In Mutual Orbit Part II
Part I
The mission ends without major catastrophe. Back in San Francisco, Kirk and Spock get medals pinned to their chests, Chekov gets a promotion to lieutenant, and the Enterprise goes into dry dock for a year and a half of repairs and upgrades. Before settling into their teaching obligations at the academy, Nyota takes Montgomery to visit her grandmother in Kenya. When Bibi meets him, she pulls his head down to kiss him on both eyelids. She turns a watery smile on Nyota and welcomes her home.
At the academy, there are long waitlists to get into the Enterprise crew’s classes. Kirk’s has to be moved to an auditorium to accommodate the starry-eyed cadets who crowd the lecture space originally afforded her. Sometimes, before her office hours, Nyota stands in the doorway of that auditorium, watching Kirk make huge gesticulations at the front of the class, animatedly relating her lessons in command. Or, on some days, Kirk is morose, going over torture survival tactics and mental health protocols. Nyota smiles, a faint touch on her lips, remembering how young and stubborn she was in her cadet reds before heading to her office, where she’ll have her own fan club to contend with.
Spock elects to take leave on New Vulcan instead of teaching. Nyota did not speak to him before his departure. She’s not sure she’ll ever speak to him in a non-professional capacity again. The science track cadets grumble enough at Spock’s absence that a petition starts up and is sent to the colony, urging him back for the second semester. The petition is ignored, and Nyota feels resentful of him, as if through this act he is choosing his duty to his people over his duty to Starfleet. It’s not a logical feeling, but she gave up on holding herself to the exacting Vulcan standards of logic long ago.
Montgomery’s mother dies in Dunfermline during the second semester, twenty-three years after going into remission for the first time. Before taking compassionate leave, Monty stays up all night writing page upon page of a eulogy, scribbling them out with expansive hash marks, always starting again on a fresh, blank sheet. Eventually he puts his pen down and rubs his hands over his face, letting out a low, broken moan. Nyota runs her hand through his thinning hair, sets her mouth against the quivering downward curve of his, and holds on to him as his grief crests and crashes. When the weekend comes, Nyota and Keenser hop a transport to Edinburgh and take the train to stand among the mourners as Montgomery delivers his disjointed, inadequate, utterly perfect eulogy.
After the stragglers have left, the vicar’s still there, and in front of God and Keenser and Monty’s grandfather and uncles and sisters and nieces and nephews, Nyota and Montgomery get married. She’s wearing mid-calf steel-toed boots and her dress uniform, he’s in his clan tartan, and it’s more than anything she could have dreamed of when she was small, playing dress-up with Bibi’s veil.
The senior staff and the core bridge crew all enlist for the second five-year mission. The Enterprise has been fitted with the latest in technological advancements. Apparently, this just means making everything on Nyota’s console smaller, her practiced hands fumbling at her controls. Spock is infuriatingly unflappable at the science station despite the upgrades, Chekov and Sulu are wide eyed admiring the shiny new helm, and when Nyota swivels her chair around, she finds Kirk fidgeting in the new, ergonomic Captain’s chair with a frown dragging her entire face downward. She catches Nyota’s eye and grins before grabbing her padd and sending a transmission: fuckers got rid of my hard-earned ass groove.
Over the next two years, Montgomery loses more hair, eleven crew members die in freak accidents and away mission debacles, McCoy and Chapel stop pretending, Sulu earns a medal for valor, Kirk beds every female (and one male) human and alien that could pass for aesthetically pleasing on away missions, Spock loses weight he couldn’t spare in the first place, and Nyota develops an algorithm that enables the software engineers to add the whistling language of the Krath’n’huli to the universal translator. When the news comes that she’s been invited to speak at the New Vulcan Science Academy on the subject, Kirk hugs her for the first time.
Being on the Enterprise is rarely tedious. Nyota spends her shifts performing her duties to the highest standard, often surpassing even her own lofty expectations when, say, Kirk is in trouble on a hostile planet. During her off duty hours, she finds herself often in Kirk’s company. They do frivolous, necessary things: reprogram replicators to spit out strange alcoholic drinks, talk about the state of Kirk’s latest lay’s bush, watch twenty-second century B-vids with their own running commentary. Neither of them make jokes about braiding each other’s hair, but Monty does, laughing, tugging out Nyota’s sensible ponytail and burying his nose in the resulting cascade. For long stretches of time, Nyota has a satisfying career, a surprising best friend, a devoted husband, and all the happiness she can stand. Then, Spock’s vaunted Vulcan controls, once unimpeachable, shatter.
-
Nyota has kept a near total ignorance of Spock’s personal life for the past several years. The thought of him is bitter in too many ways to keep up more than a passing professional acquaintanceship, so she hasn’t tried. The sight of him, however, is ubiquitous while they both work on the bridge, two members of the senior core crew. For the past few weeks, he’s been on edge, crackling with restless energy, his back a whipcord seeming ready to snap. He’s impossible to ignore when he gives curt responses bordering on sarcastic, he’s impossible to ignore when the fuse of his temper shortens, and he’s impossible to ignore when the Captain orders him off the bridge to speak with her and he goes, following her with a hateful flame blazing behind his eyes. Nyota suppresses a spine-wracking cringe at the look on his face before turning back to her console. She briefly considers tapping into the Captain’s comm device to monitor the conversation and make sure Kirk stays safe, but Kirk can take care of herself, and she wouldn’t appreciate the invasion of privacy anyway.
The bridge crew works silently and diligently through the remainder of alpha shift, each member too focused on their own consoles for the careful attention to duty to be genuine. Nyota knows that like her, they are staring through their stations, deliberating on the consequences of the imminent implosion of their command team, so long in coming. There will be no third mission, maybe they won’t even finish this one, and their makeshift family will be scattered across the galaxy like so much space detritus. Some of them will pursue careers on their own ships, enjoying the fruits of promotion, but there will be no recreating the dynamics of the Enterprise.
After shift, Nyota finds Kirk’s door locked and unresponsive to the keycode Kirk gave her. She can’t rustle her up on her comm or her padd. After a moment’s hesitation, she tries Spock’s door, and there’s no response, but Nyota’s built her career on her ears. Through the bulkheads she can hear them in there, crashing against furniture, each other, their conversation a low roar peppered with shouts. Moans. Nyota’s heartbeat loses its steady timekeeping and becomes a nervous stutter against her ribs. Breath quickening, Nyota reels backward and rushes to the turbolift, and the nine seconds it takes to get her to sickbay feel interminable and cruel.
