Trip

He sees the Vulcan standing there when he walks into his office and, for a moment, his breath catches in his throat. He knows it's not her, but it seems that his heart hasn't completely let go of hope, so he can't put a halt to the dream that perhaps T'Pol has come to find him.

She doesn't really even look like T'Pol except in the broad way that all Vulcans look similar. The pointed ears, the slanted brow, the olive completion, but she is much shorter with darker hair and her face is more pointed, without the full mouth. He's pretty sure he stands there like a goon for longer than would be polite in any culture. But she takes it with the equanimity that Vulcans approach, or at least attempt to approach, all situations. Eventually the slightly clipped tones of his boss, that belie his English origins, break through Trip's trance.

"Trip, this is T'Lara. She's going to be working with us on the engine. Her speciality is advanced composite materials for warp applications. The Vulcan Science Academy has developed some leading edge stuff, Trip, I think it's going really put our project ahead of the curve. T'Lara, this is Charle Tucker III, but everyone calls him Trip."

He feels a surge of anger and distrust at the introduction. He's witnessed the kind of deals Vulcans do when trading away their technology and he can't help but be deeply suspicious of this development. What is strange is the obvious antipathy he observes in the Vulcan woman.

"Commander Charles Tucker III, of the Starship Enterprise." She asks with evident animosity. Evident to him anyway, Hugh McVeigh, his boss and the CEO of the company, seems oblivious to her hostility.

Trip folds his arms and leans against his desk and looks at her with narrowed eyes. "That's former Commander Charles Tucker. I resigned from Starfleet almost six months ago."

"Trip, is everything okay?" Hugh asks, looking between his head of R D and the feisty little Vulcan he met at the trade conference a week ago.

"I just have a reason to be suspicious when Vulcans come bearing gifts, Hugh." He notices that T'Lara says nothing.

"There are no gifts, Trip. We're negotiating a joint venture. Their materials, our design. It means they get some of the glory, that goes without saying. But it also means we might get to produce something truly leading edge" It's obvious from Hugh's face that this introduction is not going as well as he expected.

Trip rubs his had behind his neck and twists his mouth. He watches the news feeds and knows that the High Command has been toppled from power and a new government put in place. It's not ridiculous to conclude that these new leaders are less about playing the disapproving parent and more about partnership. He looks at the bristling little Vulcan and his perplexed CEO and suddenly he can't work out why he even cares. It's all just stuff to him and he has nothing personal left for the Vulcans to take from him anyway.

"Trip," Hugh looks at him intently. "Is this going to be a problem for you?"

"No, it won't." Trip tells him with absolute sincerity. "When I got out of Starfleet, I got out of interstellar politics. I'm just here to build the best engine I can and if that means working with Vulcans, so be it."

Hugh gives him a friendly slap on the arm. "I'm glad to hear that Trip, because we're planning to send you to Vulcan."

Somehow, Trip's not sure how, he manages to get through the next fifteen minutes of conversation while T'Lara and Hugh don't so much talk to him, as at him. Hugh is brimming with enthusiasm, despite being a entrepreneur he is also an engineer by training, nothing in the same league as Trip and he knows it, but enough that the thought of getting his hands on innovative new materials makes him a bit giddy. T'Lara's a bit of a mystery to Trip. She also seems enthusiastic about the project, which is pretty unVukcan as far as it goes.

He glances at T'Lara and wonders about his ability to read her emotions when Hugh seems blatantly ignorant of them. It occurs to him that three years of interacting with T'Pol on a daily basis probably just trained him in the micro expressions that Vulcans display, he knows better than most people, the lie that is they don't have emotions. He ponders the source of her earlier hostility, he even wonders if perhaps she knows T'Pol and holds him responsible for what happened to her. But occasionally he catches her glancing her at him in a way that, while not as blatantly hostile as her original demeanour, now seems to have taken on an air something like confusion. It's almost as if, even when she's looking straight at him, she can't really see him. He finds it strange that in the six months since he lost T'Pol, the first person to determine that he has been left somewhat incomplete, is a Vulcan.

He just trying to process the information that he's going to Vulcan. He can't figure out if he feels relief or terror at the prospect. There's a part of him, a big part, that's throwing a parade, because he's going to be closer to her, and there's a chance, even if it's slim, that he may see her, accidentally of course, and even if it's awkward as hell and all they do is talk about the weather, he'll be near her and perhaps he won't feel so broken. There's another part of him, a small sensible part, that's raining all over that parade. Because there is a not so little voice in his head that wants to find her, that is desperate to find her, even if it's just to look at her, and if he's close enough that all he has to do is drive to wherever she is, he won't be able to stop himself from doing that and he's pretty certain that would take him over the line from plain old fashioned obsessed and firmly into the realms of stalker.

