Trip

He feels it as soon as he steps off the shuttle. It's a bit like someone has thrown a chunk of hot concrete at his chest. He feels like he is thirty kilograms heavier, struggling to breathe and all the fluid was instantaneously evaporated out of his body. He's also pretty sure his lips have already chapped. The desert, his old nemesis, nothing good has ever happened to him in the desert.

A Vulcan named Turock is supposed to meet him and escort him to his hotel. It occurs to him he's only been on the planet for five minutes and all he can think of is a cold shower and a cold bed in a hotel with in-room gravity controls. He is about to be disappointed on all counts.

A woman, who looks to be his mother's age but could be twice as old for all he knows, steps forward and says his name. He responds with a wheezed affirmative. It occurs to him that if he had taken the Vulcan transport, as T'Lara had suggested, he would have had weeks to acclimatise and wouldn't feel so shell shocked right now. He vows to tell her this, because he knows how much pleasure she gets from being right, even more so when it means he is wrong. He's quite generous that way.

He squints at the woman, who is standing, cool as a cucumber in front of him. He can already feel a headache developing behind his eyes as a result of the lower oxygen, the bright midday Vulcan sun doesn't help one iota. He wishes he'd thought to have his sunglasses handy. The woman holds up her hand in the Vulcan greeting and tells him her name. Which he promptly forgets. He muses that visiting Vulcan is somewhat like having the flu: he's struggling to concentrate, his chest feels tight, his limbs feel heavy, he feels too hot and he has a headache. It's definitely a factor to include in the tourist brochure, he thinks sourly

The woman looks at him with raised eyebrows and takes his bag off him without even asking, he doesn't protest, it felt like he'd packed rocks in it anyway. She leads him to a vehicle while telling him he will feel more comfortable if he gets out of the heat. He doesn't protest that either. The air conditioning in the car is set at least five degrees higher than he would choose but it's at least ten degrees cooler than outside, so he doesn't complain.

As she directs the vehicle out of the shuttle port, some of his wits return to him and he realises he has no idea who this woman is. For all he knows she may be a dangerous criminal who preys on unwary travellers when they arrive on Vulcan. Considering what he knows of Vulcans, it seems plausible he thinks wryly.

"Um, I thought I was going to be met by someone named Turock." He asks hesitantly.

"Mr Turock had commitments on T'khut this week and was unable to meet you. Your transport arrived a week early, so we had to make other arrangements" She tells him, with the typical Vulcan blandness that somehow always sounds like an accusation. The irony being that, this time, it is his fault, because he couldn't help himself and spent most of his waking hours in the engine room trying to squeeze everything out of the engine he could. The Captain loves him, he has a sneaking suspicion the Chief Engineer hates him, no one likes to be shown up. He managed to get the transport running an average of half a warp factor over the entire journey though, hence the earlier arrival. He doesn't say anything in response to her comment , he somehow knows it's not expected.

"Your early arrival has also complicated your accommodation arrangements somewhat." She informs him. "Hotel rooms are at a premium at the moment. The Earth Embassy is still under repair and there is an interplanetary conference in Shi'kahr this week. Your serviced apartment is not available until next week and we have not been able to secure you a room in the interim."

"Oh, where will I be staying then?"

"Under the circumstances, as you are a guest of the Vulcan Science Academy, I have agreed to host you in my private home."

He's not entirely sure how he feels about that development but his Southern manners don't let him down. "Thank you, it's very generous of you. I hope you're not going to be inconvenienced by having a human in your home?"

He swears he sees her lips twitch in amusement. "I shall endure, Mr Tucker. Your thanks are unnecessary, someone had to host you privately and I have an available guest room. It was logical that I make it available for your use. It would hardly be a credit to the Vulcan Science Academy if we let our our guests to sleep in the street due to a shortage of hotel accommodation."

It's a half hour drive from the international shuttle port to her house. During the drive he takes in the city that will be his home for the next six months. The sun is so bright everything seems washed to a dull reddish sandy colour. He recognises the style of architecture from the note his sister left him before she died. He feels a familiar tug of sadness when he realises she would have loved to come here and see it all in person.

The Vulcan woman's home is on the outskirts of Shi'Kahr and is built on a small plateau. He tries to hide his dismay when he realises there are what seems to be at least fifty stairs to climb to get to the front gate (possibly an exaggeration). He doesn't even protest when she picks up his bag and walks ahead of him. His mother would slaughter him if she caught him letting a woman tote his bags on Earth. Fortunately he's on Vulcan so that won't happen, the climb is probably going to kill him anyway.

He manages to reach the top of the stairs without disgracing himself, revises the number of stairs to closer to one hundred, and follows his host into the courtyard of her home. He's struck by the beauty of the setting which feels vauguely familiar, maybe it's the the similarity to ancient Japanese architecture.

His host leads him directly to his bedroom which is small and simply decorated. She tells him that she has to return to the Science Academy as she has classes to conduct that day but she will return in four point five hours. She suggests he may want to rest while she is gone, as the environment can be quite taxing for off-worlders and it will take a few days for him to adjust.

He doesn't need to be told twice and has stripped to his underwear before he even hears the front door close. He sets the climate control to its lowest setting, a positively chilly twenty-seven degrees Celsius, and lies down on the bed.

