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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 6
Phlox was in the middle of running an analysis on a blood sample from the Enterprise's newest occupant when he heard the main door system activate. He looked up at the sound of sickbay's door opening to see Commander Tucker enter, feet practically dragging and shoulders slumped.
"Commander."
"Hey, Doc," Trip returned in a voice devoid of its cheerful lilt that had personified Commander Tucker before the cruel meddling of Terra Prime. "You told me to come by before bed, said you'd give me a sedative?"
"Ah, yes… come in; I'll be right with you."
Phlox turned his attention back to his work. When the diagnostic cycle on the hemoglobin differentiator was complete, he put the apparatus in stand-by mode and opened his drawer of hyposprays and found the one he'd prepared earlier in the afternoon in anticipation of Commander Tucker's arrival.
"All right, Commander, if you-" Phlox turned to administer the medicine only to find the commander had vanished. Phlox looked around sickbay and quickly found him; he had a pretty good idea where to start looking, and his suspicions proved correct. Commander Tucker had found his way to the bedside of the woman, the second T'Pol, for all of the tests Phlox had run verified each previous test that that woman was T'Pol.
Phlox sighed sadly and walked quietly closer to his unconscious patient and her sleep-deprived visitor. While still unconscious, she looked much better than when she was brought into his sickbay. In the course of his examinations Phlox had cleaned her, dressed her in a sterile gray set of pajama-type clothes, and now she lay with a white sheet resting just beneath her shoulders.
If Trip noticed the doctor approaching, he gave no indication for he stood perfectly still, hands limp at his sides, as he stared down at the woman's unmoving visage.
Phlox tried to read the commander's facial expression, but beyond troubled and unsettled it was hard to pin down how Trip felt about their strange guest.
Phlox cleared his throat pointedly and Trip finally glanced up from his vigil to look at the doctor. "Commander," Phlox said simply, infusing his tone with command.
The commander obeyed wordlessly and slowly left the alternate T'Pol's bedside to join the doctor.
Phlox led them both a few paces away from the patient; she was unconscious rather than sleeping, but still he didn't want to risk disturbing her.
Phlox waved the hypospray in front of Trip to draw his attention to it. When he had the commander's eyes and ears, he said, "This should do the trick for at least seven hours. Since you've taken these sedatives for sleep before, you know that they'll only do so much. They can physiologically render you unconscious, but that is not a healthy, natural sleep cycle."
"They'll stop the dreams, though, right?"
Phlox sighed. "As long as you take them, but you can only get by without a normal REM stage so long, not matter how long you're technically not awake. Dreams are a vital part of a healthy human sleep pattern."
Trip scowled. "Since I'm not sleeping as it is, it has to be better, right?"
Phlox frowned in consternation. He wasn't sure he'd qualify either situation better than the other. What he really wanted to do was find a way to get Trip back on a neuropressure regime. But he believed humans had a saying about the chances of snowballs that would be applicable to that idea.
Phlox pressed the hypospray to Trip's Cortaid and dispensed the medication. For his efforts, Phlox received a weak smile and a mumbled, "Thanks."
Instead of leaving sickbay then to go to his quarters and collapse into bed, Trip lingered. Phlox regarded him questioningly.
Trip pursed his lips, undecided, then he nodded his head in the direction of the single occupied biobed in sickbay. "How is she?"
Phlox paused in thought, not because he couldn't answer Trip's question but because he wondered at what caused Trip to ask it. Even busy with his patient, he hadn't failed to notice Trip's pale, sickly complexion when this T'Pol was first brought into sickbay. He worried about Trip's acute though obviously discomfited interest in the condition of the ship's latest guest. Given her identity, it could well be an emotional landmine for Commander Tucker. The possibility of any added complication in Trip's life at present put a quelling uneasiness in Phlox's belly. But even if it was a landmine, Phlox couldn't think of a way to deflect Trip's concern in order to spare him.
"She should be fine. None of her injuries have developed complications, and she's already responding to treatment. At this point it's just a matter of monitoring her condition and waiting for her to regain consciousness." Though what would happen after that, Phlox couldn't even begin to guess. His tests hadn't given him any indication how this T'Pol existed or where she came from.
