Day 5
She is in the EPS Manifold switching out blown relays. It is a repetitive task that requires little thought or attention. A task, usually assigned to a junior crew member, that she often found Commander Tucker doing.
"I don't mind doing it," he told her once when she questioned the efficiency of the most senior engineer on the ship doing a task that could be completed by a first year apprentice. "My fingers know the work so well I can just switch my mind off and do the job without thinking." He didn't even pause in the task as he talked to her. "It's a good job for when I'm feeling a bit antsy, keeps my fingers busy but lets my brain rest."
It is only now, when she assigns the task to herself, that she realises that what he was doing was, in effect, meditating. With her fingers busy on a menial task, she focuses on her mind, tamping down on the emotions that seem to flow from gaps in her once disciplined brain like sand through fingers. For the first time in days she is able to find a peace, of sorts, as her brain recites the the steps like a mantra and her fingers march to the cadence.
"Look, just do it Masaro. Don't complain about it." The strident tones of Crewman Rostov ring through the newly opened door, breaking her out of her rhythm.
"This is a waste of my time, I trained as a warp injector specialist, I should be working on those." The reply, which she assumes comes from Ensign Masaro, follows.
She hesitates, as First Officer, she believes she should intervene, but she is stifled by a sudden insecurity after her unsuccessful interaction with Lieutenant Hess. The relative calm that she had finally achieved is gone in moments. When did she lose confidence in her ability to do her job?
"Masaro," Rostov sighs in response. "We're under the gun here. Right now there's a full team of people working on the injectors and you're not needed there. I need this job done, and it goes to my boot-ensign, which is you!"
She acknowledges to herself that she is being ridiculous. She has dealt with situations like this a multitude of times since joining Enterprise. She puts down her tools starts to rise as Masaro's voice rings through the space.
"I may be a boot-Ensign, but I'm still an Ensign which means I outrank you."
"Commander Tucker assigned you my team, Masaro. That means you go where I tell you to, right now, that's here." She could hear the pitch in Rostov's voice rising and his words were becoming more clipped. She knew from experience this indicated anger and that her intervention would be required.
"Well, I haven't seen him around lately, so maybe that order doesn't still stand."
She feels her stomach tighten at Masaro's words and notices Rostov clench his fists and jaw at the same time.
"Is there a problem here Mr Rostov?" She deliberately chooses to address Rostov, indicating that she considers him the senior crew member. She knows the two humans will detect no emotion in her voice or bearing. To them she would be as steady and emotionless as ever. But she knows a Vulcan would spot her disquiet immediately and disdain her for it. She can't decide what is worse, someone identifying her struggle, or no one seeing it. She has a suspicion Commander Tucker would know. He always seemed more tuned to her emotions, even in the early days when he used the knowledge to provoke her.
Masaro won't look at her. She doesn't know why.
"No, Ma'am. Just giving Ensign Masaro his assignment
She understands this dance, at least. Commander Tucker has explained it to her. There is a strange kind of logic to it. She can not order Masaro to listen to Rostov, because that would undermine Rostov's authority, which is tenuous at best under the circumstances. But by only addressing Rostov she is showing that she considers him the senior of the two.
Before she can say anything further Lieutenant Hess sweeps into the room looking at a PADD clutched in her hand, a smudge of dirt on her cheek and a stray hair dropping in her face. She doesn't so much as as glance at them before launching into instructions.
"Masaro, what are you standing around for, you're meant to be working with Sub-Commander T'Pol replacing the blown relays. Rostov, I need you to get onto that second stage plasma accelerator ASAP."
She looks up for the first time and seems to register some tension.
"Is there some problem I don't want to know about?" She directs the question to Rostov.
"Nope," Rostov responds with false cheer. "Tommy was just about to get started, weren't you?"
Masaro, now clearly outranked, doesn't answer but but turns on his heel and starts walking towards the relays. As he moves he mutters something under his breath. Most of the words are indistinguishable but she catches "Tucker" and "Vulcan whore".
Rostov's winces and flicks a glance at her before catching Hess' eye. Hess snots as she rolls her eyes and gives him a slight shake of the head. "Masaro!" She calls out to the departing Ensign. "You might want to check your attitude in front of three senior crew members, who all contribute to your performance review."
Masaro starts and turns quickly back to them when he realises that at least some of his comments may have been overheard. He shoots a worried glance in T'Pol's direction, the first time he's looked directly at her since she joined the discussion with him and Rostov.
"Yes, ma'am," He replies softly and turns back to his assignment.
T'Pol is puzzled. She can see Rostov an Hess looking at each other. They seem to be having a silent conversation that she can't comprehend.
