They met when a receipt from the coffee shop blew out of her hand with the wind coming through the sliding door of the union lobby: He dove after it and caught it off the floor, asked, "Hey, do you need this?" as he handed it back and then laughed with her when she said she didn't really but thanks. She turned and tossed it into the garbage can, and it took them a couple minutes after that to realize she was his ride.

His name was James T. Kirk and Gaila had elusively emphasized the middle initial as she wrote the name down for Nyota, and then a couple more times when she reminded her of the place and time, until the name had seemed to circulate repeatedly like the tapping of her stirring her tea in unnecessarily loud little rhythms. He was something other than an admittedly vague picture of what Nyota had expected from her roommate's man of the month, but she didn't immediately care to put her finger on how. He looked a little bit like he'd just rolled out of bed and could use a dose of caffeine himself, but she tried to give him a little credit: Everybody who doesn't throw on a set of sweats for a day of sitting on airplanes or in cars tends to envy those around who didn't care about looking clean. It was just the way his eyes had glinted over her before he knew who she was, making her second guess if he would have lunged for the receipt if she'd been some man in his sixties.

"Nyota, then?" he said after they briefly shook hands.

"Nyota Uhura," she said. "Are you ready to go?"

His mom was driving most of his stuff over in her truck in a few days and he'd been able to pack as light as one duffel bag, so she didn't have to wait for him to get anything. They fell into step outside until she slowed up at the car. He liked the red color and asked her what year it was, but she'd bought it used and couldn't remember at the moment. He looked, not quite stared but looked at her in a way she couldn't scrutinize, while she pulled out of the parking lot, and when she glanced straight back at him at the stoplight with an idle polite smile, he got into his bag and pulled out a book to read. They didn't talk again for sixty miles.

Sixty miles is not very long.

::

"No, you're missing the whole point," Jim was saying in a sigh. His finger was still bookmarking the page he'd been on, indicating some readiness to return to his reading just as soon as he won the argument, when he didn't seem to be reading a paragraph or two while she was talking, which had increasingly annoyed her for the past several minutes. "I thought the assignment was a little too broad—"

"I agree," she interrupted, laughing a little. "Shakespeare is ubiquitous, you could argue almost anything was inspired by him, but you went with Reservoir Dogs?"

"It's a vague comparison, but so is the entire structure of the tragedy as it shows up in just about any mythology. Like you said...wait, what was the one you had to write?"

"Pretty much the opposite of your assignment. We had to suggest an influence on Shakespeare from something that predated the plays, and everyone knows he read Roman myths and the like, so you had to be more specific...You know the story of Caenis? She was a woman who was found alone on a beach by Poseidon, and well, what do you think he did next?" she said with a kind of rueful shrugging. "But then Caenis demanded a favor instead of an apology from him, and asked to be turned into a man so that she could never be violated by him or anyone again."

"She couldn't have just asked for super strength or something?"

"Not exactly a feminist inspiration, I know. I think some kind of immunity in battle went along with the deal, though; and Caenis went on to become the great warrior Caeneus. Anyway I applied the whole story to—"

"Wait, I'm thinking. Viola in Twelfth Night? Shipwrecked and nearly killed by the ocean, and then she starts dressing like a man...?"

"And there was this whole discussion of the ocean as a place of rebirth as well as trauma...Farfetched," Nyota conceded, "but not as cliché as using Tarantino."

"Oh, come on, I knew full well the assertion wasn't right anyway."

She flinched her eyes to the side at him, feeling more and more as she did with every conversation they had that Jim was just sparring for the sake of a debate, like so many of the philosophy stoners Gaila had invited over this one night a couple months back. One of them had been far too invested in tirelessly explaining to Nyota why she should find Ayn Rand relevant to her "situation," failing completely to ever emphasize what exactly he meant by her "situation," complete with suspicious emphasis on the commonality of literally all women; at least Gaila had agreed with Nyota about him, if on the basis that those types of guys were never good lays.

"I always started off a semester throwing a paper at an instructor that I knew didn't check out very well just to test how much bullshit I could sail past them. That was one of those papers."

"So, what, you just intentionally wrote bad papers?"

"It was a fine paper until you did the research. Not that Tarantino isn't compared to the classics all the time, even by the high-brow critics. Somebody he worked with told him that that one scene...well, there's this whole thing with a story that has to be memorized so he can pass as this likable thug—"

"Yeah, the commode story," she muttered, seeming to hit his brakes for a second with this interjection. "I never said I hadn't seen it."