Chapel has a sling on and McCoy is veritably foaming at the mouth when Nyota arrives panting in his office, nervous beads of sweat springing up along her hairline. McCoy’s eyes bug out under the high arch of one brow, his version of a welcome.
“Don’t you tell me you interrupted them,” he growls.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Nyota says. “I thought they were fighting, but… God, are they really-?”
McCoy’s lips twist in a humorless smile and he grunts.
‘“ Vulcan biology,’ he says. Vulcan biology broke Chapel’s arm and I’m expected to let Jamie go in there to-” He trails off, crossing his arms and turning his head away, shaking it as if to clear cobwebs. Chapel lays her good hand between his shoulder blades.
“You don’t ‘let’ Jamie do anything, Len,” she says in a low voice. “And my arm is barely fractured, so don’t start with the chivalrous Southern gentleman routine.”
McCoy sighs and nudges open the bottom drawer of his desk. He plucks out three glasses and lifts a bottle of bourbon in question. Nyota and Chapel nod, and the three of them huddle around his desk like it’s a fire on a cold night.
“Is she gonna be okay?” Nyota asks after they take their first sips and savor the burn and the silence.
“Amanda Grayson obviously survived it with Sarek, so James T. Kirk will get through it with Mr. Spock, too,” Chapel says when McCoy’s eye threatens to leave its socket altogether. His mouth contorts sourly.
“Sarek wasn’t so foolish as to let it get this bad before doing something about it! Sarek didn’t keep his doctor in the dark for years about an inevitability. Sarek didn’t break people’s arms when they offered him soup, and Sarek didn’t decide suicide was the answer instead of approaching a certain equally lovelorn starship captain about solving his little problem! Logical my ass!” McCoy slams back the bourbon, squeezing his eyes shut and growling in the aftermath.
“Can we back up and explain this to me? Or is there some kind of doctor-patient confidentiality thing going on? Which you’re still breaking just by hinting at it right now, I want to point out.” Nyota says.
McCoy waves a hand.
“Jamie said to tell you or you’d use some comm frequency to spy on them anyway.”
Nyota refuses to blush; Kirk knows her too well. A swell of affection for her Captain, her friend, burgeons inside her chest.
“So, what’s the deal? Suicide?”
McCoy scowls.
“Apparently, Vulcan males go through a seven-year mating cycle, and if they don’t get lucky they die. Spock was indulging on some nice, very logical denial until Jamie confined him to quarters and Chris brought him some soup. And… well.” He gestured to Chapel’s sling. “Goddamned hobgoblin. Thought his human half would keep him from losing his shit sure as any other Vulcan in the history of Vulcans. Just what in the hell was he thinking?”
“So… Spock’s in heat?”
“Something like that. We’re too far away from New Vulcan to find some suitable pointy-eared lady, and according to himself, only the Captain will do anyway. Some voodoo business about mating bonds and existing mind links and compatibility of the katra. So he went over all noble and locked himself in his quarters to die like a goddamned wounded animal! Who’s so chivalrous now?” More bourbon splashes into McCoy’s cup, only to disappear down his throat.
“And Jamie called his bullshit and hacked into his quarters.”
McCoy points at her, nodding once.
“Got it in one. A kewpie doll for the lady in red.”
“How long is this going to go on?”
McCoy’s face is a thundercloud. Chapel answers, “Oh, days, I’d imagine.” She gives a sly sideways smile at the doctor. “Maybe weeks.”
“You’re not funny, you know.”
Nyota swills her own drink idly. Maybe everything is changing. But instead of breaking under the consumptive tension between captain and first officer, maybe the crew will become the best versions of themselves under a command team united in love and purpose. Maybe they all get to keep their happiness, just for a little while longer, just until the mission ends. Nyota tries to think of it on Kirk’s terms, all her thwarted love finally justified, and not on Spock’s, who is, Nyota thinks now, only an automaton unworthy of Kirk’s tenacious attachment.
Montgomery serves as Acting Captain in Kirk’s and Spock’s joint absence. He’s not fond of command, much preferring the sleek metal innards of a warp engine to the nerve-wracking rigor of holding four hundred and fifty lives in his rough hands, but he does his duty without complaint. Back in their quarters at the end of Day Four, Nyota’s head pillowed on his chest, he’s running his fingers along the skin of her arm. She wonders aloud how much longer he’ll have to act as captain; this is the first snatch of time they’ve gotten alone since Vulcan biology sequestered their commanding officers away for an epic mating session, and she misses her husband.
“Dunno,” Monty answers. “But it’s a bit romantic, isn’t it?”
“Hmm?”
“The Captain and Mr. Spock.”
“I don’t think Spock is the romantic type. Actually, this is kind of just like him, take what he needs when it’s convenient for him, no romance involved. And when he’s done with you, pff.” She casts a hand out as if brushing junk off a table.
Monty catches that hand and brings it up to press his mouth into her palm.
“I know your heart’s not stone in there, love,” he says, linking their fingers and holding her hand over his heart. “You were so angry at him you never saw how he’s looked at her since… since they broke up. You’ve got to forgive him a bit.”
“Seriously? He looks at her like he owns her. Like a child who doesn’t want his favorite toy anymore, but doesn’t want anyone else to play with it either. Monty, I’m tired of that look.”
“Och, don’t get started on one of your ‘I hate Spock’ rants. And I don’t think that’s the look I’m talking about.”
Nyota shifts to face him, propping herself up to hover over him.
“What look then? I see him all the time on the bridge, and he’s decidedly lacking in soppy looks.”
Monty cups her face and draws her in for a slow, thorough kiss. She’s flush against his naked body, legs tangled in his, and they rest their foreheads together. His thumbs rub over her cheekbones, memorizing. When he pulls back to look into her eyes, his own are lit gold with desire and affection.
“It’s when he thinks no one’s looking,” he says. “He looks at her like I look at you.”
-
Kirk and Spock emerge two days later, back on the bridge as if nothing happened. But Spock’s mood is tempered, and Kirk moves with the slightest stiffness in her muscles. Nyota would be concerned if Kirk’s minute discomfort weren’t accompanied by a smug expression and that single filthy eyebrow wag she sent her when she entered the bridge right before shift.
