Anonymous asked: For the headcanon meme Uhura?
For THIS headcanon meme! (You thought you were free. You were wrong.) I’m kind of picturing AOS because that’s what I watched most recently with Uhura.
A: what I think realistically
Nyota Uhura grows up speaking three
languages fluently—English and Swahili, because her family speaks both, and a
German dialect, because her cousin’s husband speaks Swahili like a
three-year-old and doesn’t seem to be getting better at it. He dotes on Nyota, calls her little star and swings her up onto his
shoulders to ‘scare’ his wife and Nyota’s mothers as a monster with two heads,
and he thinks it’s the greatest thing in history when she starts translating
for him. She’s six years old when she
goes to a museum and meets the curator, who is a Vulcan woman of superlative
brilliance. The woman greets her family
with a formal Vulcan phrase and is visibly taken aback—something of an
accomplishment—when Nyota carefully, cautiously sounds out in imitation, tonk’peh, dif-tor heh smusma.
“Very good,” the Vulcan woman says in
English, arching an eyebrow. “But the
correct response is sochya eh dif.” Nyota parrots it back, and the Vulcan woman
offers her a salute. Nyota comes back
the very next day and plunks herself expectantly in front of the woman’s door,
and more or less bothers the woman into agreeing to teach her the language.
Nyota, talking to her teacher, learns
about Star Fleet, where she can learn
every language in the galaxy (“that is quite impossible–” “EVERY language in the galaxy,” Nyota
insists) and spend her entire life speaking them as a job. She never looks away
from the stars again, and she remains in touch with her teacher, until finally
it’s Nyota who offers the lessons, in the grammar of Russian and the guttural tones
of Klingon.
Nyota’s teacher, very formal at all
times, is the one who begins calling her ‘Uhura.’ Nyota knows that her name means star, but to her, Uhura means linguist and
she holds it tight with both hands.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Uhura and Jim are actually great friends
by the end of the Enterprise’s first
year, once he feels less like he has to prove himself at all times and once she
gets past some of her ingrained horror about his casual disregard for the rules
when he thinks it’s necessary. (The
first time Uhura sees herself observe a rule and then toss it aside because,
well, this is more important, she has this moment of total exasperation because He Has Infected Her.) Jim speaks not a few languages himself, and
more to the point he’s actually not the trash can she assumed him to be. He doesn’t harass his subordinates, he would
clearly die for any of them, and even though at first she’s convinced he’s
going to drink on the job and sleep with everyone on the ship, there’s no sign
of it. He drinks sometimes with the rest
of the alpha shift command crew, but never to excess, and she’s pretty sure Jim
would rather take a phaser shot to the chest than risk his crew by sleeping
around—it’s like command has turned him into a real person rather than the caricature
he worked so hard to project and goddamnit she likes that person. No one is
more shocked and aggrieved than Uhura herself.
Uhura is also rational enough to date a
Vulcan, so after two months she huffs out a breath and plops her tray down at
his table during breakfast (Jim eats in the mess hall with the crew, rather
than a private mess, because he likes to know
his people, damn him). She has the same
stubborn look in her eye that once strongarmed a Vulcan into agreeing to teach
her language to a small human child.
“Um,” Jim says, wary, “hey, Uhura.”
“You’re going to stop hitting on me,”
she tells him, pointing at him sternly with her fork, “and I’m going to stop
treating you like an asshole, and then we’re going to be friends.”
Jim stares at her. “Okay?”
“So,” she says, lowering her fork to
gesture at his PADD, “what are you reading?”
He tells her, seemingly too bemused to do anything else, and she
scoffs. “Please. If you want the really weird Vulcan
literature, I can hook you up. You
haven’t lived until you’ve read some of the Pre-Reform homoerotic star-crossed
lovers nonsense I read during my tutorial on the Pre-Reform dialect.”
Jim laughs until he’s wheezing and
flushed, clutching the edge of the table as the mess hall looks at him in mild
alarm and Uhura smirks in satisfaction.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Uhura never becomes a captain, although
innumerable promotions are offered to her.
She loves her languages too much.
She believes, after seeing Kirk and Sulu and even sweet Chekov taken by
their ships and never return, that this is the reason she and Spock end up as
the last living members of that first bridge crew.
She kind of wishes, sitting at the
monument to James Tiberius Kirk and thinking about how he would have hated
having his middle name on the thing, that she had taken the captaincy.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is
shit so I believe it anyway
LET! NYOTA!
UHURA! HAVE! A!
BIG! FAMILY!
Listen I
literally could not care less about what canon says, Nyota has like three
siblings and a bunch of cousins and her grandmother and her two moms and her
aunts and uncles and they all adore each other to little bits and pieces.
Nyota’s sister is dying to know about Spock from the first moment she hears about
him, and the poor guy is totally overwhelmed the first time Nyota brings him
home to celebrate [insert slightly ridiculous reason that the family came up
with on the spot because Nyota was on Earth and they were excited]. They immediately adopt Spock, he’s really
kind of alarmed about it.
Nyota brings
Jim to meet her family one time too (and McCoy because his wife has his kid
currently) when it’s his birthday and he just desperately does not want to deal with Star Fleet and the Kelvin
and the whole hero thing, and they all love him too.
Basically give me Nyota Uhura who travels the
stars because she loves them too much to stay on the ground, but who has very real ties to Earth because those are her people. She’s met by
the quintessential embarrassing family whenever they make earthfall. Her cousin (the one who still sucks at Swahili) has a sign.
Her sister and her twin brothers have a banner. She’s going to
murder them all but also she can’t stop grinning.
