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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 5
An unnatural silence permeated sickbay as everyone present stood and stared speechlessly at the woman lying unconscious on the biobed. Phlox alone was animated as he went about his work assessing his patient's condition. So singular was his task as a doctor that he could, for the time being, dismiss the strangeness of just who his patient was… or at least who she appeared to be. He was the only one who could ignore the strangeness of their guest's seeming identity.
Archer was still speechless; he'd been stricken thus when Trip hauled the woman's limp body from the slag metal in the launch bay and Archer first saw her face. The surprise was still holding his tongue, so he was left to watching wordlessly.
While watching Phlox study his medical readings on the Vulcan woman, Archer glanced discreetly to his left and tried to gauge how his senior officers were reacting.
Trip and T'Pol were standing very nearly shoulder to shoulder about two feet away from Captain Archer. T'Pol was closer to Archer of the two, standing between the captain and chief engineer, and Archer naturally scrutinized her first. She was expressionless to a fault, even for a Vulcan. Her eyes never left the wounded woman, but in the time Archer studied her closely, there was not the slightest flicker of emotion on her face. It was so blank it was almost painful to observe. She didn't even register the feelings Archer had rightly expected to see, if only in muted form owing to T'Pol's Vulcan control; confusion, shock, curiosity, trepidation. There was no wisp or hint of anything. His first officer stood stolidly, hands clasped behind her back, face fixed as though chiseled from stone.
Archer looked past T'Pol to Trip. Trip presented a very different picture than his Vulcan companion did. Trip stood with his arms crossed in front of his chest, tenseness in the lines of his shoulders and neck betraying how troubled he was. Like T'Pol, Trip could not seem to tear his gaze away from the injured woman under Phlox's care, but unlike T'Pol, Trip's face was a clear betrayal of his feelings. Trip was pale, his jaw clamped tightly shut, a half-furrow on his brow threatening at any moment to erupt into an all-out frown. The skin around his eyes was tight… for a second, Archer thought Trip might be physically ill. When that didn't happen, Archer settled on concluding that Trip looked torn more than anything. The taut sense of restrained energy in his body suggested that Trip wanted to do something, but for the life of him he couldn't decide what.
Archer knew the feeling; he felt much the same way as he let his eyes return to the unexpected visitor aboard Enterprise.
The Vulcan woman bore more than a striking resemblance to Commander T'Pol; the two were eerily identical to such an extent that Archer had a disorienting feeling that he was staring at his own Vulcan science officer in some warped mirror. There was no mistaking the facial features as those of T'Pol of Vulcan. Despite the fact that Archer's mind kept telling him it couldn't be, his senses told him that it was. It was hard to ignore what he saw.
This woman who very much appeared to be a carbon copy of Commander T'Pol standing a few feet to Archer's left would have been absolutely indistinguishable from his first officer were it not for the longer hair the injured woman possessed.
She was still clad in the environmental suit, minus the hardware and helmet, that she was found wearing, though the material was torn… as was the woman's flesh underneath the copper-colored layers of EV protection. Archer didn't get a good look at just how bad her injuries were, but he knew there was an uncomfortable amount of green blood on the floor and biobed, as well as his arms and the front of Trip's uniform from where they had carried their 'guest' down from the launch bay. Archer might not know who she was or what she was doing floating in space in a chunk of debris, but it didn't prevent him from being concerned about her. She had not regained consciousness since Trip pulled her from the wreckage; instead she lay so motionlessly that at times Archer couldn't be certain she was even breathing. Her pallid skin was mottled with hunter green bruises that discolored her face.
Archer's compassion flared at the sight of her, whoever she was. However she might have come to them, she was now someone in trouble… someone who needed help.
"How is... she?" Archer asked softly, finally breaking the tension that had settled over sickbay.
Phlox spared the captain a glance, conferred with the overhead display recording the woman's vital signs, and once satisfied with what he saw he answered, "She's stable for the time being. She's suffered some severe injuries, if she were a human they might prove fatal, but Vulcan physiology is considerably hardier than human. I see no reason why she shouldn't make a full recovery once I've been able to properly treat her."
Archer looked down warily at the woman and asked the question on everyone's mind. "Who is she?"
Phlox turned back to the patient and considered her face, quite possibly for the first time in any detail outside of assessing the extent of injury. The honey-brown hair falling past her shoulders and hanging on her elfin ears and the dark brown/green bruises on her skin were all the differences to be found between the unconscious patient and the woman standing not far away. The same defined cheekbones, the same full mouth, the same angular eyebrows. The resemblance was beyond 'uncanny'.
