T'Lara
It is Soval who suggests she speak plainly to Charles Tucker, explain her tragic connection to Enterprise and how it is affecting her behaviour towards him. It is an unexpected suggestion for a Vulcan to make but Soval has been associating humans long enough to know that she may benefit from their skills at managing emotions. He theorises that if she cannot suppress her emotions in the Vulcan manner, then perhaps she must express them in the human way, which seems to be through communicating them.
So she invites Mr Tucker to join her for lunch and she takes him to the Temperate Garden, in the biology department at the academy. The garden, housed in large conservatory, has an extensive collection of plants collected from the tepid regions of a multitude of planets and is artificially kept a temperature far more comfortable for him than most places on Vulcan. The gardens are lush and beautiful but the cool temperatures make them quite private as few Vulcans come here unless it is required for work.
The conversation is awkward. She did not expect anything less, she is Vulcan, after all, and she was never provided with a lexicon of emotion to help her communicate her feelings. But the result is surprising. She expects Charles Tucker to be dismissive at best, disdainful at worst. She has prepared for those responses. But she has underestimated how humans react to emotion n others. When he responds with sympathy and compassion she is somewhat undone in a way that is most un-Vulcan. He watches her calmly and without judgement as she struggles to contain her wayward emotions.
Then he tells her about his lost sister, killed in the Xindi attack on Earth with seven million other ordinary people who were just going about their lives. About the rage and grief and the burning hate that he could not express or repress and how it was T'Pol, who helped him come to terms with it, who, in the end was able to get him to acknowledge his grief was not just the blanket loss humanity felt for seven million departed souls, but specific and personal and that that was okay. He talks about how, in the end, he was able to make his peace with, not just the Xindi as a species, but the very individual who designed the weapon that killed his sister and when he did that he was able to extinguish the hate and the anger that was a raging fire beneath the surface of his existence, consuming his very soul.
She is surprised by his revelation, his situation is somewhat like hers, not exactly the same, but she understands, in some way, what he is giving her is his own story of profound loss, not as a comparison or a competition, but as an act of reciprocity, for her own story of despair. It is the human way of saying, I see your pain and anger and I offer you my own in fealty, and that this is the human equivalent of 'I grieve with thee', except it is not just a platitude, for he truly does and they are now comrades in loss.
So she gives him her story and as she tells it she realises, with shame, that it is not the loss of Seltor personally, that is the true source of her anger but the loss of her future, of her imaged life that was supposed to come with him. So she admits that, to herself and him, expecting his scorn but he just smiles at her sadly and tells her that we don't really grieve the person we have lost, we grieve for the person we will never have, the person we will never know and the life we will never have from knowing them, and, in end, when we grieve for our dead, we are all really just grieving for ourselves.
So they sit quietly for a moment, on a stone bench, under a large broad leafed tree form Earth, which he tells her is called a Maple, and each contemplate what they have lost. Eventually he asks her if she will be able to find another mate and she is compelled, in the spirit of confession they have adopted for this conversation, to tell him just why that is such a difficulty for her. He looks at her somewhat sadly at the revelation and tells her not to give up hope.
She can't help herself at that and tells him rather crisply that Vulcans do not hope.
Which just makes him laugh and respond that maybe they should.
Feeling quite Vulcan in her indignation she informs him that unless he knows an unbetrothed, Vulcan male, of a certain age who does not see a tendency to emotionality as a fatal character flaw, she can't see much benefit in hope.
He looks at her for a moment with narrowed eyes and pursed lips and she wonders if she has shattered the fragile peace that had grown between them. Suddenly he chuckle softly, shakes his head and mutters something about a scheming universe, then tells her that she definitely needs to come to his wedding in two days time.
She is somewhat thrown by this, firstly, because she did not know he was affianced, and secondly, that his fiancée had accompanied him to Vulcan from Earth and she says as much to him.
She is rather shocked, almost disbelieving, when he tells her who he is marrying and she says as much with typical Vulcan bluntness. He smiles softly at her skepticism and tells her he has found his soulmate and while he's pretty certain it's not going to be easy for them, he genuinely can't imagine life without her and he knows it for a fact because has just spent eight months trying to do just that.
