Secrets are a Prison

CW: Discussion of past pregnancy loss


2375

"So, I hear I should call you Dr. ch'Tannah now," I said to Sinta, Elentia's brother, as we sat down for our first session since the Krenim Rebellion two years prior. It felt incredibly strange to be a patient in my own office, sinking into the couch cushion with someone else in my wingback chair.

Sinta chuckled, amber eyes sparkling just like his sister's. "Yes, I've achieved the next milestone in my quest to become an elitist intellectual. But I still want you to call me Sinta, as always."

"It's a big deal." I smiled, trying my best to hide the fact that I was delaying the inevitable. As if I could fool an empath. "Congratulations."

"Thank you," he said, dipping his head. Strands of black hair fell from his low ponytail, swishing against the side of his tawny-beige face as he straightened. He didn't seem to mind them. "Let us begin with some simpler questions before we get into the more difficult areas. Alright?"

I took a deep breath and nodded.


Personal Log: Stardate 52776.4

My first session with Sinta was strange on so many levels—being a patient in my own office, being assessed by someone other than Schmullis, being asked about my mental health problems in the past several months, and being unable to hide my feelings.

I haven't had any psychotic symptoms since my neurosynaptic therapy ended, but Sinta did notice some symptoms of trauma from... well... everything. Unfortunately, we have a very limited time frame in which to work, but he thinks we can put it to good use.

Riley and Orum will be leaving on their transport in an hour to go back to the colony, but Elentia and Sinta are staying here until we reach the next Zahl station along the comm net. It'll give Elentia a break from her work and Sinta a chance to work with me.


After seeing Riley and Orum off, I went straight back to my office for a meeting with Megan Delaney. I beat her there, but only barely, and soon we were settled in the seating area.

"Meg," I said gently, "I wanted to let you know about something we learned just yesterday. For now, only the senior staff of Voyager and Equinox know, but I spoke with Captain Janeway about bringing you in the loop and she approved. I need your word that what I'm about to tell you will not be discussed with anyone outside of senior staff—not even your sister."

Her hazel eyes reflected the dread she must have felt. Only one subject could have led me to take this course of action.

Annika.

Megan nodded, silky brown waves of hair swishing freely around blue-clad shoulders. "I understand. You have my word."

I took a breath. "Yesterday, we got a visit from Dr. Riley Frazier and Orum tr'Khevek from the former-Borg cooperative that Chakotay and I met in the Nekrit Expanse. They've recently allied with the Krenim Commonwealth and are preparing to work with the Unimatrix Zero rebellion against the collective."

Megan's eyes never left mine as she followed my every word.

"Riley and Orum told us about a piece of Borg technology that can teleport people across great distances—tens of thousands of lightyears or more if the conditions are right—which the Borg generally use to send captured individuals to a centralized location. This way, they won't be lost if a ship is destroyed before those victims can be integrated into the hive mind."

I paused to take a deep breath. "Meg, Orum thinks there's a good possibility that Annika teleported herself off the sphere before it self-destructed. He didn't want to get our hopes up, but he reviewed Harry's sensor readings from the Equinox and said that's what it looked like to him."

Her eyes filled with tears. She dipped her head and dabbed at her face with the sleeve of her uniform. "How likely?"

"After he showed us what to look for, we ran a dozen simulations. It looks pretty likely. We calculated 87.6% odds that she was not on board when it blew."

Megan nodded, a faint smile tugging at her lips. "Of course she wasn't," she whispered.

I leaned forward. "Do you know something? Did she say anything to you indicating her plans that day?"

Megan shook her head. "No, nothing. But I—" She huffed a laugh. "I should have known she had an escape planned."

"What makes you say that?"

"If Annika is anything, she's efficient. It's not that I think she wouldn't sacrifice herself for us, because she would. But why waste life if there's no need to? If she had an out, I have no doubt that she would have taken it. As committed as she was to seeing this Unimatrix Zero thing through, I have no doubt that's where she is. It's where she belongs." A tear escaped Megan's eye, sneaking down the slope of her cheek and disappearing under her chin. "I only wish I could have gone with her."


At Tuvok's request, I met with him in his quarters immediately after my shift. He wanted to explain his strange comment from the day before.

I sat on his couch, warming my hands around a cup of Vulcan spice tea.

"I must warn you," he said as he took a chair across from me, "my explanation requires bringing up a difficult topic."

