Nyota Did A Slow Swivel In Her Chair From The Comms Station, Her Back Needle Straight, Shoulders Back,

❛ oh, this guy’s hilarious. ❜

Livick, a new provisional science Lieutenant that had been assigned to the Enterprise from the USS Carlsbad, had seemed to be an exuberant welcome among the ensigns and cadet class crew; which wasn’t too far from Nyota’s mind and even she hadn’t been above the contagious energy a crewman brought. Currently Livick was ornating a small group of ensigns at his table, one of whom was a round, faced cheerful nurse Chekov had nurtured a fondness for over the better part of a few long haul warps and who seemed to have grown closer to their new Lieutenant; leaving her crewmate and, more importantly, her friend - a little soured. Maybe, what she suspected, even a little hurt.

Nyota was nothing if not a fiercely loyal friend.

“ Well you know what isn’t hilarious ? I heard his work is sloppy, late, not swept for banal errors. Also he eats french fries with mayo only - can you imagine ? No thank you. ” She spoke as though her branding of subversive disapproval was a solution rather than the band aide it really was, on what she feared was a bit of a bigger wound than all that. However, she was willing to weather it’s ache out in good company, food and drink.

“ So I say we order something fucking incredible in rebellion of Lieutenant Livick’s tragically bad taste .”

@fasciinating

I missed them so I drew them in the Klimt pose

conflictaverse . indie sam kirk . 18+ only . oc + crossover friendly . written by aj

Spock & Kirk

THE TINIEST DETAILS: CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT QUESTIONS

do they drive? if so, do they enjoy driving or do they hate it? or somewhere in between?

if they drive, where is their favorite location to drive to?

if they drive, do they own a vehicle? if so, what make and model?

what bumper stickers do they have on their car?

what paintings and/or posters are on their walls?

what is a song they listen to with the windows rolled down, turned all the way up, on the highway?

is there an artform they've always wanted to try (glassblowing, woodworking, painting, ect) but never have? if so, what about that artform speaks to them?

what time of day do they usually start getting sleepy?

do they catch a second wind? if so, what is their method for catching it (napping, drinking coffee, exercising, ect)?

are they a nap person? if so, how long are their naps? do they set a 20 minute timer and wake up before it? or set no timer and wake up in the middle of the night?

what is the most obscure book they've read?

what is a book that interested them so much they took it with them to the bathroom?

what did the air smell like during their childhood?

what is a core memory from their childhood that they look back on fondly and for comfort?

when was the last time they were held, and truly held, for several minutes? who was it with?

do they meditate? if not, have they ever tried? how did it go?

how many pennies and quarters do they have in their couch?

how dusty is their home? spotless, lived-in, dust bunny haven?

what is their favorite chocolate bar?

do they like their brownies fudgy or cakey? or not at all, and only want the crusts?

whats that one weird food combination that everyone else thinks is gross but they think is delicious?

where do they put their shoes when they come home from a long day?

after a vacation, do they immediately unpack or slowly retrieve items from their suitcase until its empty?

how often do they do self-reflection?

are they more afraid of being alone with themselves or with others?

have they ever had a near death experience? if so, what was it?

out of all the subjects in school, which was their favorite? which one did they excel at?

how many alarms do they have set on their phone? what is their alarm ringtone?

do they fart in front of other people? or do they hide their farts?

do they have to see any specialist doctors? if so, do they have a strong bond with their doctor or do they dislike them?

what is their favorite seasoning?

what is their favorite sauce?

how spicy is spicy for them? (pepper, jalepeno, ghost pepper, ect)

how long do they let the dishes go unwashed?

how much laundry do they accumulate before doing it?

what shampoo, conditioner, cologne/perfume and deodorant do they use?

------ TO THE STARS

⸻ 𝐻𝐴𝐼𝐿𝐼𝑁𝐺 𝐹𝑅𝐸𝑄𝑈𝐸𝑁𝐶𝐼𝐸𝑆 𝑂𝑃𝐸𝑁.

