AN: I have to say, the response surprised me, and for the most part pleasantly.
Libran Iniquity – so glad I'm not alone, someone who can appreciate how damn frustrating it is right now not to have viewing access to Season Three.
Thanks for the sweet remarks from everyone else as well.
One small thing though – it does say in the summary "Archer and T'Pol head one of three…" blah, blah, blah. So answer me this, why read it if you're not a fan of the couple? They're not even a couple in this story, not yet anyway, but that's besides the point. Make your dislikes heard in the anti A'T'P stories, not ones that have them as a couple, please. It just makes sense. Antiarchertpol – your hatred for a fictional character scares me. t, thanks for the spoiler… Appreciated…
~Telaka~
~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~.
Nothing had really changed on that narrow black, litter-strewn street that Jonathan had proudly called home for seven years of his life before Enterprise. The side alleys were still backed up with abandoned deflated soccer balls and flags of drying washing still piled dangerously high up into the moss ridden rooftops in the grey skies above. The pavements outside were still littered with potholes and crevices, and the front door steps to the ashen apartment blocks were still worn with well-rounded corners and edges. It was still a picture of great age with a distinct musky smell still present in the heavy air around the block. Mostly though, it was still home.
In the back of the car was Porthos. He knew this place as home as well his anticipating owner did. His old frayed tartan bed beckoned warmly to him and with it his spot in the kitchen under the bay window where his food dish then and forever now always sat. He whined accusingly at the car window, his only solid barrier to the comforts of apartment 187, before he turned his fantastically rich brown eyes on Jonathan. Jonathan turned his own eyes on T'Pol. She was asleep.
It struck Jonathan as a strange sight to behold, after all this time. He knew Vulcans slept, he was hardly that naïve, although the amount of hours they slept in comparison to humans he did not know – less than their generous eight he presumed.
He knew they meditated before they slept (which he finally gathered that was what she had been participating in when she had sat forward and closed her eyes two hours down the road), yet even after keeping a Vulcan as his much valued and trusted second-in-command for so many years, he still could not imagine such orderly and efficient beings wasting their time on sleep.
He eventually made to wake her on a prompting whimper from a dire Porthos when he hesitated once again. Seeing how peaceful and controlled her olive dashed face was reminded him of the changes she had undergone over the past seven years. These changes were no light-hearted affair either, not on Vulcan terms at least.
For most all members of the species it would have been fitting enough torture for the gravest and most taboo of all crimes; to be ordered on a star ship littered by the primates that were humans, and even outranked and commanded by one. Being ridiculed for keeping emotions bound tight to the back of your subconscious; being judged and summarised simply by the fine pointed tips of your ears and being bombarded by laughter and anger and tears, the acts you must deny yourself the luxury of even in the most pressing of time, day in, day out. T'Pol had despised every minute of her first mission away with the Enterprise NX-01. After a week though that had slowly begun to change.
So when he compared her then, with the same façade of perfect control and efficiency that she wore on her sleeping face now, that mirrored the person she had been, the changes stunned him. He wondered even if he hadn't destroyed her in a sense.
Porthos barked. The harsh call sunk into every corner of the car and forced T'Pol awake before Jonathan could shake her. Something akin to a sheepish whimper escaped the beagle's maw quietly as Jonathan turned on him and glowered in the sightless dark.
"Is this where you lived?"
T'Pol interrupted the confrontation between man and dog as she gazed silently upward at the towering mass of antique brick and concrete, her brow twitching to rise but staying put instead. He smiled affectionately as he followed her eyes along the dated sculpture.
"I could never bare to part with the place, so I gave it to my cousin Richard to look after while I was gone. Neither of us banked on me being away for so long, so now's the test to see if he actually bothered after all this time."
Finally they exited the sleek silver beast that Jonathan had been given off Starfleet, Porthos and his quick white paws commanding instant lead as they made for the front door.
The door was as ancient as the rest of the building and its accompanying street, painted in a dull matted green and chipped away across its rough surface to tell of the many other coats composed of the same dull lime that had been layered on in the past. Beside it though on an ancient grey slab a sophisticated chunk of security apparatus sat boasting its most up-to-date upgrades against the backdrop of a wall that had seen many eventful, sorrowful and difficult seasons.
Out of a habit that had never died Jonathan scuffed his feet against the curved edges on the top step of three. T'Pol stood ridged at the shadowed bottom, standing as she had so many times before in his commanding midst. Porthos was at her feet, circling restlessly between her slim ankles, ever whining and anticipating the final destination of his long deserted bed.