"It has to do with the mind melds on the gravity-well planet, doesn't it?"

He inclined his head. "It does, indeed. If our conversation becomes too overwhelming for you, we can continue at a later date. However, I believe it is better for you to understand sooner, rather than later."

"If our conversation overwhelms me, will you know? Without me telling you?"

"Yes."

Another person from whom I could no longer hide my inner life. Wonderful. "How?"

"Do you recall the circumstances surrounding our first mind meld?"

I looked away, fighting the swell of emotions at his question. My throat was so tight I could barely produce sound. "I remember enough."

"Do you recall the meld itself?"

I glared at him. "Do you sense overwhelm yet?"

He ticked an eyebrow. "No I do not."

He was really going to make me do this, wasn't he? "I remember the stream, the sun, the woods..." I swallowed a sob that tried to crawl up my throat. "The sparrow." Tears filled my eyes, spilling onto my cheeks, and I wiped them away. "I remember almost drowning, and a man singing a Vulcan lullaby. I suppose that was you."

Tuvok nodded.

"I thought—" I closed my eyes, the pressure becoming too much. "I thought I was you for a moment. I couldn't sort my identity out. And then I almost drowned, but the voice—your voice—drew me out again. Gave me strength to... to let Rojel go."

It almost felt as if Tuvok was holding my hand, but we weren't even close to touching.

"The second mind meld," he prodded. "What can you recall of it?"

I opened my eyes. "Personally, not much. Tom said I was nearly catatonic and half starved to death. He said he had to beg you to perform the second meld, though given how he was at that point, I suspect he might have exaggerated that bit. He, uh—" I glanced down at the liquid in my cup. "He didn't know how much it would cost you. If I'd been able to stop him—"

"Had you been capable of interfering, the meld would not have been necessary."

My chest ached with the weight of my failure. I tightened my grip on the cup, my hands beginning to tremble. "Still, I should have tried. I shouldn't have let him... let you—"

"Miss Eelo," Tuvok said, drawing my attention back to him.

Though his dark eyes remained stoic beneath those sharply angled eyebrows, I could feel his compassion warming up my pagh. As I watched his face, I realized that it was intentional. He was feeding me that sensation, and I wanted nothing more than to wrap myself in it.

Slowly, it grew stronger. I closed my eyes, allowing it to calm all of my anxieties. The teacup was lifted from my hands. If I had let myself lie down, I could have slept.

Then came the lullaby, strong and sweet and flawless in its meter. It was soothing in a way I couldn't begin to fathom, filling the cracks in my pagh to keep it from shattering inside me.

It was a mere taste of what he had done for me with both mind melds.

Just as slowly as Tuvok had built up the feeling, he drew it back again. When I opened my eyes, I could see the compassion lingering in his own despite his expression remaining essentially the same as it had been before.

I took a breath. "You can do more than just sense my emotions."

"Indeed. After you went into labor for the second time, you entered cardiac arrest. Mister Paris did all he could to address the physiological issues at hand, but it was not enough. He believed that my intervention was psychological when, in fact, it was spiritual."

My eyes widened as the realization hit me, carried on a memory from my class in Vulcan psychology. "A katra transfer."

Tuvok took a drink of his tea and and set the cup on the table. "What I did was more of a transfusion than a transfer. I merely shared a part of my katra with you rather than the whole of it. Even so, it created a strong telepathic bond between us. At any time when you feel an emotion strongly, you involuntarily project it into me, as well."

"Oh," I breathed. "Tuvok, I'm sorry. That must be exhausting."

"Indeed, it is taxing. It is not, however, your fault. I knew before I acted that I could not burden you with this knowledge until you had an opportunity to recover, psychologically and spiritually, from the ordeal, and I was fully aware of the possibility that you might never recover. Now that you have, it is important, for your sake and my own, that I teach you how to control it. Otherwise, conditions that inevitably befall me will have a strong impact on you."

Pon farr. The slow deterioration of his neurological state and, with that, his cognitive and emotional control. Yes, this was serious. "How much would those conditions effect me?"

"It is hard to say. There is no record of a katra bond being created with a Bajoran before, and the few records on bonds or transfers done with Terrans are either classified or protected by confidentiality rights."

I sipped my tea. "So we'll be figuring this out as we go."

"Indeed. However, there are precautions we can take to reduce the risk of harm to you and alleviate the burden on me."

