Ficlet: "Blue Stragglers" PG
Title: "Blue Stragglers"
Author: yahtzee63
Pairings: Spock/Uhura
Characters: See above.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: General for the film, set post-STXI.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Gossip aboard ship leads -- as it often does, with Spock -- to a discussion of astrophysics.
A/N: written for the schmoop_bingo prompt "Looking At The Stars." Spock quotes some Wikipedia, because astronomy is not my forte.
“Blue Stragglers”
People will talk.
Nyota had been familiar with this truism since long before her time at Starfleet Academy. She’d never let pettiness or gossip get to her much, even when she was a young girl, and the older and more accomplished she became, the less important such things seemed to be - until the Enterprise, and Spock.
At Starfleet Academy, they’d kept their relationship quiet to avoid any appearance of favoritism; on the NCC-1701, a few hundred people worked and lived together in close quarters, and would for years to come, so secrecy was futile. Nyota and Spock were not the type to be overly demonstrative in any case, but they were nonetheless known to be together within days of the start of their five-year mission.
That’s when the talk began.
Most people weren’t ugly; most people didn’t care all that much, because they were normal, mature sentients. But a few people did, and oh, the lies they could spin.
Nyota had slept her way to good grades at the Academy. Nyota had used her position as “Spock’s favorite” to get on the Enterprise - especially bitter, given that HE was the one who had deviated from protocol in his original attempt to assign her elsewhere. Nyota was only using him to get ahead.
There was scuttlebutt about Spock, too - that he intentionally favored her, that his respect for “logic” was therefore a joke - but the blame always seemed to settle on the woman, in scenarios like these. Another truism, more bitter than the last.
For herself, Nyota knew she could deal with it. No, it wasn’t easy, but she could hold her head high. Anybody who thought she didn’t have the skills was somebody who hadn’t seen her in action yet. Anybody who thought Spock’s logic was a farce was welcome to take him on in an argument any old time. The truth would out.
But she wasn’t sure whether Spock knew that.
Vulcan didn’t have a word for gossip. The language could delineate many shades of untruth and motive, but gossip either didn’t exist on a world that didn’t acknowledge emotion, or it had evolved into something else, something different enough to merit a unique word of its own. However he parsed it out in his mind, though, she knew he was thinking about it now - because the night before, a security officer reprimanded for returning from shore leave drunk on Romulan ale had apparently yelled at Spock for ten minutes in the transporter room (in front of at least a dozen other crewmembers) about what “everyone” thought of their relationship.
It would be just like Spock to decide her honor was more important than their relationship. To be overly threatened by an insult to his logic.
What Nyota didn’t know was whether he would end their romance in the name of “protecting” them both.
Originally she intended to address the subject with him only after he got off-duty; they were on different shifts this tenday, which made that difficult. Nyota hadn’t gotten to see him last night; it would be almost her bedtime before Spock would be free. But still she wanted to wait - to be wholly and entirely proper, to prove how little such things affected her. Vulcans, as a rule, were terrible at relationship conversations. Best to get this one started under circumstances Spock would see as appropriate.
As the hours clicked by, though, Nyota had to admit that she was more troubled than she’d like to be. Damn them: They’d finally gotten to her. Waiting wasn’t helping.
Finally, she decided waiting could go to hell. Spock was currently running analysis on a distant star cluster in the astronomy lab; while he was technically on-duty, it was not forbidden to briefly engage in social conversation during such periods. So Nyota threw herself together and walked down there.
The astronomy lab was one of the most beautiful places on the Enterprise; all the walls were designed as holographic projectors, which gave the illusion that the lab’s inhabitants were actually standing within the starfield being studied. Nyota stepped into a sea of blackness, stars all around. As the doors slid shut behind her, she thought she might easily have become disoriented were Spock not standing several feet in front of her, padd in hand, giving her a sense of place.
“Good evening, Nyota,” he said. “I am pleased you have come.”
He, too, must have realized they needed to hash this out. Or was he already planning on ending it with her for both their sakes, and grateful for a logical opportunity? She said only, “It’s good to see you.”
“I had wished to show you this star cluster’s unique properties. Most fascinating.”
Nyota couldn’t resist a small smile. “Of course.”
Spock punched a finger at his padd, and one star - hugely brilliant - seemed to zoom closer, bathing them both in blue-white light. “Thus far it is known only as JSIN47.”
Small lines of type swam in the space near the star. Though Nyota was no expert in this field, she had taken the core astronomy requirements and knew the mass of this star was almost off the charts. “Is it a hypergiant?”
“No. It is a blue straggler.”
That term must have been known to her once, but it had probably been buried beneath the sands of the thousands of other, more critical facts she’d absorbed at the Academy. “What’s a blue straggler? Remind me.”