Trip nodded and stared toward the other T'Pol's unconscious form, expression vague and unreadable despite all of the doctor's effort to decipher his look. Trip's eyes blinked heavily and began to droop.
Phlox touched his shoulder. "Commander, I suggest you return to your quarters and lie down before that sedative lays you out on the deck."
Trip gave a sluggish nod. "Right… thanks. 'Night, Doc."
"Good night, Commander," Phlox returned and watched Trip leave sickbay. Unfortunately, Phlox's concern didn't leave with the object of it.
Phlox put away the hypospray, checked his patient one more time, then sat down in front of a computer terminal. A little more reading on the nature of human depression might be prudent. While he was conducting research, dipping into the Vulcan Medical Database might not be such a bad idea, either. This was a unique interspecies problem that dictated the two topics, human and Vulcan, be heavily cross-referenced.
*****
In hindsight, Hoshi Sato could kick herself for not thinking of it earlier. She just wished it hadn't occurred to her all of a sudden in the middle of the night. Her sudden inspiration had driven her from bed at three in the morning, and it was fast approaching time to report to the bridge for duty. Hoshi knew she had a wearisome day ahead of her, but she couldn't help it. When she had a task ahead of her, she couldn't let it rest until she'd accomplished it. Languages were that way for her; she couldn't leave them alone until she'd made sense from nonsense, extracted speech from gibberish. It didn't matter how long it took, until she did what she set out to do, it was impossible for her to think of anything else. It was a focus inborn that was honed and groomed since she was a young child. There was no other way for Hoshi Sato to be.
It meant that sleep was a waste of time that she could be using to finish what she began.
Luckily, this little project didn't take as long as it typically did to learn a language. In fact, she'd had it finished within an hour… the rest of the time she spent sitting in front of one of the standard computer terminals found in every crewman's quarters, debating on whether or not she was really doing the right thing.
It wasn't really a matter of right or wrong as it was timing… was it the right time or the wrong time? Timing could mean a world of difference, be it a pause between two clauses in a sentence spoken by an alien diplomat or the ominous pause after a Klingon casually mentioned Stovokor to an enemy. Timing was part of language just as much as nouns and verbs, and sometimes the hardest of aspects to understand, because you couldn't run timing through a translator matrix. That still had to be gauged by the listener.
Hence her dilemma in the early morning hours.
Would approaching Commander Tucker and Commander T'Pol now with her midnight creations be a blessing or just another wound added to many that were still so raw? More than anything, she didn't want to hurt her friends, not when they were already still in pain from the loss of their daughter. She'd hate herself if she made things worse for them.
Hoshi gazed down at the two items laid flat on the desk in front of her and gnawed unthinkingly on her right thumbnail. Indecision warred inside her.
"Hey, give me back my shirt."
Hoshi turned at the sleepy voice behind her and looked at Travis lying sprawled in his bed. He was watching her with warm eyes, the sheet crumpled over his hips and barely covering his privates. Everywhere else it was smooth, dark skin without a scrap of clothing. Though, apparently, he meant to rectify that.
Hoshi looked down at the over-sized shirt she was wearing and pouted. "But I don't have anything on underneath."
Travis grinned slowly. "I'm counting on it."
Hoshi rolled her eyes and tried to smile in good humor, but apparently her concern still came across in her face, because Travis stopped smiling and sat up in bed. "What are you doing up this early… is something wrong?"
Hoshi studied Travis a moment, again engaged in an internal debate, then she grabbed the two items off the desk and moved across the small quarters to sit down on the bed beside Travis. She looked a long time at his face, then handed him the items that had her so conflicted.
Travis looked down at them in curiosity. They were photographs, two identical images of Trip and T'Pol's dead daughter. They'd been inserted inside flat glass which could easily be mounted in a frame stand. Travis's quarters were littered with a few such picture displays from his family on the Horizon. Hoshi watched Travis's expression, trying to get a read on how he reacted in order to perhaps guess how the commanders would.
