The Gemini Effect
Summary: An AU in many senses, but not entirely. T'Pol goes from Science Officer onthe NX-01bridge to an alien in the land of Jonathan Bakula and Charles 'Spike' Tucker, amongst others.
A.N: If ever there was a WIP, this is it. This is all I have done so far of my next 'big piece', after Goodnight Enterprise - this and about half of the next chapter. I have a million and one ideas for it, just nothing much actually constructed into story format. I'm hoping that by posting the first chapter on I'ill prompted to carry on writing more. Hoping, but not promising.
The Gemini Effect was wonderfully and masterfully beta read by dear old tami, a.k.a gammara on Thanks a million lightyears.
And boo much to the cancellation of Enterprise! I am utterly gutted by the news, devistated beyond belief, and only hope that if a suddenrevival doesn't occur, the fan fictions at least will help keep the show running in our wistful imaginations.
Telaka
Chapter One – The Owner and the Dog
Along a small network of streets on the west tip of San Francisco where the air was fresh and sweet from the sea, a young man and his dog took a late evening walk. Very late, to be truthful, he noted as he checked his watch and caught that it was almost eleven.
The little beagle was as brisk in her elegant stride as her human companion, keen to be led on by her sensitive nose as it directed her on to wondrous sprays of new and curious scents. He was just as keen to be led on by the depressing incentive that he would yet again be late for work if he walked his beloved dog for any much longer. Together they took flight down a wide, damp alleyway, breaking off from the main street as soon as he realised a shortcut was in order if his boss ever wanted to see him in at half past eleven.
"C'mon, girl."
His young, clear voice was almost swallowed and lost in the grungy night. The beagle heard it well enough though and quickly followed around the musky corner before continuing once again to trot on ahead in search of those inquisitive alleyway smells.
It only took a second for another fascinating scent to catch the wind and grab her attention, and so she began to chase after its origin. It brought her down an off-shoot of the alleyway into a much smaller, narrower corridor - one laden with thick ebony shadows and uncomfortable stillness. Little of this bothered her though, as she was only a dog, driven forward more promptly by curiosity than the paralysing emotion of fear. She had very rarely come across anything in this ditch of the alleyway that would constitute the emotion of fear anyway, as the scents she tracked down, more often than not, ran off in the form of a feral cat or a battered mouse.
The new smell continued to allure her as she carried on, and so she continued to drive herself deeper into the shadows until she disappeared from sight and then found what she was tracking. Her discovery contradicted all of the above in the space of a moment, as she found not a feral cat or any battered mouse, but instead something unlike anything that seemed possible on that misty November night.
As the owner reached the other side of the alleyway that led him back onto the lit pavements of a main street, he stopped and realised that he didn't have a dog at his ankle.
"Breezy?"
His voice cut through the night a little clearer than it had the last time. He was more urgent to return home now than he had been a few minutes ago. The night was growing colder faster than he could walk through it.
The dog did not return on his beckoning call, however. For such an obedient, well-mannered dog not to return at her master's call was worrying.
Slowly, warily, the young man of perhaps early to mid-thirties began to backtrack along the puddles and potholes of the alleyway and made his way to the entrance of the off-shoot that had consumed his dog.
"Breezy? You coming home with me or what tonight?"
There was a gentle commotion of blunt claws against cement and a low whimper that, after a long drawn hesitation, brought the owner cautiously onward one, two and then three small, brave steps into the narrower alleyway. He was worried about his dog now.
Smooth, velvet clouds that had seized over an enigmatic silvery gold moon moved along in the rich blue, midnight sky as a breeze awoke, and allowed a spill of wispy grey light to trickle weakly into the passageway. Through this offering of light the owner was able to find his dog, and then what the dog had found in the off-shoot.
"Whoa…"
His little beagle, dubbed Breezy for her good nature, trotted around the back of his heels and stood sniffing inquisitively instead now at the soiled entrance of the alley, content and generally pleased with herself that she had shared her unusual find with her owner.
