Alright folks, pop your Prozac and read on.
Malcolm
"You're sure about this, Lieutenant-Commander?" The Captain looks at him, and waves a PADD in his direction.
"Yes, Sir." He responds. "It was Hoshi who alerted me. "She was thinking about T'Pol, wondering how Starfleet knew to look at T'Pol's medical records. It's not standard procedure after a mission. That's when she found evidence of the breach and brought it to me."
"You got someone to verify all this."
"Yes, Captain. I asked Skippy..." Malcolm sees the look on the Captain's face and corrects himself. "I mean, Sub-Commander S'Kypp, I reasoned he would be clean, given he wasn't on the ship at the time of the breach and because he's not, well, human. I didn't tell him what it was about though, just got him to check my results"
"So, these three crew members have been feeding information, among other things, to this group since before we went to the Expanse."
"Yes, Captain. It started shortly after we returned to Earth after the Xindi attack. That's when the genetic material was extracted. The second data breach occurred immediately after we returned from the Expanse. I looked at everyone who's been on the ship and had access to the data since then. These are the only three people linked to it."
The Captain nods but Malcolm can see the fury etched on his face. He feels the same way. He's lived with, and worked with, and grieved with, and celebrated with these people for over a year. The sense of betrayal runs deep. T'Pol is gone, Phlox is gone, Trip is gone, the trust is gone, all because of the actions of these three colleagues.
"Who knows about this?" The Captain asks.
"Aside from myself and you, just Hoshi and S'Kypp."
"Keep it that way. I've spoken to Admiral Forrest about this. This ties into a larger investigation that has gone well beyond T'Pol's dismissal. Planning is in place for a decisive strike, but we don't want to tip our hand by moving early against these three. Keep a eye on them but don't give anything away. We'll act when we receive orders from Command."
Malcolm mouth is a hard line as he swallows his protest. "Yes, Sir." He knows the Captain doesn't want these traitors roaming free on the the ship any more than he does. But it makes sense to keep them under surveillance until Command is poised to take down the whole network.
"Dismissed." Malcolm turns and heads to the door. "Oh, and Malcolm." He turns and looks back at the Captain. "Good work."
"Thank you, Sir." Malcolm nods his head. It doesn't feel good. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth to know just how much they have all been betrayed. He feels such outrage he can hardly breathe.
XXX
T'Pol
She has taken to counting. The stairs from the road to her compound entrance, twenty-eight. The number of breaths it takes for her to enter meditation, six. Hours per day at work, four. Minutes by hover-car to the academy, seventeen. The total number of errors she has found in her superior's work, twenty-two. Days since the wedding, seventy-three.
Her waking life is occupied by this strange accounting of the inconsequential moments of her life. As if she can find some meaning, some logic in the yawning emptiness that is her existence, if she can fill it with numbers, hundreds and hundreds of empty, meaningless numbers. There is only one number that really matters: ninety-nine .
Days since she last saw him, ninety nine.
She is not happy. She should not even experience happiness. But, she experiences unhappiness, so it does not seem unreasonable to wish for happiness, no matter how unlikely.
In the months since the turmoil of the wedding she has managed to find a certain kind of emotional equilibrium. It is not the steady, emotionless state of a true Vulcan. That level of discipline is forever beyond her. But it is a life in which the outward expression of emotion is minimised. The counting helps, she does not even realise this is a method provided to young human children to help them manage their feelings.
She has found a way to let the small emotions of everyday life to wash through her without requiring expression. The pleasure of a good meal or a problem solved. The petty annoyance of being thwarted in small desires, when the local grocer ran out of plomeek, when the hover-taxi was two minutes late. It is possible to experience these emotional blips without the countenance of doing so. They are not repressed, but they are not expressed either, just felt.
The large emotions, the despair of her current condition, the yearning for her mate, the fear for her future, she is able to keep these tumultuous feelings locked down tight, provided she meditates thoroughly morning and night. The greatest obstacle is that it is often difficult to find the necessary peace for effective meditation.
Because during meditation, the state of mind is naturally open, the bond is expressed in its most intense form, often pulling Trip into her consciousness. In this, their most raw emotional state, they seem incapable of communicating to each other what they truly want, instead they hurl blame and recriminations at each other. The hurt and betrayal each of them feel, demanding to be expressed. As unsettling as these encounters are she finds it difficult to give up these discordant confrontations, even this interaction with him is better than nothing.
Eventually the effect on her emotional life is too profound. She finds the only way to deal with these reunions is to retreat from them and keep attempting meditation until, for whatever reason, he is not drawn into her mental space. Conversely, some days she longs for him. Unsettling as the confrontations are, nonetheless, his absence from her white space is akin to losing one of her senses.
Sometimes even the mental contact is unsatisfactory and she craves his physical touch so completely that she skirts the edges of the madness she was warned about. On these nights she puts on his sweatshirt and hugs his T-shirt to her and tries not to cry herself to sleep with the cruel understanding she would have never sought emotions if she'd known that this was what loneliness felt like.
But it is the dreams she relishes most. Almost every night she is pulled into the nocturnal wandering of his subconscious mind and it is startling how frequently she is the main subject of his inner world. It is in these shared dreams that she gets to relive the romance, the heartache, the passion, the wonder, and the loss, that was falling in love with Charles Tucker III.
In these dreamscapes her emotions belong to both of them and she gives them freely. In these dreams she finds more peace and self acceptance than she has ever had, either before or after the trellium. It is the dreams that truly maintain her equilibrium. She wakes almost every morning, having spent the night cocooned in his dream love, and it is that love that keeps her alive, that keeps her counting, that allows her to continue living a life that is, at least on the surface, Vulcan. It is that love that means she can continue to breathe.