Travis frowned in what was a damnably hard to peg expression. "This is Commander Tucker and Commander T'Pol's baby."
Hoshi nodded.
Travis looked over at her, perplexed. "I don't understand."
Hoshi scooted closer. "It occurred to me out of nowhere last night that they don't even have a picture of their daughter. She… she died so soon after they brought her on board, they never had time to think about taking a photograph."
Travis seemed to mull that over, and when he realized she was right a very sad expression descended on his face. "That's awful."
"I know. Then I remembered that Terra Prime broadcast."
Travis caught on quickly. "You pulled this image from the broadcast footage?"
"Yes. I didn't even think about it until now because… well, if I'd had my way that stupid broadcast would have been erased from every computer in existence. I didn't want to think about ever watching it again. Then I remembered last night the segment of the broadcast that showed Elizabeth, and it just hit me and I had to do that." She gestured to the pictures in Travis's hands. "It took me about an hour to edit out that infuriating Terra Prime logo. I didn't want to just crop the picture; I didn't want to sacrifice one inch of that baby's image. Since this was all we had of her, every pixel was just too precious."
After a few seconds of silence, Travis smiled gently at her. "You're really great, you know that?"
Hoshi offered a hopeful half-smile. "So… you think they'll like it?"
"Are you kidding? Of course they will. Everyone on Enterprise could see that they both loved their daughter, even Commander T'Pol who probably wouldn't admit Vulcans can love. The idea that they don't even have a picture of her, not one…" Travis slumped in sorrow for his crewmates, burdened as though bearing a physical weight.
"Makes you hurt for them, doesn't it?" Hoshi asked in a faint voice.
Travis turned his head in her direction, his eyes roamed her face, and she could tell he was reading her sympathetic anguish over Trip and T'Pol's predicament. She'd learned long ago just how good Travis was at reading people. Maybe it was because he was a boomer and living on a ship meant you had to be keenly aware of your shipmates' moods in order to keep the peace on very long runs. Maybe it was just Travis Mayweather's nature. Either way, it was one of the kind, sensitive things about him that Hoshi liked.
Travis set the pictures down on the bed and put his strong arms around Hoshi, drawing her against his warm body. Hoshi readily nestled her head on his shoulder and sighed. "I was up most of the night trying to decide if I'd be doing the right thing to give the pictures to Commander Tucker and Commander T'Pol."
"If you want my opinion, it is the right thing. They'd want to have them."
Hoshi looped her arms around Travis's naked waist and held on to him. "But what if it causes them more pain?"
"Even if it does, and it might, I won't lie to you, in the end they will want to have something tangible to remember her by. If Elizabeth had been my baby, I'd want at least something to remind me of her."
"They loved her," Hoshi lowly echoed Travis's earlier words.
Travis moved one hand to her head and smoothed his palm over her silky black hair. "Yeah, they did. They'll really appreciate what you did, Hoshi."
Hoshi felt unburdened to have Travis's opinion and to hear him sound so certain about it. It made up her mind.
Hoshi disentangled herself from Travis and moved toward the head. "I'm going to get dressed and give these to Commander Tucker and Commander T'Pol before shift starts. I'll catch up with you at lunch, okay?"
Travis quirked an eyebrow at her in a very Vulcanesque fashion. "Were you planning on wearing my shirt under your uniform?" he asked with a sly lift to his voice.
Hoshi merely smiled coquettishly, peeled the black shirt off, and tossed it in Travis's face. She turned to fetch her own clothes, sauntering about the quarters stark naked with Travis's chuckle resounding behind her.
*****
T'Pol couldn't mediate like she used to.
Her inner sanctum had changed so many times in the last five years. When she had been with the Science Directorate her place inside her head was her quarters at the Vulcan Consulate on Earth. She recreated perfectly in her mind her room; she sat on the floor before her candle with consciousness turned inward and perfectly visualized sitting on the floor in her room before her candle. There was a safety and calm to the redundancy. Precision, knowing exactly where every object in her room could be found, mentally turning her outside in and her inside out until there was a transient peace. It was the same comfort found in checking her arithmetic to find she had reached the same perfect number to the exact sixth decimal place.
