Star Trek Fic: How Many Roads? or, 27 Times Jim Kirk Hit On Nyota Uhura, part 1/2

Title: How Many Roads? or, 27 Times Jim Kirk Hit On Nyota Uhura (read @ AO3)
Author: Deastar
Pairing(s): Kirk/Uhura, sort of, background Spock/Uhura
Rating: R for brief sex and… Jim Kirk?
Word Count: 9000
Summary: After the bar fight, Nyota thinks to herself that if this is what being hit on by Jim Kirk leads to, she’s very glad she’s never going to have to see him again.
Warnings: Um… bad pick-up lines?
Notes: I wrote this fic because I love Uhura, and felt bad that she got such a raw deal in my previous Kirk/Spock fic. Why I thought subjecting her to Jim’s pick-up lines 27 times would be an improvement, I really couldn’t say. A huge thank you to my amazing volunteer betas,alasse, singingintime, and danahid!

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1

It’s a pretty good bar, and a pretty good night, and not even a local boy in a black leather jacket – too drunk to really be charming – is going to ruin it.

“Her shot’s on her, thanks,” Nyota tells the bartender, but the guy will not be dissuaded. His name’s Jim Kirk, he tells her, and he’s smarter than he looks, and more charming than somebody that thoroughly sloshed has any right to be. He has absolutely no chance with her, of course – and she gets the feeling he knows that. She’s still flirting because she likes that he can keep up with her, likes the feeling that she always gets when a good-looking guy gives her all his attention.

Of course, then Caleb shows up and feels the need to get his chivalry on, and this Kirk guy doesn’t know when to get the hell out, so it all spirals way out of control and turns into exactly the kind of clusterfuck Nyota doesn’t need on her Starfleet record. If this is what getting hit on by Jim Kirk leads to, Nyota’s very glad she’s never going to have to see him again.

2

Of course, then he shows up on the shuttle the next morning.

“Never did get that first name,” Kirk says, with what he probably thinks is a winning smile. Maybe if his shirt wasn’t still covered in blood, and he didn’t smell like the bathrooms in last night’s bar, it would be.

“And you never will,” she tells him, which she will later realize was the biggest mistake she could possibly have made – because there’s nothing Jim Kirk finds as irresistible as a challenge.

3

“Introduction to Comparative Philosophy: Seminar” is a second-year class – there’s no way that that annoying Kirk guy from the shuttle should be enrolled, but there he is, on the first day of class and every day thereafter. Professor Newton is very laid-back, and cultivates an informal, friendly dynamic in the class, which gets on Nyota’s nerves a little, but which Kirk, of course, loves.

“Today we’re going to discuss the eight unanswerable queries posited by the Tellarite philosopher Jev. Who can give me an example of an unanswerable question posed in Earth philosophy? Kirk, how about you?”

Kirk leans back in his chair, looking poetically into the distance, and says, “Professor, the question that’s always preoccupied me is… how many roads must a man walk… to get a date with Cadet Uhura?”

Nyota does not murder him where he sits, but it’s a near thing.

4

“Oh, hell no,” Nyota says when Jim Kirk walks into the first Xenolinguistics Club meeting of the new term.

“I’ve heard this is where the people with the talented tongues hang out,” he says, grinning right at her in front of all the graduate students whose respect she desperately craves.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” she hisses at him.

“Well, you never answered my question in Philosophy seminar last term,” Kirk says, pouting. When she shakes her head impatiently – she can’t remember any question so important that he’d need to come track her down two months later – he smiles mischievously in reply, and asks her, in very passable Klingon, “How many roads must a man walk for a kiss from Cadet Uhura?”

Of course, in Klingon that actually works out to, “How many skulls must a warrior crush in order to bite Cadet Uhura’s lips until he can taste the richness of her blood?”

She replies, in nearly-perfect Vulcan, “I would suggest, in your skull-crushing endeavor, that you begin with your own; I do not anticipate that such an action will effect any noticeable change in the quality of your intellect.”

