Vulcan for Intimate-ch. 10

“This place is not real,” T’Pol explained. “It exists only in my mind.” She strolled up to his side just in time to catch the look of shock on his face when a young girl emerged from the home. Trip guessed the short, brown haired girl looked about five years old, but he wasn’t sure if his appraisal could be accurate, given the pointed tips of her ears. She dutifully toted a doll under her arm with a thin sheet of blonde hair and blue eyes that opened and closed as she hoisted it under one arm. Trip laughed as he watched the young Vulcan girl cradle the baby to her side while she ran past, barely dodging Tucker’s leg and clearly unaware of their presence. As if her proximity to his apparitional presence set off paternal alarms, a proud twinkle lit up his eyes as he recognized his unborn daughter.

“Daddy!” she shouted aloud. A familiar hearty laugh broke out in response and Tucker turned to find himself with an extra pip on his collar and a few more lines in his face, picking the girl up and swirling her about as a gorgeously un-Vulcan smile erupted from the girl’s lips. He hoisted her onto his shoulders and marched towards the house.

Trip turned to T’Pol who watched distantly at first until his attention brought her out of the trance and she blinked through an emotional assault and her breathing fluttered. She waited, hoping that he would understand.

“You want another chance,” he whispered as his throat tightened slightly. T’Pol looked to the floor, still unsure of how to respond. A stir of warmth in her belly tickled the corners of her lips as she felt his smile, though her eyes were still glued to the floor.

“You don’t even have to ask,” he told her quietly as he took her waist in his arms and planted his lips on her forehead. She sighed in relief, as if the closeness of his telepathic presence even in this fictitious plane of existence somehow removed the prying eyes of her own Vulcan guilt. It let her settle into the admission that she indeed wanted another child.

“When we get back,” he whispered as he pulled away from her, holding her gently by the shoulders.

“A lot of things are gonna change,” he said with raised eyebrows. “But not this,” he shook his head, pulling her hand to his chest. “Not ever.”

“Indeed, though you have never been here,” T’Pol interjected. Trip shot her an amused glance before returning his eyes to a wide expanse of orange-red soil and seething natural springs.

“Fire Plains…” he pointed in front of them. The scenery suddenly changed and T’Pol’s brow furrowed with interest. He had adjusted to the telepathic space very adeptly.. Memory by memory, he scrolled through parts of her life and shared them with her, through them touching a deep, long-forgotten part of her. A familiar sight materialized before her and she was intrigued at his choice.

“Your garden,” he pointed as he turned to her. She nodded. A new sight appeared.

“Mount Seleya,” she offered him as he struggled to form the words, his eyes lifting to take in the massive monolith of rock they stood immediately below. He turned back.

“I was gettin’ there!” he snapped playfully.

“How bout this one?” he asked flicking his tongue between his lips and throwing his arms around his telepathically-uniformed shoulders. The scenery changed, this time to something T’Pol hadn’t imagined he would root out of the recesses of her memory. It was a time and place she had not known since she was a child, when her great foremother T’Lin first told her of the Vulcan Rites of Bonding. The caves inside Mount Seleya appeared around them.

The walls were lit with torches circling the room, towering up several meters into a blackness. The ground, the walls and nearby adornments were far more elegant than he had seen Vulcan style exhibited before.

“Certainly not what I would have expected,” he snorted as he surveyed the room.

“Do you know this place?” she asked curiously, testing his telepathic acuity.

He shook his head while chewing his lip, as if the answer was buried under rubble but he could sense it near.

“This is a bonding chamber,” she informed him. He turned on her, loosened his arms down to his side and moved towards her with a boyish grin. The coy smile hiding behind the Vulcan mask shined through like the Sun being hidden by a mere space rock, glowing around its edges while the brilliance behind was unmistakable.

“I didn’t know all Vulcans did that as part of the bonding,” he smirked as she let slip an errant image of the ancient use of this place.

“We have not always resisted our emotions,” T’Pol reminded him coolly, though a sting of self-consciousness reminded her that she had partially regressed to that time. She reminded herself that she had found balance, whereas ancient Vulcans had failed and fallen into violence and war.

