T'Kirk searched the waiting line of intraplanetary transports and found the one headed for the LLangdon Hills. Within an hour of her return to quarters the directive from the Headmaster of the academy had come over her comm unit. She had been summarily ordered to leave the Academy and return to her home until further notice. No explanation was given in the terse missive, and she was quite certain none would be forthcoming.
She hoisted her travel bag up onto the overhead rack and settled into a seat by the window. The triune suns were setting and it would be dark by the time she reached the family estate Keldeen. Though she was exhausted, she could not stop replaying the events that had led her to this day.
Stovan was her friend, her first and only real friend at the Vulcan Science Academy. It was not that the other students were unfriendly toward her, after all one could hardly snub the granddaughter of someone as powerful as Ambassador Sarek with impunity. They regarded her with a sort of polite curiosity, but rarely interacted with her outside of the classroom.
It was the ultimate irony. Growing up on Terra, she had felt like an outsider with her slanted Vulcan eyebrows and delicately pointed ears, and now on Vulcan her pale, perpetually sunburned skin and bright blue eyes marked her qomi, an offworlder. Stovan, though, had not been like the others. He was almost ten terran years her senior and had recently been given a teaching load at the VSA while he pursued advanced certifications in Xenobiology.
A chance encounter in the refectory one day had led to a long conversation, which eventually became lunch, which had gradually morphed into dinner. She sensed that he too was somehow an outsider here, though in true Vulcan fashion he'd never come out and said that directly. Vulcan discourse often depended on inference, on "reading between the lines," as her mother said. Sometimes the crucial point was in what was not said.
Stovan spoke little of his own family, though she'd gleaned that at one time they had been quite prominent until some unspeakable scandal forced them to withdraw to the margins of Vulcan society. It would explain why a man as brilliant as he had been shunted aside in favor of men of obviously lesser intellect. She herself had felt the sting of having to outperform every one of her peers before being begrudgingly admitted to the VSA.
Though Vulcans would be loath to admit it, for all of the supposed "enlightenment" and the principles of IDIC, it was the politics of the clans that controlled one's destiny here. It was not just within the Academy; politics controlled one's freedom to pursue a chosen career and even intruded into the very most private and intimate areas of a person's life.
Swathed in ritual and secrecy, bonding-the forced linking of two young minds-was, in effect, a "marriage" between seven-year-old children arranged for the mutual benefit of the two houses. It was something rarely spoken of in her own home, though she had a disturbing memory of being very young and overhearing Sarek and her father arguing bitterly over her parents' staunch refusal to allow her older brother to be bonded with a young girl from a highly regarded Vulcan family.
It was the only time she had ever heard either of the two men raise his voice, and even now, after so many years, the memory caused a tight knot to form in the pit of her stomach. Tehvar-bosh, even with a five-year-old's grasp of the Vulcan language, she had understood that her grandfather was warning of danger to her brother. Sarek had stormed from the room, while Grandma Amanda held her younger brother and struggled to fight back tears.
She remembered snuggling on her father's lap on the long transport trip back to ShiKahr, an unexpected indulgence in such a public place. He had stroked her hair tenderly and told her a wonderful story about how Surak had saved the Vulcan people by showing them the ways of logic and discipline. Then he reached across to her sleeping mother and laid a gentle hand across her rounded abdomen.
"You little sister is restless this evening."
"When will she be born?" she had asked.
"At the end of Tashmeen."
Just like Solmar, her older brother. Now, many years later, for the first time T'Kirk made the connection that there were exactly seven years between the birth of her oldest brother and her sister T'Manda. Maybe her father was a better Vulcan than she'd realized.
Despite Sarek's fears, neither she, nor her siblings had been bonded and, thus far, no danger had befallen any of them. It had come as no real surprise to find that all of her classmates were bonded, and regarded her with puzzlement when she revealed that she had no bondmate. It had come as an unexplainably pleasant surprise to learn the Stovan also had no bondmate.
