Sorry this chapter took so long to get out. I kind of hit a wall with this story. I had originally intended that it would end with the birth But I felt like it needed a bit of a denouement and I was struggling with how to do it. Let me know what you think. Thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed. - you guys make it all worth while.

Archer

He hears the squeal from the bridge at about the same time as he opens his own message. He is not too worried. He has spent fours years working alongside the owner of that squeal so he knows it signifies someone has gotten married, or pregnant or a particularly interesting pair of shoes.

He reads through his message and quickly discovers which of those three must have precipitated the shriek. He gives a wry laugh, while Enterprise was on Earth forging history with the negotiations for the Coalition of Planets it seems Trip and T'Pol were having their own pivotal moment in history. Neither of them had mentioned this little matter when they resumed contact a few months previously.

He realises he has some mixed feelings about this news. He is happy for Trip and T'Pol. The kind of happiness you get from friends getting married and having kids. But also, more specifically, that these two people have done it. His brief association with Surak was enough to let him know that they would not have been having the best time while they were apart. Trip's total ignorance about what was happening to him would not have helped one bit, which is what would have caused him to close himself off.

But Archer knows he is still human at his core and he hasn't completely put aside his hurt after Trip cut all contact back in April and even though they are communicating again it's not as natural as it was. Realistically their relationship had already suffered from the ten car pile up that was the mission in the Expanse. He wants it to be what it was, but suspects there may be too much water under the bridge and too much space between them, literally and figuratively, to ever completely get that old camaraderie back.

The pragmatist in him is more than a little miffed, he had been planning a campaign of wooing the former Commander and Sub-Commander back to Starfleet. He was pretty sure, after some discreet conversations with Command, that he could have gotten the whole issue of their marriage accepted as part of the package. He had even sold it as a kind of test case for relaxing the fraternisation rules, particularly around deep space missions. He's got a shit show in hell of getting either of them into space now.

And then there's the small matter of his jealousy. A bit of it with regards to T'Pol, he acknowledged his attraction to her years ago of course and had filed it in the "never gonna happen" tray. But somehow it did happen for Trip, and he knows it's foolish but he can't stop himself from asking what would have happened if he had pursued it. Once again he has the ghost of Surak to enlighten him about how well that would have gone down.

There is more to it than that though. He feels a little closed out, he didn't just have a close friendship with Trip, T'Pol was his friend as well. It kind of felt like the three of them were the triumvirate of Enterprise, they each had such different skills but together they were the strongest team you could have forged to lead this crew. But then Trip and T'Pol went off and formed their own little club without him and he can't help wondering just how long he had been the third arm in the relationship before the other two completely broke away. Now he's always going to be on the edge of them. They're not three individuals in a friendship anymore, Trip and T'Pol are a unit and he's... alone.

He realises that's the crux of. He's alone. He's spent his life prioritising his career, he's deliberately ended relationships to preserve it and he has no family to speak of. Deep space exploration does not exactly open up many opportunities for romance and the rigours of command keep him somewhat isolated from his crew. He had come to rely on his friendship with Trip and T'Pol as a kind of replacement for a family but then they went and made their part into an actual family and he's been left alone, out in the cold of deep space.

So in the end it's not his friendship with Trip, or his attraction to T'Pol or even the dynamic between them as the former Command team on the Enterprise. It's all down to his personal choices. The life he chose to live and and what he gave up to live it. He sighs at the moment of self revelation, takes another look at the photo of Trip holding his son, then opens the cabinet in his office, takes out a bottle of bourbon and a couple of glasses and pours a measure into each glass. He takes one of the glasses for himself and pushes the other towards the picture of his old friend holding his newborn son.

"Here's to us, Trip,". He taps the second glass with his own. "Making history, although I'm not so sure this is what they had in mind for you when they coined the phrase 'boldly go where no man has gone before'."

The door chimes and he's pretty sure he knows who it is; the owner of the squeal.

"Captain?"

He looks up to see Hoshi standing the the open doorway.

"Have you seen the message from Trip?"

She notices the glass in his had and the apparently unassigned one on his desk. She giggles at the sight.

"Just wetting the baby's head." He tells her with a slightly embarrassed smile.

He fancies he sees a little smile of sympathy on her face. Hoshi has always been too perceptive by half. She walks over and picks up the lonely glass and taps it against his."To family, new and old, wherever they may be."

They both take a drink, and he hides a smile behind his glass when she coughs a little and shudders at the sharpness of the drink.

"Sooo," He looks at her speculatively. "Who won the pool?"

She coughs again and looks away and he laughs, because he knows it was probably her and Malcolm will be annoyed."

"I'd better return to my post." She puts the glass down on his desk and turns towards the door and he gets up and follows her because she's right, family are family, wherever they may be.

So he goes out to be with his, while they laugh, and reminisce, and celebrate and breathe.

XXX

Malcom

"Skippy, my good man, quick question for you."

"Certainly, Lieutenant Commander Reed, How may I assist you?"