"Okay, well, Quentin was told one time that the way the cop's boss lectures him about it is a lot like Hamlet's speech to the players."

"And what did he say to that?"

"He'd never read Hamlet."

Nyota's expression fell flat in lazy exasperation.

"Can we stop to eat somewhere?"

::

They continued their attempts at mild conversation after they ordered.

"So what are you studying at Columbia?" he asked.

"I'm a linguist."

"What for?"

"I want to monitor communications for the FBI."

"No shit?" Jim raised his eyebrows, and his mouth turned up around the straw he was thoughtfully sipping out of in a way that made her think it was too much of a smirk. He volunteered, "I'm doing archaeology."

"Hmm. Where are you taking that?"

He shrugged. "I'd like to get out somewhere in Europe but I'm really open to going all over. I couldn't stand anything that's just sitting at a desk. I'd love to get into cultural resources stuff too. There's gotta be an art theft department at the FBI so maybe we'll both end up there."

She met his freewheeling smile with a slightly dubious one. "That's probably a department of only ten to twenty people."

"And you've gotta know, what, seventy languages for a position in the FBI?"

"Try a hundred, minimum," she replied instantly. "As of yet I'm fluent in 68."

"Come on," he said, the doubt mostly playful.

"I don't even think of myself as having a first language. I like to say I still think in Swahili, but I started learning English and French when I was two, and the languages just kept piling."

There was a definite drop in his expression, like how someone looks when a leg of the chair they're sitting on cracks under them. "When you were two?...Have you ever been IQ tested?"

With the slightest shutdown in her demeanor she said neutrally enough, "Actually, as a rule I don't talk about that with a lot of people."

He accepted that much more quickly than most people did, so naturally that it was like a recognition passed between them; perhaps he knew too, all the over-shocked questions that came after, the need to turn the genius into some kind of party trick. This possible commonality didn't seem to have much effect on how her view of him had stacked up so far. She could think of a couple reasons why he probably got somewhat less surprised reactions if and when his capabilities were discussed, and that wasn't his fault, but she couldn't make herself care.

Their food came. The waitress realized, "Oh, shoot, I forgot your creamer."

Nyota chuckled down at her cup of coffee that she'd downed half of without even noticing. "I can just drink it black, it's fine."

"Sorry about that."

When she walked off, Nyota picked up her spoon and started blowing on her soup, her thought snatched away for a second.

She was about to take a sip when abruptly she realized that Jim was actually still looking at her in that sort of softly startled way, like there was something he couldn't figure out. She felt squirming and irritant all over again, and said, "What?"

As if only then noticing that she was looking back, he blinked out of his staring, and then there was something downturned and sheepish in his face. "Nothing."

"What?" she repeated, only realizing the simple fact as the demand came out. He had been looking because he'd been lured, and since it seemed clear enough neither of them wanted that, she tried to play along with the backpedal. But it was like being told to think of any animal other than an elephant and inevitably thinking of the elephant, and in the few seconds before she turned her eyes decidedly down she noticed too, the corded structure of his neck and arms, that decisively angled jaw, the way the eyelashes delicately framed the strong eyes. She tilted her head in a shrugging way and said, "Gaila didn't tell me you were some kind of genius."

He finally picked up his fork, thank God. "Who said I was a genius?"

"You sort of implied, being willing to ask me if I'd been IQ tested. You seem like you'd enjoy comparing yardsticks."

"You seem like you enjoy making a point of it when you're not impressed," he said, looking straight at her again as he took another swig of his Sprite.

"Not always," she said, sneering a little, "but sometimes."

"Why did you feel the need to bring up Gaila?"

The question was a rude pluck, throwing her off.

"Was it just a change of subject if you thought I was thinking about hitting on you?" he asked, making her feel so quickly idiotic for having felt the avoidance of this topic had been something held tactfully in common. "Or because you might be interested but you're under the impression that Gaila's my girlfriend?"

Nyota slowly sat back until her arms were crossed. "Are you screwing with me right now?"

"What?" he replied, the nonchalance only slightly pierced as if by some creeping understanding.

"Gaila is your girlfriend. You are her boyfriend. If you think I'm gonna fall for the magically disappearing commitment trick—"

"Back up like ten seconds—Are you serious? Did Gaila say we're a couple?"

Her whole demeanor went stiff in response.

"Did she?"

"I'm trying to remember if it would have ever been those exact words, but...yeah, she definitely referred to you in those terms."

Jim was utterly deflated, and before she could stop it she was laughing a little, a dark spill of needing to find humor in it so that she didn't feel the desire to throw something at him.

