Current mood:

accomplished

I seem to have committed fic.
I believe that last night's jellybeans were an immense help to my ability to finish this. Sugaaaaaaaaar. And I still have some left!

Fandom: Star Trek 2009/XI/Reboot/AOS. (Has it always taken this long for fandom to come to consensus on a title and I've just never noticed, or is ST just special? I am leaning towards ST just being special.)
People: Spock/Uhura.
Rating: G for Gen.
Disclaimer: I have taken some creative license, but the things I took creative license with are not mine. (Hence..."creative license". *g*)
[ETA:] Notes: Thank you to akamarykate, for helping out with a bit of setting specificity. *headdesk* I meant to say that when I first posted...


SNOW IN MID-SUMMER by Jayne Leitch
2009

The Enterprise returns to Earth. Jim Kirk is relieved of command pending official review. Those crewmembers who were cadets twenty-six hours ago are suddenly cadets again, told to return to their dorms and pack their things for when they're allowed to return to their new--most now permanent--shipboard positions.

Spock vanishes, first into high-level debriefings, then into strategy sessions with Starfleet and what's left of the Vulcan government. Nyota hears from him in the form of occasional, brief communiques, never more than one or two terse, technical paragraphs of text, most arriving silently in the night. She finds them unimaginably reassuring.

It's a strange, in-between time, waiting as Starfleet regroups in the wake of Nero's destruction. Limbo, she hears another cadet-lieutenant say as she passes him in the uncomfortably empty quad; fallow, his friend replies. Nyota agrees with them both.

One week passes; a second stretches out, seemingly unending. And then, one day, Nyota wakes to a message from Spock which ends: Even now, merely in its planning phase, the task of colonising New Vulcan is immense. And unfortunate: continually, I find myself thinking that the old one was perfectly adequate.

She reads those lines over and over. Then, leaving campus for the first time in days, she goes to the Vulcan embassy, finds a bench outside the main entrance, and waits.

Most of the members of the Vulcan Relief Committee have rooms at the embassy; it's only a small group that leaves the building late in the afternoon and turns toward Starfleet Command. Nyota stands watchfully as Spock's father passes her without acknowledgement, followed by another, older man, strangely but intensely familiar, who returns her gaze thoughtfully for a long moment, but doesn't stop. A few more emerge, their brown and grey cloaks rustling with every even step, and then Spock is there.

He straightens, almost imperceptibly, when he sees her. Anyone else would think they were imagining the faintest of shadows beneath his eyes, or the deliberation in his movements as he hands the PADDs he's carrying to an attache and goes to her.

Or the way his body sways toward her, incrementally, before he comes to a complete stop. "Lieutenant Uhura."

"Commander Spock. I received your message." She wants to reach out and smooth her palms along the too-taut lines of his shoulders; instead, she wraps her right hand around her left wrist behind her back and squeezes hard. "I'm going home for a couple days before muster."

"No doubt your sisters will be pleased to see you again before the Enterprise departs."

"I'm not going to see them. Samara left for Centauri VII last week, and Penda's in the middle of exams. I want you to come with me."

He blinks.

The other Vulcans are half a block down the street now. She steps closer to him, speaks more softly, but no less plainly. "You've been working non-stop, on an extraordinarily difficult project, for weeks. I got your message, Spock. Come with me."

A muscle flutters, just once, in his jaw. "My duties with the committee--" But he stops there, and looks at her the way he had in the turbolift when he'd had too much and not enough, all at once.

She'll have bruises on her wrist when she finally lets go. "There's snow on the peaks of Mount Kenya," she says in his silence. "You can see it from our house. Even at the height of mid-summer, the snow is there." Another moment, and she releases her wrist; in the course of the small, natural swing of her arms as they fall to rest at her sides, her fingers graze the back of his hand. "I grew up knowing it always would be."

Spock looks at her with those shadowed eyes, and she knows he's coming with her.

*

Nyota takes in a breath of cool evening air at the Golden Gate Transport Depot, and exhales it seconds later into the dry, enveloping heat of an Embu morning. Her next breath is full of the mingled lush/arid scent of home.

