Star Trek reboot FF: All the heroes of our own story [Crew gen; PG-13]
Title: All the heroes of our own story
Fandom: Star Trek: Reboot
Characters: Crew + Gaila (background Spock/Uhura)
Rating: PG-13
Length: 1,900
Disclaimer: Star Trek belongs to Paramount and Gene Roddenberry
Spoilers: General movie.
Warnings: Implied canonical or background character death, some angst.
Summary: They're all living in a different type of story.
"We are the hero of our own story." - Mary McCarthy
*
Chekov
A coming-of-age story. Always, and don’t they make sure he knows it? Pavel suspects that the only way he will stop being the kid on the bridge is by getting a ship of his own. Or at least a few promotions and a posting off the Enterprise. Some days he thinks about it, when Sulu or the Captain laugh and tell him that they will explain when he’s older. And Pavel knows he has already reached the necessary qualifications of manhood by any culture’s standards. He is eighteen now (barely), he has had sex (six and a half times), he has woken up with a vodka hangover that even Doctor McCoy admired. He has killed, both by failing to save and by squeezing the trigger; and people have tried to kill him, both personally and impersonally.
But he doesn’t try to leave, and he doesn’t protest. Because one day, not very long after they start their mission afresh, Captain Kirk takes the command crew to the surface and introduces them without fanfare: “Commander Spock, Doctor McCoy, Lieutenant Commander Scott, Lieutenants Uhura, Sulu and Chekov.” Then he smiles, and says, “Seems like someone else should get the benefit of the fast-track. It’ll be official next time we hit earth. Call your folks.”
And that’s important, and memorable, but not so much as - another ordinary day - when the Captain leaves the bridge at a run, barely remembering to call back, “Chekov has the conn.” And Pavel looks around and realises that he’s ranking officer on the bridge, in the middle of an emergency. The Captain calls in a few minutes later and instructs him: “Don’t destroy my ship.”
“I won’t, Captain.”
“I know.”
*
Sulu
A Western. And why the hell not? He was born in San Francisco and isn’t that gold rush territory after all? Granted, he carries a retractable katana and not a six-shooter, but styles have changed and while he appreciates the antiques, there’s something reassuring about the noise of a sword cutting through air.
Westerns start with the unexplored frontier, and that’s built into their job description. Space extends stark and beautiful in front of them, just waiting to be discovered. Sometimes they get other civilisations, and sometimes they get the border towns.
Hikaru’s not a big believer in white-hat/black-hat thinking but he’s got his lieutenant’s stripes from Starfleet and that’s as good as any shiny badge. It’s not as though playing the hero was his main reason for joining, but it’s not the worst one.
Except he’s falling, and he’s not the hero, he’s the guy caught in the crossfire while the hero and the villain have their gunfight in slow motion. He’s falling and his breath gets knocked out of him. The EVA suit doesn’t allow for it but he swears he feels the heat of Kirk’s body, the tight grip of his arms. His rushing breath and manic heartbeat, and if Hikaru can feel that then they must both be alive.
Light twists around them, and Chekov is beaming at him from the transporter room. Kirk lets go, and Chekov starts babbling about the maths, and that’s when it hits him. What he has now is a posse.
*
Uhura
Anything but a love story. She’s in love, yes, but it’s not what her story’s about. There are still days where what she feels most like is the narrator of someone else’s story: Captain Kirk, Engineering reports problems with…; Doctor McCoy, incoming wounded from…; Commander Spock. Commander Spock, please report.
She doesn’t get to be Kirk, and curse and yell orders around the bridge. She has to be calm, and stoic, and the image of the patient soon-to-be war-widow. She’s the smaller half of Spock’s love-story and that is something Nyota will not accept.
So instead she’s Spock’s lover, and Kirk’s foil, Chekov’s occasional confidante and Sulu’s less occasional sparring partner. She drinks with McCoy just enough to delude him into thinking he’ll beat her at poker, and talks circuitry with Scotty until his cheeks flush.
In between all of that, she’s one of the best communications officers in the fleet, she’s proficient in eighty-three percent of federation languages and dialects, and so maybe she’s actually in a foreign film. Something with overblown colours and wild emotions, and she’s the only one with the sense to say, “well this is what it actually means.”
She carves her story from the pieces of other, less interesting, tales, and finds that she can stitch them together how she chooses.
*
McCoy
A disaster movie, and he’s not the hero. He’s the one in the background, in medical blue and a variety of shades of blood, illustrating the horrors of war. Or natural disaster, terrorist attack, or - of course - space-travel gone horribly and predictably wrong.
His role is to come into frame long enough to close the corpse’s eyes and gravely intone, “there was nothing else we could have done.” On occasion, he guesses, his role is to lay his hands on Jim’s chest to stop him forcing himself upright and back into the fray. One of these days it’s probably going to be entering his name as the attending medical officer, recording Captain Kirk’s death in the line of duty.
