Title: Personal Logs
Author: Rogue28
Ships: Trip/T'Pol
Disclaimer: I'm just playing in the sandbox. If I was making any money off of this, I'd be writing like crazy.
Archive: Permission granted to the Warp 5 project and to the House of Tucker. Otherwise, ask first.
Summary: Post-eps to get through the summer hiatus, in the form of personal logs from both Trip and T'Pol's perspectives, starting with "Similitude."
A/N: I've only seen Enterprise from Similitude on, due to a grievous lack of UPN in my hometown, so please forgive any terminology errors. Also, feedback is fun.
Personal Log, Cmdr. Tucker, November 15, 2153.
This has been one hell of a ride.
The last thing I remembered was standing on top of the warp engine. And then I woke up in sickbay, over a week later, and there was a dead man next to me with my face.
What do you say to something like that? That there was another living, breathing, person, and he died so I could live.
The rest of the crew has been acting differently towards me. Malcolm and I had been having a couple of discussions on how much of a holy terror I must have been as a child. He didn't believe me when I told him that I behaved pretty well, despite my penchant for taking things apart.
He's not mentioned it since. He won't talk about Sim, either. He just clams up in typical Malcolm fashion. Hoshi smiles and says that she read to him, and then he read to her, and that Jon wasn't sure that he was going to get Porthos back from him.
Jon won't say anything either. He's locked himself away in his ready room, and will barely speak to me except for what's necessary for running the ship. I know he feels responsible for what happened to me, and to Sim. And when he looks at me, I think he's not just seeing me. He's seeing Sim, too, and it's something he doesn't want to think about right now.
Jon's treading on mighty thin ice with this. Starfleet may have his ass over this when they find out. Even Phlox admitted that it was unethical. But Jon's justification was that Earth needed Enterprise. And Enterprise needed me. Yet if Sim had all my memories, and all my experiences, then I really don't see why they needed me.
It's just so damn unfair. Sim could have lived. He was working on a way that could have kept him from dying, and then he would have been me. For all intents and purposes, he would have been Commander Charles Tucker III, and I would still be lying in Sickbay, unconscious.
I went to see Phlox so he could check my head. I've got a little scar on the back of my head where he replaced some of my brain tissue with Sim's. I asked him why he created Sim. And he surprised me.
"Commander," he said, "I created Sim because you are important. It was not because the captain compelled me to do so, because even if the captain had disagreed with my idea, I might have created Sim anyway. And I raised Sim from an infant through his short life. He was, in a way, my son, but he's not gone, despite his death. Everything that he did, Commander, was something that you would have done. It was the sum of your experiences in your life that caused Sim to choose to give up his life for yours. And in a way, I feel that because you are alive, he is also. I know that you would gladly give up your own life to save Earth from the Xindi, because Sim did. And that is more than encouraging."
T'Pol came in then, and the conversation stopped there. But I was dumbfounded. Phlox is, well, he's Phlox, and he sort of defies description. And while I've known him to give excellent advice before, I was sort of struck by that. Still am.
And the thing is, seeing Sim, lying there, I know very well that it could end up being me. there may come a day when it's me lying there in that coffin, and the captain saying words over, because there may come a day when I'm not as lucky as I was this time. And it's made me face my own mortality. And it's not something I'm comfortable with.
T'Pol won't really say anything about Sim either, and of all the people on the ship, I would have thought she would have been able to talk about it. I mean, she's a Vulcan, and if someone could suppress their emotions to talk about it, I would think it would have been her. But when I went to her quarters, I asked her about it. And all she said was that she would prefer not to discuss it right now. She didn't explain, and right then, I didn't think I should ask.
I didn't tell her that I had a nightmare last night. She asked me if I had slept well this morning at breakfast, and I lied and told her I had, and if she didn't believe me, she didn't say anything. Only this time it wasn't about Lizzie dying. It was about me dying. About standing there at my own funeral, only I wasn't dead, and no one realized it.
I'm supposed to go over to T'Pol's in about five minutes. And I'm wondering if she's going to talk to me about it.
Or if she's just going to look at me like she's seeing someone else. Just like everyone else.