Somehow while all this is going on in his head, he's listening to Hugh and T'Lara as they plan his life for the next six months, most of which will be on Vulcan. He doesn't know how he does it but he manages to take it all in, while at the same time completely ignoring it, until they are finally ready to wrap it all up and Hugh looks at T'Lara with a smile and says something that causes Trip to shake his head in disbelief.

"Okay, I think we're all in agreement here. Is this going to be acceptable to your people, Ladybird?"

And while she gives her ascent, Trip looks between the two of them with with a 'what-the-hell' look on his face, because his boss just used a nickname for the Vulcan and she didn't turn a hair.

"Did you just call her 'Ladybird'?" He asks Hugh, not even trying to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

Hugh just laughs in response. But T'Lara presses her lips together before she responds and Trip knows she's embarrassed. "Lady Bird is the rough English translation of my name. The T suffix before a Vulcan female's name translates as Lady and the Lara is a blue bird found in the desert on Vulcan." She tells him.

"Okay," Trip answers, wondering if he's stepped into another dimension. "Do you mind that he's calling you by a nickname?"

"Technically, it is not a nickname. It is a translation of my name." She tells him calmly, and if he wasn't trying to be on his best manners after their rocky start he would called her on her bullshit.

"I'm pretty sure sure Hugh's not fluent in Vulcan so how did he start calling you by the English translation of your name?"

"When we met, I had a Ladybird on my shoulder, when he pointed it out I assumed he had translated my name. There was some confusion, which from a human perspective was amusing."

He tries to muster a smile but just feels awkward, he can't help but remember that once upon time he would have only seen the humour and laughed himself. In fact once he probably would have teased her and asked why she had a bird on her shoulder and how Hugh knew it was a lady, and then killed himself laughing when she explained what a Ladybird was. So he says it anyway and laughs at her predicable response and Hugh is laughing as well and he can tell even she is amused and truthfully, he just feels numb to the whole thing.

Suddenly he he feels deep mourning for his former self, who could laugh and joke and felt a certain lightness of spirit, an optimism, a positive belief that somehow the universe was on his side and conspiring with him to provide moments of happiness and fulfilment and love. He knows it is irrational but it feels like fate has turned on him. First taking away the thing he love most, then offering him something new to love and taking it away before it was truly his, and finally giving him something and taking it away before he even knew it existed to be loved.

He looks up at this Vulcan Ladybird, whom he has a sneaking suspicion can see into his shattered soul. He wonders what her story is and if he should warn her to stay away from Hugh, who is obviously attracted to her, which, in the long run, is probably not going to be good for either of them. He doesn't even know how to begin a conversation like that with a Vulcan so he just smiles at her and they look at Hugh who is laughing so hard he is struggling to breathe.

XXX

T'Lara

If there was ever a moment that she wished she could be as emotionless as a normal Vulcan, it was when she was introduced to former Commander, now Mister, Charles Tucker. She wished she'd thought to ask for the full name of the engineer, Hugh McVeigh spoke so positively about, before she met him. Then she could have prepared herself in advance for the meeting and her moment of rage would not have been on display for all to see. Not, she had recently realised, that 'all' generally could see it where humans were concerned. Vulcan expressions were not obvious and were fleeting and humans frequently missed their appearance. So it was extremely unfortunate that Mr Tucker was one of the humans who seemed to identify her every emotion as it flickered across her face.

She was aware that Charles Tucker III had spent three years on a starship with a Vulcan crew member and obviously that exposure had given him enough experience with Vulcan emotions to render her something of an open book to him, which was disconcerting as she would very much like to have kept her initial reaction to him as a private thought. Because, for most of the time, T'Lara was able to use her emotions. They pushed her to achieve, they motivated her, they cautioned her, but her anger over the fate of the Seleya, that was irrational and served her no good purpose at all. It didn't seem to matter how many of the facts she was furnished with, it didn't matter how much she meditated or rationalised, she could not dispel the anger over what she had lost and she couldn't stop herself from blaming the Enterprise, most specifically the Captain, but that did not spare the rest of the crew from her rage.

She is, by dint of her position, in possession of far more of the facts surrounding the final mission of the Seleya than most of the surviving family members. She has read the report from the ship's doctor, which chronicles the damage suffered by the crew members that were still alive at the time Enterprise discovered the ship and concludes they were too badly damaged by toxic exposure to recover. She knows that the human boarding party, which included the Vulcan crew member who was quickly affected by the toxin, had been forced to fight for their lives to get off the ship. She understands that the Enterprise was on an essential mission in the Delphic Expanse, that the fate of their entire species was on the line. She is able see there was no way they would have been able to do much help the crew of the Seleya, even if they hadn't triggered the explosion, after all, they could have hardly taken 147 homicidal, terminally ill Vulcans on board or even wait around for them to die. She even understands that, in a way, killing them was a kind of mercy, as opposed to the alternative, which was to leave them, grievously ill, maddened with toxic rage, slowly dying on a disabled ship in hostile space. But all these facts, all this reason does nothing to dispel her anger and her grief.