Her new friendship with Stovan, made her life at the Academy considerably more pleasurable. The frantic days of the fast paced and extremely challenging classwork, shifted seamlessly into leisurely dinners and stimulating discussions concerning what each had learned that day. Their meals had quickly been relocated to Stovan's cottage in the faculty housing compound. In her eagerness to explore so many new concepts and ideas with him, T'Kirk found she was not able to maintain the expected silence while eating that Vulcan decorum demanded. Though Stovan had not been offended by her break from the tradition, the stares they drew from fellow diners convinced them that for the good of the many they should find an alternate site for their joint meals.
It had grown into a comfortable relationship, each of them taking pleasure in their surprising similarities, and amused acceptance of their diverse nature and backgrounds. At least it had been comfortable, until three weeks ago when everything has started to change.
One night they'd been sitting at his firepot in a brief meditation after dinner and for a moment she'd opened her eyes and saw herself seated before the fire pot. She had reached across to the vision of herself with a large, verdigris hand that was clearly not her own. She'd blinked her eyes and she was once again looking across at Stovan, but his eyes had been unfocused and confused. She'd written it off to fatigue and the extra serving of grilled ra'daht she'd eaten at dinner.
But two days later as they were walking along the path to his cottage she'd made a rather cruel joke about one of her instructors. She felt the corners of her lips edging toward a smile and again saw herself as she walked beside him, a feeling of warm amusement flowed through her. She shook her head and saw him looking at her with a mixture of fear and confusion.
"What was that?" she'd asked him.
"I am uncertain," he had said, obviously shaken.
They had gone to his quarters and for the first time consumed their endmeal in silence. The episodes had continued with increasing frequency over the next week. Each time it had happened, she saw as if from his eyes and had a fleeting perception of his thoughts. She had tried to talk to him about what was happening between them, but he refused to discuss it and gradually she'd felt him pulling away from her. Then he'd insisted that they take their meals on campus, and was not only silent during the meal but afterward as well.
Then, five days ago, unable to bear his cold treatment any longer she had gone to his office and confronted him. He'd watched her with the same superior fascination that she'd experienced from her classmates.
"Are you quite finished?" he had asked. "I will certainly not miss the daily dose of irrational blathering." He turned his attention back to the padd he'd been studying and seemed genuinely surprised when he looked back up and found her still standing in front of his desk.
"T'Kirk, I am in your debt for your assistance with my research on the psychology of Vulcan Human hybrids, but I have more than enough data to complete the project and I will no longer require your presence."
"My presence?"
"This project has taken a good deal more of my time than I had anticipated. I need to redirect my attentions elsewhere."
He had looked back down at the padd and stunned she'd fled his office.
She had no memory of the half hour walk back to her quarters, but somehow she'd found her way there. Stripping off her uniform, she'd turned the sonic shower on full blast, then afterward wrapped herself in the silky sleep robe her parents had given her on her last birthday and cried herself to sleep.
"Kaiidith!"
She awakened to Stovan's voice, though it was clear that she was alone in the small room. For a moment she thought that it had all been a bad dream, that Stovan was still her friend. "What is, is," she said aloud, snuggling down under the soft blanket in search of sanctuary from the heartbreaking emptiness within her.
The next five days went by in a mindless blur. She began having difficulty concentrating and was plagued by a growing sense of unease, the small bit of sleep she'd managed to get was a fitful tangle of vivid dreams. That morning she'd stopped for a cup of strong tea before class and overheard a cryptic conversation between two instructors discussing Stovan's absence from campus.
It had been easy to slip into Stovan's office and use his computer to access his personal files. Having a father with a Class Seven computer certification had not been wasted on her, though she doubted he would appreciate her less than honorable application of his tutelage. Stovan's mystery illness seemed to explain everything. Of course, she reasoned with a sense of relief, the illness had somehow compromised him and he had said things he didn't mean. It had seemed like the logical conclusion.
But now she was on a transport heading away from him, from the Academy, without a clue about the chain of events that had torn her life on Vulcan to shreds
