A.N: I am unusual cruel to T'Pol, I know. That's in reference to the upcoming chapter, which is also more of a filler of explanations than anything, so again I apologise, I do. I also thank all the lovely reviewers; you're always appreciated with a big smile.
Telaka
. . . . . . .
I looked deep into those golden brown eyes, aged only by wisdom, laughter and travel and almost fell into a shameless, lost sob. Instead, in restraint from tears, I stretched my dark lips into an insanely pleased smile, with a chide of charisma and seamless, innocent cheek, and waved slightly, making those golden eyes collapse in a gentle, soothing laugh.
"Travis, my boy. Starfleet feeding you well?"
Without removing my smile or spoiling hers I shook my head and sat back languidly in a cushy silver chair. "They can feed me all the processed chicken wings they want, but only in tasting your sweet, sweet macaroni 'n' cheese once again will I ever be full. How's life treating you mum?"
It had been many years since I had seen my mum face-to-face, smile-to-smile and touched on the warm embrace that had gotten me through so many years of teenage angst and brotherly torture. I suffered so much to see her so clearly now and yet to be seated so far away from her and the warm, homely environment of the Horizon, both of which I missed far beyond painful words of loss.
There was nothing of an amazing difference in her usual routine to report and to tell long, enigmatic tales about, but her every accented word I hung onto and cherished ferociously and thus found myself pining ever more to return to the one, sole place I could really affectionately call home, save the Enterprise, which had finally come to rest and left us crawling once again on Earth, which I had never been too keen on doing.
My turn, inevitably, came to tell the stories I had skipping in my letters and reports back to my mother. If nothing else they were to remind her of my young, enthusiastic voice and to allow her to gaze on, countless light-years away, at the son she had in spirit lost for close to seven years now. As anticipated she became reduced to red, bittersweet tears.
"Come home Travis."
It was something of an instructed plea and a rather sudden one. I felt almost in a stroke of humour to reply 'Yes Sir' but saw her eyes were not in any particular mood for that subjection of humour, although she continued to smile with hurting joy.
My position in the chair fell forward slightly, my rough elbows settling lightly on the smooth edges of a fine pine desk laid out neatly before me as I leant closer to the small screen in a private communications room.
"Starfleet've already asked if I'd host some lectures and presentations for them, within the week. I can't go hitchhiking across the galaxy right now."
She countered with an almost unbearably tempting argument. "We have a delivery to make that's on an almost direct route that would bring us back to Earth. We'll be rendezvousing in a place no more than a day from Earth in a little over a week, and well, do I have to explain what came to mind son?"
A rounding of the puppy-dog gaze spilled into the dirty white rims of her amazingly rich eyes as she blinked slowly and cautiously, waiting with utter patience in my heavy, comprehending silence for a vocal answer.
It had begun already to grow late. My day of fame with Hoshi was quietly drawing to an end and a late night dinner composed of Starfleet's finest mass produced gravy and meatloaf stood waiting in what we had hoped to be an almost deserted dining hall. I began to wonder, and then hoped, dreamed and preyed as a muse came gradually to me and temptation took over in the mind on the in prospect of returning to the dwelling of the Mayweathers', with company in tow.
"Do you have room for one more linguist?"
She looked confused but smelt the wavering of my reluctant to leave right now back to the Horizon and instead how my mind slowly ground towards the concept and making it a real possibility. I was just curios now if I could bring a guest.
"You know we always need translators. Just most of them are spineless student teachers that don't make it past the first fortnight."
I half nodded and half listened in her half laugh, then half smiled and returned all strayed attention back onto my mother, as I had only a few seconds left in front of the screen.
"Love you mum."
She frowned, her dark brow conveying a none too amused picture of confusion and frustrated love. "Travis…"
Quickly I rose from the cushy chair and leant forward to kiss the screen with all delicate grace. "Talk to you later, I promise. Just let me… confirm a few things, okay?"
It was the closest shave to a 'yes' she would be able to take for now and she seized it greedily with a wistful smile and a hopeful nod.
"Give Paul my regards."
Again she nodded and concealed with some success the new wash of pain that drowned her eyes as I reached forward to end the link. Unable to conjure anything of a vocal sooth I simply leant towards her again and kissed the screen gentle once again before waving slowly to portray my reluctance to say goodbye and then said goodbye and killed the screen. Regardless of the pleads of Starfleet I would be coming home.
