock says in Swahili, a language she is sure he does not speak. “I promise you, it is not your fault.” He touches her hand, slipping her child’s fingers inside his. “Uhura, you must look at me and listen to what I say.”
She looks up and meets his eyes.
“There are some things that, once broken, cannot be mended. Errors that cannot be corrected.” He squeezes her hand. “No matter how hard we may try.”
There is silence, and the stage is empty. She is herself again, twenty-seven years old and unafraid. She is still holding his hand. “Am I asleep in your office?” she asks.
“You said you only wished to lay your head down for a moment.” The corner of his mouth rises slightly. “It has been considerably longer than a moment since you did so.”
“Oh,” she says, and wakes up.
Her head is pillowed on something soft, but the edge of the desk digs painfully into her sternum. She reaches up to rub her sleep-heavy eyes and knocks the white bishop and the black queen across the chessboard. The skin of her wrist is still warm - the echo of a touch.
She looks down at her pillow. It’s made of Vulcan wool.
“I could be wrong,” she says, “but I think I drooled on your sweater.”
Spock stands by her side, his hands safely behind his back. “Excess saliva is an anticipated result of the human sleep cycle. I was aware of this fact when I chose the sweater to cushion your head from the hard wood of the desk.”
She slumps back in the chair. “I don’t remember that.”
“You were asleep at the time.” He pauses, delicately. “I did not wish to awaken you. Had I done so, you would have returned to your work without allowing yourself the rest you required.”
And here I thought Starfleet assigned you to be my advisor, not my nanny, Uhura thinks, biting back her irritation. Some must show on her face, however, because Spock turns abruptly and retreats behind his desk. He sits, his posture for once more rigid than refined, and it occurs to her that she’s being a little unfair. He is her instructor and she is his student, and in his mind that makes her very much his responsibility. Vulcans, she knows, are fond of responsibility; they have holidays and everything.
She reaches up and tightens her ponytail with a good, hard tug. “I don’t suffer from some sort of crazy orchestra phobia, you know. It’s just a dream I have every once in a while.”
“Dreams are, by their nature, irrational,” Spock says, his voice perfectly even. “It is not a phenomenon one can control.” He looks down, avoiding her eyes. “I wish to apologize again for my intrusion into your thoughts. It was an unintentional violation, but a violation nonetheless. I would understand if-”
“I’m not angry, Spock.”
He looks up. “I am aware that Humans often claim not to feel undesirable emotions, even when the most cursory observation of their emotional state would contradict this claim.”
She almost rolls her eyes. “It’s pretty unusual, isn’t it, to form a telepathic connection just by touching someone’s wrist? Particularly for someone with your mental control.”
He pauses. “The connection was a superficial one,” he says. “It was not a true meld; I encountered only the surface level of your thoughts.”
“The dream.”
“Yes. The dream.” He shifts uneasily in his chair. “Cadet Uhura-”
“My father’s a bit of a bastard,” Uhura says, folding her hands in her lap. “He’s mellowed with age, but he was worse when I was little. I mean - we’ve always been close, he was a great father in a lot of ways, but he’s not very good with people and sometimes I think that I’m the same way. That I listen to other people’s voices and only hear the dissonant notes.” She swallows and makes herself meet his eyes. “I’m not angry with you because it wasn’t a violation. It was a nightmare and I was scared and I’m pretty sure I wanted you there with me, so it wasn’t a violation.” She looks down at her hands. “So.”
There is an almost painfully awkward silence. “I must admit,” Spock says, “that I found the giant pulsing French horn to be particularly disturbing.”
Uhura grins. “Welcome to my childhood trauma.” She stands, smoothing her uniform skirt. “I should probably finish my grading and then, you know, sleep in a bed like a normal person.”
“For no fewer than eight hours,” he says. “Uninterrupted.”
“Aye aye, sir.” She gestures to the chessboard. “Thank you for the game. You should make me play again, sometime.”
“Perhaps,” he says, and picks up his PADD and stylus, ready to continue his work. She turns to leave the office, but just as she reaches the door he says, “Ms. Uhura?”
She stops and looks over her shoulder, her hand on the doorframe. “Yes, Mr. Spock?”
He lowers the PADD. “The revisions you have made to the first two chapters of your dissertation are most impressive. I found the new evidence you presented unexpectedly convincing, and have little doubt that future revisions will prove my initial concerns unfounded.”
She exhales a long breath. “Thank you, sir.”
“I am merely giving my honest evaluation of your work. There is no need to thank me.”
Her grip on the doorframe tightens, and she feels an inexplicable rush of affection. She pictures him carefully lifting her head from the desk, trying not to wake her as he slides his sweater beneath her cheek. She was probably snoring.
Uhura smiles. “See you tomorrow, Commander.”
He inclines his head slightly in her direction, but his attention has already returned to his PADD. “Good evening, Cadet. Sleep well.”
Surprisingly enough, she does.
++