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Cadet Kyle Djokovic didn’t see anything particularly contradictory in being the best and being a follower. There was always going to be a bigger fish, he reasoned. Being the best was, at best, a rhetorical tool. Defined narrowly enough it was irrelevant, more broadly it was an impossibility. He was the best of his year at the War College, which was what he expected. He did not expect people to try to follow him.
Kyle had followed his whole life. The training regimen set forward by Mom, the lessons taught by Mama. Had followed his brothers into the world, two and four years later respectively. Tried to catch up to them as they far outpaced, outweighed, and out-reached him. Followed after his younger siblings to watch after them, and yes, to try to capture some of that attention they’d absorbed from their mothers.
By contrast the War College had been an almost startling amount of freedom. They had hours a day of free study. Only had to run three miles a week instead of fifteen. They had private quarters, and there was a bar in town where cadets could go on their off hours. It had been frankly terrifying. And that was long before Starfleet Academy had moved in.
But that was getting ahead of things.
Kyle was the best of the War College. And had been since the beginning, before even. Because it had started with the placement tests. Before orientation, before meeting any of his fellow cadets personally, they were fighting. And not just throwing a sequence of punches and kicks, there were dummies for that, but actual grappling. It’d started with timed sprints, then rope climbs, then pushups til failure, a mile run, planks til failure, and on and on. Until, finally, exhausted, they were trading punches. Tourney rules, advancing brackets.
Kyle shut it all out, focused on his body. The tool it had been honed into. Threw himself repeatedly into whoever was across the ring. Til he almost got his bell rung.
He took the punch on his jaw and followed it out. Suppressed the instinct to stiffen and stayed pliant, flowed with it til it was more of a shove than a blow. He blinked back into focus. A Vulcan. He must be getting tired, he should have paid more attention to the guy. Had only thought as far as his build, his reach, the body language. Hadn’t accounted for the extra strength, speed. His expression was unreadable. Kyle bounced on his toes. Felt the familiar thrill of something new lance through him. Not just the opportunity to correct a mistake, but a challenge, the first real one of the day. The Vulcan tipped his head in a way that might have been acknowledgment. Kyle felt a grin pulling at his face. He feinted towards the Vulcan’s face—an emotional human instinct for revenge—and cut in low under his guard, battering the ribs above his heart. The heavy brows didn’t move, but Kyle caught the look of surprise in his eyes anyway. Felt his blood sing with it. Pressed in and in, keeping his opponent on the defensive. Establishing just enough of a pattern to break it, sweep the Vulcans legs from beneath him, and take the match. He should have returned to the center of the ring for the next contender, but he followed the Vulcan to the mat.
Extended his hand and said, “Thanks!”
The Vulcan blinked up at him, but took the proffered hand, let himself be pulled upright.
“I do not see any reason for your gratitude, I did not throw the match.”
Still grinning, Kyle replied, “I know, but all the same. It was a great one. So, thanks.”
The Vulcan paused a moment, but nodded, before returning to the bench. Kyle turned to see who his next opponent would be, and found the ring empty. He turned back to the holographic leaderboard and watched it click through an update. When it was through, he found himself at the top of the pile. The Vulcan, B’Avi, ranked just below him in points (had beaten him in a couple of the exercises, too).
Kyle turned back to the benches to talk to the guy, congratulate him, but the rest of the cadets barreled towards him, clapping him on the back, and the Vulcan was gone.
When classes had started in earnest, Kyle began to see how his older brothers must have felt. To have him dogging their steps every day, continually asking the same boring questions. How do you do it, what’s your routine, what are you up to later? Nothing interesting, nothing that needed to be said, nothing new. He was polite, of course, friendly—Mama had raised a nice boy.
But it made him feel flat. The way people looked at him, the only things he could think to say to them. Maybe he should ask more questions, or maybe he could get away with the little playfights that sometimes broke out. But their answers seemed just as boring as his own, and the other cadets quailed at his friendly shoulder punches.
He tried to tell himself it was only the third day, that he would get used to it. But he didn’t want to try, not today. For the first time in a long time he wanted a break. So after he’d loaded his tray, he didn’t look for familiar faces in the cafeteria. He sought the emptiest table he could manage. He ended up finding both.
In the back corner, the Vulcan was hunched over a PADD, ostensibly eating a bowl of soup. ‘Ostensibly’ because in the entire time it took Kyle to cross the mess hall, the spoon stayed halfway between bowl and open mouth. Kyle found this delightful beyond words and slid into the table across from the boy with a, “Whatcha reading?”
B’Avi displayed maybe the oddest reaction to surprise Kyle had ever seen. His face and body remained neutral, aside from clamping his mouth shut. But then he flipped the PADD face down, over the bowl of soup, and set the still-laden spoon on top of it. Kyle watched with undisguised glee. They both looked at the incongruous stack. Then back at each other. Kyle grinned.