When she joined the crew of the Enterprise, she found herself incapable of using her quarters as her retreat in body and mind. Even sparsely decorated with objects of Vulcan origin, it was still too human. The gray-blue of the bulkheads, the chill of the environmental settings, the humidity that humans from a water-logged world didn't even perceive… it wasn't conducive to inner harmony for a Vulcan. In her mediation sessions, she had to bleach the room to white. She had to strip out the human blue hues. Then the sterility became the calm.
After being forced into a mind-meld with Tolaris in her very quarters, she had to mentally tear down the entire structure of her room in order to make it a place of peace inside her mind. She had to make it as impersonal as possible. The bunk, her bench, her desk, her computer, everything disappeared. It vanished and left four simple white walls with T'Pol poised in its center.
After Trip, after she had developed an attachment to him, she had to demolish all structure and confinement completely in her cerebral retreat. Trip was a thing of wildness to her; walls would only trap him in close where she could not escape his raw, feral emotional presence. She could not void her mind of thought and emotion with him near. She had to throw free the concept of enclosed space, because only with infinity was there enough space for Trip's presence to go without driving her mindless with emotions. Her place of safety became an unending white nothing, and she was a point of singular calm like a lone figure in the desert. And like the desert, it bore its hunters. Even with the endless freedom of her mind, T'Pol always knew Trip was there, stalking her, seeking her, and a part of her walked willfully and knowingly into the hunter's range.
For a time after she and Trip bonded, her inner calm was where she found him. She met him in her thoughts when she couldn't manage more than a few awkward conversations with him in real life. The ancient Vulcan bondmate inside her found great peace in that connection, even when the relationship outside of her meditative state was a hopeless mess. A Vulcan mated first and most strongly with their bondmate's mind… that was where Trip was not confusing to her, because unlike the back and forth and advance and retreat of their encounters in the corridors and rooms of Enterprise, in her mind when she called to him he always came. He came to the slightest beckon, even when T'Pol herself did not realize she had called to him. In her mind, he was a bondmate.
For an even briefer time there was another mind that met them there, a purity of spirit and of thought, a raw emotional nerve that triggered things in T'Pol, things primal and instinctive and frighteningly powerful. There was something about that mysterious new essence that had reminded her of Trip.
T'Pol bent forward, curled her shoulders and hunched her back in an acute recoil from emotional pain that lanced sharp as a dagger… she knew now that the pure joy and love she had felt reach out to her and meet her mind had been her daughter's. Trip's daughter, with a soul so like her father's. T'Pol had felt that. She had bonded with her daughter before she even knew the child existed; she knew only something that was in some strange fashion a part of Trip was reaching out to her, and she was helpless to resist it. It was a connection and attachment she did not understand but she was driven to respond to it.
T'Pol opened her eyes and stared down at her flickering candle and struggled to meditate to no avail.
Her inner sanctum had changed form once again to fit the circumstances… it had become a dungeon.
Never had T'Pol felt Trip's soul so filled with contentment as when they rescued their daughter from the Terra Prime operatives, when they still believed Phlox could save the child… and she had never felt Trip's soul contorted by so much anguish as it was when Elizabeth died. When his sister had died T'Pol was not yet bonded to him. She experienced his grief in glancing blows. By the time they had bonded, Trip had cauterized his loss over his sister with his affection and attachment to T'Pol.
T'Pol had underestimated how closely they had bonded over the course of time until their daughter was lost. Then, she learned all too well how deep their connection had become.
Even now, the mere memory was enough to make T'Pol's body involuntarily shake.
Trip's grief had been a wave crashing down on her. Her own emotional control was strained, her mind torn to have lost contact with a mind precious to her, and it was then that a black raging wall of agony and sadness caught her up and nearly drowned her. Trip's grief was a cold black dune of impossibly heavy sand, and it was burying her alive.
T'Pol tried to control her breathing, fought to regain her composure, and stared like a person possessed at the flame.
She knew Trip had not meant to overwhelm her; he was human and he couldn't help it. But T'Pol feared she would not survive it. She could not take the whole of his misery atop her own without breaking.
