Chapter Eight
Jon slept restlessly. He tossed, turned, and fought his way through sleep. It was compelling, really, the way his unconscious mind reflected his daily struggles as the first, and most important in all likelihood, Captain of a warp five vessel.
T'Pol petted his canine absently. The mammal approached her when she walked in the Captain's stateroom. She fed it a piece of cheese to keep it from waking the sleeping man and it had settled to sleep on the cushion next to her on the sofa.
It had become a disturbing routine.
Sleep was elusive. It was something of a torture now, to sit alone at night and feel her neural pathways degrading around her. It wasn't painful, but she could tangibly detect even the slightest, permanent, loss of control. It was the worst at night when she had nothing but the disease to focus on. Sometimes the Vulcan sensitivity to their autonomous systems was not a good thing.
She could only push her physical body so far. The two weeks that they had followed the cargo ship increased her aerobic capacity by seven percent and gained her six kilos of lean muscle mass. However, even Vulcans had limits to their endurance.
T'Pol still couldn't sleep. Meditation was failing her. After nearly seven decades of dreamless sleep, she woke up at nights with a deep rush of emotion. The fact that she was dreaming at all was disturbing enough, that the dreams themselves were gut-wrenchingly disturbing was unconscionable.
She catalogued, evaluated, and analysed every single scientific reading she could get her hands on, from interstellar dust to micro-singularity readings. She'd thrown herself into the research she and Doctor Phlox had gathered during their work at the Institute, but if anything that made her dreams worse.
The only cure for her restless mind happened incidentally, she had stumbled in on Jon, asleep at his desk. She'd walked right in after a brief knock, They were in and out of each other's quarters so frequently now, that a knock was all the courtesy they needed.
She'd been somehow transfixed, intending only to fetch a padd, she'd sat there for a full hour, just watching him breathe. Just being in his room, the scent of him wafting in the still air of the cabin, was relaxing.
T'Pol closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply, making an exercise of picking his scent from the myriad of aromas in the room. There was canine, the most pungent aroma, sitting directly next to her. There were the bathroom scents, soap, and cleanser, with damp, water-laden air. His laundry was in the leftmost corner, with the slightly stale scent of human sweat. The food for the canine was in the front locker. In the middle of the room, suffused under the stronger aromas, was Jon's own peculiar scent.
She opened her eyes and met Jon's own, concerned stare.
"How long have you been sitting there?" He asked, throwing back the blankets and sitting upright.
"What time is it?" She was again, surprised to be off guard, but considering the level of her focus she was not going to rebuke herself. If her only lapse was inattention to her surroundings, she could live with a slip.
"Oh-three hundred give or take" he sounded more amused than angry, which, she reflected, was a good thing.
"An hour then… give or take" he didn't ask what she was doing there, but her own sense of propriety prompted her to explain, "I couldn't sleep"
"I thought so" he got up, and paced over to the windows of his room, as restless now as he had been asleep. "I asked you to wake me if you had problems"
"You need your sleep" she retorted, averting her eyes from his questioning gaze.
"So do you. Do you do this often?" her silence then, spoke volumes. "Please let me help you T'Pol. If it's within my power…."
"I know, you are very kind," she hung her head, feeling almost ashamed; this kind of weakness was intolerable in a Vulcan, "I do apologise for invading your privacy."
"No apology necessary," he stood in front of her, and took her chin gently, tilting her face to meet his eyes. "I told you that you are free to come. If sitting here in the dark gives you any measure of peace, then I'm all for it."
"It's not..." she began and then trailed off.
He was closer to her; his hand was on her face, straining not only her physical control, but also her mental control. Her shields began to pulse and waver dangerously; it would be the work of hours of expended strength to reconstruct them. She turned her head, away, but he followed her, sliding it up her neck. She scrambled mentally to regain her equilibrium, the shields held, but they were paper-thin. The slightest jar would bring them tumbling down.
"If it's not the dark, and you're not looking at me, then it must be something, isn't it?" her head snapped around, eyes wide. "What brings you here T'Pol?"
The fact that she even considered lying to him, for even a brief moment, raised the colour in her cheeks. She was Vulcan. Moreover, she was a scientist; her first and primary duty was to the truth however mortifying it may turn out to be.
"It's your scent." She said softly, "I find that isolating it from the other ambient smells in the room works as well as inaprovaline to help me settle my thoughts."
Her response was all the explanation he needed. Her reactions to smell were something he couldn't help but notice, but he'd only now realized to put them together. "I'm not really scent aware, but Porthos, when I have to go without him, always gets anxious and restless if he doesn't have a shirt of mine to sleep with. The scent calms him. That's it isn't it? I know you're aroma sensitive and your nose was flaring like it does when Trip walks by."
"Yes," she could not deny his acumen.
"Then here," he reached down to the crumpled pile of that days' uniform and pulled off the bright blue undershirt. "If it'll help. You need sleep as much as I do. When the scent fades, just pick up another one. I have plenty."