But for now, he stands back, and performs minor miracles and closes dead eyes, and waits for the credits to roll. That’s when - with everyone safe on the ship and disaster averted - he gets to go and rip Jim a new one for being such a bloody-minded idiot.
*
Scotty
A comedy of some stripe, he thinks. It was a farce, originally, what with the unplanned transport of beagles, and the interminable months on the ice. A man had to find some humour in that, or go for one of those long walks outside you don’t come back from.
There was a brief spell, maybe, of be-careful-what-you-wish-for satire. His hands finally inside that beautiful ship and feeling her tear apart around him. Captain James Kirk and his demands that damn well better have been jokes.
Now, though, it’s a comedy of a more traditional kind. All a comedy means, really, is that it has a happy ending. There’s a fight, and maybe some lovers or maybe just a man who’s down on his luck. There’s the part where it all goes wrong and then the part where it comes right: the good end happily and the bad unhappily. And maybe that’s only in stories and maybe it won’t last long. Maybe he’s the fool in this story, or the idiot savant, not the one who the happy endings land on. But there’s food, and good company, and a ship that sings under his touch. He can’t think of much more a man would need to call himself content
*
Spock
He doesn’t know. A few of the humans of the crew gather to watch what he understands to be a rather outdated vid from a period in earth’s history where there appeared to be a preoccupation with the idea of artificial intelligence. He understands little of the appeal of the plot, but when the human protagonists attempt to teach the robot to feel emotion, he does understand why the crew-members whisper furiously at each other, and cast nervous/amused glances in his direction. Their logic is as flawed as ever, but at least there is an internal consistency that allows him to follow it.
And the Enterprise is indeed a learning process, but not in the way they seem to mean it. There was (is) a particular genre of Vulcan literature which used the device of travel as a means to gain enlightenment, and a better understanding of the tenets of their society. But such stories always culminated in a return to Vulcan and home, either to put this new knowledge into action, or because the proof had been secured that it was the superior way of life. Now, it seems, he is always to move forward - away - and home is a shifting place he cannot easily return to.
There is another genre: stories of emigration and pilgrimage. Jim says, “We made a country out of all the little pieces of other people’s homes.” Then he begins a mostly inaccurate backtracking in an attempt not to ignore the worse aspects of his country’s history. Spock imagines that his meaning - before the confusion - was that Spock carries his home with him. It is dry sand he cannot shake from his shoes, Vulcan music learnt in his mother’s voice, and the history he saved from the rubble.
There is no easy allegory in this story: an uneven mix of tragedy and salvation, love and war. Fortunately life has no particular obligation to obey the conventions of drama.
*
Gaila
Not porn, no matter what anyone else says. Just because she can do things that would leave an earth-girl porn-star with a cricked everything, it doesn’t mean that’s the point. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn, or with the poor girl twisted into knots. It’s just that Gaila wants so much more out of her hard-won freedom.
It’s a political fantasy. She leads the way into Starfleet and okay, she also brings many beautiful people back to her dormitory, but it’s not all she does. She kicks ass in the computer lab, and she’s going to be assigned to work on a ship that takes her out into the federation and past it. She’s not much of a role model, but for some of these girls she’s going to be all they get, so it’ll have to be enough.
(Uhura never forgets, and talks to the prospective incoming classes about her brave, funny, insane roommate, and how she could have changed the universe some day. Half the time when Jim remembers he’s in bed. The other half, he’s on some mission to get them all killed, ignoring diplomatic advice about respecting cultural mores, because he remembers her telling him once that she didn’t care what happened next. That they were young and free and sexy, and why wouldn’t good things keep happening to them? But she’d put the emphasis on free, not young or sexy, and he had noticed that, but not enough to keep from using her to break the simulation. It’s never quite enough).
She’s not quite a one-girl-revolution, but she’s all they’ve got, so she’ll have to do.
*
Kirk
A tragedy, in the classical sense. A hero, and a fatal flaw, and a bad end. Hubris will be the death of him. Or fate’s arms, wound tight around him, from the moment he came screaming into the world while his father died. “You’ll come to a bad end, James Kirk,” like it was written into the stars and wouldn’t that be fucking typical?
Between his mother, and Admiral Pike, and other-Spock, the universe is just full of people who think he’s got a role to play. And they’ll figure out - after his crew but soon enough - that he’s faking it. That he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing and that he keeps risking other people’s lives without meaning to, and that they’ve started dying around him. He’s not his father; not his mother either, and not the man he sees reflected in other-Spock’s eyes.
He had good luck with the Narada, so he’ll have bad luck somewhere else. That’s how the world works. It might not look like a tragedy yet, but Jim isn’t fooled. The story’s just not over yet.