She had to keep him out to save what remained of her sanity. She built towering walls of thick gray stone, encircled herself with impenetrable rock to hold him back. She made herself a dungeon where she had barely room to breathe and think, but it was just enough to keep Trip out. His sorrow and anger and wails beat at the stone but did not break through. For now, in her oubliette, she was safe. Alone and grieving the loss of her daughter, but safe from the added burden of holding back the storm of emotion Trip was resonating like a burning star.
But last night… last night, something was different.
Trip didn't have the mental discipline of a Vulcan. His storm of agony beat at her dungeon walls constantly because his mind cried for her. Like a baby it cried, too senseless and untrained to temper its call. Trip knew on a subconscious level to go to her, and T'Pol was left to hold the walls of her pit in order to hold her mind together with 'spit and baling wire'. At night it was the worst, when Trip's conscious mind was dormant and his subconscious was running rampant. His subconscious had fangs and teeth and ferocity to make any le'matya cringe and flee. Like a hurt animal, the pain and sadness made it mean, and it knew only to get to T'Pol. T'Pol spent her nights in a fitful state fighting back a monster wearing Trip's soul like a second skin. T'Pol got used to her nights being a battle for her sanity.
But last night… the resistance wasn't there. His mind wasn't tearing at her dungeon walls, and while it was a relief almost enough to buckle T'Pol in exhaustion, there was another part of her that pressed to the wall and put her ear to the stone. Her heart told her something was wrong. Her mind chanted that her bondmate was in danger. His mind not seeking hers, even in its delirious state of aggression, was wrong.
T'Pol spent the night in a tense place between asleep and awake, plagued by the fear Trip was in trouble.
But she did not try to contact him. She did not reach past her tower walls to look for his mind in hers. She did not wake and try to reach him in his quarters. She didn't attempt to go to him in any way, but she could not shake the rotted-out hole in her brain that should have been the center of Trip's vibrant, luminous essence.
It made mediating impossible when she spent the entire time cowering in her dungeon cell, fearing the return of the beast that was Trip's emotional outpourings and hoping it would come all at once.
T'Pol stared at the flame before her in futility. Her hands trembled and her heart skipped. It should have been steady and strong during mediation, but T'Pol could hardly remember what relaxed and peaceful felt like.
She gave up on the idea of finding peace within herself and blew out the candle.
She dressed quietly and left her quarters still early in the morning, so early she met only a few crewmen in the corridors, and most of them beta-shifters heading to bed.
T'Pol went to the mess hall not because she was hungry, but because she let herself think Trip might be there.
He was not there when she arrived in the eating area. She pushed down any feeling of disappointment or concern she may have been inclined to feel at that discovery and claimed a bowl of fruit and a cup of chamomile tea.
She chose a table far from the main thoroughfare of the mess hall, but sat in such a position that she could see the doors. As she picked over her breakfast, crewmen began to trickle in, still bleary-eyed from sleep or getting ready to drag off to bed after grabbing a (relativistic) midnight snack. Every time someone came in, T'Pol looked up from her food to see if it was him.
Trip never came. It was still well before time for the alpha shift to start duty, but every morning since their return from Vulcan she and Trip were in the mess hall this early. He was always there and T'Pol could rely on that. But he was not sitting at her table this morning, and she had not felt his mind clamoring to join hers last night. It was different and therefore rattling. T'Pol lived by the contorted but dependable pattern of behavior she and Trip had adopted. This was disquieting, and when she took into account the strange woman Enterprise had taken aboard yesterday, the stranger with her exact face…
T'Pol stared into her bowl of half-eaten fruit with the same vacant, sightless gaze she had earlier fixed on her candle. 'This is what you wanted,' she reasoned with herself, 'to have Trip leave you alone, to take his unchecked emotions elsewhere.' She knew this, but still her irrational heart wanted to countermand her logical edict to keep a wall between herself and Trip. A primitive part of her wanted to go to her bondmate. It was a powerful urge, but she knew that the deluge of crippling emotion she would experience if she tried to connect with him would be overpowering. She had felt it once and it had nearly undone her. That had been nothing more than the touch of his hand.