"How long is a Vulcan pregnancy?"

"I believe it is roughly equivalent to twelve point five Earth months, Lieutenant Commander Reed."

"That bloody Yank bastard! I knew there was more going on than neuro-pressure. 'Just friends', my arse."

"I beg your pardon Lieutenant Commander?"

"Sorry, Sub-Commander, just talking to myself. I'll see you at dinner?"

"I will see you then, Lieutenant-Commander."

"He could have damn well given me a heads up. Bloody yank bastard, when I see him I'll make wish he never learned how to breathe."

XXX

Trip

He steps into the living room to find T'Les pacing the living room floor, humming softly to his his new born son, with an expression on her face that could only be describe as affectionate. It is something of a surprise to see his very Vulcan mother-in-law behaving so emotionally.

She looks up at him with no trace of embarrassment at being caught by her human son-in-law.

"He is a remarkably calm baby." She tells him quietly.

Trip shrugs "He seems pretty normal to me." He can't claim to have huge experience with newborns. He remembers his nephews as babies only vaguely but he can't remember them being much different from this.

T'Les strokes the cheek of the sleeping baby. "Vulcan newborns cry a great deal. It is a very trying time for a parent." She looks at Trip and notices his expression of surprise. "You expected the opposite to be true?"

He walks over and looks down at the screwed up little face of his son and can't help the wash of love the passes over him. "Honestly, yes." He looks up at her with an evil grin. "I expected Vulcan babies to exit the womb with one eyebrow raised, immediately comment on how illogical the whole birthing process is, then request a bowl of plomeek broth."

She looks at him with one of her own eyebrows raised in, what he hopes is amusement. "You are right on one point: childbirth is immensely illogical. However, Vulcans are not born with the emotional discipline of an adult, it is a skill that must learned. Vulcans are, by nature, an extremely emotional species which is probably never more clearly evident than when they are infants."

"So you think he will be more human in his nature?"

She looks down again at the sleeping baby with an expression that he can only describe as doting. "He will be himself." She says softly. "T'Pol and I will teach him how to be a Vulcan and you and your family will teach him how to be human but ultimately, he will have to define himself because he is the first of his kind."

Trip swallows with the immensity of the task that is before him. He'd had very little time to accustom himself to the reality of his impending parenthood. It had taken several weeks for him just to get over the fact that he hadn't lost T'Pol for good. If he's honest with himself, with the wedding and work and learning about the bond and taking care of T'Pol in the final months of a difficult pregnancy, he has to admit he had kind of pushed aside facing the very pertinent fact that pregnancy ultimately leads to a child. He and T'Pol hadn't even discussed names, they had been somewhat tied up with each other.

The child stirs in his grandmother's arms and she promptly passes him over to his father.

"He will be more settled with you." She tells him calmly.

"Why do you think that?" He asks as he accepts the bundle somewhat awkwardly and sits down on one of the couches.

"Because of the parental bond. He has is a weak bond with me, through my bond with T'Pol. But the bond with you is already strong. Can you not feel it."

The whole bond thing is kind of new to him he has to work at perceiving what comes as naturally as breathing to Vulcans. He concentrates, turning his mind inwards as he has been taught by Saros and T'Pol. He finds T'Pol immediately, something like the way he can find the nose on his face without a mirror, she has awoken from her nap and is moving around the bedroom. Sensing his attention on her she gives him a mental nudge, a telepathic caress on his cheek. He returns the sensation to her and pulls away from her focusing, trying to tease out the different consciousnesses. He finds it tucked between them, somewhat nebulous and unformed, connected to them, but, at the same time, distinct.

It amazes him, this new world that has opened up to him since being informed of the bond. He cannot believe they thought he would be intimidated by it, by the intimacy, the inevitability. He is as intrigued by it as he is content. To him it is as though his love has been rendered as something tangible, something more real than just feeling. He knows T'Pol will never tell him she loves him, but he doesn't need to hear it. Because the bond makes it so palpable it's like he can see it and taste it and touch it.

He focuses on in son's katra again and is surprised to find an can only be described as an empty space along side it and ponders what it signifies.

"T'Shanik".

He startles, equally from the name reverberating around his consciousness as from T'Pol suddenly sitting down next to him. He looks at her questioningly.

"The "empty space" you perceive." She speaks aloud this time. "It is from our bond with T'Shanik."

He feels torn between grief and relief. She had been so much more than just a sliver of his genetic code, rudely spliced together with T'Pol's to serve some madman's perverted agenda. She had been a part of his soul and he knows with tragic certainty that the space she left will never be filled, it will remain within him forever. It also makes him reassess what his parents have lost and survived; the unhealable wound that occurs when you outlive your child. At the same time he is comforted by the thought that his tragic daughter did not live and die alone as he had always supposed, but had used the abilities inherited from her mother and reached out across the emptiness of space and found them, and nestled herself between their conjoined souls, making herself truly theirs.

