Parting and Never Parted - Ch 2

Parting and Never Parted

By MissAnnThropic

Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: None of it’s mine. I’m just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching taped episodes of her favorite shows. Sad, isn’t it? :(

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Chapter 2

When Archer pressed the door summons of T’Pol’s quarters there was no answer. While that would have been abnormal in any case, the fact that Archer was worried only amplified his concern at the unmoving door. He pressed the summons again, more urgently, but still no response.

Without hesitating, Archer input the security override and the door slid open obediently.

The first thing to hit Archer when he stepped over the threshold of T’Pol’s quarters and the door closed behind him was the ambiance. In the ten years he’d served with his Vulcan first officer, he did not often have cause to go into her personal quarters. Even after serving with the Enterprise crew for a decade, T’Pol had always maintained her strict sense of privacy. The truth of the matter was that there was probably no one on the ship who could say they had been inside Commander T’Pol’s quarters enough to be familiar with them. No one save Trip.

The lights were dim and Archer’s eyes took a moment to adjust. In that time his other senses were at work. There was a faint smell of wax and wick, the scent of burning candles though there was no pinprick of yellow-orange light to catch Archer’s eye. The air was warmer in T’Pol’s quarters than on the rest of the ship, but it did not surprise him that a Vulcan would find the human ship cool. The silence was deafening. The bulkheads were thick enough to drown out most of the hallway traffic noise, and T’Pol’s quarters were so eerily quiet that it was tomb-like.

That notion sent an ominous shiver down Archer’s spine and he blinked as his eyes finally started to make out shapes in the small room.

It was in impeccable order, clean to a fault, T’Pol down to the very last detail. She could probably pack up her meager possessions in ten minutes and leave the room as it was and no one would be the wiser that it had been her residence for ten years.

Archer didn’t want to think that she could be gone so easily and his eyes turned to the right, seeking out her bunk.

He saw T’Pol lying on her side, curled underneath a ruddy maroon blanket. She was so still Archer paused a moment to see if she was even breathing. Barely, but yes.

He thought she had to be asleep and he called out softly, “T’Pol?”

She did not move.

Archer moved toward the bed and his heart began to race with dread. As he neared he could see her face, her eyes... she was awake. Her expression was hollow and empty, her gaze glassy and fixed on a misshapen lump of wax on her floor that had once been a candle.

Archer wanted to reach down and shake her. She had not answered her door, she hadn’t answered his call, she didn’t even show that she knew he was there as he invited himself into her quarters and moved toward her bed. That wasn’t T’Pol, everything was all wrong. Trip was gone and T’Pol was apathetic and Archer’s world couldn’t take all the wrongness in so short a time.

Archer was at the side of her bed, standing inches from her, and she didn’t even look at him. Her eyes remained locked on the spent, lifeless candle.

Archer knelt down beside the bunk and studied his first officer. She was breathing shallowly, her hands tucked against her chest like a wounded animal curled in a ball. Her lips were a thinly pressed line, the only sign of tension or discomfort in her otherwise pale, motionless face.

“T’Pol... can you look at me?”

Her eyelids flickered but she didn’t obey.

“T’Pol, look at me.”

T’Pol inhaled more than she had before, a facsimile of a sigh, but she didn’t comply. She did, however, stiffened and her eyebrows drew together in a scowl.

“Phlox told me about you and Trip.”

“He is dead,” she said, barely audible, voice tight, and Archer blinked. He was used to her sounding so self-assured and competent... none of that strength was in her voice now.

“Yes, I know.”

T’Pol’s face flinched, as though beset by a physical pain, and Archer leaned closer in worry. “T’Pol?”

The Vulcan blinked slowly, her eyes tightened around the eyes, and she whispered roughly, “Pupak-tor th’at ashayam.”

Archer was taken aback at the unanticipated string of Vulcan. T’Pol had always been reliable to a fault about speaking English in the presence of the Enterprise crew, such that Archer at times forgot it was not her first language. “What does that mean?” he asked.

T’Pol didn’t seem to hear him. “Maf-tor th’at katra.”