He glared.

"I'm sorry, but..." She wasn't sorry and they both knew it. "You just have this look like this little misunderstanding happens with you a lot."

"...Hah," he said, not offering whether that was true or not.

She sighed and shook her head, asking after a brief moment, "So what's the story?"

He gave a scoff of frustration. "The story is Gaila and I slept together just a couple times, and we never even talked about it afterwards when we kept hanging out. I thought there was some unspoken agreement that it was probably a mistake. Or something."

"Maybe she thought you were just putting the brakes on when you continued to see her as if you liked her."

"Of course I like her, what the fuck?" Jim snapped.

"That's not what I mean," Nyota said, "it's just that you got different ideas."

"Well, my assumption was just as good as hers, wasn't it?"

"No, it wasn't," she said, insistence crackling into her quickly.

"Romance doesn't have to be the default," Jim argued just as fast, his anger only somewhat tampered as if he was glimpsing his own fervor coming up to him from the back of the diner and seeing that it hadn't even bothered to shave for the ladies. "Most of the time it's just sex...Why isn't just-sex the default?"

"Just-sex is not the default," she said, shaking her head.

"Because everybody's looking for Shakespeare, right?" he said with a frolic of sarcasm in his voice.

"I think as far as people's emotions are concerned," she explained evenly, "it is the best assumption to make. I mean, maybe if you'd only slept with her one time, but a couple times?..."

"So, whatever, we'll communicate about it." Jim pushed his plate forward in an abrupt movement, no longer eating. "Even though she has no real reason to be hurt."

She looked at him, steely. "Just because you manage to be unsentimental doesn't make you able to tell other people what they should or shouldn't feel."

"I never said I was unsentimental, just that I don't see why somebody I've stayed up all night with just talking, somebody I've laughed with and studied with and deeply respected as a human being, should feel all that sad if I'm not sentimental about her body."

She gave an incredulous half-grunt. "People fall in love. I'm sure you're familiar with the concept."

"People make the mistake of sleeping with people they care a lot about," he mumbled, "I'm familiar with that concept."

She opened her mouth, got interrupted.

"Listen. Take the two of us for example. Say you and I were very good friends." He crooked his head in response to her immediate look. "I know, laugh it up, it's just an example. I mean, I could theoretically be friends with you the same way I am friends with people I have no desire for. But alas, you are an extremely attractive woman, so—"

"People are attracted to people they don't actually sleep with all the time—"

"No, uh-uh, just, let me finish. So we're the best friends ever, and I really really care about you, et cetera, but I cannot...expel my latent desire to sleep with you." Jim said this with a delicate gesture that was possibly some attempt at trying to cover his words with some measure of respect. "Now, people would say that's still a friendship, and I agree. But if I said to you that you cannot be in love with somebody without having had sex with them, what would you say?"

"Of course you can, but come on; it's just different. You notice certain things about them, you think about them more..."

"Yeah, but if you took away the physical attraction, you'd just have a kind of rational but equally valuable version of the exact same affection; you'd still love them, you'd still appreciate the same things about them that really matter. I don't see any reason why this whole constructed notion of 'being in love' isn't just an entirely problematic overlap."

"Oh, are you going to draw me a Venn diagram? I love those."

The intensity of her sarcasm slowed his charge a bit, but he gave a sigh and argued, "People think that being physical with somebody that they care about sort of intensifies whatever you feel about them, when all you're really doing is letting your body and your brain send you all these messages about ways in which you need them close to you that really aren't important. And before you know it something about that can screw it all up and then you're out one relationship because you gambled on something you can get with anyone else who's pretty enough. And we all put on a good show; we go around saying no one needs a man or needs a woman, they just need someone who's there for them and friendship should be cherished, blah blah blah, but deep down that 'true love' is something people never quite stop believing in because all the movies and the whole Valentine's Day parade still feeds us that old lie, so we all run around bumping off of each other chasing this fairy tale, and it makes the world look lonely as hell, and that's why I think romance is bullshit." He finished with a harsher brevity creeping in on his words, as if suddenly realizing he didn't know how he'd gotten so deep into the subject with her.

Uhura's arms were crossed again as she eyed him narrowly, eventually shaking her head and sighing. "And I think you're the type who has to push people's emotions into some cataloging system, just so that you can trivialize everything and push off the possibility of ever getting mixed up with anything serious. Do you even have a friend you consider so important to you?"

He rolled his eyes at her, but not before a flinch of looking a bit stung. She could have almost felt guilty for that attack, but then her next words came out with a feeling weight that seemed to surprise both of them.