XXX
Trip
It is still dark when he pulls his car into his dedicated car park and and walks towards his office. He knows that the joke among his staff is that years of living on a starship have caused him to be too accustomed to living at work and now he can't get used to the fact that he can have a life outside his engines. Externally he laughs along with them, part of the elaborate act he has slipped into to appear like a normal person. Internally he doesn't want to acknowledge that the reason he works so much is because it is the only time, other than when he's asleep, that he is able to turn his back on the yawning emptiness that has opened up in his life since he lost T'Pol.
He is amazed himself, at his ability to act like the person he used to be. Somehow he jokes with his new colleagues, gently mentors the young engineers under his guidance, and flirts harmlessly with the women from the office who occasionally drift down from marketing and accounting and Human Resources to interact with the handsome, exotic, spacefaring hero that now runs the R and D department. But he can't shake the feeling it is all an elaborate act. That he does it because that's the person the job needs to get these people woking effectively for him. As if this joking, mentoring, flirting person is just a habit and he does it without thinking, but the real him, the broken, lonely shell that remains after T'Pol, is watching this performance and shaking his head.
He doesn't contact anyone from Starfleet, he knows it's unfair. They were good friends and probably wonder what happened to him. He is aware he can't maintain the facade with them. He knows that they know him and would spot the crumbling core behind his shiny exterior. So he hides his hollow soul in the anonymity of people who did not know him before so can't see how he's changed.
At least he has the work, the real work that is, designing this engine. They had some great concepts already in place and he was able to improve it within days of arriving, much to the delight of his new boss. Work is probably the only thing that is keeping him sane, aside from the dreams. So he generally arrives at work at five a.m. when he can get a couple of hours in, and he doesn't have to be reasonable and charming, and personable, and feel like fraud while he does it. He sometimes wonders why this time is so important to him, why he's so keen to have this time to be this person he knows his colleagues wouldn't want to get to know. Because even though he hates the fraud that he perpetuates on his co-workers on daily basis, he has not interest in letting them know the real him, because he doesn't really want to know himself anymore.
He doesn't just work, he socialises He goes to his club and plays racquetball and works out. He's often invited to join other members for a meal which he frequently accepts. Most Friday nights he and the other singles on his team go to a local bar where they drink, and play pool, and talk it up, and flirt with whichever gender works for them, and laugh at each other's successes and failures. He is often invited to barbecues, family affairs, where he plays friendly games of football, and wrestles throngs of small children, and cooks over an open flame and gently fends off suggestions of divorcees he could date. His boss is a personable guy who has invited him sailing on a couple of weekends and they ride the breeze and shoot the breeze like they've known each other for years. He thinks it should feel like he has a full life, but he gets home after every single one of these various social encounters and wonders just who the hell he was while he was there.
It feels like all these people should be friends, he suspects they think they are, or at least are working towards being so, given the short amount of time they have known him. But he can't seem to shake off the feeling that he is living on the surface of this life. As though he's observing himself living it but not really experiencing it. He puts so much work into maintaining his air of normalcy that sometimes he can't understand why it doesn't take, why it doesn't just become a real life, why he can't get over the idea that he is somehow incomplete no matter what he does.
The only time he feels like his real self is in the dreams. At first when he starts dreaming of her it is the strange, cloud-like space. What stands out to him the most in these visually bland but emotionally explosive encounters, is the intensity of the feeling. The emotions are so raw and unfiltered that everything he feels is akin to feeding pure oxygen to a fire. All the things he really wants to say to her, how much he misses her how much he loves her seem to get lost in whatever raging emotion the dream unleashes that night. The dreams never last long before the intensity of the feeling pulls him into consciousness and he often has to get up and go for a run or work on something to take his mind off the residual sensation of the nightmare.
As days pass to weeks the dreams lose the emotional intensity but became more visually acute and physically tangible. Mostly they take place on Enterprise, occasionally at his apartment in Sausalito, less likely some other location he has never been with her. These imaginings have more of a dreamlike quality but he wakes up with the feeling that she had really been there, that he really was talking to her and touching her. Although his sleep is better, and the dreams give him, at least the illusion of relief from living without her, waking each morning is a double edged sword that cleaves to the depth of his soul as he finds and loses her again on a nightly basis. But the grief of losing her repeatedly does not outweigh the comfort of being with her again so he welcomes sleep like he never has before, even though waking is as close to physical pain he could get without injury.
There are some mornings when he lies in bed contemplating another day of this exhausting, faux existence and wonders where he is going to find the will to do it all again. Somehow, he's never sure how, he finds some untapped reserve of energy that allows him to push through the inertia that marks each new day. Mostly he tries not to contemplate this existence he has found himself in. It's better not to stare too hard into the abyss, he doesn't want to know what might be staring back.
But every now and again he wonders if this is what it will be like for the rest of his life, and if that's case, how long he can keep on going. He wonders if there is a point in time that he will give up, give in to the feeling that he will never be complete again and just stop trying. He's not even sure if he fears that day. But for now the dreams are enough to keep him going. The memory of her, but also the knowledge that she is out there in the universe, living and breathing and being herself. He realises that he hasn't lost all hope of getting back to her somehow, that some day, some miracle intervention will bring them together again. Until that day all he has to do is keep on going, keep up the pretence that he is a part of life, put one foot in front of the other and breathe.
XXX