. . . . . . .
It was four o'clock in the morning and on a prompt from ancestral instinct Jonathan woke up. He woke up with a rough scratchy grunt and the last vigorous wash of a cold, light sweat. What had caused these were forgotten on the evaporation of the enigmatic dream that had cloaked him for the past few hours, but he knew he was wholly glad to find himself in a formidable reality once again.
For ten dark, labour-breathed minutes he sat contently up in his warm bed and thought about nothing, his mind becoming a swirling void of blissful emptiness. The silence in the apartment lulled a silky calmness onto his taut muscles and his causeless apprehension soon lost all power of sweat and agitation. Slowly he began to lower his tired head back onto his feathery pillow and even managed to settle slightly and allow the stuffed weight of his duvet to coax him into a swathe of ease.
However not any longer than another ten minutes later he found himself once more pulled into a stiff sitting position with his neck craned painfully to the right, to the wall that separated his and T'Pol's rooms.
That night had witnessed a beautiful silence, a cool unbroken layer of peace that had suffered nothing in terms of disturbance save tuneless winds and the soothing rustle of dead autumn leaves. Overall it had seemed a good omen for something, although for 'what' was still undecided.
At twenty past four this bliss was shattered.
. . . . . . .
I sat up, again. It seemed I had no great array of choice, as I grew restless with a low hum that had suddenly found its way into my eardrum. I called it a hum, but the low broken grunting din seemed not to have a class of noise for itself, just a tuneful few chords, and so ragged edges of dissatisfaction ate quietly away at my subconscious. I frowned at its invisible essence and then gave it the satisfaction of finally getting up in the midst of the early morning and its grey darkness.
The humming seemed not to have a source either to call its own, but my eyes in the shade of my shadow-washed room seemed constantly drawn to the joining wall of the bedrooms. My legs in turn were drawn to the cold living room beyond.
There was no comforting warmth out in the spacious main room of my apartment as there was in my bedroom. My torso rippled into a blotchy shade of blue as I stood vulnerably with only a pair of ridiculously long boxer shorts and a set of frayed white sports socks on. Across my cream couch sat a Starfleet t-shirt and I quickly grabbed in and threw it over my head, enjoying the new soft warmth that the black cotton offered me for a quick second before I called out for the lights to come on in a gentle glow.
I remembered again why I had been brought out here as I squinted in the painful yellow wash of light that was summoned instead and simultaneously tuned into a bombardment of rough melodic grunts, no longer a smooth chain of unidentified noise but instead a series of short painful coughs. They grew increasingly disturbing, and they stemmed from T'Pol's bedroom.
For a long unnecessarily long moment I froze and I stayed happily rooted in my living room in front of my television set and surrounded by homely photographs. The moment soon began to tear at me though with remorse, and an all to familiar wash of guilt soaked over me and laughed at me as it did so, and as the grunts grew louder I grew more terrified. I could never say why.
"T'Pol?" The word echoed flatly around the apartment as I came to the heavy oak door and knocked gently with loosely clenched knuckles. I cringed to think I had woken her but regardless of that called her short name several times again. The noise as way of an answer grew louder and it came to me that it was the sound of discomfort and illness.
As that idea smacked me hard across the mind I felt almost complied to laugh. I had nothing to worry about, as quite blatantly Vulcans did not get sick. Although this reassurance left the noise once again with no explanation I nodded at it and shook hands with it and liked it, so wholly agreed with it.
For a third time in vain I called T'Pol's name and knocked sympathetically on the door. Perhaps she had finally learnt how to work the radio and had chosen distortion as her station to lull her discontented mind to sleep. She was Vulcan, even now she still managed to surprise me – to discover she had a taste for distortion would just be one of those many times.
I was wearing a hood of pretence and I was shameless to admit it.
Before I managed finally to scrape forth the courage to open the door and find out the reason for the chilling grunts, the graphic image of T'Pol's ankle in that dog's muzzle came back again with the shock of how much blood she had actually been able to shed in such a small area over a matter of hours. Reality was drawn in perfect pitch and I wasn't that much of a fool to ignore it.
"T'Pol?" I whispered carefully her name as I opened tentatively the bedroom door and allowed a streak of the living room's bold yellow radiance to spill into the dark warmth of the eerily still and clammy room.