He smiles sweetly, and tells her, in beautifully inflected Deltan, “I’m a lover, baby, not a fighter.” And of course, out of the seventy-four words the Deltan language has for “lover,” he chooses the one that implies the person so described is very skilled at cunnilingus.

“See?” he says, in Federation Standard, eyes twinkling. “Talented tongue. Not as good as yours, I’m sure,” he adds hurriedly, his smile broadening into lewdness.

Nyota could kill him.

Or, she could learn from him.

“Damn right,” she says. “Now tell me how you incorporated an informal contraction into a poetic-mode verb in the Deltan – and don’t try any bullshit.”

5

“Nice shoes,” he says, leaning up on the bar next to her. “Wanna—”

“They’re boots,” Nyota snaps. “And no.”

Kirk pauses for a minute, and looks down at her feet.

“Nice boots,” he says.

After a minute of silence, Nyota asks, “Were you going somewhere with that, or—”

“No,” he says, shrugging. “Just, now that I look at them, they are pretty kickass boots.”

“I know,” Nyota says, smugly.

Normally, this is where he’d say something about how they’d look even better kicked under his bed, but instead, he asks where she bought them, and an hour later, Nyota is shocked to realize that they’ve actually had a very enjoyable conversation about, among other things, the recent redesign of the Starfleet cadet uniforms.

“Oh, hey, gotta go,” he says, looking at his watch and grimacing. “I promised I’d help my roommate out with his epidemiology project.”

He smiles up at her from where he’s slouched on the bar stool and says, “Oh, by the way, awesome earrings. Wanna—”

“No.”

6

Oh, for God’s sake, Nyota thinks, rolling her eyes heavenward.

“Why is it,” she asks Gaila, “that every time I go to a bar now, he’s always there?”

“Hey, Uhura,” Kirk says, sliding into the seat next to her. “I’d say ‘come here often?’ but we’ve actually seen each other here before, so that kind of ruins the effect, I think.”

“You make me not want to go to bars,” Uhura tells him, and he grins uncertainly.

“Is that some kind of euphemism?”

“I’m leaving,” she announces. As she walks out, she can hear Kirk say to Gaila, “Come here often?” and Gaila reply, “Not as often as I’d like… want to help me do something about that?”

“No more bars,” Nyota mutters, and she almost means it.

7

Nyota realizes, waking up, that there are parts of last night that she doesn’t actually remember. Shit, she thinks. Shit. What do I remember?

She remembers Jim Kirk coming up to her at the bar where she was sitting alone, and she remembers him making one of his usual idiotic pick-up attempts, and she remembers how he’d looked at her more carefully when she didn’t parry back, just downed another shot and slammed the glass down on the wood of the bar.

Of course, by then Nyota’d been drinking for two hours straight, crying for the hour before that, and taking her Advanced Syntax final for the three hours before that, so she wasn’t exactly behaving like herself at that point.

She remembers how he sat next to her, nursing his own beer and rambling about nothing while Nyota thought about her uncle’s funeral, which she had missed that day because her Syntax professor wouldn’t let her reschedule the exam; and Nyota Uhura is apparently the kind of person who sends her regrets rather than attend the funeral of a man who’d held her in his arms when she was a baby, so that she can guarantee the kind of exam score that will earn her a top internship next year, Nyota had thought, choking on a shot that went down too fast.

“Sometimes I get so tired of being the person I am,” Nyota remembers saying abruptly, interrupting Kirk. The smile he’d offered her in return was old and sad. He said, “I know, baby. I really do.”

Normally, Nyota would have kicked his ass for calling her “baby.” Last night, she remembers, she’d just picked up her next shot.

She remembers that, two shots and one Saclokian Sling later, she’d turned to him, with as level a stare as she was capable of in that condition, and, just barely slurred, said, “Fine.”

“What?”

“Better than fine,” she’d told him, speaking slowly because the words kept wanting to run away from her. “I want you to. The kind of person I’m not would sleep with you. So okay. I’m going to be that person.”

