Archive of Our Own

Nyota’s initial encounter with Jim Kirk ends in a bar fight, which feels like a sign of something, and the next time she sees him is on the shuttle, where he immediately starts drinking hard liquor out of a flask with some scruffy guy from Georgia who spends the flight loudly describing all the ways they might die in space. By the time the shuttle lands in San Francisco most of the other cadets are looking slightly green, and even Nyota is feeling on edge, but Kirk, who was the main audience for Georgia man’s lecture, looks totally unbothered and possibly even entertained by the prospect of dying painfully in the line of duty. Which, Nyota will realize later, should probably also have been a sign of something.

Once they’re at the Academy he’s just everywhere, in three of her five classes and four doors down in the dorms, talking too loud in the library and attempting to sweet-talk every female cadet and most of the male ones, too, with a remarkably high success rate. Nyota isn’t sure how much of that success is due to his own undeniable magnetism and how much is due to the allure of celebrity—everybody’s known he’s the Kelvin Baby since the beginning of their first class, when the professor called Kirk, James T and the whole lecture hall turned to stare at him. To a bunch of Starfleet Academy brats he’s basically Jesus. 

“If I have to hear Federation Hero George Kirk one more time,” Nyota complains to her roommate about a week into the semester, “I’m going to go insane.”

“You and me both, sister,” Kirk says from behind them in the lunch line. 

Nyota carefully doesn’t jump. “Don’t call me that.”

“Will you tell me your first name so I can call you that instead?”

“Absolutely not.” 

“Spoilsport,” he says, and turns to her roommate. “Gaila, right?”

“That’s me,” says Gaila, holding out her hand for an uncoordinated shake. “James Kirk?”

“Just Jim,” he says, and then, blatantly looking Gaila up and down: “You, though—you can call me whatever you like.”

“Stop flirting with my roommate!” 

“She doesn’t mind,” Kirk says. “Do you, Gaila?”

Gaila smiles coyly. “Not at all.”

“Okay, bye,” Nyota says, dropping out of the line and stalking away to her next class, although the effect is somewhat ruined by the knowledge that they’re in that class together and he’ll be sitting right behind her. He always sits in the third row, at least in every class that the two of them share. It’s an unfortunate coincidence that Nyota prefers the second. Sometimes she can feel his eyes on the back of her neck. It’s distracting. 

“You know you want in on this!” he calls after her, loud enough to turn heads.

Everything about Kirk is distracting. 

He laughs too loud like the world is a joke. He comes to class with his hair still damp and his collar unbuttoned, sometimes with hickeys on display. He’s always in a rush. He falls asleep in the library and in the dining hall. By the end of fall semester he’s hooked up with half the student body, who all peddle rumors like they’re moonlighting as gossip journalists, so depending on who you ask he might be terrible in bed, some kind of love god, mediocre but well-intentioned, a masochist, a sadist, secretly xenosexual, or half-Andorian with the dual genitalia to match. The Andorian thing gains popularity for a while due to his apparent immunity to alcohol poisoning despite drinking like a maniac every weekend—Andorians have two livers—but Kirk’s blood is undeniably red. He gets in a lot of fights, so within a few months of meeting him everybody’s seen him bleeding at least once. 

“And here I thought I was special,” Nyota says, the first time she’s out with classmates and Kirk ends up sprawled across their table. “Turns out you’ll take a hit for anybody.” 

He grins cross-eyed up at her. He’s missing a tooth. “You’re the only girl for me, baby,” he says, a little slurred, before the other guy hauls him up by the shirt collar and throws him into the jukebox. 

The jukebox is undamaged, other than a brief skipping of the record. And Kirk gets back up again, of course. He always does. He’s a big believer in the power of persistence, as evidenced by his unwavering attempts to get Nyota to like him.

Nyota does not like him. Nyota believes in persistence, too, and she’s even better at it than Kirk is, see university degree and valedictorian title and multiple published research articles for proof, thank you very much. See fluent in five languages and conversational in six more. See a lifetime working for a chance at the recognition that Kirk gets just by virtue of being alive.

Not that he uses it. For a while people assume that Kirk’s good grades are because of who his father is, but none of their instructors can stand him. He seems to mainly view the world as a series of hills worth dying on. Seminar classes with him are more like formal debates, and group simulations end in mutiny. Any accusations of favoritism stop being believable around the fourth time he’s thrown from a lecture hall for calling a professor an unrepeatable word.