So you’re gonna tell me, right? Nyota hits send. Nothing’s happened since shift began three hours ago, so she thinks it’s safe.
Until you can’t stand to hear any more, LT.
Nyota sneaks a glance at Spock sitting at the science station beside communications. He looks… the same as ever. Nyota vaguely remembers a time when she would drink in the sight of him, straightbacked and concentrating on his analyses. It seems so distant now, so asinine to have to study the man she loved in order to understand him at all. She sends another transmission, this time to Montgomery’s personal padd. His response several minutes later reads I love you too.
As shift ends, Kirk shares some meaningful looks with Spock before turning that wide grin on Nyota and jerking her head toward the turbolift and leading her to it. It pitches downward toward the officer’s decks, and Nyota bumps into Kirk’s side, but doesn’t make a move to get out of her personal space once the turbolift settles.
“You’re all right, right Jamie?”
The turbolift door slides open to an empty corridor, and Kirk slings an arm around Nyota’s neck, dragging her toward her quarters.
“I swear to every deity I never believed in, Uhura, I’ve never been better.”
Glasses clink as Kirk sets them out on her work table.
“What are we in the mood for?”
“I think this conversation should take place over basic beers.”
Kirk smirks and inputs the proper replication code. They’ve tinkered with it, but so far they haven’t been able to get it to produce anything other than a light, generic pilsner, which is fine for their current purposes. Kirk leans back in her chair and kicks her feet up onto the table, and she regards Nyota with a sort of amused admiration.
“So tell me how close you were to tapping Spock’s quarters,” she says, tilting her glass back into her open mouth.
“Three more hours,” Nyota answers. She props her elbows up on the table, resting her head in one hand as she looks at Kirk. Kirk is changed, the shadows gone from behind her eyes, her shoulders lacking their habitual line of tension. Nyota wonders how long she’s been carrying those things; so long that Nyota only notices them now that they’re gone.
“Jesus, I don’t think I could have taken three more hours. Anyway, we were done day before yesterday, but I needed a rest and some goddamn ointment,” Kirk says, laughing once and shaking her head. “Maybe I’ll be more prepared seven years from now.”
“What is this whole thing, Jamie? I mean, McCoy explained a little, but I don’t think I get it. At all. Seven years? Mating, for Christ’s sake?”
Kirk shrugs.
“I don’t think I get it either. But it was- It was really intense. I mean, he went absolutely batshit, and I was the only thing that could calm him down. He acted like I was… something precious. If we’re not careful, it’ll go to my head.”
Nyota snorts. “Insert comment about your already-swollen ego here, Kirk.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Kirk waves a hand. “No, it was- good. I feel like it was good, even though he’s totally embarrassed about it, and I’ll be walking bow-legged for the next week. I feel like anything I say right now will be a cliché. I just… we don’t have to be apart anymore, you know?”
“I’m having a hard time seeing how you could forgive him. He really treated you like shit, Jamie.”
Kirk puts her feet back on the floor and leans forward on her elbows. She wraps her hands around her glass. She takes a moment to fill her lungs to capacity, exhaling slow and even.
“When we were in his quarters,” she says, “doing our business, I felt him. Jesus, I mean, obviously I felt him, but I mean, we were together, in our minds. One person, one spirit, one body, just… together, in a total and complete way I can’t even describe right. It was… transcendent. And I knew his motives and his conflicts, and I just… there’s nothing to forgive, Uhura. He was… doing what he thought was best. In a really shitty way, without offering me the explanation I deserved, but it wasn’t malicious, and it wasn’t like, some judgment he made on me, which is how it felt, before.
“I wish- I wish we didn’t have to go through four years of hurting each other and being apart to get here, but. We’re here now, and I finally feel like, like I’ve arrived where I’m supposed to be, and I’m who I’m supposed to be, and I’m with who I’m supposed to be with, and I’m really- happy.” She lifts one shoulder in a shrug, her expression hesitant, as if Nyota will laugh uproariously at her admission. “Like I said, cliché.”
Nyota wants to pry. Nyota wants to know exactly what Spock’s motives were, and she wants pick them apart, analyzing them piece by piece like something tangible to be measured. She wants details and reports and explanations with footnotes, she wants Spock to earn the grace Kirk is bestowing upon him, she wants him to prove his worth to her. Instead, she pokes a code into the replicator, and it spits out what passes for cookies covered in a layer of chocolate. Not exactly beer food, but it’s what they like while they braid each other’s hair.
“I’ll try to understand,” she says, pushing the plate of cookies between them. “So, are you bondmates now?”
Kirk nods. “Yeah.” A laugh. “Jamie Kirk gets a shotgun wedding after all. Riverside would be proud.”
“Don’t let him pull his superior no-emotions Vulcan bullshit on you, anymore. Promise me.”
Kirk shifts, drawing her shoulders in defensively. She swallows down a few mouthfuls of replicated beer, and lively blue eyes meet Nyota’s over the rim of the glass.
“Ah, Uhura,” she says with a tiny smile, “you’re my favorite girl, always looking out for me. But seriously, me and Spock, we’re fine. We’re gonna be fine. I’m not saying we won’t have fights and shit, I mean, who doesn’t? But… I get him, you know? I mean I really get him, and… and we’re gonna be just fine. You can quit worrying, and you can, I don’t know, call a cease fire between you and him, or whatever you need to do to become civil again.”
“I call best friend rights to be suspicious and constantly give him the hairy eyeball for a period of five years.”
“I guess that’s fair.”
That’s as much satisfaction as she’s going to get on the subject, for now. Nyota programs herself another beer and kicks back, slouching in her chair and putting her feet up.
“So,” she says, giving Kirk a furrowed brow and downturned mouth: her serious face. “Let’s talk about what’s important. How was the sex?”
Kirk’s laugh echoes off the bulkheads.
-
After the third mission, the admiralty bangs a gavel and the Enterprise is retired permanently. She goes into dry dock where she was born, Kirk’s own dried up, cornhusk hometown. Cadets run simulations on her during their third years, and tourists pay 65 credits a pop to walk through the corridors and rooms where some of Nyota’s finest memories took place, oohing and aahing and never really comprehending. Nyota and Monty choose to raise their children in San Francisco, where Nyota lectures on xenolinguistics and experiments on the ever-evolving universal translator at the academy, and Monty holes up for days at a time tweaking warp cores and making the sleek new ships run faster and quieter and cleaner.