She is not overly concerned by Masaro's comment. She faced far greater hostility from all the crew when she first came on board Enterprise, two and a half years before and she is not surprised when she encounters it from the new crew members. Commander Tucker had warned her there had been gossip about the nature of their relationship but she had brushed it off as irrelevant, which she still maintains.
She wonders if she is missing something. There is an undercurrent that she can't decipher. In the past Commander Tucker would have decoded any emotional content of crew interactions if he felt she needed to know. She had come to trust his judgement as to when it was necessary to inform her of issues and when it was irrelevant to her. But Commander Tucker isn't here and she is alone, becalmed in a sea of human emotion with no way to fathom it.
Day 6
The new day brings an end to her need to avoid sickbay when she finally meets the clone she has been so determined to avoid. He, quite literally, runs into her as she rounds a corner on her way from completing repairs on an EPS junction near the port side, third stage plasma accelerator. The box of EPS Ribbon she is carrying is knocked to the floor, its contents spelling from the carton. She watches as a reel rolls across the deck, unraveling as it goes.
"Sorry, sorry sorry." As he chants his apology, the child, who she calculates would be the the Earth equivalent of an 8 or 9 year old, immediately goes to the floor, sweeps up a handful of unwinding reels and dumps them in the carton, tangling them further in the process and starts to reach for another.
She puts her hand over his arm to halt his action and prevent further disorder. He startles at her touch and looks into her face for the first time. His eyes widen as he abruptly drops the reels in his hands and jumps back from her, then stands and regards her nervously.
"You're a Vulcan," he tells her, rather pointlessly.
"Indeed," she replies as she bends to pick up a reel and begin the process of disentangling its contents from its neighbours and rewinding it. "I am aware of what species I am."
"My Daddy says Vulcans are interfering auto... automatos and trying to prevent Earth from progressing." He folds his arms and looks sternly at her as he speaks.
"I believe the word you are looking for is 'automatons'," she tells him blandly.
"That's what I said." He nods sagely at her correction. "Daddy says you're trying to prevent us from developing our warp capabilities and exploring space. He says it's your fault Henry Archer hasn't gotten his engine to fly yet."
She looks up at him impassively. "And yet, here you are, in space, on an Earth ship with a warp five engine designed by Henry Archer and a Vulcan crew member." She raises a typical Vulcan eyebrow as she says it.
In response he narrows his eyebrows and presses his lips in a way that is so reminiscent of Trip that she has the illogical urge to rip the DNA from his very cells. How dare this... creature stand here recalling his memories, speaking with his accent, reproducing his mannerisms, expressing his genes...
All of a sudden he changes from hostile prepubescent to eager child. He crouches down next to her, picks up a reel and begins to wind the ribbon back onto it. "Sorry about your stuff, it's a bit of a mess. What is this anyway?"
She retreats to her Vulcan facade, determined not to show this adolescent version of Commander Tucker just how unsettled she is. "It is known as EPS Ribbon. Despite its fragile, fabric like appearance, it is actually a very strong, flexible, nanopolymer tube, that is used to transport plasma as part of the EPS grid. EPS refers to the Electro-plasma system, which..."
"I know what the EPS grid is," he interrupts her cheerfully as he puts a wound reel into the carton and picks up another to begin winding.
"Is it true that Vulcans have green blood," He asks, quite randomly changing the subject, looking up her eagerly.
"It is true. Human blood is red due to your iron based Haemoglobin, which is involved oxygen transportation. Vulcans have copper based Haemocyanins."
"Horseshoe crabs have copper based blood, but their blood is blue." He stops winding as he says it and gives her a challenging look. There is so much of Commander Tucker in his manner, it is impossible not to respond.
"Vulcan blood has extremely high levels of a compound that is very similar to biliverdin and bilirubin in Earth vertebrates. These yellow and green compounds, in concert with the blue Hemocyanins result in the green colour".
He narrows his eyes and rolls his tongue around his around his cheek as he processes the information. "So," he looks up at her earnestly, "does green mean go and red mean stop on Vulcan too?"
Before she can even begin to process the leap of reasoning that would take a human child from the colour of Vulcan blood to the colour of Vulcan traffic lights, she hears his name being called through the halls, accompanied by the sound of heavy footfalls.
"Oops, I reckon I'd better skedaddle."
She doesn't have so much as a chance to formulate a hypothesis on the meaning of "skedaddle", before he is thrusts the half wound reel into her empty hand and races off down the hall. Which is how Corporal Hawkins finds her when he comes striding round the corner.
He stops abruptly, eyes wide, at the sight of her, kneeling amongst the mess of unwound ribbon and empty reels, bends down to pick up the reel that had rolled across the deck and begins to rewind it as he walks towards her.
"I sense the fine hand of young Sim in this mess," he says apologetically as he hands her the reel.
"He is... somewhat energetic."
