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fiercelydreamedSome time last summer, shaenie and I hit a point where we started writing nearly anything we could think of, just to get ourselves writing again. One of the sandboxes we jumped into was Star Trek XI/Reboot, where shaenie came up with the ingredients for a fairly epic bodyswap fic, half from Kirk's POV, half from Uhura's. We both got sucked into other projects in the interim, so the early scenes have been sitting untouched in googledocs for the last few months. I felt the urge to post one of them here, for my entertainment and hopefully yours, and she gave me the go-ahead. We may or may not finish it eventually -- it's built on some damn cool scaffolding, but boy howdy would it be long -- but it's us, so who knows.
(Totally arbitrary) title: First Impressions; or, You: 1; This Guy: 0. [excerpt]
Details: STXI/Reboot/whatever we're calling it, Nyota-POV. Contains references to Spock/Uhura but is basically gen for this scene. ~4,300 words.
Summary: Nyota at bat.
Notes: The story takes place within the first year after the events of the movie. It opens with Kirk, Uhura, Spock, and Bones beaming back from a fairly uneventful mission and arriving bodyswapped -- Kirk traded with Uhura, and Spock with Bones. Medical sticks them into quarantined observation, where they have nothing to do but be varying degrees of freaked out and try with varying degrees of success not to strangle Kirk (who is incapable of killing time unobtrusively). Closing in on the second day of that, Scotty radios from the bridge to report that a really persnickety Romulan on the other side of the Neutral Zone is demanding to speak to Kirk and threatening to make it into A Thing if they won't let him. Uhura steps up to the plate.
*
They dispatch someone to Jim's quarters to get her a clean uniform. Nyota negotiates with M'Benga to spend the few minutes' wait at the console in Leonard's office, conferring with Lt. Herrera about the communications with the Romulans thus far. She isn't sure what the source of the medical team's reluctance is – whether they're still worried that the four of them may be under hostile influence, ready to stage a coup as soon as they can get access to anything more complicated than a tricorder and PADD. Maybe the vigilance of the last thirty-eight hours is just a hard habit to break. In the end, she persuades them to disable all functions but the audio channel with Herrera, which is all she really needs anyway.
The briefing on the contact with the Bird-of-Prey is short but valuable. But at this point, she would've done just about anything to get four minutes in a room by herself.
By the time she gets changed and takes the turbolift up to the bridge, Spock, Leonard and Jim have already left the medical bay. She spends the few seconds' ride up hoping that this means everyone's gotten the stunned ogling out of their systems. The doors open, and it's clear that they haven't.
"It's like they've never seen you in a pair of pants before," Jim says by way of a greeting. Nyota pauses (under the guise of surveying the bridge) long enough to weather the surge of dislocation that hits her at the sight of herself lounging against the wall to the left of the view screen, hands shoved in the pockets of one of her pants uniforms in a way that looks casual and almost definitely means Jim's still put off by how he has to cross her arms over her ribs instead of over his chest. Hikaru, seated nearly in arm's reach, is intently examining everywhere that Nyota's body is not.
Jim's smirk is almost completely undistorted by her own features. Unnerved, she rolls her eyes and heads for the captain's chair. The entire bridge crew tracks her as she walks, as do Leonard (leaning on the railing on the far side of the bridge) and Spock (positioned to the right of the view screen, straight-backed with his hands at his sides, only his eyes moving).
In front of the chair, she stops, turns, squares off toward the view screen and takes a deep breath. In Jim's broad shoulders, with the downward slope of the bridge laid in front of her, it's like she's seven feet tall and three and a half feet wide. Without doing anything, she can suddenly feel the power of this body and not just her own clumsiness, even as a nervous sweat breaks out over her borrowed skin. Is Jim nervous like this every time they're on alert? Or is this body just sweaty?
Jim, Spock, and Leonard, stationed at the bridge's periphery in their blacks, are somehow far more conspicuous than the rest of the crew in their primary colors. They look like technicians who've wandered onto a stage during a performance.
"Wait," she says, though what she'd opened her mouth to say was on screen. "The visual on the communications so far – are they seeing the whole bridge?"
"The first two, audio only, this last exchange, yes," Pavel answers before Marcos can get past a stammer. If she'd had to put credits on who would be the fastest to produce a straightforward answer, Pavel's would not have been the name that sprang to mind. She feels the uncharacteristic desire to hug the kid, and immediately squashes it.
"What are they showing us?" she asks him. The tires-on-gravel rumble of Jim's voice resonates without any effort on her part.
Pavel frowns a little. "Only the Sub-Commander."
Spock and Jim both swing their heads up at this. Jim is frowning, which etches strange lines that Nyota's not sure she's ever seen on her own face. She catches their eyes quickly and nods once: it's weird behavior for a Romulan in this situation. Romulans only use the cropped screen for interactions they deem personal -- negotiations, which require enemies to offer assurance of individual honor, or threats meant to target the person qua person on the other end of the screen. More general diplomacy or threats of military force are almost always given with the screen set to the widest angle, so the viewer can appreciate the full might of the Bird-of-Prey and, by extension, the Romulan empire.
"Keep the transmission at its current parameters," she tells Herrera, turning just a little to the right. "Bones, get down in front." Leonard's eyebrows wing up nearly up to Spock's bangs -- she fights down a twitch of discomfort -- but he tosses off a salute as he moves down the ramp and out of the camera's line of sight. She can hear the pulse beating loudly in Jim's chest.
"You got a plan, 'Captain?'" Jim lays into the velar plosive to telegraph some sarcasm, but he steps away from the wall, his hands pulling themselves free of his pockets. Like all she has to do is say the word and he'll take over, no questions asked.
