Petals for Armor
"This is so weird," Harry said as Tuvok lit his meditation lamp.
Blowing out the match, Tuvok straightened his posture and rested his hands carefully in his lap. "It is indeed an unusual situation. However, it was inevitable. No matter how well Miss Eelo trains her mind to block out my own, my pon farr will still affect her."
"Except now it's about more than that." I shifted nervously, wrinkling the mat beneath me. Its deep blue fabric looked almost black in the dim light of mine and Harry's apartment. I tugged it straight. "Now I'm dragging you both into a plan that could get us all assimilated."
Harry grabbed my hand. "Or save the universe. And you didn't drag us into anything. We're choosing this because it's our duty, and it's the right thing to do."
I glanced at Tuvok. It both was and wasn't a choice. If it hadn't been for me nearly dying in labor, Tuvok never would have needed to pour his katra and so much of his own energy into me. Without that bond, there would be no need for Tuvok to give more of himself and link Harry's mind to mine.
On the other hand, Tuvok could have simply let me die on that wretched planet. For all he had known at the time, I wouldn't have lived very long anyway. It was a gamble—a stopgap action to keep me alive while we waited for uncertain rescue—and it had cost him deeply.
Now he was about to pay even more for that choice.
How much more could he give before he lost his grip and slipped beyond the point of his condition being treatable? Maybe, if we were successful, he could get a transwarp ride to Vulcan in time to save him.
Hope. It was such a dangerous thing, yet it burned in me just like the small, fierce flame flickering between us.
"Let us begin," Tuvok said.
I took a breath.
Harry squeezed my hand and let it go.
"Focus on the flame." Tuvok's voice was deep, smooth, and sure. "Pay attention to the color, the movement. Breathe and let your mind clear of all thought. If your mind wanders, bring it back to the flame."
He allowed the silence to linger for a few seconds as I studied the fire and let it become the only thing in my mind.
"Now imagine the flame exists within you at the center of your being. See the light burn in the darkness of your soul. Feel the heat radiating from your center and warming your entire body."
I let myself sink into the meditation, the fire drawing me out of my body like smoke.
Tuvok's fingers settled on the side of my face, rough and warm. "Your minds to my mind. My thoughts to your thoughts."
With those words, my awareness expanded. Sight no longer mattered. I wasn't a body sitting on a mat and staring at a lamp with two eyes.
Instead, a different sense took over—a sense that didn't come naturally to me, yet it felt more and more my own each time I practiced using it. With this sense, I was able to connect with Tuvok in a way beyond words, beyond sight or smell or touch. It was like empathy but much more. It was understanding. Connection. Harmony.
A second flame entered my awareness—Harry. I had expected there to be three, but now I understood that Tuvok was just a bridge. He gave us common ground to be on.
Usually when Tuvok and I did our work, we remained separate souls momentarily connected in this special sensory plane as he guided me through the mental exercises necessary to protect our minds from bleeding into each other when we didn't want them to. Ever since we began our work together, that had been the only sort of telepathic link I experienced.
Until now.
As Harry and I moved closer, our energies began to intertwine, two lines of smoke twisting and curling around each other until they were so completely blended that telling them apart was impossible. Fingers of flame reached across the space between us, growing brighter and hotter with the desire for a new kind of bond—something deep, primal, and all-consuming. I reached for him, too.
Until a dreadful realization made me shrink away.
In all the time I'd known Harry, I always believed he was too good for me. He was kind, wise, thoughtful, pure, curious, altruistic, and selfless. He was everything that was good in the universe, and he needed to be protected at all costs.
Even if that meant protecting him from me.
If I let myself meet him in the middle of this place, my pagh would tangle with his. He would know me in a way I didn't even know myself. His perfect light would be tainted with my corruption.
What would that mean?
"Talia," he said, though not with his voice. He tugged at my mind the way he sometimes tugged on my hand, gently drawing me closer. "I don't care what you've done. I don't care what you're hiding. I don't care that you're so different from me. I love you. I choose you. We're in this together, remember?"
My center burned blue and white. This was a pain I had carried in my pagh my entire life, an ever-growing list of all the ways I'd fallen short.
Not strong enough for Marnah. Not committed enough for Starfleet. Not experienced enough for the Bajoran militia. Not skilled enough to escape being tortured. Not moral enough to keep my hands clean in the Maquis. Not resourceful enough to save my son. Not wise enough to save Voyager. Not resilient enough to be the counselor that my crewmates needed.
Not enough. Never enough.
If only I could be better. It wasn't for a lack of trying. All my life I'd tried to measure up, to simultaneously meet others' expectations and follow my own pagh. Yet it always seemed to fall apart. It was too much.
