To The Journey
Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it's not mine. This is an AU story.
Chapter Forty: Together in Tragedy
Tasha looked up sharply when she heard footsteps. So far, only one of the doctors had given her any trouble about being there, and that had been during Elieth's brief visit. Much to her surprise, the young Vulcan man had affirmed that "this woman lived with us as a member of our family for several years, I believe she qualifies as an acceptable visitor." It was hardly a warm affirmation of family ties, but it was only knowing that Elieth wouldn't understand that kept her from bursting into tears when he said it. For his part, he had left soon after, not seeing the logic in staying around to watch his sister sleep.
She did a double take when she realized who was there. "Captain Scott!"
He blinked, as though he hadn't even seen her there until she'd spoken. "Commander. What are ye doing here?"
"I could ask you the same question."
He nodded once, seeming to accept that, before rephrasing his question. "You know her?"
"Almost her entire life. When she was four and I was seventeen, she would follow me around like a little shadow." Tasha laid her hand gently on the unburned side of her sister's face.
"Well, I canna say I've known her that long. But she's one of my best. Actually, she's far and away my best, but I shouldn't say that out loud."
"Do you - do you know what happened?"
"Mostly." He visibly swallowed back his emotions. "She saved a lot of lives, that I'm sure of. The Breen would've blown the whole complex if she hadn't stopped them."
Tasha nodded numbly. "What went wrong?"
He shook his head, letting out a choked noise that sounded suspiciously like a sob. "Nothing. She did what she did knowing there was a good chance it'd be the last thing she'd ever do."
"But it wasn't ," Tasha replied sharply. "She's still here. She's still fighting."
He nodded, an impossibly sad smile crossing his face. "Aye, that she is."
Tasha's combadge chose that moment to flicker to life. "Data to Yar. Tasha, come in, please."
"I'm here, Data. What is it?"
"I must see you immediately. I am outside Starfleet Medical now. It is important."
"On my way. Out." She looked over at Scott. "Would you, if you're not busy -"
"Of course I'll stay with her. We wouldna want her to be alone when she wakes."
Tasha nodded her thanks and made her way out front. As promised, Data was waiting for her. The somber look on his face was all she needed to know it wasn't good.
"Data," she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer, "what is it?"
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The Paris household was somber. Grief seemed to hang in the air like a veil.
Owen and Julia were holding each other, both openly crying. Moira was leaning on her husband while at the same time holding both of her children. Bryan Dudley, Kathleen's husband, sat staring into empty space as though he couldn't believe the world still existed, holding four-year old Hannah in his lap and absently stroking her hair. His other three children were standing nearby, huddled together. Ten-year-old Lisa was sobbing in the arms of her sixteen-year-old brother. Patrick had tears running down his own face as he tried to comfort her. Twelve-year-old Andrea stood a little apart from her sister and brother, apparently too shell-shocked to cry. They were all trying to process what had happened, just as Tasha was trying to process what she'd heard.
Kathleen was gone.
Data had been able to fill in a few of the details based on official records. It appeared that a squadron of Breen had attempted to break into the shelter where Kathleen, her children, and Moira's children had been hiding out. Security had tried to hold off the Breen to allow the occupants to evacuate to a ground transport but had been outnumbered. Kathleen had picked up a phaser rifle and started firing into the mass of Breen on a wide beam setting, giving her children and Moira's, along with countless others a chance to get on the transport but taking multiple hits in the process. A member of the transport crew had risked his life to run out and drag the grievously injured woman aboard, but she had died of her wounds before they could get her to hospital.
Tasha looked over at Owen and Julia again, feeling her heart break for them. She couldn't imagine what they'd been through the last few years. Learning one of their children was missing, coming to terms with the fact that he was most likely dead, and then getting him back only to lose another child a scant year later. She reached behind her, seeking out Data's hand. He bypassed the hand altogether, pulling her backwards into his arms instead. No one spoke. No one seemed capable of speech.
