fic: Bridge2Sickbay ficlets (Star Trek AOS)
This week's theme was childhood memories.
Title: Echo
Rating: all ages
Characters: Joanna, Kirk, McCoy
Summary: Nine-year-old Joanna collects seashells. Her father and Uncle Jim send her specimens from distant worlds. (Prompt: collecting seashells. 536 words.)
Joanna takes the shells out of their box one by one, and lays them carefully on her desk. According to the note, written in Uncle Jim’s messy scrawl, the pink one is from Tanar II, a planet thirty-five light years from Earth. That means, she knows, that the sunlight that warmed Uncle Jim and her daddy when they walked along that distant shore and picked up this shell for her won’t reach Earth for another thirty-five years.
At nine, she can’t quite wrap her head around time dilation, but she understands that much.
The purple fan-shaped shell is from Eldera IV, which is even farther away than Tanar. Joanna knows that her daddy and Uncle Jim got into some sort of trouble there; in his note, Uncle Jim wrote: glad to put that planet behind us! It’s distressingly vague. Joanna has an active imagination; she can think of all sorts of horrible scenarios, and it doesn’t help at all when her mom tells her not to worry.
She’s a McCoy, damnit. She worries about everything.
The long, twisted shell is from Pelendra. Joanna thinks it looks a bit like a unicorn’s horn, except for the fact that it’s hollow and there’s an opening at the base. In shadow, it looks dull and off-white, but when she holds it up to the morning like spilling through her window, it shimmers like a rainbow.
Jim wrote, You wouldn’t believe the creature that used to live in this! Never seen so many tentacles on one animal. Like a plate of spaghetti. One of these guys - not this one - almost drowned me, but Spock and your daddy saved my life.
Joanna sighs. She worries, but she’s glad that Uncle Jim has her daddy and Commander Spock to keep him safe. She’s glad her daddy and Commander Spock - whom she only met once, but whom she sort of likes - have him.
She picks up the shell from Tanar II and holds it to her ear. Long ago, when her parents were still married and used to take her to collect shells by the Atlantic, Joanna believed it was the ocean she was hearing, and she used to lie in bed with a shall to her ear, her eyes closed, pretending she was still at the beach.
Now, of course, she knows it’s the echo of her own blood rushing through the blood vessels in her ear. But she closes her eyes anyway, and imagines she’s hearing the waves pounding up the gray sand beach on Tanar II. She imagines a whole bunch of pink shells, strewn like dogwood petals across the sand, and her daddy and Uncle Jim walking among them, picking them up and putting them down again, trying to find the perfect one to send to her.
Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. Maybe she’s wrong to imagine the sky as pale lavender, or clumps of shiny black seaweed caught among the rocks. Maybe it was actually night. Maybe there were some sort of alien birds. She doesn’t know and she doesn’t really care.
Her daddy and her Uncle Jim were thinking about her on a faraway planet. She knows that much is accurate.
__________
Title: Siren
Rating: teen (barely)
Characters: Spock/Uhura
Summary: Nyota sings in the shower. Spock has complicated thoughts about that. (Prompt: The Little Mermaid. 393 words.)
Nyota sings in the shower. Arias from Terran operas, Andorian blues, Denobulan lullabies, even the occasional Klingon drinking song. She stands under the showerhead with her feet apart, the hot water sluicing down her front and back, her long black hair clinging to her skin, singing as if she were alone.
Spock likes to watch.
Appreciates the aesthetics, rather. To like would imply an emotional response, and a shallow one at that. While Spock cannot deny that he is, for a variety of reasons, deeply attached to Nyota Uhura, well … he is Vulcan.
Sometimes, depending on the song, she will sway her hips, and her hair, heavy with water, will swing against her lower back like a veil. When she does this, she reminds Spock of images he has seen in Terran museums, paintings of mermaids.
Though, of course, Nyota has legs.
(Does she ever, his human side - which, at times, sounds annoyingly like Jim Kirk - often remarks. At such times, Spock feels a flash of resentment toward his friend and captain, who is quite open with his emotions, both the shallow and the deep. He suppresses it quickly, as it is illogical. Nyota made her choice, fully cognizant of what Spock could and could not give to her.)
He has not shared these observations with Nyota, has not informed her that he has a secret name for her: T’sai Masutra, ocean lady. It is not exact, but it is the nearest approximation that he can achieve in his native language. He is quite certain that she would appreciate it, as she has informed him, her tone warm with affection, that her parents chose nicknames for her and her sisters with utmost care.
(It is not the custom of Vulcan parents to bestow nicknames upon their children or spouses. Nonetheless, he finds himself wondering what diminutive his mother might have chosen for him.)
In any case, he doubts that anything he might say would surprise Nyota. She can see into his mind better than anyone and, though she does not speak of it when she steps out of the steam-filled bathroom, he is certain that she is aware of his scrutiny. She looks at him over her slender shoulder, the flecks of soap reminding him of sea foam, and there is understanding and delight in her deep, dark eyes.