Then suddenly something clicks in her mind, the strange impression she always had of him as being almost two dimensional, as though he was playing the part of himself but not really all there, was evidence his being separated from his bonded mate. She studies him frankly now and can see the change in him and wonders why she hasn't noticed it before. It's strange to think that she had been able to see what no human could, the space that another person had left in his soul, and she knows that if he had been Vulcan she would have recognised it immediately. She had not identified it though, she had not even been aware that such a thing was possible with a human so it had never occurred to her consider it. After all, if humans have any reputation regarding their psychic abilities, it is for their near complete lack of any skills worth mentioning.
An alarm suddenly goes off on his communicator and he apologises for leaving suddenly but he has an appointment to attend. Before he goes he extracts her promise she will attend his nuptials, which she provides, out of shear curiosity, if nothing else. And, as he farewells her in the human custom, he gives her a smile, the likes of which she had never seen on his face before, which is understandable, given that he had, to all intents and purposes, been surviving with only half his soul.
She is left alone with her thoughts in the cool, lush garden of exotic plants, so unfamiliar for a desert world. She has to acknowledge that Soval was right in directing her to speak with Mr Tucker, she does feel calmer and more centred and more Vulcan than she has in months. So the Vulcan sits quietly alone in the garden of alien plants and speculates that the photosynthesis of this extensive collection of plants must result in higher levels of oxygen and that would account for why, in this space, she finds it easier to breathe.
XXX
Koss
This is the moment he finally comes accept that this was always the likely outcome and possibly even the logical one. There were always signs that, even though T'Pol had come to respect him, and even perhaps find him somewhat agreeable, she had always felt a certain distance from him, perhaps even a kind of distaste that was the natural reaction of a bonded female to a man who was not her mate. But he was convinced he had logic on his side, that despite everything she was meant to be his.
He had seen quite clearly how unwell she was at their wedding, how damaged she was by her association with the humans. But he also sensed how trapped she felt, bonded to a man who had rejected her, betrothed to another not of her choice. So he offered her freedom, conditional freedom, a year to find this human and attempt to resolve her relationship with him, and if it was not feasible, which logic dictated it was not, then she would sever her bond to the human and marry him. She had agreed, and he had, to a certain extent, taken on responsibility for her as though they were married already. He never considered for a moment her choice would be to keep the bond with the human.
He had virtually moved into T'Les' house, staying frequently in her guest room, but was never expected to behave as a guest. Instead he worked on showing T'Pol how useful he is, how Vulcan, finding her employment, getting her mother reinstated at the Academy, helping to prepare meals, accompanying her to appointments, even taking care of her during the Kir'Shara incident and assisting her mother and the human starship Captain to bring the Kir'Shara to the High Command.
After some initial awkwardness their relationship had taken on a kind of ease and, for the first few months, he had remained confident that his plans would come to fruition. In fact many Vulcans assumed they were already married, especially as Vulcans do not gossip so the story of their aborted wedding was generally only known to those who had been in attendance, he had certainly done nothing to dissuade anyone of the notion. But then things had settled and while she clearly did not find him objectionable, neither did she look at him with anything beyond a kind of reluctant acceptance. If anything she treated him like a distant relative she knew somewhat, but not well, and certainly not a potential mate. He also frequently sensed that she wished she did not feel so obligated to him so she could dismiss him from her presence. She never did, of course, because, for all that she strayed from the path of logic, she is still Vulcan and she would not dishonour herself and her agreement by sending him away.
Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the human had arrived on Vulcan and far from showing distaste for the bond or reluctance to complete it, he embraced it and agreed enthusiastically to marriage. So, on the eve of T'Pol's marriage to an emotional, illogical human, T'Les gathered for dinner, a few key people who assisted them over the past months. Koss had no particular desire to spend an evening with the human who trapped T'Pol in this travesty of a union but can find no logical reason to refuse, so he sat watching them as the human forced his emotional attention on her and she responded with cool acceptance as the bond and Vulcan custom required.
The meal progressed better than he expected it would. The human, while overly emotional, was not impolite and seemed to have, at least, some rudimentary understanding of Vulcan customs. It was his treatment of T'Pol that irked Koss. He was overly familiar with her, stood too close to her, smiled too widely at her, held her gaze for too long. It was unseemly, and he concluded she must surely, as any Vulcan would, find his attention unwelcome. Saros and Soval, the only other guests, along with T'Les, seemed oblivious to his undignified behaviour which may just have been a demonstration of superior emotional control on their parts.