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Evening found Tasha back at her sister's bedside. She knew the rest of the Paris family would be sticking together that night, but as much as she wanted to be with them, she needed to be here. If Asil woke, she wanted to be there. If she didn't - Tasha didn't want to even go there, but if Asil didn't wake, she needed every minute she could get with the girl.
A soft, uneven sound came from the hall, like someone shuffling along with a cane. The door was opened, and Tasha did a double-take when she saw who was aboard. She'd seen him in person only once, and at a distance at that, but he was a living legend.
"D-doctor McCoy," she stammered. She wasn't usually so at a loss for words, but after everything that had happened that day, she just didn't have the energy to form them.
"For God's sake, I'm here to see the patient, not be gawked at like some zoo attraction."
"Of course, sir." She was just grateful he didn't expect more talk from her.
"Scott told me about this one. Damn near blew herself up stopping the Breen. You'd think a person from a race of logical people would have more sense."
Tasha knew he meant nothing by it. That was just his way, Jim had told her countless stories about the doctor who had served with him. But something about the words triggered the emotions she hadn't been able to express beforehand, and before she could stop she finally started to cry.
The doctor stopped what he was doing and gently rested a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, now, it's okay," he offered, his voice much softer than it had been a mere moment ago.
"My cousin is dead," she sobbed. "And my sister could be dying. What's okay about that?"
"I'm sorry." He touched her shoulder again.
"Is she going to be okay?" Tasha whispered. "Please tell me she's going to be okay."
"I can't assure you of something I don't know. I'm sorry."
"How bad?" she choked out.
"Well, that Vulcan resilience is good for something. If she were human, she'd be brain-damaged or dead from oxygen deprivation alone. Tests show normal neural activity for a comatose patient, so if she does wake, that Vulcan mind of hers ought to be fully intact. Those burns are pretty bad, but nothing grafting and surgery can't handle. It's what we can't see that's the worst. Whatever she did, it created what I can guess was a sub-atomic particle shower, and after surviving the initial blast, the damage was left untreated for an indeterminate amount of time until she was found. That's what we're fighting. And she's fighting too. That's obvious."
"That's good, isn't it?"
"Very good. You'd be surprised how much of a difference patient attitude can make in a situation like this. All the same, has her family been contacted?"
"I am her family." She held that defiance for a moment before relenting. "Her brother knows. He can call her mother." She stroked Asil's face gently, an action she'd been repeating almost on autopilot for the last few hours. "Her father's out of comm range. God, this would kill him if he knew." Her tears were still falling. "I can't lose her," she whispered. "I can't ."
Another gentle touch to her shoulder. "Hey, now. If there's one thing I learned from that green-blooded hobgoblin on the Enterprise, it's that Vulcans are as strong and resilient as they come." He gave her another look. "Us mere humans, on the other hand, need to take a little more care. You look like you haven't slept in days."
"I was woken - the night before last by the Red Alert sirens," she said after a moment's thought. Was it really only forty-eight hours ago that no one had even contemplated the idea of the Breen attacking Earth? "I've been too busy to sleep since."
"You say you're family?"
She nodded, prepared to defend herself. But he spoke before she could. "I'll take your word for it. I'll have someone bring a bed in for you. The last thing I need is another patient because a visitor worked herself to exhaustion."
Tasha met his eyes then, and what he saw behind the tears was possibly the sincerest look of gratitude he'd ever laid eyes on. "Thank you."
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"Scotty."
The engineer looked up to find his old Captain standing there. "What is it?"
"I thought you'd like to know, everyone from our old crew is accounted for. Took Spock and me a while to track Uhura down, but it turns out she's fine, just hurried to make herself useful and ended up in the most remote posting on the entire planet or something."
"Aye, that's good," the other man replied absently.
Jim sat down next to his friend. "You're really upset about her, huh? You must really care about this one."