“Blue stragglers are main sequence stars in open or globular clusters that are more luminous and bluer than stars at the main sequence turn-off point for the cluster,” Spock said. “Standard theories of stellar evolution hold that the position of a star on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram should be determined almost entirely by the initial mass of the star and its age. In a cluster, stars all formed at approximately the same time, and thus in an H-R diagram for a cluster, all stars should lie along a clearly defined curve set by the age of the cluster, with the positions of individual stars on that curve determined solely by their initial mass. With masses two to three times that of the rest of the main sequence cluster stars, blue stragglers seem to be exceptions to this rule. The resolution of this problem is likely related to interactions between two or more stars in the dense confines of the clusters in which blue stragglers are found.”
Nyota untangled this for herself. “So blue stragglers are exceptions to all the rules. They’re too large to fit in with standard theories of stellar evolution. Any explanation, Spock?”
“I subscribe to the most common theory, which holds that blue stragglers are, in fact, current or former binary stars that are in the process of merging or have already done so. The merger of two stars would create a single more massive star, potentially with a mass larger than that of stars at the main sequence turn-off point. While a star born with a mass larger than that of stars at the turn-off point would have already evolved off of the main sequence, a more massive star which formed via merger would not have evolved as quickly.”
Nyota nodded, interested but no more - until Spock gave her a look, and she began breaking down what he had said to its most basic form:
Some stars behave differently than all the others. And yet they’re still stars, on the same continuum as all the others, subject to the same rules. They evolved differently because they merged. Because two became one. And if they’d remained separate, their progress wouldn’t have been nearly as fast.
So much for Vulcans being terrible at relationship conversations; she, of all people, should've realized there could be more than one way to voice a truth.
“I understand,” she said slowly.
Spock simply turned back to his padd. “You were always a quick study at astronomy.” He gave her a quick look, one eyebrow arched, as a distant comet soared through the holographic sky behind him. “And in other matters as well.”
“Tonight, when you get off-duty, come by my cabin.”
“It will be in the middle of your sleep cycle.”
“Don’t wake me up, unless you feel - significantly motivated,” Nyota said. “But I’d like to see you when I get up in the morning, even if I don’t wake you either.”
In the earliest days of their relationship, Spock might have argued that this was illogical. Now, he simply nodded. Their union truly had evolved quickly.
Nyota left him then; no further words were necessary. Even after she walked into the bright hallways, it seemed to her that she was still afloat in a sea of stars.
END
Author: yahtzee63
Pairings: Spock/Uhura
Characters: See above.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: General for the film, set post-STXI.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Gossip aboard ship leads -- as it often does, with Spock -- to a discussion of astrophysics.
A/N: written for the schmoop_bingo prompt "Looking At The Stars." Spock quotes some Wikipedia, because astronomy is not my forte.
“Blue Stragglers”
People will talk.
Nyota had been familiar with this truism since long before her time at Starfleet Academy. She’d never let pettiness or gossip get to her much, even when she was a young girl, and the older and more accomplished she became, the less important such things seemed to be - until the Enterprise, and Spock.
At Starfleet Academy, they’d kept their relationship quiet to avoid any appearance of favoritism; on the NCC-1701, a few hundred people worked and lived together in close quarters, and would for years to come, so secrecy was futile. Nyota and Spock were not the type to be overly demonstrative in any case, but they were nonetheless known to be together within days of the start of their five-year mission.
That’s when the talk began.
Most people weren’t ugly; most people didn’t care all that much, because they were normal, mature sentients. But a few people did, and oh, the lies they could spin.
Nyota had slept her way to good grades at the Academy. Nyota had used her position as “Spock’s favorite” to get on the Enterprise - especially bitter, given that HE was the one who had deviated from protocol in his original attempt to assign her elsewhere. Nyota was only using him to get ahead.
There was scuttlebutt about Spock, too - that he intentionally favored her, that his respect for “logic” was therefore a joke - but the blame always seemed to settle on the woman, in scenarios like these. Another truism, more bitter than the last.
For herself, Nyota knew she could deal with it. No, it wasn’t easy, but she could hold her head high. Anybody who thought she didn’t have the skills was somebody who hadn’t seen her in action yet. Anybody who thought Spock’s logic was a farce was welcome to take him on in an argument any old time. The truth would out.
But she wasn’t sure whether Spock knew that.
Vulcan didn’t have a word for gossip. The language could delineate many shades of untruth and motive, but gossip either didn’t exist on a world that didn’t acknowledge emotion, or it had evolved into something else, something different enough to merit a unique word of its own. However he parsed it out in his mind, though, she knew he was thinking about it now - because the night before, a security officer reprimanded for returning from shore leave drunk on Romulan ale had apparently yelled at Spock for ten minutes in the transporter room (in front of at least a dozen other crewmembers) about what “everyone” thought of their relationship.
