[oneshot] wake me up in a meadow of flowers (and let us dance)
Title: wake me up in a meadow of flowers (and let us dance)
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Chulu (Chekov/Sulu)
Genre: Fluff
Summary: When Hikaru thinks of Chekov, flowers will always come to mind.
Notes: Will be writing star trek fanfic for a bit, if you're looking for my je fanfic you'll have to wait a while more!
Slight liberties taken with character background and pre-canon storyline. Kind of inspired by these three posts.
Gratuitous references to both flower language and hanakotoba.
~
When he thinks of Chekov, for some reason Hikaru will always think of flowers.
The first time he sees Chekov is when the freshmen come into Starfleet Academy for the first time, all wide-eyed and wondering in their civvies, walking around the grounds and dragging their suitcases behind them as they drink in the intimidating concrete walls they will spend the next few years living, studying, and building friendships in.
He picks out Chekov immediately because the boys behind him (judgemental second-years trying to sound old, he thinks) snicker and point at him, the “lost little kid who probably got corralled into being his older sister’s porter and mannequin on her first day at the Academy”.
He’s a skinny boy, still short but awkward like a fawn, looking a little lost in the sea of young adults and more than a little weighed down with two duffle bags and a huge yellow suitcase. Perched rakishly on his head of wild corkscrew curls is a flower crown, several large white blossoms intertwined with each other.
(Hikaru’s first impression then is that he looks a little like a woodland elf.)
“Hey,” he says, going up to the boy. “You lost?”
He winces a little at his accent - despite spending a couple of years in the Academy the slight Japanese accent he’d picked up from more than ten years of living in a primarily Japanese-speaking community had yet to fade, and he finds himself stumbling over l’s and r’s way too often. The boy doesn’t seem to mind though, and Hikaru understands why when he opens his mouth.
“I am… how you say? Searching? For west wing dormitories.”
His accent is thicker than even Hikaru’s when they first stepped on American shores, and he wrinkles his nose as he stumbles over the word dormitories. Hikaru figures he’s probably relieved to hear another foreign accent in this strange land, and doesn’t comment.
“I stay there,” he says instead, genially. “I can bring you to the Dorm Head’s office.”
The boy beams at him, a little shy but his teeth still flash, and the flower crown on his head tips a little as he nods.
“That would be nice, zank you.”
“Hikaru Sulu,” Hikaru introduces, and the boy gently shakes his hand.
“Pavel Chekov.”
~
Chekov, as it turns out, has a very good reason for entering Starfleet at the wee age of thirteen. Hikaru discovers this when he steps into third-year astrophysics halfway through the first term of the year and sees Chekov hunched nervously at the back, trying to ignore the curious glances everybody throws at him.
“Hey,” he greets, sliding into the empty seat next to Chekov’s, and the boy nearly jumps out of his seat.
“Ah!” he says, when his eyes have refocused back on Hikaru’s face. “Hikaru! It is nice to be seeing you.”
“What are you doing here?” Hikaru asks by way of reply.
“My professor, she did not like that I never pay attention in class. But I know everything she teaches! I tell her zat but she got angry, and today she tells me she has transferred me to new class.”
Hikaru is slightly disbelieving, until halfway through Professor Quinn’s lecture he starts to zone out, formulae flying over his head, and happens to turn his head to see Chekov frantically scribbling notes, his book a mess of chicken-scratch numbers and Greek symbols that should make sense to Hikaru but don’t.
He also notices a couple of tiny red flowers - ixoras, probably, he thinks, recalling the huge bushes filling the park right opposite the Academy - sitting in Chekov’s curls, along with some small leaves. It makes Chekov look like he’s been rolling around in the grass, and Hikaru suppresses a tiny snicker as Chekov flips his book over and the tiny draft dislodges a leaf from his hair.
“Your hair,” he tells Chekov as they head to lunch. It’s become a near-daily routine, Chekov sticking to him whenever possible like Hikaru’s his only friend (and seeing how his yearmates treat him as a baby, it might actually be a real possibility). “You’ve got flowers in it.”
“Ah,” says Chekov, and he reaches up to muss his hair in a (largely failed) attempt to get the flowers out. “I did not notice.”
He looks incredibly cute doing that, Hikaru thinks, and immediately backtracks upon realizing that he’s just called Chekov cute. Which he is, except ‘cute’ has never been a part of Hikaru’s vocabulary and it disturbs him slightly that his mind uses it now.
“Also,” he says, quickly changing topic. “How did you understand that? I couldn’t get a word of the lecture.”
“Secret!” Chekov laughs, and ducks, giggling some more, as Hikaru tries to ruffle his hair in indignation.
Hikaru only manages to grasp a handful of diamond-shaped petals.
~
Two years fly by, and Hikaru graduates from the Academy with decent all-round grades and top honours in Flying and Combat.
Chekov is fifteen now, and has shot up incredibly, now a gangly but still very much fawn-like teenager. Hikaru sees him scuffing his worn trainers awkwardly outside the hall, watching the fourth-years file out of the hall one by one, all wearing their cadet red for the last time.