"She's a child," he said softly. "At least ten years younger than the next youngest person there. She's so bright. The first time I saw her I knew she was no ordinary engineer, not even by Engineering Corps standards." He sighed heavily, in a way that suggested he was using that as an alternative to crying. "I canna stop thinking about Peter."
"Your nephew."
"Just like him, she stayed when they all left. She did her duty, above and beyond, knowing she'd likely die." He'd never erase the memory of that awful day when his young nephew had died in his arms. "I could've stopped her! Why didn't I?"
"My guess? Because you knew she was right."
"What?"
"Look, I may not know her, but I know Vulcans. She didn't just ask to stay. She gave you a reasoned-out argument. And you let her stay because what she said made sense."
"I told her not to let me regret it."
"A fact you can remind her of when she wakes up. Come on."
"Where are we going?"
"Somewhere that isn't here. You're drowning in your own misery."
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It was four days after the attack, and Asil's condition was still tentative. McCoy, on another visit, had told Tasha that, since Asil was on only minimal mechanical support, every day she survived increased her chances as the damage began to heal. Elieth had been by once, and Scott had stopped in each morning since Tasha had first encountered him.
But the figure standing in the doorway was neither of these, and it wasn't a doctor either. If seeing McCoy had taken her aback a bit, this completely struck her dumb. It took her several seconds just to engage her vocal cords. "T'Pel."
Tasha wondered if it was the woman's Vulcan control that allowed her to act unsurprised, or if Elieth had told her the woman would be there. T'Pel said nothing, so Tasha finally managed to form a full sentence. "I'll leave you alone."
"Tasha."
"Yes?"
"I would have a word with you later, if you are willing."
"All right." She supposed she owed the woman at least a chance to explain herself.
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Tasha barely refrained from pacing or fidgeting while looking at the woman across from her. She had absolutely no idea what to say.
"I'm surprised you'd want to see me," she said finally, deciding she ought to address the proverbial elephant in the room right off. "I know you regret having had me around, don't deny it."
Her eyebrow raised ever so slightly. "Asil told you of our disagreement."
"Yes."
"I will not deny what I said, however I can attempt to explain, if you would allow me."
"I owe you that much, at least."
"I was concerned for my daughter. I am still."
"Why?"
"Because her behavior is not typical of Vulcans."
"What's so wrong about that? Everyone's different. Even Vulcans. So what if she's a little more obviously different?"
"Tasha," she began, then paused. "What I am about to tell you is something my children do not even know, and I will ask you not to tell anyone else. When I was young, only a decade or so older than Asil is now, a person I cared for did something to bring him into conflict with the leaders of our culture. I believed that he was in the right, and so I stood with him, and for doing so I was ostracized by many in our community. Including my own family."
"I'm sorry." Sincerity was clear in every word she spoke. "I truly am. But what does this have to do with me? Or Asil?"
"As time went on, the people around me began to forgive my errors, but it has never been forgotten. Tuvok and I did what we could to raise our children to be truly Vulcan, so that there would be no doubt as to whether they were meant to be a part of our society. So that my mistakes would not taint them. Asil, and to a lesser degree Elieth, were never entirely well-suited to that. Elieth's logic was often troubled and inconsistent, leading to a discord within him - his wife, though I was hesitant to accept her at first, has helped him much in that, bringing to him a peace of mind he never had."
"And Asil?"
"Asil's situation will not be so easily resolved. She is firm in her logic, but her perceptions are different than most. She has been compared often to her father, but she is also very much as I was at her age."
"You think she's likely to make the same mistakes you did."
"There have been those who expected each of my children to make the mistakes I did. I am, at this point, quite certain that my eldest two sons will not do so. And, as you said, even Vulcans are not all exactly alike, and Elieth does not have the sort of personality to become seriously involved with something, especially something controversial, unless it affects him directly, and as he has been on Deneva for several years and will likely remain for the foreseeable future, that is unlikely to happen. Asil I am not so certain about, and considering the suspicion she already falls under, I do not believe our society would be so forgiving of her." She met Tasha's eyes. "I am sorry that I hurt you. That was never my intention. I only wanted to protect my own family."
