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The first time Kirk tries to get Nyota in his bed ends with him getting the shit kicked out of him in a bar fight, so obviously that attempt is a wash, and all of his efforts over the next three years of knowing each other end in either cutting rejections on her part or (once, just before everything goes to shit) him sleeping with her roommate, so he doesn’t actually succeed until after they get back from nearly dying together for the first time, after the Enterprise battles a particularly troubled Romulan from the future and escapes a black hole by ejecting their own warp core. It takes them three weeks to limp back to Earth on reserve power, three weeks of constant alarms and exhaustion and grief. Nyota does her job, working both alpha and beta shifts because the guy who should be working beta died when deck six blew apart and there’s nobody else to do it. When she closes her eyes she sees Vulcan imploding. In the mornings she brushes her fingers across Spock’s wrist in silent greeting and knows, even without telepathy, that his dreams are the same as hers.
Chekov breaks down on the Bridge one day, apologizing over and over. “I tried to catch her,” he says, near tears. “I tried but I lost her, I’m sorry, sir, I’m so sorry—”
“Your apology is unnecessary,” Spock returns, stoic. Later he tells Nyota: “I did not tell my mother I loved her before I left for Starfleet,” and she holds his hand in the dark. She tries very hard not to think of Gaila, on the Farragut, who she did not say goodbye to.
“She knew,” she tells Spock. It’s all she can give him. “Your mother loved you. She knew.”
On the bridge she sits at the communications console and keeps her back to the viewscreen. The unknown isn’t as inviting as it used to be, now that they’ve seen what’s out there.Every time an alarm goes off her heart drops out of her chest. Every change in lighting is the ship switching to red alert, a photon torpedo on its way to tear open the hull.
“I promise you we will get home,” Kirk says over shipwide comms. If she weren’t sitting on the bridge watching him, Nyota wouldn’t be able to tell that he’s just as burnt out as the rest of them, but he is, and she can.
Up until he took over as captain, she’d thought that he didn't know how to be afraid.
When they land they’re the center of a nonstop media storm. Nyota and the rest of the bridge crew spend endless hours in interrogation rooms, retelling the same story to a parade of strangers with various important titles but identical condescending attitudes. The world seems to be trying to decide whether all of them—Kirk specifically—are heroes or cadets or mutineers or all of the above. Nyota has never cared less about anything in her life.
“My god, man, people are dead,” McCoy finally snaps. “Don’t you have more important things to deal with?” When they’re finally released his hands are shaking. He doesn’t relax until Kirk emerges from his own interrogation, exhausted, and claps McCoy on the back.
“That sucked,” Kirk says. They cling.
Almost every deep-space mission was called back to Earth, and classes are suspended, of course, since a quarter of the Academy’s student body are frozen corpses floating around where Vulcan used to be. Nyota throws herself into the same double-shifts she was pulling on the Enterprise, because the alternative is to wander around campus in a haze thinking about how empty it is. The Vulcan Refugees are being put up in spare bedrooms and hotels all over San Francisco. Starfleet is trying to find a new planet for them to settle—Spock is helping, gone all day. When Nyota comms him he looks tired and sad. They’re all tired and sad.
“I regret that I cannot be with you,” Spock says, and Nyota waves him off even though she would give her left arm just to have him hold her.
“Just come home safe,” she tells him. She hangs up before she can do something humiliating, like tell him she loves him.
She can’t sleep. She keeps forgetting to eat. She’s so pathetically scared all the time, heart jackrabbiting. The whole universe feels too big and dusty and cold.
It takes weeks for Starfleet to come out with a definitive list of the officers and cadets who died. Nyota is responsible for double-checking the spellings and pronunciations of all non-human names. It takes her two days and her heart breaks with every single one.
The final number is 1,642.
Once the casualty list is finalized they have to sit through an ostentatious and wholly-unnecessary memorial ceremony for their fallen classmates that feels more like a series of lectures, Admirals and professors onstage extolling the value of sacrifice and of honoring those who were called to something greater, whose memory will live on in everything we do, etc etc, and Nyota spends the last half of the ceremony shaking with some unidentifiable emotion and barely makes it back to her dorm before she finally starts to cry. Kirk finds her an indeterminate amount of time later, huddled against the door to the room that she used to share with Gaila but doesn’t now, sobbing like a child because she forgot her keys and can’t call her roommate anymore and ask to be let in.
“Uhura?” she hears him say. “Hey, you okay?”
Go away, Nyota tries to snap, but her throat is clogged and everything hurts and Gaila is dead, dead, dead, so all that actually comes out is this pathetic gasping wail, and then she starts sobbing even harder. She buries her face in her arms.