𝘱𝘭𝘰𝘵 𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯 ／ 𝘰𝘤 ＆ 𝘥𝘶𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘭𝘺 ／ 𝘢𝘶 ＆ 𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴 ／ 21+

N Y O T A  –  K A N

IT  FELT  ALMOST  DECADENT  WHEN  THEY  WERE  this close; pulled together by a ligature of the souls that was, by Nyota’s very limited life through the cosmos, incomparable to any of her experiences. These hallowed moments of ardency that bloomed between them like this – in the quiet of the dark with just distant and blinking stars to observe them – were necessary to remind Uhura how this had been one of the earliest intimacies of her heart. A venerated thing that she manifested, with him, out here in the wild yon of space. Spock lays flush against her so closely that she breathes in the timbre and words of his Vulkhansu so that it might cast out the polluted air left by fear’s hand; – before falling into him the way people fall into dreams. Legs tangling and twining around his with a renewed, albeit libertine, kind of vitality. Briefly her mind dwells on the velveteen soft of his mouth, the warmth of his hand splayed along her face, and then circles back to that intimate place in her heart, the sacred place where his name is carved into the ventricles and sinew. The place where she loves him. A nexus point so profound it spiders out through the rest of her being – ingratiating so deeply it reaches her at the atomic level. She’s lost to him in that moment, somewhere fixed in time, a plotted place where he might always return and there she would be, wrapped around him so tightly that it seemed like she might try to fuse with his skin, flood beneath it, live there with him until the universe returned them to stardust. To never be parted, to share a single, last breath. Perhaps not in this reality or universe, but maybe so in another. But for now, laying bare at the altar of Spock, she had him and he had her; an irrefutable and universal truth as it was written in that moment.

Because a few short months prior, Dorian  N I N E  showed her in brutal, real-time that the sum of any one being’s life is a collection of moments that can and most certainly will change from one to the next. It will happen without warning, without seemingly any rhyme or reason, and it will occur with savage and equally cruel indifference.  She holds him with that same, uncharacteristic tightness from only a little while ago, eyes shut. She’s in one of the Dorian escape pods vaulting to the surface of it’s planetary ocean, watching the nova-like explosion from the submerged city. She’s watching where they left Spock. Where he shoved her into a pod, tapping into some deep Vulcan logic of The One & The Many, while he turned away from the desperate pleading and protesting from his mate. 

Fear is insidious.

It bleeds.

The tips of her fingers [ though the nails are kept short and smooth at the edge ] dig hard into the muscle of his shoulders and back, cementing him against her, eyes held shut - tighter than what was necessary. The beating of her heart accelerates, but not to the tune of two amorous lovers, but in the way a rabbit’s heart beats when a fox is sniffing near the glenn.

“Spock,” his name is a hush she dares to speak against his skin, burying the sound in the crook of his neck.

There’s the familiar hand of fear crawling up the back of her throat, pulling back the words, covering her eyes to memories that were covered in the dust from over long, forgotten years. Shoved at the back, in a place where it does not want her to look. A place that held all the grief she was never permitted, because in the way they had been taken from her, the sound of it…

It was coated in fear.

It was a place she did not want to discover.

But discover she must.

Perhaps, not alone, however.

Nyota, with a great deal of reluctance, pulls back from him just enough so that they once again are looking at each other while alternately her hand slips over top of his, guiding it to lay flush against her face.

Spock was the help she needed.

Uhura couldn’t pretend any longer as though he weren’t – distantly she did wonder if it was less shirking the importance of how Spock could help and more an ulterior need to shield him from what lay beneath in the places she had buried Fear in her memory.

A tear, hot and glistening, rolls down against the ridge of his nose and splashes against the pillow – it wasn’t an easy thing to be the Communications Officer of Stafleet’s flagship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, pride herself for years and years on her ability to communicate in ways that far exceeded words, and yet here with a person to whom she trusted everything to implicity - she could not find any way to express to him the burden that clung to her bones.

This beast of burden. Of fear.

So she invited him to look. To see what she could not say, to know the place where words and any other means of expression had categorically failed her.

Nyota invited her mate to chase the devil from her heart.

@fasciinating

D I S C O V E R. THIS WAS A WORD WHICH INCITED from her fathomless ambition; Nyota Uhura had always wanted to be an explorer for the sake of brilliant and beautiful – discovery. And yet there are things that perhaps needn’t be discovered or explored; but should serve as caution to the rest. The consequence of going too far; to toe along the edges of where lingers the apotheosis of fear. The eldritch things that live in the dark parts between the stars – were such nightmares meant to be found? How far can malevolence be explored? And to what end? Nyota drew herself closer, chasing the warmth from him, again finding comfort in that familiar darkness, face pressed into the crook of his neck; clinging far tighter than what would be her conventional grip into his skin. In hushed, slow inhales and exhales she sidestepped Spock’s sentiment about discovery as the idea felt strange and tight in her chest, a concept that did not belong. Instead she followed the invisible equations he drew into her body, a great many she could not guess their beginnings, middles or ends, but she did catch patterns, numbers and the occasional order of operation; it was the secret she kept with his hands, had yet to ever say aloud her hypothesis to what he left etched into her skin. Briefly smiling into his neck, Nyota drew her leg high, sliding slowly through the middle of his – smooth skin against soft, black hair.