"You said I was your family," she whispered. "You said I had a family with you as long as I needed one. I loved you." Tears brimmed in her eyes.
"I am sorry," she said again. "I did not realize you would still require what I had offered so long after you reached maturity."
"You're the only family I'd ever had. Of course I still needed you." She turned her head to blink back her tears.
"If it makes any difference to you, I never truly regretted allowing you into our home."
"Then why did you say -"
"I regretted what I saw in Asil, and I believed the presence of a human she looked up to was a large part of that. Your presence, in and of itself, was not at issue. Only the result was."
"Maybe not."
"What do you mean?"
"It's a debate human philosophers have had for centuries. Nature versus nurture, the question of to what degree traits come from the way a person is raised and to what degree they are innate, even when not taught. I always told Asil she's her father's daughter, but you just told me she's like you were at her age. I don't think she gets that from me. I think she gets that from you."
T'Pel gave a very slight nod. "Perhaps. I had not considered it. May I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"If Asil told you what I said, why is this the first time you spoke to me about it? Knowing you, I would expect you to have contacted me."
"I - I felt guilty," she admitted. "Even if we weren't thinking of the same reason, I thought you had a reason to oppose my presence in your family."
"Why?"
"I've tried to see Asil as a sister, and to a strong degree I do. But at the same time, I felt like I was taking your daughter from you." She drew a shaky breath, absently fingering the small ornament she always wore. "Before I knew you, I had a child, a little girl. She lived less than two days before she died in my arms. Had she lived, she would be a year younger than Asil is today." She dropped her gaze to the table. "I tried not to see Asil that way, but when she was a little girl, sometimes I couldn't help myself. I'd hold her in my arms, and I could imagine, just for a second, that it was my Eva I was holding instead."
"And your grief is reason for me to oppose your presence in my home?"
"That I tried to use your daughter to replace my own is."
"No." To Tasha's surprise, the woman reached out and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. "You never tried to take my child from me. I cannot begin to comprehend the extent of your grief, but nothing you did harmed my daughter, and nothing you did interfered with the familial relationship that existed between my daughter and myself. If anything, I did far more to damage that bond than you."
Tasha wiped her eyes on her hand and looked up. "She wants to fix it, you know. She never tried to hide that."
"At this moment, you are more familiar with my daughter than I. What does she want from me? Do you know?"
"If you want to start fixing things with her, the first thing to do is drop your expectations. She's already made it clear she doesn't intend to meet them, and the more you try to insist the more you push her away. Try to rebuild the relationship unconditionally, without seeming to require her bending to your point of view as a condition of this rebuilding." Tasha smiled just a little. "You were willing to permanently alienate your parents to follow your convictions. Your husband was willing to marry someone who had nearly been exiled. Do you really think the daughter of parents like that would be capable of anything less?"
"No," T'Pel admitted. "Most likely not."
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She didn't immediately know where she was. She remembered being in the reactor room, trying to manually activate security measures, when the Breen had broken in. She had known she couldn't fight with conventional weapons, but in the same moment, she had never been more aware that the reactor, in the right hands, was a substantial weapon. The Breen knew that; she had no doubt they intended to use it. She would have to get to it first.
Unlike what she believed the Breen were likely planning, she could not simply detonate it; it would take the entire building with it at the very least. But she knew this technology better than they did. A precisely modulated shock pulse would kill every Breen in the room without damaging any equipment and dissipate too quickly to harm anyone more than approximately a hundred meters away. There was no time to formulate an alternate plan, even if a possibility existed. A shock pulse would almost certainly end her life as well, but what was one life if it saved countless others? If they detonated the reactor, her life was over in any case.