It was one of an almost unaccountable amount of times that I wished to be wrong, made rarer still by wanting to be wrong in the midst of T'Pol. She was something of an extraordinary friend to me, but I always did play to get small smug triumphs over her, from the day we had left on our mission with the Klingon till the day the mission was declared over, and still now.
Unfortunately I was right. I was listening to a record of discomfort and illness. Beyond that it was a cry for mercy from an inferno of hot white pain and to escape from an allergic reaction whose intensity was far beyond anything I had ever seen before.
I didn't much care for being right now.
. . . . . . .
Something stirred with a whippet of unrest inside of me, beginning to move at the bottom of my memories as I felt myself being moved physically. I resisted as I detected a touch on my burning skin and, resenting that, felt some win over the body who tried to take me unwillingly as I blindly fought the hands off. In the end however the stubborn and somewhat harried entity that was Jonathan at four o'clock in the morning prevailed over me.
I allowed, with some quiet grudge, his warm, muscular hold to suffocate me in the gentlest sense as he adopted a far more domineering grip, then felt in the rash of heat that had risen from my stomach a level of comfort that I needed all of a sudden come from him.
This was the basis from which my memories stirred.
This hold, this particular embrace of his felt familiar to me. As I registered with some difficulty in a subconscious haze the feel of Jonathan's hands entwined protectively around my shoulders and then my shaken knees I knew without question or doubt or flaw in my confidence of my knowledge that this was what had revived me five years ago.
I shuddered bodily. My ankle blazed vengefully in an inferno of hot white pain and it was far more difficult to forget now when my mind was in such a fevered disarray. I summoned just enough of my wit to utter the name of my carrier – perhaps just to confirm that it was actually him.
There was a sad bitter smile in the response I received and I saw it even, through a blurry flicker of my eyelids.
"Vulcans don't suffer allergic reactions my ass."
On his triumphant note I moaned a logical protest but all that tumbled from my dry mouth was a mumble of inaudible groans. A quick hush from Jonathan as we began to move out sent me on my set path into the clear-cut bank of memories.
The sun on Salanacon is hot, on average a generous few degrees above Vulcan's day-to-day temperatures. I found it no less difficult to withstand than the susceptible colds of New York in November, which I had accustomed myself to within a day, after a horrendous blizzard during a visit to several High Command colleagues many years ago.
Commander Tucker's body on the other hand had other ideas from allowing him to strain gracefully under the three dominant violet suns of Salanacon.
"Why aint this place on the database then?"
His pant on every second word may have been amusing to some. I may have been mildly concerned in some sense as his superior, if not for the edgy curiosity he possessed to see this supposed Warp 7.5 technology that more than kept him standing. I was down for simple micro-scans and other unspoken reasons.
It was to be no more than a half-day mission, perhaps a day if Charles bargained well with the Captain, who was more eager to get to our next shore-leave stop.
"Our peoples' history together, though not considered significant in Vulcan timelines, is not a harmonic one."
Trip's fine golden brow was quipped both in curiosity and concern.
We were footed on the edge of an entrance to one of the many bustling towns of Salanacon. Although so far we had not yet encountered one of the many Sala people yet the distinctly pitched sounds of rushing and working and fraternising came clear over the sandy brick wall, heeding to us that it would not be long before we met one of their many purple hued kind.
Behind us was a fabulous opulent desert of silver grains of sand and a fourth small but the nonetheless glorious golden sun, on a parallel running to the three purple ones. Seated on the edge of the never-ending landscape was our dusty shuttlepod.
"Is it safe for you to be bringin' those ears in there then?"
With all confidence I nodded. "Quite. Over the decades the feud has settled, and apart from perhaps a nerve of disgruntlement within the people they should recognise me as a non-threat as I do them."
The Southern Commander was far from a level of convincement. "Should?" was all he uttered as way of a protest though.
So we carried on regardless in our mild-mannered mission. Almost immediately after crossing the perimeter and making it to the building dedicated to Warp technology our interest were divided. The first three hours of a twelve-hour exploration were initially to be dedicated to a tour around their facilities, a show to highlight their achievements and perhaps allow some bargaining on Trip's behalf for a few trades that would assist in much needed upgrades. Two hours in it was blatantly obvious that another hour would be far from sufficient in covering the rest of the building's grounds.
