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"Reflecting to You"
By MissAnnThropic
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: None of its mine. I’m just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching taped episodes of my favorite shows. :(
Description: A different ending to In a Mirror Darkly, Part I, results in the Mirror Universe T'Pol ending up on our universe's Enterprise when the relationship between Trip and T'Pol is at a breaking point. (later becomes a cross-over with ST:TOS, Spoilers: The Tholian Web)
Chapter 18
Ensconced in the silence and solitude of her own quarters, T'Pol sat perfectly still on the floor with her eyes closed. She might have been a stonemason's creation but for the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Her body was a motionless housing for her mind, apart and secondary to the power of her thoughts. She surrendered to her inner world, shed the outer like a cloak in the desert night. She had not eaten dinner for want of an appetite, she had not slept for the torment of holding Trip's emotions at bay, but she forced those physical discomforts to the back of her consciousness. Of late, she was not particularly successful, but she tried. She had to try. She was lost without the trying. It was her last desperate refuge.
The illumination in her quarters was low and the temperature a relaxing eighty-five degrees. A candle burned steadily in a glass jar before her. The comforting but alien smell of Georgia peaches richly filled her living quarters, permeating outward from the melting cream-colored wax, and she breathed the saccharine tang as she sank deep into meditation, the only way she could hold herself together since Elizabeth's death.
*****
The quarters in which Mu'Pol was staying aboard Enterprise were Spartan. Trip should have expected no less, for she had come from her universe with only a torn uniform to her name and she hadn't gone on any away missions to accumulate any 'souvenirs', but still, somehow, in his mind Trip had expected something… red. Something warm and Vulcan and personal, like the Vulcan art in T'Pol's quarters or the mediation mats on her floor.
Instead Mu'Pol's current quarters were virtually barren, as though she existed in transience. No past in this universe of her own to claim and at best an uncertain future. Thinking about it made Trip feel… hollow.
Mu'Pol rounded him as he stood mutely in the center of her sparse quarters. Trip turned his eyes to her and waited. With Mu'Pol, the waiting was important. If she was rushed she lashed out. So he waited.
Mu'Pol regarded him curiously then asked him a question in the only manner she seemed to know… bluntly. "What made you think to bond with a Vulcan in the first place?" As ever, her voice was cutting. Mu'Pol lacked the subtle softness Trip had become so good at discerning in T'Pol, albeit faint and fleeting. Mu'Pol's words were always serrated, and Trip was coming to understand it was a defense mechanism. Most shied back from the bite of steel… he was beyond caring if he was cut.
Trip canted his head slightly and stared at her questioningly. When he wanted more from her, silence was a better prod than talk.
Mu'Pol's eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "It has caused you a great deal of pain… surely this was not an unexpected result of bonding with a female outside your species."
Trip sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. "It's not as simple as that. I didn't wake up one morning and decide to bond with her. It wasn't so Vulcan and planned as that. I'm not sure I could make you understand."
Mu'Pol's expression flickered, part insulted, part curious, despite herself.
With a half-shrug, Trip continued, "If love is a four-letter word to you, I couldn't possibly make me and T'Pol make sense to you."
Mu'Pol's nose scrunched slightly at that answer and Trip laughed, abrupt and bittersweet. He could see her again, as Elizabeth as she would never be, older and forced to eat peas.
"Then explain love," Mu'Pol countered logically.
Trip smiled ruefully. Look past her intellect, Mu'Pol could be so very like a willful child. "No human in all of earth's history has been able to do that," he pointed out, "and I'm no poet. Ask Hoshi."
Mu'Pol cocked one dubious eyebrow. "She knows how to define love?"
"Every human knows what it is, but Hoshi can do a better job than me of coming even close to explaining it."
"I don't know how you expect me to help you tame emotions you cannot even describe."
Trip frowned at that and turned it over in his head. His eyes wandered from Mu'Pol until, at last, they fell to the star field outside her window. A spark of a thought leapt forth.
"Okay…" Trip moved toward the viewport, "this will be pretty stupid, but… you're a scientist, you can imagine the vastness of the universe, right?"
"Of course," Mu'Pol replied.
"Well, imagine in all the universe, in all the cold and emptiness and void, there's only one Minshara class planet. Only one. In all of existence there's only one place of warmth and life. That's her… that's T'Pol."
Mu'Pol seemed to ruminate on that a moment, wrestling with its symbolism and meaning. Trip gave her time alone with the idea and cast his eyes out to the stars beyond the ship's hull. Looking for his T'Pol in the blackness, maybe.
Mu'Pol announced her conclusions with a curt, "This will be exceedingly difficult if that is the best you can do."
