Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: You did Nyota for the headcanon ask meme, can you do Bones?

Headcanon meme.  Bones is my one true saltmate, okay, it’s like a soulmate but with bitterness about the world.  Also, this is a little bit gonna be the Jim & Bones Friendship Hour.

A: what I think realistically

Bones actually has a very real phobia of space.  Like, he manages it.  He does a good job managing it.  But.

Listen.

In order to successfully graduate Starfleet Academy, every student must take and pass a shuttle piloting class.  In case of emergency.  Pass proficiently, not just scrape by on a wing and a prayer. Bones fails twice and scrapes that pass the third time and honestly he’s thinking about just giving up.  He knows all the settings and controls—Jim drilled him silly after that first fail—but getting into the simulator and seeing all that black, and the pressure, he just.  He locks up.  It’s all he can do to control his breathing, never mind controlling the shuttle. He can’t go back to Georgia and he can’t do this and where does that leave him?

Jim finds Bones in a tiny-ass little bar the day before his fourth retest date and drags him protesting out the door, about eight whiskeys down, and bundles him into bed and listens to him mumble about how he’s never going to pass and he’s never going to graduate and honestly fucking good because space is the worst and Jim’s crazy for wanting to go there but also Jim’s going to go into space without him and Bones doesn’t have anywhere else to go and it’s all just really awful, you know what I mean, Jimmy?

“Sure, buddy,” Jim says, propping Bones up and pushing a glass of water into his hands. “Drink something, okay?”

The next day, at 1500 hours, Bones stumbles into the simulator room with—well, not the worst hangover of his life, but probably top ten.  And lo and fucking behold, instead of the usual gaggle of students looking to (re)test, there’s James Goddamn Kirk, hands stuffed in his pockets and a sunny-ass smile on his smart-ass face.  James Goddamn Kirk, who passed his pilot’s test with glowing scores on the first try.

James Goddamn Kirk, who somehow lied and cheated his way in here so that he could sit in the simulator while Bones sweats his way through a passing grade.

It doesn’t cure his phobia, obviously, but the first time Bones does actually have to pilot a shuttle, it’s James Goddamn Kirk bleeding out in the copilot’s seat and Bones barely even notices his heart race.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Leonard McCoy, day one of his term at the Academy as he stumbles, shaking and panting, off the shuttle, swears to himself that he’s going to pry this blue-eyed limpet off him on the spot and also sedate anyone who addresses him as Bones.

Day one of his second year at the Academy, Bones McCoy gets half-tackled by Jim, who’s already talking about this badass new Tactics class they’re offering, I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna destroy everyone, it’s gonna be awesome and he has no idea how this happened.

What would have been day one of his fourth year, Bones is fuck knows how far into the black of space, listening to his crew tattle on Jim’s delinquent ass.

“Doc, I don’t think he’s taken an off shift in, like, a couple days maybe,” Sulu says as he passes through for an antihistamine.

“I’ll work on it,” Bones says, and jabs Sulu with a hypo.  “Stop poking plants you don’t recognize.”

“Doctor McCoy, Alpha shift told me to tell you that the captain forgot to eat today,” Chekov reports, sticking his head inside.  “Can I get another screen?”

“I’ll deal with that,” Bones says, and waves the kid in.  “Stop sleeping with people you don’t know.”

“Doctor, I would appreciate it if you intervened in the Captain’s opinion that holodeck safety protocols are optional,” Spock says evenly as Chapel checks him for broken ribs.

“I’ll do my best,” Bones says, and gives Spock a bitter wave with the medical tricorder. “Stop getting in fistfights, you have a damn phaser.”

“Doctor,” Uhura starts as Bones sprints past her.  “I think the Captain might be allergic–”

“I’m on my way!” he yells back over his shoulder.  “Stop Spock from causing a diplomatic incident!”

“Doc,” Scotty starts, leaning into the medbay and squinting painfully.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Bones snarls, and gives Scotty a vengeful jab with a hangover hypo (actually a calibrated mix of thiamine, folic acid, and magnesium sulfate, but listen, it’s a hangover hypo) as he marches past toward the bridge.

Bones has Regrets.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

Bones keeps expecting to get to a point where he’s…like…past being horrified and shocked when one of the crew rolls in, near death or already dead.

It wears on his soul like acid, every time.  He decides very early that he’s going to leave Starfleet when Jim dies.  The longer he spends on the Enterprise, the more names he adds to that list (when Spock dies, when Uhura dies, when Chekov-Sulu-Scotty dies).

Bones is a doctor, not an adventurer.  He’s not built to outlive these people.  When they are gone, he will never leave orbit again.

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Read an AU once where Bones was a humanitarian aid volunteer at like 21/22 who went to Tarsus IV and met furious, half-starved, 13-year-old, fresh-off-a-genocide JT Kirk and it was my favorite thing.  It was also abandoned after like two chapters.  But like.  Any intersection of my infinite feelings about Tarsus IV and my infinite feelings about Bones & Jim (& Spock) friendship is My Favorite Thing and I believe in my heart that this is true.  Bones didn’t recognize him at the time and it takes him years to connect the emaciated murderous kid with the electric blue eyes to his buoyantly brilliant best friend, but he does, eventually.  He asks Jim straight up, very late one night, and they have one single conversation about it before they vow to never discuss it again.

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.