Jackass really isn't sure she can do this.
Rather than snapping out any of the obvious cracks (wait, you're supposed to have one first?), she gives him a couple of seconds of what Gaila called the go fall in a hole glare. Then she drops down into the chair, kicks Jim's long thighs out until they're bumping against the armrests, shifts her ass forward and to one side so she's half-propped on an elbow, and flicks two fingers back over her shoulder in Herrera's direction.
Jim gapes, and Nyota drawls, "On screen."
The visual feed blots the starscape out. She gets a fraction of a second's glimpse of the Romulan at the other end half-twisted to look at something off-screen before the open feed jars him out of what he's doing, and he jerks around to stare at her, narrow-eyed. No, not at her. At Kirk; it's Kirk who he's been waiting to see, and Kirk who he does see now. For a moment, she's locked into the slumped posture she's adopted, some long-buried hind-brain response; don't move or the predator will see you. No sooner does it register than she's pissed at herself for even feeling it.
"Jim Kirk," she calls, pitching it to carry and hearing, to her immense satisfaction, that brass-bell clarity Jim gets when he's really getting ready to antagonize you. "My crew says you were asking for me, Commander ..."
The Romulan's scowl twitches deeper, and he draws himself up haughtily. "I am Sub-Commander Purek," he snaps, nettled by the double insult: that Kirk either didn't check or didn't remember the name he'd given, and that now he's had to demote himself to correct her.
Niiiiice, Jim mouths broadly, nodding, and holds up both hands, one shaping an "O", the other with slim brown index finger extended upward. It's child's play to translate: you, 1; this guy, 0. There's a strong urge to smirk that she doesn't entirely smother.
Meanwhile, Purek's noticed her eyes wandering, and has clearly decided that the best way to regain the upper hand is by getting snippy. "Your crew took quite a while to locate you, Captain. On a Romulan ship, such dereliction of duty would not go unpunished."
On opposite sides of the viewscreen, Leonard and Jim both roll their eyes so obviously that even with her own eyes front she can't miss it. The fact that it's her face and Spock's doing it is profoundly bizarre, and Hikaru drops his head fast to study the conn in a way that probably means he's swallowing a slightly hysterical giggle.
"Oh, well, you know how it is," she says, shifting her weight to the other side. "Delegation is an important part of leadership, increases efficient operations, reserves command staff time for vital decisions ..." She opens and closes the fingers of one hand against the thumb as the words trail off, that classic Terran signifier, blah blah blah.
Purek's lip twitches. Another cultural similarity between Romulans and Vulcans: both have a very small and limited repertoire of manual gesture, relying more on body language to augment verbal communication. Use a non-Standard gesture with a Vulcan, and they will either seek to clarify its significance or decide the probability that it carries vital semantic content is too low to warrant inquiry. Use a non-Standard gesture with a Romulan, and they assume it's synonymous with flipping them off.
She knows this, of course. She's also positive that Jim knows it too.
Down in front, Spock's gaze shifts rapidly between the viewscreen and her position at the center of the bridge. Alternating flickers of wariness and concentration swim across his face, like he's having a hard time fathoming why she's deemed this an appropriate time to riff on the third seminar of Introduction to Command Decision-Making. She can't tell whether he knows Leonard's features aren't holding a consistent mask of impassivity.
"So, does Romulus have a message to convey to the Federation?" she asks. Jim's leg wants to jiggle. She doesn't let it. "Or did you just need to borrow a cup of sugar?" Purposeful use of colloquialisms in cross-cultural communication is considered insulting pretty much regardless of the parties involved.
"If the Empire had a message, Captain, you would be the last person I would trust to carry it," Purek sneers, but he leans in instead of pulling back, wrong body language entirely. He's hiding something. And the use of the first person, that's wrong too. If that were the Empire's condemnation, he'd have said we.
Jim waves an arm over his head down front; she shifts the angles of her legs toward him, to show she's noticed, and he mimes a shove. Push him.
"Then tell me what we're doing here, Sub-Commander," she replies, and cocks her head to the left to tilt the question towards Jim.
Apparently this puts them back on the script. Purek settles himself more squarely in his chair and tilts his chin up, which is Romulan for you're about to get told. "On Romulus, we have a saying, that a wise leader will travel any distance to look a great enemy, a great traitor, or a great failure in the face. That way, you will always know his features, and also his mistakes."
Jim is now twisted halfway around to stare at the screen in disgust. It rhymes? he mouths. Leonard and Spock give an eerily similar twitch of amusement.
Nyota kicks one leg over to rest on the other knee and beams at the viewscreen. She's starting to see why Jim likes this part so much. "Aw, that's so sweet of you," she says. "And here nobody'd called me great since last night." Somewhere behind her Scotty makes a choking sound, and Jim pulls a face and mimes a rimshot. Opposite him, Leonard grins at her -- she sees Spock blink at the facial contortions this involves, and on Leonard's features Spock's expression is nearly alarmed -- and holds up both of Spock's hands: you, 1; Jim, 0. Constance and Ji'Ltt'O at environmental are gaping at them both.
Purek's scowl deepens, but she doesn't want to wait for him to come up with a response, or notice Kirk's crew is getting unruly. "So you're a Sub-commander, huh?" She swings her foot once, idly. "That's kind of unusual, isn't it, putting a Sub-commander in charge of a Bird-of-Prey? In the Federation, if you're going to give a guy a ship, usually you'd just go ahead and promote him."
Jim's eyes brighten, and he spins his index fingers in a rolling motion in front of his chest (narrowly missing it, in fact), signaling yeah, good, keep going. "Recruitment not what it used to be?" She flip-flops a hand. "Getting a little short-staffed?"