T'Pol had never hindered any affection for the small dog. Whereas she had finally come to tolerate his often overpowering scent as she had with the humans she had never so much as brought her hand to glide across his finely marked back or behind the soft down of his oversized ears to scratch it with the tips of her fingers. Yet now she barely took notice of the actions, actions which would have before set her sensitive skin to crawl and her nose to object to the weltering smell with a slight crinkle across the bridge, as his warm side persisted to brush up and along her ankles during the time it took the owner to unleash the door, and inevitably his dog inside. Porthos was gone when the hinges subsided, up the stairs that were within and around their winding pathway towards the fourteenth floor he remembered sauntering up for the first few months of his active life with Jonathan, before Enterprise had beckoned them both. Beagles were renowned for being smart and he was no real exception with that. He would be sitting patiently outside apartment 187 before Jonathan and T'Pol had even managed to call down the elevator.
"I think I underestimated him."
Jonathan turned to T'Pol with a creased smile. "He's not exactly your average beagle."
There was no argument in that.
There was argument however in whether it was miserable nerves or uncomfortable apprehension that Jonathan watched flicker by in T'Pol's even cast eyes as they darted up, down and around every gap and corner to the shadowed ground floor hallway of the apartments. He settled on a medium between the two and offered her the rusty elevator first, playing up to that perfect gentleman he had promised her he would be.
She always knew he act of nothing less.
She was intrigued, and for a Vulcan it was a generous way to be when in viewing of a human's living quarters. She fell short of being disgusted or uncomfortable, instead reaching to be curious and even approving of where her former Captain had once lived.
It was a simple affair, a two bedroom flat with one joining en suite and a living room and kitchen joined as one decent sized room, separated only by the divide of lino and carpet and handsome oak worktops.
The walls were of a placid yellow and the carpet a modest beige, a combination that neither insulted nor excited the eye. His ceilings were dirty ivory and the window frames an unpolished sun-bleached birch. For the time they lived in, it was quite an old-fashioned settlement, with an old homely feel throughout.
Porthos had wasted no time in settling his rump down in his old tartan bed, which still took up its terrain in Jonathan's little bedroom. Jonathan had followed him in as he conducted a brief overview of the condition of the place.
"Well, I can't complain."
As he stood in the middle of the living room, declaring that that was his inspection over he turned to T'Pol. She remained standing in the doorway, the door not having managed to shut over yet as she lingered unsure of how an appropriate way to behave here would be. Her head was tilted very slightly to her shoulder and her eyes carried on the same scrutinising search that they had begun in the car.
"It's okay to come in you know."
He brought forth her attention quickly and she stepped forward without a word.
"You hungry?"
Her eyes had rolled onto the biggest of the accessories in the apartment, his television set; a wide flat screen that dominating the south wall of his living room. It was impressive in its colossal state, but to her one of the most useless and abused pieces of apparatus humanity had ever conjured up from their inventive minds.
From there she came across an empty crystal vase on a birch windowsill, certificates and abstract art pieces littered on the other walls and numerous photographs of Jonathan with his family or Trip or Porthos, and there was even one small silver framed picture of himself and Hoshi in Brazil, taking up residency in a stack of suspiciously unstable looking shelves.
These were just the 2D photographs though, and she discovered albums under his coffee table and on the shaky shelves that were crammed full of the small silver disks containing holograms no doubts of himself and his loved and acquainted ones.
Then she realised she had been spoken to and consisted not so much to blush as to hide some sort of buried level of embarrassment in her ever docile gaze.
"No, I'm fine thank you."
Jonathan leant on the kitchen units for a minute, and battled with her for the better part of thirty seconds to claim eye contact with her, which he eventually grasped in the end.
"You haven't eaten since we left Enterprise, and all I've had since then is Admiral Forrest's mother's fruit cake, which has left much to be desired with my tongue…" He reflected on that for a second then shook the thoughts away. "I'm sure I have something in here that'll do us both anyway."
Without offering his ear to another word from T'Pol he began scanning his cupboards and fridge for a vegetarian supplement to his usual evening meal of anything taken from a cow or a pig.
"I phoned Richard, asked ahead if he'd restock for me…"
T'Pol watched silently the amusement that was Jonathan Archer's backside high in the air as he continued to root around in the bottom cupboards for something to claim as dinner for two. He finally came up triumphant a few minutes later.