He took another two steps forward, dipping himself deeper into the shadows before he slowly collapsed his knees into a wary crouch. His pale and shaky hand ventured forward to the pile that lay before him.
She didn't move when he touched her, gently raking his fingertips over a short, bowl cut of coarse, brown hair that was ruffled and tangled in many places. Eyes remaining closed, her lids unwavering, and her breath sounding tight, it was obvious to him that she was far away from any conscious state. He noticed the slight pout of her dry lips and raised his brow, now more allured than wary by what he had found. Along with these facial features, he saw she had a dark olive complexion, almost too dark, with tinges of obvious green around her eyes and cheekbones. Her skin seemed almost flawless to the touch and the eye though, as he scanned over her with mild concern and swelling curiosity, his head cocked to the side as he took his fingertips from out of her hair.
Trying not to be allured or impressed by her looks alone, the late night walker still had to admit to himself that she had a fine figure - slim on every curve and feature from her face to her hands to her waist and to her legs, but not skinny anywhere, more carefully toned – defiantly someone who worked out. She was perhaps lacking a little height, although this was hard to tell as she was laid out on her side and curled slightly into herself.
He could have been forgiven for simply thinking this was just some unfortunate young woman who had been out to make money in the seediest of ways, but had instead been used at her own cost and humiliation for someone else's ill gotten and ultimately free gain. Unfortunately, however, he could not bring himself to say this just to give himself clarity for a couple of obvious reasons.
She was for one dressed as any self-respecting woman would be, in neat black trousers and a practical, if not slightly tight, white t-shirt. She almost looked business-like in fact - with that sensible cut of short hair and a pair of black ankle boots with a stout heel.
And then there was the other reason. He was not entirely sure if 'woman' – specifically in the human sense – was the right definition to summarise whatever it was before him.
It was the set of ears on her that startled him the most, and instantly set his suspicions alight. They were so very human-like ... every curve and groove and hole, right up until the tall pointed tips on each. He dared to touch one of them, and it felt as human as his own did, only slightly too cold as the rest of her body was. Still, it seemed absurd and out of place on a body that looked every other inch like a normal woman. It gave her an eerie, very subtle… alien-like appearance, along with the green tinge to her complexion.
There was another oddity that fed on his doubt about using the term 'woman.' She had only one sign of injury, a small cut on her forehead, which made him bite his lip hard when he saw it; from it pulsed a thin trickle of rich, dark-green blood.
Distant echoes of the voices that belonged only to the night in this neighbourhood began to sing through the lulled air. He jumped as he heard them and Breezy grew restless on her paws.
He could only hesitate though, unable to pull himself to rush into action. A few barely plausible explanations shot to mind as for the origins of his dog's discovery as he contemplated what actions to take at the same time. He considered that perhaps he was only dealing with a woman in costume who had lost her way to a Star Wars convention (although he could not remember any aliens in Star Wars having pointed ears). Or that she was one of those human mutants, a phenomenon in genetic science that so many television documentaries owed their existences to. The only other muse he could ponder was that she was actually alien to this world in some way, and that, he thought to himself, was a dangerous concept if so.
The echoes were intensifying like a loud choir of deviance. These were risky times to be out amongst such people at such an hour. And, whether the approaching crowd noticed the subtle difference or not was irrelevant; they'd do her harm no matter her origin. She was vulnerable enough that they would not ask themselves questions.
In taking his dog out the owner always chose, walked and timed his route and shortcuts to perfection. They should have been on the relatively safe doorstep to home by now, if not for this distraction. Breezy began to whine quietly.
"I'm coming, I'm coming."
He allowed his instincts and the gentleman inside him to speak; they commanded him to lift the woman of around his age, perhaps younger, and carry her home quickly and safely with him.
She made no protest.
