Star Trek: Mosaic

Yesterday was First Contact Day.

Marty Kirk might've even noticed if he hadn't been so crippled by his neuroses.  Marty had just passed the entrance exams for Starfleet Academy, showed up in San Francisco, and discovered his roommate was an Andorian named Chinook.  Marty had led a somewhat sheltered life to this point.  This is to say, he'd never actually met an alien before.  He hadn't ever really roamed far from his hometown in Iowa.

He wasn't even particularly aware that he share his surname with a Starfleet legend.  He knew what he knew extremely well, but not a whole lot beyond that.  He was probably suited to become a brilliant engineer, or at least some career in engineering, that much had been obvious for years.  He was the kind of kid who drove his parents crazy disassembling household appliances and somehow putting them back together in better and more efficient working order, somewhat complicating life when it sometimes turned out the results weren't necessarily compatible with other systems, although his reputation grew so that neighbors would eagerly recruit his services for more deliberate results, duplicating what he'd done late at night in his bedroom, absently drinking proffered milk, munching on replicated cookies, always, always lost in dreamy thought about the possibilities.

Which is also to say, Marty was simply lost in his own head, and never much enjoyed being forced out of it.  It tended to make him grumpy.  Chinook was a shock to his system beyond all previous magnitudes.  Marty didn't know if all Andorians were like that, or just Chinook, if it made him racist, xenophobic, whatever the term was supposed to be, or if it was just the way he faced all obstacles in life, desperate to escape it.  He applied that first night for exemption, to have his own quarters, and then once a week every week despite every rejection, and frequently found himself at odds with Chinook at increasingly petty levels.

He just wanted to be left alone.

He spent all his time studying manuals and every spare minute in a lab, most of the time daydreaming through classes, lost in the cloud of his own thoughts and resentful anytime a professor dragged him kicking and screaming back the classroom around him.  

It was Chinook who forced him back to reality, or perhaps for the very first time.  He placed a lock on their quarters Marty couldn't force open.  At first Marty fumed, shouting down the hall into every closed door and every one someone foolishly opened trying to will the noise away, and then he just threw himself against the door, slumping down defeated, at which point the Andorian tried talking to him through it.  Marty loudly noted he couldn't hear Chinook and then grew silent for a whole five minutes.  Then he slammed his fist into the door, or rather at the door, because it was at that precise moment it slid open, and Marty's fist ended up colliding with Chinook's blue nose, smashing it out of place.

At the infirmary, Marty apologized profusely for another five minutes, and Chinook couldn't help but grin.  He had an ancestor who probably would have been very amused indeed by the whole affair, but in all the time they ended up sharing together he never once named him.  He instead told Marty he'd been named after a bookstore on Earth, but it'd been closed for centuries, otherwise they might even have made a road trip to visit it.

They somehow became friends.  Marty slowly started making an effort to socialize.  Chinook showed him around campus, even tried to get him into a bar, but of course Marty didn't drink.  

By the next First Contact Day, Chinook showed Marty a holoprogram of the Andorian perspective on humanity's introduction to Vulcans.  That was the day Marty redirected his career.  He had chosen to join his friend in xenoanthropology.  Or to make it official, anyway.  That was also how he ended up learning that Jim Kirk came from Iowa, too.  Chinook just had to laugh at that one...