His face lights up when he sees Hikaru, and Hikaru can’t help but grin as he waves.
“Congratulations,” Chekov tells him breathlessly. “I heard from Professor Spock that you were assigned to Captain Pike’s crew.”
“I was,” Hikaru confirms, a hint of pride in his voice - not all cadets get assigned to work under one of the best captains Starfleet has - Captain Christopher Pike. “Or well, I will be once he gets his ship - his old one supposedly was trashed beyond repair by Klingons so I’m on TA duty until he gets the new ship.”
Chekov beams, and fumbles in the little bag he’s brought, fishing out a slightly limp flower crown of feathery white bells and round blossoms the colour of Starfleet command gold.
“I made for you,” he says, and passes the crown to Hikaru. Upon closer examination, Hikaru recognizes the flowers from his module on Terran biology - white heather and yellow poppies.
“Protection?” he asks, smiling wryly as he touches one of the heather flowers gently. He remembers his mother cultivating in him an interest in hanakotoba, the language of flowers, and he’s read up on the Western version extensively enough to interpret the flowers Chekov has given to him.
“And success,” Chekov says. “To wish you all ze best.”
“Thank you,” Hikaru says warmly, and - not really caring what the students milling around him think - perches the crown of flowers awkwardly on his head.
Chekov beams sunnily at him, and Hikaru feels his heart warm. (And possibly his face as well, but he’ll deny that a little longer.)
~
Two years later, and Hikaru’s first day on the Enterprise is… eventful. The senior helmsmen all come down with lungworm, and Hikaru finds himself sitting nervously in front of the flight console, staring at buttons and screens that he’s seen infinite times in Academy simulations but never on an actual, honest-to-god ship.
They’re heading out to answer a distress call from Vulcan, and cadets from the Academy have all been distributed out to the various ships. Hikaru sees a couple of faces he recognizes, including the slender African girl he remembers as Professor Spock’s favourite and a beefy man he remembers pulling away in a bar brawl just off-campus three years ago.
Then he sees a flash of command gold out of the corner of his eye, and turns to see a very familiar head of curly hair at the navigator’s panel.
He turns around the same moment Hikaru remembers who he is.
“Hikaru!” Chekov says brightly eyes shining, and Hikaru notices a blue, star-shaped flower carefully pinned over his heart, just under the Starfleet badge on his uniform shirt.
“I expected you to be on this ship,” says Hikaru, “but I didn’t know you’d be my navigator.”
“I didn’t either,” replies Chekov, “but Captain Pike called me Russian whizkid and sent me up here.”
He pronounces it ‘wheez’ and Hikaru smiles slightly - he’s missed this easy banter, what with the hectic life of being a TA and also training with the crew and refining his fencing by himself.
“Flowers again?” he asks, gesturing slightly to the blue flower.
“Borage,” Chekov says softly as Captain Pike steps onto the bridge, Professor - Commander - Spock trailing behind him. “For courage.”
Courage, Hikaru thinks, as Captain Pike orders him to bring the ship to warp. We’ll all need some of that today.
~
There isn’t enough room onboard to accommodate the sudden addition of three years’ worth of cadets (the first years had been left back on Earth), and almost everybody ends up having roommates in their quarters. By a stroke of fate (or luck), Hikaru’s roommate is Chekov, and he’s been a great roommate, leaving the bathroom spotless, never letting his belongings spill out all over the floor, and leaving quietly for his pre-shift runs so he doesn’t wake Hikaru from his much-needed sleep.
Today, Hikaru heads back to the room exhausted, every muscle in his body aching after the assault on the Romulan drill device. He pushes open the heavy metal door after punching in the access code, and sees Chekov sitting on his bunk, awkwardly wringing his hands.
“You’re safe,” Chekov blurts, eyes still stretched as wide as they were in the transporter room, desperately punching in formulae and codes to beam him and Kirk back to the Enterprise.
“Yeah,” says Hikaru. “That was some great work you did today.”
Chekov doesn’t acknowledge the praise, and Hikaru suddenly notices he’s been worrying something pink in his hands, over and over again, staring into space and consumed by some measure of shock.
“I almost didn’t make it,” he whispers, voice hoarse.
Hikaru understands immediately, and moves to squat in front of Chekov.
“Look at me, Pavel,” he says (after so many years of friendship he’s finally broken himself of the last-name habit). “I’m here, and I’m alive. All thanks to you. There’s no need to imagine the what-ifs, okay?”
Slowly, Chekov unclenches his fingers, and lifts a small corsage of pink flowers to Hikaru’s eye level. They’re the fake kind, Hikaru observes, with petals of nylon and stalks of thin plastic, but then again he would wonder where Chekov would obtain fresh flowers anyway.
“Azalea,” he notes. Take care.
He closes his fingers around the pink petals.
“I will,” he says. “So promise me you will too.”
After a long, long pause, Chekov nods slightly.