He’d given her a look that had something almost like sympathy in it, something dangerously close to pity; Which is ridiculous, Nyota remembers thinking, indignant, because he’s the pathetic pervert, and I’m doing him a favor.

“This is what you want, isn’t it?” she remembers asking him, her voice challenging and maybe a little mean, with a needy undercurrent that she’d hated. “This is what you want. So come back to my room with me,” she’d demanded.

“Yeah,” she remembers Kirk saying, with a rueful smile, “Seems somebody’s gotta, and it looks like I’m the lucky guy.”

Nyota remembers having one more shot before leaving the bar with Jim Kirk with the intent to prove something to herself in bed with him, and that’s the last thing she remembers from last night.

Nyota opens her eyes, prepared for the worst – but she’s in her own bed, thankfully alone. The covers are tucked up around her chin, and when she pushes them down, she can see that she’s still wearing everything from last night’s outfit, except her boots – she puts a hand up to her earlobes – and her earrings, apparently. She looks over to the bedside table, where she finds a hypospray and a tall glass of water. The trashcan has been helpfully moved to the side of her bed from its usual resting place by her desk.

“Thank you,” she tells Kirk when she next sees him, between classes.

He looks uncomfortable for a minute, then gives her a kind of sideways smile.

“I don’t sleep with people who aren’t sober enough to properly appreciate the mind-blowing brilliance of the experience,” he tells her, adding a broad wink before walking away to class.

8

Nyota strides confidently onto the Great Lawn, and does a spontaneous twirl, smiling the smile of someone who has finally gotten the most intelligent, gorgeous, fascinating, witty man on campus to agree to carry on an utterly illicit student-teacher romantic relationship with her. Oh, and he’d also agreed to be her thesis advisor. Nyota’s a little proud of herself for forgetting that, in the glow of the first part.

Jim Kirk’s voice hails her from somewhere on her left. “How did you know I’d be out here on the Lawn, Cadet Uhura? Are you stalking me?”

She turns to bestow a benevolent smile on him where he’s sprawled out bonelessly in the sun.

“What do you mean?” she asks politely – nothing can get her down today, not even James T. Kirk.

“Well, I saw that big smile on your face, and naturally assumed it was because you were looking forward to seeing me here,” Kirk explains.

Nyota laughs.

“Believe it or not, Kirk, this smile is for the thought of a long, happy future of dating someone as unlike you as possible.”

“Oh, good,” Kirk says, and Nyota tips her head to one side, confused.

“Why good?”

He spreads his hands wide, looking supremely satisfied. “This is a golden opportunity! When you get sick of him and dump him, you’ll be looking for someone as unlike him as possible, i.e., me. I officially offer myself up to you as your rebound guy – a painful sacrifice on my part, but I’m willing to go that extra mile for you, because we’re such close friends.”

“That’s very noble of you,” Nyota observes, still smiling.

“I am a noble guy,” Kirk agrees. “In fact, I’m so noble I’m going to give you this special one-time-only offer – how about you skip the ‘date the boring guy’ step and cut straight to the part where you take advantage of my selflessly offered body again and again and again?”

“You are a troglodyte,” Nyota informs him fondly, without a trace of malice or irritation. “An utter troglodyte, and I will never date you, not if I live to be a hundred. And now I am going to go celebrate with some ice cream, and you are not invited. Enjoy your afternoon.”

“My offer stands!” he calls after her, but she’s already thinking about Mint Chocolate Chip and long evenings of translation-as-foreplay with Commander Spock.

9

“How are things going with Mr. Boring and Perfect?” Kirk asks, standing in line at the cafeteria.

“Things with Mr. Hot and Classy are going fantastically well,” Nyota tells him, and it’s the truth.

“You know, it’s funny,” Kirk says, twirling his tray between his hands. “I’ve asked around, and nobody seems to have seen you out and about with Mr. Boring and Perfect, no one seems to have heard anything about it – in fact, aside from what you said to me, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of Mr. Boring’s existence.”

