"Singularity" By Alelou Rating: PG Disclaimer: All things Star Trek belongs to CBS/Paramount. Genre: Adventure, Missing Scenes, Angst, Trip/T'Pol Description: Missing scenes from Season Two. Author's Note: Thanks to jT for beta and to my reviewers for making me happy. Trip wondered what the hell he was doing lying on the deck.  He groggily raised himself up.  "Did we get some nice pictures of the black hole?" he asked.  That had been what they were doing, right? Archer stared back at him from the helm.  The helm?  What was he doing at the helm? Not to mention, the man looked awful.  "Cap'n?" Trip said uncertainly, not so much because he hadn't gotten an answer as because it was clear he was badly out of the loop on something.  "I wouldn't know," Archer said, and turned to the science station.  "T'Pol?" "We collected quite a bit of data including a number of images," she said.  "Are you all right, Commander?" "Uh huh," he said, and sat down rather heavily in his chair. He felt utterly discombobulated.  What the hell was he doing here?  Where was the rest of the crew?  But then he heard another groan, and Malcolm beginning to fumble to sit up at his station.  Another crewman back in the situation room slowly got to her knees. Wait a minute.  He squinted at the empty place where the captain's chair should be. The chair... Oh, damn.  The chair. "I get it.  You're sitting there because I haven't fixed your chair," he said heavily.  He'd failed -- that much was clear.  This felt a little bit like one of those nightmares in which he'd discover that he'd royally screwed up something extremely basic like, say, anti-matter containment. "Actually I'm sitting here because we had to get the hell away from that black hole before everybody died.  It was doing something bad to our brains.  Except T'Pol's.  Apparently her brain is immune to whatever weird OCD radiation that black hole was spewing." "OCD radiation?"  "The captain is referring to the way everyone on board began to exhibit obsessive-compulsive behavior," T'Pol said.  "The captain became obsessed with his preface.  Lt. Reed became obsessed with security protocols.  You became obsessed with fixing the captain's chair." "If I was so obsessed, why the hell didn't I get the damned thing done?" Trip said, confusedly checking the chronometer.  He had no memory of that much time passing.  "It's a chair." "I believe you were attempting to create the most fully-functional captain's chair in the history of the universe," she replied. The hyperbole made Trip stare at her.  Archer had turned in surprise as well. She looked blandly back at them.  "Captain, I believe it would make sense to request damage and casualty reports from every department." "Agreed," Archer said, and sighed heavily. "But something tells me it may take us awhile to get them." "Indeed," she said, and set to work at her console. Still feeling profoundly out of sorts, Trip did as much as he could to assess status from his.  Thankfully there didn't seem to be any crisis brewing in the ship's systems, although it did appear that someone had industriously dismantled every radiation detector in one section of C deck.  If his team was feeling the way he was, they were probably in need of some reassurance about now.  "I'm gonna head down to engineering, Cap'n," he said. "Okay," Archer said, busy at the helm. "Why are all our weapons online?" Malcolm muttered, staring down at his station. Trip patted him on the shoulder as he passed, heading for the lift, but paused a moment before he hit the button.  T'Pol hadn't looked up when he walked past, which was not unusual -- not lately, anyway -- but he had a niggling feeling he'd said or done something he probably shouldn't have.  "Sub-Commander," he said.  "Did I ...?"  He had a vague memory of raising his voice, maybe even ... had he chewed her out for something?   "Did I say something inappropriate while I was ...?"  He hoped he hadn't said anything about that mission she'd gone off on with Jon and Travis.  He wouldn't want her to know how much that still infuriated him. She looked up then, and the bleakness of her expression struck him.  "You were not yourself, Commander.  I know that you would never intentionally behave anything other than professionally with me." "That's right," he said.  "But I still feel like I should apologize if I said anything out of turn." "There's no need," she said, and turned back to her console.  In the lift, just before the door closed, he saw her glance at him once again.  If anything, she looked even more depressed. Damn it, what had he said?  But it didn't matter, he told himself.  She'd said it herself.  Professionalism was his mantra now.  Professionalism was the only way to go.  Professionalism would keep him from taking anything the captain or first officer said or did too much to heart. And professionalism would also get that damned chair fixed and back in place this afternoon if it killed him. Next installment: Vanishing Point.

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