Then he handed B’Avi a napkin and said, “Hi. I’m Kyle.”
B’Avi accepted the napkin, and the conversation, apparently, saying, “I am aware. As you likely are, of my own name.”
He pulled the spoon from the PADD, it hovered for a moment as it had before, then he took the long-forsaken bite and set the spoon on the table. He cleaned the tablet briskly, luckily only a slight splotch from the spoon and some negligible condensation from the soup itself. Kyle wondered idly if logic dictated that suffering this embarrassment would be lesser than that of leaving the table entirely. Almost asked as much, almost asked again what was on the PADD.
Asked instead, “Is that plomeek? I tried the replicator’s čorba but none of it tastes like home, you know?”
B’Avi considered the soup, and the question, before answering, “I found the initial recipe to be unpalatable in the extreme.”
“Initial?”
The Vulcan’s studying gaze lingered for a long moment, he finally admitted, “After a period of failed experimentation, I was able to establish a procedure for modifying existing recipes.”
Kyle’s eyebrows rose. And that was enough. B’Avi explained with increasing intensity his journey through hacking the replicator systems. First by combining dishes and ingredients, then literally attempting to access their systems via programmable matter—an incident which had gotten him disciplined (midway through their second day apparently). Before finally admitting that he now had comms access to the sysadmin, who was happily deploying new modifications directly. They ended their meal plotting a path towards Kyle’s mother’s čorba od zelja—which they thought B’Avi might enjoy. They were nearly late to their next class, a first for both of them.
—
The next morning Kyle scanned the mess hall excitedly and found B’Avi right where he expected him. And better yet the table was still empty. He slid onto the bench across from him. The Vulcan looked up from his nearly empty bowl of porridge, and nodded.
Kyle waited. His smile began to dim as B’Avi turned back to his porridge, then rose to leave. Leave!
“Wait!” Kyle burst, unsure what had happened, what to say, grasped, “Did you hear back about the soup?”
B’Avi said, “Not yet.” and left.
Feeling stricken, Kyle sat and pushed food around his plate. He’d hoped that he had found a friend, someone interesting, someone not so fixated on routine, the College, the scores. But maybe Kyle wasn’t good enough after all. He dumped his untouched food into the recycler and went to class.
—
At lunch Kyle sat at the first empty table he saw and pulled out his PADD. The physical stuff came easy, but he’d never had a head for figures, maps, and tactics was kicking his butt, so he put in his reps there, too. But moments later, someone sat on the bench across the table. He looked up and it was B’Avi. He watched, stunned as the Vulcan set two trays full of tureens onto the table before him.
He said, “There were a number of variables unaccounted for in your mother’s recipe—” here he paused, a slight pinch of those sloped eyebrows, “I hope you will not take this as a slight, it is more a matter of locality than any deficiency on your mother’s part.” and then he waited.
Kyle’s mouth opened, then closed, then he managed something like, “Huh?”
And B’Avi continued. He’d worked out a branching series of iterations, each tackling an aspect of the recipe in question. Once they addressed the issue of the milk substitute, the texture, and the varietal of pepper, they could combine the winners into a nearer approximation. This treatise was delivered with an air of breathlessness Kyle had never heard in a Vulcan, certainly not one who’d snubbed him so fully mere hours ago. But he’d take what he could get. He and B’Avi tried the soups and compared notes, recording them in a shared processing space on their PADDs.
This time they were late to class, by nearly a whole minute.
The excitement of having a shared, slightly stupid, project hadn’t bled off by dinner. Kyle was trying not to get his hopes up as he followed B’Avi to their table, especially given the guy hadn’t responded to the messages he’d sent between classes. But maybe he was just busy? The meal passed quietly, if not as awkwardly as that morning had. This time Kyle pressed beyond an inquiry into the soup project. Asked about the Vulcan’s data entry systems, his classes. And it’d worked. Just like that first time, he’d found the way in, and B’Avi seemed unable to keep himself from speaking once he’d gotten started. Kyle would listen intently, and every once and awhile a cloud would pass over the Vulcan’s brow, and he would pause. And Kyle would smile an encouraging smile, and he’d be off again. They had the shape of it now, the patter of conversation. It carried on this way for another day or so before the table began to fill up.
It hadn’t occurred to Kyle that B’Avi’s table had been heretofore empty because of the guy’s general demeanor. That other people had probably felt rebuffed by his private nature. That maybe Kyle’s presence would assure people, encourage them to try again. They did. And it wasn’t just boring anymore, but irritating, like flies interrupting their meals. Not just because their conversation was the same rote patter, but because they never left space for B’Avi (where most folk only required the length of a breath to have the excuse to speak, B’Avi required the conversational equivalent of a lightyear or so.) It made Kyle snappish in a way he didn’t like. But either his heart, or else his cherubic face, weren’t in it and no one seemed very convinced of his annoyance. Until Dzolo.