In the brief few moments between the press of the button and the actual activation of the pulse, she had slid underneath the reactor as best she could. If there was anywhere in the room she had even the most miniscule chance of survival, it was there, behind the reactor's shielding. She had heard the pulse activate and felt the pain a moment later, unspeakable agony across her body. When the darkness had tugged at her she had not resisted. If the shielding was not sufficient, her own force of will alone would not keep her alive, and to fight unconsciousness would only be to prolong her suffering. She had let go, sinking into oblivion. And then there had been nothing. Until now. So she was alive, at least. That was more than she had expected.
She felt someone touch her cheek, and then she felt a sensation as though something that had been on her face was gone. Something was wrapped around her hand. With more effort than she might have believed possible for such a small action, she moved her fingers a little, trying to figure out what it was.
"Asil?" The voice reached her as though through a tunnel. "Do that again!"
An illogical request. The action serves no purpose. But the voice was so insistent that she complied anyway. The thing around her hand - it is another hand, she realized - tightened. She mimicked the motion and felt another hand on her forehead.
"Come on, sweetheart." The voice was more recognizable now, and not so distant. "You're almost there. Come on."
Almost where? She didn't know where she was going or why. But the hands had to be a guide. She grounded herself in them, trying to use them to find her way to wherever it was she was supposed to be going. Where am I going? Where am I now? With an extreme effort, she forced her eyelids to raise.
Consciousness returned in a rush and with it an awareness of where she was and what was happening around her. She recognized her surroundings as some sort of hospital. And the voice - even before she followed her eyes to the person attached to the hands, she knew who it was. That woman's name was the first word out of her lips. "Tasha?"
"Oh, God." Tasha's hand moved from her forehead to her cheek, and she bent to kiss her sister on the forehead, heedless of the tears spilling on the girl's face. "You're okay."
"That statement would seem to be contradicted by my presence in a hospital room."
"You're alive and you're awake. You've been lying here in a coma for two weeks. I think that qualifies as a significant step forward."
"Yes, perhaps." She shifted a little. "I admit, I am - surprised to be alive."
"You're damn right! What were you thinking?"
"I was thinking that my options were extremely limited. Had the Breen succeeded and caused the reactor to explode, I would have been killed in the resulting blast in any case, and others would have died with me."
"You have an explanation for everything, don't you?"
"As I would be unlikely to do anything for which there was not a rational explanation -"
"All right, all right." Tasha couldn't stop a small laugh from escaping. "I take your point."
"How long has it been?"
"Nine days since the attack."
"Have you been here this entire time?"
"Most of it. Captain Scott dropped in a few times, and your brother's been by once a day for updates."
"My brother?" She looked mildly surprised. "Which?"
"Elieth. I think he'd like to talk with you, now you're awake." She drew a short breath. "Your mother's been by too."
"My mother was here?"
"Elieth called her. She does want to talk to you, you know."
"Why?"
How to explain? "Sometimes, after something like this happens, people start to think differently about conflicts. When they realize they could have lost the person they were fighting with, the fight itself doesn't seem so significant. Anyway, I don't think it was as bad as you two made it out to be."
"What do you mean?"
"Asil, you and your mother are two very stubborn personalities. You had a difference of opinion that turned into a years-long falling out because of the simple fact that neither of you could give an inch - figuratively speaking," she added on, remembering who she was talking to. "She's already apologized to me. She didn't mean anything by it."
"Then why would she say it?"
"You'll have to ask her." Tasha knew it would go easier if Asil knew the truth, but she wasn't about to betray T'Pel's confidence. "I'll call her. For now, you should rest."
"It appears I have done little else for the past nine days."
"And if the doctors have anything to say about it, it's going to be a few more days." Tasha couldn't help but smile at the banter. Everything was normal again.
Sorry this took so long, but it was a lot of ground to cover!
I know I'm probably mean holding out for a grand reveal on what exactly T'Pel did, but I'm the author so I can hold out as much as I want!
As for Kathleen, I felt like it would be incredibly unrealistic not to have someone close to the main cast of this story die. Originally it was going to be one of Kirk's crew but I couldn't bring myself to do it.
Please review.