InsaneJournal

To say she was nervous was an understatement. While Captain Kirk had been very amiable with her request to teach any interested parties to ride brooms and to play quidditch, it was a different story today. As part of the deal, Ginny had promised him the first ride on one of the brooms that she had built, mostly to further ease the Captain’s mind that anything might go amiss with her plan and today was the moment where all of her planning came to fruition.

If anything were to go wrong, she was sure that Kirk would require her to hold off on teaching anyone at the least, at the worst, he would insist that she couldn’t teach anyone and that they couldn’t use the brooms she had worked so long to make.

Swallowing back the bundle of nerves that seemed to be caught in her throat and squirming around in her stomach, Ginny stepped through the door and into the holodeck which, without a simulation to run, was nothing more than an enormous room with high ceilings and wall panels that she knew would project whatever she asked into a scene so realistic that it could have been conjured by magic.

Kirk was already waiting, which is what she really expected, and Ginny gave him a smile that she hoped wasn’t as strained as it felt. “Hello,” she said, approaching Kirk with sure steps and extending the broom in her right hand for him to take. “This is one of the brooms I was telling you about,” Ginny explained, the edges of her smile relaxing as she reveled with a bit of pride that she had managed to produce something like the broom in his hands and, better yet, that it actually did what it was needed to do. “It’s not as fast as the broom I have here,” she kept talking, feeling like it was best to get the most relevant information out there early on. “There are charms and things that I could add to really help them move faster and turn smoother, but given that only four or five of us really know how to fly, I thought it was better to start small and expand if people really took to it and wanted to do more.”

“This broom here,” Ginny added, wrapping her fingers around the handle of the pristine broom she had kept in her left hand, “It was the newest model out in my time, and the one that I was using to train for the upcoming quidditch season with my team.” And, indeed, it was far sleeker and more modern looking than the broom that Jim held but that was also something that she hoped she could improve on with time and practice because aesthetics were important, too.

Lifting one shoulder in a half shrug, she gestured to the room at large. “Do you want to just practice like this or should I turn on the actual simulation so you can see the pitch itself?”

When Jim agreed to do this, it had been to humor the girl, not necessarily because he wanted to actually fly around on a broomstick. But now, standing there in the holodeck with Ginny, out of uniform, not on duty, relaxed, he wanted to give it a try. He took the broom from her and turned it over as he examined it. "So tell me," he said, "in your world, brooms just fly, right? So here, you've programmed brooms to fly for anyone who wants to. Even though I'm not a witch - wizard? - I'll be able to fly with this?"

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Ginny answered, going to the panel on the wall and tapping in what she needed to set the simulation. She had forgone one of the professional pitches that she had played in during her career and instead gone to the first one, and still probably her favorite, the pitch at Hogwarts with the castle hovering on the cliff in the distance. “The brooms fly because of the magic that we put on them to allow them to fly. Hovering charms, for example. It’s not like someone picked up an ordinary house broom and decided to fly with it like some of the……” she had to pause for a moment, to think of the right word that she was looking for. “Cartoons, I think they’re called. I’ve seen those around Halloween in some places, and it’s always a witch riding across the sky on a plain old broom.”

“The brooms we use for quidditch and flying for fun are made with that specific purpose. The shape of the broom, the length of the twigs on the end, the way the handle curves. It’s all to help you have a better experience in the air. Even the charms that are used are added with those ideas in mind. The more charms and magic used, the more work that goes into the design of the broom, then the higher the price,” she held up her broom as an example. “You’ll see what I mean when you ride that one and then try this one.”

With a chuckle, she gave a nod of her head. “You’re a man so you’d be a wizard,” Ginny said, pausing to tie her hair back into a quick ponytail. “But yes, you’ll be able to fly it. At home, that wouldn’t really be possible, but it’s more about secrecy laws and politics than magic, I think.” She shrugged her shoulders at that, deciding that it wasn’t the time to talk about those particular issues. “I tested these with Peter Parker before he went back home, and it worked just fine with him so I’m not worried.”


Jim looked around as the holodeck came to life and turned in a circle as he took in the sites. "Where's this?" he asked. "It's incredible." He raced a hand back through his hair and grinned over at her. "So what do I do?"

Ginny had already been smiling, but her grin stretched that much wider at his reaction to Hogwarts coming to life around them. It was easy to take how stunning Hogwarts Castle and the surrounding countryside could be when she had spent so many years staring at it day after day, but now that Ginny had been away from school for sometime and was facing the possibility of never seeing the castle or her world again, she had learned to take her time.

“Yeah, it’s not bad,” she said with a proud grin. “This is the quidditch pitch at Hogwarts,” she told Jim, pointing towards the castle. “And that is Hogwarts itself. It’s where most of the young witches and wizards in England go to school and learn to use their magic. Up in the Scottish Highlands where the muggles won’t stumble across us.”
Stepping over beside him, Ginny placed her broom on the ground and gestured for him to do the same. “You won’t have to do this every time. This is mostly so you understand that to control the broom, you have to do it with confidence. If you are hesitant or let your fear win out, the broom won’t respond as well to your commands.”

