Star Trek Big Bang - The Most Precious Thing; Sulu/Chekov
Part Two - Overlook Nothing
Being at Starfleet was a rush. As soon as Pavel stepped through the steel gray walls of the conservatory, he was introduced to commanding officers and professors, instructors and other cadets, academic aides and some who are alien and beautiful with blue hair, pink eyes, and green skin. It was overwhelming.
Pavel felt himself coming to life.
He called his parents when he is finally settled in his dormitory, babbling about the things he'd seen. His mother laughed and asked him to write about it in letters so she might read about the things he learned about. Pavel assured her that he would try.
There was no sign of Captain Pike and when Pavel finally got up enough nerve to ask, they informed him he was back in America, overseeing the development of new Constitution-class ships and very rarely returned to tour other campuses. That Pavel was special enough to warrant a personal visit remained unsaid and Pavel tucked that information into his memory and began to concentrate on his work.
He was Cadet Chekov now and he got used to it. He was happy when they called him for his help or his advice. Pavel worried that he came across as overly enthusiastic and excited, bouncing impatiently on his heels while waiting for approval, scowling when he was irritated and he tried as hard as he could to rein that in, grow up faster, to be able to stand up straight and school his face into something more serious.
Pavel began matching the numbers in his head to the field of study and relished being able to compartmentalize his knowledge into neater categories. His thoughts became more organized and soon he would be able to express what needed to be said with the proper words. It was incredible, the feeling like he was coming into sharp focus and he realized that once he had one concept mastered that there was room for more.
A year went by fast and Pavel turned fourteen. His parents sent him a book on Russian fairytales and he paged through it, liking the feel of paper after hours of sliding his fingers over the touch-sensitive screens or the metallic alloy that made up the transporter room.
Pavel learned to strip engines, to handle dilithium crystals; he learned to map out the stars and committed them to memory and played three dimensional chess with his roommates. They were all a little older, of course, and as disciplined as cadets were expected to be but they were still young and uninhibited in a way that Pavel had never experienced before. They taught him to hold his liquor and how to defend himself and other things that Pavel would have never learned in the classroom. Pavel turned fifteen and grew taller still, his body toned to a wiry flexibility. His freckles started to fade the more time he spent indoors, studying.
Pavel met Irina when their instructor paired them off in class. She was beautiful, dark and willowy and she seemed to find him amusing. She was also two years older than him and patient, brilliant at quantum physics and easygoing, in a gentle way. Until her, Pavel had hardly thought much about girls but when they presented their instructor with a paper on red matter, he beamed at them proudly. Irina hugged him tight in her excitement, her face pressing into the side of his neck, her scent clouding his senses and something inside Pavel stirred.
It took a month for him to sort out these feelings; at first, he tried to label them, like labeling the parts of an engine, and then imagined himself giving in to impulse but disliking the images that they brought to his mind. Pavel was the top of his class but he still felt awkward around many people, was slow to warm up and had no idea how to treat someone like Irina because she was not only a girl but a fellow cadet and an upperclassman. In six months, he thought morosely, she would receive her first commission from Starfleet and it would be somewhere he would never see her again.
Why people didn’t come with an instruction manual, Pavel would never know. He’d have to take matters into his own hands, when all of the advice he looked up in books and databanks proved useless and unhelpful at giving him any information about talking to women. The next time the cadets were given an off-campus pass for the weekend, he politely asked to take her out for a meal and then some coffee and a walk. It was almost a shock to him when Irina tilted her head and accepted.
The next weekend, they went to see a film that featured 21st century productions. The weekend after that, they caught a ballet. Irina seemed enthralled but it bored Pavel nearly to tears until she pointed the rotational mechanics when the prima ballerina whipped into a series of pirouettes and he was hooked. They murmured to each other about angular momentum and how the rotating core of the hyperdrive felt like a dance, like this one in fact, like Swan Lake, and when the male dancer flung himself into a grand jetè, Pavel smiled because projectile motion was one of the basic concepts of flight.
They walked home and Pavel kissed her chastely in front of her door. Irina smiled and rubbd his face fondly with her hands and said good night.
It dawned on Pavel when he woke up the next morning to the shrill tones of the alarm clock that his parents had perhaps neglected to lecture him on the finer points of sex. He felt like it was too awkward to ask his roommate about it but later spaced out in class worrying it over his mind while discussing intersects. It was really unlikely that he would be able to apply anything he knows about physics to sex, could maybe substitute the electron emission from matter with feelings and the absorption of the energy, as if coming inside a warm human body was like emitting electromagnetic radiation. Pavel was mortified to realize that he had just equated orgasms with radiation and also that he was half hard and had to bolt from the classroom to the nearest commode, with barely enough time to shove his pants and underwear down before he was coming all over his fist.
He berated himself about his lack of control for a good ten minutes before returning to class, looking so worn out that the instructor sent him out again to lie down in the infirmary.
Pavel was dully watching simulations in the laboratory and nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand landed on his shoulder. He looked up to see Irina and she looked sweet and wonderful, her hair pulled out of her normally neat bun and falling around her face like a curtain.
"Pavel, you look like you need to eat," Irina said, kindly. "The tech is coming to take over. You really need to take it easy, genius," she teased. Pavel nodded and got to his feet.
"I am pretty hungry," he admitted and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
"Come to my room," she said, suddenly. Pavel nodded again and followed.