2/20/2011
Title: Echo
Rating: all ages
Characters: Joanna, Kirk, McCoy
Summary: Nine-year-old Joanna collects seashells. Her father and Uncle Jim send her specimens from distant worlds. (Prompt: collecting seashells. 536 words.)
Joanna takes the shells out of their box one by one, and lays them carefully on her desk. According to the note, written in Uncle Jim’s messy scrawl, the pink one is from Tanar II, a planet thirty-five light years from Earth. That means, she knows, that the sunlight that warmed Uncle Jim and her daddy when they walked along that distant shore and picked up this shell for her won’t reach Earth for another thirty-five years.
At nine, she can’t quite wrap her head around time dilation, but she understands that much.
The purple fan-shaped shell is from Eldera IV, which is even farther away than Tanar. Joanna knows that her daddy and Uncle Jim got into some sort of trouble there; in his note, Uncle Jim wrote: glad to put that planet behind us! It’s distressingly vague. Joanna has an active imagination; she can think of all sorts of horrible scenarios, and it doesn’t help at all when her mom tells her not to worry.
She’s a McCoy, damnit. She worries about everything.
The long, twisted shell is from Pelendra. Joanna thinks it looks a bit like a unicorn’s horn, except for the fact that it’s hollow and there’s an opening at the base. In shadow, it looks dull and off-white, but when she holds it up to the morning like spilling through her window, it shimmers like a rainbow.
Jim wrote, You wouldn’t believe the creature that used to live in this! Never seen so many tentacles on one animal. Like a plate of spaghetti. One of these guys - not this one - almost drowned me, but Spock and your daddy saved my life.
Joanna sighs. She worries, but she’s glad that Uncle Jim has her daddy and Commander Spock to keep him safe. She’s glad her daddy and Commander Spock - whom she only met once, but whom she sort of likes - have him.
She picks up the shell from Tanar II and holds it to her ear. Long ago, when her parents were still married and used to take her to collect shells by the Atlantic, Joanna believed it was the ocean she was hearing, and she used to lie in bed with a shall to her ear, her eyes closed, pretending she was still at the beach.
Now, of course, she knows it’s the echo of her own blood rushing through the blood vessels in her ear. But she closes her eyes anyway, and imagines she’s hearing the waves pounding up the gray sand beach on Tanar II. She imagines a whole bunch of pink shells, strewn like dogwood petals across the sand, and her daddy and Uncle Jim walking among them, picking them up and putting them down again, trying to find the perfect one to send to her.
Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. Maybe she’s wrong to imagine the sky as pale lavender, or clumps of shiny black seaweed caught among the rocks. Maybe it was actually night. Maybe there were some sort of alien birds. She doesn’t know and she doesn’t really care.
Her daddy and her Uncle Jim were thinking about her on a faraway planet. She knows that much is accurate.
__________
Title: Siren
Rating: teen (barely)
Characters: Spock/Uhura
Summary: Nyota sings in the shower. Spock has complicated thoughts about that. (Prompt: The Little Mermaid. 393 words.)
Nyota sings in the shower. Arias from Terran operas, Andorian blues, Denobulan lullabies, even the occasional Klingon drinking song. She stands under the showerhead with her feet apart, the hot water sluicing down her front and back, her long black hair clinging to her skin, singing as if she were alone.
Spock likes to watch.
Appreciates the aesthetics, rather. To like would imply an emotional response, and a shallow one at that. While Spock cannot deny that he is, for a variety of reasons, deeply attached to Nyota Uhura, well … he is Vulcan.
Sometimes, depending on the song, she will sway her hips, and her hair, heavy with water, will swing against her lower back like a veil. When she does this, she reminds Spock of images he has seen in Terran museums, paintings of mermaids.
Though, of course, Nyota has legs.
(Does she ever, his human side - which, at times, sounds annoyingly like Jim Kirk - often remarks. At such times, Spock feels a flash of resentment toward his friend and captain, who is quite open with his emotions, both the shallow and the deep. He suppresses it quickly, as it is illogical. Nyota made her choice, fully cognizant of what Spock could and could not give to her.)
He has not shared these observations with Nyota, has not informed her that he has a secret name for her: T’sai Masutra, ocean lady. It is not exact, but it is the nearest approximation that he can achieve in his native language. He is quite certain that she would appreciate it, as she has informed him, her tone warm with affection, that her parents chose nicknames for her and her sisters with utmost care.
(It is not the custom of Vulcan parents to bestow nicknames upon their children or spouses. Nonetheless, he finds himself wondering what diminutive his mother might have chosen for him.)
In any case, he doubts that anything he might say would surprise Nyota. She can see into his mind better than anyone and, though she does not speak of it when she steps out of the steam-filled bathroom, he is certain that she is aware of his scrutiny. She looks at him over her slender shoulder, the flecks of soap reminding him of sea foam, and there is understanding and delight in her deep, dark eyes.
2/20/2011