I Told You We Weren't Going to
Lose Touch
a Star Trek: Enterprise
- based fan fiction
by: Joycelyn Solo
Summary: Thanks
to an old friend, T'Pol and Trip may have a new lease on life.
Author's note: This takes place shortly after begins his
speech at the end of These are the voyages (aka: The
final episode of Enterpriseaka: What the heck
were they thinking?)
Disclaimer: Star Trek: Enterprise and associated
characters are property of Paramount Pictures. No copyright infringement
is intended; this story is for entertainment purposes only.
Rating: G
Challenge Response: Fix the Finalé on Trip/T'Polers
Genre: Trip/T'Pol Romance; Angst
Standing alone in the Green Room, T'Pol listened to the polite applause as it welcomed Captain Archer to the podium.
Though she tried, she could not give her full attention to her commanding officer's speech -- one she had heard snippets of for the past four days. In a way, she supposed she should have been grateful for the captain's preoccupation with what he was going to say for this prestigious occasion. His anxiety had been a distraction from the more severe emotions -- yes, emotions -- she refused to let herself feel. The same emotions that had made it nearly impossible for her to meditate since...
Blinking, T'Pol turned her attention to the monitor that allowed her to watch the proceedings in private. Had things been different, T'Pol would have sat with pride beside her crewmates. She would have gladly sat in the company of the Humans who had become her friends in the course of ten years. But the absence of one man, one who had become much more than her friend, prevented her from joining her crewmates in the audience.
He had been her confidante, her lover, the father of her child.
And, now, he was gone.
Trip was gone.
The Human who had come to mean more to her than any being in her life, had been taken from her in a foolishly self-sacrificial act only he could be capable of. For reasons T'Pol could not fathom, the engineer had thought that destroying himself was the only way to protect Archer and assure the captain's safe arrival back on Earth for the all-important speech.
Along with the grief his death brought, T'Pol could not suppress her anger. Only Trip would have been able to anger her in death as he had in life. Only he could make her acknowledge the emotions she had worked all her life to suppress; just as he had once brought her feelings of love, joy and belonging.
The Human who had done so much for her was gone. And she had unable to help him when he needed her most.
Even as the guilt, another emotion, threatened, T'Pol could imagine Trip's voice as he admonished her for such thoughts. He would have said, in that garbled way of his that passed for English, "There wasn't anything you could have done." But T'Pol, alone with her grief, couldn't help but wonder.
"There really wasn't anything you could have done."
T'Pol stiffened. The admonishment had come from behind her, and had sounded so much like Trip, that she knew she must have imagined it. The lack of meditation, in addition to affecting her tenuous control of her emotions, was obviously allowing her mind to play tricks on her.
"A fella's dead a couple days and this is the welcome he gets?"
Turning slowly, T'Pol could not stop the widening of her eyes or the strangled noise that emitted from her throat. "Trip? But you..." Sure she was imagining the smiling Human before her, she drew a deep breath and straightened her spine. With calm detachment, she informed the apparition, "You are dead."
"Well," he said, taking a seat and making himself comfortable. "I was dead. Or pretty close to it. But an old friend of ours didn't like that idea."
"An old friend?" she asked, staring at the man who was, perhaps, not a hallucination caused by her emotional state. He seemed real enough. The chair had given under his weight. She could smell him -- the scent achingly familiar. If she concentrated, she could almost feel the echo of their long-dormant bond. He was...
As her mind raced for rational explanations of her former lover's return from the dead, T'Pol was distracted by a shimmer in the air that took the shape of a man -- a man she recognized.
"Crewman Daniels."
"Hello, Sub-commander," the time-travelling agent, or so had his claim always been, smiled faintly at T'Pol. "It's 'Commander,' now, isn't it? I'm sure this is quite a shock for you, but Commander Tucker insisted on seeing you himself, first."
T'Pol was at a loss, her gaze going from one supposedly dead man to the other. "You died nearly seven years ago," she informed the man who may or may not have been Daniels.
"That's what I told him," Trip -- or the Human who bore a striking resemblance to the man T'Pol knew as Trip -- said.
"And, as I told Commander Tucker, that's one of the tricky things about temporal mechanics. Yes, to you, I died seven years ago. For me, however, it hasn't happened yet. The man you saw die was me, only several years in my own future."
"Don't worry, T'Pol," Trip said. "I didn't understand it much the first time he told me, either."
"And when, exactly, was that?" T'Pol asked.
"About six hundred years from now," Trip answered.
Daniels, much to T'Pol's surprise, rolled his eyes at the commander. "If you will take a seat, Commander, I will explain from the beginning -- or the beginning as you know it."
T'Pol took a seat, more for her own comfort than for Daniel's suggestion. If she was indeed hallucinating, she figured a sitting position would prove less of a hazard.
"Four days ago, a dying Commander Tucker was placed in the hypobaric chamber in hopes of saving him." Daniels began, watching T'Pol flinch at the reminder. "However, the body that later came out of the chamber was not Commander Tucker."
"Who's body was it?" T'Pol asked.
"Actually, it wasn't anybody's body," Trip answered. "It was a fake with some of my blood on it to make it look real enough for everyone."
"For what purpose?"
Daniels, shooting Trip an annoyed look, continued, "Shortly after Commander Tucker was placed in the chamber, he was transported to a medical facility in the twenty-seventh century and his injuries healed."
"If you hoped to prevent the commander's death, why did you not simply stop Shran's agressors or warn Enterprise of their pending intrusion?"
"Because of one man," Daniels answered, inclining his head toward the monitor. "Archer had to make this speech -- the exact speech he's giving now -- for the United Federation of Planets to form. For him to make this speech, Commander Tucker had to die."
"But, as I can see, Commander Tucker is not dead."
Daniels opened his mouth to answer, but Trip leaned forward and beat him to it. "It turns out, I wasn't really supposed to die. In fact, I've still got an important role to play in history." He smiled widely. "Actually, we have an important part to play in history."
"You weren't supposed to tell her, Commander," Daniels informed Trip, his voice resigned.
"You've been telling me I'm not 'supposed to' do a lot of things, Daniels. Have I listened to you once, yet?"
From the look on the time-traveler's face, T'Pol assumed that Trip had been just as much trouble in the future as he had ever been in her present.
"What role are we supposed to play, exactly?" she asked.
Trip looked at her, his blue eyes drawing her into their depths. "I told you we weren't going to lose touch."
Their gazes intent on each other,
the commanders barely noticed as the temporal transport effect
claimed Daniels and retuned him to the future. A future that,
with the Trip and T'Pol reunited, was once again a brighter place.