Almost twenty years after the establishment of the colony, Spock finally answers the call to return there to live and rebuild. New Vulcan has flourished in that time, but Spock’s people still face extinction, their birth rates low, their gene pool limited. At the outset, geneticists anticipated that birth defects would occur with increasing frequency after the third generation to be born on the colony. Amid outcry and many citations of opposing modes of logic, the elders began to encourage interspecial unions with Remans, Romulans, Terrans, Betazoids and Andorians. There are more combinations each time different planets send aid; Vulcans, for all their logic and suppression of emotion, fall easily in love with the aliens who come and add color to their stark and sandy way of life. There are successes and failures, xenophobic attacks on new families and formations of interspecial friendship foundations, and every reaction in between.
On visits to the city of Shri’hazukh to see her friends, Nyota notes that Jamie’s smile is echoed in her quarter-Vulcan children, and the happy flash of curved lips and pearly teeth is a common sight as people, Vulcan and otherwise, go about their business in the capital. Vulcans have found a measure of peace here, within themselves and amid the tumult of emotions that other races have brought to their growing colony. For the first time, Nyota believes that their lofty talk of IDIC is truly in practice.
Today, Nyota and Monty are late. Their shuttle was delayed, and the rest of the gang should be there already. When they arrive, Spock answers the door, a tiny girl with delicately pointed ears and a riot of black curls propped in the crook of one elbow. T’Mina squeals and offers a grin dotted with teeth, reaching out with chubby hands, and Spock allows himself the smallest smile.
“Nyota, Montgomery, boys. It is very pleasant to see you again.”
Nyota had given up on babying Spock’s stodgy sensibilities long ago, and now she wraps her arms around him and the rather adorable fruits of his last ponn farr, squeezing with more force than is necessary. T’Mina gurgles in protest, gasping out Nyota’s name until she lets go. Montgomery scoots past them into the welcoming air conditioning of the house, and Adam and Benjamin tear through the front hall calling out to Samek, a much more sedate little boy than Nyota’s own darling terrors.
Spock had failed to mention during the first agonizing plak tow that a Vulcan’s sperm at the height of his Time, as Spock liked to call it with a demure pout, was so powerful that it overcame the yearly contraceptive hypos and triggered ovulation almost instantly, and so Samek’s first years were spent on the Enterprise. He was soon joined by Monty and Nyota’s own Adam, Hannah Chapel-McCoy, and, everyone’s favorite surprise, Oksana Chekova Sulu, the result of a ‘gift’ from the Ormidians of Lorisivar VI. After T’Mina, Kirk got her tubes tied, finished out the final mission, and she and Spock both settled into teaching positions at the New Vulcan Science Academy.
“Sure I’d love to captain a ship again,” she’d said at the time, idly stroking the downy hair along T’Mina’s crown. “And I will, I think, like a science vessel or something. But I’m gonna be there for my kids, put salve on their scraped knees, read them bedtime stories, give them a hard time about their crushes. Space, the stars: they’ll be there after the kids grow up and can’t stand the sight of us anymore.”
Spock, Monty, McCoy, Chapel, Chekov and Sulu mill in the kitchen as Spock tends to the forthcoming meal. T’Mina doesn’t often let her father out of her sight, so there she stays as the adults catch up after years apart, talking Federation policy and low-down Starfleet gossip alike. Nyota kisses her hellos and asks appropriate questions about everyone’s respective careers, lets Chekov and Sulu coo at her belly, but soon she slips out in search of an unabashed ringing laugh, blonde hair, big hand gestures - her closest friend.
Nyota finds Kirk upstairs in Samek’s loft, surrounded by all the Enterprise babies now grown reedy and endearingly awkward, reenacting - exaggerating - the mission where she and Spock had to battle talking dinosaurs twenty times their size. Nyota leans in the doorway smiling as Kirk roars and the children (excepting Samek) shriek. Kirk makes gnashing noises, then bellows, “And you know what dinosaurs’ favorite food is? KIDS!”
She swoops down and grabs Benji, who is four and therefore still grabbable, swinging him up into the air and burying her face in his belly to blow a devastating raspberry. Benji squeals and clutches at Kirk’s hair, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She catches Nyota’s eye, face lighting and grin growing impossibly wider, and sets Benji back down.
“Samek, why don’t you go bother your father and get your friends some ice cream?” Kirk says. “Tell him I said one scoop was okay.”
Samek is a solemn little boy who holds Oksana’s hand as he leads the string of chattering kids downstairs. Facing Nyota fully, Kirk thrusts her thumb in their direction.
“Says he’s gonna marry her,” she says with a smirk.
“Chekov planning the wedding yet?”
“Better believe it, L.T.”
Then Nyota’s caught in a ferocious hug, breathing in the warm, clean scent of her former captain, the consuming happiness of this reunion a bright star flaring in the center of her chest. They whirl and laugh, locked together for long moments before they part.
“How is everything?” Kirk asks, her hands lingering at Nyota’s shoulders. “Making a new baby, I see. So pissed you didn’t tell me earlier, by the way.”
“I knew we were all gonna be here, so I wanted to surprise you. It’s a girl this time. I’m giving her four more months until eviction.”
Kirk makes an indistinct, happy sound and gathers her up in another short embrace.
“I fucking missed you, you know?” she says when she’s grinning down at her again.
Nyota only nods, feeling the strain of a smile gone on too long, but not caring. Kirk puts an arm around Nyota’s neck just like she used to, pulling her out of Samek’s loft. They catch up on all the frivolous, necessary things they miss out on, living on separate planets.
The urgency of their youth is gone, the Enterprise a clunky relic. They lead calm lives these days, their students marveling at them, disbelieving that their instructors were once the fiercest guardians of Federation space; they have passed into legend, into comfort and domesticity. The grand days of the Enterprise may have come and gone, but the bonds forged in her corridors, on every deck, in meeting rooms and mess halls, officer quarters and supply closets, are as infinite as space and unbreakable. Jamie Kirk is a gravitational force, and, almost twenty-five years after they first met, Nyota is content in her position as one satellite among many.
The End
Link to "Rebirth," in which Jamie breaks into Spock's quarters during the plak tow.
