Disclaimer: Enterprise and all related characters are owned by Paramount Studios. No copyright infringement intended.
Summary: Temporal Cold War. The shape of things that passed.
---
It is dusk.
The room lies shrouded in shadow, heat and brief shards of bleeding sunlight staining the atmosphere, permeating the paleness of the floor.
They call her heretic, a cursed child, spawning her heresy and her madness, a dissident to be suppressed. They call her weak, one who should never have been permitted existence. They call her dangerous, they whom she has so often gazed upwards to and bowed low before. They call her many things, the woman who strode from the deserts wearing an insignia never invented.
None of it matters.
Here, now, she no longer lives. Exists, perhaps, if barely, unmarked in any familiar record. There is no P'Jem. No starship Enterprise. The reasons are unimportant, irrelevant. Temporality requires no reason.
She alone struggles to continue to exist, unchanged.
Fingers clawing into the tufts of hot sand requested specifically for such a purpose, the female dies slowly, lying on the hard floor and staring up through ancient and threatening slats of rotted wood.
Footsteps rise and fall in pattern. Soft, clad in the soft wools of a true follower of Surak, rather than the rough leather of soldiers and politicians. This one, she knows…his eyes are soft, his voice rarely broken, but never wholly steady. She thinks that he would make a satisfactory convert to the ways of desperation, were there time.
There is never time.
The door is old; creaks and clanks as key and hinge protest. He approaches, kneels, his robes swirling in comforting pools about her legs. The numbness is gone now, but the pain of battle wounds will soon be eclipsed. Turning her head in a gesture of acknowledgment, the prisoner grasps the shaking hand of her devout jailor, drawing his elegant fingers across her abdomen.
"You are in pain?" The priest draws back, but her grip is unshakable.
"It is life."
Pulsing. Weeping. Beautiful.
Back arching, T'Pol of Enterprise stiffens…and welcomes the pool of green blood forth from her womb with a scream.
---
It is dawn.
Her attention does not linger on the heavens. The life-force at her breast is demanding, ignoble, earthen in beauty and strength.
He is no star-goer. No Starfleet expectant. He will be no hero, this Vulcan child.
None of it matters.
He will survive. He will survive.
---
Dusk falls.
The infant is swaddled in her tired arms, hidden, and ready to be placed in the large and unquestioned bag of the initiate.
His breaths tear at her, his gaze pulls asunder heart-strings few Vulcans develop. He reaches upward, and she traces a delicate, upswept ear briefly, halting the priest as he prepares to lift the bag.
She speaks, and if her voice is weak as a whisper, he does not mind, the child she bore. "Live long…and prosper."
The jailor kneels. Their hands meet briefly, and undaunted continue in ritual exchange.
"You are Sarek, given son of T'Pol." Her voice wavers, her control threatens to shatter.
Strong arms take the burden, cupping the small, ash covered head within a palm, the thrashing thighs within the other. He is captured by the gaze of the child, the initiate, and his voice is far from steady. "You are Sarek, taken son of Skon."
"So human." She whispers the phrase softly; aware that soon enough, all vestiges of inferiority will be removed…conditioned away.
"You are in pain?" The priest stands, shrouding the silent, solemn child in the bag, preparing to remove him from his mother's presence.
"It is life."
Pulsing. Weeping. Beautiful.
Fists bearing down into the sand as the heavy door clatters shut, T'Pol of Enterprise stiffens…and greets death.
Alone.
FIN