FIN. Comments very welcome
Fandom: Star Trek: Reboot
Characters: Crew + Gaila (background Spock/Uhura)
Rating: PG-13
Length: 1,900
Disclaimer: Star Trek belongs to Paramount and Gene Roddenberry
Spoilers: General movie.
Warnings: Implied canonical or background character death, some angst.
Summary: They're all living in a different type of story.
"We are the hero of our own story." - Mary McCarthy
*
Chekov
A coming-of-age story. Always, and don’t they make sure he knows it? Pavel suspects that the only way he will stop being the kid on the bridge is by getting a ship of his own. Or at least a few promotions and a posting off the Enterprise. Some days he thinks about it, when Sulu or the Captain laugh and tell him that they will explain when he’s older. And Pavel knows he has already reached the necessary qualifications of manhood by any culture’s standards. He is eighteen now (barely), he has had sex (six and a half times), he has woken up with a vodka hangover that even Doctor McCoy admired. He has killed, both by failing to save and by squeezing the trigger; and people have tried to kill him, both personally and impersonally.
But he doesn’t try to leave, and he doesn’t protest. Because one day, not very long after they start their mission afresh, Captain Kirk takes the command crew to the surface and introduces them without fanfare: “Commander Spock, Doctor McCoy, Lieutenant Commander Scott, Lieutenants Uhura, Sulu and Chekov.” Then he smiles, and says, “Seems like someone else should get the benefit of the fast-track. It’ll be official next time we hit earth. Call your folks.”
And that’s important, and memorable, but not so much as - another ordinary day - when the Captain leaves the bridge at a run, barely remembering to call back, “Chekov has the conn.” And Pavel looks around and realises that he’s ranking officer on the bridge, in the middle of an emergency. The Captain calls in a few minutes later and instructs him: “Don’t destroy my ship.”
“I won’t, Captain.”
“I know.”
*
Sulu
A Western. And why the hell not? He was born in San Francisco and isn’t that gold rush territory after all? Granted, he carries a retractable katana and not a six-shooter, but styles have changed and while he appreciates the antiques, there’s something reassuring about the noise of a sword cutting through air.
Westerns start with the unexplored frontier, and that’s built into their job description. Space extends stark and beautiful in front of them, just waiting to be discovered. Sometimes they get other civilisations, and sometimes they get the border towns.
Hikaru’s not a big believer in white-hat/black-hat thinking but he’s got his lieutenant’s stripes from Starfleet and that’s as good as any shiny badge. It’s not as though playing the hero was his main reason for joining, but it’s not the worst one.
Except he’s falling, and he’s not the hero, he’s the guy caught in the crossfire while the hero and the villain have their gunfight in slow motion. He’s falling and his breath gets knocked out of him. The EVA suit doesn’t allow for it but he swears he feels the heat of Kirk’s body, the tight grip of his arms. His rushing breath and manic heartbeat, and if Hikaru can feel that then they must both be alive.
Light twists around them, and Chekov is beaming at him from the transporter room. Kirk lets go, and Chekov starts babbling about the maths, and that’s when it hits him. What he has now is a posse.
*
Uhura
Anything but a love story. She’s in love, yes, but it’s not what her story’s about. There are still days where what she feels most like is the narrator of someone else’s story: Captain Kirk, Engineering reports problems with…; Doctor McCoy, incoming wounded from…; Commander Spock. Commander Spock, please report.
She doesn’t get to be Kirk, and curse and yell orders around the bridge. She has to be calm, and stoic, and the image of the patient soon-to-be war-widow. She’s the smaller half of Spock’s love-story and that is something Nyota will not accept.
So instead she’s Spock’s lover, and Kirk’s foil, Chekov’s occasional confidante and Sulu’s less occasional sparring partner. She drinks with McCoy just enough to delude him into thinking he’ll beat her at poker, and talks circuitry with Scotty until his cheeks flush.
In between all of that, she’s one of the best communications officers in the fleet, she’s proficient in eighty-three percent of federation languages and dialects, and so maybe she’s actually in a foreign film. Something with overblown colours and wild emotions, and she’s the only one with the sense to say, “well this is what it actually means.”
She carves her story from the pieces of other, less interesting, tales, and finds that she can stitch them together how she chooses.
*
McCoy
A disaster movie, and he’s not the hero. He’s the one in the background, in medical blue and a variety of shades of blood, illustrating the horrors of war. Or natural disaster, terrorist attack, or - of course - space-travel gone horribly and predictably wrong.
His role is to come into frame long enough to close the corpse’s eyes and gravely intone, “there was nothing else we could have done.” On occasion, he guesses, his role is to lay his hands on Jim’s chest to stop him forcing himself upright and back into the fray. One of these days it’s probably going to be entering his name as the attending medical officer, recording Captain Kirk’s death in the line of duty.
