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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)
Author's Note: Just to let everyone know, I am a die-hard Trip/T'Pol fan, but as they say the course of true love never did run smooth. Have faith.
Chapter 10
"An alternate universe? Seriously?" Travis sounded equal parts excited and floored by the idea as he sat in the mess hall late that night with Hoshi. They were two of only a handful of crewmen still lingering over dinner in the mess, everyone else on the alpha shift having retired to their quarters or their personal recreational pursuits, but half of Travis and Hoshi's dinner had been conversation and it had slowed the actual process of eating. The topic had been quite distracting, after all.
Hoshi nodded while chewing a bite of chicken. She brought up her hand to touch her fingers to her lips, swallowed her food, and said, "Apparently one that mirrors our universe closely enough for the crew to have counterparts where this other T'Pol comes from."
Travis's eyes widened.
"Uh oh," Hoshi teased.
"Uh oh what?"
"I know that look… you're already concocting tall tales for the next time we're crammed in the nacel housing, aren't you?" Hoshi did her best to hide an affectionate upward tick of her lips that would give away her game.
Travis reached over and stole a potato wedge from her tray. Hoshi slapped at his hand, but only playfully. "Hey," Travis protested, popping the morsel into his mouth then wagging his finger at Hoshi, "you like my stories as much as anyone."
"Who said anyone likes them? Because if no one does, I can still like them as much as anyone and it wouldn't be a compliment."
Travis frowned. "Linguist sharp-shooting. I'm hurt."
Hoshi dropped her voice and leaned closer. "Remind me to kiss it better later."
Travis winked. "I should tell you, that remark hurt everywhere." Travis sat back then and his expression turned serious. "Do you think we exist in this universe where T'Pol, I mean Mirror Universe T'Pol… uh, where Mu'Pol comes from?"
Hoshi coughed on a sip of water. "Mu'Pol?"
Travis shrugged.
Hoshi mulled the thought over. "I don't know, Captain Archer didn't get very specific, he just said the counterparts were very different from Mu'Pol's description. I suppose we could." Hoshi let her fork dangle from her fingers rock to and fro like the pendulum on a grandfather clock. "I wonder what we're like over there, if we do exist in Mu'Pol's universe."
"I'm sure I'm a captain. A brave, commanding force to be reckoned with," Travis puffed up proudly.
Hoshi giggled. "Oh, I'm sure. With which to be reckoned."
Travis cast her look that said 'smart ass', then straightened in his chair. "What about you? Probably some humanitarian working in an orphanage on some back-water planet I'll bet."
"I don't know. Anything's possible, I guess, though it's more likely I'm on Earth considering how much I initially resisted coming out on this mission in this universe."
"I can't believe I'm dating a land-lover," Travis said with a shake of his head, feigning disgust.
"Boomer arrogance," Hoshi countered in kind, then let her eyes wander over the mostly unoccupied mess hall. Because it was so sparsely populated the figure at the back table stood out. T'Pol was sitting alone, facing the view portals, her back to the world of her shipmates. The blackness of space seemed to swallow her whole, the scant lighting in the dark corner barely touching her.
Hoshi frowned at the troubling image the commander presented. If one were to look at it symbolically, it would make them weep.
"What?" Travis asked to her troubled look.
Hoshi looked back at Travis. "Just thinking… Commander Tucker seemed pretty unsettled during the briefing."
Travis looked down at his cup as he rotated it between his fingers. "I guess it's rough on him, I mean, having as tough a time as he is with our T'Pol, to have another one show up…"
Hoshi looked up at the sound of the mess hall doors opening and thought 'speak of the devil'. Trip walked in with a PADD in hand. He stopped just inside the threshold, looked up, and scanned the room. Hoshi noted how very little time it took for Trip to bring his eyes to rest on T'Pol, hidden away in her corner. He looked torn, but even Hoshi knew what he would do.
With a resigned, almost beleaguered look on his face of a soldier who had fought one too many battles, he headed directly for T'Pol.
Hoshi couldn't help but watch. Body language was linguistics in a very fundamental sense, and even if Trip and T'Pol had not been speaking lately their bodies had been screaming. Hoshi couldn't not watch, no more than she could hear an alien language and not try to decipher some meaning from the garble.