“He was right, though,” says Gaila, who was in the class where it all went down. “There is no ethical justification for the Tarsus IV Massacre.” 

“I’m not disagreeing,” Nyota says, squinting out at the quad. Kirk’s on his knees in the center, painstakingly clipping the grass with nail scissors while Professor Ortiz yells from the shade. “But he probably should have thought about the consequences first.”

Kirk catches sight of them and shoots off a cocky half-salute, smile glinting in the sun. 

“I think he did think about them,” says Gaila. Nyota hums. “He’s very gallant, don’t you think?”

“He’s very something, all right.”

She runs into him, sweaty and grass-stained, three hours later on her way back to her dorm. He promptly attempts to talk her into showering together. “You wash my back, I’ll wash yours,” he says, and waggles his eyebrows at her until his roommate—McCoy, the grumpy doctor from the shuttle, who’s afraid of space but who’s apparently single-handedly revolutionizing Starfleet Medical’s triage procedures—drags him off to their room.

“You know where to find me!” Kirk calls as their door closes. “Dress code is none!”

He just never gives up. 

In October, he breaks the Academy record for most consecutive hours spent in the flight simulator, then re-breaks his own record four times in a row. In November they end up paired for an Ethics assignment and try so hard to outdo each other that their final paper is twice as long as everybody else’s; the professor gives them each 102% and Kirk calls her Phillipa Foot for two weeks. In December he dresses up as sexy Santa and talks half the bar into sitting on his lap. In January he eats poisonous mushrooms during a survival simulation, goes temporarily blind, and hikes nine kilometers to the pickup point with hearing alone. 

On Valentine’s Day he offers to buy her a coffee. Nyota has done nothing but turn him down as long as they’ve known each other, and by this point in time almost everybody knows that Cadet Nyota Uhura a) doesn’t date in general and b) refuses to date Jim Kirk specifically, but Kirk seems to thrive on rejection. 

“I don’t like coffee,” Nyota tells him, wondering if she can convince the customer ahead of her to let her cut in line. 

“Tea, then,” Kirk says, undeterred. “Ooh, or chai?”

“Chai is tea.”

“Wait, it is?”

Nyota rolls her eyes. “It’s the Hindi word for tea. Comes from the Chinese word chá.”

“Which means what?”

“Also tea.”

“So what’s masala chai mean?

“Mixed-spice tea. Now go away.”

He lasts about ten seconds before he’s tugging on her sleeve again. “So how do you say tea where you’re from? Is it chai there, too?”

“Do you even know where I’m from?”

“Kenya, right? Your name’s Swahili.” He looks vaguely offended at her raised eyebrow. “What? Even dumb hicks know how to look things up.”

Nyota sighs. “Yes, we say chai, too.” There’s much more she could tell him, about how you can practically trace the history of trade prior to First Contact by mapping out who says what, and about the 36 languages across the galaxy whose own word for tea is a false cognate with Earth Chinese, but he hasn’t earned the privilege. She clamps her jaw shut.

Kirk beams at her anyway. “Neat,” he says. 

They reach the order window and the girl behind the counter smiles at them both. “What can I get you two? Are you doing our Valentine’s Day two-for-one?”

“Sure are,” Kirk says cheerily. “Two large masala chais, please.”

Nyota chokes on her own spit. “What?” she says, but Kirk’s already finished paying, and her only options are to either stumble after him to the pickup window or hold up the line. 

“See?” He grins at her, smug, and leans against the wall. “I’m telling you. You’re the only one who can’t see it. ”

“I can’t stand you.” 

“Oh, come on, that can’t be true. What about that project we did together last semester? You said my contributions were ‘above satisfactory.’”

“Those peer evaluations were supposed to be private!” she says, flushing.

He shrugs. “Everybody needs a hobby.”

Nyota crosses her arms. “How did you know I was going to get masala chai?”

“You always get masala chai.”

“How do you know that?”

Kirk shrugs. “I pay attention.” 

“Creep,” she mutters. Why did he even offer to buy her coffee, then?

Their orders are set on the counter and Kirk hands hers over with a flourish. He takes a sip of his own. “Not bad,” he says, smacking his lips. 