Perhaps if she was a different type of Vulcan, a more traditional type of Vulcan it wouldn't have mattered quite so much. But her emotional nature makes her less attractive as a mate and that was the simple fact of the matter. As a child, her parents approached her betrothal with same detached logic that they approached most of their lives. It was logical to find their daughter a mate who was attracted to her nature, not repelled by it. So their search for their daughter's future husband had largely ignored the usual logical shopping list of traits sought in a future mate. family connections, wealth, intelligence, status, tribe, alliances and what not; while all these things were certainly used to find a pool of candidates, many superior specimens were passed over in the final selection. The result had been Seltor.

Seltor had been selected on the basis of his apparent attraction to T'Lara. Not that there was a sexual component to that attraction, they were seven at the time after all. But he seemed to want to be around T'Lara. He seemed fascinated by her emotions. At seven, children were only just starting to learn the discipline that would shape their entire mental life but Seltor, despite his own quiet, passive nature, seemed to enjoy the fact there was a rebellious streak in T'Lara. He had been the obvious choice, and his parents were pleased because T'Lara's family had a good reputation and the connection was far better than they had hoped for their youngest son.

Thousands of years of tradition had determined that allowing the betrothed too much time together as children seemed to alter bond to be more like that of siblings, so T'Lara did not see Seltor again until she was roughly the equivalent of a human teenager. After that her parents subtly encouraged contact between the two, hoping for an affectionate connection on the part of Seltor, that would prevent him from forming a distaste for the less conventional aspects of her nature. Their reasoning was sound and Seltor and T'Lara developed a warm relationship, that humans would classify as a friendship and both looked forward to their eventual marriage, probably more than the average Vulcan couple.

T'Lara was under no illusions, theirs would not have been passionate union. No doubt the bond between them would have quite sound and she had looked toward to her life with Seltor with satisfaction, ultimately she was still Vulcan and that would have been enough for her. Of course all that ended with the Seleya. He was an engineer and it had been an agreeable development when he secured the commission as it was one of the most advanced ships in the fleet and space experience was almost de rigueur for advancement in certain science and technology careers on Vulcan. They had planned together that she would complete her secondment to Earth and he his tour of duty on the Seleya and then they would fulfil their marriage contract and complete the bond.

But now the Seleya is gone and Seltor is gone with it and, along with them, the future she had envisioned for herself since their true friendship began as young adults. While she does genuinely grieve for her lost fiancé, she has no illusions that some of her grief is for herself. Because she is an adult, with a personality trait that is not just less desired amongst Vulcans, but undesirable. Because unbetrothed adults are not so common on Vulcan, so it is unlikely that she will secure as compatible a mate as Seltor, if she is able to secure one at all. This means the life, and the mate, and the children, and the simpatico that she had imagined with him are unlikely to eventuate for her at any point.

So when she is introduced to the former Engineer from the Starship Enterprise, the first crew member, past or present, that she has met, she is not able to quell the flash of anger that streaks through her soul and passes across her features, even though it's not his fault, but because that illogical part of her that won't let her anger go wants it to be, because it's easier to feel angry at a real person than to curse fates you have been taught not to believe in.

Mr Tucker displays a certain amount of anger towards her as well. He suggests that Vulcan's are untrustworthy, particularly in the area of technology exchange. Before she can defend the reputation of her race, Hugh McVeigh steps in and explains the agreement and then she sees a strange alteration in Tucker, almost as if holding on to his anger is too exhausting for him. She finds herself surreptitiously observing him while she and Mr McVeigh discuss details for the alliance. He seems to be listening, he answers when directly spoken to, but there is something about him that she can't quite understand, as if there is some absence in him that she can't seem to rationalise in a human, but she has the strangest sensation that if he was Vulcan she would know what it meant.

It is when he expresses surprise at Mr McVeigh's calling her Ladybird that she has a revelation about herself. She has detected Hugh McVeigh's attraction to her and she has done nothing to dissuade him. She realises that she has been quietly considering the possibility of forming a romantic relationship with the human entrepreneur. She knows she does not want to spend her life alone and has reasoned that a human would be more accepting of her nature than a Vulcan. Then after Mr Tucker jokes with her about why she had a bird on her shoulder, although she is somewhat amused, she catches a strange look on Charles Tucker's face as he looks at her, as if he wants to tell her something but doesn't know how to broach the topic.

She looks at Hugh McVeigh, laughing uproariously at the joke and compares him to Charles Tucker, whose emotions seem somewhat muted, as if he is numb to his life. It is then she realises that there is a vast chasm between a slightly more emotional Vulcan and even a slightly less emotional Human. But more importantly she knows that Hugh is completely oblivious to anything she feels, that she is little more than a blank slate to him and while it would be alright at first, in the long run both she and Hugh would suffocate in the empty space between their two nature's and a relationship could not survive where it could not breathe.

XXX