Explanation over, she extended her hand so that it was directly over the broom and, in the most commanding voice she could muster, spoke the one word she needed. “Up!” As expected, her broom immediately jumped into her hand, the slightest vibration from the wood tingling up her arm as the looked over at Jim, a silent indication that he should do what she had.

"Scotland," Jim said. "Have you talked to Mr. Scott about that yet? He might have some good stories from that part of Earth to share with you, you know."

He scratched his jaw and bent to set the broom down beside him on the ground. Jim was all about trying something thrilling like racing through the air on a broom, but he wasn't so sure about starting off like this. Still - He watched Ginny for a moment with his arms crossed over his chest, his shoulders back. Once the broom was up in her hand, he followed suit and flattened his palm in the air at his hip. "Up," he commanded it, in the same tone he might use to tell a crewmember what their next task was.

“I haven’t,” she replied, “I didn’t know he was from Scotland. But I would like to go visit. Whenever we go back to Earth, that is.” That was something that Ginny had been thinking about a good deal, and while she knew it would undoubtedly be sad to visit the places where she had grown up and know they weren’t going to be the same, her curiosity was still there all the same.

It maybe wasn’t the most definite reaction like what Ginny had gotten from her broom, but Jim Kirk wasn’t magical, he was a muggle, and even though he could use the broom, it wasn’t going to be without its own challenges. Still, she had to grin when the broom responded, and she couldn’t help but think that a great deal of it lay in the tone he had used. There wasn’t much room for arguing left in it, a practical demand that broom respond and do so quickly. “Brilliant!” she told Jim, swinging one of her legs over her broom and adjusting her grip on the handle. “The next thing you’ll want to do is mount the broom, but situate yourself so that your sitting closer to the back near the twigs versus closer on the handle, it’ll be more comfortable that way.”

“And when you feel like you are in a good position, put both hands on the handle with a firm grip. It doesn’t matter where so much, that’s just personal preference. If you want to be over the handle, put it higher, if you want to sit up as you fly, place them lower.” For the moment, Ginny’s hands were lower on her broom, her position upright since she wasn’t planning on racing off and needing to stay low to the handle to help her fly faster. “And once you’ve gotten that situated, you kick off from the ground. Do it slowly so you won’t go up too high, too fast and make sure you don’t pull on the handle.”

Jim hadn't taken instructions like this in years, really. He swung a leg over the broom, judging it in the way he did his motorcycle, once, years ago too. Of course, a broom was narrower and more unforgiving than his bike was, but he figured the motions and feel of it all were nearly the same. He slid his palm down the handle and leaned forward a little before kicking off the ground, the broom hovering a few feet in the air. "You know," he said, "I've always liked flying and obviously do it in space craft. Though I have been known to free jump a time or two, both on missions and for fun. Guess this'll be somewhere in the middle."

Ginny had rarely been happier that she had taken Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, and that she had a father and so many friends with knowledge of the muggle world than when she had arrived on the Enterprise. It hadn’t helped her bridge every divide between her culture and that of the one she was now living in, but it had certainly assisted in her adjustment. Even so, she had never heard of free jumping and the way her nose wrinkled up and her mouth twisted slightly to the left were indicators of her confusion. “What’s a free jump?” she asked, kicking off from the ground and rising up to be at eye level with Jim.

He smirked. "Basically it's jumping from a high altitude for as long as possible without pulling your parachute. It's a rush." Jim took a chance and leaned forward on the broom, which lifted him up higher. He knew they had the confines of the holodeck to deal with, but hopefully there was enough room to really enjoy this.

“Hey now, don’t get all smug because I asked a question,” Ginny said, though from her tone she was clearly teasing. Listening to him explain what a free jump was, she thought she might want to try it the next time she got a chance. Heights weren’t anything that scared her, and while she was sure what a parachute was, she assumed it was what muggles used to stop their momentum when falling from a great height or maybe to soften the landing so that it wouldn’t be fatal. “I’ll have to try it sometime,” she told him, raising her eyebrows in slight surprise when Jim lifted himself higher of his own accord.

“You steer the broom by guiding the handle the direction you want to go. Down takes you back to the ground, up takes you higher, and then left and right. To accelerate, you lean forward over the handle and to brake you sit up or just give a hard tug on the handle and that will stop you.”

He was a quick learner, even if he wasn't a wizard and flying on a broom was never something that crossed his mind. "I'm sure that next time we're somewhere where free jumping's an option, we can get you up there." Her instructions were clear and he nodded. "So it's kind of like riding a horse," he said, thinking back to his time at Admiral Pike's ranch recently. "You know, if the broom was a horse, of course."

She could only shrug when he compared flying a broom to riding a horse, having never ridden one herself. But, now that it had been brought up, Ginny decided that was also something she might like to do, perhaps even something she should do given that her patronus had taken on the form of a mustang back at Hogwarts. “I wouldn’t know,” she explained, leaning back slightly on her broomstick and stretching her arms above her head to loosen up the muscles in her shoulders, “I’ve never ridden a horse before, just seen them from a distance a couple of times. But that is something else I’d like to do, as well. Riding a horse.”