The mission ends without major catastrophe. Back in San Francisco, Kirk and Spock get medals pinned to their chests, Chekov gets a promotion to lieutenant, and the Enterprise goes into dry dock for a year and a half of repairs and upgrades. Before settling into their teaching obligations at the academy, Nyota takes Montgomery to visit her grandmother in Kenya. When Bibi meets him, she pulls his head down to kiss him on both eyelids. She turns a watery smile on Nyota and welcomes her home.
At the academy, there are long waitlists to get into the Enterprise crew’s classes. Kirk’s has to be moved to an auditorium to accommodate the starry-eyed cadets who crowd the lecture space originally afforded her. Sometimes, before her office hours, Nyota stands in the doorway of that auditorium, watching Kirk make huge gesticulations at the front of the class, animatedly relating her lessons in command. Or, on some days, Kirk is morose, going over torture survival tactics and mental health protocols. Nyota smiles, a faint touch on her lips, remembering how young and stubborn she was in her cadet reds before heading to her office, where she’ll have her own fan club to contend with.
Spock elects to take leave on New Vulcan instead of teaching. Nyota did not speak to him before his departure. She’s not sure she’ll ever speak to him in a non-professional capacity again. The science track cadets grumble enough at Spock’s absence that a petition starts up and is sent to the colony, urging him back for the second semester. The petition is ignored, and Nyota feels resentful of him, as if through this act he is choosing his duty to his people over his duty to Starfleet. It’s not a logical feeling, but she gave up on holding herself to the exacting Vulcan standards of logic long ago.
Montgomery’s mother dies in Dunfermline during the second semester, twenty-three years after going into remission for the first time. Before taking compassionate leave, Monty stays up all night writing page upon page of a eulogy, scribbling them out with expansive hash marks, always starting again on a fresh, blank sheet. Eventually he puts his pen down and rubs his hands over his face, letting out a low, broken moan. Nyota runs her hand through his thinning hair, sets her mouth against the quivering downward curve of his, and holds on to him as his grief crests and crashes. When the weekend comes, Nyota and Keenser hop a transport to Edinburgh and take the train to stand among the mourners as Montgomery delivers his disjointed, inadequate, utterly perfect eulogy.
After the stragglers have left, the vicar’s still there, and in front of God and Keenser and Monty’s grandfather and uncles and sisters and nieces and nephews, Nyota and Montgomery get married. She’s wearing mid-calf steel-toed boots and her dress uniform, he’s in his clan tartan, and it’s more than anything she could have dreamed of when she was small, playing dress-up with Bibi’s veil.
The senior staff and the core bridge crew all enlist for the second five-year mission. The Enterprise has been fitted with the latest in technological advancements. Apparently, this just means making everything on Nyota’s console smaller, her practiced hands fumbling at her controls. Spock is infuriatingly unflappable at the science station despite the upgrades, Chekov and Sulu are wide eyed admiring the shiny new helm, and when Nyota swivels her chair around, she finds Kirk fidgeting in the new, ergonomic Captain’s chair with a frown dragging her entire face downward. She catches Nyota’s eye and grins before grabbing her padd and sending a transmission: fuckers got rid of my hard-earned ass groove.
Over the next two years, Montgomery loses more hair, eleven crew members die in freak accidents and away mission debacles, McCoy and Chapel stop pretending, Sulu earns a medal for valor, Kirk beds every female (and one male) human and alien that could pass for aesthetically pleasing on away missions, Spock loses weight he couldn’t spare in the first place, and Nyota develops an algorithm that enables the software engineers to add the whistling language of the Krath’n’huli to the universal translator. When the news comes that she’s been invited to speak at the New Vulcan Science Academy on the subject, Kirk hugs her for the first time.
Being on the Enterprise is rarely tedious. Nyota spends her shifts performing her duties to the highest standard, often surpassing even her own lofty expectations when, say, Kirk is in trouble on a hostile planet. During her off duty hours, she finds herself often in Kirk’s company. They do frivolous, necessary things: reprogram replicators to spit out strange alcoholic drinks, talk about the state of Kirk’s latest lay’s bush, watch twenty-second century B-vids with their own running commentary. Neither of them make jokes about braiding each other’s hair, but Monty does, laughing, tugging out Nyota’s sensible ponytail and burying his nose in the resulting cascade. For long stretches of time, Nyota has a satisfying career, a surprising best friend, a devoted husband, and all the happiness she can stand. Then, Spock’s vaunted Vulcan controls, once unimpeachable, shatter.
-
Nyota has kept a near total ignorance of Spock’s personal life for the past several years. The thought of him is bitter in too many ways to keep up more than a passing professional acquaintanceship, so she hasn’t tried. The sight of him, however, is ubiquitous while they both work on the bridge, two members of the senior core crew. For the past few weeks, he’s been on edge, crackling with restless energy, his back a whipcord seeming ready to snap. He’s impossible to ignore when he gives curt responses bordering on sarcastic, he’s impossible to ignore when the fuse of his temper shortens, and he’s impossible to ignore when the Captain orders him off the bridge to speak with her and he goes, following her with a hateful flame blazing behind his eyes. Nyota suppresses a spine-wracking cringe at the look on his face before turning back to her console. She briefly considers tapping into the Captain’s comm device to monitor the conversation and make sure Kirk stays safe, but Kirk can take care of herself, and she wouldn’t appreciate the invasion of privacy anyway.
The bridge crew works silently and diligently through the remainder of alpha shift, each member too focused on their own consoles for the careful attention to duty to be genuine. Nyota knows that like her, they are staring through their stations, deliberating on the consequences of the imminent implosion of their command team, so long in coming. There will be no third mission, maybe they won’t even finish this one, and their makeshift family will be scattered across the galaxy like so much space detritus. Some of them will pursue careers on their own ships, enjoying the fruits of promotion, but there will be no recreating the dynamics of the Enterprise.
After shift, Nyota finds Kirk’s door locked and unresponsive to the keycode Kirk gave her. She can’t rustle her up on her comm or her padd. After a moment’s hesitation, she tries Spock’s door, and there’s no response, but Nyota’s built her career on her ears. Through the bulkheads she can hear them in there, crashing against furniture, each other, their conversation a low roar peppered with shouts. Moans. Nyota’s heartbeat loses its steady timekeeping and becomes a nervous stutter against her ribs. Breath quickening, Nyota reels backward and rushes to the turbolift, and the nine seconds it takes to get her to sickbay feel interminable and cruel.