"The might of the Romulan Empire is far greater than you can imagine!" Purek blusters, slapping one palm down on the console in front of him. "If you knew the resources at our disposal, you would--" He snaps his mouth shut, but he's still fuming.
Spock is staring at the screen with keen attention. Jim's hands are circling more wildly now, and he's nodding so hard that it sets the long tail of her hair bouncing. Nyota angles forward so she's leaning over Jim's crossed legs. Purek looks like he's right on the edge. If she can push him just a little farther, without offering an insult that Romulan standards would deem actionable, she can goad him into spilling something. Adrenaline kicks in, like she's dropping from mark to set on the starting block, but she can still feel Jim's heart beating steady and even. If this is what it's like to live inside his body, then his fight-or-flight response is pretty damn sophisticated.
"You know what I think?" she muses conspiratorially, running one hand over her chin -- and suppressing a twitch when her fingers hit stubble. "I think they've got you wandering the edge of the Neutral Zone with nothing to do but make sure none of us sneaks a toe over. You're bored, your crew's not real thrilled either, and you figured hey, why not kill an hour taunting the other guy. But I don't think you've got a mission, I don't think you've got some trick that we don't know about. There's nothing for a couple of parsecs around you, and if you had another ship out there, they'd have shown up so they could call me names t--"
The feed goes black all of a sudden. "Herrera," she says, jerking up to a straighter stance, as Jim calls, "What the hell?"
"I don't know," Herrera says, hands flying over the touch-screen, "the computer thinks the channel's still open--"
The visual flips back on, but now it presents the bridge of the Bird-of-Prey, all the officers at their stations, manipulating the controls without ever dropping their eyes for more than a second or two. Purek's nowhere in sight. Instead, there's a scarred woman standing in the middle of the bridge, her hair streaked with gray, face as hawkish and severe as her uniform.
"I am Commander Delar of the Morath," she declares, and lifts her chin a half-inch in unmistakable challenge. Her cold regard is like a bucket of water to the face.
"Captain James Tiberius Kirk, U.S.S. Enterprise," Nyota replies, shoulders squaring.
Up front, Jim goes suddenly tense, face swinging around so that her own eyes are staring up at her. Everyone she can see has gone rigid -- even Spock's found an extra inch of height somewhere in Leonard's spine -- but they've all been tense since Delar came on screen. Jim didn't go tense until Nyota answered her.
Sweat springs out in sharp prickles down her back. Clearly she made a wrong move just now. Should Kirk have stood? No, she thinks, mind racing, that would have been a disaster -- you stand for superior officers, do that and you give up the symbolic dominance without a fight. Not cocky enough, maybe, so she tips her own head and offers up her best version of Kirk's insubordinate closed-lip smile before adding, "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Especially since Sub-Commander Purek was such a peach."
"Their weapons and shields are still off-line," Pavel murmurs quickly, in a voice low enough that the feed won't catch it.
Delar doesn't even blink, just continues to stare Nyota -- Kirk, she reminds herself, you're not you, you're Kirk -- down like she's looking at a small dog with its hackles raised. Not a major cause for alarm, but if you move you might spook it and it might scuff up your boots going for an ankle. "The Sub-Commander is no longer your concern." She lets the possible conclusions of that statement hang there, implicit.
Down in front, Jim has slipped quickly around the console so that he's right up against the edge of the viewscreen, where he won't be on the feed and where she can see him clearly without needing to shift her gaze in his direction. He pushes one flattened palm out and down from the center of his chest, easy, take it down a notch, then swings his arm up in what she recognizes as a basic defensive parry.
She arches an eyebrow, pushes her lower lip into her upper to indicate disinterested surprise. "I wasn't concerned."
"You have found yourself at a remote edge of Federation space, Captain," Delar observes. Spock's taken half a step out from the wall, angling Leonard's body toward the screen, and his eyes are flickering in rapid pattern between Delar, Jim, and Nyota. As far as Nyota can tell, Leonard hasn't moved. "The nearest Federation settlement is what, twenty light years away? It would seem that you are quite alone out there."
Jim holds both hands up, palms facing her, and brings them up and back in a smooth, tightly controlled arc. Nyota dips her head pleasantly. "So it would seem."
"The fleet tells us this is a common occurrence for you in recent months, surveying the Neutral Zone." Delar circles around behind her crew, letting her gaze skim over the screens at their stations as she moves. It's an easy, smooth movement, the kind that the Romulans sometimes drop into the same way that Vulcans will drop into complete stillness. Find a pattern and hold it; it's a masking technique. "Then again, so many of your ships were destroyed in the Battle of Vulcan. So many experienced officers lost. The security of your borders must be a significant concern."
Nyota turns toward Scotty midway through this speech, arching her eyebrows with an expression of casual interest. The far edge of the bridge is off the visual feed, which is why she's picked it. Telo, at the secondary engineering station, notices her shift in focus and kicks Scotty in the shin. "Wh--" he starts, jerking around, and Nyota smiles and nods acknowledgment as though he's just finished giving her some interesting but routine update.
"Exploration, Commander. It's what the Enterprise was built for," Nyota replies, starting the sentence before she turns to catch Delar's eyes again. "But I'm touched that you were worried about us. I'll make sure to relay your concern back to Starfleet Command."
Sometime during Nyota's faked inattention, Delar's finished her pass along the bridge and come back to a stop front and center, so that she's nearly two-thirds the height of the feed, larger than life size, and significantly closer than when she started. "Interesting. And yet I don't see your half-Vulcan science officer," she comments, sounding slightly bored. Spock jerks, hands jumping almost an inch at his sides before he can stop them. "Has he resigned his post? How ... disloyal. Then again, I suppose his species needs all the survivors they can find right now, however diluted." She smiles suddenly, sharp as a knife. "I hear that they've organized a breeding farm."