It was not particularly warm, well decorated, nor tidy where the man and his dog stayed. It was an apartment, a bare minimum box design that was part of a decrepit collection of one-bedroom shacks with walls, a roof, a floor and several doors and windows that made up all they needed and all they really wanted in this world to live in. The paint job may have been brown, the furniture lovingly chewed wherever Breezy could reach and two of the seven wall-sockets broken, but somewhere under the mess and the musk lay a homely feel that the owner always went out of his way to create, and created nicely. He slowly climbed the five cracked cement steps to the apartment block's green front door.
"Oh…"
There he remembered he only had two hands, and both were occupied. With a careful glance he stared down at the creature in his arms for about the nth time that night. As if sensing the attention and feeling finally she should give birth to some action, she sighed heavily and flicked her left ankle. She seemed to him content in an odd way, as if she thought she were in the arms of an old, trusting friend.
Something ran across his ankle, making him jump and she unconsciously tense with him. On the top step Breezy looked up and waved her tail innocently, waiting patiently to get in.
His guest made a sound for the first time that night, a sort of quiet, groggy moan. Continuing to stir in his tender grasp, he figured she was on the verge of rejoining them onto the platform of consciousness. He'd rather she did that though out of his arms. He would most likely drop her if she screamed, although he had a feeling she wouldn't.
Just as he was considering how cruel but essential it was to actually put her down – cruel because the stony steps looked to be freshly urinated on, but essential because his keys were jammed into the tight back pocket of his jeans – a dark figure began to emerge from one of the ground floor flats inside. He was unsure whether to be grateful for this or to run; his neighbours generally fell into two categories: 'smile and nod to' or 'avoid like you do your mother-in-law with the plague.' As the figure made his way toward the entrance though, the grey shadows dropped from his body as he entered a pale shaft of light; he knew it was safe to stay put.
"Danny," the dog owner smiled and nodded as he greeted the one tenant he had any real liking for, "what brings you up and out at this ungodly hour?"
Danny had a mutual liking for the dog owner, which was obvious in his easy smile and casual tone. "On call again. You'd think it was the end of the world as we know it, the way my boss goes on." He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. "New friend I take it?"
Danny's blasé blue gaze met the quiet and still bundle of woman that the owner held rather close to his warm chest. The blue stare rested for a moment on her green forehead-cut and the pointed ears, both too well moulded to be make-up he could see.
Looking up at Danny in the doorway the owner's eyes instantly liquefied to a terrified and somewhat desperate pleading gaze. Everything laid back and comical about this man, which could be seen just from his lopsided smile, was gone in the second it took for a fearful shiver to pulsate through his body. Danny sighed and mocked him with a teasing smile, but spoke with genuine reassurance.
"Come on, you really think I'd report her to them?"
Danny stepped out into the bitter night as the owner stepped in from it. They exchanged a knowing look, and the owner an eternally grateful one too.
"I'd pick up a few hats though tomorrow, if I were you."
The mysterious being stirred once again amidst a guttural moan of unrest.
"Or maybe some aspirin first. See you round."
They exchanged another nod before Danny turned into the temperamental night, ignoring the scatterings of rain, which threatened a possibility of the first proper downfall in months.
As the door shut over and he made his way to the dreaded apartment lift, the owner took liberty once again to look down and see what he had gotten himself into this time. She tried to stretch out and he carefully tightened his hold, as she was stronger than she appeared. If she didn't open her eyes within the next fifteen minutes he'd be surprised.
"Give me five, okay?"
He blinked as she slowly fell still, like she was grudgingly obeying his orders.
The lift opened and he, his bundle and the beagle made their way to the sixth floor together, which save from the roof was as far up as the establishment went. There on the sixth floor landing he again discovered he would have to have at least one free hand to open the door to his brown apartment.
He considered hoisting her over his shoulder, as he still hadn't cleaned up the mess from this morning where Breezy's stomach and the previous night's leftovers had had an argument, and ended it outside. But then he considered how fast jamming his shoulder into her stomach would wake her and decided against it. So he picked a nice clean spot against the wall (which was no small task) near the door and carefully placed her down there, promising her it would only be for a moment.