Chapel has a sling on and McCoy is veritably foaming at the mouth when Nyota arrives panting in his office, nervous beads of sweat springing up along her hairline. McCoy’s eyes bug out under the high arch of one brow, his version of a welcome.
“Don’t you tell me you interrupted them,” he growls.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Nyota says. “I thought they were fighting, but… God, are they really-?”
McCoy’s lips twist in a humorless smile and he grunts.
‘“ Vulcan biology,’ he says. Vulcan biology broke Chapel’s arm and I’m expected to let Jamie go in there to-” He trails off, crossing his arms and turning his head away, shaking it as if to clear cobwebs. Chapel lays her good hand between his shoulder blades.
“You don’t ‘let’ Jamie do anything, Len,” she says in a low voice. “And my arm is barely fractured, so don’t start with the chivalrous Southern gentleman routine.”
McCoy sighs and nudges open the bottom drawer of his desk. He plucks out three glasses and lifts a bottle of bourbon in question. Nyota and Chapel nod, and the three of them huddle around his desk like it’s a fire on a cold night.
“Is she gonna be okay?” Nyota asks after they take their first sips and savor the burn and the silence.
“Amanda Grayson obviously survived it with Sarek, so James T. Kirk will get through it with Mr. Spock, too,” Chapel says when McCoy’s eye threatens to leave its socket altogether. His mouth contorts sourly.
“Sarek wasn’t so foolish as to let it get this bad before doing something about it! Sarek didn’t keep his doctor in the dark for years about an inevitability. Sarek didn’t break people’s arms when they offered him soup, and Sarek didn’t decide suicide was the answer instead of approaching a certain equally lovelorn starship captain about solving his little problem! Logical my ass!” McCoy slams back the bourbon, squeezing his eyes shut and growling in the aftermath.
“Can we back up and explain this to me? Or is there some kind of doctor-patient confidentiality thing going on? Which you’re still breaking just by hinting at it right now, I want to point out.” Nyota says.
McCoy waves a hand.
“Jamie said to tell you or you’d use some comm frequency to spy on them anyway.”
Nyota refuses to blush; Kirk knows her too well. A swell of affection for her Captain, her friend, burgeons inside her chest.
“So, what’s the deal? Suicide?”
McCoy scowls.
“Apparently, Vulcan males go through a seven-year mating cycle, and if they don’t get lucky they die. Spock was indulging on some nice, very logical denial until Jamie confined him to quarters and Chris brought him some soup. And… well.” He gestured to Chapel’s sling. “Goddamned hobgoblin. Thought his human half would keep him from losing his shit sure as any other Vulcan in the history of Vulcans. Just what in the hell was he thinking?”
“So… Spock’s in heat?”
“Something like that. We’re too far away from New Vulcan to find some suitable pointy-eared lady, and according to himself, only the Captain will do anyway. Some voodoo business about mating bonds and existing mind links and compatibility of the katra. So he went over all noble and locked himself in his quarters to die like a goddamned wounded animal! Who’s so chivalrous now?” More bourbon splashes into McCoy’s cup, only to disappear down his throat.
“And Jamie called his bullshit and hacked into his quarters.”
McCoy points at her, nodding once.
“Got it in one. A kewpie doll for the lady in red.”
“How long is this going to go on?”
McCoy’s face is a thundercloud. Chapel answers, “Oh, days, I’d imagine.” She gives a sly sideways smile at the doctor. “Maybe weeks.”
“You’re not funny, you know.”
Nyota swills her own drink idly. Maybe everything is changing. But instead of breaking under the consumptive tension between captain and first officer, maybe the crew will become the best versions of themselves under a command team united in love and purpose. Maybe they all get to keep their happiness, just for a little while longer, just until the mission ends. Nyota tries to think of it on Kirk’s terms, all her thwarted love finally justified, and not on Spock’s, who is, Nyota thinks now, only an automaton unworthy of Kirk’s tenacious attachment.
Montgomery serves as Acting Captain in Kirk’s and Spock’s joint absence. He’s not fond of command, much preferring the sleek metal innards of a warp engine to the nerve-wracking rigor of holding four hundred and fifty lives in his rough hands, but he does his duty without complaint. Back in their quarters at the end of Day Four, Nyota’s head pillowed on his chest, he’s running his fingers along the skin of her arm. She wonders aloud how much longer he’ll have to act as captain; this is the first snatch of time they’ve gotten alone since Vulcan biology sequestered their commanding officers away for an epic mating session, and she misses her husband.
“Dunno,” Monty answers. “But it’s a bit romantic, isn’t it?”
“Hmm?”
“The Captain and Mr. Spock.”
“I don’t think Spock is the romantic type. Actually, this is kind of just like him, take what he needs when it’s convenient for him, no romance involved. And when he’s done with you, pff.” She casts a hand out as if brushing junk off a table.
Monty catches that hand and brings it up to press his mouth into her palm.
“I know your heart’s not stone in there, love,” he says, linking their fingers and holding her hand over his heart. “You were so angry at him you never saw how he’s looked at her since… since they broke up. You’ve got to forgive him a bit.”
“Seriously? He looks at her like he owns her. Like a child who doesn’t want his favorite toy anymore, but doesn’t want anyone else to play with it either. Monty, I’m tired of that look.”
“Och, don’t get started on one of your ‘I hate Spock’ rants. And I don’t think that’s the look I’m talking about.”
Nyota shifts to face him, propping herself up to hover over him.
“What look then? I see him all the time on the bridge, and he’s decidedly lacking in soppy looks.”
Monty cups her face and draws her in for a slow, thorough kiss. She’s flush against his naked body, legs tangled in his, and they rest their foreheads together. His thumbs rub over her cheekbones, memorizing. When he pulls back to look into her eyes, his own are lit gold with desire and affection.
“It’s when he thinks no one’s looking,” he says. “He looks at her like I look at you.”
-
Kirk and Spock emerge two days later, back on the bridge as if nothing happened. But Spock’s mood is tempered, and Kirk moves with the slightest stiffness in her muscles. Nyota would be concerned if Kirk’s minute discomfort weren’t accompanied by a smug expression and that single filthy eyebrow wag she sent her when she entered the bridge right before shift.