Trip scowled but said nothing.
"But… I will do my best," Mu'Pol said and gestured to the uncluttered floor at their feet. "Sit and assume the Mes-tor posture." She studied him intently and Trip knew that she had chosen her words deliberately. She wanted to see if he knew what she wanted when she only gave him the Vulcan. It was hardly the first time she'd done it. Why she always felt the need to test him he couldn't fathom. He didn't particularly care. If there was a test it was hers to pass or fail; he refused to make it his.
Trip lowered himself to the floor and sat down with his legs crossed, hands folded right over left where his shins touched. He drew back his shoulders, leveled his chin, and took a relaxing breath. Then he looked up at Mu'Pol watching him. He waited for her next move.
*****
T'Pol was in her dungeon, her cell, her oubliette of sanity with madness beating at the walls pressed close around her. It was seeking rest in a war zone. She struggled to find the balance between letting herself relax and protecting herself from the storm outside her pit.
Her mind and body needed intensive treatment and she was forced to make do with battlefield triage. Again. As ever. As always. An eternity of sorrow that began when her daughter ended.
*****
Mu'Pol sat down on the floor across from Trip, mirroring his body position. For a moment, they merely stared at one another. It was almost a contest to see who would falter and give way first. Trip would not be the one; he sat patiently, with the command of his restlessness that T'Pol had taught him with such exacting care, and waited.
Mu'Pol finally frowned and brushed a strand of hair off of her cheek. "Do you know the Tal t'li?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Achieve it now."
Trip thought meditation would be rough when ordered to do it so abruptly, but he did as she asked and closed his eyes. He closed his mind to his daily concerns, his duties as chief engineer, his body's hunger or thirst, his skin's moisture at the heat of the room, and focused on the quiet rush of his breathing. Air sweeping in, through him, out and away, steady and rhythmic. He sank into the calm, his small dive boat in a glass-like sea. Time became nothing. His physical body settled, relaxed and drooped toward the grav plating by bare degrees. It was almost a waking sleep.
"Your aptitude is… impressive," Mu'Pol said, and he could hear in her voice that she was surprised.
"Thanks," Trip answered dryly, not opening his eyes. He stayed on the sea. Endless water stretching to every horizon as far as the eye could see. With trepidation, he peered over the side of his boat. A kraken lurked beneath the lapping waves, a sea monster, formless, shapeless, and dangerous. Trip drew back sharply from the edge, found a spot perfectly in the middle of his little bobbing boat, and waited.
"Why are you here?" Mu'Pol asked, an ethereal voice on the ocean.
Trip swallowed. "To control my emotions."
"Describe them."
Trip almost cracked open an eye to look at her. "You mean… describe grief?"
"Yes."
Trip pursed his lips in frustration. How could grief be explained? "It's… loss. Emptiness. Loneliness."
"Poetic… and useless."
Trip did open his eyes then. "What?"
Mu'Pol cocked an eyebrow at him. "You want to control your emotions; I'm trying to show you how to do that."
"Then just what exactly did you want from me?" Trip asked testily.
Mu'Pol considered him a second before explaining, "To tame something you must have something that can be tamed first. You cannot strike emptiness, loss, or loneliness."
"So what do I do?"
"The emotions you want to control… manifest them. In your mind, make them something tangible. Your mind must believe your agony lies within a shape that can be confronted, as one faces an enemy in battle."
"That's how Vulcans do it?" he asked, curious. For the vastly superior intellect they claimed this method to control emotions seemed rather… elementary.
Mu'Pol gave him a condescending look. "This is how we teach Vulcan children to do it; concentrate and do as I say."
Trip closed his eyes again, knowing when he'd been insulted. "Right… something real."
*****
Quiet erupted inside her thoughts like a phase canon blast.
A silence consumed abruptly, so completely, that T'Pol was driven to her metaphysical knees. The monster at the walls had paused. Like a held breath, she felt it waiting. She had lived so long with the cacophony of railing grief that the lull deafened her senses, frightened her to the edge of reason.
T'Pol braced against her cell walls, tense and wrought with anxiety.
What now? What new agony would be flung her way when the monster resumed its assault? Could she survive a different angle of attack?
She didn't know. Her mind trembled in exhaustion.
Poised on her meditation pallet in her quarters, T'Pol shivered.
*****
Trip tried to recreate the sea, the kraken in the deep beneath his tiny dive boat. He thought he could assign his emotions to the underwater monster and concentrated on picturing the beast in great detail.