Breezy sniffed her own mess, and then tenderly began to lick it.
"Breezy, no!"
A second later she was tossed beside their new companion, and the companion suddenly opened her eyes.
"Alright," he fiddled with the locks and a half smile on his lips for a moment before the door swung open, "we're in."
She was off. Before he even realised that she was awake she had made a clean break for the stairs and was flying down them as fast as the beagle could follow.
"Hey, hey no, wait up! Don't go outside, outside is not a good idea!"
He doubted she hadn't heard him, not with those ears, but he knew she refused to heed him, and so with a heavy sigh he took off after the stranger and his dog.
He began to take the stairs two at a time, but didn't have to go very far. As he jogged down past the fifth floor, never being a fan of stairs, up or down, he could hear a gentle growling wafting up from the forth floor. Knowing what he would be greeted by he slowed to a power walk descent.
Most people on first sight of a beagle would be far from intimidated like the way a slathering Rottweiler would intimidate you. But be it Rottweiler or beagle when a dog bared its teeth and growled at you, in all likelihood you would back away, and do as it was asking you to.
The dog had her trapped in the landing to the fourth floor, in the corner with nowhere to go. Breezy would not touch her unless he asked, but with her white muzzle curled back and her canines now in full view, it hardly looked that way.
Surprisingly, although the pointy eared woman was as far pressed into the corner as her slim body could manage, her face was plain expressionless as she looked blankly down at the dog. Not a flicker of fear or apprehension, she provided only a toneless gaze.
He went to speak, but she threw her own words forward first as she spotted him approaching. She spoke quietly with unintentional menace in a smooth flat voice, as emotionless as her dead expression. She spoke fast, her eyes locked onto his bemused gaze, and made no hand gestures to go with what she had to say. Hand gestures would have been helpful; she wasn't speaking a word of English.
"Please— please just… calm down, okay?"
He hadn't ordered Breezy to move yet, and she continued to stand as she had when he found them, only with her muzzle pulled over her canines again. In response the woman in her corner did not move either.
"I don't understand your language," he had a feeling this was mutual. "Do you speak English by any chance?"
She blinked slowly, lids closing and opening over a pair of dull brown irises that had more strength and allure in them than any other feature he could see, more sway even that her tight lips and poised legs.
"Yes…" she said slowly in a far more shaky, thoughtful tongue. English was far from her mother language, he could tell, but he was relieved she spoke it, to whatever extent.
"Then you understand when I tell you it's not safe to go running out into the streets like that, especially with… those."
He glanced briefly at her ears.
It was rounding on quarter past eleven. Another night at work shot to hell. He would have to use the one excuse he hadn't yet; Breezy had gotten knocked up.
"I understand, but that is not to say I believe you. Who are you?"
Her English was better than she had first let on. He gave her what he prayed was a small, reassuring smile. Her brow dipped at it.
"Look, if I call off my dog, will you promise not to run off again?"
Slowly her head cocked to one shoulder. If nothing else she had at least a mild curiosity in her emotionally drained eyes.
"Where am I?"
He took a look around, realising she had to be desperate for any answer if she were so willing just to drop her first question for another.
"In my apartment block along Wisk Street."
"What region?"
He gave her a questioning frown, but she said nothing, waiting for an answer.
"West San Francisco."
"Where is that?"
A heap of questions suddenly buried themselves on the front door of his brain, but he knew as long as she was asking, he would not get any answers for himself. His frown was beginning to show traces of concern for her.
"North America," nothing seemed to register, so half jokingly he threw in, "Earth."
Finally something seemed to stir in her blank gaze. She kept quiet about it though.
"Who are you?"
He looked down at his dog briefly then made the decision to call her off, knowing it was just as easy to send her hunting once more if the woman took off on her amazingly fast sprint again.
"Jonathan. Jonathan Bakula. Can I ask the same?"