It makes him think of their other other impossible child (reminding him that this latest one is not actually the first of his kind) who roamed the expanse for a hundred years and may still be out there, but is more likely dead, or possibly didn't even exist in the first place. He snorts to himself with amazement as much as amusement, causing T'Pol to lift her head from her quite logical admiration of their son and looks at him questioningly.

"Talking about T'Shanik also got me thinking about Lorian and I realised that you and I probably have the weirdest family in the Galaxy."

"It is quite an unlikely group of offspring." She tells him blandly. Her expression is fixed but he knows she is amused because he can feel it. She has started pushing her excess emotion off onto him because he is better able to deal with it. Her mother is infinitely amazed that a human spouse has made her emotional daughter more logical not less.

"At least we get to keep this one." He says at last smiling softly at her. "But I think we need to give him a name."

"I believe I have already indicated that he should be named in the tradition of his father." She gives him the eyebrow as she says it.

He gives her a sideways smile in return. "I wasn't quite sure if I should count on a conversation that took part in a dream, as being relationship cannon."

"You may safely assume that anything that happened between us in the dream space is akin to actually occurring."

"Really? Including the one where you turned into a mad zombie and tried to strangle me?"

"While you are aggravating enough to test the emotional control of even the most logical of Vulcans, nonetheless, for a Vulcan that would be an expected response to her mate engaging in an intimate social engagement with an unbound, unrelated female."

"Maybe, but in all fairness, I hated every excruciating minute of that date and I only went on it because I thought you were married to someone else and I figured I should at least try to have a life."

Sometimes he's amazed at how easily they seem to have just slid gracefully past the hurt of the past year and back into the cool banter that has defined their relationship. This is why he loves the bond, especially now that is complete, they are laid bare to each other and the pain, anger and self recriminations of their months apart are a secret to neither of them. It is a very efficient way to manage a relationship. He can see see how Vulcans can be so dismissive of emotions when they don't have to speak of them. At the same time he is not fooled at all, they can harp on all they like about telepathy and katras, calling it a bond makes it seem like something different, but he knows it is really just another name for love.

"It is extremely unVukcan for me to admit it,". Her tone has changed, she is no longer teasing him, though only those very familiar with Vulcans would be able to hear the difference. "but every minute that I believed I would have to marry Koss, I also found excruciating. No matter how hard I tried, I could not envision my life without you in it." She reaches carefully across him so not to disturb their sleeping son, takes his face in her hands and kisses him gently and rests her forehead against his. "You are half of my heart and half of my soul, without you I can barely breathe."

XXX

Things are different. For as long as he had known anything, things remained the the the same. The same temperature, the same fluid surrounding him, the same sounds, the same darkness, the same patterns of movement and stillness. Then everything changed and keeps changing. Now he feels and he does not know what it means.

Mostly he is warm, but sometimes he is colder or hotter and it makes him feel. Sometimes he is wrapped tight and sometimes the familiar feeling of being contained is gone and parts of hims flail about and it makes him feel. Sometimes it is too still and that makes him feel. Sometimes it is bright and he can see many shapes and shadows that he does not know how to define and it makes him feel. Sometimes it is very quiet, too quiet, which also makes him feel. Sometimes he is alone, which definitely makes him feel. Frequently he gets a strange feeling of need in him, this makes him feel, it makes him feel a lot. Then, at other times, there is a strange wetness against a part of him, just another thing to make him feel

When he feels, he reaches out to her, the one that used to contain him, then suddenly let him go, set him adrift on all this feeling. When he feels, and it is too much, he makes a loud sound and reaches out for her mind. He pushes everything he feels out to her. Often someone, not always her, takes away the circumstance, but the feeling remains and she tries to push it aside so he does not feel it. He knows this is her way but it does not help him, so he seeks out the other. The one whose mind was always there. A part of her? A part of him? No, they are all parts of the same thing, he can see it. They belong together, him, her and the other one. The other one knows about feelings, the other one absorbs feelings, processes them, then lets them float away. The other one helps him see, there are two kinds of feelings: the ones he wants, and the ones he does not want.

They help him with the feelings he does not want. They hold him close, and make sounds, and remove the wetness, and move him, and she attaches him to her and the need in him goes away.

But they also give him feelings he wants, from the holding and the noises and the moving. But there is something else, something he always wants, that is always there, something that encompasses the three of them, it is the thing that holds them all together. The other one one knows what it is, the other one has a name for it, because it is a feeling.

Now the other one is holding him, close enough that he can see patterns of light and dark that feel familiar and right and he does not want to look away. He wants to learn this pattern of the other one, it is important. Then she is there as well, near enough that that he can make out a similar pattern of light and dark on her. He studies the pattern on her as well, there are subtle differences between them that he will learn. They are making sounds and the connection between her and the other one is open and the feelings flow between them and he is awash in them. He feels hope, awe, gratitude, amusement, contentment, happiness, joy, love. The names of feelings flow into him from the other one. This is right, all these feelings are right, even the ones he doesn't want, he knows that from the other one, this is what it means to be alive, this is what it means to breathe.

The End

XXX