"And I have heard about enough and known enough and yeah, even dated enough smartass pompous dickbags to acknowledge that you are more than intelligent enough to take responsibility for the emotions of everyone around you. And I think that you're the type of guy who chooses to apply his aggressive little philosophy by refusing to communicate with a girl he's sleeping with as some form of protest to the fact that the world is not set up to his advantage in that respect. I don't think you were oblivious to the fact that you might end up hurting Gaila. This is all a little too convenient for you."

He looked blankly out the window to their left, then forward after a brief moment. "And how many irreplaceable dear friends do you actually have, with how you make up your mind so fast about people?"

The stalemate felt strangely both relieving and discomfiting. It was suddenly clear that neither of them had meant for any fight to get this far, but the silence had dawned with only a petulant shrug, weary and gloomy. When the bill came, Jim grabbed it and paid for both of them up at the front; she was grateful for the assumption that he'd done it as an excuse to get away from her for a couple minutes more than out of any kindness or desire for a truce, though it actually somehow seemed that the truce itself was in that fact, that he'd known she wouldn't know for sure.

::

The sun was waning off when they got back on their route. Jim read his book again until it was too dark, and finally asked in a diffident mumble if he could browse through the radio stations. In the static stretch of nothing but yellow towns glowing along by them, it was inevitable that sooner or later they would slide back into that momentum of speaking to each other.

They managed almost effortlessly, in fact, to talk and talk despite the tension that had been there all day and the fact that the talking didn't quite make that slight streak of iciness go away. It was as if, now that the mutual dislike had been not so softly implied, they were free to pick at each other for entertainment as casually as they liked, with no need of polite biographical inquiries or feigned interest in topics that neither of them cared about. And even more unusual was that even though they seemed able to make just about any possible subject into an argument, after a time the grudging deference braided together with the tension in some athletically essential way, two dancers performing a duet that took as much force as grace.

Late into the night, the farther the car launched through its illuminated tunnel surrounded by the most fleeting flow of traffic, there was some planetary separation to it that gave her the feeling that if the road could continue to take them infinitely forward, she and Jim would never once run out of things to talk about. And it wasn't all disputes either: Between some of the ripostes, some histories and milder opinions did slip in. Jim recalled to her how much trouble he'd gotten into when he was sixteen and cut class so that he and a friend, who at the time was only known as "Motherfuckin' Pete" (one of the great mysteries of Jim's adolescent life in Riverside, he explained, was how this label was applied to Pete both by his friends and apparently also by several of the parents in town, despite neither group ever doing so in earshot of the other), could hitch-hike to Chicago for a Beastie Boys concert. This had led to the somewhat friendlier back-and-forth about which of them got away with the "baddest shit" while they were teenagers, and he seemed, she thought, overly interested in just how rebellious she'd been capable of being.

"So that's why you're kinda..." He gave a vague gesture, a good percentage of his attention focused on the Rubik's Cube he'd found when he was distractedly fishing through her back seat.

She glanced shortly at him. "What?"

"I was just thinking maybe you're not so...uptight by default." It sounded a little bit like he'd been searching for a less insulting word, so Nyota let it go. "Like you haven't been given enough credit for how much you can do yet. When you're done proving yourself, maybe you'll have room to unwind a bit."

"Not being willing to take shit does not make me uptight."

He made a few abrupt twists to the cube, shook his head slightly. "Come on, you know that's not what I meant."

And on and on. Eventually the philosophies of romance, relating it to faith in higher powers in some way, came back around. The cynicism of moral objectivism, the optimism of numerous technology theories, something to do with Carlos Fuentes, and does she like to read in French? But somehow swerving back to what they'd talked about in the diner numerous times. By the time the weight of the night started to tip towards morning she was convinced that Jim believed in absolutely nothing and no one but himself.

"It's so strange, you know," she said with playfully exaggerated thoughtfulness, "you don't seem at all like a moron but then you talk like a high school kid who's just discovered Nietzsche."

She didn't look over for his initial reaction, and almost worried a bit about his hesitation before he managed to defend himself with, "Nietzsche wasn't all cynicism."

"Well..."

"'It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages,'" he quoted matter-of-factly. Before she could reply he was saying, "Hey, that exit there...I think, let me grab the map..."

Another few minutes passed. When she spoke again it was to tersely say, "I can't believe I gave you a ride and you're not even dating Gaila."