Trip sat down wordlessly across from T'Pol. T'Pol didn't give any indication that she even knew he'd joined her, but Hoshi knew better. Vulcans, who valued privacy so much, would never fail to notice someone sit at their table without asking permission first. Trip was the only one who ever took a place at T'Pol's table without asking; even Archer would ask to join T'Pol before he sat down with her. T'Pol's silent acceptance of Trip's actions was a message, one that had once been so beautifully fluent and soft but now jarred painfully and loudly.
The two proceeded to stare at their respective PADDs in complete silence, only two feet apart with light years between them all at once.
Hoshi hated to see a translation break down like theirs had. They used to speak so wondrously, Vulcan and human body language forming a dialect uniquely its own, distinctly Trip and T'Pol, and now it rattled with broken structure, stuttered with faulty conjugations… a sad deterioration from fluent Creole to stilted pidgin.
Hoshi also noticed Trip hadn't even had the presence of mind, or maybe the interest, to grab a tray on his way to his self-imposed torment.
"I think Chef made pecan pie tonight," Hoshi thought aloud.
Travis reached over and squeezed her hand. She looked at him to find him regarding her gently. "Go do your thing," he said softly.
Hoshi smiled gratefully at Travis's understanding and stood, pocketing her PADD with the linguistic research on the Tholian language. She went to the food dispensers, got an empty tray, and brashly placed three slices of pecan pie upon it. She had seen T'Pol eat pecan pie before. Rather, she'd seen T'Pol eat pecan pie for Trip, but she decided it couldn't hurt to try.
When Hoshi reached the table Trip and T'Pol shared, the silence between them was so thick it almost cowed Hoshi and sent her back the way she'd come. Her first year aboard Enterprise, it certainly would have, but she was braver and more confident than that jumpy girl she once was.
For a moment, neither Trip nor T'Pol acknowledged her (which gave Hoshi the creepy feeling she'd experienced when she'd been stuck in the transporter buffer for a fraction of a second). She was just about to clear her throat when Trip looked up at her.
"Hoshi."
Hoshi smiled, "Good evening, Commander. Um… I saved you both some pecan pie; you know how fast that goes when Chef makes it."
Trip smiled faintly. "That was nice of you."
An awkward pause followed. Trip looked from Hoshi over at T'Pol. T'Pol lifted her eyes from her work and looked at Hoshi, at no point returning Trip's gaze. "That was considerate, Ensign. You may sit." Immediately after extending the invitation, T'Pol's attention returned to her PADD.
Hoshi did just that and doled out the plates, one for her, Trip, and T'Pol.
Trip took a few bites which Hoshi mirrored. T'Pol allowed hers to sit before her untouched. Hoshi tried to think of something to say, but she'd been to more lively funerals.
The thought only reminded her that the last memorial service she'd attended had been for Trip and T'Pol's daughter.
She was spared coming up with anything tactful to say when a certain tactical officer made his presence known.
"Oh, good, I thought I'd be the only one up this hour." Malcolm stood opposite Hoshi with a full tray in one hand and a PADD in the other. "May I join you three?"
"Sure," Trip said, gesturing at the last empty seat.
Malcolm sat and quickly shoveled a forkful of potatoes and carrots into his mouth. "Mmm… waf fo 'ungry, 'a missd 'unch," he spoke around his dinner. T'Pol lifted her eyes to the tactical officer in a silently reproachful look then focused on her PADD before her.
"Done with your systems checks?" Trip asked in a carefully controlled voice.
Malcolm nodded and swallowed. "Just finished."
Trip nodded at the active PADD in Malcolm's hand. "Then what's that, if you're done?"
"Oh, this… I'm doing some extra research on the Tholians. If they have anything to do with our guest in sickbay, if they were the ones who sent here her, for instance…"
Trip's brow furrowed. "We found her barely alive in an abandoned hunk of metal… you still think she's some kind of enemy operative?"
"Well, I wouldn't be much of a tactical officer if I didn't assume it was a possibility, would I?"
Trip stabbed an unsuspecting pecan. "You don't think you might be taking it a little too far?"
Malcolm blinked. "No."
