Perspectives
(Raffi, Gabe, Pel)
As Gabe escorts Pel out of the Freecloud Fertility Clinic, letting her lean on his arm to support her weight, she can sense through touch-telepathy that he is still deeply troubled.
"You're angry with your mother," she says. "Why?"
Gabe scowls as if the answer were obvious. "She's an addict - "
("I'm clean," Raffaella echoes in his memory, smiling with painful hope, and he has no way of knowing if that's true.)
" – A crackpot conspiracy theorist - "
("It's not crackpot!" And Pel feels Gabe's disappointment like a punch to the gut.)
" – And she chose strangers over Dad and me!"
His voice cracks with impending tears, and for a moment, she can see the echo of the eleven-year-old boy he once was.
She feels his pain, but she cannot agree with his reasons … and as he senses that (for, even with a human, the bond goes both ways) he turns to her with a frown.
"Strangers," she repeats, pointedly raising one Vulcan eyebrow. "Aliens like me, you mean?"
"That's not what I - " He blushes and stumbles over his words. "You know I didn't - "
But he did mean it. Where he turned on the news channels and saw the Romulan refugees as alien, Pel saw faces that could have belonged to her own family. It was all too easy to put herself in the place of those desperate mothers, and her own unborn child in the place of those orphans.
"The way I see it," she said, squeezing her husband's hand, "Your mother's choices are not mutually exclusive. She could never have cared for those Romulan families if she didn't care for her own."
"You don't know my mother," Gabe says, with an embittered sigh.
But as they step outside into the neon-lit streets and he hands her up into the back seat of their hovercar, touching her as gently as if she were a globe of blown glass, something about her words, or perhaps just the heavily pregnant state of her, seems to reach him.
"You know I love your relentless sense of logic," he says softly, kissing her on the forehead as he straps her seatbelt on. "Even when it's driving me crazy."
"Does that mean you'll contact her?"
"Maybe. Someday. I don't know."