She took it, folding it, and worrying it between her hands. "This is not right. Even among your people, this is an act of intimacy." She met his eyes defiantly over the scrap of blue cloth, "You are courting me"
Something about her words seemed to strike a chord in him. He met her gaze squarely, "Yes. I am. Maybe I don't know how it's done on Vulcan, but when a man cares for a woman on my planet, he has the right to court her until she gives in or tells him to get the hell out."
"I will never be human, Jon." She shot back defiantly, "I can't be what you need."
"Don't tell me what I need." He backed her slowly against the wall, not touching her anymore, but trapping her just as irrevocably with his implacable consideration. "Just tell me if my advances are…unwelcome"
At that moment, the stress caught up to her. In one less than spectacular instant her shield crumbled. If she hadn't been braced against the wall her knees would have given way as well. Emotion swamped her: fear, anger, anxiety…arousal.
"How is it done on Vulcan T'Pol?" he asked, meeting her eyes squarely, "Am I missing something?"
"No" her voice was soft, too soft, and breathy. He noticed her discomposure. Backing off a little to give her some space he sat, poised on the edge of the bed. T'Pol looked practically stricken. She sat, almost tentatively on the sofa.
"On Vulcan, respectable, upright citizens" he noticed these words held a certain amount of bitterness, "bond their children after the Kahs-wan ordeal at the age of seven."
Ordeal? Jon's eyes widened as she continued her lecture, "The bondmates follow their own path until the Kalifee, the time of mating, arrives. Then the female has a choice. Accept her bondmate's dominance or choose a champion in her defence. To the victor go the spoils."
"They fight?" asked Jon, trying very hard to picture the Vulcan society he knew, treading an ancient and barbaric path.
"To the death" she acknowledged, "It does not usually get that far, once challenged a male will usually give up his claim rather than risk another's life. However if the male is in the throes of the mating sickness and she chooses a rival rather than a brother or father, then it is known to happen."
Ice water trickled down his back, was she trying to tell him something?
"T'Pol, do I have a rival?" he asked not wanting to see the business end of what amounted to a duel.
"Not anymore" the darkness of the room shrouded her expression, but she sounded smug. "His family was affronted when I asked to postpone our bonding to serve on Enterprise. They issued an ultimatum and I told them to …take a hike."
He smiled at the colloquialism; she was learning much from Trip's uninhibited lips. "Ultimatum's don't sit well with you I imagine."
"No" he could have sworn she was smiling, "they don't. You do not have a rival for my affection Jonathan, Koss and I were never close, but if we choose this way it will not be an easy path to walk."
"If it was easy then there wouldn't be a challenge. Something's always worth more when you have to fight for it." He tried earnestly to meet her eyes, "I swear to you T'Pol I'll honour your heritage. I am beginning to understand what it means to you to be Vulcan. I won't ask you to be anything but what you are."
"I would expect nothing less." She sounded content with his promise, "Your courtship is not unwelcome Jonathan Archer. I will accept this gift," she raised the t-shirt slightly, "as such."
"Gift?" his mind raced, that wasn't a proper gift. However, he had one, two really, he got up off the bed and raced to his front closets. "That's not a gift T'Pol, that's a courtesy."
He handed her the small cardboard box, tied with string, and he mentally berated himself for not wrapping it or dressing it up at all. She neatly untied the string and slipped the lid off the box. Then the universe proved to Jon that regardless of race or species, a woman still reacted well to a gift of jewellery.
"The workmanship is magnificent," she said, picking the pendent up out of the soft tissue wrapping and twirling the chain around her fingers. She held the pendant at an angle to examine the engraving.
"It's Mount Seleya." He said happy that she was happy.
"I know," she fastened it around her neck with an amused look; "I have been there. It's an important pilgrimage site."
"Oh yeah, right" he couldn't help a somewhat goofy smile as she tucked the medallion under her chemise.
"I should be going" T'Pol's unshielded range of sensitivity was minimal, only a few inches beyond her skin, but Jon was the only person on the ship who would go and touch her without warning. That would not be a good thing.
"Are you sure? Can you get back to sleep?" Sleep was unlikely; she had to re-construct her mental barriers from scratch. It wasn't a difficult procedure, but it was painstaking and time consuming.
"I'm sure this" she lifted the folded shirt, "will help. Thank you Jon"
"Anytime" he looked as if he really wanted to touch her, his hands flexing at his sides, but he held himself still. It touched her that he would curb his own wants to make her comfortable.
That night as she worked to centre herself her hands strayed to the heavy medallion hanging from her neck. The shirt she was wearing was at least two sizes too big, it gapped at the neck and laid the engraved ruby open to anyone who could see.
Her last thoughts before she fell into a deep, albeit short sleep were what her mother would say to her if she could see T'Pol now. In a dark, damp, ship full of humans with a courting gift around her neck, marked by the scent of the Captain of the vessel.
It mattered little, was the conclusion T'Pol came to, her mother wasn't speaking to her anyhow.