Blood sends a rush of sudden heat through her, but before the flush can hit her, the anger's washed back by the sight of Spock -- Spock -- making a wild lunge toward the conn, Leonard's features contorted with fury. Pavel's chin snaps up, eyes wide, but Leonard darts forward with the speed of Vulcan reflexes and whirls Spock back against the wall just before he can cross into range of the visual feed. Then Jim's crossing the bridge, someone's PADD in one hand and a slow, easy stride as he mounts the ramp, radiating presence in a way that draws everyone's eyes back to him as he crosses to the Captain's chair and presents the PADD to Nyota. Heart pounding, Nyota stares up at her own face, and Jim smiles politely and bends to tap the screen twice as though calling up a particular display, then turns and walks with a slightly hipshot gait off to the side of the bridge.
When Nyota looks down, all that's on the screen is the central file tree. For a fraction of a second, she can't think what Jim's trying to tell her, and her thoughts take a steep dip towards panic. Then it's obvious.
The PADD isn't meant to tell her anything. It's just a pretext for walking across the feed, drawing Delar's and the crew's attention away from Leonard and Spock's corner of the bridge, and giving Nyota two seconds to get her balance back.
Nyota holds the PADD out and hits the screen three times, just as meaninglessly as Jim had, then stands with easy purpose. "The Romulan fleet's intelligence is as well-named as always," she says with a quirk of the lips. Down in front, Leonard's got Spock pinned with one hand spread on his chest, and he's leaning in to murmur something low and rapid in Spock's ear. Spock's staring over his shoulder at Nyota, Leonard's eyes hot beneath disarrayed hair and face a conflicted mask. "Commander Spock is still with us; I've just told him to stay focused on the important stuff. Speaking of which--" she waves the PADD as Delar's face twitches at veiled insult "--thanks for the call, Commander, but you'll have to excuse me. Say goodnight to Purek for me, will you?"
Before Delar can answer, Nyota flicks two fingers and calls, "Kirk out." Herrera cuts the feed.
There's a couple seconds of silence, then Pavel says, "Romulan defenses are still offline, Morath is moving away at impulse," and the entire bridge crew bursts into relieved applause. Hikaru spins his chair around and grins at her as he claps, and she can here Scotty's appreciative whistle and Ji'Ltt'O's rattling hiss over the rest of the din. People are grinning at her, calling out laughing comments she doesn't bother paying any attention to. She takes a long deep breath, lets it out, and turns to the upper deck where Jim had gone. He's leaning against the edge of Martine's station, forearm braced on the panel above his head, and the smile he's wearing is slow, wry, and completely unsurprised. Then it falls right off his face as his gaze shifts past her, and she turns just in time to see Spock sweep by her in a stride so fast it's just shy of a run.
"Spock, wait--" Jim starts as Spock crosses past him, but he doesn't get to the turbolift before its doors shut behind Spock. The look he gives Nyota is alarmed, and it tips over into incredulity as Jim realizes Nyota hasn't moved, isn't moving.
That's not how it works, she thinks, anger threading its way through the current of alarm at Spock's departure. That's not how we work. But there are twenty-seven people on the bridge, and if there's one thing Nyota is not going to do, it's stand here and explain the operating structure of her and Spock's relationship just to soothe the dissatisfaction of Jim Kirk.
The moment lengthens, and then Jim's expression shifts to a resolute scowl, and Nyota gets to watch her own body pivot and lope into the turbolift, running after Spock as she stands still.
"Goddammit," Spock's voice growls from behind her, and she whirls to find Leonard standing next to her with a deep crease of profound annoyance working its way between his brows. "I'll get him," he says, and she can tell from the way he rakes a hand back through his hair that it's Jim he means, not Spock. He claps a hand on her shoulder in a gesture of apologetic solidarity as he passes, and then he's gone too, and it's just Nyota standing in the middle of the bridge, wearing Jim Kirk's body, with the most of the bridge crew looking up at her with the belated focus of people who've just realized that something important happened that they missed.
"Lieutenant Herrera, put me through to Sickbay, please," she says, Jim's voice carrying easily over the last few threads of conversation. When Herrera taps the console and turns back with a nod, Nyota lifts her face toward the central sensor out of habit and says, "This is Lieutenant Uhura for Doctor M'Benga."
"M'Benga here."
"We've finished talking to the Romulans. Do you need us to return to Sick Bay for observation?"
There's a brief murmur on the channel as M'Benga and Chapel confer. "Well, we'd prefer it, Lieutenant, but you've all been in stable condition since your return. You'll all need to come back in the morning for more scans, but you can go back to your quarters for the night."
Nyota lets her eyes shut for just a moment. "Thanks, Doctor. It's appreciated. The other three have stepped off the bridge; would you please program an alert to our calendars for when you'd like us each to return?"
"Yes, Lieutenant. M'Benga out."
She looks to Herrera as he closes the channel. "Lieutenant, please complete your preliminary report before going off-duty and upload it for my review." He nods, and she turns to Scotty, who's watching her with a faintly surprised expression on his face. "Commander Scott, if there's nothing further, permission to leave the bridge."
"Granted," he replies, perplexed tone making it almost a question.
By now everyone is staring at her. She doesn't meet any of their eyes as she strides into the turbolift and hits the screen for her level, her whole body attuned to the soft hiss that the doors will make when they slide shut and obscure her from sight.