"I don't suppose you've ever had beans before?"
~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~.
There were small church candles littered throughout my cupboards and drawers and one box of half full matches left over from all the birthday cakes and Christmases that had been seen in my modest little home, so aided by them that night I helped to settle her in. It didn't so much unease me as pain me to have to do this, for as close as she had become to the humans aboard Enterprise, and as use as she had grown to our ways of life, our silly insignificant quirks and restless emotions, she was still a Vulcan, who you could tell when looking into her sage eyes, belonged on Vulcan with her family and her kind.
And as much as I loved and truly did appreciate to have her company here on the first night of our retirement from Enterprise, and fully valued the comfort she offered from that hollowing fact, I knew she could never truly call my little apartment on my little corner of Earth home in any comfortable or content way.
Her continuing misery, to which she would have denied that was how she felt, conjured up something in my own edgy soul that night and the conjuring in my dreams was what had been so far the most terrifying and utterly heartbreaking days of my life. Only it wasn't so much a dream as just a vividly detailed and elongated recall of events, a reminder to the subconscious that those dark, damnable days had actually happened and I was most likely never allowed to forget them and all the many haunting moments that contracted with them.
Perhaps it was prompted most by my concerns for her and her vague future. She had family, she had told me this back at that high-spirited party, but where were they? On Vulcan, doubtlessly, burying their placid faces away from hers, their eyes cast over her shoulders, around her outline, anywhere but on her tainted body, to make sure she knew that she was no longer considered one of their bloodline, even to an extreme their species. But they were not in my dream that night, to begin with anyway, simply because they did not belong to most of the memories that drew in like a hungry fog to claim the sweat from my brow and cold low grunts from my taut throat that night.
"You lost her?" were three of the rare few words I remembered outing in the next lot of long and difficult days that were to come. I couldn't see Trip over the communicator but the trembling panic in his quaky voice brought forth no other imagine but one of pale horror and complete devastation.
"She aint answerin' her comm. sir, an' she aint where we said we'd rendezvous after we were both done with our jobs. It's been two hours, ah thought ah should let y' know."
It was at this early on point that I had to stand back and remind myself of what a dear treasured friend Trip was, because if he had been footed in front of me right then and I had just happened to be holding a phase pistol in my cold white fist at that moment, then there would have been no flicker of hesitation in my stern unblinking eyes for that brief second of unaccountable rage that tore at my mind. I knew, and I had proof from others' ears, that I had ordered them to stay close together in a planet that had little information about it held on the Vulcan database.
I listened to myself bark the orders I barely remember issuing now, and then demanding of Hoshi a scan for any Vulcan bio signs on the yellow surface we hovered steadily above. Instead she offered me a hail that flowered before her as Trip's shaky voice left us and as I listened to it my heart fell hard to the floor.
"Captain Archer? Yes, yes this is Ambassador Kreenal."
A pale face of slight purple hue dominated my vision and a pair of arrogant crimson flared eyes heeded a warning to me that what she had to say would not bring me any desired relief.
"Yes, I'm afraid I forgot to mention that our people hinder something of a most awful hatred for the Vulcan kind." I almost laughed with shear disbelief, but instead remained in stony silence.
"For years we have tried to right this wrong in them," the boredom in her voice wrote out an oxymoron of the truth to this, "but still, most of our people would hold no great guilt to heart if they were to say for the sake of talking, kill one of their many numbers. Please, I urgently advise you warn your Sub Commander of this."
She was gone during the time it took me to blink blatantly at the screen. The three pairs of eyes left remaining on the bridge were all trained, unflinching and painfully shocked, on me.
"Malcolm."
He was on his feet before I had even finished the hoarse whisper of his name.
"Yes sir."
"You're with me."
The dream, or flashback, failed to recall to me in my trapped sleep most any of the agonizing two-day search that had followed, except minor blurry images and the tail end 'rescue' to conclude. None of the three of us (Trip's guilt kept him down with Malcolm and myself) left the sweltering heat of the beautiful inner cities of a planet whose name I have long since forgotten. We hunted vigorously through sandy back alleys and beehives of public buildings. Not a street or pathway or city square wasn't raked and picked at by our dry squinted eyes. We dared to ask if any of these purple painted faces had seen our lost science officer but we received so many black eyes and grazed cheekbones that the hate riddled silence we were always offered as our full answer did not become worth it anymore.