Co-eds were not discouraged from mixing, although it wasn’t actively encouraged either. The boys and girls were separated by dormitory buildings and there was a large common room that they all enjoyed. The cadets were mostly kept too preoccupied with duty to try anything truly reckless, trying to stay on top of their game for the chance to be picked to be the best among the best. Pavel was safe here, on this small enough campus where bullying was not tolerated. Sometimes, Pavel felt like he actually had too much time to think about other things, now that he wasn’t preoccupied with keeping out of other people’s way.
He was already learning the signals, like when to make himself scarce when his roommate brought back a girl to neck with. Pavel didn’t know how to flirt but a couple of his fellow cadets showed him how he didn’t need to if he learned how to project the earnestness of his face, how his eyes fall open with interest and how his fanaticism with the stars looked almost like lust.
At first, Pavel thought that they were kidding but later changed his mind when a few of the freshmen girls started looking in his direction. He was the same age as they were but levels ahead of them academically. It gave him a strange sort of status, the appeal of an upperclassman but without the pressure of age.
He wasn’t interested in them, though, not for a second. He liked Irina, nearly eighteen, petite but tough and bright as the sun. It was only when he stood in her room that he realized what was happening and that it could only go one of two ways, eying her nervously when she handed him a bottle of clear liquid he thought was water and took a swig.
The vodka made him choke but it wasn’t terrible or unfamiliar, just startling. Irina smiled at him and pushed him into a chair, gently, straddling him and reaching over his shoulder to dim the lamp. Her mouth was sweet and certain, taking charge of the kiss so that Pavel didn’t have to. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he put them on her thighs and ran them over the uniform of her skirt. Irina licked her lips and Pavel figured that it was going well enough so he pushed his hands up higher up her torso, underneath her red turtleneck. Her hair tickled his cheeks and he stuck his tongue in her mouth experimentally, as she bore down on him, on his half-hard cock and rocked in his lap.
It happened fast after that. Irina’s hands were deft and made quick work of his belt and his underwear and her skirt. Pavel had no idea where the condom came from, just that Irina must have planned this because he certainly didn’t have the insight to have one on him, given the-now, assumed-unlikelihood of anything like this ever happening at all.
There was a small moment of terror as Irina slid down onto him. What was he doing? What was she doing? His thoughts were tinged with a little bit of panic. He was months shy of sixteen, the age of consent and the last thing he wanted was for Irina to get into trouble for this. But his body overrode all rational thought as he shut his eyes and pulled her closer, arching up into her and throwing his head back against the back of the chair. He gasped when he came, his hands trembling as he reached down between them to thumb her clit until she did as well, although they were probably both stressed out enough, both strung out enough to come without much effort.
They got clean enough to lie in her bed together, curled around each other for warmth. It was nice, Pavel thought, nice but not explosive, almost business-like, really. There was thicker, more thrilling warmth when he was operating the high energy particle accelerator in the big laboratory. Maybe that was what sex should feel like, Pavel thought, vaguely. Right now, it felt sweet and comfortable and a relief, coupled with a shred of gratitude for the way Irina had divested him of his virginity in the least embarrassing way possible. He trusted her and they were friends but, with startling post-coital clarity, Pavel knew that was all they would ever be.
Not much changed after that. Pavel was given a battery of tests in order to determine his progress. Two months after that, he turned sixteen and kissed Irina at a small get-together, friendly but meaningless. The sex became a little more enthusiastic, a little more experimental but remained nothing more than blowing off a little steam.
Irina was assigned to the Starfleet outpost in Saint-Petersburg and on her graduation day, made Pavel promise to keep in touch with her. Pavel gave her a little statuette of a ballerina and they both smiled at the memory. With his hands balled in his coat pockets, he watched as the shuttle achieved lift-off. It wasn’t until he was out-of-sight when he’d realized he’d come full circle, the feeling of disconnect he hadn’t felt in a while was growing again, like the black hole in the pit of his stomach when he was twelve years old.
It felt strange coming back to a near empty dormitory, devoid of seniors all deployed to their new commissions, as freshly minted ensigns. Pavel by now was well beyond senior year level and already getting his hands dirty with graduate level science but the truth was he was bored. The only people who were left were at least three levels below Pavel were all too green to relate or too young and, he thought with a little scorn, too beneath him.
Pavel took a shower and then got dressed in new clothes, intent on getting more lab work done but was called by his supervisor to his office. Once there, he was told to sit and did so, surprised when a piece of paper was slid across the table to him.
It was official, with the Federation logo on one side and the logo on the right with the distinct logo of Starfleet Academy-San Francisco campus. Pavel looked up at the admiral for clarification.
"Read it," the admiral said, leaning back in his desk chair, his eyes bright with something.
Pavel did:
Cadet Pavel Andreivich Chekov
Star City Conservatory
Moscow, Russia
Cadet,
You are hereby transferred to the San Francisco main branch in the United State of America. We look forward to the completion of your official senior year certification as well as your advanced studies in the maths and sciences.
America.
America, Pavel realized, sitting up with a jolt.
The rest of the letter was a blur of detail: when, where, how, and what he would be doing for Starfleet Academy once he arrived. There wasn’t much he could do but stare in shock, his mouth opening and closing as he scrambled for words.
The admiral beamed at him. "Cadet Chekov, they have only been waiting for you."
"And my parents, Admiral?" Pavel asked.
"It is a bit urgent but we have taken the liberty of informing them. You have a week to wrap things up here and visit with your parents but Cadet," the Admiral lifted a finger. "I hope you realize what an honor this is."
"I do, sir," Pavel managed. "I do."
Part Three