*
shaenie and I hit a point where we started writing nearly anything we could think of, just to get ourselves writing again. One of the sandboxes we jumped into was Star Trek XI/Reboot, where shaenie came up with the ingredients for a fairly epic bodyswap fic, half from Kirk's POV, half from Uhura's. We both got sucked into other projects in the interim, so the early scenes have been sitting untouched in googledocs for the last few months. I felt the urge to post one of them here, for my entertainment and hopefully yours, and she gave me the go-ahead. We may or may not finish it eventually -- it's built on some damn cool scaffolding, but boy howdy would it be long -- but it's us, so who knows. (Totally arbitrary) title: First Impressions; or, You: 1; This Guy: 0. [excerpt]
Details: STXI/Reboot/whatever we're calling it, Nyota-POV. Contains references to Spock/Uhura but is basically gen for this scene. ~4,300 words.
Summary: Nyota at bat.
Notes: The story takes place within the first year after the events of the movie. It opens with Kirk, Uhura, Spock, and Bones beaming back from a fairly uneventful mission and arriving bodyswapped -- Kirk traded with Uhura, and Spock with Bones. Medical sticks them into quarantined observation, where they have nothing to do but be varying degrees of freaked out and try with varying degrees of success not to strangle Kirk (who is incapable of killing time unobtrusively). Closing in on the second day of that, Scotty radios from the bridge to report that a really persnickety Romulan on the other side of the Neutral Zone is demanding to speak to Kirk and threatening to make it into A Thing if they won't let him. Uhura steps up to the plate.
*
They dispatch someone to Jim's quarters to get her a clean uniform. Nyota negotiates with M'Benga to spend the few minutes' wait at the console in Leonard's office, conferring with Lt. Herrera about the communications with the Romulans thus far. She isn't sure what the source of the medical team's reluctance is – whether they're still worried that the four of them may be under hostile influence, ready to stage a coup as soon as they can get access to anything more complicated than a tricorder and PADD. Maybe the vigilance of the last thirty-eight hours is just a hard habit to break. In the end, she persuades them to disable all functions but the audio channel with Herrera, which is all she really needs anyway.
The briefing on the contact with the Bird-of-Prey is short but valuable. But at this point, she would've done just about anything to get four minutes in a room by herself.
By the time she gets changed and takes the turbolift up to the bridge, Spock, Leonard and Jim have already left the medical bay. She spends the few seconds' ride up hoping that this means everyone's gotten the stunned ogling out of their systems. The doors open, and it's clear that they haven't.
"It's like they've never seen you in a pair of pants before," Jim says by way of a greeting. Nyota pauses (under the guise of surveying the bridge) long enough to weather the surge of dislocation that hits her at the sight of herself lounging against the wall to the left of the view screen, hands shoved in the pockets of one of her pants uniforms in a way that looks casual and almost definitely means Jim's still put off by how he has to cross her arms over her ribs instead of over his chest. Hikaru, seated nearly in arm's reach, is intently examining everywhere that Nyota's body is not.
Jim's smirk is almost completely undistorted by her own features. Unnerved, she rolls her eyes and heads for the captain's chair. The entire bridge crew tracks her as she walks, as do Leonard (leaning on the railing on the far side of the bridge) and Spock (positioned to the right of the view screen, straight-backed with his hands at his sides, only his eyes moving).
In front of the chair, she stops, turns, squares off toward the view screen and takes a deep breath. In Jim's broad shoulders, with the downward slope of the bridge laid in front of her, it's like she's seven feet tall and three and a half feet wide. Without doing anything, she can suddenly feel the power of this body and not just her own clumsiness, even as a nervous sweat breaks out over her borrowed skin. Is Jim nervous like this every time they're on alert? Or is this body just sweaty?
Jim, Spock, and Leonard, stationed at the bridge's periphery in their blacks, are somehow far more conspicuous than the rest of the crew in their primary colors. They look like technicians who've wandered onto a stage during a performance.
"Wait," she says, though what she'd opened her mouth to say was on screen. "The visual on the communications so far – are they seeing the whole bridge?"
"The first two, audio only, this last exchange, yes," Pavel answers before Marcos can get past a stammer. If she'd had to put credits on who would be the fastest to produce a straightforward answer, Pavel's would not have been the name that sprang to mind. She feels the uncharacteristic desire to hug the kid, and immediately squashes it.
"What are they showing us?" she asks him. The tires-on-gravel rumble of Jim's voice resonates without any effort on her part.
Pavel frowns a little. "Only the Sub-Commander."
Spock and Jim both swing their heads up at this. Jim is frowning, which etches strange lines that Nyota's not sure she's ever seen on her own face. She catches their eyes quickly and nods once: it's weird behavior for a Romulan in this situation. Romulans only use the cropped screen for interactions they deem personal -- negotiations, which require enemies to offer assurance of individual honor, or threats meant to target the person qua person on the other end of the screen. More general diplomacy or threats of military force are almost always given with the screen set to the widest angle, so the viewer can appreciate the full might of the Bird-of-Prey and, by extension, the Romulan empire.
"Keep the transmission at its current parameters," she tells Herrera, turning just a little to the right. "Bones, get down in front." Leonard's eyebrows wing up nearly up to Spock's bangs -- she fights down a twitch of discomfort -- but he tosses off a salute as he moves down the ramp and out of the camera's line of sight. She can hear the pulse beating loudly in Jim's chest.
"You got a plan, 'Captain?'" Jim lays into the velar plosive to telegraph some sarcasm, but he steps away from the wall, his hands pulling themselves free of his pockets. Like all she has to do is say the word and he'll take over, no questions asked.
Jackass really isn't sure she can do this.
