A Voice In The Desert
By Laura Schiller
Crossover: Star Trek/Hetalia: Axis Powers
Copyright: Hidekaz Himaruya/Paramount Pictures
"Hey, T'Pol," came the whisper from the opposite side of the catwalk. "I can't sleep. What are you reading that's so fascinating?"
T'Pol covered the light from her PADD with one hand. "Should I switch it off?"
"No, seriously, I'd like to know," said Captain Archer, smiling tiredly at her from the cocoon of his sleeping bag. "I'm at that point where the more I try to sleep, the more my brain starts racing. I'd really appreciate a distraction right now. Unless you'd rather be left alone."
T'Pol was tempted to say yes. Personal space had become a precious rarity over the past few days, since the neutronic wavefront had forced the whole crew into hiding in this small but shielded section of Engineering. But to be honest, she was in almost the same state as the Captain. Communal living was not conducive to meditation. She was bored, and underneath it, she was anxious. If ever there was a time to read the Scrolls of the Forge out loud, this was it.
"It is a Vulcan sacred text," she said. "I do not know if you would find it interesting."
She half expected Archer to say something flippant, but his voice was surprisingly sincere as he said, "I would."
She cleared her throat, settled herself a fraction more comfortably against the steel grid floor, and began.
/
On the third day of his pilgrimage, Surak saw that the grass beneath his feet was dying. The rich earth had turned to barren sand, and the wind was dry upon his face.
He tracked the changes to a cave at the foot of Mount Seleya, and there he found the Spirit of Vulcan lying on the ground. She appeared to him as a woman, lovely yet battle-worn, bleeding from several wounds. She wept, and where her tears and blood touched the ground, they became grains of sand.
"Lady," he said to her, "What happened to you?"
"I am the last of my kind," she said. "I killed my brothers and sisters. I am alone."
"I, too, have killed," he said. "I, too, am alone. Let me help you."
He reached out his hand to tend her wounds, but she turned her face to the cave wall.
"It is nothing to me," she said, "whether I live or die."
As a soldier in the Global Wars, Surak had seen too many deaths. He had grown utterly weary of seeing lives wasted, and he would not allow it any more.
He cleaned and bound the Spirit's injuries, and gave her food and water from his own supplies, which she accepted. Only then did he speak.
"I do not know what you are," he said, "Or what powers you have, that the land should be poisoned by your touch. I only know that you are foolish – yes, foolish and blind. If you grieve the loss of your kin, why not live in such a way as to honor them? If you deplore death, why spread it further with every drop of blood and water that you shed?"
She sat up and wiped her eyes, and saw the desert she had made.
"Forgive me," she whispered, and the air became soft, as it is during the rainy season. "I have been weak."
"So have we all," said Surak. "Many a time during this war, I have wished for death. Even my love for my family tortured me, knowing I might lose them. Love, fear, anger and shame – they are sehlats that threaten to run away with us into a ditch. But remember, it is your mind that drives the chariot. Your logic holds the reins."
She gazed up at him with dawning comprehension. The light in her eyes was boundless as the stars, and her smile as ancient as the stones beneath them.
"You are wise, for a mortal," she said. "I am the Spirit of Vulcan. Teach me what you know."
/
T'Pol switched off the PADD. "The next few chapters are rather … abstract," she said.
"I'm sure even a human could understand them," said Archer, raising his eyebrows in mock offense. "If you used simple words."
"Perhaps another time." When she herself was less tired. Falling asleep at temple had been one of her most common failings as a child; reading the Scrolls still had a soporific effect on her, though she'd never admit it.
"Who translated that, anyway?" Archer asked. "You were reading it in English."
"I did, spontaneously." She showed him the PADD, where the story was written in modern Standard Vulcan. "It was not difficult. I have known that story since childhood."
"It's more … poetic … than I would've expected."
Now what did he mean by that? In the dim emergency lighting that signaled the ship's "night", his face was half in shadow. There was a strange intimacy in talking this way. She mustn't forget that he was human, and her commanding officer too.
"Metaphor is a common device in spiritual and philosophic texts," she said.
"What I meant to say is, it's beautiful."
He spoke in a hush, so as not to be overheard by the crewmen nearby.
Beautiful? She bit back the lecture Soval would have given if he'd been there, about aesthetic principles being irrelevant to the pursuit of self-control. She had never, herself, found anything particularly beautiful about the life of Surak. It had been drilled into her from infancy, and she had taken it for granted. It was only now, on a ship full of aliens, with no one to meditate with or speak to in her native language (except sometimes Ensign Sato), that she found herself reading the Scrolls in her free time.
She hadn't expected, as she read, to suddenly feel as if she were the dying Spirit of Vulcan.
Forgive me, I have been weak.
Jazz music. Tolaris' hands clamped to her temples. The seventh spy lying dead at her feet in the jungles of an alien planet.
Teach me what you know.
Pecan pie. Tucker's smile. Archer's voice cutting through a snowstorm. The Robinson Nebula glowing blue. A blanket on P'Jem.
"Beautiful … yes," she said. "I suppose it is."
She did not, of course, believe for a moment that the Spirit of Vulcan was anything but a metaphor. But when she curled up in her sleeping bag a few minutes later and closed her eyes, she dreamed of a woman in sky-orange robes, with eyes as green as blood. A sehlat crouched at her feet, ready to play or to attack at a moment's notice, but she kept it quiet with one slender hand at the back of its neck.
T'Pol reached for the woman's psi points, like a child reaching for its mother.
I miss you, she thought-spoke. Did I do right to leave?
You serve me well, daughter, Vulcan replied. Have courage. You will need it.
The sehlat ran up to T'Pol like an affectionate cub, and she buried her hands in its silky fur and allowed it to lick her face. By the time Vulcan snapped her fingers to call her companion back, T'Pol felt lighter than she had in months.
Captain Archer, still awake, saw her smiling in her sleep and was glad.