~
Months after the entire Romulan debacle, Hikaru finds himself onboard the Enterprise again, this time at the helm as the proper pilot, rather than a stand-in. This time round, the captain is no longer Pike but James Kirk, the stowaway that Hikaru remembers falling towards the surface of Vulcan with months ago.
Some things, though, haven’t changed, like his bout of pre-flight anxiety (he’s checked the external inertial dampener three times already, for god’s sake) and Chekov’s comforting presence next to him. Chekov’s wearing borage again, a small splash of blue against gold cloth, and it comforts Hikaru, somewhat.
And then the chief engineering officer, a Scottish man Hikaru remembers is called Scotty (or Scott?), storms off the ship, and suddenly Captain Kirk is ordering Chekov to transfer to Engineering on account of his godly physics knowledge.
Chekov is too intimidated to argue with Kirk, but Hikaru can see a slight tremble in his hand as he unfastens the borage flower from his shirt, ready to change into engineering red. No doubt he’s heard the rumours flying around about mortality rates and red shirts, and Hikaru dearly wishes he can reach over the console and squeeze his best friend’s hand, tell him he’ll be fine.
He does, however, whisper “good luck” as Chekov brushes past his chair, and Chekov nods distractedly in reply, pushing something into Hikaru’s hand.
“For you,” he says quietly. “Perhaps you will need it more than I will, da?”
Hikaru only opens his hand long after Chekov has left the bridge and someone else takes his place, and sees the slightly-crushed blue flower that until recently was pinned to Chekov’s shirt. He pins it on, over his heart, just like Chekov did.
When Captain Kirk decides to go down to confront renegade John Harrison, he takes Commander Spock with him, and suddenly Hikaru finds himself saddled with the role of Acting Captain.
He can hear McCoy behind him, doubting Kirk’s decision a little (he can’t fault McCoy, he’s pretty shocked too), but he moves his hand over his heart to where the flower is.
Courage.
He takes a deep breath, steels himself.
“Attention John Harrison. This is Captain Hikaru Sulu of the USS Enterprise…”
~
After two back-to-back voyages filled with enough action and adrenaline for five lifetimes, Hikaru’s hoping for a relatively harmless voyage (or, well, as harmless as space exploration can get) the next time he steps onto the bridge of the USS Enterprise.
His mother’s worried and fussed over him long enough during the shore leave they’d all received after the John Harrison incident. Hanako Sulu has always been a worrier, and on Hikaru’s final day of shore leave she places two sealed jars in his hands, each containing a single peony suspended and preserved in clear gel.
“One for that Russian boy you keep telling me about,” she says, when he tries to return one to her, and her tone brooks no argument. “Have a safe trip.”
So Hikaru boards the Enterprise with two jars in hand, and places one at Chekov’s console at the bridge, still feeling rather happy that his best friend got transferred back to command.
“Hikaru,” Chekov says, looking up in surprise. “What’s this?”
“Peony,” replies Hikaru, feeling only slightly awkward. “In Japan they stand for bravery.”
Chekov’s smile then could light up every room on the Enterprise, and he studies the flower inside carefully, taking in every detail.
“Zank you,” he says quietly.
Hikaru pats his head good-naturedly, ignoring the little flip his stomach does when he felt the full force of Chekov’s megawatt grin.
~
He doesn’t like it when Kirk decides that Chekov is ready for away missions, and as the two of them leave for the transporter room he feels a slight feeling of unease.
Kirk had claimed it was only an empty planet, no reports of Klingon activity for ages, and so they’d be ‘just fine’. Hikaru closes his fingers over the small peony jar he keeps in his console drawer when on shift, and sincerely tries to believe in Kirk’s words.
Three hours later, Kirk sends a frantic call back, screaming for Scotty to beam them back to the Enterprise immediately, and in that moment Hikaru can feel his heart plummet all the way down to his toes.
He wants to get up, run to the transporter room, see for himself that his best friend is alright, but he can feel the cool gaze of Acting Captain Spock on him, silently telling him to rein in his emotions and carry on, and so he only tightens his grip on the controls and tells himself to calm down.
Kirk’s voice is loud on the bridge, and Hikaru whirls around in his chair to see an exhausted Jim Kirk, still in the gear from the mission, skin littered everywhere with cuts and some deep gashes and quite a bit of blood splattered on his clothes.
“McKenna, relieve Sulu. He’s needed in the medical wing.”
~
Chekov’s face is pale, too pale, and Hikaru itches to grip the hand hanging limply off the bed in the medical wing, except it’s swathed in bandages and has an IV jammed halfway up the arm.
“Klingon patrol,” Kirk says quietly, sadly. “They came all at once, but neither I nor the Ensign were able to last very long against them.”
Hikaru mostly ignores this, trying to remind himself that Chekov getting injured is not Kirk’s fault.
“He’ll be okay,” says McCoy from where he is running checks on Chekov’s vitals. “We’ve got him pretty much stabilized now, but he’s lost quite a bit of blood and sustained some nasty injuries, so I’m not too sure yet when he’ll wake.”
Hikaru has never felt so lonely than that moment, staring at his best friend’s broken body metres away and rendered totally helpless.