"Aw T'Pol, c'mon now."
Trip was one of the few that called me T'Pol, bar the Captain, and I often wondered why I didn't chide him more often about it. In this for-instance I forced upon myself a deep breath of warm stale air within a room in the main lab of operations that contained the epicentre of all work and toil – a prototype Warp 8.1 engine.
"We've only been here two hours an' we aint even been shown the gist of it all yet. Ah've still to see the blueprints this baby's gonna go on to."
Behind him stood an eager Chief Engineer of the purple hued Salan race. Often I did a double take on his features, but my eyes always landed on a bright, enthusiastic smile, a wavering one but a smile nonetheless.
"Another hour should be more than enough time to allow you a look at what we planned. Blueprints to Starships were not part of what we had discussed."
Trip's eyes pained and I almost sighed irritably again as his face rolled into a half beg. For a brief second I was reminded of the rich brown eyes of Porthos and found myself losing the will to argue with him. In my hand my sleeping scanner waited patiently along with the subtropical oasis five or six kilometres away, where I had designated the place for part my scans.
"We will rendezvous here in two hours Commander."
Behind him the Salan seemed unquestionably thrilled. Trip frowned, but looked hopeful.
"Ah thought we were t' stay together?"
In my head I once again recounted the Captain's orders and found them rather tedious in nature.
"This is my away mission. It will do us no harm to take separate paths for a couple of hours."
In no way did Charles look ready to protest, instead donning an eager, wholly thankful grin.
"Two hours?"
I nodded. "Two hours."
On the fourth hour I threw my bruised arm up in the air and deftly blocked yet another shatteringly powerful punch. The Salan still despised the Vulcan race.
On me were trained five low-level phase pistols, their beams not nearly powerful enough to knock out even a human but their hot red rays more than enough to seer third degree burns into my skin.
There were five pistols and seven of the Salan. The unarmed three at first took great pleasure in fighting fist to fist. A couple of them even managed a successful hit. Their pleasures dispatched rather quickly however when they discovered despite my lack of height and muscular build, certainly compared to them, I was no vulnerable target, and I was formidable enough to make the fight a fair challenge.
A dank, stained back alley was where I had unwittingly been dragged in to in the midst of this derogatory fight. It worked both to my advantage and was where I eventually fell.
The Salan cannot see in the dark, much like humans although their line of vision is far more superior in poorness. Their twenty hours of intense sunlight a day in a twenty-six hour day, with only dull grey nights, had ruined what was needed to be able to see past corner-shadows and ebony cover. Vulcans as an extreme opposite have an acute eye in the dark, with only a little less vision at night than during any well sunlit day. This was the advantage.
I successfully took down four with this gift of an upper hand, three with swift nerve pinches and one with a bone-cracking hammer to his shoulder via my elbow. He had not allowed me the proper hold on him to execute a nerve pinch, and so he had had to go brutally. I attacked with the powerful action grudgingly. I in many Vulcan senses 'despised' the use of violence, but moreover right now I felt a great need to stop the constant bombardments of burning shots to my torso. Doctor Phlox had been wrong to diagnose my ankles as the first on the long list of injuries, but he had not been far off on his predictions either.
One of the remaining three had finally figured out the simple example of logic that would allow this attack to work much better and faster – that their phasers would not have the same desired effect on me as they would have perhaps on other enemy species, but their bundled fists would most likely make a more than rewarding impact.
The Salan are an ironic race. Although Vulcans do not like the suggestion of the term 'ironic' I once heard it used in a History lecture in my second year at a post-primary Vulcan education centre – a second year at high school on a basic human's terms. The study of Salanacon and the Salan people had taken up half of nine-hour lecture, the other half dedicated to a two-week term on the founding and principles of the High Command. I had been rather intrigued in those first four and a half hours.
The Salan, we were told on an abnormally hot day, are both primitive and highly sophisticated. Physically, as I discovered now, they were built only for a life that thrived on instinct, falling under the loose term of a 'caveman species'. Their weapons were extremely low yield, not yet having created a pistol with a proper stun setting or a brand of torpedoes that could fly. Transport on their planet relied heavily on the labour of animals, or the will of the people to walk great distances, and an average well lived life lasted for only anything of forty-eight human years.
