San Francisco 2145


T'Pol was unsure why- was disturbed to her very core by the impulse - but from the moment the ugly rumour reached her, her every step had brought her to this doorstep. She could say nothing at all about the emotion which compelled her here, except that it was large; it was large enough that she found herself knocking on the door of one of her former cages.

He -the boy - answered the door unnaturally quickly, and T'Pol saw that it was true.

If she had been less familiar with him, if she had not spent years in his immediate proximity, she might not have recognised him at all. The disfiguring swelling aside, everything was wrong - his posture, his eye-line, he even smelled wrong, somehow. Her mind's eye had something to say about this - it didn't show her the first time she saw him, the slave masters office, but the second, the time he had almost dropped a book in surprise at the sight of her in his room. That unnameable emotion thundered within her; the boy would never look young again.

He didn't invite her in, but he did step back as she stepped forward, and she was propelled into the familiar space, the walls smothering her as if she had never left them.

"You are clearly in pain. You require medical attention," she said, taking care to reveal nothing with her voice beyond the bare syllables.

He barked - a laugh, T'Pol supposed, and did not otherwise reply. He didn't really have to, just seeing a doctor in this situation, in this place, was far easier said than done.

"I can help, I think," T'Pol continued. "I've encountered a Denobulan doctor. He is competent, and cares little for politics, so his services and discretion can be bought just with money. And you do still have that."

"I doubt discretion matters terribly at this point."

He wasn't wrong about that, and T'Pol lowered her eyes ever so slightly.

"And," he continued flatly, "What would you know about discretion, anyway? I was told that you told anyone who would listen that I was some foppish, limp-wristed cream-puff, too anaemic to know what to do with you."

T'Pol shifted, that nameless emotion growling away inside her. "I didn't tell anyone..."

"Oh?"

"...except... Tucker. I wanted him to find me attractive, to think well of me. It wasn't really about you at all."

He sneered at her, looked straight at her, unblinkingly. "Ahh. I see. All those years, I took care of you. Never harmed you. And yet you betrayed me, anyway, because Tucker made your panties wet."

The nameless emotion burst forward and named itself rage. "How can you say you never harmed me?" she all but screamed. "You enslaved me! You locked me away in your room for years. I lived for years with the knowledge that any second you could decide to do whatever you pleased to me, maim me, rape me, blind me or kill me as casually as you might break and throw away a toy."

"What the fuck are you even talking about?" he roared back. "You had no cause to fear me. I never touched you! Never. Whatever I might have wanted."

"No YOU didn't..." she stopped. Too late.

"What?"

And she told him; told him what his father had done to her in his childhood bedroom.

All those years she had thought that, if she had ever told him, he would be mortified, apologetic, perhaps enraged on her behalf. She'd imagined it more than once, even childishly fantasised about him seeking revenge on her behalf. Of course nothing like that happened now. He barely reacted at all. Except to one small detail.

"And you say Lloyd...excuse me, SOVAL, is it?... was there to save you, not quite in time. That's interesting, isn't it? JUST in time to earn your gratitude and get you to wangle his freedom from me as well as yours. I wonder what SOVAL whispered in my father's ear right before he decided - after years of leaving you alone - that he just HAD to have a taste?"

"You're wrong!" T'Pol hissed, even as her mind reeled.

"Perhaps I am," he replied lightly. "Tell me your name."

She did.

He sneered again - maybe it was the closest his devastated face could manage to a smile. "Well, T'Pol, ifyou are still here in one minute's time, then one of us won't leave this room alive. And I wouldn't count on it being me."

"The Denobulan's name is Phlox," she said.

And then she left.