Rather than snapping out any of the obvious cracks (wait, you're supposed to have one first?), she gives him a couple of seconds of what Gaila called the go fall in a hole glare. Then she drops down into the chair, kicks Jim's long thighs out until they're bumping against the armrests, shifts her ass forward and to one side so she's half-propped on an elbow, and flicks two fingers back over her shoulder in Herrera's direction.
Jim gapes, and Nyota drawls, "On screen."
The visual feed blots the starscape out. She gets a fraction of a second's glimpse of the Romulan at the other end half-twisted to look at something off-screen before the open feed jars him out of what he's doing, and he jerks around to stare at her, narrow-eyed. No, not at her. At Kirk; it's Kirk who he's been waiting to see, and Kirk who he does see now. For a moment, she's locked into the slumped posture she's adopted, some long-buried hind-brain response; don't move or the predator will see you. No sooner does it register than she's pissed at herself for even feeling it.
"Jim Kirk," she calls, pitching it to carry and hearing, to her immense satisfaction, that brass-bell clarity Jim gets when he's really getting ready to antagonize you. "My crew says you were asking for me, Commander ..."
The Romulan's scowl twitches deeper, and he draws himself up haughtily. "I am Sub-Commander Purek," he snaps, nettled by the double insult: that Kirk either didn't check or didn't remember the name he'd given, and that now he's had to demote himself to correct her.
Niiiiice, Jim mouths broadly, nodding, and holds up both hands, one shaping an "O", the other with slim brown index finger extended upward. It's child's play to translate: you, 1; this guy, 0. There's a strong urge to smirk that she doesn't entirely smother.
Meanwhile, Purek's noticed her eyes wandering, and has clearly decided that the best way to regain the upper hand is by getting snippy. "Your crew took quite a while to locate you, Captain. On a Romulan ship, such dereliction of duty would not go unpunished."
On opposite sides of the viewscreen, Leonard and Jim both roll their eyes so obviously that even with her own eyes front she can't miss it. The fact that it's her face and Spock's doing it is profoundly bizarre, and Hikaru drops his head fast to study the conn in a way that probably means he's swallowing a slightly hysterical giggle.
"Oh, well, you know how it is," she says, shifting her weight to the other side. "Delegation is an important part of leadership, increases efficient operations, reserves command staff time for vital decisions ..." She opens and closes the fingers of one hand against the thumb as the words trail off, that classic Terran signifier, blah blah blah.
Purek's lip twitches. Another cultural similarity between Romulans and Vulcans: both have a very small and limited repertoire of manual gesture, relying more on body language to augment verbal communication. Use a non-Standard gesture with a Vulcan, and they will either seek to clarify its significance or decide the probability that it carries vital semantic content is too low to warrant inquiry. Use a non-Standard gesture with a Romulan, and they assume it's synonymous with flipping them off.
She knows this, of course. She's also positive that Jim knows it too.
Down in front, Spock's gaze shifts rapidly between the viewscreen and her position at the center of the bridge. Alternating flickers of wariness and concentration swim across his face, like he's having a hard time fathoming why she's deemed this an appropriate time to riff on the third seminar of Introduction to Command Decision-Making. She can't tell whether he knows Leonard's features aren't holding a consistent mask of impassivity.
"So, does Romulus have a message to convey to the Federation?" she asks. Jim's leg wants to jiggle. She doesn't let it. "Or did you just need to borrow a cup of sugar?" Purposeful use of colloquialisms in cross-cultural communication is considered insulting pretty much regardless of the parties involved.
"If the Empire had a message, Captain, you would be the last person I would trust to carry it," Purek sneers, but he leans in instead of pulling back, wrong body language entirely. He's hiding something. And the use of the first person, that's wrong too. If that were the Empire's condemnation, he'd have said we.
Jim waves an arm over his head down front; she shifts the angles of her legs toward him, to show she's noticed, and he mimes a shove. Push him.
"Then tell me what we're doing here, Sub-Commander," she replies, and cocks her head to the left to tilt the question towards Jim.
Apparently this puts them back on the script. Purek settles himself more squarely in his chair and tilts his chin up, which is Romulan for you're about to get told. "On Romulus, we have a saying, that a wise leader will travel any distance to look a great enemy, a great traitor, or a great failure in the face. That way, you will always know his features, and also his mistakes."
Jim is now twisted halfway around to stare at the screen in disgust. It rhymes? he mouths. Leonard and Spock give an eerily similar twitch of amusement.
Nyota kicks one leg over to rest on the other knee and beams at the viewscreen. She's starting to see why Jim likes this part so much. "Aw, that's so sweet of you," she says. "And here nobody'd called me great since last night." Somewhere behind her Scotty makes a choking sound, and Jim pulls a face and mimes a rimshot. Opposite him, Leonard grins at her -- she sees Spock blink at the facial contortions this involves, and on Leonard's features Spock's expression is nearly alarmed -- and holds up both of Spock's hands: you, 1; Jim, 0. Constance and Ji'Ltt'O at environmental are gaping at them both.
Purek's scowl deepens, but she doesn't want to wait for him to come up with a response, or notice Kirk's crew is getting unruly. "So you're a Sub-commander, huh?" She swings her foot once, idly. "That's kind of unusual, isn't it, putting a Sub-commander in charge of a Bird-of-Prey? In the Federation, if you're going to give a guy a ship, usually you'd just go ahead and promote him."
Jim's eyes brighten, and he spins his index fingers in a rolling motion in front of his chest (narrowly missing it, in fact), signaling yeah, good, keep going. "Recruitment not what it used to be?" She flip-flops a hand. "Getting a little short-staffed?"
"The might of the Romulan Empire is far greater than you can imagine!" Purek blusters, slapping one palm down on the console in front of him. "If you knew the resources at our disposal, you would--" He snaps his mouth shut, but he's still fuming.