::

A couple hours outside of New York she finally admitted she was fighting sleep, and they pulled over so Jim could drive the rest of the way. She woke later with her head bumping into the window, steered herself to sitting up and realized they'd just parked near his apartment complex as he was already getting into the back seat to grab his backpack.

Moving a little drowsily, she came around to the driver's side, stopping in front of him with her hands buried into her kangaroo pocket as he shifted his bag up over his shoulder.

It worked well for this departure that they would be going to the same school; despite the fact that it was unlikely two grad students in different programs would ever be running into each other, they were at liberty to leave it at "See you around" as if they would be.

"Well," Jim said, arching his shoulders back to give them a stretch. "See you at the races, I guess."

"Uh-huh," she said, smiling crookedly. She extended her hand and, after the briefest flinch of surprise or hesitation, he shook it.

"Good luck with everything," he added with a nod, genuinely enough.

"You too."

He grinned at her, something in it cheerfully self-deprecating, then made a pantomime of tipping an invisible hat, and walked away down the road.

Her small smile, one that was stranded somewhere in the greys between artificial and well-meaning, fell just as he turned away, and as soon as he'd landed several footfalls she was turning to get back into the driver's seat.

She let out a long tired breath, her shoulders shrugging briefly with the motion, before she turned on the engine. Leaning to grab the atlas and put it up on the dashboard, she noticed something and stretched down farther, finding the Rubik's Cube and picking it up to turn it over as Jim had left it. Perfectly solved. With some muttered grunt, she threw it into the backseat, and then pulled out.

Half a block down the road, something snagged Jim Kirk into pausing and turning to look with a kind of regretful curiosity in the direction of Uhura's car; but she'd already gone. He turned back, shoving his hands into his pockets, and kept walking.

::

::

::

THREE YEARS LATER

::

"Wait, so she told you on Sunday?" Jim said, grunting when the wind pitted a hard gust up his umbrella. "On your anniversary?"

"That's the worst part," Bones said, sidestepping to let an elderly lady stray in from the crosswalk crowd and hunching under an umbrella with a ladybug pattern on it that somehow only added to the miserable wet-dog drag of the whole picture. "I don't think she remembered that it was our anniversary."

"How the hell could she forget?" Jim demanded angrily. "I don't know why I know when your anniversary is, but she shouldn't—"

"I figure it's a hole-in-one. I'll be apt to get drunk every year on the day we got married and also the day she left me, so."

"Bones...You will be over it in a year. Over it in less than a year probably."

"Frankly, Jim, I don't see how you have the experience to tell me when I'll be able to get over my damn marriage, so stuff it."

"You will be fine, man. God, there are like a hundred women I know who would love to date you."

"That's nice. Can any of them hypnotize me into forgetting the last, uh, fifteen years of my life?"

The number stuck in the air a little harder than anything else Jim had heard. "Okay, listen, I'm sorry as hell. I don't know...Jesus, I don't even know what to tell you, but you'll pull through this. You don't give yourself enough credit, and it's like...you know what, I give up, I can't ignore it anymore: What's with that umbrella?"

"Agh, it's Joanna's," Bones groaned, as if he'd just remembered how ridiculous he looked. "I haven't had it in me to get much of my stuff from the house and it was the only one we had at the hotel. Can't wait to keep a straight face showing up at the hospital with this damn thing. Hey, what—?"

Jim was grabbing the handle of the umbrella. "Just so happens I adore ladybugs. Let's trade."

"Are you serious?"

"Come on, you gotta do what you gotta do to feel dignified. I'll take it." He made it so that Bones had little choice but to grab Jim's handle to avoid getting pelted by more water, and the doctor looked at Jim strangely, a tension falling out of his shoulders by a little bit as he started to hold the black umbrella. Jim asked, "And what's the deal with the hotel? You need to stay at my place for a while?"

"I think I can afford a hotel better than you can afford all the company."

"Well, the offer's out there."

"Thanks, Jim." They slowed up a bit at Jim's turn. "Listen, uh...you're a good one to have around."

Jim looked like he was about to protest, but his eyes hiccuped to the red parasol and he just shrugged and smiled ruefully. "Call me soon. Don't do this on your own and all that, okay, are we done being softies?"

Bones gave a warm kind of rolling of his eyes. "Later."

As they took off separately, Jim checked back over his shoulder once, frowning in concern.

::

Her plane got in on time, and as soon as she had the opportunity she ducked into the bathroom and stood up in the stall with her back to the door.

She cried for a while, a quiet but thorough welling of tired tears. After the crying she felt better, and changed back from the sandals she'd put on for the flight into the pair of brand new kitten heels she'd worn to the funeral.