"Maybe we should talk to Mu'Pol before we start judging her," Hoshi offered.
"Mu'Pol?" Malcolm parroted, puzzled.
Hoshi smirked a little foolishly. "Travis came up with it, you know, Mirror Universe T'Pol."
"Ahh, interesting… easier than saying 'that other T'Pol', I suppose. Convenient."
T'Pol joined the conversation for the first time to say, "Convenient, but inaccurate."
"It never occurs to Vulcans to use nicknames?" Malcolm asked innocently.
T'Pol looked very briefly across the table at Trip before dropping her eyes again. "No."
Trip went perfectly still.
"I don't really know what I'm looking for," Malcolm continued, heedless of the emotional landmine that had just gone off at their table. "Commander T'Pol, do you happen to know of any history between the Vulcans and the Tholians? Have they ever worked together?"
"Give it a rest, Malcolm," Trip snapped.
Not even Malcolm could miss the tone of that. He looked over at his companion with a fretful expression, evidently lost for how to respond to such an unjustifiably vehement reaction.
Trip leveled a look at the tactical officer. "She's not here to destroy Enterprise."
"You're making baseless assumptions driven by flawed emotional reasoning."
Everyone looked up at T'Pol as she openly chastised Trip, genuinely joining the conversation at the table for the first time in doing so. It was not the best entrance, but certainly the most Vulcan one. Trip and T'Pol stared at each other across the table, neither saying a word. Hoshi felt like she'd stepped between the armies of Vulcan and Andoria. The stalemate made Hoshi want to shrink back from the crossfire.
Finally, T'Pol continued speaking. "You have defended the moral integrity of this woman predicated entirely on a human inability to distinguish her from the shipmate whom she resembles."
Trip's jaw clenched. "Just because I don't want to throw her in the brig I'm being illogical? Did you ever think it might have nothing to do with the fact she happens to look exactly like you?"
T'Pol lifted an eyebrow. "No."
Trip's eyes narrowed.
"Phlox says she is you."
"Perhaps genetically," T'Pol conceded, "but that does not mean we are the same. She does not have my past, only my features. Appearance is an insufficient determinate for how she should be treated."
Trip glowered. "Well, I'm glad I wasn't around to see how you treated Sim. He must have gotten a real warm welcome from you with that kind of attitude."
T'Pol froze. Her gaze was ice cold as she pinned Trip with a look that made Hoshi wither, and she wasn't the target of the scrutiny. The linguist wasn't sure which was more distressful, the quiet fury of the Vulcan or the sharp memory of their crewman and friend who had lived so tragically short a life.
Just when Hoshi was hoping for a tactical alert to diffuse the situation, T'Pol mutely stood and left.
Hoshi and Malcolm exchanged worried looks before they both looked at Trip.
Some would have claimed that Trip was the winner of the argument, but he looked far from victorious. The minute T'Pol left the mess hall he sagged forward, supporting his head with one hand.
Malcolm looked as though he'd swallowed a horned lizard whole.
Trip wearily looked over at Hoshi, and the regret and shame in his face was hard to bear. "I screwed up, didn't I?" he asked.
Yes, but how could he have known? They had all been evasive with Trip about his mimetic clone. It was hard for them to talk about it, it was hard for Trip to know another being had died to save him. It was so much easier to move past it, one of many things that happened in the Expanse that the crew tried not to let overrun their consciences. Trip didn't hear just how dear a friend Sim had become in the time he was with them. He couldn't know that Sim's last walk through the ship's corridors, his walk to sickbay where he'd been sacrificed, was with T'Pol at his side.
Hoshi only nodded assent.
Trip sighed. "Shit," he cursed and quickly rose and went after T'Pol.
Hoshi looked at all the unfinished pecan pie and couldn't wait to crawl under the covers with Travis, where heartache, for now, had yet to call.
*****
Trip jogged through the corridors to catch up to T'Pol, who was walking swiftly toward her quarters. A few crewmen in gym clothes coming back from a work-out slid out of the way of his hurried passage, craning their necks after him as he rushed past.
T'Pol marched on as though she was ignorant of it all.
"T'Pol," Trip called, receiving no answer.