Hoshi's scans became lost causes; hers, our and everyone's hopes slowly and meekly began to erase themselves.
I could still feel the undesired aching that dominated every conscious nerve of my brain. It was a hybrid of guilt, loss and angst concentrated into a rolling ball of bleak shock and refusal to believe, which was quickly countered by a burdened reasoning that told me straight I had to believe and I had to accept.
Gentle understanding hands had begun to glide across my arched back and I realised without caring that I was on my knees, staring tearfully into the copper alloy of a magnificent water fountain in one of the innermost town's many overflowing centres.
"Shall I ask Hoshi to run another scan Sir?"
Malcolm's voice had been comforting, it was comforting to hear another throat torn with grief, but his suggestion only seared me.
"No. Let her know we're coming back up, and tell Travis to prepare to break orbit."
My shoulders shook violently as I said it, admitted it, and tears void of shame had started to abuse my scorched eyes but I knew it had to be done, and so did Malcolm and Trip.
It was in slowly rising next though, standing back up onto my exhausted burnt feet and taking one last detestable look over the serpent headed horse statute before me, that I watched the end of my heartbreaking search stumble into a shadowed alley, flanked, or more so carried by five burly slight-purple skinned beings.
Neither Malcolm nor Trip saw it. Their own dry bleak eyes were trained on my filthy back, the back that took off with the rest of my heat stroked body in a flash of adrenaline, no hesitations or doubts ever daring to cross my determined mind as I instantly adopted a ferocious chase.
The road to that narrow spidery alleyway, hurdled by a teaming mass of purple skinned shoppers, workers and general wonderers had never stretched so long in the five or six times I had paced it in vain hope. I lost Trip and Malcolm but at the speed I suddenly acquired it was no difficult task to accomplish.
I angered and agitated the crowds as I discarded their shopping from their hands and their balance from their stances. I was slain with fingered points of accusation and dirty narrow stares and loud obnoxious exclamations, but I was only aware of this because my two crewmen had watched it all with awe-filled aghast and silent confusion, later telling me how I had been greeted down the street in sickbay.
I could not run forever only because the dusty roads and scarred pavements could not hold before me an endless path. My speed was already breakneck but the pitiful chocks of protest I heard as I closed in dangerously fast on my destination forced my wild feet to thunder on quicker until I reached the end and discovered my impulse was horribly justified.
T'Pol was not dead, although in the second I discovered her I would have shot her myself to take her out of the hellish state she was now in.
There was no gallant rescue here. I shot two of the five aliens, who in human terms would have bordered closely on their early thirties. As their dead weights fell on my phase pistol the remaining three scattered as cowards would in the playground as soon as they had realised they had cornered off the little sister of the biggest boy in school.
Right now T'Pol was my kid sister, the one I had always wanted, always begged and pestered my parents for but disappointingly never got; she was my little cousin Jess, who had never learnt to defend herself in any way; she was my most beloved and treasured, lost and found and perhaps lost again. She was my kin, as close to me as Trip was and my father had been. What hurt her beat me in conjunction, with the full brunt of the merciless sting directed straight at my bleeding heart.
A crowd laden with curiosity had begun to breed just outside the alleyway. I saw a hundred pairs of crimson, hazel and olive eyes blink stupidly in at me, then widen and narrow in waves as they laid their prejudice sights on the torn points of T'Pol's battered and swollen ears. Not soon after they were gone. Trip and Malcolm came up in a rush of red cheeks and breathless chests, nonetheless parting and diminishing the swarms with their phase pistols out for all to see. There was no leeway in their eyes – if we were stopped from leaving then they would let themselves loose without remorse.
I just knelt and started pointlessly at her for a while. Five years previous to this if I had discovered the very same sight I would have been shocked, outraged and no more. She would have been the Vulcan I had known for a total of five minutes and despised for every second of that, but also appreciated that she didn't deserve the beating she had taken just for being born into the race she was.
Suddenly I jerked sharply in the drenched tangle of sheets I shared with my dog that night. I could not emerge from the heap of memories, not for every inch of struggle and protest I put in to escape, and so across the soul I was struck again now as I had been with that same poisoned sting when I had found T'Pol then.
Trip and Malcolm continued to keep the hate ridden sea at bay as I took her in my arms and carried the defeated body away, a body that felt of almost nothing but a burden of pain and injustice, back to the shuttlepod.