Now the meal has concluded and the after dinner conversation moves through a variety of topics: some of which the human contributes to eloquently, even somewhat logically, although never emotionlessly; others which he listens to intently. Eventually, T'Pol, looking somewhat fatigued, excuses herself and withdraws to the garden for some fresh air. Koss surreptitiously watches her for some time, as she stands looking out into the night with her back to the house, while he considers approaching her and outlining to her, one last time, the logic of her severing her existing bond and joining herself to him. But before he commits to a course of action he notices the human, who suddenly withdrew from the group a few minutes earlier, crossing the garden towards her.
She does not turn as the alien approaches her from behind, and Koss struggles to suppress the indignation he feels on her behalf when, as the human drapes a light shawl over her shoulders, he wraps his arms around her, draws her back against his body and presses his mouth against her neck where it meets her shoulder. Koss briefly considers going out to inform this human what constitutes appropriate behaviour for a Vulcan but knows that it would shame T'Pol. At any rate he fully expects that, given their relatively private setting, T'Pol will not allow this type of attention to continue.
Instead she cants her head slightly to the side and drops it back onto the man's shoulder exposing more of her neck to his attention. Koss watches with barely suppressed shock as the man trails his lips up to her ear then whispers something to her softly. She shivers in response and turns slightly in his arms placing one hand behind his head to pull it down to her, while rising up to press her mouth against his.
Suddenly his preconceptions are turned on their head. He thinks back to the aborted wedding all those months ago, he could have forced her, made her marry him, he would have been within his rights to do so. He had seen in the moment he touched her Katra that she belonged wholly to someone else but he had later convinced himself his logic had been corrupted by her rampant emotions. He had become certain that under normal circumstances she would not have chosen to bond with a human. He concluded the unique environment in the Delphic Expanse, her Pa'nar syndrome and the effects of the trellium-d made her vulnerable and this human had taken advantage of that vulnerability. He believed that if he could demonstrate that he was a superior mate, that logic would bring her to him, that there was no benefit keeping a human mate when a Vulcan one was available.
He had been certain that he was her logical partner and her relationship with the human was not one she would have chosen freely. He finally accepts that the opposite is true. She has only ever felt trapped by her connection to him and whatever force has tied her to this human, she has never questioned its validity or its logic. He turns his head away from the lovers, granting them the privacy they believe they already have and catches T'Les' eye as he does so. Her expression is unreadable and while he was once certain that she supported his suit he wonders now if she too has accepted the strange logic of T'Pol's human mate.
The following day he watches impassively as his former betrothed weds her human mate and he notices that T'Pol's eyes follow the human wherever he goes, that when she approaches him to speak of some detail or introduce him to a guest she positions herself close enough to him that their shoulders touch or their hands brush against each other and when, at the commencement of the ceremony, their fingers touch in the ozh'esta the air around them seems to shimmer with their connection. He realises as he watches the couple, so inextricably drawn to each other, that for all that he had been fascinated by T'Pol's evident emotions, by the fire within her, he had never felt true desire for her as a person, he had never felt compelled to touch her or know her, that she had been almost like a curiosity to him, something of interest, something to possess.
Now, as he has stood by, unprotesting, and watched the woman once promised to him, marry another, he realises that he will need to find another mate. For the reality is that the isolation of an emotionless existence and the strange cycles of Vulcan sexuality are not particularly compatible with bachelorhood. It is, as he ponders this new undertaking, that Soval approaches to introduce a delicate young Vulcan woman who has recently returned from a secondment to Earth and will be working closely with Mr Tucker on his project.
It is as he converses politely with the petite Vulcan woman, that he is struck by how much she reminds him of T'Pol. Which is unaccountable as the two appear quite different in looks and natures. But as T'Lara comments on the strange circumstances of the wedding and he looks into her lively, dark eyes he has the most illogical thought that it is actually the other way round and that T'Pol has always reminded him of her. It is with this incongruous notion that he suddenly remembers the scene he observed the night before and wonders how she would taste if he were to press his mouth against her skin. Fortunately his Vulcan discipline does not desert him but it takes all his effort just to stand calmly near her and breathe.
XXX