He thought it very unVulcan-like to pretend not to hear him, especially with those Vulcan ears, but he only sped up and covered the distance between them. "T'Pol, wait." He was only a pace behind her. Still, she acted a though he were invisible, unheard, a figment of her nonexistent imagination.
"T'Pol," Trip said once more, in a lower volume since she was right in front of him, and he slowed down and reached out, grabbing her by the elbow lightly to halt her momentum and get her to turn and face him.
Instead, the moment he touched her he felt as though a shuttle pod had slammed into him. It was too cacophonous to describe, too intense to parse down, it was just a raw, massive wall of feeling. So powerful and abrupt that it registered as pain, like suffocating, like sinking in wet sand up to his neck. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't think, and he couldn't see. The corridors, T'Pol, his own hand on her arm, they all bleached to blinding, disorienting white.
An image flashed before him, superimposed itself on the whiteness with the suddenness of a gunshot. It was like a scene from a horrific nightmare. A picture from the horror movies they used to watch on movie nights before they went to war and didn't have the stomach to watch it for fun anymore. He saw T'Pol, backed against a drab stone wall, maybe the confines of a deep, dry well, braced defensively for an attack and bent in terror. She looked impossibly frail, breakable and fragile, like a nymph about to be crushed by a giant.
Trip knew he was the giant and that he was the one about to smother her into nothing.
As quickly as it had assailed him, the image and the intense experience vanished. He was in the corridors of Enterprise again, standing facing T'Pol who had stepped back and drawn her arm free of his hold. She was outwardly unmoved by the encounter, but her eyes were those of the nymph buried alive that had flooded Trip's mind.
It was more than that… Trip could sense her fear. It resonated inside his skull, tantalized like the smell of Thanksgiving dinner, tormented like all the searing memories of T'Pol's touch that had become the only tactile bit of her he had left. It was the instant that he had been a goliath about to destroy her, but to have been there, to have been with her, had been intoxicating.
It made Trip sick to remember the feeling of horror he'd experienced to be the one to cause T'Pol so much distress and at the same time like it.
T'Pol took another small step away from him.
Trip fought to recover himself before she turned and walked away again. "I… I'm sorry," he croaked.
T'Pol tensed, her voice strained with the effort to maintain control. "Apology is illogical."
Trip wanted to reach out and touch her again and yet, at the same time, it was the last thing he wanted to do. It came down to a question of how he preferred to suffer, alone or with her. He knew what he would pick, but it was not what she would choose. He fought everything inside him to respect that choice.
"Not… not just about what I said in the mess hall," he whispered. "I mean," he searched her face for anything, any sign of empathy, "I'm sorry."
T'Pol looked away uneasily. "Good night, Commander," she said in an unsteady voice, and before Trip could say anything more she turned and left him alone.
Trip reached out to catch himself on the wall. Emotional currents swept over him, icy and drenching, and left him shivering in the hallway. His mind was racing, a toddler who just noticed his mother missing and was running around frantically looking for her, crying out for her.
There was no answer, only a solid stone wall.
Trip shoved himself upright and collected himself. He decided then and there. He couldn't do this anymore. Maybe Vulcans could live like this using their impressive mental discipline, but he was human and he knew he was dancing dangerously close to the point of absolute breakdown.
Something had to give before it cracked under its own immense weight and tore him in two.
He turned and headed for sickbay.
*****
Doctor Phlox was tending to his menagerie in sickbay, covering cages and turning down the temperature in climate-controlled aquariums to simulate night. The lights were already dimmed in the primary portion of sickbay, mostly to accommodate his recovering patient, though there was very little chance the light would wake her. Phlox had convinced her to accept a sedative to help her sleep. She had not admitted as much, but Phlox surmised she was still in a considerable amount of pain. It was the only way it made sense for someone as wary and distrustful as her to consent to medicated unconsciousness in an environment she considered potentially hostile. It seemed Vulcan pride was as rigid in his patient's universe as it was in his own. He would give her another day to voluntarily admit to pain before he pressed her about it, though. She wasn't in immediate danger, only uncomfortable, so Phlox considered it more vital that she come to the conclusion it was safe to confess weakness, demonstrate an understanding that no one on Enterprise would take advantage of it and cause her further harm.