"What precautious?"

"I will teach you how to use inward restraint so that you will be capable of choosing that which you wish to communicate with me, and ignoring that which I may not intend to communicate with you."

I nodded. "That sounds wise. I'm in."

"I am pleased to hear that. We should begin our work immediately. I suggest a mind meld."

I nearly choked on my tea before meeting his gaze. "Tonight?"

"I do not sense emotional overwhelm within you, so I see no reason for delay. Do you have somewhere else to be?"

I couldn't let him into my mind that deeply, not yet. Not with Alixia only just beginning to show me glimpses of the destiny we were trying to change. As my mind scrambled for an excuse, I couldn't help but glance at the box containing the orb, dark and quiet on a small table in the corner of the room. Looking back at Tuvok, I finally said, "I'm having dinner with Harry."

Tuvok didn't hide his displeasure, pressing his lips into a thin line. He studied me for a moment, and I knew he was suspicious of my excuse.

Could he sense avoidance, too?

After a moment, he nodded. "Very well. Taking Lieutenant Kim's schedule into account, the most ideal night to meet will be four days from now. Is that agreeable to you?"

It would give me time to process everything, time for Alixia to show me what I needed to know, and perhaps time enough to make my own small attempts at learning to control this katra-connection on my own. I forced my feelings down and nodded. "Yes, that will be fine."


2404

After Harry departed with his ship to monitor the barrier, I made my way from the habitat ring to Deep Space Nine's massive sickbay. As always, the station's Chief Medical Officer was already hard at work.

Dr. Julian Bashir was the poster-boy for overachievement—always working and rarely going out. I'd been told he was a different person before the cold war with the Borg, that the years since had been even harder on him than the Federation-Dominion war had been. Yet in his better moments, he possessed an unmatched level of charm and wit. He was the kind of person everyone wanted to hate but couldn't help loving anyway.

Julian was stooped over a microviewer when I arrived, and all I could see was dark-brown hair streaked with an increasing number of grays. He'd stopped coloring it after getting divorced more than a year before, and I had to admit that I liked it better with the gray.

"Good morning," I said in a sing-song voice, snagging the chair at his station.

"You're in a cheery mood," he mumbled, a thick British accent making his irritation sound almost jaunty.

I shrugged. "You'd be, too, if you'd come out to the promenade with Harry and me sometime."

He huffed and adjusted his instrument. "When is Admiral Janeway's transport supposed to arrive?"

"Within the hour."

"So, you're just here to kill time until then."

"Not entirely," I said, dragging my finger along the tabletop in circular patterns. "I also wanted to know what you were working on."

"You'll find out soon enough."

I groaned. "I'm just as important to this research as you are. I'm the leading psychologist in this field. I think I have the right to know what you know."

"You'll find out soon enough, Miss Eelo," he reiterated.

"It's Doctor Eelo," I muttered, "you juk'soraya yev."

Julian couldn't help but laugh. "You know, you fall for it every time I call you that, right?"

"Yeah, yeah."

A wide grin lit up his features as he looked up from the microviewer, bringing life back to his green eyes and gathering wrinkles in his olive-toned skin. "And every time, it cheers me up. So, thank you."

I gave him a slight smile. "You're welcome."

"Now, if you don't mind, I have a lot to do before Admiral Janeway's visit."

"I can help."

Julian signed. "We've been through this already."

"Fine," I grumbled, twisting the chair one way and the other. "Then maybe I have a job for you."

His eyebrows twitched. "Oh? And what might that be?"

"To entertain me."

He chuckled and shook his head. "That big, genetically-enhanced brain of yours and all you can think of is entertainment."

I shrugged. "I'm a simple person."

"Well, as much as I enjoy wasting both our talents on being your entertainment—" he gestured towards the microviewer— "I believe this takes priority."

"Overachiever."

"You'd better believe it."

Just then, a two-toned notification sounded, alerting us to an incoming comm. "Ops to Commander Eelo," came the voice of Fleet Admiral Kira Nerys.

"Speaking of Bajorans with foul mouths," Julian muttered, returning to the microviewer.

I laughed and tapped my combadge. "Eelo here, Admiral."

"Admiral Janeway's transport has just arrived. Please meet her at landing pad E."

"On my way."

I gave Julian's shoulder a squeeze before leaving him to his work.