4Author's Note: This is my first story published here and my first Star Trek fanfiction. On New Year's Eve I was thinking about writing a New Year's Fanfiction about how one year can change your life (ergo the title) and I decided that this would be the best fandom for it. So basically this is a really late New Year's fic.
Disclaimer: I don't own Star Trek. I would currently be in LA on the set of the sequel if I did.
Kirk
Any other New Year's Eve James T. Kirk would have been out at a bar in downtown San Francisco ringing in the New Year with a bunch of fellow cadets and alcohol, but not this year. This year he was sitting on the lawn of Starfleet Academy staring up at the Golden Gate Bridge. As he had told Captain Pike back in Riverside he had completed the officer program in 3 years. After graduation he would be assigned to a starship and sent off into the universe. To be honest he had never expected that to happen to him. Growing up in a home with a mother who constantly fled off planet on missions, leaving him alone with his stepfather all because she had never really recovered from his dad's death had caused him to merely wander through life with no real purpose. He had become so accustomed to that that he didn't even realize it until Captain Pike sat him down in a bar and told him to enlist in Starfleet and to be honest he still wasn't entirely sure why he went along with it. What James T. Kirk didn't know was that the year ahead would give him his answer.
McCoy
Leonard McCoy was spending New Year's Eve like he always did: in his room alone. Ever since the divorce he really had no interest in celebrating. It wasn't like he didn't have friends to celebrate with, he just didn't want to. The divorce still scarred him; he had been humiliated when Jocelyn had taken everything. It had led him to enlist in Starfleet while slightly intoxicated. He didn't know why he was here, he hated space. So why hadn't he dropped out by now? He was already a licensed doctor he was able to graduate in three years instead of four. He only needed officer training to know how to handle himself on a starship. That still didn't answer his question as to why he was here. He could go back to Georgia, set up his own practice and live a comfortable life instead of constantly dealing with crisis scenarios. Perhaps this was his way of proving himself after the divorce, proving that he wasn't the failure that everyone made him out to be. Leonard McCoy did not realize that by the end of the forthcoming year no one would dare say he was a failure again.
Uhura
It was nights like this that made Nyota Uhura dislike her reputation as a social person. Yes, she liked going out with friends and having a good time, but she also enjoyed being alone to have some time for herself. Trying to convince Gaila that she wasn't feeling well had been such a challenge that she had started to wonder if it was even worth it, but she knew that she needed this time to herself so that she could socialize later. However, being alone on New Year's Eve just didn't feel right. Wasn't it supposed to be a time for friends and celebrating? Perhaps she had just gotten bored with the routine, it was always the same. She did her work on certain nights and went out on other nights. It worked for her and helped her stay organized. Maybe that was the problem, maybe she had become to stoic and she wanted to do something unplanned for once. Of course choosing to stay in on New Year's Eve probably wasn't the most exciting of unplanned things to do, but maybe it was a start. Nyota Uhura was unaware of just how much her life would soon be changed by something unplanned.
Scotty
This time last year Montgomery Scott was most certainly not expecting to spend New Year's Eve on the ice planet Delta Vega. It was only a beagle. Why on Earth was Admiral Archer so attached to it? He paced around the starbase once again going over the events that had led him to this wasteland in his mind. They had all said he was crazy, that his theory for trans-warp beaming was impossible, but he didn't believe them. People had once said that it was impossible to sail around the world. Now people had done that multiple times and had moved onto exploring whole new worlds and galaxies so who was to say anything was impossible? People must still like believing in limits and in his mind, they were the crazy ones. He realized that limits did exist and always would, but he believed that you had to discover them, not assume them. This time of year was for making wishes for the year ahead and on that night Montgomery Scott wished that he could redeem himself in some way. The way that would happen though was so crazy that no one could have seen it coming.
Sulu
The only reason Hikaru Sulu was not spending New Year's Eve out with his friends was because once again he had gotten involved with something he wasn't supposed to. He had tried to break up a fight between two first year cadets but one of them had made him their new target. He was now sitting in his room with a minor concussion from when he had been slammed down onto the pavement. He hoped his parents would never hear about this incident. His entire life his parents had both admired and been wary of that particular trait of his, a hero complex they called it, admiring that their son recognized the importance of helping others, but wary of the fact that sometimes it would be at the cost of his own safety. Joining Starfleet had done nothing to ease those worries about him, they feared that he would someday get involved in a situation that was a lot worse than normal and this time he wouldn't make it through relatively unscathed. By the end of the upcoming year though Hikaru Sulu's parents would understand why he did what he did and never think his hero complex was a flaw again.
Chekov
It was New Year's Eve and Pavel Chekov saw no reason to go out. He wasn't of legal age for anything yet so what was the point? So instead he was sat in his room at Starfleet Academy waiting for midnight. He was always too young for everything and because of that he had very few friends since most of the other cadets thought he was too young to even be in Starfleet. He would constantly have to prove himself so much more than anyone else there. As a result he was always a bit jarred when someone paid more attention to his abilities than to his age, but it made him think that maybe someday more people would see that there was more to him than his youth as well. That was all he wanted, just to prove himself and he was tired of having to. He couldn't wait for the day when more than a handful of people acknowledged his skills before his age or even forgot about his age all together. What Pavel Chekov didn't know was that that day was coming and it was going to change not only the way people saw him, but the he viewed his universe.
Spock
In Spock's mind New Year's Eve was just another human tradition that was illogical in his mind. Therefore, he had no plans and was currently going over the results from his classes in the past semester His mother had tried to explain it to him many times, but he even though he understood where humans were coming from he just couldn't find any logic to it. Why did they feel the need to stay up as late as possible and celebrate the end of the year? It happened every year and it was always the same. They all seemed to think that they could change, become a new person just because the year had changed. They all seemed to forget that that was highly unlikely. It was like a form of amnesia overtook humans temporarily on that night. His mother had always said that humans weren't expecting everything to change. It was more the hope that things could change and that one year later they would be somewhere else, somewhere that they didn't expect to be a year ago. When Amanda Grayson had told him this, after his first year at Starfleet Academy, Spock had dismissed as another human oddity, but he didn't realize that his mother had been right. One year could change your life and his was about to change in a big and tragic way.
Review and if you have any writing advice I'll gladly take it!