But for now, he stands back, and performs minor miracles and closes dead eyes, and waits for the credits to roll. That’s when - with everyone safe on the ship and disaster averted - he gets to go and rip Jim a new one for being such a bloody-minded idiot.
*
Scotty
A comedy of some stripe, he thinks. It was a farce, originally, what with the unplanned transport of beagles, and the interminable months on the ice. A man had to find some humour in that, or go for one of those long walks outside you don’t come back from.
There was a brief spell, maybe, of be-careful-what-you-wish-for satire. His hands finally inside that beautiful ship and feeling her tear apart around him. Captain James Kirk and his demands that damn well better have been jokes.
Now, though, it’s a comedy of a more traditional kind. All a comedy means, really, is that it has a happy ending. There’s a fight, and maybe some lovers or maybe just a man who’s down on his luck. There’s the part where it all goes wrong and then the part where it comes right: the good end happily and the bad unhappily. And maybe that’s only in stories and maybe it won’t last long. Maybe he’s the fool in this story, or the idiot savant, not the one who the happy endings land on. But there’s food, and good company, and a ship that sings under his touch. He can’t think of much more a man would need to call himself content
*
Spock
He doesn’t know. A few of the humans of the crew gather to watch what he understands to be a rather outdated vid from a period in earth’s history where there appeared to be a preoccupation with the idea of artificial intelligence. He understands little of the appeal of the plot, but when the human protagonists attempt to teach the robot to feel emotion, he does understand why the crew-members whisper furiously at each other, and cast nervous/amused glances in his direction. Their logic is as flawed as ever, but at least there is an internal consistency that allows him to follow it.
And the Enterprise is indeed a learning process, but not in the way they seem to mean it. There was (is) a particular genre of Vulcan literature which used the device of travel as a means to gain enlightenment, and a better understanding of the tenets of their society. But such stories always culminated in a return to Vulcan and home, either to put this new knowledge into action, or because the proof had been secured that it was the superior way of life. Now, it seems, he is always to move forward - away - and home is a shifting place he cannot easily return to.
There is another genre: stories of emigration and pilgrimage. Jim says, “We made a country out of all the little pieces of other people’s homes.” Then he begins a mostly inaccurate backtracking in an attempt not to ignore the worse aspects of his country’s history. Spock imagines that his meaning - before the confusion - was that Spock carries his home with him. It is dry sand he cannot shake from his shoes, Vulcan music learnt in his mother’s voice, and the history he saved from the rubble.
There is no easy allegory in this story: an uneven mix of tragedy and salvation, love and war. Fortunately life has no particular obligation to obey the conventions of drama.
*
Gaila
Not porn, no matter what anyone else says. Just because she can do things that would leave an earth-girl porn-star with a cricked everything, it doesn’t mean that’s the point. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn, or with the poor girl twisted into knots. It’s just that Gaila wants so much more out of her hard-won freedom.
It’s a political fantasy. She leads the way into Starfleet and okay, she also brings many beautiful people back to her dormitory, but it’s not all she does. She kicks ass in the computer lab, and she’s going to be assigned to work on a ship that takes her out into the federation and past it. She’s not much of a role model, but for some of these girls she’s going to be all they get, so it’ll have to be enough.
(Uhura never forgets, and talks to the prospective incoming classes about her brave, funny, insane roommate, and how she could have changed the universe some day. Half the time when Jim remembers he’s in bed. The other half, he’s on some mission to get them all killed, ignoring diplomatic advice about respecting cultural mores, because he remembers her telling him once that she didn’t care what happened next. That they were young and free and sexy, and why wouldn’t good things keep happening to them? But she’d put the emphasis on free, not young or sexy, and he had noticed that, but not enough to keep from using her to break the simulation. It’s never quite enough).
She’s not quite a one-girl-revolution, but she’s all they’ve got, so she’ll have to do.
*
Kirk
A tragedy, in the classical sense. A hero, and a fatal flaw, and a bad end. Hubris will be the death of him. Or fate’s arms, wound tight around him, from the moment he came screaming into the world while his father died. “You’ll come to a bad end, James Kirk,” like it was written into the stars and wouldn’t that be fucking typical?
Between his mother, and Admiral Pike, and other-Spock, the universe is just full of people who think he’s got a role to play. And they’ll figure out - after his crew but soon enough - that he’s faking it. That he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing and that he keeps risking other people’s lives without meaning to, and that they’ve started dying around him. He’s not his father; not his mother either, and not the man he sees reflected in other-Spock’s eyes.
He had good luck with the Narada, so he’ll have bad luck somewhere else. That’s how the world works. It might not look like a tragedy yet, but Jim isn’t fooled. The story’s just not over yet.
FIN. Comments very welcome