Truthfully, he feels eager to sleep. His dreams have become more vivid and realistic as he has gotten closer to Vulcan. All about her of course, with the exception of the living Enterprise dream, which he still has at least weekly, but most of the dreams have been in unique locations he doesn't recognise. Aside from the novel settings, the content of the dreams has been almost mundane, watching her eat, or work, or wait for an appointment. But it doesn't feel mundane. It feels like... life. As if they are doing these things together, because he can smell the food in the cafeteria she is eating in, and hear the soft murmured conversations of serving staff with patrons, or her fingers tapping the keyboard, or smell the disinfectant of the medical facility and occasionally, she has stopped what she's doing and seemed to look straight at him and in those moments he's been so tempted to reach out and touch her, but has always resisted just in case it shatters the illusion.

In some ways it feels like the dreams are more real than his life as there have been times, when he's been concentrating intently, that he's felt like she was there with him, as if he could see her in the corner of his eye but as soon as he turns to look directly at her she is gone. There is a part of him that truly wonders if he is going insane because he's basically hallucinating and his dreams feel more real than his real life. He worries a bit for himself since there is always the temptation to give in to the curious seduction of these dreams, to simply fall asleep forever and not wake up and stay with her forever in his mental space and he has the mystifying knowledge that it is an option. He's not sure what holds him back, that it would break his parents' hearts; that he's not ready to give up on life; that there are friends, good friends, who he hasn't spoken to for months, who would nonetheless grieve for him; and her, he knows, without any doubt, it would hurt her. Because, despite everything, whatever has happened, he would never do anything willingly that would cause her pain, he would die for her, or live for her, if that's what is required.

So he lies on the strange bed, in the strange house, on the strange planet and welcomes the strange sleep that enables him to be wherever she is, and watch her do whatever she is doing, and smell her soft perfume and hear her familiar voice and even, if he gets close enough, feel her breathe.

XXX

T'Pol

She has come to despise these stairs. She knows it is illogical to hate something inanimate, that serves a useful purpose, that only exists because it has been created to serve that purpose, but she hates them all the same. She knows there are twenty-eight, she has counted them incessantly, but as the months have passed, twenty-eight seems to have become a much bigger number than it was when she first returned to Vulcan.

She has foregone work today, her early appointment has left her drained and a strangely throbbing headache has come on suddenly making concentration near impossible. The specialist has been advising her give up work permanently for several weeks, the strain on her body is becoming more evident and it is illogical to continue something that contributes to her fatigue. She decides in that moment that she will hand in her notice the following day, it is the cursed stairs that are the deciding factor.

She steps into the house and feels a rush of emotion so complex she fails to categorise it. Because she can smell him, as if he has been in this room only moments before. She ignores it, since it is not the first time this has happened to her in the past few weeks. She has increasingly been having strange experiences, where she is certain he is present and the first thing she usually notices in these episodes is his sent wafting over her. The most recent incident was just yesterday as she was eating lunch, or trying to at any rate, when she had caught his scent and been overcome with the certainty that he was nearby, watching her, so much so that she had looked around for him, and she had even felt, just for a second, that she had looked right at him before the moment passed.

She has mentioned these incidents to Saros, and asked if it signifies anything with the bond. In a typically Vulcan manner he refuses to speculate. She is travelling through uncharted territory and Vulcans have spent too many millennia suppressing their imaginations to suddenly start trying to conjure up monsters at the edge of their knowledge to torture her with now. The medical specialist she consults with is not prepared to hypothesise either so she is left with the ticking worry in the background of her mind that this incomplete bond, along with everything else, is finally driving her insane.

She drops her bag and slips out of her shoes by the door, moving towards the kitchen and relishing the feel of the cool stone floor beneath her feet. Her mother would press her lips in disapproval, she was never able to cure her daughter of the habit of going bare foot in the house. She puts water on to boil for tea and takes out the ceramic cup that she prefers to drink from, stopping when she hears movement from the bowels of the house. Koss, she reasons with some resignation, he has been staying more and more at his apartment in the city so she hasn't seen him as much in recent weeks, she is grateful for the reprieve from his company. She feels some guilt for that. There is no denying that he is considerate or that he has all the attributes that make for a good mate and he has been more than generous towards her. But she feels bowed under the weight of his expectations and although she feels duty bound to honour the agreement she made to him, she can't help but anticipate being released from it, should the opportunity present itself.

She has her moments when she wonders if she should have taken the option offered to her by the specialists all those months ago, to forfeit his life, their lives, with a sundering, a termination. To make herself free so she could have bonded herself to Koss, and been a good Vulcan wife and fix at least some of the things that make her an object of suppressed disdain amongst her people. But Trip is not just a part of her mind, he is a part of her soul. While they may have been able disentangle the bonds of the mind, the bonds of the heart are much harder to unpick. Because she has learnt the flavour of love and it tastes of iron and salt, and smells of pecans and burnt sugar and its vowels are drawled and it's hands cool and calloused and now that she knows, she can't forget and doesn't even want to.

"T'Pol?"

She startles at the sound and drops the cup which shatters into a multitude of ceramic shards all around her. She had been so lost in her own thoughts she hadn't even heard him approaching. She stands there, in her bare feet, stranded amongst the slivers of porcelain and stares at him open mouthed, not even sure if she's remembering to breathe.

XXX