Chapter 5

AU for "Damage," Part 2

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Trip was waiting for T'Pol when she returned to her quarters, leaning against the wall beside her door. He didn't know what exactly she'd done with the Trellium-D, but the steadiness of her footsteps and the stiffness of her spine as she walked towards him spoke volumes.

Somehow, she'd ingested it. And it had significantly lessened her symptoms.

With a wary glance in Trip's direction, she keyed in her code and the door slid open.

"I need sleep, Commander," she said as he followed her inside. She walked to the window and stared out.

He studied her back, feeling bruised, and not just physically. Her use of his rank hurt, especially after she'd been so forceful with him in the cargo bay.

"I'll leave you alone if you answer some questions."

The silence stretched uncomfortably.

"I will answer one."

"And more later," he insisted.

After a pause, she nodded once.

If she was only going to allow him one, there was only one question to ask.

"Are you okay?"

Her shoulders relaxed slightly. "I will be fine for at least 24 hours."

"You think."

She acknowledged that with a stiff nod.

Trip briefly let himself remember what she'd been like after being on the Seleya. Trellium-D was poison to Vulcans. What could have possessed her to deliberately ingest it?

He didn't understand this. At all.

"You need to see Phlox."

"Perhaps," she whispered.

Trip sighed, rubbing the space between his eyebrows. He desperately wanted to come at her with a barrage of questions. Demand she tell him what was happening, why she would do this.

Equally strong was a desire to grab her and hold her close, reassure her that everything was fine and she would be okay. Even if he knew it wasn't true.

But he just stood there, feet glued to the deck, feeling trapped.

The comm chirped, Archer's voice following: "Senior officers report to the situation room."

Trip hung his head, sighing. "We'll finish this later."

He headed toward the door, stopping when he felt her hand on his arm. He turned back to face her.

She immediately dropped her hand. Her eyes searched his face, but he couldn't read her.

"I'm sorry," she finally said.

"For what, exactly?" He couldn't help the bitterness in his tone.

For a brief instant, so quickly he almost missed it, pain flitted across her features before disappearing. "I'm sorry for endangering your life in the cargo bay."

Her apologies were rare. He should be happy she'd offered one. Normally, he'd see it as positive, but he was finding it hard to trust that this one was sincere. "I appreciate you sayin' that. But it doesn't solve this situation."

She looked away. "I know."

A weight settled on his heart. For the first time, he acknowledged the truth: his help could only do so much.

T'Pol had to take the first step herself.

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"Are we really doin' this?" Trip asked Archer in disbelief.

The Captain had just informed them that they were going to hijack another vessel, the one belonging to the Illyrians they'd met a few days earlier, and steal their warp coil.

Enterprise needed it, no question, but this seemed extreme.

"We don't have any other options. We have to get to Degra's coordinates in time."

Malcolm began asking the captain about rules of engagement, but a movement in Trip's periphery caught his attention. T'Pol stood across the situation room table, her spine stiff. She was agitated, unhappy.

This was not a plan she supported.

As he studied her profile, Trip felt helplessness well up within him. That night they'd spent in her quarters, now just a few weeks ago, felt like a different life. He'd felt so close to her then, so certain that he'd found something special. Something real. Something life-changing.

With her that night, he'd felt whole. Now, he felt broken.

He'd left her quarters trying to pick up the pieces. All the way here, alone down the corridors, he'd weighed his options.

He could leave her alone. Let her deal with this herself. She certainly thought she could manage it. Hell, she'd called Trellium a "medicine," and while that seemed like the worst kind of denial, she didn't seem to want his intervention. She'd probably kick him off another catwalk if he tried.

But washing his hands of her seemed extreme. This connection to her made quitting her cold turkey damn near impossible. If he were being honest with himself, his feelings ran pretty deep. She felt integrated into his psyche now, and ripping her out seemed akin to a field amputation: excruciating, messy, and certain to leave a massive scar.

So that left option two: bringing in reinforcements. If she was ingesting Trellium-D on the regular, he had every right as an officer to turn her in. It was essentially substance abuse. A little tough love might scare her straight.

Trip scoffed at the thought as he punched the turbolift call button a lot harder than necessary. Scare her? A Vulcan? These volatile emotions of hers not withstanding, using emotional manipulation on her seemed destined for failure. Her reactions were unpredictable. There was no way to adequately prepare for the inevitable fallout, which was sure to be massive.