~
He’s taken to growing Terran flowers in a greenhouse room onboard, and now he visits it daily, choosing new flowers to put by Chekov’s bedside. White gardenias, like the first time they met, for luck. Delicate snowdrops, for hope. Ivy, for endurance.
Through it all, Chekov sleeps, and Hikaru worries. Kirk grants him temporary reprieve from his duties due to his emotional state, and though he’s slightly offended that Kirk thinks his emotions will affect his performance, he’s largely thankful.
He sits in the medical wing for hours on end, the heart-rate monitor beeping coldly behind him at too slow a pace as he stares into nothing and lets his mind wander. Hikaru’s never been much of a thinker, more of a doer, more eager to go onto the field and fight rather than stay calm and strategise, but he thinks now, mind sorting out all his memories of Chekov and reminiscing, thinking, connecting.
He collects a basketful of beautiful almond blossoms, pure white and stained in the centre with deep pink, and spends three days clumsily weaving them together into a flower crown. Somehow, he find it slightly ironic that it’s his turn now to give the flower crown, but doesn’t dwell on it, opting instead to concentrate on not breaking the flowers, and also on ignoring the occasional glance of pity McCoy sends his way.
(He’s not a pining maiden, he doesn’t need Bones’ pity.)
Nearly a week after the incident, Kirk comes down to the medical wing to watch him weave in the final almond blossom.
“I need you,” Kirk says quietly. “You’re one of the best we have in way of combat, and the mission this time is more dangerous.”
“Aye, sir.”
Gently, he places the flower crown on Chekov’s head, half-mangled stems and all, and leaves with Kirk, turning back one last time at the door to glance at Chekov, pale face framed by a halo of slightly-wilted flowers.
~
The mission goes alright, until a snowstorm kicks up and they find themselves stuck in a cave for three days. When the snow finally dies down, they venture cautiously out, peering at the blanket of white everywhere, and Hikaru shivers at the icy wind, stepping to his right where there’s a boulder that might act as a windbock.
It proves to be the wrong move, when snow under his foot gives way, and Hikaru suddenly remembers (a little too late) that their cave had been near a cliff-edge. Kirk grabs his hand and then they’re falling in the avalanche, tumbling down with chunks of snow and plant debris, and Kirk is shrieking into his communicator to beam them up, beam them up now.
Half delirious with cold and the shock of the sudden fall, Hikaru thinks that he can hear Chekov’s voice speaking to him, though he cannot make out the words.
Is this the last thing I’ll hear before I die? Hikaru wonders. I must be hallucinating already.
And then gold threads enter his vision, and suddenly they’re not plummeting to their deaths down a snowy cliffside but crashing to the floor of the transporter room.
Hikaru lies on the floor while Kirk gingerly gets off him, and he’s too tired to even open his eyes, only groaning when he hears McCoy somewhere near him, telling medical officers to help him up.
“Hikaru!”
He’s pretty sure he’s still hallucinating, until warm hands grab hold of his face and press slightly, squishing his cheeks.
“You’re safe!”
He opens his eyes blearily to meet those of Chekov, who looks far too excited (he can, out of the corner of his eye, see McCoy shooting Chekov a concerned glance, as though he’s just recovered).
“You’re alive,” is all he can wearily manage, and Chekov nods, pulling back to show an almond blossom pinned neatly to his shirt.
“Promise,” he says. “I promised I’d take care of myself, and I kept it.”
Relief fills Hikaru then, like a bubbling spring, and he doesn’t know if it’s that relief or if it’s exhaustion that causes him to pitch forward and collapse in Chekov’s arms.
~
The next time Hikaru opens his eyes it’s to the bright white lights of the medical wing.
“I’m alive,” he croaks.
“Da, you are indeed,” replies a voice from his left, and suddenly there are hands helping him up until he’s propped against the pillows. “The doctor said no major injuries, mainly exhaustion. Is good, no?”
“We are a pair, aren’t we?” Hikaru observes dryly. “You just get out of here and then I get sent in.”
Chekov giggles, just a little, and fishes around until he pulls out a flower crown.
“I couldn’t find real flowers so fake ones from the replicator will have to do,” he says lightly, but Hikaru’s now paying attention to the flowers. The crown is a delicately twisted chain of tiny purple ivy blossoms, but at the front there are two roses twined together - one red, one yellow.
He brushes his fingers over the petals, and Chekov stretches up to drop it on his head before grinning shyly at him.
“The Doctor gave me weird looks when I made the flowers,” confesses Chekov. “I fear he thinks I’m a girl now.”
“That makes two of us, then,” snorts Hikaru.
“A matched pair.”
Hikaru thinks of the flowers in the crown on his head, and the meaning they hold, and he allows himself the tiniest smile as he reaches for Chekov’s hand, lying on his bedside table where a dozen wilted almond blossoms lie, free from the crown Hikaru had clumsily woven.
“Yes.”
fin.
//ADDITIONAL NOTE: yellow roses on their own mean friendship; red roses on their own mean love. together, though, they also mean joy and excitement. when chekov gives them to sulu, what he wants to get across is a mix of all three.
