Chapter Three: T'Pring
Author's Note: Some characters are borrowed, some are my own madness. None make me any money. If you haven't yet watched SNW season one: episode seven, you might want to before reading.
The flight from Omicron Lyrae to Vulcan is almost full by the time T'Pring boards. As she maneuvers down the center aisle scanning for her assigned seat, she has a rare moment of second-guessing herself. Perhaps this unscheduled visit home is unwise. Her parents will be suspicious, or worse, alarmed. Her mother, in particular, questions her decision to work with the v'tosh ka'tur at the Ankeshtan K'til facility. Not that she'd say anything, but T'Pring can feel the burr of her disapproval through their familial bond.
Her mother will assume—logically but wrongly— that this visit signifies a problem or a needed hiatus from her job. Good. T'Pring doesn't want to talk with her parents about her relationship with Spock. As far as they are concerned, that matter was resolved years ago in the koon-ul ceremony when the two 7-year-olds spoke the ancient promise that bonded them: Parted from me and never parted, never and always touching and touched.
She doesn't plan to spend enough time with her parents for them to discover the source of her current distress. After a quick visit to their home in the capital city of Shi'Kahr, she'll take a personal transport to a small settlement to the east where her grandmother lives. A flitter accident years earlier killed her bondmate and left T'Zela confined to a motorized chair. Despite that, she lives a fiercely independent life. T'Pring not only admires her, she aspires to be like her, a woman living on her own terms.
T'Zela understands T'Pring with the special kind of savvy only grandmothers seem to have. They share the same exasperation with T'Pring's mother, for instance, and when she was a teenager, T'Pring sometimes lived with her grandmother for months at a time. Among the extended family, T'Zela is the only relative who encourages T'Pring's work with El-Kashtanktil, the organization committed to rehabilitating criminal Vulcans.
T'Zela knows Spock almost as well. Since their koon-ul, Spock has joined T'Pring for many family holidays at T'Zela's home. Even now she still calls him by his childhood diminutive: Spohkh-kam.
"Spohkh-kam, come sit with me," her grandmother would say, and Spock would leave whatever he was doing to join her—in the garden to examine some new plantings, or on the patio to scan the sky for the va'khen who made their nests in the nearby trees, or simply for a cup of the kind of tea she knew he liked. "You can come, too," T'Zela would say, but T'Pring would usually decline, not willing to be an afterthought—and annoyed with herself for feeling, if not quite jealous, then a little displaced when Spock was around.
Still, her grandmother's familiarity with them both and her long observation of them is exactly why she's the person T'Pring most wants to see. Needs to see. Needs to talk over the troubling events that have made meditation impossible.
She finds her seat next to a viewport and settles in for the flight to Vulcan to begin. Just before takeoff, an older Andorian man sits down heavily in the seat next to hers. He glances over and tips his antennae in her direction but before he can make eye contact or initiate a conversation, T'Pring makes a show of turning on her tablet and reading. She has too much to think about before she gets to her grandmother's house to waste time chatting with a curious stranger.
The visit with her parents is exactly as she imagined it would be—awkward with their unspoken questions and her stiff resistance to revealing anything. She stays long enough to share the midday meal and then schedules a ride to her grandmother's house. If her grandmother is surprised to see her with so little forewarning, she doesn't show it. In fact, T'Zela has already set out a tea service on the flagstone porch at the back of the house and is waiting for her when T'Pring arrives.
"I am always grateful for your visits," T'Zela says as soon as T'Pring sits on the chair set out for her. T'Pring feels the affectionate buzz of her grandmother's mind nudging up against hers like a comforting blanket.
"I am always grateful that you allow me to come," she says, reaching for the teapot and pouring them each a cup.
For a few moments they sit quietly savoring the tea. When T'Zela sets her cup down, she gives her granddaughter such a penetrating look that T'Pring squirms.
"Perhaps now is the time to tell me why you really came to see me today."
One of the reasons T'Pring is so well suited to working with the v'tosh ka'tur is that her own emotional control is impeccable. Behavior that might disgust or startle an average Vulcan into a visible reaction rarely registers in her expression. Chris Pike once told her that she would make an excellent poker player, which Spock later helped her understand was both a compliment and a mild criticism from a human point of view.
So she is astonished when she loses control now with her grandmother. To her horror her throat constricts and tears come to her eyes. Shamed by the show, she doubles over, her face almost to her lap.
In a flash, T'Zela maneuvers her wheeled chair to be beside her granddaughter. T'Pring feels her hand stroke her back, the way Vulcan parents soothe their infants. That tenderness makes her cry harder. She hears her grandmother saying, "Oh, tal-kam, what has happened?"
When she can at last trust herself to talk without snuffling, T'Pring wipes her cheeks and tells T'Zela all that she has tormented herself with for the last week. She tells of the space pirates that commandeered the Enterprise, their threat to harm Spock unless she released one of the Vulcans from Ankeshtan K'til, the pantomimed kiss between Spock and Christine Chapel, the very public breaking of the bond she and Spock share.
"But you knew it was a sham," T'Zela assures her, and T'Pring nods. "Surely you did not actually believe that Spock would dismiss your vows that way."
"I—I did not believe it," T'Pring says, but T'Zela gives her another penetrating stare and T'Pring adds, "I mean, I hoped it was a subterfuge, but I was not sure. Not until later."
"Then why are you still troubled by it?"