Outwardly, Nyota tries to project calm and disinterest, but inside, she’s cursing herself for being stupid enough to tell Kirk anything. If he digs deep enough, he could get Spock in more trouble than Nyota wants to think about.

“But I know the truth. Honestly, knowing you like I do – knowing what you like in a man – it wasn’t that hard to figure out,” Kirk murmurs, keeping his voice down, which is a small mercy as Nyota’s heart beats faster.

“Still,” he continues, putting on a mock-disappointed face, “I wouldn’t have believed it of you. Upright, uptight, honest Cadet Uhura…”

“I—” Nyota knows she’s giving herself away, knows she’s breathing too fast, and curses herself for ever underestimating—

“You didn’t have to make up a boyfriend, Uhura,” Kirk says, rolling his eyes. “I mean, I’m flattered, and if you’re into that, I can totally say I’m madly jealous, but, I mean… have I been too subtle? I’m into you. Well, not in the way I’d like, if you know what I mean, but… I’m into you. I want to know your first name. I totally had sex with Gaila on your bed because it smelled like you, I think my interest is pretty clear.”

“You what?!”

Kirk shrugs, totally unashamed. “She told me not to let you find out, but if you’ve gotten to the point where you’re inventing boyfriends to make me jealous, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that you don’t mind.”

Nyota honestly cannot think of a single appropriate verbal response to this situation.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed, Uhura,” Kirk continues, tossing a biscuit on his tray. “I knew you’d admit it eventually, although I’m surprised that you’d sink to—”

“I could not possibly despise you more,” Nyota says, unable to decide between being relieved and being offended.

“Oh, yeah?” Kirk winks. “I’ll believe it when I see it. When I see Mr. Perfect and Boring, I mean… if he really exists.”

“We’re not going to make out in front of you,” Nyota says, exasperated, before walking away, head held high. Of course, when Spock is standing on that transporter pad on the Enterprise, getting ready to beam onto the Romulan ship, and it’s so far past the time for giving a damn about fraternization or student-teacher relationships, that’s exactly what she and Spock end up doing. The expression on Kirk’s face when he finally connects the dots is one of Nyota’s fondest memories.

10

In the mess hall, after dinner, on the first day of the Enterprise’s true maiden voyage, Kirk walks up to Nyota’s table and, maintaining steady eye contact, asks her very formally, “I was hoping I could have your opinion, Lieutenant, on an engineering matter. I know that your particular expertise is in communications, but as this issue may be related to you, specifically, I would appreciate your input.”

Puzzled, Nyota says, “Of course, Captain.”

“Is it your impression that the internal temperature controls in this room are malfunctioning in such a way as to increase the level of heat beyond the normal range that most Humans find comfortable?” Nyota frowns – it doesn’t seem particularly warm to her… “Or is it just you?” Jim finishes, still totally straight-faced, and his tone and demeanor are so professional that it honestly takes Nyota a long minute to figure out what just happened here.

“What the…” Nyota sputters, glaring at Jim. “Was that really some lame attempt at a… what – a Vulcan pick-up line?”

He gives her an injured look. “What? I thought you were into that now!”

Nyota tries very hard not to be amused, and tries even harder not to be the tiniest bit impressed, but sometimes Jim Kirk just can’t be denied.

“To answer your question—” She picks up her tray and tosses her hair over her shoulder. “—It’s just me,” she says, enjoying his own amused, impressed smile as she walks away.

11

“…the successful completion of this mission will consist of a treaty granting the Federation first claim on the initial yield of any dilithium mined using Federation technology, and a general impression of goodwill created between the Clurifek and our crew, as representatives of the Federation,” Spock concludes. “Are there any questions before we disembark?”

Kirk raises his hand. “I’ve got one, Spock.”

“Captain,” Spock acknowledges.