So you’re gonna tell me, right? Nyota hits send. Nothing’s happened since shift began three hours ago, so she thinks it’s safe.
Until you can’t stand to hear any more, LT.
Nyota sneaks a glance at Spock sitting at the science station beside communications. He looks… the same as ever. Nyota vaguely remembers a time when she would drink in the sight of him, straightbacked and concentrating on his analyses. It seems so distant now, so asinine to have to study the man she loved in order to understand him at all. She sends another transmission, this time to Montgomery’s personal padd. His response several minutes later reads I love you too.
As shift ends, Kirk shares some meaningful looks with Spock before turning that wide grin on Nyota and jerking her head toward the turbolift and leading her to it. It pitches downward toward the officer’s decks, and Nyota bumps into Kirk’s side, but doesn’t make a move to get out of her personal space once the turbolift settles.
“You’re all right, right Jamie?”
The turbolift door slides open to an empty corridor, and Kirk slings an arm around Nyota’s neck, dragging her toward her quarters.
“I swear to every deity I never believed in, Uhura, I’ve never been better.”
Glasses clink as Kirk sets them out on her work table.
“What are we in the mood for?”
“I think this conversation should take place over basic beers.”
Kirk smirks and inputs the proper replication code. They’ve tinkered with it, but so far they haven’t been able to get it to produce anything other than a light, generic pilsner, which is fine for their current purposes. Kirk leans back in her chair and kicks her feet up onto the table, and she regards Nyota with a sort of amused admiration.
“So tell me how close you were to tapping Spock’s quarters,” she says, tilting her glass back into her open mouth.
“Three more hours,” Nyota answers. She props her elbows up on the table, resting her head in one hand as she looks at Kirk. Kirk is changed, the shadows gone from behind her eyes, her shoulders lacking their habitual line of tension. Nyota wonders how long she’s been carrying those things; so long that Nyota only notices them now that they’re gone.
“Jesus, I don’t think I could have taken three more hours. Anyway, we were done day before yesterday, but I needed a rest and some goddamn ointment,” Kirk says, laughing once and shaking her head. “Maybe I’ll be more prepared seven years from now.”
“What is this whole thing, Jamie? I mean, McCoy explained a little, but I don’t think I get it. At all. Seven years? Mating, for Christ’s sake?”
Kirk shrugs.
“I don’t think I get it either. But it was- It was really intense. I mean, he went absolutely batshit, and I was the only thing that could calm him down. He acted like I was… something precious. If we’re not careful, it’ll go to my head.”
Nyota snorts. “Insert comment about your already-swollen ego here, Kirk.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Kirk waves a hand. “No, it was- good. I feel like it was good, even though he’s totally embarrassed about it, and I’ll be walking bow-legged for the next week. I feel like anything I say right now will be a cliché. I just… we don’t have to be apart anymore, you know?”
“I’m having a hard time seeing how you could forgive him. He really treated you like shit, Jamie.”
Kirk puts her feet back on the floor and leans forward on her elbows. She wraps her hands around her glass. She takes a moment to fill her lungs to capacity, exhaling slow and even.
“When we were in his quarters,” she says, “doing our business, I felt him. Jesus, I mean, obviously I felt him, but I mean, we were together, in our minds. One person, one spirit, one body, just… together, in a total and complete way I can’t even describe right. It was… transcendent. And I knew his motives and his conflicts, and I just… there’s nothing to forgive, Uhura. He was… doing what he thought was best. In a really shitty way, without offering me the explanation I deserved, but it wasn’t malicious, and it wasn’t like, some judgment he made on me, which is how it felt, before.
“I wish- I wish we didn’t have to go through four years of hurting each other and being apart to get here, but. We’re here now, and I finally feel like, like I’ve arrived where I’m supposed to be, and I’m who I’m supposed to be, and I’m with who I’m supposed to be with, and I’m really- happy.” She lifts one shoulder in a shrug, her expression hesitant, as if Nyota will laugh uproariously at her admission. “Like I said, cliché.”
Nyota wants to pry. Nyota wants to know exactly what Spock’s motives were, and she wants pick them apart, analyzing them piece by piece like something tangible to be measured. She wants details and reports and explanations with footnotes, she wants Spock to earn the grace Kirk is bestowing upon him, she wants him to prove his worth to her. Instead, she pokes a code into the replicator, and it spits out what passes for cookies covered in a layer of chocolate. Not exactly beer food, but it’s what they like while they braid each other’s hair.
“I’ll try to understand,” she says, pushing the plate of cookies between them. “So, are you bondmates now?”
Kirk nods. “Yeah.” A laugh. “Jamie Kirk gets a shotgun wedding after all. Riverside would be proud.”
“Don’t let him pull his superior no-emotions Vulcan bullshit on you, anymore. Promise me.”
Kirk shifts, drawing her shoulders in defensively. She swallows down a few mouthfuls of replicated beer, and lively blue eyes meet Nyota’s over the rim of the glass.
“Ah, Uhura,” she says with a tiny smile, “you’re my favorite girl, always looking out for me. But seriously, me and Spock, we’re fine. We’re gonna be fine. I’m not saying we won’t have fights and shit, I mean, who doesn’t? But… I get him, you know? I mean I really get him, and… and we’re gonna be just fine. You can quit worrying, and you can, I don’t know, call a cease fire between you and him, or whatever you need to do to become civil again.”
“I call best friend rights to be suspicious and constantly give him the hairy eyeball for a period of five years.”
“I guess that’s fair.”
That’s as much satisfaction as she’s going to get on the subject, for now. Nyota programs herself another beer and kicks back, slouching in her chair and putting her feet up.
“So,” she says, giving Kirk a furrowed brow and downturned mouth: her serious face. “Let’s talk about what’s important. How was the sex?”
Kirk’s laugh echoes off the bulkheads.
-
After the third mission, the admiralty bangs a gavel and the Enterprise is retired permanently. She goes into dry dock where she was born, Kirk’s own dried up, cornhusk hometown. Cadets run simulations on her during their third years, and tourists pay 65 credits a pop to walk through the corridors and rooms where some of Nyota’s finest memories took place, oohing and aahing and never really comprehending. Nyota and Monty choose to raise their children in San Francisco, where Nyota lectures on xenolinguistics and experiments on the ever-evolving universal translator at the academy, and Monty holes up for days at a time tweaking warp cores and making the sleek new ships run faster and quieter and cleaner.