Not to mention it felt like betrayal. For now, he was the only one who knew about her problem. If he reported it, it went on the record. He'd essentially be forcing the Captain to sanction her. And if he'd learned anything about T'Pol, he knew that putting her back against the wall was the absolute worst way to get her compliance. The end result might be that she'd get the help she needed, but she would despise him for it.

He'd entered the situation room for this meeting feeling frustrated. No solutions. No options. But plenty of wishing that things were different.

Now, as Malcolm continued to explain the defensive capabilities of the Illyrian ship, Trip let his eyes drift back to T'Pol. She still stood ramrod straight, disapproval for the captain's plan obvious.

But Trip pushed past that, his eyes lingering on the curve of her neck. At his side, his hand flexed as he remembered holding her head to his chest, the warmth of her, the feel of her breath against his skin.

A desperate longing to feel that closeness again clawed at him. For a brief moment, Trip closed his eyes, turning his focus inward. Her presence was there, the glow back again, faintly pulsing. He pushed his own mind energy closer to hers, bumping just the edge. A faint thrill spread through him like a burst of static electricity.

He opened his eyes. T'Pol wasn't looking at him, but he could see that it had affected her. Her frown was less intense, her shoulders more relaxed.

Not quite as good as holding her, but it was something.

"Prep a team," Archer was saying. "Bring your best. I want casualties minimized."

"Yes, sir," Reed said, face grim.

"Will they put up a fight?" Mayweather asked.

"Under normal circumstances, we'd be more than a match for them," Reed answered. "But we have a lot of damage. Our aft torpedoes are better than anything they have, but that's all we've got."

"Couldn't we just transport the warp coil out?"

Trip forced thoughts of T'Pol from his mind and reengaged in the discussion, shaking his head. "It's integrated into the rest of their systems. If we yank it out like that, we'll cripple 'em." He sighed. "I gotta be there, decouple it by hand."

Captain Archer let the silence hang. "How long will it take?"

"Ten minutes, give or take," Trip said. "But that's an awful long time in a hostile situation."

Archer turned to T'Pol. "How far away are they?"

"We'll reach them within the hour," she said.

He looked back at Malcolm and Trip. "Make it happen."

"We'll be ready to board in 30 minutes," Lieutenant Reed promised.

Trip was the last out the door when he heard T'Pol's voice, speaking softly to Archer behind him.

"May I have a moment?"

"Not now," he said, his voice like gravel as he walked past her, heading for the other exit and his ready room. Trip felt T'Pol's frustration well up, pushing his mind energy away, and he knew his attempt to calm her had been thwarted.

He watched, his own frustration surging, as T'Pol followed Archer out the door and into an inevitable confrontation.

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"She's runnin' like a custom-made fit," Trip said, gesturing to the warp engine. The vibration under his feet felt right. Enterprise with her engines cold was a sad state, for certain.

Trip just wished they hadn't had to cripple someone else to get moving again.

Captain Archer stood at his elbow, looking at the engine with a grim but determined expression. "Are we going to make it all the way there?"

Trip nodded. "The engine's runnin' fine, like I said. The rest of the ship still needs a lot of work, though. The EPS grid is hit or miss, and now that we're not relyin' on the impulse engines, we need to work out the last of the glitches we were facin'."

"And the rest?"

"Bulkheads are still holding. But I'm not gonna lie—we've got a lot of work ahead of us."

Archer nodded decisively. "We've got 48 hours until we reach Degra. Give most of your team 6 hours rest. Then get back to it in shifts. We'll need all hands on deck when we get there."

"You got it, Cap'n."

Trip watched Archer leave engineering, his emotions mixed. Making progress in this Xindi mission was a good thing, no doubt, but the captain was staking everything on this alliance with Degra and his cohorts.

As far as Trip was concerned, he'd trust a Xindi about as far as he could throw 'em.

Kneeling down, Trip pulled his toolbox closer and began putting away the tools he'd used to finish the installation of the stolen warp coil. The mission had gone off without a hitch. The Illyrians had seemed more concerned with preserving the lives of their crewmembers than saving the warp coil, and once they realized that the Enterprise crew outmatched them, they backed off. But the anger and then despair in their eyes was going to haunt Trip for awhile.

Saving Earth wasn't an easy task, that's for sure.

Putting the last spanner into the tool kit and closing the lid, Trip turned his thoughts inward and checked on T'Pol's presence in his mind. She was a deck away in her quarters, but ever since her nightmare, he was able to sense her from nearly all over the ship. His connection to her seemed to be growing stronger. He'd lost contact on the Illyrian ship, but as soon as they'd neared Enterprise, she'd appeared again, that faint glow warming his thoughts.