His fingers lazily crept around her slender hips and pulled her towards him, the nimble body moving willingly against him as he planted his lips onto hers. She reciprocated eagerly but a few moments later forced herself to relinquish his embrace. He searched her eyes for a long moment and found nothing but dream-like peace as he drowned in a sea of brown on hazel.

“Open your hand like this and move your two fingers together,” she instructed him.

“What like a meld, I thought we were already in here?” he asked, referring to the strange mind-space T’Pol brought him to when they melded and meditated together.

“This gesture is not for melding, it is a Vulcan greeting of one’s mate to another, and it is considered our only acceptable form of affection to show in public. Most offworlders do not recognize it as an affectation of intimacy,” she stated matter-of-factly.

He chuckled and moved his fingers the way she instructed, with the index and middle joined together but separated from the rest of the hand, touched together to the tip of hers. He winced as they made contact, expecting a surge of electricity or some similar feeling now that he was beginning to expect the strange telepathic effects of these Vulcan rituals.

Instead, there was nothing. He frowned disappointedly but T’Pol’s eyes remained affixed to his and her lips parted slightly as she exhaled and slowed her breathing to focus on Tucker. Suddenly her fingertips began to beat lukewarm, then hot, then steaming! Somehow the warmth leapt from his fingertips immediately to the junction of his shorts and he choked and almost lost his balance and began to crumple to the floor under an unexpected wave of pleasure.

T’Pol grabbed him and met his lips passionately, tugging him to the floor with her. The fire in him became cooler and sustained as he pulled her down on him to the mat that lie on the floor. It was only then as he pulled himself off the heavy-breathing T’Pol that he realized two tall candles in holders flanked them on either side and a large gong hung several feet in front of them. The gong rang out and he looked up to see a visage of himself there, in regal Vulcan robes that seemed to become him, if a bit large. He watched in wonder as a woman emerged from nothingness as an apparition of T’Pol, dressed not in bland Vulcan robes of Earthy colors, but a staggering violet wedding dress. The imaginary T’Pol approached her would-be t’hyl'a and they stepped to the side, kneeling in front of one another and meeting their hands together at the two-fingered greeting. Trip remained on the mat beside T’Pol, watching their wedding play out before them.

“Will you be my mate, forever, they?” the real T’Pol asked him as she reached up and held his cheek in her hand, running her fingers over the ruddy stubble of his jaw. He looked down at her from the imaginary fantasy playing out and smiled. As her hand went flat against his skin and firmly moved from his neck down to his chest, the muscles beneath her palm rippled and flinched nervously. Her eyes widened while her hands roamed his chest, awakening a presence within her as her eyes grew cloudy with desire while she awaited his response.

“Of course. I love you, T’Pol,” he answered.

“This thing that happened to us,” he looked down.

“It’s changed me, forever. I don…” he stopped, shaking his head.

“I don’t know what’ll happen when, or if,” he stammered.

”We get back to the Enterprise. But I want to be with you for the rest of my life,” he whispered before meeting her lips again. She pulled away.

“This is my Vulcan heart, my Vulcan soul, and this is our way. Then we are bonded as one, never parted again.”

“Does that mean I can finally hear you say you’ll love me for the rest of my life?” Trip asked with a smirk, half-joking. She had still never used the words and part of him begged it to be now, if never again.

She sprang up at him, clutching his abdomen and pulling herself up to meet him. She was straddling his lap now and he leaned forward to feel her against him. He recognized the hot rhythm of her pulse against his skin and looked down to find their tele-uniforms had disappeared. Unable to lift his eyes from her golden bronze body, he trembled as she traced the edges of the “rocket tattoo” with her fingertips, temptingly close to an area than began to throb powerfully against her thigh. The heat was almost unbearable but she struggled to focus on answering his question first as her hands hungrily went up his neck and stroked his hair.

“No,” she confessed. He looked deflated before she leaned up until her lips tickled his perfectly rounded ear.