Nyota huffs and takes a drink of her own. “I wouldn’t get it if it wasn’t good.” And it really is. There’s a reason she comes to this cafe to spend actual credits instead of using the free replicators on campus. This place doesn’t make it quite like her grandmother does, but it’s the closest she’s found so far, and on cold mornings like this one it always makes her miss home a little less. 

When she lowers her drink Kirk is smiling at her. She glowers at him from behind her cup. “What?” she barks.

“Will—“

“No, I still won’t go out with you.” 

“Damn.” He smiles ruefully. “You just love shooting me down, don’t you?”

“Everybody needs a hobby,” Nyota parrots. Kirk laughs. When she strides off back towards campus he doesn’t follow her, but later that week when she shows up to class there’s a still-steaming cardboard cup waiting at her usual seat and he’s in the row behind her with his feet kicked up, sipping an identical drink. He sees her squinting at him suspiciously and raises his cup in a toast. 

She doesn’t toast him back. But she doesn’t not drink it, either. It’s cold out today, after all.  

<^>

Nyota is on good terms with almost everyone but prioritizes academics to a degree that many find objectionable, so the only person she actually hangs out with on a regular basis is Gaila, who sleeps four feet away and so would be difficult to avoid even if Nyota wanted to. She would never want to. Gaila is a delight. Nyota didn’t enter the Academy with the intention of gaining a best friend, but one day she looks up and realizes that’s what they are.

Gaila notices her looking. “What’s up?”

“We should try to get assigned together,” Nyota says. “When we graduate.”

“I kind of thought that was already the plan,” says Gaila.

Nyota can’t recall ever talking about it before. “It is?”

“Well—yeah. If you want it to be.”

“Oh.” Nyota smiles. “That’s the plan, then.”

“That’s the plan,” Gaila agrees, and so it is. For three and a half years, Nyota falls asleep every night in the soft glow of Gaila’s padd and wakes up to her singing in the shower. 

She’s aware, in a distant sort of way, that some people think they’re sexually involved, but she doesn’t mind. It isn’t an unreasonable assumption—Gaila does kiss her on the cheek an awful lot, and Nyota does always seem to end their nights out by being cuddled in the wrong bed, and sharing a bathing place does make them the Orion equivalent of common-law married—and Nyota doesn’t date, anyway, so she’s hardly bothered that people might think she’s unavailable. She is unavailable. 

“Do you mind?” she asks Gaila once. 

Gaila laughs. “Do I mind people thinking I’m getting regular sex from a beautiful woman? No.”

“If people think you’re with me, it’ll make it harder for you to find someone.” Nyota doesn’t date, but for Gaila casual sex is like a hobby. Nyota would hate to keep her from it. But Gaila just laughs again.

“Honey,” she says, flashing white teeth, “I assure you I will never have a problem finding someone willing to sleep with me.”

She’s right, too.

All things considered, Gaila is far from the best roommate in the world; her side of the room is a mess, and she brings guys back to the dorm without warning Nyota ahead of time. Her alarm is too loud, and her curly orange hair gets everywhere. But the mess never crosses the invisible boundary between their beds and she always uses headphones when she listens to music. And she’s always willing to let Nyota in when she’s forgotten her keys—which happens far too often, because the skirted version of the cadet uniform that Nyota prefers doesn’t have pockets.

“You really should just wear the pants,” Gaila says every time Nyota calls her.

“I like skirts,” Nyota always says.

“Hmph,” Gaila says, judgemental. “I’ll be there soon.”

Sometimes she really does arrive within a minute or two. Sometimes she’s clear across campus or busy with a project, so Nyota sits in the hallway, back against the wall, and does homework with her padd balanced on her knees. But Gaila always comes home eventually. And she always opens the door.

<^>

Nyota’s not Command Track, which means that she doesn’t have to take the Kobayashi Maru and doesn’t really care about anybody else taking it, either, so she doesn’t hear about Kirk’s attempt until a good three days after it happens, basically eternity in Academy Gossip Standard Time. He failed, obviously. Everybody does, but according to her classmates he took it harder than most.

“He punched the console.”

“I heard he punched his navigator.”

“He kept asking to try again—”

“He was freaking out—”

“—was basically yelling—”

“He kept saying he could save them.”

For nearly a week the only thing Nyota hears about Kirk is that he’s not doing anything worth hearing about. It’s like all the wind has gone out of his sails—he doesn’t argue with any professors, doesn’t climb anything he’s not supposed to climb, doesn’t get involved in any scandalous affairs. He’s like a robot going through the motions. Then one day he’s himself again, feet kicked up on his desk and calling the nearest female student baby. Nobody seems to know exactly what happened during the test.