We could have opened fire on that planet, planted our phase canons in their cracked and barren desert grounds, mirrored the damage that had been done unto my loyal second-in-command on their men, woman and children, on their rich and poor, on Kreenal and her own family. They had done this not for a ransom, not for the expenses that our ship could offer them, not even for the values that hung over T'Pol's head, and how much I would have paid for her back, but for sport, for pride, for hate and for fun.
I hadn't the mind to do it though, I had myself focused on only one thing, and it was not petty revenge.
It took Phlox nothing short of three agonizing hours to compile a full and comprehensive list of injuries. Every one of them that he solemnly reported back to me I numbed to, as I stood at the bedside of my Sub Commander silent and motionless, holding her sallow hand.
They, whoever 'they' five had been, and probably with others more, had broken both her ankles first, most likely so she could not run from them. Phlox assured me that this is what they had done first, that gauged with her many other injuries these were the oldest.
She had been shot too, several times by phase pistols similar to ours, just not ones as powerful. Her shoulders and torso were littered with small second-degree burns.
Her ears had been shredded and this is where the most fun had been had. Down the middle of each handsomely pointed tip was now a schism; in effect she had four points between the two ears. They had vomited a steady rich flow of her green Vulcan blood all over my dusty chest, where her head had rested after I was sure she knew she was in my arms and not theirs.
That same blood that I could see clearly in my vivid landscape of a dream was still on my chest, still drenched through in the same filthy clothes that I had donned for nearly three days now. Returning back to my quarters was quite simply out of the question, being selfish enough to cater for my own needs at this moment in time was unthinkable. It was a sin and I intended not to go to hell for it.
The doctor never argued with me, but the flatness of his often alluring and brilliant blue eyes warned me that broken ankles and severed ears were hardly the worst of it. Those blue eyes became a very real part of the memory as well, almost as if they watched over me now were I lay trapped in my bed and in my past, acting as another painful reminder of what had happened.
"I'm afraid… she's been poisoned Captain, and quite fatally."
I must have reacted in some way, I just don't remember how.
Trip claimed that he had walked in at that moment, and in my dreams I did see him. I saw him for an all too brief second clad with a stalwart face and strong confident eyes that were there to grasp onto mines and assure me of the health of my first officer, that the word 'poisoned' in this case meant nothing more than being a little queasy with her food for the next few days, and that Phlox had not said 'fatally', instead I had just imagined the worst. But when his hand came down on my tense shoulder blades that façade broke and he could offer me no real reassurance at all. Although he was still something of a comfort, as Malcolm had been with his strained voice.
It was in this dire moment that the reason for why I was being made to relive this temporary hell through these long and crudely detailed flashbacks became glaringly obvious and an ease of clarity took a wash over my hot brow where my dog's maw was now at rest.
Suddenly I was gone from my Sub Commander's side and I was instead in the cool of my serene quarters, taken here on the advice from Phlox that "Someone should probably contact her family."
That strange bemusement was back, the same one that had swept through me as I had watched T'Pol sleep in my car, and when I had seen her cry over a body she hadn't remembered killing, when she had shouted at me and when she had smiled once when she hadn't thought I was watching.
The thought of T'Pol with family had never once crossed my mind. She had only ever mentioned them with bitter secrete remorse over a dinner once, when she stated that they and the High Command would no longer recognize her as one of them. I didn't know what they consisted of; mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles; I had limited experience in Vulcan sociology and family lattices. I hadn't the imagination to sight T'Pol with a brother or sister in my head, or even a father or a mother. I hardly even perceived her as a Vulcan anymore, certainly not a stereotypical member of the species I had adapted myself to hate and spite so much before.
For hours I simply stood. There had been many occasions during my time on Enterprise when I had simply stood in front of my comm., listening to Admiral Forrest's appraisals and chides, composing solemn or proud speeches, shouting and smiling, laughing and on a rare time crying. And for hours now I had stood and paced, seeking out a passage of contact back to T'Pol's family, to warn them of her uncertain future in living.
Very few Vulcans, in hearing the 'rebel's' name were willing to aid me, and the search quickly became a test of patience. I could feel chilling frustrations and nerves coursing through my veins, constantly pouring over my persistent headaches as my white fists twitched and my throat fought relentlessly with me to bombard the next Vulcan who cut me off with abuse and hellish curses.
It was Admiral Forrest who salvaged my situation.
"Jon the Vulcans are growing bitty with you again, what've you done this time?"
There was a slight smile there that shouldn't have been on his lips, but when I turned with my matted gaze and dry voice it quickly diminished.