Spock is staring at the screen with keen attention. Jim's hands are circling more wildly now, and he's nodding so hard that it sets the long tail of her hair bouncing. Nyota angles forward so she's leaning over Jim's crossed legs. Purek looks like he's right on the edge. If she can push him just a little farther, without offering an insult that Romulan standards would deem actionable, she can goad him into spilling something. Adrenaline kicks in, like she's dropping from mark to set on the starting block, but she can still feel Jim's heart beating steady and even. If this is what it's like to live inside his body, then his fight-or-flight response is pretty damn sophisticated.
"You know what I think?" she muses conspiratorially, running one hand over her chin -- and suppressing a twitch when her fingers hit stubble. "I think they've got you wandering the edge of the Neutral Zone with nothing to do but make sure none of us sneaks a toe over. You're bored, your crew's not real thrilled either, and you figured hey, why not kill an hour taunting the other guy. But I don't think you've got a mission, I don't think you've got some trick that we don't know about. There's nothing for a couple of parsecs around you, and if you had another ship out there, they'd have shown up so they could call me names t--"
The feed goes black all of a sudden. "Herrera," she says, jerking up to a straighter stance, as Jim calls, "What the hell?"
"I don't know," Herrera says, hands flying over the touch-screen, "the computer thinks the channel's still open--"
The visual flips back on, but now it presents the bridge of the Bird-of-Prey, all the officers at their stations, manipulating the controls without ever dropping their eyes for more than a second or two. Purek's nowhere in sight. Instead, there's a scarred woman standing in the middle of the bridge, her hair streaked with gray, face as hawkish and severe as her uniform.
"I am Commander Delar of the Morath," she declares, and lifts her chin a half-inch in unmistakable challenge. Her cold regard is like a bucket of water to the face.
"Captain James Tiberius Kirk, U.S.S. Enterprise," Nyota replies, shoulders squaring.
Up front, Jim goes suddenly tense, face swinging around so that her own eyes are staring up at her. Everyone she can see has gone rigid -- even Spock's found an extra inch of height somewhere in Leonard's spine -- but they've all been tense since Delar came on screen. Jim didn't go tense until Nyota answered her.
Sweat springs out in sharp prickles down her back. Clearly she made a wrong move just now. Should Kirk have stood? No, she thinks, mind racing, that would have been a disaster -- you stand for superior officers, do that and you give up the symbolic dominance without a fight. Not cocky enough, maybe, so she tips her own head and offers up her best version of Kirk's insubordinate closed-lip smile before adding, "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Especially since Sub-Commander Purek was such a peach."
"Their weapons and shields are still off-line," Pavel murmurs quickly, in a voice low enough that the feed won't catch it.
Delar doesn't even blink, just continues to stare Nyota -- Kirk, she reminds herself, you're not you, you're Kirk -- down like she's looking at a small dog with its hackles raised. Not a major cause for alarm, but if you move you might spook it and it might scuff up your boots going for an ankle. "The Sub-Commander is no longer your concern." She lets the possible conclusions of that statement hang there, implicit.
Down in front, Jim has slipped quickly around the console so that he's right up against the edge of the viewscreen, where he won't be on the feed and where she can see him clearly without needing to shift her gaze in his direction. He pushes one flattened palm out and down from the center of his chest, easy, take it down a notch, then swings his arm up in what she recognizes as a basic defensive parry.
She arches an eyebrow, pushes her lower lip into her upper to indicate disinterested surprise. "I wasn't concerned."
"You have found yourself at a remote edge of Federation space, Captain," Delar observes. Spock's taken half a step out from the wall, angling Leonard's body toward the screen, and his eyes are flickering in rapid pattern between Delar, Jim, and Nyota. As far as Nyota can tell, Leonard hasn't moved. "The nearest Federation settlement is what, twenty light years away? It would seem that you are quite alone out there."
Jim holds both hands up, palms facing her, and brings them up and back in a smooth, tightly controlled arc. Nyota dips her head pleasantly. "So it would seem."
"The fleet tells us this is a common occurrence for you in recent months, surveying the Neutral Zone." Delar circles around behind her crew, letting her gaze skim over the screens at their stations as she moves. It's an easy, smooth movement, the kind that the Romulans sometimes drop into the same way that Vulcans will drop into complete stillness. Find a pattern and hold it; it's a masking technique. "Then again, so many of your ships were destroyed in the Battle of Vulcan. So many experienced officers lost. The security of your borders must be a significant concern."
Nyota turns toward Scotty midway through this speech, arching her eyebrows with an expression of casual interest. The far edge of the bridge is off the visual feed, which is why she's picked it. Telo, at the secondary engineering station, notices her shift in focus and kicks Scotty in the shin. "Wh--" he starts, jerking around, and Nyota smiles and nods acknowledgment as though he's just finished giving her some interesting but routine update.
"Exploration, Commander. It's what the Enterprise was built for," Nyota replies, starting the sentence before she turns to catch Delar's eyes again. "But I'm touched that you were worried about us. I'll make sure to relay your concern back to Starfleet Command."
Sometime during Nyota's faked inattention, Delar's finished her pass along the bridge and come back to a stop front and center, so that she's nearly two-thirds the height of the feed, larger than life size, and significantly closer than when she started. "Interesting. And yet I don't see your half-Vulcan science officer," she comments, sounding slightly bored. Spock jerks, hands jumping almost an inch at his sides before he can stop them. "Has he resigned his post? How ... disloyal. Then again, I suppose his species needs all the survivors they can find right now, however diluted." She smiles suddenly, sharp as a knife. "I hear that they've organized a breeding farm."
