|
"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: Okay, everyone, this is the point where you might hear a long silence from me, because this is where I'm stuck! I know exactly what I need to do, it is extreme resistance to having to write the next scene. I'm not looking forward to paraphrasing the entire mirror universe AT ALL.
Chapter 8
T'Pol knew she was being tended, she recognized the hands of a doctor on her. The sounds and smells of sickbay, though slightly off to those that she remembered, were recognizable enough to her senses to place her location in space.
She took a moment to take stock of her physical condition. Her back did not burn as it had, and her brain was no longer hammering at the confines of her skull. She could feel the fuzzy numbing effect of medication at work within her. She had to give silent thanks that she had rated the expenditure of medicines. Frequently a Vulcan, with the option to slip into a healing trance available, was not afforded such luxury.
The sounds of the doctor moving around her grew louder as her consciousness returned more fully.
T'Pol knew she could evade reality no longer. The doctor would know by her vital readings that she was coming around, and if she needlessly faked unconsciousness in order to be tended like a superior race, like a human, she would suffer for her presumptuousness. Excessive medical treatment was not a courtesy extended to Vulcan slaves.
She slowly opened her eyes.
The blue-gray ceiling of sickbay was soon blocked by a well-familiar Denobulan face.
"Ahh... you're awake. How do you feel?"
"Well enough," she replied in a hoarse voice through a dry throat. She touched her parched lips with the tip of her tongue, trying to estimate how many days she had been without water (though the rest of her body did not scream dehydration).
Phlox's visage momentarily disappeared and when it returned she felt a shallow container being touched to her bottom lip. "Drink slowly," Phlox ordered, and T'Pol lifted her head enough to accept the small swallows of water. It was instantly refreshing and cooled the hot scratchiness in her throat.
"There," Phlox said gently and laid his hand at the back of her neck, guiding her to rest her head once more on the bed.
T'Pol blinked in confusion and wariness at the doctor's gentle manner and kind treatment. It was out of character to say the least.
"Doctor Phlox?" she questioned him.
"Then you do know me. I take it your name is T'Pol?"
T'Pol narrowed her eyes marginally at him and returned tersely, "I thought it was I who had sustained a head injury."
Phlox seemed startled at the reply but soon enough smiled... and T'Pol's brows lowered over her eyes suspiciously because it wasn't a twisted little smirk like it usually was. It looked almost like a genuine smile… it was grotesque for being so utterly foreign on her shipmate's face. "I see you have back your fighting spirit, that is a good sign you're on the road to recovery."
T'Pol's mind flitted back to the commander, rightly the captain now, as she had last seen him, full of fire and fury. She noted that she was on an Empire ship... not the Defiant. She remembered her mission and that she should have died carrying it out. Obviously, that had not happened… it led her to a sickening conclusion. Commander Archer had sent her, most assuredly to her death, to release the clamp holding the Defiant stubbornly in Tholian dock. If she had succeeded, she should not be alive.
Her eyes closed wearily and dread seeped into her bones.
"Did I fail?"
"I beg your pardon?"
T'Pol took in a breath. "The clamp... I failed."
"Doctor," she practically whispered in a resigned voice, "I would ask you to give me time to heal before I am sent before Archer. If you can, delay him from beating me until I am stronger." It was weak and almost inviting further torment to ask for a favor from the doctor, but she was in bad enough shape to take the chance on trying.
"Beating you? Captain Archer? Why, he would do no such thing!" Phlox ejaculated, his eyes wide and stunned as his face twisted into a reflection of total bewilderment.
T'Pol looked pointedly at Phlox. She was not in any condition to deal with his sadistic mind games, but she was at his mercy and she knew it. She needed him; if she could appeal to him as a fellow alien on a human ship she might have time to recover before she was punished for her failure to the Empire. It put her in a tenuous position, to say the least. She would have to humor the Denobulan, in whatever flight of fancy he saw fit. He did delight in having others under his control and prey to his mercurial fiendishness, and it was to that part of the Denobulan doctor she would have to cater to attain any respite from punishment.
But Phlox's eyes were not glittering in wicked enjoyment at toying with her, a look she knew well. Rather, they swam with what genuinely appeared to be true concern. T'Pol knew even less what to do with that. What sick game had Phlox devised this time? She was too weak to keep up with him, to anticipate his newest sport.
Phlox moved closer to the bed and T'Pol, because she'd come to the conclusion Phlox's newest gambit could not be predicted, reacted on reflex. She made a feeble attempt to inch away from him. Her vitals registered heightening distress and the spiking of pain as she irritated her wounds. Phlox stopped short and really began to regard her with worry. T'Pol's gaze, for the first time, left his face and trailed down the doctor's torso. She noted the absence of his black garment... instead this attire was an unassuming, light blue. What was going on?
Phlox, as though in deference to her discomfort and confusion, took a step back and lifted his hands, palms out, to show her he meant no harm. It calmed her to a marginal degree... at least he wasn't quite within striking distance anymore. "T'Pol, please, listen to me. I'm not certain where you think you are, but I can promise you it is not where you think. No one here is going to harm you."
