Nyota Uhura
(she lives among the s t a r s)

When you're six years old, your favorite aunt tells you that your meant to live among stars.

She teaches you every constellation, whispering stories that have been long forgotten about Orion's Belt and Three Sisters and two sets of stars shaped like dippers. Astronomy has long changed from what it used to be, now all about alien life and other planets, just facts and science. There aren't really any more stories, no more fiction.

But your aunt whispers forgotten tales about the stars to you, the same way girls at school whisper secrets about boys and crushes.

She tells you that not only are you meant to live among stars, but that you are a star, that being named Nyota means that you'll sparkle and glitter and shine, just like all the other stars that fill the night sky.

She whispers it to you, like it's a secret.

And you start to think of it that way.

Not only is you knowledge of the stars meant to be kept to yourself, but also your first name should be kept a secret. What you've been told defines you, destines the rest of your life, Nyota, must remain a secret.

That belief is what makes you refuse to tell some blue-eyed country boy that your name is anything beyond Uhura. He's gorgeous, you will give him that, but he knows he's gorgeous and that's more than enough of a reason to make you turn him down. Then he's outnumbered but still fighting in a way that's almost desperate.

You're talented with your tongue.

But you're talented with your eyes too.

You read all kinds of things from him in those short moments, learned that he preferred to swagger instead of walk and that the only reason he was so confident was because he felt he had nothing to lose. You notice that every time he's told to stop, to back down, he gets more and more defiant, more and more reckless.

Then Pike is there and you leave the bar without a fuss, still slightly curious about the boy with too blue eyes that you left bleeding on a table.

You stop thinking about him soon enough though.

It's not like you're ever going to see him again.

When he turns up on the shuttle, you roll your eyes and ignore him, but you don't really think that he'll leave you alone. He proves your suspicions correct. The next two years are nothing but routine, going through classes and turning down Kirk.

And then you meet Spock.

He's like no one you've ever met before. His half-Vulcan qualities make him so much harder to read, so much more difficult to understand.

He's a mystery.

And you're hooked.

So the first time he calls you Nyota, on your third date, you don't complain. You just press your fingers to his in a Vulcan kiss and, later, when he walks you home, you touch your lips to his in a human kiss.

Time passes and you slowly fall in love with Spock, each day learning slightly more about him. You learn his tells, what each thing he does means, with the same dedication that you used to learn each language that you currently know.

And things are good.

But then your up in space, on the freaking USS Enterprise and it's just you, the crew, and a farm boy with eyes the color of the sky against the end of the world. Things move almost too quickly for you to understand them, the fate of two entire planets, two entire civilizations decided by only a handful of people and a too short span of minutes.

After everything, with Pike in sickbay under McCoy's watchful eyes and Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov slowly but surely directing the Enterprise back to Earth, Kirk smiles at you.

"You did good, Nyota," he murmurs, eyes shining like the stars your aunt told you stories about when you were just a little girl. He breaks gazes with you to clap Chekov on the back; a broad grin covering his bruised and bloodied face.

You smile.

You walk from the bridge, glancing at Spock and gesturing at him, hoping that he'll follow you. You know that he's devastated, that he just lost his mother and his home, and you want to help in any way that you can. You aren't sure if he'll just tell you to leave him alone, but you have to try. He walks into your quarters behind you, eyes suspiciously bright with grief and adrenaline and fear.

He stalks towards you, and you forget to worry about what happened to Gaila or if Kirk was going to pass out before McCoy could get him to sickbay or what's going to happen when you make it back to Earth.

All you can think about is him.

And when he presses his hips against yours, his lips whispering Nyota in your ear, like it's a secret, you finally feel like your aunt was right.

Maybe you were destined to live among the stars.

You were named after two grandfathers that you never met, by a man that died as you were born.

You like to change your name, change it to match whatever identity that you slip into as easily as chameleons change colors to suit their surroundings. You've been called various things throughout the years, some names special and others painful.

When you were young, you were only ever called Jimmy or boy. You preferred Jimmy, it was what your mom called you, but Frank didn't care.

He called you boy anyways.

By the time you had been shipped off to Tarsus IV, you were going by Jim. It was much more grown up after all. But then there was fungus and terror and the crops were failing and people were dying all over, four thousand people sentenced to death simply because Kodos said so.