"According to all my preliminary DNA scans, this is Commander T'Pol."
All eyes turned toward T'Pol standing at Trip's side, and she looked back at each of them in turn. "Obviously that is impossible."
"Maybe not," Archer mused, "we've met another you once before." Archer would never forget the disorienting experience of meeting T'Pol when she was well over one hundred years old.
At the reminder of the alternate Enterprise that her and Trip's son had captained, T'Pol looked down in subtle but (from the Vulcan) noticeable discomfort. Perhaps unknowingly, she turned her head toward Trip slightly. For his part, Trip looked only more troubled by Enterprise's newest guest.
"That T'Pol was really old," Trip pointed out lowly. T'Pol upturned her eyes to regard him quietly at his words, though Trip did not return her glance. Trip's attention was focused on the unconscious woman. He frowned and looked up at Archer and Phlox in befuddlement. "You think this T'Pol could be from another time?"
Even as Trip asked, Archer had his misgivings about the likelihood of that being the case this time. He only had to look at the patient to think this was something different than a future version of their own Commander T'Pol. She just didn't look old enough.
Phlox thought aloud, "I doubt it, or if so from a time-line very nearly our own. This... um... well, this 'T'Pol' is, from all of my examinations so far, physically the same age as you, Commander."
T'Pol straightened infinitesimally and uncomfortably at the public discussion of such private information, even if the doctor did not divulge what age it was that these two women shared. Trip shifted his weight to unknowingly stand an inch closer to her. Archer could almost swear that Trip knew T'Pol was uncomfortable with Phlox's brush with revealing personal information about her and he was stirred to object to it going any farther. It may have been subtle, but the body language of 'back off' was there.
"Then where did she come from?" Archer asked, turning his attention back to the doctor.
"I haven't the first clue, Captain, not at the moment. However, I would like to run a more complete exam if I could be afforded some privacy."
Archer gave a fleeting smirk at the doctor's none-too-veiled dismissal of those gathered in sickbay. "All right, Doctor, we'll leave you to your work. Trip, T'Pol."
After an uncertain moment regarding her double, T'Pol turned to leave the room. Trip was stalled another second beyond that as his eyes locked on the prone figure on the biobed. His expression spoke volumes. Archer did not have to ask the chief engineer to know that the sight of T'Pol, any T'Pol, bleeding and unconscious, sat ill with him.
'This is the last thing Trip needs right now,' Archer thought morosely as he studied the discomfited expression on his friend's face. It probably wasn't the best for T'Pol, either, but Trip looked really debased by the mysterious T'Pol's arrival. This curve-ball heaped on top of the loss of baby Elizabeth. The old saying 'the straw the broke the camel's back' popped into Archer's mind at the thought, and it made his stomach clench.
T'Pol paused fractionally in her journey toward the doors and Trip wordlessly, without looking, took the cue. He turned and in three strides caught up with her. T'Pol picked up her pace again and the two left sickbay together, Trip barely behind T'Pol's right shoulder.
Archer lingered behind his two officers, watching the door through which they had just disappeared with a worried frown. He decided then and there that he would make it a point to talk to them, or at least to Trip, soon. There wasn't anything he could do at the moment about their strange visitor, not until Phlox gave him something more to go on or the patient regained consciousness, but Archer had to believe there might be something he could do for his two friends. He'd given them space, and time, but Archer was beginning to feel like instead of respecting their privacy he was watching them slip away.
'One thing at a time,' he thought and turned to Phlox. "Let me know as soon as you've found out anything about our new guest."
"Yes, Captain."
Archer looked one last time at the motionless Vulcan then left the doctor to tend his patient.
Rather than return directly to the bridge, he followed the path he knew Trip had followed moments before that would lead toward engineering. Archer had an invitation to extend to his old friend and third in command.
T'Pol would be a tougher nut to crack, but Archer was sure he could get through to Trip, at the very least reach out to him, and dinner in the captain's mess seemed like a perfect place to do it.
*****
Dinner wasn't going well.
It had begun to sour before the meal had even been served; Archer had almost had to order Trip to attend. When he caught up to his friend in engineering after leaving sickbay, Trip had been less than enthusiastic about the idea of sharing dinner in the captain's mess. When he cottoned to the fact that Archer wasn't keen on taking no for an answer, it was with such reluctance that Archer had trouble looking forward to the meal.
Then Trip showed up late, having conveniently been 'in the middle' of something that let him lose track of the time. Archer suspected that if there had been any way to believably stretch that project that had delayed him through dinner entirely Trip would have.
