A quick but important fic that fits in between chapters Eight and Ten of "The Tides of Vulcan". It can stand on its own, however.

Enjoy!

Project:

1. (noun) A specific task of investigation, especially in scholarship.

2. (verb) To produce a clear impression of one's thoughts or personality to an audience; To communicate clearly and forcefully.

3. (psychology) To ascribe one's own feelings, thoughts, or attitudes to others.

Question

There's something about him. Even the ones who don't like him - even the ones who openly hate him - even they admit that. He seems to inspire in people all the different emotions he claims to have entirely erased from himself.

No one is indifferent to him.

Odd, since indifference is perhaps the strongest impression anyone can get out of him.

He's been here two years, just like me, but unlike me - and unlike every other cadet at the Academy - he has taken such an accelerated course of study that he has earned two full-fledged degrees in those two years, and he's working on a third. He has everyone wondering, why is he even here? A young man like that, who earned an invitation to the VSA, for galaxy's sake, and on scholastic merit, yet. Why would he turn down something like that - something all of us would die to achieve - and come here? Here where he has to arrange his own pace and curriculum because literally no one can keep up with him? He's going to walk away from Starfleet Academy with at least four PHD's, and unless I'm greatly mistaken, the most thoroughly earned commission any graduate has ever had. He'll probably go right to Commander too. No mucking about as a Lieutenant, no, not a chance. I'm not jealous. . . but I wonder. There's just something about him. "Gifted" or even "genius" doesn't seem to define it. "Alien" comes closer, but he's far to human-like in appearance for instant dismissal as simply a non-human type intelligence. What on Terra is it that brings him here?

He always sits in one corner of the cafeteria. One chair set at an otherwise empty table. No one has dared approach him since about the third day he sat there, and a rather smitten girl tried to flirt her way into that corner. I don't know the whole story, but the rumors that got started that day took about six months to die down. And there have been other rumors too, less than kindly ones, and all of them mysterious. Even now, years later, there are people who whisper to each other whenever he walks into the room. I wonder why he even bothers to come, since he never eats the replicated crud that passes for food here, and I have never heard of anyone else even trying to study in the cafeteria during full occupancy. Yet, he always does. I don't think a single person here has ever seen him without a book in his hand. The few of us who have ever heard him speak have only heard him say strangely bland, off-putting things, and he obviously dislikes crowds.

So why is he here?

I'm in the middle of the room, with as clear a view of everyone and everything as I can get. I've been eating my lunches at this table for almost two years. My friends all sit here, we talk and eat and leave in a regular, easy way, comfortable in the normalness of the routine, but all at once I am tired of it. I'm tired of being here, and oh, so very tired of that one, almost empty table, with a who-knows-what sitting at it. He might be of alien extraction, he might be capable of absorbing the same amount of information in a single year that it would take one of the very best of us four years to achieve, but he's young too, for crying out loud, he's just a boy. Suddenly, it bothers me that we've been treating him like we have, it worries me that he lets us, and. . . . well, darn me for a space sick idiot, but I'm going to DO something about it.

Besides. There's something about him. . . .

I pick up my PADD, and quickly dial up my favorite novel. I leave my purse and other books with my best friend, asking her to take them back to our dorm room when she's done eating. We have a free period after lunch today, and she nods her head casually, not interrupting her other conversation. She's assuming I'm just off to do some random studying, or to meet up with one of my guyfriends for a sweet little make-out session.

Any other day, she'd be right.

Today, I'm not entirely sure I'm going to survive my free period. The alien boy across the room has a reputation for incredibly cutting speeches. Especially when he's approached by someone he doesn't know, or want to know.

But, somehow, the right thing to do has occurred to me. Strange. . . inter-species ethics were never my strong point.

I walk around the room a bit, scanning for an empty chair. When I find one, I snatch it up, not even asking if it's taken or not. No one calls after me, so I must have got away with it. In about ten strides I've plunked the chair down at his table, and two seconds later I'm sitting there, about five feet away from him, and furiously reading from my PADD. I don't look up, or acknowledge him in any way. I don't know if he notices me at all. . .

Suddenly a dizzying wave of. . . something. . . washes over my head. Why am I here? I don't really want to be here, do I? Who do I think I am? Wait. . . who am I? I am deeply afraid, chokingly shy, and yet I want, I need to stay right where I am. The cafeteria fades from my consciousness, I am alone in a crowd of noises, surrounded yet isolated - it is the only state of being that I have ever experienced, and thus the only one I understand. I must be here, like this, or I will come to hate this Academy, and I cannot do that. I need to be here. . . and I always do what I must do. What is required is always necessary. What is necessary is always logical. Why has my isolation been invaded again? Oh, how I hate human pranks. . . The feelings are so scorchingly alien to me, I never feel like this, and then, just as abruptly, I feel an echoing draft of silence inside my brain, like I've stepped away from a great windy forest only to look down into a vast dark canyon. A tear drops onto the smooth surface of my PADD. I blink, and all at once I am in the cafeteria again. I look up. He's gone.

What the hell was that?