It wasn't working. He didn't have a vivid enough image of the fictional creature to make it real to him. He knew and always would, intellectually, the thing he was trying to make wasn't real, at least not on his homeworld, and for that reason he could never really combat it. His mind would never honestly believe in the danger of a mythical monster.
He needed something different. Something that could really hurt him, something his human brain would register as truly dangerous.
Trip vanquished the sea inside his thoughts and imagined a clean slate, whiteness like the place he and T'Pol used to meet, and from the void he conjured an animal. It came to him piecemeal… fangs and teeth and muscle and power until it was wrapped in a hide and given projected life. In what seemed an ageless minute it was manifest and before him stood a bristling, gargantuan tiger, three times the size of an actual tiger, staring intently at him with unblinking eyes.
*****
With a start T'Pol was falling, the stone at her back suddenly vanished and she crashed downward through air… down, sailing through white nothing, her cell gone, her safety ripped away. Her sanctuary disappeared and she was in free fall.
The monster roamed unchecked here, and she felt panic seize her.
Without warning she stopped falling. She stood in the whiteness of her old retreat now turned hunting ground.
T'Pol looked around, frantic, and saw she was not alone.
The scientist in her knew the creature, panthera tigris. She knew it by the orange and black striped coat, the feline frame, the yellow eyes, and the bone-crushing jaws full of carnivore's teeth. She knew it as an observer. Tiger. Earth animal. Predator.
The core of her being locked in panic as she stared at the animal. It stared directly at her, seemingly twenty feet away and yet far too close.
What now? WHAT NOW??
*****
"All right… I have something real, now what do I do with it?"
"Put into it everything you don't want. Every emotion and feeling and desire you want to control, force it into this creature. Don't associate your grief with it, make it the creature. Make it incarnate. Until your mind believes it, my teaching will be worthless to you."
Trip scowled in consternation then concentrated on forcing his feelings into the body of the tiger. He crammed his grief for Elizabeth into the cat. His anger at having been helpless to save her. His frustration and agony and misery at losing T'Pol, being lost to her, being without her. His ache to be unbroken again, to be able to breathe without the twinge of living sharp as a barb in his side. He force-fed the cat his pain and the beast fed on it eagerly, drew power and energy and strength from it. The tiger consumed with such alacrity that, shortly, it became a thing Trip genuinely feared.
He sucked in a breath.
*****
T'Pol took a faltering step back. The immobile tiger that had stood so looming before her exploded into a vicious beast. In the span of seconds, it seemed to double in size. Madness clouded its eyes and it drew back its lips to spit and hiss. Fangs bared and gleamed dangerously. Muscles tensed and locked, ready for the killing charge.
It thrashed and screamed and raged… and it saw her.
It wanted her.
T'Pol turned and fled.
She didn't look back, but she didn't need to to know it was close on her heels.
*****
"What do I do?!" Trip asked frantically, his eyes still clenched shut in a grit of terror.
"Take control of it," Mu'Pol answered simply.
Trip's eyes flew open and he gaped at her, his heart racing and lungs burning. The tiger was on the hunt and out of control, rampaging through his mind with a taste for destruction on its tongue.
Mu'Pol just looked at him placidly.
What had she done? What evil had she set loose in him?
"What?! Control that!"
Mu'Pol began to look genuinely uncertain as she studied him.
Trip was on the razor edge of all-out panic. This wasn't better, now his grief had claws, it could cut in two and rip apart, and…
He knew it was after T'Pol. It meant to tear one of them to pieces before the night was done.
"Gentle the creature as you would a 'puppy'," Mu'Pol suggested, using a word clearly awkward to her but one she knew a human would grasp readily.
Trip's body shook and he tried to reach out to the beast that had been unleashed, he tried, but it was savage and rabid and tried to rip him apart for trying.
It was close to T'Pol, gaining on her, thirsty for green blood.
Trip was going to hear his mate destroyed inside his mind and he knew it would strip him of all sanity.
He barely heard Mu'Pol's irritated sigh before her fingers were on his face, anchored on cheek and temple, giving her the means to force her way in… whether he liked it or not.
*****
T'Pol was seconds from feeling the tiger's teeth in her throat when suddenly a shattering yowl let loose behind her and the tiger was down.
T'Pol collapsed and for a moment could only lie there, fighting for control. When she had mastered her instinctive fight-or-flight response, she pushed herself up and looked back, afraid to look but determined to see.
The tiger was pinned to the ground while a Vulcan woman clasped the base of its neck in her expert fingers while standing imperiously over the cat's sprawled form.
It was her… the alternate universe T'Pol. She regarded the tiger with the cold eyes of a hunter regarding prey. She had the tiger in a paralyzing grip, holding it, crippling it, hurting it.