But if she didn't fess up tomorrow, he would corner her about it the next day. He would only watch someone under his care suffer so long before he would at least offer to help. Whether she accepted or not was up to her, but he couldn't ethically or morally withhold the opportunity to be treated.
Phlox heard the doors to sickbay open and turned to see who had straggled in so late at night, expecting a pulled muscle from a late-evening exercising bout in the gym.
It wasn't a gym patron, but he wasn't surprised to see Commander Tucker walk through the doors, either. He was concerned by the appearance of the young human. Trip looked like he was in the bouts of a virulent strain of the Bolian flu. He was pale and sweaty, stoop-shouldered and listless with a glassy, fevered look in his eyes.
"Commander?"
Trip came into sickbay with fatigued, dragging steps. "I gotta talk to you," he said hoarsely.
Phlox immediately escorted him to the back office area of sickbay where he kept his canisters of 'critter food' as Travis had once called it, one arm on Trip's elbow to guide him. He guided Trip right to a stool and urged the commander to sit before he fell.
Trip dropped down without protest and took a ragged breath. Phlox grabbed a medscanner and began to scan the commander.
"Your blood pressure and heart rate are extremely elevated," Phlox observed with worry. "Did you suffer some kind of attack?"
Trip gave a strangled half-laugh. "I guess you could call it that."
Phlox frowned. "Commander, I can't help you if you don't tell me what happened to cause this physiological reaction."
"Exactly how much do you know about Vulcan medicine?" Trip asked bluntly as he looked up at Phlox with pleading, desperate eyes.
"I'm afraid I don't follow."
Trip appeared to wilt before Phlox. "I… I can't take this anymore, Doc. I just… I tried, but I'm tired to death of… this."
Realization dawned. Phlox discretely laid the medscanner aside and pulled up a stool to sit facing Trip. "I presume you mean the bond you share with Commander T'Pol."
Trip gave a weak nod. "I thought… I felt… even if she was shutting me out, at least it was still there. A closed door could open again one day, that's what I told myself…" Trip closed his eyes. "But… I'm not helping myself living like this, and I'm not doing her any favors." Trip opened his eyes to level a plaintive look at the doctor. "Is there something you can do?"
Phlox eyed the commander closely. "To lessen the effects or to sever the bond completely?"
Trip shook. "Sever it."
Phlox felt truly sorry for the both of them, but this was always a possible outcome. "I don't know if there is anything I can do or not, typically those kinds of procedures have to be carried out by a highly trained Vulcan telephysician. I do know that, either way, Commander T'Pol must be a participant in this procedure if you both wish to survive it."
Trip only watched the doctor with open need for salvation in his expression. The mortal danger in severing the bond did not seem to be a factor in his decision.
Phlox sighed. "Let me dig through the Vulcan database and see what they have about severing a matebond… and I'll need to speak with T'Pol about this before proceeding any farther, as it cannot go forward if she does not consent to it."
"I'm sure she'll be all too happy to do it," Trip commented.
'I'm not so sure,' Phlox thought to himself. T'Pol had had the resources and opportunity to sever the link on Vulcan when both she and Trip were there for Elizabeth's funeral, and yet she had neglected to do so. He hardly thought it was an oversight, something she'd meant to do but just 'forgot'. Phlox rather thought that was a telling inaction on T'Pol's part. But then, sometimes Vulcan logic amazingly mimicked human emotion (though they would be scandalized to hear such an accusation).
Phlox administered another sedative to ensure Trip got a fair night's sleep and watched the human engineer drag himself laconically from sickbay. He didn't even try to sneak a look at the other T'Pol, despite his recent preoccupation with her well-being.
Phlox felt very sad about the whole affair. He'd hoped that Trip and T'Pol could salvage their relationship from the wreckage of their lost child. He had seen only a few couples as unique as the human male and Vulcan female, and the part of Phlox that longed to see the galaxy unite as one community mourned the loss of a potentially historical union.
It was only added anguish to know that the deterioration of their pairing left Trip and T'Pol both in abject misery.
Phlox dourly finished his nightly routines and returned to his computer for another long night of research on Vulcan neurophysiology in addition to the homework with which the captain had already saddled him. It was very fortunate Denobulans could go for so long without sleep.
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