It was a feeling she wanted to chase.

But fear is insidious.

It bleeds.

Her hand, that was soft snaking a delicate line up his neck to the tip of his ear and back down again, finally stopped to rest against his chest, smoothing the hair idly with her fingers.

Fear bleeds – bleeding into the familiar darkness she found in the comfort of Spock. The dark of a vacant rip in the cosmos, a singularity of darkness - unquantifiable fear.

“Spock–” his name trembled in her mouth, “ . . . do you think fear is tangible? If it’s observable and quantifiable - couldn’t it be tangible? A sentient thing?”

The question itself sounded like nonsense, she knew it to be true, but there was a context that she couldn’t explain. It was how she knew fear was tangible; it was a cold hand that held sense at the back of her esophagus and reached down and polluted the air in her lungs with which to speak it.

Maybe Spock might draw an equation of numbers with which to unlock the words trapped in her throat.

@fasciinating

if looks could kill, it would have been us instead of him. - Pike

The transmission had been broken, but playing back the recording what felt like a loop of times that had the message laser burned into her memory; and after conferencing with her reporting officer and eventually Captain Pike – determining this a grave enough matter that further investigation proved warranted. The deep, subspace transmission Nyota had received while in the middle of her Gamma shift just the night prior, was the gathering of Klingon ships on a fourth and distant moon of a baron gas giant located on the most remote edges of Federation space.

What Nyota had not anticipated was assignment to Captain Pike’s covert away mission. Uhura’s Klingon was widely unmatched by most save for Klingons themselves, and she had also trained in several forms of martial arts and combat, because she found this a more useful application of her time at Starfleet Academy than aimless running and toning on machines and programs in a gym; however she has never had to exhibit the practical application of either.

Though she was Starfleet to her core and she believed in their ideals and she believed in her Captain; what she did not believe of herself to be true until this fateful mission was that she could take the life of another being. Naive was something she never was nor had she ever believed the possibility unrealistic, but given her chosen field and how fresh from the academy she’d been - never would she have guessed herself primed for such a task.

The Lieutenant’s Captain clearly felt otherwise.

This had given her both a sense of pride, and even more importantly a keen and staunch sense of duty, because she did not want to give Captain Pike a reason to think he may have misjudged the assessment of his comms officer.

The away team was small, only four, and had shuttled to the small outer moon while the Enterprise lay hidden on the other side of the planet, hidden from Klingon sensors by the large magnetic field surrounding the planet as a result of ongoing electrical and ion storms throughout the planet’s atmosphere. Conversely, it meant the away team would be temporarily cut from communications with the ship.

This had been functional, right up until it wasn’t.

What they had come to realize the Klingons had discovered, on this miniscule moon, was uncovered dilithium veins in ancient and entirely frost covered mountains and were covertly mining the crystals while taking advantage of the planet’s magnetic field distorting sensors on long range scans. Their mission parameters were clear; assessing Klingon operations, obtaining evidence to present to Starfleet high command, abscond back to the shuttle to rendezvous with the Enterprise. What no one’s knowledge allotted for was the Klingons having set black market Romulan traps armed with trilithium resin based explosives taking out the two other ensigns assigned to the away team. The Captain was able to dispatch three of the four Klingon patrolmen, but the fourth had gotten the drop on Pike, and a strange sense of both calm and urgency gripped her as tightly as Uhura gripped her phaser rifle; Nyota began to open fire with an adrenaline-fueled-accuracy that she did not yield from until the only one of the two moving was Captain Pike.

There was a suffocating quiet as she looked down at a now lifeless Klingon. Sorrow wasn’t the sensation she felt, but hollowness followed by an abstract sense of satisfaction knowing that feeling was an indicator to her that killing and death were not something she aligned with outside of the most extreme circumstances; and now Uhura saw clearly what those circumstances entailed. Nyota came unfroze from her existential reverie at the sound of Pike’s voice, and she knew the gallows-quip was to meant exactly for that.

The Lieutenant’s attention was back and honed, she repressed the preceding moments to be in the present one, duty sidestepped her Captain’s words and assessed him up and down in search of fatal injury;

“Captain,” her voice steady as she could manage, “ – are you alright? The shuttle is just over this hill, but we have to go now … they won’t let us leave alive, not when they know we’re with Starfleet.”

The Last Quarter Moon l Rami Ammoun