She leads Spock through the city: takes him to the statue memorialising the Eugenics War's Battle of Kibwezi, its lines and curves striking a careful balance between African and Indian art; her favourite music shop, where Mfundo, the owner, greets her with a grin and the sheet music that's been back-ordered for months; the East African Museum of Culture, its newly-renovated Maathai wing opened to the public just last week; an open-air market, spicy and musky and sweet, with the stalls of off-world traders scattered between those of local, traditional artisans and chefs.

They eat a meal of ugali and icobean relish in a park, in the shadow of a sprawling, leafy Jacaranda. She's describing the profusion of purple blossoms that transforms the trees after the rainy season when she realises she'll be months deep into space when the flowers next appear.

"My mother kept a garden." Spock's quiet voice startles her from her thoughts. When she turns to him, he's looking up into the canopy, the slightest tension visible at his eyes and mouth. "I believe she took pride in her ability to cultivate alien flora in Vulcan soil."

Nyota remembers her own mother's death. It hadn't been sudden, or violent; nevertheless, even an expected loss could feel abrupt, shocking. World-ending, some would say.

Nyota hadn't said that. Not even on the day itself.

She covers Spock's hand with her own, letting her fingers slip between his on the warm grass. "Your mother flourished on Vulcan, too."

He looks down again, directly at her. His gaze is dark--even, for an unguarded moment, openly upset--and she thinks he's going to pull his hand away.

Instead he nods, and controls himself. The tension remains, faint lines in his skin. "Indeed."

*

The house is well outside the city, nestled into the slope of a thickly-forested hill. By the time their taxi deposits them at the edge of the property, it's too dark to see much of their surroundings; Nyota leads Spock up the path to the door by starlight and memory.

Technically, she'd told him once, in a conversation that seems very long ago, now, the house belongs to all three of us, but Samara's the only one who lives there. Penda goes home for the occasional weekend, though. Nyota had, as well, during her first year away at school.

It's been a long, long day. She gives Spock a quick tour and a soft kiss, then crawls into bed, exhausted.

*

It's a change of light, maybe, that wakes her. When she opens her eyes, Spock's standing at the window, his back to her, his hands clasped behind him. He's motionless, a dark, lean silhouette against the grey-lit sky.

Nyota sits up. At the rustle of her blankets in the dawn quiet, Spock shifts, aware that she's awake; after a time, he asks, "Is the view as you remember it?"

She looks past him, out at the familiar panorama of rainforest and mountains: the sun's rising behind the hill, leaving most of the forest in shadow, but the shapes of the distant, white peaks are crisp, limned in brightness. "The light's different," she says, and smiles. "But the snow's still there."

In the silence that follows, she stands and goes to him, her bare feet padding comfortably across the thick rug her grandfather had made--woven with his own hands--before she was born.

When she draws up next to Spock, he says, "I visited Australia during my first term at Starfleet Academy."

It takes her a moment; then, recalling heat and dust and towering cliffs of red-orange rock, she understands. "Did you go often?"

"Only once. It was...an illogical act." He says it as dispassionately as he says everything. But there's tension still in every line of his body, and his gaze is fixed on a distance far greater than that between the house and the mountains, and Nyota hears both the bald statement of fact and the indescribably intimate confession beneath.

She touches him then, freely, one hand wrapping around his, the other laid alongside his jaw to turn him to her, to make him look at her. Meeting his hooded gaze openly, seriously--lovingly--she says, "Spock. Sometimes, illogical acts are all we have."

And she kisses him, rising up on her toes to press her lips gently to his. She feels his hand slip around her waist to the small of her back; when they part, it flattens there, keeping her close. "Nyota," he says quietly, holding her against him, his eyes closed. Then again, urgently, and it's barely out of his mouth before he's kissing her, deep and breathless and bruisingly hard.

When he breaks the kiss, he raises his hand. At the press of his fingertips to her cheek and temple, she leans into the touch; the torrent of emotion that follows makes her knees buckle, brings tears to her eyes, makes her cry out in sorrow and longing and fury and guilt and love and--

This was my home, she hears inside her head, and he shows her.


End.

*~*~*

I find it amusing how, whenever I sat down to work on this, my first attempt at typing "Spock" always came out "Spcok". Amusing and irritating.