It would be just like Spock to decide her honor was more important than their relationship. To be overly threatened by an insult to his logic.
What Nyota didn’t know was whether he would end their romance in the name of “protecting” them both.
Originally she intended to address the subject with him only after he got off-duty; they were on different shifts this tenday, which made that difficult. Nyota hadn’t gotten to see him last night; it would be almost her bedtime before Spock would be free. But still she wanted to wait - to be wholly and entirely proper, to prove how little such things affected her. Vulcans, as a rule, were terrible at relationship conversations. Best to get this one started under circumstances Spock would see as appropriate.
As the hours clicked by, though, Nyota had to admit that she was more troubled than she’d like to be. Damn them: They’d finally gotten to her. Waiting wasn’t helping.
Finally, she decided waiting could go to hell. Spock was currently running analysis on a distant star cluster in the astronomy lab; while he was technically on-duty, it was not forbidden to briefly engage in social conversation during such periods. So Nyota threw herself together and walked down there.
The astronomy lab was one of the most beautiful places on the Enterprise; all the walls were designed as holographic projectors, which gave the illusion that the lab’s inhabitants were actually standing within the starfield being studied. Nyota stepped into a sea of blackness, stars all around. As the doors slid shut behind her, she thought she might easily have become disoriented were Spock not standing several feet in front of her, padd in hand, giving her a sense of place.
“Good evening, Nyota,” he said. “I am pleased you have come.”
He, too, must have realized they needed to hash this out. Or was he already planning on ending it with her for both their sakes, and grateful for a logical opportunity? She said only, “It’s good to see you.”
“I had wished to show you this star cluster’s unique properties. Most fascinating.”
Nyota couldn’t resist a small smile. “Of course.”
Spock punched a finger at his padd, and one star - hugely brilliant - seemed to zoom closer, bathing them both in blue-white light. “Thus far it is known only as JSIN47.”
Small lines of type swam in the space near the star. Though Nyota was no expert in this field, she had taken the core astronomy requirements and knew the mass of this star was almost off the charts. “Is it a hypergiant?”
“No. It is a blue straggler.”
That term must have been known to her once, but it had probably been buried beneath the sands of the thousands of other, more critical facts she’d absorbed at the Academy. “What’s a blue straggler? Remind me.”
“Blue stragglers are main sequence stars in open or globular clusters that are more luminous and bluer than stars at the main sequence turn-off point for the cluster,” Spock said. “Standard theories of stellar evolution hold that the position of a star on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram should be determined almost entirely by the initial mass of the star and its age. In a cluster, stars all formed at approximately the same time, and thus in an H-R diagram for a cluster, all stars should lie along a clearly defined curve set by the age of the cluster, with the positions of individual stars on that curve determined solely by their initial mass. With masses two to three times that of the rest of the main sequence cluster stars, blue stragglers seem to be exceptions to this rule. The resolution of this problem is likely related to interactions between two or more stars in the dense confines of the clusters in which blue stragglers are found.”
Nyota untangled this for herself. “So blue stragglers are exceptions to all the rules. They’re too large to fit in with standard theories of stellar evolution. Any explanation, Spock?”
“I subscribe to the most common theory, which holds that blue stragglers are, in fact, current or former binary stars that are in the process of merging or have already done so. The merger of two stars would create a single more massive star, potentially with a mass larger than that of stars at the main sequence turn-off point. While a star born with a mass larger than that of stars at the turn-off point would have already evolved off of the main sequence, a more massive star which formed via merger would not have evolved as quickly.”
Nyota nodded, interested but no more - until Spock gave her a look, and she began breaking down what he had said to its most basic form:
Some stars behave differently than all the others. And yet they’re still stars, on the same continuum as all the others, subject to the same rules. They evolved differently because they merged. Because two became one. And if they’d remained separate, their progress wouldn’t have been nearly as fast.
So much for Vulcans being terrible at relationship conversations; she, of all people, should've realized there could be more than one way to voice a truth.
“I understand,” she said slowly.
Spock simply turned back to his padd. “You were always a quick study at astronomy.” He gave her a quick look, one eyebrow arched, as a distant comet soared through the holographic sky behind him. “And in other matters as well.”
“Tonight, when you get off-duty, come by my cabin.”
“It will be in the middle of your sleep cycle.”
“Don’t wake me up, unless you feel - significantly motivated,” Nyota said. “But I’d like to see you when I get up in the morning, even if I don’t wake you either.”
In the earliest days of their relationship, Spock might have argued that this was illogical. Now, he simply nodded. Their union truly had evolved quickly.
Nyota left him then; no further words were necessary. Even after she walked into the bright hallways, it seemed to her that she was still afloat in a sea of stars.
END