(“Professor Spock is the one who programs it,” Gaila offers. She nudges Nyota in the ribs. “Maybe you should go to his office hours and ask him.”

Nyota’s face grows hot. She’s had a small and unprofessional crush on Professor Spock since taking Advanced Vulcan way back in their first year. Gaila is the only person in the world who knows, and she never misses a chance to tease. 

“I’m sure he’d find it a pleasure,” Gaila continues, grinning. “I bet you could have a long and satisfying conversation—okay, okay, let go of my hair!”)

Kirk does nothing by halves; when he’s himself again he’s all the way himself. So Nyota isn’t all that surprised that Friday night when she finds him sprawled on the sidewalk a block from her second favorite bar, sporting a black eye and bloody nose that he’s unsuccessfully trying to staunch with his hands, smelling like a brewery with glass in his hair. 

“Fancy meeting you here,” he says, smiling drunkenly at her and clearly attempting to look up her skirt. 

Nyota wrinkles her nose. “What the hell happened to you?” 

“Oh…” His eyes unfocus. “I got in a fight.”

“Clearly. How?”

“He put a…a thing in her drink.” Kirk gestures vaguely. “So I smashed it. And he smashed his.” He laughs. “On my head.”

That explains the glass and the smell. “And then he punched you in the face?”

“No, he slammed me on the bar.” Kirk frowns. There’s blood all down his neck and chin. “A couple times, I think. I don’t know.”

“You’re probably concussed.” Nyota leans over to poke at the bridge of his crooked nose and he yelps. “And I think your nose is broken.”

“For sure,” Kirk agrees. She guesses he’s probably pretty familiar with how it feels by now. 

“You don’t sound very worried.”

“I’ve had worse,” he says, dismissive. He attempts to sit up with a hand against the sidewalk, misses, and lists over again. “Shit.”

“Definitely concussed.”

“Bones will fix it,” Kirk assures her. “He always does.”

“Bones” is McCoy, the aviophobe roommate. As far as Nyota can tell, he functions as both Kirk’s friend and his on-call physician. Or maybe they’re something other than friends, actually, it’s hard to tell—Kirk eats off McCoy’s plate and they’re basically attached at the hip, but Kirk also hooks up with half the student body and Nyota can’t imagine McCoy ever liking somebody that much. Either way, Kirk would probably be history by now if he didn’t have McCoy to patch him up all the time. 

McCoy’s not here tonight, though. Nyota sighs.

So much for her night out.

“Alright,” she says, holding out a hand. “Come on.”

He squints up at her. “What?”

“I’ll help you get home. Unless you want to spend the night on the curb?”

“Oh…No.”

“I didn’t think so. Come on, then.”

She pulls him to his feet and slides her arm around his ribs. He slings his arm around her neck with the ease of somebody who’s been in this position multiple times before.

His nose is still dripping. Nyota rifles in her purse.

“Put this up your nose.”

Kirk frowns blearily at her hand. “Is that…a tampon?”

“Yes, it is. Now put it up your nose. Not too far.”

“Bossy,” he mumbles, but he does as she says. “Smart.”

“Somebody has to be.” 

It’s only a few blocks back to campus, but it feels like it takes forever. Kirk’s surprisingly heavy for someone so skinny, and he keeps tripping over his own feet and hers. Every crack in the sidewalk might as well be an Olympic hurdle. 

“Why did you jump in like that?” Nyota asks, exasperated but also genuinely curious. Her arm is getting sore. “You had to know he might hit you.”

“Couldn’t do nothing.”

“Did it ever occur to you to, I don’t know, tell the bartender?”

“No,” he says honestly. 

Of course it didn’t. Idiot. “Well, I guess you won’t be doing that again.”

“I probably would,” he tells her. 

“You got the shit kicked out of you.”

Kirk makes a vague noise like that’s inconsequential. “Stopped her drinking it. ‘Sides,” he adds, before Nyota can say something about his concerning lack of self-preservation, “I got a pretty girl on my arm.” 

“You’re on my arm.”

He smiles at her, sleazy and lopsided. The glass in his hair glints in the streetlight, strangely beautiful. 