With a slight laugh, she gestured toward the quidditch pitch around them. “This is what I’ve spent a lot of my life doing, at least once I got out of school. The wizarding world is…..it’s brilliant, but since I’ve been here I’ve learned that there are a lot of muggle things, simple things really, that I’ve missed out on because of how I grew up. I guess I’ll add free jumping and horse riding to my list.” And it wasn’t a good thing or a bad thing, it was just the difference in the two cultures and exacerbated by the fact that the boy she had spent much of her adult life in a relationship with had also experienced a childhood missing all those basic experiences and, therefore, hadn’t really thought about doing them now that he was an adult.

"You should have come out to Admiral Pike's ranch when we were on Earth," he said. "He's got a few horses there and was taking people on trail rides. Though I'm also pretty sure there's a simulation here too that'll let you do it." Jim sat up a little straighter on the broom, getting a better feel for it now. "How fast do these things go?" he asked, a daring edge to his tone.

Ginny remembered that invitation being extended to everyone on the ship, just like she remembered why she hadn’t gone. Her one hope had been that maybe the wizarding world somehow still existed in this one, and she’d tried her best to locate the small pocket of wizarding life that was in San Francisco to no avail. And after that, she hadn’t felt much like going to a party. “I don’t think I’d want to use a simulation for the first time,” she said with a slight wrinkle of her nose. “I’d want to do it properly, with a real horse and all.”

Of course, given a bit of time, she might change her mind but for as brilliant as all this science and technology was, she mostly preferred having the real thing.

With a tilt of her head towards Jim her eyes narrowed just a bit while she sized up her flying companion. He wasn’t scared, of that much she was certain, but sometimes fear was a good thing. Fear had a habit of keeping you honest and not allowing you to push too much too soon. “Pretty fast,” she said slowly, half expecting him to lean forward and shoot off to the other side of the pitch. “The lower you are to the handle, the less wind resistance you’ll have and the faster it will go, but you always have to keep in mind that you only need to go as fast as your reactions will allow you to stop. Otherwise….” Ginny moved one of her hands through the air in a downward arc, her eyes lingering on the ground for just a moment. “The safety functions are on, and I’d do my best to slow you with a charm as well, but even so, a little caution wouldn’t be misplaced.”

Maybe her explanation was a bit much, but Ginny thought it was important to stress safety. Even if she had taken all the precautions, she was still going to feel horrible if Kirk or someone else got hurt because she had failed to explain the risks.

He shrugged. He had no qualms about using a simulation to do just about anything, left over probably from his days at the Academy. That's how they learned about no-win situations and other types of issues after all. But he could see how someone from a different time and place might see things differently. "Well, the good thing about this holodeck and the safety protocols," Jim said, "is that we don't really need caution." One of the things he liked about this type of simulation is that even though they were confined to a certain room, with dimensions and walls, the simulation around them would be manipulated so that if he wanted to fly higher and farther, he'd be able to, even if the room ran out of physical space. It was all a trick of the simulation and the mind. "Race you to those goal posts," he said and then took off before giving her a chance to respond.

Right then and there, Ginny decided that if Jim Kirk had gone to Hogwarts, he would have been in Gryffindor. It was such a staple of her Hogwarts House to just dive in and worry about the rest later, which meant that she didn’t hesitate or try and get him to stop. Instead, Ginny flattened herself on her broom and took off like a rocket, streaking down the pitch with her eyes focused on the large golden hoop in the center.

The only thing missing was a quaffle tucked under one hand, something that she could easily remedy once she had beaten Kirk to the end since the simulation came with a couple trunks of quidditch equipment to enable several people to practice at once.

Jim laughed at the feeling of flying, which would only be better if he was doing it without a broom between his legs. Oh, and if it wasn't inside of a simulation, too. Other than that, he enjoyed the wind in his hair and the rush of it all. Of course, Ginny beat him, but he didn't mind. He pulled up on his broom to stop it, overcompensating and almost - almost! - tumbling right off. "Pretty cool," he said, grinning. "You'll probably have people lining up to use this program."

Beating Kirk to the other end wasn’t a big deal, mostly because it really hadn’t been a fair race. She had more experience on a broom and the one Ginny was riding was just better, built by professionals that had spent years working on perfecting every inch of it rather than someone who had taken it up as a hobby and, for the most part, didn’t quite know what she was doing just yet.

Even so, hovering in front of the middle goalpost, she had to grin at Kirk’s comment. “You really think so?” she asked, her cheeks going as red as the hair on her head. “I don’t even mind if people don’t want to play quidditch, really. Just giving them the opportunity to fly around like this would really be enough.”

He winked at her. "Yeah, I think so. Everyone can use something like this to take a break from everything else. Travelers and crew alike."

And just like that, Ginny Weasley was beaming, giving him a smile that was so big it made her cheeks hurt. “Thanks, Kirk. I really appreciate you saying that.”

A moment later, she had pulled her wand from the pocket of her pants and given it a wave, “Accio quaffle!” she said, taking the time to tuck her wand back in place as the red ball rose up from the open trunk on the ground and sailed directly to her outstretched hand. “So. you want to learn the rules of quidditch, or just keep flying that thing around?”