Someone To Trust
By Laura Schiller
Based on Star Trek: Enterprise
Copyright: Paramount
"My report, Captain."
"Thanks." Jonathan Archer swiveled his chair away from his computer to take the padd from T'Pol. She handed it over with a tiny nod, folded her hands behind her back, and stood with customary poise, almost as motionless as the drawings of old Enterprise ships behind her. The captain's ready room hummed with the sound of the distant warp core.
He glanced at the padd. She hadn't touched him, but the metal was still warm.
He thought of her half-carrying him into the cold shower, toweling him dry, and holding that cup of coffee to his lips. The past few hours had been a dizzying haze of headaches, old grief for his father, fever, editing, and rage. But even so, those memories stood out to him with all the force of Malcolm's Tactical Alert klaxon.
She turned on her heel, ready to go.
"T'Pol?"
Smoothly, she turned again.
"Why me? I mean … why is it me you woke up to fly the ship, out of everyone on the crew?"
She gave him one of her steady, unreadable looks.
"It is your ship," she said, with that Vulcan simplicity which, in his less than stellar moments, he took as condescension. Only in moments like this did he recognize it as the pure clarity of thought it really was. "Your responsibility."
"I know." Jon made a face. He did know now, but he'd certainly forgotten during those hours locked up in his quarters obsessing over the preface to his father's biography. Humiliating.
"It's just … you could've woken Travis up, even from his sedation. Or the night shift helmsman. Or Trip – he's the Chief Engineer, he knows more about the ship than me. I'd have thought one of them would be … the logical choice."
Her face didn't move a centimeter at the implication, even a subtle one, of questioning her logic. She reminded him of some Buddhist statues he had seen once in a temple while visiting the Sato family in Japan; the set of her eyes, the sleek curves of her figure, the faraway expression.
Then she spoke, and the statue image faded, much to his relief.
"You possess more mental discipline than any human I have ever met, Captain. I believed if anyone could resist the effects of the radiation long enough, it would be you."
Do I? Jon thought, startled. Had he resisted enough? He'd gotten the ship between the two black holes in one piece, if that was what she meant. But not without making an utter pig of himself in front of her for the second time in as many months. He'd shoved her out of his quarters. Had she mentioned that in her report?
"Yeah, well. Not without being half drowned, apparently." He ran his hand through his short hair, pointedly checking for dampness, even though it had dried hours ago. "If I catch a cold, will you take - " He swallowed the word care just in time, swiveling back to face his computer screen and trying not to remember her slim body holding him up. " – the blame?"
Maybe, he thought ruefully, there was something to her 'mental discipline' comment after all. He hadn't let out a single Freudian slip since that night in Sickbay.
Have you thought about why T'Pol's opinion is so important to you? How long has it been, Captain? Damn. He could shake Phlox by the collar for putting those ideas into his head. Never mind that the ideas had been there long enough already. Simply be aware of it, indeed.
"It worked. If anything, I should take the credit." T'Pol's voice took on that wry tone that told him, without looking, that her left eyebrow must be raised.
"Touche." He typed a few more nonsense words, then turned back around in time to catch the inquiring tilt of her head. "A fencing term. It means you're right."
Of course I am, said her flickering eyelashes.
"Thanks, by the way. I … I owe you one, T'Pol."
"On the contrary, Captain."
T'Pol's voice grew slightly deeper when she was suppressing some emotion; there was a roughness to it, like the desert sands of her homeworld. It had taken him months to learn to hear it, but it was clear to him now.
"When we captured Menos, I became … emotionally compromised. Without your guidance, Captain, I might never have completed that mission."
A shiver went down Jon's spine in memory of the blizzard on Agaron Prime that night. T'Pol had frozen in mid-chase, her phaser aimed at Menos' fleeing figure, terrified that she might be shooting an innocent man, calling Captain? in a voice that trembled with emotion. Trusting his primitive human logic more than her own.
This once, he had been right. Menos had been smuggling biotoxins. T'Pol's trust in her captain, as evidenced by pressing that stun button, had probably saved dozens of innocent lives.
"I told you," said T'Pol, still in that desert voice, "That if you ever needed someone to trust, I would be there."
Jon had to clear his throat twice, and blink hard several times, before he could meet her eyes. Leftover radiation symptoms, no doubt. Or maybe that cold he'd joked about beginning to surface.
"So there you were," he said, his own voice taking on a distinctly gritty edge. There in his quarters shaking him awake; there on the other side of the shower door; there with a towel, a coffee cup, and her soothing hands; there on the bridge shouting course corrections, her voice his only anchor to reality. He'd been there to find her when she lost herself, so she had done the same for him. "And here we are."
She trusts me with her life, her secrets, her conscience, whispered a voice, as stubborn and untameable as Phlox's little blue bat. Everything that matters, except … He caught the thought with an imaginary net and stuffed it into its cage.
"Good night, T'Pol."
With a formal little nod and a quiet "Captain", she glided out of the room.