Then you became JT.

All your kids called you that, except for Kevin. Kevin still got to call you Jim. But no one else did. It was always JT, up until the moment that Kodos was threatening to shoot you. You stood there, your body frail and thin but gloriously unbreakable and your eyes shining blue, the same color the sky used to be before it turned gray and red with all the death caused by a governor with too much power.

And you told him that your name was James Tiberius Kirk.

And that he wasn't ever going to forget you.

Then you ran like hell.

You got back to your kids and moved them, seventeen starving bodies slipping through the forest like ghosts until Starfleet showed up, weeks too late.

After that it went back to Jim, just Jim. You wandered from city to city, never leaving Iowa but never staying in one place for too long. You slept with countless strangers and fought even more. Life between the horror of Tarsus IV and the responsibility of Starfleet was nothing more than drinking, fighting, and fucking.

That was when Chris Pike found you.

And he called you Jim Kirk.

You know that he thinks the only reason you signed on to Starfleet was because he taunted and dared you into it, but that wasn't really true. You joined because you had something to prove.

You had to prove that you could change the world, that anyone could change the world, without dying in order to do it.

You had to prove your father didn't have to die to save you.

So you enlisted and officially became Cadet Kirk for the next three years.

Some of the girls that you preferred more than the others, like Gaila, called you Jim but the majority of campus called you Kirk. Teachers called you cadet, or smartass, and behind closed doors they bemoaned the loss of you brilliance, drowned out by all your laziness.

You passed all their classes without attending a single one during your freshmen year, before Pike implemented attendance rules. But it killed your teachers because not only did you pass; you were number one in your class, in all of Command Track actually, and you never even tried.

Bones called you Kid, or Jim, gruff affection making his southern drawl warm and pleasant to listen to. He was your best friend, possibly the only friend that you had ever had. You like to just listen to him speak sometimes, his thick drawl warm in your ears as he berates you for some stupid stunt. You know it's kind of insane, but you like it when he scolds you. It means he cares, and very few people ever have.

But none of those names matter.

Not really.

Not as soon as you're Captain.

Then, Captain Jim Kirk is the only name that you care about.

You saved Earth, with nothing but half insane decisions and a crew of too young heroes. And, by some unspoken agreement, when none of the crew spoke about the Nero incident to any reporters, the Admirals decide maybe you've become respectable.

And they promote you to Captain.

And give you the USS Enterprise.

Something like vindication thrums through your veins, warm and bright and golden. You spent your entire life with a mother who didn't want you because all you did was remind her what she lost, with an abusive stepfather and a big brother who hated the world more than he loved you.

You had never been told that you were good enough.

And now you were better than good enough.

So, yeah, you figured you could safely say that Captain was the best thing you've ever been called.

Well, at leas it was.

Because about three months into your five year mission, Bones corners you and presses a warm, warm kiss to your mouth, then whispers James in your right ear, the molasses thick drawl making your knees shake in a way they haven't since you were a fumbling fifteen year old.

And as he pulls you into his room, his brown eyes locked on your blue, his kiss-swollen lips once again murmuring James, you decide that you have a new favorite name.

To shine or radiate.

That's what your name means.

From birth, you were expected to not only shine, but to shine brilliantly.

As you grew up, expectations grew with you. It wasn't that you were to get an A in all your classes; it was that you were to get a hundred percent in all your classes. Being number three in a class of 6,000 isn't good enough, you must be number one.

When you turn eighteen, you're forced into the family business. You work for your father in Japan, as he worked for his father before. You go without a fight, doing what you're told without any complaints.

Then you turn twenty-one.

And your parents inform you that you are to marry the daughter of one of their best friends, Amaya Tamura.

That's when you start fighting.

You try to reason with them, you try to tell them that you aren't sure you ever want to marry a woman, let alone one that you don't know.

But they won't listen.

You leave for Starfleet the day before the date that your parents had ordered you to ask for Amaya's hand in marriage.

You shine there too, passing all your classes with flying colors and graduating one and a half years earlier than most pilots did. You have to wait around for months before Starfleet gives you your orders, sitting on your hands and trying to keep from going crazy.

Then they inform you that you've been assigned to the USS Enterprise, to serve under Captain Pike.

For a moment, you forget that you have to breathe.

You were assigned to the flagship that was under control of the captain.