She wasn't doing well.

Despite her claims that she would be fine, her mind was teetering again. He could feel her agitation, her anxiety, slowly building like pressure behind a closed valve. He hadn't seen her since the meeting in the situation room, but he knew with a certainty that her physical symptoms were returning as well.

With a sigh, Trip put the toolkit away and headed in her direction. He had to convince her to see Phlox. It wouldn't be easy, but she needed a clinical opinion. He worried for her fate if she didn't seek help as soon as possible.

She was meditating when he arrived, surrounded by candles, her face lit in a glow not unlike her energy in his mind.

"Do you need more time?"

T'Pol stared into the flame in front of her. "No," she said. "Meditating has not been particularly effective in the last few days."

Trip stayed silent. This was not his area of expertise—commenting seemed like an unwise idea.

"Did you need something?" She said after a moment, raising her eyes to meet his.

He studied her face, looking for physical signs of what his mental connection was telling him. He thought—but he couldn't be sure.

Settling for directness, a quality he knew she appreciated, he asked, "How are you feeling?"

She dropped her eyes again, hesitating.

"Please don't lie to me," Trip said.

Her mouth opened slightly in surprise, and she inhaled as if to give a swift denial, then stopped and pressed her lips together.

Trip waited.

"I am—not completely myself," T'Pol finally said.

"The shaking? The dreams?"

T'Pol lifted her hand, and the trembling was there, albeit lessened from before she retrieved the Trellium. "I have not tried to sleep since the nightmare."

"What was it about?"

She studied the flame for a long time, so long that Trip thought she was refusing to answer.

"It was about us."

He quirked an eyebrow, but motioned for her to continue.

"We were—" she hesitated, "engaged in a romantic encounter."

"Huh. Here in your quarters?"

"Why is the location relevant?"

Trip shrugged and gave her a slight smile. "Just tryin' to picture it, is all."

"We were in the shower."

Trip tried to suppress a grin but couldn't. There had been so little to smile about lately, the humor caught him off-guard.

"Sounds promising," he said, but dropped the smile when her eyes turned haunted.

"It began well," she conceded. "But then—"

"What?" he whispered, taking her hand and gently rubbing her fingers with his.

She gripped his fingers tightly. "I started to hurt you. I bit you. I could feel myself, my emotions getting out of control. And then I was choking you, my hands around your neck, and they were covered in lesions, just like the Vulcans aboard the Seleya—"

Her voice broke. T'Pol swallowed, taking a deep breath.

"I was killing you. You were suffocating." Her voice broke. "And then I woke up."

Trip looked down. Her other hand rested on her knee, and he watched as she raised it briefly as if to touch her face. It shook, like a prolonged spasm, and she dropped it again. Pulling her other hand away from his, she folded them tightly together in her lap.

"I think you need to answer my questions now," Trip said after a moment of silence.

It was a long time before she met his eyes and finally responded with a terse nod.

"How long have you been doing this?"

She bit her lip. "Since the effects of the Trellium wore off after the Seleya."

"That's been months."

T'Pol nodded once.

"You've done this every day?"

She gripped her hands harder, her knuckles white with the pressure. "Not at first. But over time, the effects began to wear off more quickly."

"There had to be side effects."

T'Pol shrugged. "They were minor. Slight agitation before my next dose. Some strange dreams. But nothing that hindered my ability to perform my duties."

Trip fell silent, studying her bowed head. He was hearing her. Grateful she was finally opening up to him. But it felt like it was all coming at a distance. Like a dream, or maybe an alternate reality.

Trip understood what she was saying. He was trying to process it. But it was like he'd been completing a puzzle and someone had just handed him a key piece, but it was from a different puzzle entirely. The T'Pol he knew—or thought he knew—didn't match the one in front of him right now.

And there was only one question that would make that dissonance go away.

"Why?"

His soft question seemed to startle her.

"I still don't understand why," he said again. "Before the expanse, you were the most logical, most controlled person I knew. But this—"

Trip picked up her hand again, cradling her trembling fingers in his. "This addiction is the last thing I ever would have expected." He watched her carefully, but her eyes remained downcast. "You were terrified after the Seleya. I saw you, heard you screaming. Why would you want that again?"

Her shoulders slid forward and she seemed to curl in on herself, but she didn't take her hand away from his.

"I didn't want that. But not all of it was terrifying. In sickbay, when the effects of the trellium were slowly wearing off, there were several hours when I was almost myself. Almost in control, but not quite." She finally looked up at him, and her eyes were unfathomable, a myriad of emotions he couldn't parse out.