For some reason I remember all of that conversation, where I barely remembered any other conversation from those anguished days.
"I need to contact Sub Commander T'Pol's family."
A thoughtful silence cloaked us for a brief second.
"Why?"
"There's been an attack. She's in a pretty bad shape. The doctor's not sure how she's going to be."
I was revealing the truth to myself as I did curtly to him, one I had continued to deny myself despite the constant counter with reason and logical conclusions in my battling conscience.
"I'm sorry to hear that Jon, I really am, but they won't want to see her."
"Well I'll talk to them then."
"Do you really think you'll have any more luck than she would?"
"I'll damn well try."
I saw my own eyes then, and they took me aback as they did the Admiral. They were narrow and dark, no longer splashed with fatigue and grief but brimmed with a cold stubbornness that without question would see I had my way.
An hour later I locked those same stern eyes onto T'Pol's father.
I was confronted by an arrogant, self-centered, narrow mined specimen of the species and I wagered all this simply from the icy, unflinching center of his placid grey eyes. He hadn't offered me a word yet and already I despised him. Although if I were being honest with myself this is almost parallel to how I felt about T'Pol when she had first crossed my midst.
I began an awkward haul of banter.
"I'm afraid, there's no easy way to say this Sir, but your daughter's… she's been badly injured in an attack that was labored by prejudice from the Salan people. My doctor's doing the best he can with her right now but there's no certainty that she'll pull through her injuries. I thought it best if I told you this myself as her Captain and her friend, and send my condolences to you as well."
We shared a long stroke of silence and that silence echoed in my sleep as I waited apprehensively for his answer just as I had two years ago. And again it was both the answer I had expected and one that rewarded me with unexpected painful shock at the same time.
"I have no daughter."
The link died without my consent.
T'Pol, inevitably, lived after a long and uncertain week in sickbay. Next to none of that week was relived itself in my sleep although I do remember on my own accord how wholly difficult and horrendous the past six and a half days had been.
Trip became something of a veteran Captain by the end of it through the amount of times I left him in charge when the bridge was quiet and my services not compulsory. He would most probably have enjoyed it too, had it not been for the reason why I was leaving him in command so often.
Never once did Phlox ask me to leave his sickbay and his patient, and the quality of understanding was more abundant in him than I had originally thought. His optimism too was far more resilient than it had ever been or I had ever seen it before. In effect traces of it rubbed off on me, and these were the times I smiled wryly and hoped.
I had shed my now characteristically shameless tears when she finally came to. Her cool hand had responded to the touch of mines, her fingertips twitching stiffly and her smooth flawless palm curling to grasp around mines as she took a desperate gasp of air, as if this whole time she had delved deep under the water of her subconscious and was unable to resurface until now.
"Captain… you're crying."
Although barely audible I allowed those first three words to bounce joyously through my head for hours to come.
"I don't understand why…"
With a start I finally woke up into blissful consciousness. Even though I had desperately desired to wake for the better part of three hours though I willingly allowed the last of the horrific trauma, its final valiant last acts, to play out in my dazed and heated mind.
"You spoke to my father?"
"I had to try. A week ago you almost weren't here with us anymore. Anyone's family deserves to know about the possible death of one of their own."
"And what did he say? … Captain, please, what did he say?"
"That… he had no daughter."
"… I, would have expected that, but thank you, anyway."
I received a delayed letter from T'Pol's mother the day after her recovery. It was short, but it was all I had wanted to hear from her family.
Captain Archer
"I am most regretful to hear of my daughter's current condition and would be grateful if you could keep me as well informed as possible on her progress."
Appreciated
T'Chall.
I debated for hours with myself on whether to enlighten T'Pol on this. She had at least another two days left designated by Phlox to remain in sickbay, but otherwise would be perfectly fine after everything she had been dragged and driven through. In the end I replied, but never revealed to her her mother's simple letter.
T'Chall
"I'm pleased to reply that T'Pol will be fine. She will have make a full recovery in approximately two days where she will return carrying on her valued work and duties on our ship.
You have a most wonderful daughter Ma'am, and life on the Enterprise would never have remained the same without her. I only wish the circumstances of her status with your people was better."
Yours sincerely
Jonathan Archer.
With a heavy sigh I returned back to a dreamless sleep for the rest of the fresh early morning, trying my best but failing miserably to once again forget what I had remembered.
~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~.
Chapter Three later…