She could not go to him without losing all that she had left of herself.
"Commander?"
T'Pol blinked and looked up to find Ensign Sato standing before her table, looking rather flustered and uncertain. That was not entirely abnormal for the young ensign; she was not the most self-confident person outside of her uncontested mastery of languages. Where T'Pol had once found such tentativeness a character flaw, she had come to appreciate its unique facet of Ensign Sato's personality.
T'Pol couldn't think of a reason the ensign would have approached her. She had more confidence when she was conducting business, and she did not have a tray of breakfast with her. The only thing she had in her hand was something thin and unyielding which the ensign tapped her fingernails against nervously. It reminded T'Pol of the sound Captain Archer's dog's nails made against the floor plating when he walked.
T'Pol realized she had not yet responded to the ensign's address.
"Ensign. Was there something you wanted?"
Hoshi flinched, shuffled her feet, then she said, "Uh, yeah… do you mind if I sit down?"
T'Pol didn't care for company, but she had learned that to refuse would illogically offend a human. It was a question to which no human wanted a truly honest answer. T'Pol gave a faint nod to the chair nearest Hoshi.
Hoshi sat down and resumed her fidgeting.
T'Pol found her patience utterly lacking this morning. "What did you wish to say, Ensign? I intended to leave for the bridge shortly."
Hoshi took a noticeable breath. "I… I wanted to give you something." Hoshi laid flat one of the objects in her hand, hesitated, then slid it across the table toward her.
T'Pol picked it up, turned it over… and for a moment she couldn't breathe. A meteor of emotion slammed into her and rendered her defenseless. Her mind reeled and her body flew into an anxiety response reaction.
She had not been prepared to look at the image of her daughter.
"I… I just," Hoshi stammered, "I realized that you didn't have a picture of her. Of Elizabeth. I thought you would want to have one. I hope I haven't upset you. I was worried it might be stressful, but… well…"
T'Pol fought to control her breathing, to keep her hand steady as it held the photograph of her half-human daughter. Her control slipped and her intellect went to its knees, bested by the unanticipated blow. In a fit of primitive panic, her mind screamed 'Trip!'
He didn't come.
T'Pol reined in her emotions frantically, though it felt like one trying to hold in a water spill with bare hands. She set the picture down on the table where a tremor in her hand could not betray her tenuous control. She took a few deep breaths to regain her center. When she braved looking up, Hoshi was watching her nervously.
T'Pol knew she had to respond to her crewmate's gesture.
"Nash veh tu itaren."
Hoshi seemed taken aback at first to be spoken to in Vulcan without forewarning, but it took only a second for her linguistic finesse to catch up and render the meaning of the Vulcan words, and when she understood she smiled. She looked greatly relieved. "You're welcome."
T'Pol's eyes were drawn down again to the image of Elizabeth. Such an aesthetically pleasing child who had possessed a hybrid soul and katra to match. Beautiful, she could be called that in every definition of the word. The injustice of her death burned viciously in T'Pol's core.
Hoshi waited in silence a few moments then she rose from the table. "Well, I wanted to stop by Commander Tucker's quarters and give him one, too, before I had to report to the bridge."
T'Pol looked up. She instantly opened her mouth to say something, but she didn't know what to say. She reacted to the mention of Trip like a reflex and felt displeasure at her weakness the moment it occurred. Hoshi saw T'Pol seem to begin to speak and stopped.
T'Pol could not translate the message in her heart, not even to a linguist who thrived on extracting meaning from confusion. She could not let herself accept the concern for Trip, she could not give in to the mindless drive to go to him. She had chosen her only recourse, the only way she could defend herself against him, and it would fall down around her if she went to Trip.
T'Pol dropped her gaze again to the picture of Elizabeth. "He will appreciate your thoughtfulness, Ensign," she said somberly.
Hoshi lingered a few more seconds then left T'Pol alone with her thoughts.
T'Pol rose from the table with Elizabeth's picture in hand. She had time still before she was due on the bridge. She needed to return to her quarters and try again to mediate.
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