The funeral. Another stab got her on the way to the sink. "Shit," she muttered aloud, burrowing part of her face into her jacket and clicking back into the stall for another round. She moaned a few more curses as the water wailed up again. A small mercy was the emptiness of this side of the bathroom, but she wondered if she would have really been able to care if anyone heard.

She finally got it under control, touched up her make-up in front of a cracked mirror as a mother dragged her cranky child in and gave Nyota some generically empathetic smile that made her feel too transparent. Finally slumping to lean her hands on the sink top, she looked in a more confronting way at herself in the mirror, and then stopped slouching, deciding it really wasn't so bad. She landed her attention on how the shoes went with the dress slacks. It never made her feel good to look cheap.

There was hard rain outside, and she had a moment's groaning dread that she'd forgotten her compact umbrella before she found it at the far bottom of her shoulder bag. She wasn't sure whether to stall here or get an early start to the subway station, but a restless locomotion took her walking down the street outside either way, until she slowed up at the sight of the art exhibit through the glass of a corner office. She was curiously glancing at the neat rows of pottery and the leisurely observations of the people drinking out of flutes, when her cell rang.

Checking the ID, she picked up eagerly. "Hey, I just got in. How was the dinner?"

Christine, sounding content but tired, replied, "God, they rained so much food on us. I got to eat two steaks. They don't usually do that stuff for the assistants, so it was great. I was just kind of in a mood the whole time, cause I found out...agh, you don't want to hear about that..."

"Oh, now. What's happened?" Hearing a grunt of hesitation, Nyota rolled up her eyes affectionately, pushing, "Come on. I already know who this is about."

"Okay...Remember how I told you that he actually took a vacation about a month back? For an entire week? And he never does that, he never takes time off, and I wasn't the only one at the office thinking that maybe he had actually met somebody, that he'd taken off to have this steamy getaway with somebody in the Bahamas or wherever."

"Hmm," Nyota vaguely confirmed, her eyes following the back of a tall couple who were examining a few paintings on one of the exhibit walls, one of them a blond and fit man and the other a woman working a pair of stiletto heels with the agility of a supermodel. "And?"

"And I found out from a colleague the other day...he was just attending a chemistry conference in England." Christine drew out this fact like it was a truly torrid thing, worthy of the most anguished jealousy. "I mean, it has to be true. I don't think he's ever going to date anybody."

Nyota sighed. "Well, you've been saying that for a while now."

"I'm serious, though. I don't think he ever dates anyone, ever."

She lifted her eyebrows in dutiful regret. "Well, you know, some people don't."

"I know. I know that."

"Look, I hate to..." Nyota's attention slipped forward, and she interrupted herself with a laughing exclamation of "Oh my God..."

"What?"

The tall blond had turned to look far back over the entrance, probably checking a clock, and her recognition had startled her. "It's nothing, just...I've been looking into the window of this gallery, and there's a guy in there I carpooled with a few years ago."

"Ah. Are you gonna go in and say hi?"

"Sweet Jesus, no way."

"What, you don't like him?"

"Oh, he annoyed the hell out of me for half the trip." She paused, squinting in on the sight of him as he bent in to whisper something into the woman's ear. "Except he's like...at the same time he can throw an informed opinion on a dozen different subjects while solving a Rubik's cube, and that just makes everything else all the more annoying. You know what I'm saying?"

"Not really," Christine said, laughing. "Is he cute?"

Laughing too now, Nyota asked, "God, why?"

"Well, you know how I go for the smart ones. Especially when they're devastatingly unavailable..."

Unable to help laughing more, she said, "You're not that bad, honey."

Their playfulness faded naturally over a handful of seconds, and Christine cleared her throat. "Listen, before I hang up. How are you doing?"

Nyota let out a long breath. "Not so good. I did manage not to cry on the plane."

There was a long pause of unspoken gloom. "I'm so sorry. And I'm still sorry I couldn't go with you."

"It's okay. I kind of needed to be as alone as I could be, you know?"

"Sure. Call me if you need me, honey."

"Yeah, thanks. Bye."

"Bye."

Nyota hung up and put away her phone, and when she glanced back up, Jim Kirk was looking out the window and right at her.

There was an oddly stunned couple seconds, and then Jim's eyes roamed away to something else outside before he turned abruptly back to his date, or whatever she was, and Nyota wondered if he hadn't actually been looking directly at her but at something posted next to the swinging doors. She swiveled to face away from the window, feeling halfway foolish, but wasn't sparked into moving along just yet. She took her phone back out and swiped the screen into her photo album to clean out some of the sloppier photos as some of the patrons started spilling out of the gallery doors.