Nyota has to knock for at least three minutes before McCoy finally opens the door in pajama pants, yawning. “Wh—Oh, come on.”

“I brought you a patient,” Nyota says. 

“Bones!” Kirk says, delighted, making grabby hands. “I missed you.”

“I didn’t miss you,” McCoy grumbles, but he holds out his arms and lets Nyota transfer Kirk over all the same. “What happened this time?”

“Stopped a roofie in progress,” Nyota reports. “I found him on the sidewalk. I think he’s concussed. And his nose—”

“Jesus, kid, you broke it again?” 

“Had to,” Kirk says, swaying into him. 

McCoy sighs. “Yeah, I know you did.” He slings Kirk’s arm over his shoulder more securely and peers at his nose. “Is that a tampon?”

“Uh-huh.”

McCoy nods his approval. “Smart thinking.”

“Smart lady,” Kirk agrees, and attempts to wink at Nyota, although it doesn’t really work. 

McCoy grimaces at her as he maneuvers Kirk into their room. “Thanks, Uhura. And uh, sorry.”

Nyota shrugs, caught off guard by his apology and by his knowing her name. “Sure.”

“My face hurts,” Kirk complains.

“Serves you right,” McCoy shoots back. The door shuts behind them. The next time Nyota sees Kirk is in their shared lecture that Tuesday, by which point the ever-imaginative rumor mill is claiming that his bruised face is the result of either a Klingon threesome or some sort of Fight Club situation.

“I had a great time the other night,” he says. “Wanna do it again sometime?”

“Keep your voice down,” Nyota hisses, but it’s too late. By the time she sits down for dinner that night four people have asked her how he finally got her to crack. Her protests only make it worse. 

“The price we pay to rub wrists with celebrity,” Gaila drawls, talking with her mouth full. 

“Who is we?” Nyota stabs her casserole with more force than necessary. “Nobody’s talking about you. And it’s shoulders, by the way.”

“What?”

“The saying is rub shoulders, not rub wrists. Or some people say rub elbows.”

“Okay, well, now some people say rub wrists.”

Nyota rolls her eyes. “Uh-huh.”

There’s a clang across the dining hall then, and nobody seems very surprised to see that Kirk is the origin, having knocked a tray off the table while climbing up on top of it in order to argue with somebody more effectively, gesticulating furiously and clearly winning. Ten minutes later he’s off the table and on somebody else’s arm, all teeth and bright eyes and shameless flirting. He falls asleep in class that Thursday and smirks when their instructor calls him out, but Nyota sees him in the library that night studying with his hands in his hair just like she does, trying to press the material he missed into his head. His next fight ends when he bites the other guy’s ear half off, and then he avoids arrest by flirting with the cops until they let him go. He coos over Admiral Archer’s beagle. He leers at Nyota in the hallways. He punches a hole in the wall of the philosophy building. 

He’s a different person all the time. Nyota doesn’t know how he does it. She’s tried her whole life, but for better or worse she’s never been able to be anybody but herself. 

The rest of the semester goes by alright. Kirk scores two points higher than her on the midterm for their shared class, but she scores three points higher than him on the final. He tells her good job and they should get a drink to celebrate, and she tells him in your dreams, which turns out to be the right call because he spends part of that night running from the police after some couple in the suburbs catch him crawling on their roof. People say he did it for no reason, or as a dare, or to show off for the guy he ended up going home with, but a few people say they saw a cat in his arms before he started running, like maybe he climbed up to get it. Kirk won’t tell either way—he never does—but Nyota thinks of him with a tampon up his nose telling McCoy he had to help and knows which story she’d rather believe.

<^>

Spock sneaks up on her like Gaila did, an irreversible part of her life all at once. They are the picture of consummate professionalism until perhaps three days into her being his TA, when she gets the nerve to ask about his research on quantum entanglement and he not only speaks on it for nearly an hour but pulls over a whiteboard to draw her diagrams. His eyes light up when he speaks. He calls her curiosity commendable. The conversation drifts to other topics, string theory and her senior thesis and Vulcan versus human pedagogy in the musical arts. Nyota thinks she loves him by the time they finally leave the office late that night, hours after everyone else has gone home; she knows she loves him less than a week later, when she forgets her padd one night and returns in the morning to find it charging on the desk right next to his own, with the screen neatly wiped of fingerprints.

“It was the most logical course of action,” he explains. She smiles at him and says thank you. His ears turn green and her heart stutters in her chest.