Blood sends a rush of sudden heat through her, but before the flush can hit her, the anger's washed back by the sight of Spock -- Spock -- making a wild lunge toward the conn, Leonard's features contorted with fury. Pavel's chin snaps up, eyes wide, but Leonard darts forward with the speed of Vulcan reflexes and whirls Spock back against the wall just before he can cross into range of the visual feed. Then Jim's crossing the bridge, someone's PADD in one hand and a slow, easy stride as he mounts the ramp, radiating presence in a way that draws everyone's eyes back to him as he crosses to the Captain's chair and presents the PADD to Nyota. Heart pounding, Nyota stares up at her own face, and Jim smiles politely and bends to tap the screen twice as though calling up a particular display, then turns and walks with a slightly hipshot gait off to the side of the bridge.
When Nyota looks down, all that's on the screen is the central file tree. For a fraction of a second, she can't think what Jim's trying to tell her, and her thoughts take a steep dip towards panic. Then it's obvious.
The PADD isn't meant to tell her anything. It's just a pretext for walking across the feed, drawing Delar's and the crew's attention away from Leonard and Spock's corner of the bridge, and giving Nyota two seconds to get her balance back.
Nyota holds the PADD out and hits the screen three times, just as meaninglessly as Jim had, then stands with easy purpose. "The Romulan fleet's intelligence is as well-named as always," she says with a quirk of the lips. Down in front, Leonard's got Spock pinned with one hand spread on his chest, and he's leaning in to murmur something low and rapid in Spock's ear. Spock's staring over his shoulder at Nyota, Leonard's eyes hot beneath disarrayed hair and face a conflicted mask. "Commander Spock is still with us; I've just told him to stay focused on the important stuff. Speaking of which--" she waves the PADD as Delar's face twitches at veiled insult "--thanks for the call, Commander, but you'll have to excuse me. Say goodnight to Purek for me, will you?"
Before Delar can answer, Nyota flicks two fingers and calls, "Kirk out." Herrera cuts the feed.
There's a couple seconds of silence, then Pavel says, "Romulan defenses are still offline, Morath is moving away at impulse," and the entire bridge crew bursts into relieved applause. Hikaru spins his chair around and grins at her as he claps, and she can here Scotty's appreciative whistle and Ji'Ltt'O's rattling hiss over the rest of the din. People are grinning at her, calling out laughing comments she doesn't bother paying any attention to. She takes a long deep breath, lets it out, and turns to the upper deck where Jim had gone. He's leaning against the edge of Martine's station, forearm braced on the panel above his head, and the smile he's wearing is slow, wry, and completely unsurprised. Then it falls right off his face as his gaze shifts past her, and she turns just in time to see Spock sweep by her in a stride so fast it's just shy of a run.
"Spock, wait--" Jim starts as Spock crosses past him, but he doesn't get to the turbolift before its doors shut behind Spock. The look he gives Nyota is alarmed, and it tips over into incredulity as Jim realizes Nyota hasn't moved, isn't moving.
That's not how it works, she thinks, anger threading its way through the current of alarm at Spock's departure. That's not how we work. But there are twenty-seven people on the bridge, and if there's one thing Nyota is not going to do, it's stand here and explain the operating structure of her and Spock's relationship just to soothe the dissatisfaction of Jim Kirk.
The moment lengthens, and then Jim's expression shifts to a resolute scowl, and Nyota gets to watch her own body pivot and lope into the turbolift, running after Spock as she stands still.
"Goddammit," Spock's voice growls from behind her, and she whirls to find Leonard standing next to her with a deep crease of profound annoyance working its way between his brows. "I'll get him," he says, and she can tell from the way he rakes a hand back through his hair that it's Jim he means, not Spock. He claps a hand on her shoulder in a gesture of apologetic solidarity as he passes, and then he's gone too, and it's just Nyota standing in the middle of the bridge, wearing Jim Kirk's body, with the most of the bridge crew looking up at her with the belated focus of people who've just realized that something important happened that they missed.
"Lieutenant Herrera, put me through to Sickbay, please," she says, Jim's voice carrying easily over the last few threads of conversation. When Herrera taps the console and turns back with a nod, Nyota lifts her face toward the central sensor out of habit and says, "This is Lieutenant Uhura for Doctor M'Benga."
"M'Benga here."
"We've finished talking to the Romulans. Do you need us to return to Sick Bay for observation?"
There's a brief murmur on the channel as M'Benga and Chapel confer. "Well, we'd prefer it, Lieutenant, but you've all been in stable condition since your return. You'll all need to come back in the morning for more scans, but you can go back to your quarters for the night."
Nyota lets her eyes shut for just a moment. "Thanks, Doctor. It's appreciated. The other three have stepped off the bridge; would you please program an alert to our calendars for when you'd like us each to return?"
"Yes, Lieutenant. M'Benga out."
She looks to Herrera as he closes the channel. "Lieutenant, please complete your preliminary report before going off-duty and upload it for my review." He nods, and she turns to Scotty, who's watching her with a faintly surprised expression on his face. "Commander Scott, if there's nothing further, permission to leave the bridge."
"Granted," he replies, perplexed tone making it almost a question.
By now everyone is staring at her. She doesn't meet any of their eyes as she strides into the turbolift and hits the screen for her level, her whole body attuned to the soft hiss that the doors will make when they slide shut and obscure her from sight.
*
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 05:09 pm (UTC)I will totally read more of this if you ever write it. I just love your Uhura, how well she's thinking through the ramifications there, the complexities of whose face is which person and how to out-bluff the Romulans and pretend to be Kirk all at the same time. Win.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-23 04:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-23 04:51 am (UTC)