Almost twenty years after the establishment of the colony, Spock finally answers the call to return there to live and rebuild. New Vulcan has flourished in that time, but Spock’s people still face extinction, their birth rates low, their gene pool limited. At the outset, geneticists anticipated that birth defects would occur with increasing frequency after the third generation to be born on the colony. Amid outcry and many citations of opposing modes of logic, the elders began to encourage interspecial unions with Remans, Romulans, Terrans, Betazoids and Andorians. There are more combinations each time different planets send aid; Vulcans, for all their logic and suppression of emotion, fall easily in love with the aliens who come and add color to their stark and sandy way of life. There are successes and failures, xenophobic attacks on new families and formations of interspecial friendship foundations, and every reaction in between.
On visits to the city of Shri’hazukh to see her friends, Nyota notes that Jamie’s smile is echoed in her quarter-Vulcan children, and the happy flash of curved lips and pearly teeth is a common sight as people, Vulcan and otherwise, go about their business in the capital. Vulcans have found a measure of peace here, within themselves and amid the tumult of emotions that other races have brought to their growing colony. For the first time, Nyota believes that their lofty talk of IDIC is truly in practice.
Today, Nyota and Monty are late. Their shuttle was delayed, and the rest of the gang should be there already. When they arrive, Spock answers the door, a tiny girl with delicately pointed ears and a riot of black curls propped in the crook of one elbow. T’Mina squeals and offers a grin dotted with teeth, reaching out with chubby hands, and Spock allows himself the smallest smile.
“Nyota, Montgomery, boys. It is very pleasant to see you again.”
Nyota had given up on babying Spock’s stodgy sensibilities long ago, and now she wraps her arms around him and the rather adorable fruits of his last ponn farr, squeezing with more force than is necessary. T’Mina gurgles in protest, gasping out Nyota’s name until she lets go. Montgomery scoots past them into the welcoming air conditioning of the house, and Adam and Benjamin tear through the front hall calling out to Samek, a much more sedate little boy than Nyota’s own darling terrors.
Spock had failed to mention during the first agonizing plak tow that a Vulcan’s sperm at the height of his Time, as Spock liked to call it with a demure pout, was so powerful that it overcame the yearly contraceptive hypos and triggered ovulation almost instantly, and so Samek’s first years were spent on the Enterprise. He was soon joined by Monty and Nyota’s own Adam, Hannah Chapel-McCoy, and, everyone’s favorite surprise, Oksana Chekova Sulu, the result of a ‘gift’ from the Ormidians of Lorisivar VI. After T’Mina, Kirk got her tubes tied, finished out the final mission, and she and Spock both settled into teaching positions at the New Vulcan Science Academy.
“Sure I’d love to captain a ship again,” she’d said at the time, idly stroking the downy hair along T’Mina’s crown. “And I will, I think, like a science vessel or something. But I’m gonna be there for my kids, put salve on their scraped knees, read them bedtime stories, give them a hard time about their crushes. Space, the stars: they’ll be there after the kids grow up and can’t stand the sight of us anymore.”
Spock, Monty, McCoy, Chapel, Chekov and Sulu mill in the kitchen as Spock tends to the forthcoming meal. T’Mina doesn’t often let her father out of her sight, so there she stays as the adults catch up after years apart, talking Federation policy and low-down Starfleet gossip alike. Nyota kisses her hellos and asks appropriate questions about everyone’s respective careers, lets Chekov and Sulu coo at her belly, but soon she slips out in search of an unabashed ringing laugh, blonde hair, big hand gestures - her closest friend.
Nyota finds Kirk upstairs in Samek’s loft, surrounded by all the Enterprise babies now grown reedy and endearingly awkward, reenacting - exaggerating - the mission where she and Spock had to battle talking dinosaurs twenty times their size. Nyota leans in the doorway smiling as Kirk roars and the children (excepting Samek) shriek. Kirk makes gnashing noises, then bellows, “And you know what dinosaurs’ favorite food is? KIDS!”
She swoops down and grabs Benji, who is four and therefore still grabbable, swinging him up into the air and burying her face in his belly to blow a devastating raspberry. Benji squeals and clutches at Kirk’s hair, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She catches Nyota’s eye, face lighting and grin growing impossibly wider, and sets Benji back down.
“Samek, why don’t you go bother your father and get your friends some ice cream?” Kirk says. “Tell him I said one scoop was okay.”
Samek is a solemn little boy who holds Oksana’s hand as he leads the string of chattering kids downstairs. Facing Nyota fully, Kirk thrusts her thumb in their direction.
“Says he’s gonna marry her,” she says with a smirk.
“Chekov planning the wedding yet?”
“Better believe it, L.T.”
Then Nyota’s caught in a ferocious hug, breathing in the warm, clean scent of her former captain, the consuming happiness of this reunion a bright star flaring in the center of her chest. They whirl and laugh, locked together for long moments before they part.
“How is everything?” Kirk asks, her hands lingering at Nyota’s shoulders. “Making a new baby, I see. So pissed you didn’t tell me earlier, by the way.”
“I knew we were all gonna be here, so I wanted to surprise you. It’s a girl this time. I’m giving her four more months until eviction.”
Kirk makes an indistinct, happy sound and gathers her up in another short embrace.
“I fucking missed you, you know?” she says when she’s grinning down at her again.
Nyota only nods, feeling the strain of a smile gone on too long, but not caring. Kirk puts an arm around Nyota’s neck just like she used to, pulling her out of Samek’s loft. They catch up on all the frivolous, necessary things they miss out on, living on separate planets.
The urgency of their youth is gone, the Enterprise a clunky relic. They lead calm lives these days, their students marveling at them, disbelieving that their instructors were once the fiercest guardians of Federation space; they have passed into legend, into comfort and domesticity. The grand days of the Enterprise may have come and gone, but the bonds forged in her corridors, on every deck, in meeting rooms and mess halls, officer quarters and supply closets, are as infinite as space and unbreakable. Jamie Kirk is a gravitational force, and, almost twenty-five years after they first met, Nyota is content in her position as one satellite among many.
The End
Link to "Rebirth," in which Jamie breaks into Spock's quarters during the plak tow.