"That, ko'mekh-il, is what I do not know," T'Pring says, slipping back into the term of affection she uses for her grandmother when they are alone. "Spock spared me the choice of saving his life or bringing dishonor to myself and my family if I released the inmate to the pirates. His actions not only saved me, they saved his ship."
T'Pring hears T'Zela give what sounds like a very human sigh.
"Perhaps I am too old to understand what you are telling me," T'Zela says, "but I have not heard yet what has happened that continues to cause you pain. You and Spock outwitted a criminal enterprise. You two are to be applauded. What more is there to say?"
T'Pring takes a deep breath. Why, indeed, is she still upset? She realizes that her journey here was motivated by the hope that her grandmother could answer that question for her, she who knows T'Pring better than she knows herself. T'Zela should be able to sort through the tangles of this story and help T'Pring pick the narrative thread back up so she can move forward.
"It, it was not the kiss—though I found it…confusing…to watch," T'Pring says. "We aren't married, after all, and he is free to explore others sexually until we are—"
"But you did not like it," T'Zela says simply. "Even if it is allowed."
"No," T'Pring admits. "I did not." She waits a beat and continues. "The kiss is not what I cannot forget," she says. "It is…something else."
T'Zela tips her head slightly and waits. T'Pring takes another breath. "Lately, I have endeavored to explore what it means for Spock to be…human…as well as Vulcan. I thought we were making progress in that direction, but now I am not certain."
She feels T'Zela's disapproval through their familial bond and she hastens to add, "It's not that I object to his humanity. Indeed, I try to appreciate it and…research it." In spite of herself, she gives the ghost of a grin remembering Spock's discomfort when she suggested they explore his human sexuality.
"Not everyone is as open-minded as you, T'Pring," T'Zela says. "Spock has endured much prejudice at the hands of so-called enlightened Vulcans."
T'Pring is no fool. When she and Spock are in public, she hears whispered comments from strangers. They have served to make her more determined to make their relationship work. She tells herself that his mixed heritage is what sets him apart and makes him more interesting. She tells her grandmother as much.
"What I am coming to realize, however," T'Pring says, "is that I may never truly know him."
"No one truly knows another, not in the way you mean," T'Zela says.
"At that moment when the pirate captain threatened Spock's life, I was willing to abandon my duty, my family's name, my career, to save him."
"Why does that surprise you? You are bondmates—"
"But that was the wrong thing to do. If Spock had not tricked them with the kiss, the pirates could have killed him as soon as I transferred the prisoner. They could have stolen the ship."
"They didn't," T'Zela says. "Spock's strategy worked."
"Spock's strategy was not something a Vulcan would have done," T'Pring says. "It was not something I could have imagined. That's why I say I do not think I can ever know who he is."
T'Zela shakes her head and wheels herself close to the table where the teapot sits. She pours herself another cup of tea.
"I'm tired, tal-kam, and you need to decide what it is you need to say."
The afternoon winds are starting up, hot and dry, and in the distance T'Pring can hear the shriek of the female va'khen riding the updrafts. Spock and her grandmother have spent countless hours watching them—to the point where Spock can identify individual birds. It is just one of the many interests he and T'Zela share, that draws them together, that—however inadvertently—makes T'Pring an outsider.
And that, she realizes at last, is the source of her distress now. The worry that she will always be an outsider in Spock's life, that no matter how committed he says he is to her, no matter how tender their private time together, when he has to decide between her and service on the Enterprise, Starfleet will win out every time.
She looks over at T'Zela gingerly sipping her tea and is suddenly ashamed at worrying her grandmother this way. There's a weariness in T'Zela's manner that T'Pring has tried to ignore until now. T'Pring feels a pang that she hasn't paid enough attention to the vagaries and challenges of age that her grandmother is enduring. She makes a mental note to visit more often—and to tell Spock that he should, too.
If she sees him, that is. For what she doesn't tell her grandmother—what she can barely admit to herself—is that at the moment that Spock decided to deceive the pirates with the kiss, at the moment when they unraveled their betrothal vows, she felt through their tentative bond an unmistakable emotion—not just from him, but in herself as well: relief.
In that edge of a moment, in that tiny fraction of time, what they felt was not love, or sadness, or surprise, or determination—all things she felt soon afterwards—but relief. Relief that the effort to know each other was over. Relief that they could go their own ways unimpeded, that their futures were unencumbered with each other.
Vulcans do not believe in fate or destiny or prophecy, and T'Pring is no exception. She cannot say for certain what her life with Spock will be like, but logic suggests that it will bring as much pain as joy.
She knows this now, but she keeps this to herself.
Or so she hopes. T'Zela is a powerful telepath.
"I believe that what I have come to tell you," she says to her grandmother, whose hand trembles in a way that is new, whose eyes are more filmed than the last time T'Pring visited, "is that Spock and I are fortunate to have you in our lives."
T'Pring starts to raise her hand in a farewell ta'al but T'Zela gestures to her to stop.
"Tal-kam, you and Spock are fortunate to have each other in your lives. Whether or not that is always so, it is true at this moment. Do not let this moment be ruined by what may or may not happen in the future."
Before T'Pring can answer, her grandmother turns in her wheeled chair and heads back across the flagstones towards the door. Without looking back, she says loud enough for T'Pring to hear, "Go. Find him. And do some more of…what did you call it…research with him on what it is to be human."
Author's note: In my Star Trek 2009 story "What We Think We Know," I wrote a chapter that includes T'Zela and her fondness for Spock. That version of T'Pring is slightly more frosty than the one we are getting to know in SNW. It's an interesting change! Thanks for all the feedback about this story. It makes writing so much fun!