T'Pol fought through the confusion.
The other T'Pol was in the white space, in the consciousness she shared with Trip. She was not there by T'Pol's doing… that meant she was in a mind-meld with Trip. She had entered through him as a portal.
The other T'Pol was touching Trip's mind. Her mate's mind.
T'Pol rose shakily to her feet and stared, dumbfounded. The tiger was helpless. Fear bled from its presence in her mind. Trapped as it was, it didn't seem as big as it had before.
Then T'Pol understood the truth. The tiger was Trip. It was parts of him.
And the other T'Pol was hurting him.
Before she could think, T'Pol was racing forward. She roughly grabbed the other T'Pol's hand and pried it fiercely from the tiger.
The two T'Pols locked eyes.
*****
Trip collapsed in a heap on the deck of Mu'Pol's quarters with a shudder and heaved for air with great gasps.
Mu'Pol looked down at his huddled form, puzzled. "That should not have happened," she said at length, uncertainty taking the edge from her voice. "I do not understand…"
"Which part?" Trip snapped venomously, still buckled by the experience, quaking from the onslaught of his own mind.
Mu'Pol regarded him as a scientist studied an unanticipated finding. "Never in my use of the mind-meld have I touched a human mind that reacted like yours did." Mu'Pol looked almost perturbed. "I have entered Commander Tucker's mind on many occasions, and it was not like yours. Your psychoexperience should not have been that intense or vivid."
Trip clenched his hands into fists, fighting down his residual panic, as he continued to lie on his side. He looked up at her from his balled position. "What went wrong? Damn, I felt like I was going bat-shit insane. I was going to lose my mind, I felt it."
Mu'Pol faintly shook her head. "You turned ephemeral to concrete more wholly and quickly than any human I have ever encountered. It should not have happened. Humans don't have the mental capacity or faculty to master their subconscious thoughts so absolutely…"
"That wasn't mastery!" Trip yelped. "It was a god damn nightmare. My skin's still burning! It's like every nerve is scorched."
"You made a danger out of thoughts and were truly prey to it," Mu'Pol argued over his complaints. "You created from your mind a threat as true as flesh and blood. Your mind transcended the limitations of your body. It accepted the danger of the mind as equal to any danger of the body. That is inhuman." Mu'Pol paused and frowned slightly when the answer clearly came to her… and it didn't please her. "There is something Vulcan about you."
Trip pushed himself up shakily on his elbows. "Vulcan?" he parroted, confused.
Mu'Pol looked long and searchingly at him, now with her curiosity piqued. "The resonance in your mind is similar to the sense I would expect to find in a Vulcan mind… never a human's." She frowned thoughtfully. "I may be able to ascertain the source of the… Vulcanness," Mu'Pol commented and she leaned toward him, hand rising toward his face.
Trip flinched back out of reach. "T'Pol," he blurted, speaking purely by instinct. For a moment, Mu'Pol returned him a blank look, clearly thinking he had addressed her.
Before either he or Mu'Pol could speak further, the door to her quarters opened with a quiet swish. Security override… whoever meant to interrupt them cared nothing for courtesy.
Trip knew, before he looked, who stood at the door.
Mu'Pol did not seem surprised to see who her new guest was.
T'Pol announced herself with a steely command for Mu'Pol. "Do not touch him."
Trip gazed up at T'Pol, his pointy-eared knight to the rescue, and couldn't decide if he was relieved to see her or not. He was too overwhelmed to think. So he watched and listened.
Mu'Pol blinked calmly. "I did not damage him."
T'Pol's eyes blazed for a fraction of a second as she looked down at Mu'Pol. "What were you doing to him?"
Mu'Pol glared at T'Pol then rose in resolute disgust. "I will not be the middle of your quarrel. If you want answers, get them from him," she gestured toward Trip who was still sitting on her floor.
The certainty and fire in T'Pol ebbed as she let her eyes finally move to her bondmate. The hesitancy and fear returned full-force.
Mu'Pol headed for the doorway. T'Pol reflexively stepped aside to let her pass, but before leaving, Mu'Pol stopped and sized up her double critically. Mu'Pol looked back at Trip, her expression almost… caring.
Returning her eyes to T'Pol, Mu'Pol asked acidly, "Why protect his mind now only to destroy it later?"
T'Pol looked debased by that.
Mu'Pol lifted her chin fractionally. "Prolonging such torture is illogical. If you mean to end him, do it sooner rather than later. If I were you…" she glanced again, for longer, at Trip, "I would afford him that much kindness."