Hawkins snorts, "He's a menace. Phlox asked me to watch him for an hour, he dismantled my phase riffle while I was getting orders from Hayes and took off while I was reassembling it." He crouches down in front of her, picks up another reel and begins to wind it while he talks.
"It appears he is, by his nature, quite curious. It is likely he wanted to understand how your weapon worked."
Hawkins sighs in response and hands her another rewound reel. "Sorry to leave you with this mess, Ma'am, but I had better go hunt him down before he follows that curiosity to engineering and dismantles the warp core."
She is left again, now holding four reels, stranded amongst the remaining mess of equipment, watching the Corporal stride away.
She is somewhat surprised by how natural and relaxed Hawkins was with her. Most of the MACO's display a certain caution around her, which seems typical for humans who have little or no prior experience with Vulcans. After the incident on the Seleya and her catastrophic loss of emotional control, which demonstrated the violent proclivities of Vulcan emotion, she has expected his wariness to have increased, but it appears that the opposite is true.
In fact, it is her second interaction with him where she has been surprised by his willingness to engage her. She has not reflected greatly on their prior encounter, which occurred in the weeks subsequent to the events of Seleya, while she was still recovering from the emotional ruin that was the result of the trellium-d exposure. She has disciplined herself not to reflect on that period, as though just remembering the emotions will bring them all to the surface.
Although she had been cleared for duty she had still been struggling with the residual emotions and had avoided most crew interactions outside of duty. It had been a difficult time for her, fighting so desperately against the feelings unleashed by the alien compound, never sure how she would react to situations and unable to name or understand the emotions she had never been taught to identify or process.
She had encountered Corporal Hawkins in the mess hall when she had gone to obtain some food at an impossibly late hour, in the hope of avoiding human contact. Even without the trellium poisoning she would have been able to identify that he was unsettled by something, but her lack of emotional control had decimated her usual reserve and before she could stop herself she had asked him what troubled him. His reply had unleashed a stampede of emotion that had, doubtlessly, coloured her reply.
When he confessed that he was uneasy about their decision to destroy the Seleya and its crew, she should have, would have under normal circumstances, responded with the logical answer: referencing the terminal levels of trellium exposure in the crew, the inability of Enterprise to provide palliative care to a ship load of emotional, dying Vulcans, the necessity of the boarding party to urgently escape the broken ship and it's doomed crew.
Instead she spoke of her own guilt: for her lack of control which jeopardised the mission, for surviving when so many of her former colleagues had not, for not preventing their deaths, for trying to prevent their deaths and thereby endangering her Enterprise crewmates. There had been no logic in her answer, only feeling. But Hawkins did not seem unsatisfied with her answer, in fact, he seemed reassured by it.
"I guess it should never feel right to take another person's life, no matter what the circumstances," he commented quietly before getting up from his chair and leaving the mess hall.
For the first time she realises, in retrospect, that she also had been strangely comforted by the exchange. That, even though, at the time, she had completely resisted the emotions she experienced, the latter part of her recovery had not been the terrifying, overwhelming experience that had characterised the earliest days of her exposure. That, as the compound had purged from her system, the rage and fear and paranoia had gone with it.
In its stead she had been left with a range of more gentle emotions: curiosity during gossip sessions and amusement from the idle repartee during lulls on the bridge, fascination from the plots and relationships portrayed at movie night, satisfaction at solving a problem, pleasure from a good meal, a zinging attraction between herself and Commander Tucker during neuro-pressure sessions... Like her interaction with Corporal Hawkins, her interpersonal exchanges had been less jarring when her logic was tempered with small doses of feeling. Niceties she'd never bothered with in the past had slipped into her language. She had expressed her gratitude when her staff had done a good job, her amusement at their jokes, her interest in their lives. They had responded in kind, but had worked harder for her when they perceived that she cared.
Even the negative emotions had not overwhelmed her, just added a new dimension to her experience. Everything had seemed more colourful, painted with a coat of emotion. No wonder humans were so resistant to the dull, grey of Vulcan logic, when their emotions gave such a bright, glossy lacquer to all their experiences.
She feels a sudden uncharacteristic longing for that briefly experienced ability to feel her emotions, but not be completely overwhelmed by them. She thinks of her recent interactions with Hess, Rostov and Masaro and knows she would not have been so perplexed if she could have accessed her own emotions during the exchanges. Then she thinks of Commander Tucker, lying prone in sickbay, possibly to never return to them, and his juvenile doppelgänger roaming the halls of Enterprise and she wonders, with uncharacteristic emotional honesty, if she truly does want to know what she feels about that.
She looks down at the tangled mess of equipment for a moment before sweeping it all up in bundle and depositing it back in the box. She does not need it right now and there are more pressing matters for her to attend to. Logic dictates she should deal with it at a later date, when the current situation is resolved.
XX