That was the boldest lie she had ever heard the doctor tell… but he did look sincere. Her head started to hurt again. "I don't understand."
"You're aboard the human vessel called Enterprise."
T'Pol faintly shook her head. "I saw Enterprise destroyed..." T'Pol stopped and stared pointedly at Phlox as piece-meal memory trickled back to her. "You were on Enterprise when it was destroyed." That clearly didn't track, so she came to the logical conclusion. "So at least some of the crew used the escape pods and found their way back to the Empire. That does not change the fact Enterprise is gone."
"I know of no such incident. Enterprise has not been attacked recently, I assure you. At least, not this Enterprise."
T'Pol frowned lightly at the Denobulan. For all her logic she could not decipher this new mind game of the doctor's. Then she attended to his precise words and was even more confused. "This Enterprise?"
"It is clear we can't be talking about the same ship or neither of us would be here if Enterprise was, as you say, destroyed."
Something in the back of T'Pol's mind was screaming for her attention, but her thoughts were too disjointed and muddled. She could not say if it was the medication or the injuries for which they had been administered that was to blame.
"Tell me about the Enterprise you are familiar with," Phlox said in a completely rational tone as she fought to capture that elusive, important thought.
T'Pol stared in utter bafflement at the doctor then decided to play along. The longer she talked to him the more it delayed a possible encounter with Archer. That alone was enough to secure her momentary cooperation in any interrogation the doctor felt like conducting. After all, talking could not hurt her.
"The Enterprise is one of the flagships of the Terran Empire. I serve aboard her as her science officer... Enterprise was under the command of Captain Forrest; I presume he was killed aboard the Enterprise when it was attacked by the Tholians." She felt certain Forrest or one of his loyal underlings would have been present in sickbay if he'd survived. He would be interested in any information she could provide about Archer's actions while part of the Defiant boarding party.
"Ah ha… and how is it you did not perish if the Enterprise you served on was destroyed?"
T'Pol sighed sharply in annoyance. If that was an attempt to be condescending on the doctor's part, then it was much more in character. "I was with the boarding party on the Defiant, the ship from the future... you know this, Phlox. I can only surmise that you escaped the Enterprise's destruction in one of her escape pods." She cast a scathing look at the Denobulan. "I find it well within your character to foresee the ship's destruction and flee to save your own life." When the doctor opened his mouth to speak, T'Pol cut him off, "You need not concern yourself with my intentions or discretion; I will not report your desertion in battle to the Terran Empire, but I fail to see the gain in feigning ignorance of what I say. You were there and you have knowledge of these events as well as I."
Phlox regarded the agitated Vulcan woman a moment, quite a long time for a being not renowned for being patient, then ventured, "I'm afraid I don't know what to say but to assure you that I know nothing about a ship called the Defiant or this Terran Empire."
T'Pol's lips pursed in frustration, heightened by her physical discomfort and causing her head to ache even more fiercely. "The Defiant, Doctor! The ship from the future, the one the Tholians pulled from an alternate..." T'Pol abruptly trailed and she suddenly grew intensely thoughtful. Her eyes left the doctor to cast around sickbay searchingly, as though only just then taking notice of her surroundings.
Which, in a sense, she was… for the first time really seeing what was all around her and taking it into consideration, placing it in context.
An alternate universe… could it explain all this?
It might well be the most logical explanation for all the discrepancies in what she had seen and heard since regaining consciousness and what she had expected to find.
"T'Pol?" Phlox asked to her sudden change in demeanor.
T'Pol's eyes finally returned to Phlox and some of the confusion that had been plaguing her mind had diminished. She was more collected and calm as she took in a breath, one that steadied her, and then she said, "Perhaps I should apologize for ardently disputing your facts, Doctor Phlox. It may well be I who am mistaken."
Phlox was visibly thrown by the turn-around. "Oh, well, that's quite all right... might I ask what caused your change of heart?"
T'Pol looked at him oddly for his use of the human expression, then she turned her eyes up to the ceiling. She analyzed the data. The doctor did not appear to be acting a part. His concern seemed real. Her sensitive sense of smell could not detect the tang of blood in the air that was always ever-present in sickbay from Phlox's many brutal experiments and dissections. There was no one bearing down on her (save the doctor's truly gentle disposition), either for answers or to beat her for failing her commanding officer. She had survived when she should not have, so how much greater a leap of illogic was it to believe two impossibilities rather than one?
"I believe," she began slowly, "that I may be from a universe alternate to this one."
Phlox didn't have a response to that, and when T'Pol glanced over at him he looked puzzled… puzzled, but not disbelieving. That such a wild suggestion from a Vulcan would be given credence and the benefit of the doubt was telling in itself.
"Where I am from," she said at long delay, "the human phrase is 'it's a long story'."
Phlox, despite his obvious bafflement, laughed momentarily at that. "Our universes can't be that dissimilar, it's an Earth-saying here, too.
"Before you start to tell it, however, let me call someone else down to sickbay… someone who will need to hear it."
Back to Chapter 7
Continue to Chapter 9
|