The woman, who had not an ounce of any accent on her (he finally realised), looked down as the dog came to heel at his side. A flicker of relief seemed to cross her brow, but no more before she faced his docile hazel gaze again.
"I… don't know."
A quarter of his questions became answered in the time it took him to realise something else.
"You're amnesic?"
She straightened herself up slightly, coming out from the corner by an inch or so.
"It would appear as such."
She spoke with such a blasé nature it was hard to tell whether this bothered her or not. It bothered him nonetheless.
"You don't know who you are, where you're from, how you got here even?"
Carefully she raised one slim eyebrow. "No. But I don't believe I belong here, so I will ask if I can leave now."
He looked at the grey plastered wall, even though there was no window there to peer out into the risky night.
"I wouldn't advice it, not with those ears. You'd be safer back at my place."
"You expect me to believe so after being chased by your… companion down several flights of stairs?"
"What do you remember before now?"
She was not impressed by his answer. When she thought about it though, he fancied he could see the slightest flicker of frustration light into her cool gaze.
"I remember falling down in a dark street, an alleyway I think."
He watched her closely. "Nothing more before that?"
She shook her head, lapsing into a wary silence.
"Yeah well I found you in that alleyway, and if I wasn't to be trusted then I would have done the dirty deed with you and left you there for the next man to come along. You have to give me credit for that."
Her brow was up again. "The 'dirty deed'?"
He winced slightly. "You know…"
She blinked once. "No, I don't know."
Suddenly at the other end of the hallway the archaic lift shutters opened up and a noisy young couple stumbled out, heading, of course, nowhere else but towards their position at the stairs. As per his usual run of luck, it was obvious to him that they would have to pass them, as the couple could not possibly live anywhere else but in one of the five apartments beyond the stairs on the fourth floor. There was enough drab yellow light in the hallway too that her ears were painfully obvious to see, even at a quick glance.
Drastic actions had to be taken, and with a sharp, quick-thinking mind, one bred into him through his family bloodline, he instantly knew what to do. He cupped his large, rough hands over her alien ears and pulled her forward for a long, passionate kiss.
It took the couple a good minute or so to saunter by, Jonathan cursing them for every moment they took to stop and laugh at what the other had to say. As soon as they spotted the kissing couple, however, they quickly moved on and disappeared into the second from last shack on the left.
A pair of hands shoved hard against his chest, and he found himself stumbling back onto the stairs, luckily the ones that led up. Again she showed him she was far stronger than her lithe figure appeared.
"I hope that was necessary."
There wasn't a glint of humour in his eyes.
"There have been reports of people like you before with strange features, upside down anatomies, alien tongues; the government nor the local residents to this planet have taken very kindly to them. There's hardly a prize for figuring out you don't come from around these parts, so if anyone finds out about you being here…"
He took a deep breath as she looked on blankly.
"I've seen what happens," he said, subduing the momentary rise in his temper, "when people get there hands on something new, it's not pretty when they do."
She found she was able, if she thought hard enough about it, to place herself in his situation, even though she already ached with confusion and a nasty, sharp headache, and straining to imagine was a chore. She had to give him credit for handling things so smoothly. Although she didn't not know where 'home' for her was, she imagined she would be wary of catching an alien on it if she ever did.
"And what do you have to gain from inviting me into your domain?"
He shrugged. "I don't know, call it chivalry, but I'd rather not leave you out there to get caught by God-knows-who so they can do God-knows-what to you. And maybe we can exchange questions for answers, 'cause I have a few."
She nodded slowly. "As do I."
Jonathan lifted himself off the stairs and put a foot on the first one. Breezy was already climbing them, her tail bouncing back and forth again, her placid nature back.
"Shall we then?"
Hovering beside her corner the woman hesitated visibly.
"What year is it?"
He gave her his lopsided smile, despite her asking a question to which he assumed she would know the answer to at least that.
"I thought we were leaving the questions for the apartment."
"Please."
"It's 2021."
She nodded and then slowly began to follow. She may not even have known her own name, but she knew that was not right.