Maybe you were going to get that chance to shine brilliantly after all.

Later, after accidentally, um, not starting the ship and watching Pike shuttle over to the ship that just killed the majority of your friends, you meet someone who shines.

Jim Kirk is the most radiant person you have ever met. He fights like he's got nothing to lose and he throws himself from safety into near certain death for no more reason than to try and save your life, a stranger's life.

You won't ever forget the blue of his eyes as they glowed at you; relief and adrenaline making them glitter as you crashed onto the landing platform aboard the Enterprise. Then an entire planet is just gone and Kirk's being marooned and Spock is telling you what to do. Then Kirk is back and Spock's choking him and Jim Kirk is captain of the USS Enterprise.

Everything after that is a blur, just moment after moment of flashing blue eyes making decisions no one man should ever have to make in order to save the only home any of you, besides Spock, have ever known.

And you're the one that gets the ship safely away from the black hole that Spock and Kirk just created in the middle of space.

Your smiling as the crew around you rejoices, newly born heroes leaping for joy like five year olds do on Christmas.

And suddenly, you realize everyone around you is shining.

You're shining.

Leonard is a terrible name.

It's horribly old fashioned and you really, really don't like it. You especially hate it when people shorten it to Leo, because then you have to hear all these 'sun god' jokes from your fellow doctors.

They harass you quite often.

You still maintain that it was solely because they were jealous.

Your life consists of a bad marriage and an awful job, so you turn into a grumpy, angry man. Sometimes, you're kind, but only to Joanna, and only when she's not around her shrew of a mother. You probably owe an apology to your own mother.

She always told you not to marry young.

And so, when your terror of a divorce is over with, and Jocelyn is yelling at you to leave her the hell alone, Starfleet's kinda the only option. You're pissed as hell that you aren't gonna be able to see your baby girl, but you know courts and they always side with the mother.

So when Pike offers you a chance to become a doctor for Starfleet, you go with only one glance, for Joanna, back.

You get on the shuttle, your mind already churning with possible space diseases and your stomach rolling with bile. The polite but firm Starfleet employee directs you back to a seat, telling you that you most certainly aren't allowed to stay in the bathroom for the entire flight.

You sit down to some bruised and cut kid, his blue eyes staring at you incredulously as you try to tell him about potential death.

Then his eyes grin at you when you offer your flask to him and they flash with something that looks horribly like mischievousness when you tell him your name.

Three hours after the flight, and there's some golden kid named James Kirk settling into the bunk opposite yours, in the medical dorms, even though he's already told you he's in the command track.

And he's calling you Bones.

You've never really appreciated nicknames, thought they were kinda silly and a waste of time and why can't people just call you McCoy?

But when you tell the kid all that, he just flashes a grin brighter than the sun at you and says that Bones fits much better.

Somehow, he worms his way into your life, your routines. He alters, perhaps broadens, your worldviews and makes you more open to trying new things.

He makes you… happier.

Whatever the hell that means.

And when you sneak him onto the Enterprise, you don't regret it. Even before his too intelligent brain figures out a way to save not only the ship and her crew, but also all of Earth, you didn't regret sneaking him aboard.

You could never regret something that kept Jim with you.

So this bright eyed boy from Iowa saves the world and no one's really quite sure where to go from there. Then he bursts into your room a couple days after you got back to Earth, his body nearly vibrating and his eyes glowing bluer than the midday sky. He shouts that he was made Captain, pressing cool lips against your temple and then running from the room in the same whirlwind he arrived in, already yelling for Uhura and Scotty and Sulu and Spock and Chekov.

He leaves you there, dazed and trying to imprint his smell of sunshine and ocean and sandalwood into your mind because it may be the best thing you've ever breathed in.

The scent stays with you and three months into your job as Chief Medical Officer of the USS Enterprise, you finally give in.

You yank him halfway into your quarters and press your lips against his, mumuring James in a voice that's so heavily accented you barely recognize it. He hisses when you pull him all the way into your room and cries Bones when you sink your teeth into the cord in between neck and shoulder.

And you suddenly see the appeal of nicknames.

Or at least this one.

Yeah. So. Disclaimed. And, before someone asks, I did these characters because they're my favorite and there's so much Jim Kirk because I find him to be the glue that holds things together.

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Thanks for reading.