"How do you do it?" I asked.
"You don't," Harry said. "You just do the best you can to be the best version of yourself at any given moment, even if what that looks like is just dragging yourself out of bed. No one can be everything to everyone, ja'lat. Anyone who asks for that isn't worth your effort."
I could feel the tears rising in a throat I wasn't even sure I had in this state. "But I can't seem to be anything for anyone. All I have is failure and weakness."
Even before the thoughts finished leaving my being, I knew how he would respond. That's not true. You're not a failure. You're strong. He would never understand. No one could. I braced for his beautiful, ignorant words.
"Then wear it like armor," he said.
I stilled. "What?"
"Failure is how you grow, and vulnerability is how you connect with other people. That's what makes you human."
Not once in all the time I'd known him had Harry asked me to be anything but my honest self. Even in that I'd fallen short, holding back from him for fear of being found out as an irredeemable person, or of dimming his lovely light.
And what had he done all this time? He gave me his honest self and waited patiently for me to, little by little, do the same.
"I don't want you to do this unless you actually want to," he said. "We can stop now."
That would mean going on the mission without him. I could keep him safely away from the Borg and keep my own walls up at the same time. It was a very tempting way out.
But it wasn't an option for me—not with our crew, our loved ones back home, and our entire universe on the line. And I had promised Harry back on Voyager that I wouldn't leave him out of my life again. We're in this together.
I reached for him. "Our paths are one."
When our flames finally met, we became a great fire that seemed to fill up everything. Our souls danced, light and color and heat vibrating all the way down to the subatomic, roaring with the raw energy coursing through us and binding us together.
It wasn't erasure like the hive mind. If I wanted, I could pull back, take my kindling and put space between us once again. We were both completely free and entirely ourselves. Yet together we burned brighter and hotter than we ever had on our own. We were stronger this way, inseparable by any outside force.
Two souls, one flame.
The Vulcan mating bond was forged, a Terran and a Bajoran now joined in a way Surak could never have anticipated when he taught an entire species about infinite diversity in infinite combinations. No doubt there were a great many of the more orthodox Vulcans who would disapprove, but what better way to live into the IDIC philosophy?
And what a new way to understand love.
No wonder Vulcans held marriage so sacred. For Terrans, falling in love meant being swept into a great and vulnerable unknown. For Bajorans, holding sexual love, romantic love, and family love together at once meant embracing the complex and ever-changing nature of life partnership. But this mating bond was transcendent. It stretched across space and time, forged an impossible connection between creatures who were entirely separate, and brought us into perfect harmony. It was dangerous and wonderful and entirely illogical, yet it was also the highest order of logic.
It made no sense, yet it made perfect sense.
There was no other way to describe it.
Coming back into my body was a letdown. The pressure of Tuvok's fingers lifted from my face. My eyes came back into focus, one small flame flickering on a meditation lamp.
Without even thinking about it, my eyes found Harry's. All I wanted was to touch him, to feel the thrill of our minds, souls, and bodies sparking at the slightest brush of our hands.
"Holy shit," Harry murmured, and I could feel the awe radiating from him.
I snorted. "Yeah, no kidding."
Carefully, Tuvok lifted the lamp off the floor and blew out the flame.
Still, I felt its warmth.
"For the next few hours," Tuvok said, "you will be able to communicate telepathically together with ease. As the effects subside, however, it is difficult to predict how much this bond will enhance your latent psionic abilities with one another. No Vulcan in history has created a mating bond between two members of non-telepathic species before."
Harry folded his mat and handed it to Tuvok. "I guess we'll find out."
Winter was on its final gasping breaths in our province. Two days ago it had been warm enough to wear short sleeves, but tonight I sat in the courtyard and watched it snow. Little white flakes floated lazily down from the clouds, collecting on every surface. Tiny droplets of water that had once been crystals of ice speckled my heavy coat. I should have been inside, but it was likely the last snow of the year, and when would I get to see snow again?
Maybe never.
Footsteps approached, slightly muffled by the thin layer of snow that had formed on the ground. The chair beside me was shifted a bit, then someone sank into it with a quiet grunt.
Sisko.
"Are you done letting me avoid you?" I asked.
"Are you done running?"
Ouch. Part of me wanted to snap back with some vicious comment, to get in a hit about his ambiguous messages to me from the orb or his incessant attempts to control my life, but it wouldn't accomplish anything. He wouldn't see it the way I did, and even if he did he wouldn't care.
Besides, in this he was right. I had been running, and I couldn't avoid this conversation forever.
"Nowhere else to go," I said. "Not if we're going to free the Borg."
"Have you been thinking about the scriptures I told you to study?"