"I had my first dream about you there," she said, a whisper.

He blinked, startled. "Me? Back then?"

She nodded. "We had just started neuropressure. You were still reluctant, and Dr. Phlox had asked me to try to persuade you not long before that. Do you remember?"

Trip quirked up a half smile, and gently squeezed her fingers. "Oh, I'm not likely to forget you pullin' off your top and lettin' me touch you. Even if it was just the neural nodes on your back."

Her eyes softened, but then she looked away. Trip was stunned to realize she was feeling shy. She cleared her throat. "My dream was about that night. About us. A desire for you I'd denied before then. But in sleep—"

"Your mind filled in the gaps," Trip finished for her. "Dreams have a way of doin' that."

"So I've learned," she said wryly. "When I woke up, I felt alive. More alive, more aware, more interested in the world around me than I'd ever been before. It was like my life had been a dull surface, and the Trellium polished it."

T'Pol stared down at their hands. Trip watched in amazement as she started moving hers, the pads of her forefinger and middle finger rubbing his palm as if she could soothe his worry with only her touch.

"After the effects dissipated, the memory of those emotions remained with me. The intensity of the fear and paranoia seemed unreal, like a nightmare. But those six hours of heightened emotion had been almost euphoric. I couldn't forget them."

"You wanted more," Trip said.

T'Pol nodded. "As this mission continued, you and I worked closely together more and more often. I became more comfortable with you. At times I would remember my dreams, how I felt afterward."

She caught his gaze. "I wanted more."

The moment hung there, full. Trip's heart was pounding, his breath shallow.

After an eternity of seconds, she lowered her eyes, and Trip could breathe again.

"Eventually, none of the logic I applied was strong enough to overcome the temptation," she continued.

"So you tried it."

"Just once. It was a small amount, but I got the results I had hoped for. My interactions with you, and with the rest of the crew improved. At first, I monitored my physical response closely, and I was satisfied that the side effects were within acceptable parameters."

"But you said it wore off?"

T'Pol fidgeted slightly. "There was—an escalation."

"Go on."

She met his gaze again. "You were injured. Nearly killed."

Trip was stunned. "It affected you that much?"

"You were important to me. And what I hadn't realized until then was that the trellium hadn't just let me access positive emotions. It also released negative ones."

"Fear."

"Yes, and worry. Frustration. Anger. Helplessness." She paused, breathing deeply to steady herself. "So I stopped ingesting it. I thought that my control over my emotions would return. It didn't. And it seemed that only the negative emotions remained."

"But you worked closely with Sim, didn't you?"

"Your clone was a week old by that point. Within that week, while he was an infant and then a child, I had very little interaction with him. I had returned to the trellium by the time he was an adolescent."

"And it helped you regain control?"

"Surprisingly, yes. The positive emotions returned and balanced the negative ones. You were healed. And I regained my control, for the most part."

Trip sighed. "You know, after hearin' all this, you comin' onto me that night in your quarters doesn't seem quite so outta left field."

"I had restrained myself for quite sometime before that night," T'Pol admitted. "It did not seem illogical then to act on those desires."

"And the next mornin'? When I accused you of lyin'?"

"I felt overwhelmed. Regretful. Ashamed."

"And vulnerable, I'd imagine." T'Pol looked at him in surprise. "It's not uncommon," Trip continued. "People sleepin' together for the first time, not in a committed relationship, but a lot of emotion ridin' on the outcome. On both sides. It makes sense to retreat some, out of a need to protect yourself."

T'Pol let silence fall, considering.

"I felt vulnerable too," Trip said softly. "That night was special. I felt—it was—"

"I can not find adequate words to describe our connection, either."

They sat there, silence falling, the weight on Trip's chest dissipating as the secrets were finally exposed. Knowing didn't solve anything. But it certainly made him feel more stable.

"You need to see Dr. Phlox," Trip said after several minutes of peaceful quiet.

T'Pol sighed. "I know."

"I'll come with you, if you want. You shouldn't have to do this alone." He paused, then took a deep breath and added, "Will you accept my help?"

She met his eyes. He stared back at her with every ounce of determination, caring, and support he could muster, and waited for her decision.

"I will."

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A/N: I know this sort of seems like an ending, but think of it as an end to Act I. Or II. I've lost count. :) Anyway, the story's not over. Hopefully I'll be able to post the next chapter within a few weeks.

Thanks so much to everyone who's been reading and reviewing. Your positive feedback is super encouraging! I'm so glad you're enjoying the story.