Now Trip was sitting across from him, picking silently at his food. Archer had requested chef prepare catfish, hoping he could ply Trip with his favorite dish, but so far the effort seemed to have been wasted as he watched Trip eat mechanically. 'Probably could have served him cardboard and he'd be just as interested,' Archer thought glumly as he ate his own steak and potato.
The silence was next to deafening. Archer thought he should let Trip speak first, give him time to come at it from the angle he preferred. Instead, Trip let the quiet consume their table save for the clink of silverware against plates. Mute at mealtime was not Trip Tucker, the man was usually a joyful conversationalist, and his incommunicativeness worried Archer. Could things have been even worse than he'd suspected?
Archer glanced to the corner of the room where Porthos was lying meekly, watching the two diners with sad, brown eyes. Even the dog could tell there was something morose and glum about the humans in his company, and he fed off their negative energy. Porthos looked positively down in the dumps. He didn't even risk entering the zone of discomfort in order to beg for food.
Finally, Archer couldn't stand the silence anymore. "So…"
Trip looked up absently at him when he broke their interminable silence.
Archer wasn't sure what to say.
Instead, Trip beat him to it. "Hear anything from Phlox about…" Trip stumbled over how exactly to describe the 'T'Pol' in sickbay.
Archer, however, knew whom Trip meant… and was just glad to have a conversation going. "Not yet. If I haven't heard from him by 2200 hours I'll stop by sickbay tomorrow morning and see how she's doing. At this point, no news is probably good news; Phlox would have commed me if she'd taken a turn for the worse."
Trip nodded, though a deeply troubled scowl had settled on his face. "She looks just like her, doesn't she?"
"Yes, she does." Archer studied Trip, who had stopped eating altogether. It was the sudden, rigid stillness to his frame that told Archer how truly unsettled Trip was, however, rather than his loss of appetite. Trip had an overt body language… absolute stillness was a warning sign. He'd displayed the same immobility when he attended Sim's funeral, when he requested a transfer to Columbia, most recently in the delegation room just after Elizabeth's death.
Lately, Trip had been far too still far too often. Just like he was right now.
"Trip… you okay?"
"Yeah… just… hard seeing her like that. I know she's not my- she's not our T'Pol, but still, she looks just like her. She almost could be; it's hard seeing her hurt."
Archer smiled tightly. "I was actually talking about how you were doing overall."
Trip looked up at Archer, his expression momentarily confused.
Archer leaned forward carefully. "I haven't really seen much of you since you returned from Vulcan."
Archer could almost watch Trip shut down like a powering-down warp reactor. A guarded distance clouded his eyes, his expression became an unreadable mask, and he physically sat back in his chair, utterly abandoning his meal and all pretenses that he might finish it. Archer's alarms were blaring loud and clear. He suspected that Trip wasn't taking the death of his daughter well, but had he misjudged the situation this badly?
"Have you been talking to Phlox?" Trip asked in an even voice.
"Phlox?"
Trip looked up from his plate to pin Archer with a penetrating, almost betrayed look.
Archer suddenly understood. "No, I haven't. I just wanted to see how you were doing; if you've been to see Phlox lately he hasn't said a word to me about it."
Trip seemed to gauge Archer's sincerity a long moment, and when he decided his captain was telling the truth he sighed and sagged wearily. "Sorry, Captain, I just thought- nevermind… I'm fine."
Far from it. "If you don't mind my saying so, you don't look 'fine'."
Trip looked out the window to avoid looking at Archer. Archer tried to find a way to get the conversation moving again. The Enterprise had limped along on auxiliary power in enemy territory more smoothly than dinner was progressing.
"You went to see Phlox?"
Trip shot a testy look at Archer then quickly thereafter locked his eyes on his plate and the remains of his meal.
Archer felt the situation spiraling out of control fast. "Trip, it's all right, I just want to talk."
"About what?"
"You. How you're feeling. I know losing Elizabeth was hard-"
"You don't know a damn thing about what it was like losing her," Trip snapped, and Archer blinked in surprise. He sat gaping at his friend, wondering when he'd lost sight of him so profoundly. Trip had been going through the motions, doing his duty, and Archer had not looked beyond the façade of functional… a front that he now understood was clearly an act. The anger with which Trip glared at him was like that of a wounded animal, hurt and scared and falling back on lashing out when backed into a corner.
"Trip…"
Trip stared at Archer stonily for a minute. For his part, Archer tried to implore his friend with his most compassionate, understanding and conciliatory look he could affect.