“How many roads must a man walk to get a little love from Lieutenant Uhura?” he asks, grinning over at her. Nyota does not murder him – by now, she’s had a lot of practice not murdering him. Spock, of course, actually answers the stupid question, because he’s Spock.

“A most fascinating query, Captain, for the answer to the question depends entirely on the identity of the unnamed man. For example, were that man to be you, Captain, I anticipate that even an infinite number of roads would be insufficient. However, were I the man so described—” Spock’s eyes lock on to Nyota’s, and the heat in them makes her shiver pleasurably. “—I estimate a transit of no more than five strides to be sufficient.” The corner of his mouth quirks, and Nyota smiles back as Kirk mutters, “Geez, get a room.”

12

Kirk collapses to the ground, and Nyota rushes over.

“Spock, keep them away!” she calls, and Spock, bless him, doesn’t ask questions, just swiftly and firmly corrals the little purple aliens until they’re several yards away from the fallen captain.

Nyota kneels down beside him, and leans over to check his pulse, saying urgently, “Captain, are you all right?”

His eyes slowly drift open, which happens to put them right in line with Nyota’s chest.

“My head hurts,” he mumbles, “but the view is spectacular.”

Nyota rolls her eyes. “Never mind!” she calls to Spock. “You can’t even tell they shot him.”

13

Kirk and Nyota slowly look around what is clearly the uninhabited planet of Kloo, rather than its fourth moon, Leevo, which is the home of a bustling pre-warp society, and onto which Scotty was supposed to have beamed them.

It’s very flat. And empty. And flat. And brown. Nothing moves. Not even the wind. It’s completely desolate.

Kirk shoots her a look out of the corner of his eye.

“So when you said back at Academy that you wouldn’t sleep with me even if I was the last man on earth—”

“I had no idea how literally I would someday mean it, sir.”

14

Nyota does not know what possessed her to initiate sex with Spock in the Communications Office – or, more to the point, what possessed her to initiate sex with Spock anywhere where Jim Kirk might conceivably stumble across them.

“Hey, Uhura, have you seen—Oh, wow. That is… that is hot.”

Nyota closes her eyes and wishes she were anywhere in the universe but on her desk in the Communications Office with Spock’s hand up her skirt, her arms wound around Spock’s neck, and Jim Kirk lounging in the doorway.

“You guys, um… need a hand?” Kirk asks, visibly having trouble suppressing the urge to laugh. His eyes travel hungrily up the inside of Nyota’s spread legs and brush covetously across her slightly open mouth, which she expected… they also skate appreciatively over the curve of Spock’s neck, and the strong line of his thighs, which she did not. Spock twitches under Kirk’s scrutiny, which makes Nyota gasp as his fingers brush up against something very sensitive. Kirk’s eyes go dark and hooded.

I must be drunk, drugged or deranged, Nyota thinks, because for one insane second, she actually considered taking him up on it. Spock’s fingers on her bare skin catch the stray thought like a slip of paper blowing by in the wind, and he cocks an eyebrow at her thoughtfully.

“Oh, you’re kidding me,” Nyota says out loud. Spock’s eyebrows do the Vulcan equivalent of a shrug, while Kirk, who apparently thought she was talking to him, says in a low, dark voice, “I’m really, really not.”

I am not opposed to the concept, Spock whispers in her mind – the feeling of their thoughts blending is almost more intense than the wave of pleasure that breaks over Nyota when Spock bends to kiss her again while sliding two fingers deep inside her. Kirk groans, and when Nyota breaks the kiss to look over at him, she can see his hands clenched white on the doorframe.

Still not completely convinced that she’s in her right mind, Nyota begins to raise a hand toward Kirk, a beckon or a welcome, but suddenly, the ship-wide emergency klaxons start blaring, and the moment is broken – by the time she and Spock have put themselves back together, Kirk has called battle stations.

No more sex in semi-public places, Nyota tells herself, determinedly, and doesn’t think of it again.

Well… maybe a few times. When it’s late at night, and Spock is away on a mission, and—

Just a few times.

(on to part two)