They’re friends, then, in a way that she doesn’t think the Academy administration would be too pleased about. Talking while they work is probably fine, and meeting for breakfast to go over her thesis outline could be excused as him taking a more junior scholar under his wing, being a professional mentorship—which would be surprising, given that until Nyota came along he’d never gotten more than a 6/10 on his course evaluations—but once those breakfasts turn into a twice-weekly thing she knows they’re pushing a boundary. Professional mentors do not do the daily crossword with their mentees over Vulcan teas they refused to let the mentee split the cost of. They definitely don’t keep hair ties in their uniform pocket in case the mentee loses hers, or shyly present the mentee with rare original recordings of a now-dead language on her birthday. And mentees don’t usually catch themselves daydreaming about the mentor’s lecturing voice in the middle of class or having wet dreams about him at night. 

Which Nyota does. 

A lot.

Gaila thinks it’s the best thing ever. “I can’t believe you’re going to hook up with a professor before I do.”

“I’m not,” Nyota says, flushing. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s my friend.”

“I don’t see why that means you can’t sleep with him.” 

“He’s also my boss,” Nyota says, instead of getting into the unnecessary strict categories that humans use to define relationships. Gaila has a lot to say on the subject, and there are more pressing issues at hand. “And a professor, like you said. It’s against regulations.“

“Any guy who wouldn’t break the rules for you doesn’t deserve you in the first place. You’re totally worth a formal letter of reprimand.”

“He would lose his faculty posting and be transferred, actually,” Nyota says. “So a little worse than a reprimand. But I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Any time.” 

Cadet Nyota Uhura doesn’t date. Everybody knows that. She used to—she had boyfriends in secondary school and at university. They liked her because she was career-focused and driven and knew what she wanted. But that admiration only lasted until she spent too much time studying or stayed shut up in the lab all night or went out with classmates, and then they’d feel neglected and jealous and she’d get annoyed and it would end. By the time Nyota entered the Academy just the idea of being someone’s girlfriend kind of made her want to scream. She doesn’t want to be half of a whole or rearrange her life around somebody. She doesn’t want to belong to anybody but herself.

So she doesn’t date. But that September she spends six hours with Spock at the natural history museum under the guise of curriculum development, staring at him the whole time instead of at the exhibits. In October they watch a meteor shower from the roof of the linguistics building. In November they eat lunch together every day for a week. In December his mother sends him  recipes, so she goes to his apartment and they try to make pasta from scratch. 

(“Isn’t he supposed to be a genius?” Gaila asks, mouth full. ”How did he burn spaghetti sauce this bad?”

“Sorry. I distracted him.”

“Ha! I’m sure you did.”

“Shut up.”)

She doesn’t date. But she finds herself learning the basics of quantum physics so she can talk to Spock about his research. She introduces him to old American jazz and gets him hooked on Billie Holiday. She looks forward to work because work is where he is, and being with him always makes her happy even if they’re not doing anything. She thinks about him when he’s gone.

Being with Spock feels comfortable, easy, right. It feels like being with her best friend, except that she’s never wanted to get Gaila up against a wall and kiss her stupid. 

“Yep,” Gaila says decisively, when Nyota tells her this. “You’re in love, all right.” And she is.

Spock actually does end up breaking the rules for her, but only by thirteen minutes, kissing her in his office at 11:47 on the last night of the semester after three long hours grading final papers together. At 12:01 he says, with a green-flushed face, “It is permitted for me to ask now: Would you accompany me to dinner?” and Nyota, who by now is sitting on his desk with her legs around his waist and her hand up his shirt, can only drop her head to his chest and laugh. 

He always makes her laugh. It’s her favorite thing about him, aside from his intelligence and his kindness and how passionately he lectures and how he stands up straighter when he sees her and the way his eyes change when he’s amused and a million other things. The first time he gets a hand down her panties he says her wetness—natural lubricant, as he refers to it—is “fascinating,” explaining that for Vulcans it’s the male who self-lubricates, and then they get distracted discussing the differences between human and Vulcan reproductive organs and so they both get off like that, her hand in his slacks, Spock murmuring wetly about estrous cycles into the ticklish spot behind her ear. 

“Definitely in love,” Gaila says when Nyota comes home the morning after, smelling like Vulcan body wash.