“Oh, honey,” Kirk says. He crouches in front of her. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay, Nyota.”
“Don’t call me that,” she chokes out, voice thick with snot.
“Nyota or honey?”
“Both.” She can’t stop crying. “Neither. Leave me alone.”
But he’s never listened to her when she’s said that before and he isn’t going to start now. Instead he sits down next to her, careful, still a little bruised. When Nyota peers up at him through blurry eyes he’s got this look on his face she’s never seen him wear before, concern and tenderness and something else she can’t place. He does not look like the man who's driven her crazy for three years. He does not look like the man who said horrible things to Spock on the bridge of the Enterprise.
Oh, god, Spock’s mother. Six billion Vulcans, disappeared into nothingness along with their planet. Hundreds of Starfleet personnel and two thirds of Nyota’s graduating class. Gaila, Gaila, Gaila.
She gasps for air. “I—I can’t—”
“You’re okay,” Kirk says uselessly. “It’s gonna be okay. I’m right here.”
And he is. Nyota cries, hyperventilating, and Kirk hunches next to her and stays, and all Nyota can think is that Gaila probably was alone at the end, flung into cold space before she even knew what was going on, the Farragut’s metal shell torn and leaking the crew out like the yolk of a broken egg. Nyota was supposed to have been on the Farragut, too, but she wasn’t, and so Gaila died with no one to hold her hand, reaching out to find nothing but space, and she’ll be lost out there forever, and once Nyota gets around to cleaning her hair out of the shower drain she won’t be anywhere at all anymore.
Nyota curls in on herself and shakes.
She doesn’t notice Kirk’s arm until it’s already around her shoulders, pulling her into his side.
“It’s okay,” he says again, into the top of her head, holding too tight, and he’s a liar, nothing is okay, and they’re not friends, Nyota doesn’t even like him, but he’s here and Gaila isn’t and his arms are around her and she curls against him miserably and cries into his armpit.
It hurts. It’s like a sucking chest wound. Every time Nyota closes her eyes she sees Gaila walking away for the last time, curls bouncing above the stiff collar of her cadet uniform. Gaila loved adventures. All she ever wanted was to see things no one had seen before, to make some kind of a difference. To matter.
Nyota and Kirk are probably the only two people in the world who even care that she’s gone.
“It’s okay,” Kirk keeps saying, helpless. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” Nyota wails, “I didn’t say goodbye,” and he just holds her tight and rocks back and forth a little and keeps lying.
She should have said goodbye. She should have told Gaila she loved her. She should have told somebody about those mysterious Klingon transmissions. She should have been nicer about Gaila bringing guys home all the time. She shouldn’t have kicked Kirk out of their room. She should have complained less about Gaila’s hair everywhere and let her borrow that cute strappy dress. She should have boarded the Farragut and died with everyone else. She wishes she had.
“I didn’t say goodbye,” she tells Kirk again, pathetic and cracking. “I didn’t tell her—”
She breaks off.
“She knew,” says Kirk.
“How do you know?”
“Because she loved you,” he says. “You were best friends, right?”
Her voice is a whisper. “Yes.”
“Then she knew,” he repeats. “She knew. I promise.”
Nyota starts to cry again. Kirk holds her tighter.
They stay there on the floor until her breathing evens out and all the light is gone from the hall windows.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he tells her. “Do you want me to call Spock for—or not,” he amends quickly, because Spock is leaving Starfleet and Nyota knows that even if Spock himself doesn’t yet, and his name prompts another humiliating sob. “Okay. Come on, then.”
He stands up with an arm around her waist and hauls her to her feet.
Nyota wipes her face on her cadet reds, which are horribly unabsorbent, and succeeds only in smearing makeup and snot. “I—I need to get my door unlocked.”
“Not now,” says Kirk.
“What?”
“C’mon, Uhura. Do you really want to be alone right now? In your room with all her things?”
Nyota pictures Gaila’s side of the room, how empty it is, and feels her eyes well up again. “No,” she admits.
“Exactly,” says Kirk. “So come on.”
He takes her to his and McCoy’s room, which is unique among all the rooms on their floor by virtue of still having two living occupants. He keeps her upright while she kicks off her boots. He sits her down on his bed. He pours her a glass of water and finds a makeup wipe somewhere. He makes her eat a granola bar and loosen her ponytail. He pulls McCoy’s good whiskey out of the cupboard.
“Let’s have a toast," he says, and doesn't specify to whom, because there are too many people.
They end up on his bed, lying with their heads in opposite directions. They drink, but they don’t really get wasted, just the kind of sad drunk where long silences are not only permissible but encouraged, and in between those silences she tells him things she never would have before.