T'Pol could only stand there, speechless, as Mu'Pol left her assigned quarters. The door hissed shut behind her and then it was just Trip and T'Pol, stuck alone in a room together.
Trip wasn't sure what to do or say, and as T'Pol stood awkwardly rooted in her spot it seemed she was in the same quandary.
Trip was finally feeling like he was in control of himself again enough to address the situation. "Are you okay?"
T'Pol practically shied from him.
Trip rubbed his temple where Mu'Pol had touched him for the meld. "I had no idea that would happen. If I had…"
"Why were you mind-melding with her?"
The question was posed so quietly Trip almost missed it. He looked up at her, hunting her face for clues. Her expression was too well guarded, but her vocal inflections… she was bothered by Trip having Mu'Pol meld with him. He wasn't sure what to make of that, but lately there was so much about which he wasn't sure, it seemed pointless to split hairs over every new mystery in his life.
"I didn't exactly let her, she just did it."
T'Pol bristled, despite herself. "She forced you."
Trip nodded, paused in thought, then grimaced. "Well, she didn't ask… considering, though, I'm not sure I wouldn't have let her if she had asked first. I didn't have control of the situation and was at the point of resorting to anything. I felt you nearly… you were almost…" Trip's chest tightened to think about the tiger.
T'Pol looked away.
Trip dropped his gaze to the floor. He felt the blackness of their twisted matebond seeping over him again and it left a heartsick, bitter churning in his stomach. "I'm sorry… believe it or not, I was only trying to make things easier for you."
A silence stretched for so long Trip thought T'Pol was ignoring him, then she asked, "How so?"
"I asked her to show me how to control my emotions. I thought if I could learn to keep them in check, you'd be better off… at least until we can have the bond severed." Trip gave a sardonic smirk. "Guess that blew up in my face and yours."
T'Pol deliberately moved around where he sat and stopped directly in front of him. He didn't look at her face until she'd knelt slowly and cautiously across from him. She watched him warily and he found himself, like always, becoming lost in her. He took in her beauty with his eyes, cherished her smell with his nose, coveted her company… and grieved when his mind was turned away from hers when it reached out to her.
"She said that shouldn't have happened," Trip mumbled apologetically. "Said what happened shouldn't have been possible for a human."
T'Pol dropped her eyes. "It would not be possible for any other human. Your bond to me has… changed you."
"I figured." He wasn't even angry or indignant; Trip could only feel resignation.
"I am sorry," T'Pol said softly.
Not so long ago, Trip would have argued the change was not necessarily bad. Before Elizabeth, he might have been excited and even, in time, glad for it.
"Not your fault," Trip assured her gently. He eyed T'Pol closely while she made a concerted effort not to meet his eyes. "You stopped her."
T'Pol looked up at him.
"She was… suffocating me, or, part of me, in my head… you stopped her."
If she'd been human, T'Pol may have chewed nervously on her lip. "Your mind is my mind, your pain was mine. The matebond was intruded upon; my reaction was… instinctive."
So another female, or perhaps that female in particular, wasn't allowed in his head. As if matters weren't complicated enough already. Trip sighed, frustrated. "So where does that leave me, T'Pol? I have to learn to control this. Even when you're gone, I'll still have to deal with my feelings. I need her to teach me."
T'Pol was silent for quite some time, either lost for an answer or lost for words. "There are masters on Vulcan who could… instruct you."
"Vulcan? How long until then? You might have your safe little retreat behind that brick wall of yours, but I don't have the luxury of a buffer between me and the tiger, T'Pol. I'm running from it all. the. Time. I'm tired." Trip clenched his jaw shut after his tirade when he saw T'Pol blanch, though she did not let herself flinch or move overtly.
Trip raked a hand wearily through his hair. "Sorry… I didn't mean to yell at you. I'm just… I'm trying to figure out how to live without you."
T'Pol did not betray her emotions outwardly, but Trip sensed a slight twinge of pain and thought it may have come from her.
"It's not easy," Trip added lowly.
"No, it's not," T'Pol concurred in a voice barely above a whisper.
T'Pol rose to her feet. "If you believe you need… her… then continue with the tutorials."
"I need you," Trip blurted, and when T'Pol froze and looked at him he added, "to be okay with this. I don't… I can't hurt you."
T'Pol's expression closed and Trip was helpless to read anything in her features. "It is necessary… you must learn to," she hesitated a bare fraction of a second, "live without me."
Trip watched mutely as T'Pol left Hoshi's former quarters. He sat alone on the floor and wondered if he would have the chance to learn what living without T'Pol was like. He wondered if the severing would set the tiger upon him one last time, with no one to pull it away.
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