I scoffed. "You told me to study all of them, but you didn't give me a single clue what I was supposed to be looking for."
"Did it ever occur to you that maybe I did that on purpose?"
I squinted at him in the warm glow of the courtyard lamplights. "Why?"
"Because you need to find the wisdom for yourself."
"What wisdom?"
"I can't answer that. Only you can."
I threw up my hands. "Damnit! You know, this is why people quit going to temple. There aren't any answers, just more questions."
"The answers are up to you."
"What does that even mean?"
He shook his head and chuckled, bright teeth flashing in a grin. "Tell me, Eelo, if you had to boil all of the scriptures down to one idea, one concept, what would it be?"
"Love?" I ventured.
He raised his eyebrows. "Is that really your answer?"
I studied his face, the challenge in his eyes, and shook my head. "Marnah always said that unity was the most important virtue."
"And what do you think?"
I recalled the stories I'd analyzed, the poems I'd studied, and the truisms I'd dissected. Love in almost any form was sacred, yes, but there were also warnings of what consequences might come of losing oneself in it.
Unity… well of course Marnah would hold to the interpretation handed down by her family and embraced by believers in the old ways. Viewing scriptures through that lense had justified the unification of Bajor.
For many millions of Bajorans, however, "unity" had meant losing millennia of diverse cultural development. In the name of unity, an entire planet was limited to one faith, one language, one government, and a thousand years of submission to the rigid d'jarra social hierarchy. Yes, there had been peace, but at what cost?
And was that truly what the scriptures had all pointed to?
What other virtues did they extol? Freedom, but also service. Hope, but also caution. Sacrifice, but also self-determination. Scriptures certainly supported the ideals of peace and compromise, but there was also a pivotal story in the works of Dashke Pemba about the former nation of Laynid overthrowing their brutal dictator in a bloody war after a decade of government-sanctioned oppression and death—a story that exploded with popularity during the occupation, justifying all kinds of horrors. For every virtue I could name, there was another that seemed to counter it.
Then it hit me.
"Balance," I said.
Sisko nodded. "When you encounter the Borg, they will lure you with their promise of perfection. No more pain. No more weakness. No more failure. Anything you could want, you can have in the collective. If they don't have it, they'll find it and assimilate it."
I frowned. "How do you know this?"
"The Unity One Cooperative."
Oh.
"Perfection is a tempting idea," he continued. "People have been chasing it since they evolved big enough brains to dream up the concept. But it is a lie. There is no such thing as perfection." He turned to face me. "Living in an imperfect universe isn't easy. We love and lose. We try and fail. We fight to survive knowing death is inevitable. But this—" he clenched his fist— "is life. The flaws and pain are what make life special, and it is worth fighting for."
My chest ached. If I could, would I erase the pain I felt over losing Rojel? The flashbacks and anxiety from things past? All the regrets and failures I carried around like so many burdens I couldn't seem to put down? Would I give into the deep, desperate desire to rid myself of it all at the cost of my individuality?
I wanted to think that I wouldn't. From the sound of it, the mission would depend on me clinging to my humanity, flawed as it was. But I couldn't deny there was a part of me that was attracted to the idea of never having to live with that weight again.
I thought back to the brief moment I was dragged against my will into Riley's small collective before Sisko took over—an experience I had later described to Lyndsay as akin to drowning. For that little piece of time, my past didn't matter at all. Voyager didn't matter. The rights of the people who were about to be forced into a collective didn't matter. I had one goal—to protect the collective—and it filled up every part of my mind. That goal had been my whole entire purpose.
Slowly, I began to nod. "I think I understand, at least a little." I gave him a spiteful look. "I still hate you."
"It's not my job to make you like me."
"No, just to be a pain in my ass."
"If that's what it takes to get you on the right path so we can save this universe, then so be it."
The path of the Prophets.
My awareness moved to the blade at my side. A year ago, I had been so sure that was what Sisko had wanted me to find in the Bajoran scriptures, and that my path was using it to kill Loran. Even when Alixia and Sisko both tried to warn me otherwise, I was so sure in my belief.
When I tried to fulfill that misguided calling, I failed horribly.
"My tagh," I said. "The orb fragment. Is it part of this 'right path'?"
"It might be useful," he replied, watching the snow.
"You don't know?"
"I don't."
"So it was a coincidence then?"
"Maybe."
"Am I supposed to be a warrior like my mother?"
He turned to me with a stern look. "You are supposed to be whatever your pagh tells you to be. If that means being a counselor, then be a counselor. If that means switching to command, then switch to command. If that means being a warrior, be a warrior. Don't do it because you think you have some duty to your mother or the Prophets or anyone else. Do it because your heart says to, or don't do it at all."