::

When Callie had promised not to be dragging him to see some pretentious installation art parade, he'd been more than happy to tag along to look at her sister's stuff with her, but this had quickly proven to make him wish it was the sister he was taking out. The artist was the artist; her sister thought of herself as the critic, the kind that felt the need to whisper into his ear about the pedestrian simplicity of the concepts because of course it was vulgar anymore to think that the most central point of a piece could be to simply make a visual impression. If he had any opinion it was a liking for the more classical stuff, which seemed to quickly flush their art-viewing compatibility down the drain. Callie probably noticed this, but any mild disagreements between them were usually countered with a look his way that seemed to saucily intimate the valuable way in which they were compatible. This managed to put Jim back into a lighter mood bordering on self-ridicule, and the playful charade between them continued, as it always did, with promises that would be paid in full at her hotel room.

It had been when Callie was pulled off to the side by her sister for a moment that Jim's eyes strayed forward to the rainy city outside, and the thin figure in the long coat took a moment to seem familiar to him. As soon as he'd realized it was Uhura, he'd reflexively looked away.

But a good several minutes later she was still there, and he wondered if it would be alright to go out and say hi. She hadn't liked him, but there had been at least some kind of curiosity between them, if he remembered much about the rapport that had carried them through the many miles to New York all that time ago.

It was strange how easily that night slipped into the front aisle in his mind. His thoughts hadn't glanced at her in a long while, though there had been several events or presentations around campus where he'd found himself glancing around the crowd just to idly see if he spotted her head somewhere. They'd learned a pretty good deal about each other a few years ago, and even though Jim had none of his best friend's Southern etiquette, it seemed right to try to compare notes for a second time.

"Hey, Jim," Callie said as she came up to squeeze him forward.

"You ready to go? Listen, can I meet you back at the room?"

"...I guess so. Why?"

"There's somebody standing out there I just recognized from...from a while ago. Do you mind?"

She kissed him, lips curling in a smile he could feel against his mouth. "Okay, but keep in mind I'm ever so impatient."

He cocked an eyebrow. "Ever so?"

She chuckled, checked for anyone watching, and then gave him a decidedly more thorough kiss, with quite a bit more of her body involved. He playfully swatted her away when they finally noticed her sister shaking her head in disapproval. She headed out through the back way towards the parking garage, and when he turned, he was mostly relieved but a tiny bit unsteady to see that Uhura was still there.

By the time he came out the door and approached her in a few steps, she'd set down her bag to card through several things inside of it. About to open his mouth, he was cut off by her saying, "Hold this for a minute, please?" and could only respond with wide-eyed slowness when she held up the handle of her umbrella for him to take while she searched with both hands.

"I guess that answers my first question," he muttered.

"Yes," she replied easily, "I did recognize you, Jim. How have you been?"

"Rough year, but I'm not too bad," he said, falling swiftly in line with her casual terseness.

"Still trying to be Indiana Jones?"

"Oh, you know it. How's linguistics?"

"Great. I'm really into Mandarin right now."

He gave an impressed whistle, then furrowed his brows at her defeated sigh as she stopped digging through her bag. "Did you lose something?"

She stood up, replacing the bag over her shoulder, and took the umbrella handle back. She took a moment to answer him, distractedly gazing past him into the street while she seemed to be weighing something carefully in her mind. Then she said, "I think I somehow left my pepper spray in Kenya."

"Kenya?" Jim exclaimed.

She looked back at him, opening her mouth to explain, but then her eyes went up and down him and her mouth dropped open into a near-laugh. She stammered in helpless humored confusion, "Jim...What little girl is missing her umbrella?"

He looked up, rolled his eyes. He'd taken the thing out on rote a couple minutes ago, forgetting how foolish it looked. "My friend's daughter—He's got my umbrella because he was having a bad day, look, it's a long story..."

Her laughter rang out fully now, doubling her over so that she had to trip back from the edge of where the rain was blocked by the awning and then readjust her hair. "It doesn't even cover your shoulders...You look ridiculous..."

He let her go on a bit, snickering at him, his chagrined feeling somehow eclipsed by a warmth that spread through him in response to seeing her in such a giddy spill of emotion, as if he instinctively felt it meant something that she would allow herself to give him that laugh even if it was at his expense. Finally, after beginning to chuckle in return, he demanded, "Come on, would you control yourself?"