However their Warp and Starship technology was almost unheard of. It seemed the race's one sole purpose and pride – ships faster even in their prime than the High Commands'. Trip had been rendered speechless by blueprints and prototypes, an impressive sign on the research and dedication these people thrived on.
Their lone achievement in Warp and engine technology is what drove that stern wedge between our people. The reasons within this were twofold, and the irony they were laced with a prompt for our aggravation towards the world – we wanted them simply to share their impressive advances in their specialised fields, and endlessly encouraged such a potential and wasting race to achieve more than what they had become perfectionist in.
The Salan, through their irony, are also a proud and shortsighted race.
Many of our negotiators fell because of this, because we tried to revive a species with such narrow aspirations and goals yet such amazing and impressive potential. We at least thought this was ironic.
I became quite literally littered in third degree burns as they convinced themselves for so long that I would fall when I continued relentlessly to stand and fight. In the end it was their weapons that helped them realise the easier option in this fight. I rather 'despised' irony as much as I did violence.
The sleek black nose of one pistol touched lightly on my skull and with feline grace I twirled and grabbed it in a locked hold, intending to disarm or at the very least redirect the aim. Instead I was yanked forward with a horrible jolt back towards the wielder with the gun and thereafter was sent crashing with no given mercy into a dusty brick wall. Next I crumpled to the ground. I remained in my senses though, long enough to feel the shocked and rather pleased surprised silence, and then the effect of what had clicked in the violent group's mind a few seconds later. Their physical caveman strength did indeed produce the more desired result than their weapons.
They snapped my left ankle first with frightening ease, whilst one sat on my back and kept me neatly pinned and still. The right one followed a few awful seconds later. I grunted somewhat forcefully as really I wanted to scream. I grunted again when I was sat on hard enough to crack a rib, the splintered bone pinching lightly at my thundering heart. I mercifully passed out when they pressed so hard on my strained back that my breakfast could do no more than rise back up in my throat again.
I wanted Jonathan to come now. Right now behind me I wanted him here if nothing else that to hear the reassurance he had so often before given me even though I rarely asked for it. Through the blindingly hot reminders of the pain, not the tedious physical torture but the mental angst and strain, I only scraped by because I knew somewhere that my Captain was looking for me, and he would be releasing all hell to find me. I preyed for the man I had come to trust to an insane degree to come now and stop this barbaric, unjust torture of a game. I preyed with all illogical will and preyed fast. Vulcans do not prey very often.
He came as I beckoned two days later. He came as I collapsed on my last inch of wilful strength. I had been rendered a helpless fool for that time, as I could only watch and suffer their continuation to shoot at me, to laugh when they kicked my broken rib and bled my stomach of food until it was dry and instead stemmed out little trickles of blood as a substitute. To laugh when I pointlessly protested and poignantly asked for mercy.
They took scissors to my ears. With an ecstasy of joy and encouragement to the five main fiends they ran a schism down the two tips and bit with lust of grinning hatred into the delicate unmarked lobes and olive rims.
They took me to the alley it had all inevitably started in to be executed, finally mercifully taken out of my misery. At this point, on the very hour of the last of the games I had sorrowfully forgotten about the man I had been begging for. I wondered where Trip was though and, utterly delusional, wondered why he had not made our rendezvous point two hours ago. I was uncharacteristically mad at him, keeping in mind to note his tardiness to the Captain when we eventually, if ever he were to arrive, made it back up to the Enterprise. Perhaps a day on probation would keep his time keeping to standard in the future. No doubt he had been caught up in the blueprints of this proposed wonder of a Starship.
I had begun to consider if perhaps I weren't being a little harsh on the Commander when I felt the nape of my hairline seized and my neck jerked back with a stiff crack. They came close to breaking it, and only just fell short of implying enough force to do so. I wanted to protest but in the darkness of my closed lids I was still considering what to do with Commander Tucker. Perhaps I should just let it slide…
My dry, bloody mouth was forced open to a clammy, dusty air and this time I did, removing my priorities from the Commander's time keeping, protest. I spat with no saliva, only gritty breath and coughed with a foul scent of the dank conditions I had been kept in for close to forty-nine hours now. It made no difference however and a burning serum was plunged down my throat despite my continuation to cough and spit dirty air.