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Chulu (Chekov/Sulu)
Genre: Fluff
Summary: When Hikaru thinks of Chekov, flowers will always come to mind.
Notes: Will be writing star trek fanfic for a bit, if you're looking for my je fanfic you'll have to wait a while more!
Slight liberties taken with character background and pre-canon storyline. Kind of inspired by these three posts.
Gratuitous references to both flower language and hanakotoba.
~
When he thinks of Chekov, for some reason Hikaru will always think of flowers.
The first time he sees Chekov is when the freshmen come into Starfleet Academy for the first time, all wide-eyed and wondering in their civvies, walking around the grounds and dragging their suitcases behind them as they drink in the intimidating concrete walls they will spend the next few years living, studying, and building friendships in.
He picks out Chekov immediately because the boys behind him (judgemental second-years trying to sound old, he thinks) snicker and point at him, the “lost little kid who probably got corralled into being his older sister’s porter and mannequin on her first day at the Academy”.
He’s a skinny boy, still short but awkward like a fawn, looking a little lost in the sea of young adults and more than a little weighed down with two duffle bags and a huge yellow suitcase. Perched rakishly on his head of wild corkscrew curls is a flower crown, several large white blossoms intertwined with each other.
(Hikaru’s first impression then is that he looks a little like a woodland elf.)
“Hey,” he says, going up to the boy. “You lost?”
He winces a little at his accent - despite spending a couple of years in the Academy the slight Japanese accent he’d picked up from more than ten years of living in a primarily Japanese-speaking community had yet to fade, and he finds himself stumbling over l’s and r’s way too often. The boy doesn’t seem to mind though, and Hikaru understands why when he opens his mouth.
“I am… how you say? Searching? For west wing dormitories.”
His accent is thicker than even Hikaru’s when they first stepped on American shores, and he wrinkles his nose as he stumbles over the word dormitories. Hikaru figures he’s probably relieved to hear another foreign accent in this strange land, and doesn’t comment.
“I stay there,” he says instead, genially. “I can bring you to the Dorm Head’s office.”
The boy beams at him, a little shy but his teeth still flash, and the flower crown on his head tips a little as he nods.
“That would be nice, zank you.”
“Hikaru Sulu,” Hikaru introduces, and the boy gently shakes his hand.
“Pavel Chekov.”
~
Chekov, as it turns out, has a very good reason for entering Starfleet at the wee age of thirteen. Hikaru discovers this when he steps into third-year astrophysics halfway through the first term of the year and sees Chekov hunched nervously at the back, trying to ignore the curious glances everybody throws at him.
“Hey,” he greets, sliding into the empty seat next to Chekov’s, and the boy nearly jumps out of his seat.
“Ah!” he says, when his eyes have refocused back on Hikaru’s face. “Hikaru! It is nice to be seeing you.”
“What are you doing here?” Hikaru asks by way of reply.
“My professor, she did not like that I never pay attention in class. But I know everything she teaches! I tell her zat but she got angry, and today she tells me she has transferred me to new class.”
Hikaru is slightly disbelieving, until halfway through Professor Quinn’s lecture he starts to zone out, formulae flying over his head, and happens to turn his head to see Chekov frantically scribbling notes, his book a mess of chicken-scratch numbers and Greek symbols that should make sense to Hikaru but don’t.
He also notices a couple of tiny red flowers - ixoras, probably, he thinks, recalling the huge bushes filling the park right opposite the Academy - sitting in Chekov’s curls, along with some small leaves. It makes Chekov look like he’s been rolling around in the grass, and Hikaru suppresses a tiny snicker as Chekov flips his book over and the tiny draft dislodges a leaf from his hair.
“Your hair,” he tells Chekov as they head to lunch. It’s become a near-daily routine, Chekov sticking to him whenever possible like Hikaru’s his only friend (and seeing how his yearmates treat him as a baby, it might actually be a real possibility). “You’ve got flowers in it.”
“Ah,” says Chekov, and he reaches up to muss his hair in a (largely failed) attempt to get the flowers out. “I did not notice.”
He looks incredibly cute doing that, Hikaru thinks, and immediately backtracks upon realizing that he’s just called Chekov cute. Which he is, except ‘cute’ has never been a part of Hikaru’s vocabulary and it disturbs him slightly that his mind uses it now.
“Also,” he says, quickly changing topic. “How did you understand that? I couldn’t get a word of the lecture.”
“Secret!” Chekov laughs, and ducks, giggling some more, as Hikaru tries to ruffle his hair in indignation.
Hikaru only manages to grasp a handful of diamond-shaped petals.
~
Two years fly by, and Hikaru graduates from the Academy with decent all-round grades and top honours in Flying and Combat.
Chekov is fifteen now, and has shot up incredibly, now a gangly but still very much fawn-like teenager. Hikaru sees him scuffing his worn trainers awkwardly outside the hall, watching the fourth-years file out of the hall one by one, all wearing their cadet red for the last time.