She stood up tall again, sighing out a last strike of laughter. "Listen, we can share my umbrella if you walk me to the station. How does that sound?"

Lifting his brows but not entirely surprised by this, forgetting for the moment all about Callie and her dadaism and anybody's mean streak, he nodded.

Several blocks later he was pausing in the middle of saying something to warn, "Look out" and pull in Uhura by her arm.

"I see it," she said, stepping in to avoid the bits of broken glass. "You were asking about tone recognition. I've already worked with it a lot because I know several Bantu languages, though, it's really something you either can or can't get the hang of, and every language is different..."

"So did you grow up in Kenya? I remember you saying something about Swahili being your first language."

"When did I say that?" she asked, squinting and shifting after her heel slipped on a wet patch.

"Three years ago?"

"Oh...I'm surprised you remember."

He sniggered a little. "I'm sure you remember too, but only the bad stuff."

"Hmm," she said, playfully neglecting to correct him in any way, and dive-bombing right into, "So how's your love life?"

He shook his head. "I haven't seen the light, if that's what you're asking."

"Come on, that looked like you were on a date with what's-her-name back there."

"Her name is Callie and I never said that I don't date."

"You pretty much said that there was no point."

"No point in dating? I never..."

"I can't exactly say I would still remember but that was very much the impression I got, Kirk...By the way, I really don't mean this in that way, but have you heard from Gaila lately?"

"Yeah, I went to her wedding." In response to her obvious surprise he asked, "Were you not invited?"

"I just couldn't make it," she said, and Jim figured the surprise was over the fact that he and Gaila were still in touch, and a lazily vindictive part of him chose not to share that he and Gaila's friendship was mostly carried out on greeting cards these days, when it was remembered at all.

"The reception was kind of an epic production...She and her man are like, very loudly in love, it was crazy."

"...Huh," Uhura said, still seeming distracted.

"The wedding was where I met Callie, actually. She lives over there and I only see her when she's in the city visiting family. What about you, got anything for me to be nosy about?"

"There have been several people in my life," she shared tersely, "but there's not much going on right now."

And so on, as the rain finally started to let off, and they were able to walk a normal distance away from each other, whatever that should have been for whatever the two of them were at that point. It was the lack of change in Uhura's demeanor at this reestablishment of comfort that made him realize she wasn't exactly fussed to be around him. He began to ask more questions, and was intrigued to get answers fairly easily, to the point that any short responses she'd given may have just been something else to her mood. In fact it didn't take him long to get the reason for this, when she mentioned in an offhand way that it had been a funeral she'd had to make it to in Africa, in the roundabout way that one knocks over a delicate subject on the way walking by it rather than letting it come head-on. But she did add, "My father," as explanation, and so Jim said, "My mom too, just this past year," and it felt somehow sturdy to have that in common.

Finally they stopped at the steps outside the station. She dutifully made sure he hadn't inconvenienced himself by walking with her and he reassured her Callie's hotel was a decent cab fare distance away.

"Oh, here." He'd been carrying her umbrella and handed it to her, shaking off some of the droplets. She took it from him and they faced each other in idle symmetry, until something in her face, the same shade of melancholy he'd seen in it since they took off from the gallery, made him ask, "You doing okay?"

He seemed to have surprised both of them. Her mouth slightly opened, then shut in a considering expression. She suddenly looked hunched in on herself as she looked off in the distance. He realized that there was a film of tears in her eyes, exhausted and barely shed, almost like she hadn't realized they were there herself.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's none of my—"

"Do you want to go have a beer or something?" she asked.

His eyes stuttered over the air between them. "I...What?"

"Listen." She was speaking with the lift of being the one who'd started this awkwardly sympathetic conclusion all along, struggling past that shake in herself but coming out strong. "I...Okay, I feel like this kind of thing is supposed to be implied rather than actually asked, but considering the two of us didn't get off to the best start I think I need to be clear about it...I guess I'm trying to say that I would like it if...you know, if we could be friends."

The drowsy wet air felt stunned around his head and he blinked, unable to respond.

"I know neither of us were really..." She swallowed. "We didn't really get the best out of each other, and I have no idea how you feel about the idea, but...well, how would you feel?...about starting over?"

She was then putting out her hand in a way that felt self-consciously awkward, crooking her head to the side in a kind of question.

Still in disbelief, he looked down at her hand, and then shook his head. "Come on, I'm not gonna shake your hand." Something in her twitched, and before she could get the wrong idea he was pulling her lightly along with him to wave down a cab, saying, "I liked you just fine the first time around."

::