tushanshu | Text; Don't judge.

Korra.

[And Jim's suddenly serious, and he sets his own drink aside. There's no anger in his tone, but there is patience. Jim's a teacher, too.]

A lot of my people have lived and died wearing this, for what it stands for to us. It's important. It's a lifelong philosophy every bit as much as it's a piece of a uniform.

[Hearing her name spoken like that drains the smile from her lips and she places her cup onto the table. It’s the one Tenzin used when she didn’t fully understand something. When the seriousness of what he meant by earning is explained to her, Korra bites her lower lip and furrows her brow.]

I’m sorry, I just thought… [She felt she had overstepped her bounds and shoved disrespect where her playfulness should have been.]

I won’t ask for one again.

It's fine. I'm not mad or anything, okay?

[He lets the seriousness bleed off, and he's back to being a little more relaxed.]

I think you'll rock the blue, though.

[She nodded, slightly apprehensive. That is until he says that.]

You mean I don’t already? [Going from tense to relaxed is something you master when your teachers allow you to finally sit down after hours of training.]

Oh, I dunno. It's not quite the same shade. Might have some calibration issues.

[Totally playful. It's his default, really. Jim can do serious when the situation calls for it, but it's not him.]

Make sure to give the tailor that input, they might be lost otherwise.

[Now this is a language Korra knows well.]

I can see your tailor seemed to be quite taken with your hair.

Didn't I tell you? That's part of it. You've gotta match. Monochromatic dress policy. You'll have to go blue, sorry.

[UNREPENTANT.]

I guess you were just destined to be Captain then. Unless the starship has janitors that wear gold too.

[NOT EVEN SORRY.]

We don't actually have janitors. Robots, mostly.

[How do you think the floors of that ship stay so damned clean, gosh.]

Those are real?

[Mops Jim. They’re called mops.]

They're totally real. Captain's honour.

[He holds up his right hand to swear.]

So machines make your food and clean your ship. Tony would be so offended.

[If anything, Korra would assume Tony would be the one inventing said robots and starships.]

Tony who? Stark? Yeah, he wishes.

[He met the guy and though amused, was not much impressed.]

[Korra can’t help but raise her eyebrows.]

You guys have that stuff on the starship too?

[She wasn’t sure if Jim had seen his armor or not, but Korra had caught a glimpse of it on the network earlier that night. It was still hard for her not to think that wasn’t some kind of advanced form of metalbending.]

What stuff?

[He reaches back for his glass of ice fruit thing, giving her a curious expression.]

Um, Stark stuff.

[And that’s the best the Avatar can come up with on the fly.]

[... Excuse him, he bursts out laughing.]

'Stark stuff'. He's from a different universe, so probably not.

[Korra can’t help but laugh too, it really did sound pretty dumb when she heard it repeated back at her.]

Well, that’s a shame. Some stuff I’ve never seen before, but I guess that’s not saying much. Everyone thinks all I’ve ever seen is glaciers and igloos.

[Then a realization.]

Wait, which Tony did you meet?

[... That gets an arch of one eyebrow.]

There's more than one? Acts like me, a little shorter, dark hair, funny facial hair? Thing-- [he waves vaguely toward his sternum] in his chest? Super interested in science? Like to the point where he was practically willing to ['prostitute himself' excuse you Jim] take me out to dinner to get a look at my tricorder?

Acts like you? [She shakes her head.] Not really. But yeah to pretty much everything else.

[Korra's eyebrow raised and she took a good long stare at Jim.]

Tell me a tricorder is something not attached to your body. [Please.]

[Oh god, why would you ask that. Jim facepalms very briefly, and then pulls his tricorder out of its belt holster and forks it over for her to examine in full.]

It's a scientific device that scans for things like atmosphere viability, lifeforms, that sort of thing. It's got a twenty metre radius.

[Thankful that it was an actual device and not kind of slang from Jim's home world, Korra takes the tricorder and just blinks when it's open.]

I'm not even going to ask about the lights. [She runs finger over the lights, avoiding the buttons as if it would explode if she touched them.]

And no music? I thought you had better-than-stark-stuff. [Her smile is small, but filled with playfulness.]

Does it have any kind of weapon on it? [The main reason she didn't want to touch any buttons.]

[And Jim, with the utmost in patience, replies to each of her comments in turn,]

The lights are coded, they mean a lot of different things, we're trained to interpret them. It doesn't have music, it's a tool. For a job. Music would be a distraction. And no. It's not a weapon.

[He leans over, presses the 'scan lifeform' button, and a tiny holographic representation of a human (ie: him) pops up above the device.]

We're explorers first. Our mission is to boldly go where no one's gone before. Weapons are sometimes necessary for that, but a Starfleet Officer is trained to always try a diplomatic solution first.

[There’s actually a little sigh of relief at the no weapons part. She remembered what happened when she fiddled with the buttons on the sphere piece of tech she found after the satellite fell.]

Oh whoa. [The little holograph of Jim causes her eyes to widen and she slowly pokes it with her finger, cleanly passing through it.]

I think I see what you mean about earning your way through those Starfleet ranks.

[Then a question comes to her mind, and she has to ask:] Did you show up on Tu Vishan in the palace, or did you get here by your starship to explore…?

[The question makes him close his eyes, and he thinks of Spock. I order you to-- he cuts it off. He doesn't need to think about that right now, or hear it.]

No, I got here like everyone else. Man, I wish my ship were here. She's the most gorgeous thing you've ever seen, I bet you'd love her.

[She's everything beautiful bout the universe rendered down to sleek lines and folded steel and she's his heart and soul and being apart from her is worse than he could have ever imagined. His ship, his crew, his entire family's out there somewhere without their captain and it's driving him crazy by degrees.]

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