At long delay, Trip crumbled. His angry expression fled and his shoulders sagged in fatigued resignation. He let out a breath and looked away. His voice, when he spoke, was much gentler. "I'm sorry… I know you're just trying to help. Guess I'm just tired; I didn't mean to snap at you."
"Don't worry about it." Archer paused. "How are you doing?"
Trip sighed. "A little better every day, I guess. Some days are harder than others. It's going to take time to get past it, that's all. Just… it'll take time."
"How's T'Pol doing?"
Trip's expression closed again. He gave a weak shrug and answered, "You'd have to ask her."
"You two aren't…"
Trip looked broken for a second before he replied thickly, "She and I aren't really talking."
It was as Archer had feared, what he had hoped beyond hope was not the case. If Trip hadn't been with T'Pol this whole time that Trip was avoiding the rest of the crew, then it meant he was alone.
"I'm sorry, Trip," Archer said softly before he could stop himself. He was the captain and officially shouldn't condone any romance among his crewmembers, but he couldn't stop himself from feeling for Trip as he sat across from him with such anguish and unhappiness etched in the features of his face.
Trip nodded sullenly.
Archer pushed a blob of potatoes around his plate absently. "You know, if you wanted to take some more time…"
"No… if it's just the same to you, Captain, I need to work."
"You sure?"
Trip met Archer's eyes and said nothing, but the look on his face said that it was all Trip had left. Archer couldn't be the one to take it from him. He still knew the Chief Engineer Charles Tucker, and he knew how important his job was to him.
"All right, if that's what you want."
"It is."
Archer gave a relenting nod. If the only thing he could do for Trip was let him remain the ship's chief engineer (as long as his performance didn't demand interference), then that's what he'd give him. "In that case, how are your people coming with that piece of junk we found, uh, our guest, in?"
Trip looked relieved to have something work-related to discuss. "It's a tough job; that thing was twisted and bent into such a damn mess I'm surprised as hell anyone managed to survive in space inside it. I have teams pulling it apart and studying every nut and bolt; I should have something for you within the next two days, maybe three. At this point, all we'd really have for you is a scrap inventory."
"Sounds good. So far, there's no sign of anyone coming after that thing, so for the time being I don't see any rush. Let me know when you're ready to go over the reports and we'll have a sit down meeting."
Trip nodded, frowned, then he brought up a hand and rubbed his forehead with his first three fingers.
"Trip?"
Trip gave a dismissive grunt. "Headache. You mind if I call it a night, Captain? I woke up early this morning and could really use some shut-eye."
He looked like he could do with a good night's sleep. "Not at all."
Trip offered a wan smile that almost made Archer's brain hurt and got up from the table. Porthos gave a piteous half-bark for a pat on the head in parting from his master's old friend, but Trip was out the door before the beagle got it. The animal rose from his resting spot a safe distance from the table and approached Archer's chair.
Archer looked across the table at the remnants of Trip's dinner and frowned. Trip looked skinner than he had since the captain first met the engineer as a lanky young lieutenant, but his face looked ten years older than his true age. Was there any part of Trip that fit anymore?
Porthos jumped up to rest his front paws against Archer's thigh and whined.
"I'm worried about him, too, Porthos," Archer said while scratching the dog behind the ear. He was worried, but what could he do? He'd offered Trip every helping hand he could imagine, but every time Trip just stepped back out of reach.
Archer had let it go when he thought it might be possible that while Trip was backing away from him Trip was moving toward T'Pol. But he wasn't, he was just pulling back alone.
Was T'Pol just as miserable? He wouldn't put it past her; she looked much better than Trip did, but T'Pol was much better at hiding what she was feeling. Could she be hiding as much pain as Trip's eyes reflected?
Porthos whimpered and rested his head atop his paws on Archer's leg.
"We're going to have to talk to Phlox, boy," Archer said wearily. "Trip won't like that, but…" Archer sagged at the mere thought. Phlox may not even tell him anything; he could invoke the right of doctor/patient confidentiality, though on a starship that was a much finer line than elsewhere. A crewmember's mental and physical state could very easily affect his or her performance, at which point it very much became a concern for the ship's captain.
"I suppose whether or not the doctor tells me anything will really say a lot about how bad off he is," Archer commented absently to his dog. Archer wasn't sure if he hoped Phlox clammed up on him or not.
"Come on," Archer said and moved to stand. Porthos jumped down and stepped back to wait for his master. "It can wait for tomorrow. Bed sounds like a really good idea."
Porthos wagged his tail half-heartedly and trotted along at Archer's heels as the captain left the mess.
Back to Chapter 4
Continue to Chapter 6
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