His face lights up when he sees Hikaru, and Hikaru can’t help but grin as he waves.
“Congratulations,” Chekov tells him breathlessly. “I heard from Professor Spock that you were assigned to Captain Pike’s crew.”
“I was,” Hikaru confirms, a hint of pride in his voice - not all cadets get assigned to work under one of the best captains Starfleet has - Captain Christopher Pike. “Or well, I will be once he gets his ship - his old one supposedly was trashed beyond repair by Klingons so I’m on TA duty until he gets the new ship.”
Chekov beams, and fumbles in the little bag he’s brought, fishing out a slightly limp flower crown of feathery white bells and round blossoms the colour of Starfleet command gold.
“I made for you,” he says, and passes the crown to Hikaru. Upon closer examination, Hikaru recognizes the flowers from his module on Terran biology - white heather and yellow poppies.
“Protection?” he asks, smiling wryly as he touches one of the heather flowers gently. He remembers his mother cultivating in him an interest in hanakotoba, the language of flowers, and he’s read up on the Western version extensively enough to interpret the flowers Chekov has given to him.
“And success,” Chekov says. “To wish you all ze best.”
“Thank you,” Hikaru says warmly, and - not really caring what the students milling around him think - perches the crown of flowers awkwardly on his head.
Chekov beams sunnily at him, and Hikaru feels his heart warm. (And possibly his face as well, but he’ll deny that a little longer.)
~
Two years later, and Hikaru’s first day on the Enterprise is… eventful. The senior helmsmen all come down with lungworm, and Hikaru finds himself sitting nervously in front of the flight console, staring at buttons and screens that he’s seen infinite times in Academy simulations but never on an actual, honest-to-god ship.
They’re heading out to answer a distress call from Vulcan, and cadets from the Academy have all been distributed out to the various ships. Hikaru sees a couple of faces he recognizes, including the slender African girl he remembers as Professor Spock’s favourite and a beefy man he remembers pulling away in a bar brawl just off-campus three years ago.
Then he sees a flash of command gold out of the corner of his eye, and turns to see a very familiar head of curly hair at the navigator’s panel.
He turns around the same moment Hikaru remembers who he is.
“Hikaru!” Chekov says brightly eyes shining, and Hikaru notices a blue, star-shaped flower carefully pinned over his heart, just under the Starfleet badge on his uniform shirt.
“I expected you to be on this ship,” says Hikaru, “but I didn’t know you’d be my navigator.”
“I didn’t either,” replies Chekov, “but Captain Pike called me Russian whizkid and sent me up here.”
He pronounces it ‘wheez’ and Hikaru smiles slightly - he’s missed this easy banter, what with the hectic life of being a TA and also training with the crew and refining his fencing by himself.
“Flowers again?” he asks, gesturing slightly to the blue flower.
“Borage,” Chekov says softly as Captain Pike steps onto the bridge, Professor - Commander - Spock trailing behind him. “For courage.”
Courage, Hikaru thinks, as Captain Pike orders him to bring the ship to warp. We’ll all need some of that today.
~
There isn’t enough room onboard to accommodate the sudden addition of three years’ worth of cadets (the first years had been left back on Earth), and almost everybody ends up having roommates in their quarters. By a stroke of fate (or luck), Hikaru’s roommate is Chekov, and he’s been a great roommate, leaving the bathroom spotless, never letting his belongings spill out all over the floor, and leaving quietly for his pre-shift runs so he doesn’t wake Hikaru from his much-needed sleep.
Today, Hikaru heads back to the room exhausted, every muscle in his body aching after the assault on the Romulan drill device. He pushes open the heavy metal door after punching in the access code, and sees Chekov sitting on his bunk, awkwardly wringing his hands.
“You’re safe,” Chekov blurts, eyes still stretched as wide as they were in the transporter room, desperately punching in formulae and codes to beam him and Kirk back to the Enterprise.
“Yeah,” says Hikaru. “That was some great work you did today.”
Chekov doesn’t acknowledge the praise, and Hikaru suddenly notices he’s been worrying something pink in his hands, over and over again, staring into space and consumed by some measure of shock.
“I almost didn’t make it,” he whispers, voice hoarse.
Hikaru understands immediately, and moves to squat in front of Chekov.
“Look at me, Pavel,” he says (after so many years of friendship he’s finally broken himself of the last-name habit). “I’m here, and I’m alive. All thanks to you. There’s no need to imagine the what-ifs, okay?”
Slowly, Chekov unclenches his fingers, and lifts a small corsage of pink flowers to Hikaru’s eye level. They’re the fake kind, Hikaru observes, with petals of nylon and stalks of thin plastic, but then again he would wonder where Chekov would obtain fresh flowers anyway.
“Azalea,” he notes. Take care.
He closes his fingers around the pink petals.
“I will,” he says. “So promise me you will too.”
After a long, long pause, Chekov nods slightly.
~
Months after the entire Romulan debacle, Hikaru finds himself onboard the Enterprise again, this time at the helm as the proper pilot, rather than a stand-in. This time round, the captain is no longer Pike but James Kirk, the stowaway that Hikaru remembers falling towards the surface of Vulcan with months ago.