My bruised jaw was clamed shut and I fought for breath through my jammed nostrils. I began a weak vocal complaint. I shamelessly begged for my life once again but it fell deaf in amongst the triumphant smears and joyous laughter. And then a few minutes later it was answered to.
"T'Pol!"
I hadn't heard my name in two days and despite the strangled voice it came from it revived something long lost in me – my simple will of hope.
That beautiful warm embrace evoked me, the same one that had gathered me up in reality a few hours ago now. I thrived for it, and although I wanted just to sleep now I let the choked voice that continued to speak in remorse resurface some lost fraction of my consciousness.
"I'm sorry…" he was hot and breathless and strained heavily on every syllable, "I'm so sorry. I tried, I really did, to get here sooner, I did, I tried, I—I really, did… I didn't think, T'Pol, that you'd, I didn't…"
To me as I listened carefully through closed eyes, he sounded sick, and I worried to some degree as I worried for where Trip had gotten to.
"But we're here now, it's okay, Dr Phlox, he'll… yeah…"
The ground was taken away from my aching back and I was elevated in a fiercely protective hold. It was that what saved me then as it did now in the vague present hour around me. What had been downed in my throat had lit my stomach in an agonising fire of acids and chlorine, as my ankle had been now. I knew of the chlorine because I was critically allergic to it, and one of only a handful of Vulcans who were. It was another factor that accounted to my father's set belief that I was unnaturally 'different'.
I stemmed from a long line of males on my father's side and by every law of Vulcan nature he should have had a third son. Instead I was conceived and produced.
In terms of the education that laboured every Vulcan into complete self-control within a half a decade I was no less than a year behind my peers. I had still been susceptible to the occasional mild temper tantrum at two and a half and was easily distracted until I was just shy of seven.
Thereafter of course I was a model of self-discipline and control, but the reputation amongst those of my age and those who had taught me that I was a 'rogue' of some kind became a stain that my father forever regretted privately.
I was impulsive and stubborn and very strong minded, as well as having a tendency to boast at times. I wanted without question to teach – I did best socially when in the company of those looking for academic aid from me. In that quiet sense I was proud. I was gifted in the sciences and above average in maths and wanted to take these as what I would teach at the utmost level of study, which I know perfectly well I could no with all success.
Instead my father steered me towards the High Command and there was where I lost most of this 'free spirit' that shamed him so. He was the only reason, although I worked wholly hard to do my father's bidding and earn a place with the High Command, that I managed to become a Science Directory and then eventually a Sub Commander on their Starships. If I had been anyone else but the daughter of one of the most respected Ambassadors there I would have been far too disagreeable and strong-minded to make it in.
As my stomach twisted in furious pain I began to struggle under the hot suns of Salanacon and the hot grip around me. For a brief second I lost my bearings and so in turn my trust as to whose hold this was around my seared shoulders and knees. Unresolved issues chose to surface in the rolling mist of my sickly confusion. I had unfinished micro-scans to finish, a chance to redeem my race a little more with the Salan by talking directly to Ambassador Kreenal. I had to find Trip. He still had not rendezvoused with me yet. I had to let the Captain know this.
"My Gawd."
That was Trip.
"Move aside, now, if you wish for us to leave peacefully."
Malcolm.
"Shh, T'Pol. It's me, Jonathan."
I had continued to struggle as I fretted but stopped when that hot whisper spread across my burnt face. My filthy cheek brushed against his dusty chest and without consciously knowing it I dug my face in a relieved nuzzle. My swollen fingers gripped his t-shirt desperately and feebly and my left ear bled freely into his shoulder.
My stomach cindered in acidic fire again and I could feel the lining break out into a blazing rash but it seemed not to bother me as much now that I knew whose sorrowful hold I was in.
The past glided smoothly into the present as Jonathan mimicked his same hold of remorse on me into Starfleet. I gripped his t-shirt, I nuzzled into his chest and relished in the same hot whisper that blew over my quiet face again.
"Shh. I'm not gonna let this happen to you. I'm not gonna lose you after everything we've already been through together. I'm just not."
They had been the exact same words he had uttered to me before I had woken up five years ago and wondered why he had been crying over my bed.
A drop of salty water landed on my forehead. I wondered yet again why he was crying over me.