“I tried to clean out her side of the room yesterday,” Nyota says. “But she always borrowed my clothes and we shared jewelry and I can’t tell what’s mine and what’s hers.” She closes her eyes. “What was hers, I mean. I guess it could all be mine now.”
Pause. Breathe. Drink.
“I’m so scared now. All the time. I can’t sleep.”
Pause. Breathe. Drink. Kirk puts his hand on her shin.
“I keep thinking they’ll detect some miracle distress signal, you know? That she’ll still be alive somehow.”
Pause. Breathe. Drink.
“I just miss her so bad.”
“You get used to it,” Kirk says.
“Does it ever go away?”
“Not really,” he admits, and she guesses that if anybody knows it would be him. “But you fill the space with other stuff. Other people.”
“Everybody’s dead.”
“Not everybody,” he tells her.
Pause. Breathe. Drink.
Pause. Breathe. Drink.
“I think Spock’s leaving Starfleet so he can help rebuild Vulcan.”
Kirk hums. “I don’t think he’d leave you behind like that.”
“It’s his whole culture out there, though. His people. He has a duty to them.”
“Maybe,” Kirk says, sounding skeptical. Then he sits up—swaying a little, because they’re pretty drunk at this point—and rests his hand on her hip. “But even if he goes, you won’t be alone. I’ll still be here.”
Nyota smiles. “Not if they go through with that academic dishonesty charge.”
“Oh, yeah,” Kirk says. “I forgot about that.”
And then they’re both giggling, wet and hiccupy.
“It’s gonna be okay, though,” he says when the giggles have trailed off. “You’re gonna be okay. I mean it.”
Pause. Breathe. Drink.
Kirk keeps his hand on her hip, and she lets him.
At some point around midnight McCoy comes in, exhausted and miserable from his double shift at the hospital. He grunts “Hey, Uhura” like he’s totally unbothered by her presence—probably Kirk messaged him while she was busy crying—and then starts berating him for drinking the good whiskey and for cuddling Spock’s girlfriend under the influence. Halfway through this tirade, Kirk stumbles off the bed and slings an arm around his neck.
“Love you, Bones,” he interrupts, so McCoy knows, and McCoy pauses mid-sentence.
“Yeah, whatever,” he says. “Just go to bed.”
So they do, and Nyota ends up tucked between Kirk’s surprisingly clean sheets, wearing his too-big T-shirt, staring across the narrow room to where he and McCoy are spooning like they do it all the time. Maybe they do—she was never really clear on what their relationship entailed, beyond spending every second of every day together and sneaking each other onto starships. They look comfortable, though. At peace. She’s never seen Kirk so still.
She falls asleep to the sound of his breathing.
In the morning she slips out before he or McCoy has woken up, leaving them still wrapped around each other like clinging vines. She gets her room door unlocked and packs up Gaila’s things alone and successfully avoids Kirk for a solid week out of embarrassment up until he corners her in the sensor lab, literally bouncing with excitement, to tell her that it hasn’t been announced yet but they’re giving him the Enterprise and he wants her as Chief Communications Officer.
“Me?” she says, stunned.
“You and your talented tongue,” he says, and grins at her when she glares at him, the same way he always has. “Come on, Uhura, you know you want to.”
(“C’mon, Uhura,” Kirk said in the library months ago, recruiting her for his third attempt at the Kobayashi Maru. “One more time?”
“And when you fail?” she asked him. “Then what will you do?”
“Try again,” he said, like it was obvious.)
“Yeah, okay,” she says, and he whoops and ducks in and kisses her and is halfway to the door faster than she can react.
“Kirk!” she screeches after him, hand to her mouth.
“No take-backs!” he calls over his shoulder.
The message confirming her assignment to the Enterprise arrives on her PADD thirty seconds later.
“We’re gonna have the hottest crew ever,” Kirk blurts out, the first time he has all his senior officers assembled. McCoy kicks him in the leg.
“It’s just the captain bringing down the curve,” Nyota says, and he grins at her like she’s made his day.
She keeps waiting for him to bring up the night she spent in his bed, but he never does, an unexpected kindness. He never brings up that kiss, either, so for the weeks leading up to the launch they’re just as they always have been, him flirting and her turning him down, both of them going through the motions, everybody counting down the weeks until they turn into days. Then they board by rank and run final preflight checks, and Spock appears at the last minute and Kirk grins smugly at her over the back of the Captain’s chair with the whole of the universe visible through the viewscreen behind him, waiting for them, and finally he gives the order and Sulu punches it and then they're on an adventure, off to see things no one's ever seen before.