Some things, though, haven’t changed, like his bout of pre-flight anxiety (he’s checked the external inertial dampener three times already, for god’s sake) and Chekov’s comforting presence next to him. Chekov’s wearing borage again, a small splash of blue against gold cloth, and it comforts Hikaru, somewhat.
And then the chief engineering officer, a Scottish man Hikaru remembers is called Scotty (or Scott?), storms off the ship, and suddenly Captain Kirk is ordering Chekov to transfer to Engineering on account of his godly physics knowledge.
Chekov is too intimidated to argue with Kirk, but Hikaru can see a slight tremble in his hand as he unfastens the borage flower from his shirt, ready to change into engineering red. No doubt he’s heard the rumours flying around about mortality rates and red shirts, and Hikaru dearly wishes he can reach over the console and squeeze his best friend’s hand, tell him he’ll be fine.
He does, however, whisper “good luck” as Chekov brushes past his chair, and Chekov nods distractedly in reply, pushing something into Hikaru’s hand.
“For you,” he says quietly. “Perhaps you will need it more than I will, da?”
Hikaru only opens his hand long after Chekov has left the bridge and someone else takes his place, and sees the slightly-crushed blue flower that until recently was pinned to Chekov’s shirt. He pins it on, over his heart, just like Chekov did.
When Captain Kirk decides to go down to confront renegade John Harrison, he takes Commander Spock with him, and suddenly Hikaru finds himself saddled with the role of Acting Captain.
He can hear McCoy behind him, doubting Kirk’s decision a little (he can’t fault McCoy, he’s pretty shocked too), but he moves his hand over his heart to where the flower is.
Courage.
He takes a deep breath, steels himself.
“Attention John Harrison. This is Captain Hikaru Sulu of the USS Enterprise…”
~
After two back-to-back voyages filled with enough action and adrenaline for five lifetimes, Hikaru’s hoping for a relatively harmless voyage (or, well, as harmless as space exploration can get) the next time he steps onto the bridge of the USS Enterprise.
His mother’s worried and fussed over him long enough during the shore leave they’d all received after the John Harrison incident. Hanako Sulu has always been a worrier, and on Hikaru’s final day of shore leave she places two sealed jars in his hands, each containing a single peony suspended and preserved in clear gel.
“One for that Russian boy you keep telling me about,” she says, when he tries to return one to her, and her tone brooks no argument. “Have a safe trip.”
So Hikaru boards the Enterprise with two jars in hand, and places one at Chekov’s console at the bridge, still feeling rather happy that his best friend got transferred back to command.
“Hikaru,” Chekov says, looking up in surprise. “What’s this?”
“Peony,” replies Hikaru, feeling only slightly awkward. “In Japan they stand for bravery.”
Chekov’s smile then could light up every room on the Enterprise, and he studies the flower inside carefully, taking in every detail.
“Zank you,” he says quietly.
Hikaru pats his head good-naturedly, ignoring the little flip his stomach does when he felt the full force of Chekov’s megawatt grin.
~
He doesn’t like it when Kirk decides that Chekov is ready for away missions, and as the two of them leave for the transporter room he feels a slight feeling of unease.
Kirk had claimed it was only an empty planet, no reports of Klingon activity for ages, and so they’d be ‘just fine’. Hikaru closes his fingers over the small peony jar he keeps in his console drawer when on shift, and sincerely tries to believe in Kirk’s words.
Three hours later, Kirk sends a frantic call back, screaming for Scotty to beam them back to the Enterprise immediately, and in that moment Hikaru can feel his heart plummet all the way down to his toes.
He wants to get up, run to the transporter room, see for himself that his best friend is alright, but he can feel the cool gaze of Acting Captain Spock on him, silently telling him to rein in his emotions and carry on, and so he only tightens his grip on the controls and tells himself to calm down.
Kirk’s voice is loud on the bridge, and Hikaru whirls around in his chair to see an exhausted Jim Kirk, still in the gear from the mission, skin littered everywhere with cuts and some deep gashes and quite a bit of blood splattered on his clothes.
“McKenna, relieve Sulu. He’s needed in the medical wing.”
~
Chekov’s face is pale, too pale, and Hikaru itches to grip the hand hanging limply off the bed in the medical wing, except it’s swathed in bandages and has an IV jammed halfway up the arm.
“Klingon patrol,” Kirk says quietly, sadly. “They came all at once, but neither I nor the Ensign were able to last very long against them.”
Hikaru mostly ignores this, trying to remind himself that Chekov getting injured is not Kirk’s fault.
“He’ll be okay,” says McCoy from where he is running checks on Chekov’s vitals. “We’ve got him pretty much stabilized now, but he’s lost quite a bit of blood and sustained some nasty injuries, so I’m not too sure yet when he’ll wake.”
Hikaru has never felt so lonely than that moment, staring at his best friend’s broken body metres away and rendered totally helpless.