Nyota throws a pillow at her, embarrassed and happy. “Shut up,” she says, and Gaila laughs, and it’s a little scary, that love is so easy, but Nyota thinks she can get used to it.

<^>

“You should be on my crew for the Kobayashi Maru again,” Kirk says in the library. 

“You should learn some manners,” Nyota responds, eyes still on her padd. 

“I have manners!” He sits on the table, knees blocking her view. He’s not even in uniform. “I just choose not to use them.” 

“That’s worse.”

“So will you do it?”

Nyota sighs. “Do what?”

“Be my comms officer! It’s like you’re not even listening.”

“I’d rather not be,” Nyota says tiredly. She sets down her padd. “I can’t believe you’re actually taking it again.”

(She was there for his second failed attempt—her Intro Aeronautics professor was offering extra credit for participating and she had nothing better to do, plus Kirk gave her twenty credits for it—but more importantly she accidentally stumbled upon and overheard the immediate aftermath: Kirk furious in the hallway behind the flight simulator and McCoy sounding exhausted, telling him to calm down.

“I just want to know why I lost.”

“Everyone loses. You know that.”

“What, so you don’t think I can do it?”

“I don’t think anyone can do it.”

“Bullshit. I can’t believe that. I want to try again.”

A sigh. “C’mon, Jim, you know there’s a waiting period. And it’s booked six months out.” 

“I don’t care. I’ll sneak in if I have to. I have to figure this out.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? To save the people on the ship!”

“Jim—”

“There’s gotta be a way to get past the Klingons,” Kirk continued, sounding like he was pacing. “I just have to figure it out. Then I can get to the ship and save them. They could—”

“Jim,” said McCoy again, harsher. And then, uncharacteristically gentle: “They’re not real.”

A long silence. A shaky wet inhale like someone was about to cry. Nyota slipped away as quietly as possible and didn’t tell anyone about what she’d heard, not even Gaila.)

“You know what they say,” he tells her. “Third time’s the charm.”

“You know,” Nyota says, “they also say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for different results. You’re not going to beat it.”

“Oh, come on. You’re just saying that because nobody ever has.”

“Shh,” says somebody at one of the other tables. Nyota hunches down in her seat, face burning. 

“Yes,” she says, through her teeth. “No one’s ever beaten it. Because it’s unbeatable.”

“Sure,” he says easily, “but I’m gonna. And I want you there.”

Nyota squints up at him skeptically. “Why?”

“To be my comms officer! I just said that!”

“Shh!” says the same person again. Kirk ignores them.  

“No,“ Nyota says, lower, “why me?”

“Oh. Well, you’re the best in your division.” Which is true—her grades are excellent and she’s made enormous contributions to her field—but she didn’t think Kirk was paying enough attention to know any of that. Hardly anybody does. “Besides,” he adds, “we’re friends.”

“We are not friends.”

“Okay, fine, colleagues, then. Peers. Whatever. My point is we have a long and storied history.” He catches sight of her hands. “Oh, hey, I like your nails.”

“Thank you,” Nyota says, suspicious. 

“You could rake them down my back later if you—” 

She throws her stylus at his head. “You’re the worst.”

“This is a library,” says the librarian at the desk. Nyota waves in apology, cringing. Three and a half years of impeccable library etiquette and Kirk’s flushing her reputation down the drain.

“This is why we’re not friends,” she hisses at him.

Kirk hands her stylus back, rubbing the side of his head. “Okay, fair enough. Ow. But you should still be my comms officer.” She scowls. He bats his eyelashes at her. “C’mon, Uhura. One more time?”

Nyota sighs. “And when you fail? Then what will you do?”

“Try again,” says Kirk, like it’s obvious. Maybe it is, to him. He puts his hands together, pleading. “C’mon, Uhura. Please? Please? Pleeeeaaa—“

“Yes, god, whatever,” she snaps, and he whoops and slaps the table and then they both get kicked out. 

Nyota keeps her word, though, even after Gaila tries to hide Kirk under her bed and he sees her in her underwear and she throws him half-naked out into the hallway. She shows up to take that unbeatable test, which he beats, and she shows up to the academic dishonesty hearing, where Spock says the name George Kirk in a voice that makes Nyota’s insides curl, and then there’s a distress call from Vulcan and several hundred emergency authorizations for active duty, and Gaila gets put on the Farragut and Nyota talks her way off the Farragut, and then a lightning storm in space, and then—