After the third uncomfortable meal—by now B’Avi had given up sticking his nose in his PADD as it seemed to invite more scrutiny than it deflected—Kyle had ceased speaking entirely. So it was, with matching scowls, that Kyle and B’Avi met the third of their little trio.
The Romulan practically tossed her lunch tray to the table, the resultant clatter scaring the rest of the cadets half out of their seats.
She glowered, passing her gaze across the table like a radar sweep, looking for targets. She snapped, “Everyone but the human and the Vulcan: leave.”
Kyle was fairly certain that Cadet Roberts was also human, or at least half, but everyone seemed to understand she’d meant Kyle himself. They all scuttled away with varying levels of performative nonchalance. The Romulan settled at the end of the table and began to eat. He wasn’t easy to read, but B’Avi seemed almost amused. Resumed eating, and this time pulled out his PADD. The Romulan continued to ignore them. Toward the end of the lunch hour, she stood to leave, but paused, looking back to them.
She asked, “Why didn’t you just tell them to piss off?”
Kyle exchanged a glance with B’Avi. The Vulcan lifted a brow, practically a full-body shrug for him. Kyle shrugged his own shoulders in turn. The Romulan scoffed and left.
She was at the table the next day. And Kyle almost hesitated to sit there. Like maybe she’d claimed the territory for herself. But B’Avi took his customary seat and she didn’t object, so they settled back in. This time she spoke.
“You’re Djokovic and B’Avi.”
Kyle nodded, but B’Avi put in, “He is called Kyle.”
The girl inclined her head, and said, “Kyle.”
“You have us at a disadvantage,” B’Avi continued, “You know our names, yet we do not have yours.”
Her lip curled in a way that might have been a smile, she said, “Your names are easy. Top of the Fit-rep board. My name is too, if you’re looking at Tactical, which you’re not.”
Kyle reddened a bit, he was still falling behind in tactics.
B’Avi however lifted a brow again, and said, “Cadet Dzolo.”
She nodded, and that was it. Until again as she left, “It’s quieter here.” she pronounced. Then added, “But you could talk.”
So they did. The next day B’Avi was able to resume the pursuit of the čorba od zelja, which Dzolo judged disgusting in all iterations, but Kyle found some quite close to correct. Kyle tried the plomeek recipe B’Avi was the happiest with, and soon they began fiddling with a sort of Romulan chowder, using scallops as an approximation for the mollusks. And of course Dzolo asked if they could replicate some Ale—B’Avi demurred, but Kyle suggested the club in town and plans were made. And when Dzolo turned to leave, Kyle and B’Avi followed.
It was easy to slide into a new routine. To follow Dzolo, enjoy the silence and space she seemed to pull along with her. Never had to answer boring questions, or compete for tables, or seats, or the best spots on the campus grounds. Like traveling in a warp shadow, cloaked, Kyle could be himself. B’Avi, too. Could finally talk about the comics he read. Kyle was delighted to find they were the sort of old Starfleet stories his grandfather had read him, only B’Avi had a few on flimsy. Actual physical copies, not just files on a PADD. They stayed up late some nights, caught up in the world of yesteryear. The way the quadrant had been, might never be again.
Sometimes Kyle was stuck there in B’Avi’s quarters. Past lights-out, didn’t want to risk the demerits, and just stayed over. And sometimes, following Dzolo down the halls, or down the neon-lit streets, Kyle thought it might be more. Following the beat, the music, B’Avi’s lead, or Dzolo’s, or both. That maybe this would lead somewhere else. Not just to class, or the lunch table. But it never did, not beyond the necessity of the shared bunk every once and awhile. It was enough.
It was enough then, and it was enough now... Only... Only there was not boring and there was interesting. And regardless of how you felt about Starfleet’s Academy moving in—or moving back in, technically—it was undeniably interesting.
They didn’t care about the Fit-reps board, even though Mir could easily have topped it. They had dozens of other courses of study. It was like Dzolo and the Tactical board. A whole new dimension Kyle had never considered. The lack of discipline, the gangling, noisy clutter of them, it was like getting to be in the club all day. See new faces not pinched in effort or drawn into seriousness. One of them told jokes. Had stopped them in the hallway to introduce himself, and tell a joke.
Dzolo had scoffed and stomped off, and for the first time Kyle didn’t feel the tug of that tether he’d always known. Didn’t feel the need to follow. There was something new here, and it needed understanding, chasing. Catching.
So while Dzolo fought to find the control, and quiet, and space that the Academy cadets seemed set on disrupting.
And while B’Avi plotted and researched.
Kyle found himself on a new track.
Maybe still a kind of following. Following a laugh, a touch. The intoxicating newness of another person knowing him for himself, not his academic standing, or position on a fire team, or place in a platoon. The idea that he could be more than his upbringing, like Jay-Den was doing, had done.
That there could be more. And it would be new, and interesting, and that the world of yesteryear could be here again. Shining. That maybe the best was yet to come.