~
He’s taken to growing Terran flowers in a greenhouse room onboard, and now he visits it daily, choosing new flowers to put by Chekov’s bedside. White gardenias, like the first time they met, for luck. Delicate snowdrops, for hope. Ivy, for endurance.
Through it all, Chekov sleeps, and Hikaru worries. Kirk grants him temporary reprieve from his duties due to his emotional state, and though he’s slightly offended that Kirk thinks his emotions will affect his performance, he’s largely thankful.
He sits in the medical wing for hours on end, the heart-rate monitor beeping coldly behind him at too slow a pace as he stares into nothing and lets his mind wander. Hikaru’s never been much of a thinker, more of a doer, more eager to go onto the field and fight rather than stay calm and strategise, but he thinks now, mind sorting out all his memories of Chekov and reminiscing, thinking, connecting.
He collects a basketful of beautiful almond blossoms, pure white and stained in the centre with deep pink, and spends three days clumsily weaving them together into a flower crown. Somehow, he find it slightly ironic that it’s his turn now to give the flower crown, but doesn’t dwell on it, opting instead to concentrate on not breaking the flowers, and also on ignoring the occasional glance of pity McCoy sends his way.
(He’s not a pining maiden, he doesn’t need Bones’ pity.)
Nearly a week after the incident, Kirk comes down to the medical wing to watch him weave in the final almond blossom.
“I need you,” Kirk says quietly. “You’re one of the best we have in way of combat, and the mission this time is more dangerous.”
“Aye, sir.”
Gently, he places the flower crown on Chekov’s head, half-mangled stems and all, and leaves with Kirk, turning back one last time at the door to glance at Chekov, pale face framed by a halo of slightly-wilted flowers.
~
The mission goes alright, until a snowstorm kicks up and they find themselves stuck in a cave for three days. When the snow finally dies down, they venture cautiously out, peering at the blanket of white everywhere, and Hikaru shivers at the icy wind, stepping to his right where there’s a boulder that might act as a windbock.
It proves to be the wrong move, when snow under his foot gives way, and Hikaru suddenly remembers (a little too late) that their cave had been near a cliff-edge. Kirk grabs his hand and then they’re falling in the avalanche, tumbling down with chunks of snow and plant debris, and Kirk is shrieking into his communicator to beam them up, beam them up now.
Half delirious with cold and the shock of the sudden fall, Hikaru thinks that he can hear Chekov’s voice speaking to him, though he cannot make out the words.
Is this the last thing I’ll hear before I die? Hikaru wonders. I must be hallucinating already.
And then gold threads enter his vision, and suddenly they’re not plummeting to their deaths down a snowy cliffside but crashing to the floor of the transporter room.
Hikaru lies on the floor while Kirk gingerly gets off him, and he’s too tired to even open his eyes, only groaning when he hears McCoy somewhere near him, telling medical officers to help him up.
“Hikaru!”
He’s pretty sure he’s still hallucinating, until warm hands grab hold of his face and press slightly, squishing his cheeks.
“You’re safe!”
He opens his eyes blearily to meet those of Chekov, who looks far too excited (he can, out of the corner of his eye, see McCoy shooting Chekov a concerned glance, as though he’s just recovered).
“You’re alive,” is all he can wearily manage, and Chekov nods, pulling back to show an almond blossom pinned neatly to his shirt.
“Promise,” he says. “I promised I’d take care of myself, and I kept it.”
Relief fills Hikaru then, like a bubbling spring, and he doesn’t know if it’s that relief or if it’s exhaustion that causes him to pitch forward and collapse in Chekov’s arms.
~
The next time Hikaru opens his eyes it’s to the bright white lights of the medical wing.
“I’m alive,” he croaks.
“Da, you are indeed,” replies a voice from his left, and suddenly there are hands helping him up until he’s propped against the pillows. “The doctor said no major injuries, mainly exhaustion. Is good, no?”
“We are a pair, aren’t we?” Hikaru observes dryly. “You just get out of here and then I get sent in.”
Chekov giggles, just a little, and fishes around until he pulls out a flower crown.
“I couldn’t find real flowers so fake ones from the replicator will have to do,” he says lightly, but Hikaru’s now paying attention to the flowers. The crown is a delicately twisted chain of tiny purple ivy blossoms, but at the front there are two roses twined together - one red, one yellow.
He brushes his fingers over the petals, and Chekov stretches up to drop it on his head before grinning shyly at him.
“The Doctor gave me weird looks when I made the flowers,” confesses Chekov. “I fear he thinks I’m a girl now.”
“That makes two of us, then,” snorts Hikaru.
“A matched pair.”
Hikaru thinks of the flowers in the crown on his head, and the meaning they hold, and he allows himself the tiniest smile as he reaches for Chekov’s hand, lying on his bedside table where a dozen wilted almond blossoms lie, free from the crown Hikaru had clumsily woven.
“Yes.”
fin.
//ADDITIONAL NOTE: yellow roses on their own mean friendship; red roses on their own mean love. together, though, they also mean joy and excitement. when chekov gives them to sulu, what he wants to get across is a mix of all three.