With a sick certainty Archer realized she was not fully compos mentis. “Sorry, T’Pol,” he said with a wane smirk, “ten years serving together but I never learned to speak Vulcan.”

T’Pol reopened her eyes only to stare at her wasted candle.

Archer sighed and rubbed his face with one hand. “I know it’s hard... I miss Trip, too.”

At Trip’s name T’Pol reacted. Her eyes left their station on her candle and she looked at him. Archer was at first glad for the change, the acknowledgement that she knew he was right beside her, but that relief quickly turned to sadness. The despair in T’Pol’s eyes, glittering brightly like a plasma fire behind brown, shook him. He never thought to see such powerful emotion bleed from a Vulcan like it did from T’Pol’s eyes.

“Can you even understand me?” he asked wearily, almost not expecting an answer.

T’Pol stared intensely at him a moment before she said in a quavering voice, “Yes, Captain.”

Archer felt a seed a hope. He could never hope to convince T’Pol if she’d slipped beyond the comprehension of English. “T’Pol, listen... Phlox told me about the bond. He told me about what could happen to you.”

T’Pol didn’t looked perturbed or annoyed or even concerned. She looked nothing but lost and sad and Archer was out of his mind worried by it.

“I know you miss him. I do, too, but you can’t just die.”

T’Pol didn’t rise to his reason, she just blinked slowly.

“Why didn’t you tell me when Trip... died...” Archer fought to keep his voice from cracking, “why didn’t you tell me you’d get sick?” Archer, beneath the panic and desperation, was hurt. He thought she trusted him.

T’Pol tucked her hands closer to her and pulled her legs nearer to her chest. She looked like she was having a go at disappearing. “It is not fit for a Vulcan to discuss such things with an outworlder.”

Archer was wounded. He thought T’Pol had stopped seeing him as an outsider years ago, that the distinction between human had Vulcan had become a matter of simple semantics.

“You would have told Trip.”

T’Pol flinched visibly and shot him a venomous look. “Kroykah!”

Archer startled but didn’t move from his spot. “I’m sorry he can’t be here to tell you himself how stupid this is to let yourself die, but if I don’t get you to see reason he would haunt me until the day I died.”

T’Pol’s body shook, whether with agony or rage Archer couldn’t tell.

“T’Pol, please,” Archer reached out his hand to touch her shoulder.

Before he could come into contact T’Pol moved away. She pushed backward on the bed and rose to crouch in the corner of her bunk and glare at him. Not since the Seleya had Archer seen a Vulcan look so feral. He carefully pulled back his hand and regarded T’Pol closely.

“You will cease to pry into my personal matters, Captain.”

Archer couldn’t take it. He’d lost Trip and if she had her way he’d lose T’Pol, too. Needless... so much pointless, unnecessary death.

“I can’t do that, Commander.” Archer gave T’Pol a hard, stern look. “I know you’re hurting, but you have to know Trip would never want this.”

“You do not know.”

“The hell I don’t, Trip was my best friend!”

T’Pol shuddered again, hands gripping the blanket at her feet and her shoulders rigid. “Pe’ew t’hy’la th’ah. Th’ashayam Trippe!”

“I can’t let you do this,” Archer said firmly, unphased this time by the words he could not understand. “I won’t lose another friend, certainly not this way.”

“Do not presume to know the proper course of action, Qomi.”

“Phlox said you can be treated; Enterprise can be at Vulcan in two days. Hopefully we’re not too late.”

“Nirsh!”

“T’Pol, please... I don’t want to force you to do anything.” He looked away and said lowly, “Can you imagine what Trip would think if he knew you were going to let yourself die because of him? What that would do to him?”

That quieted T’Pol, to an extent it stilled her, and she looked down somberly. Archer returned his eyes to her, hoping for a sign that he’d gotten through to her. She took a number of deep, exact breaths, then looked back at him. The anger was gone and Archer almost missed it, for her rage had clearly been masking drowning anguish. “You speak of friendship, Captain, of compassion. You ask if Trip would wish my death, yet you do not ask yourself if he would want me to suffer as I do.”

Archer frowned. “Losing Trip... it will take a long time before it gets better, but it will get better in time.” Archer smiled bitterly. “I know that doesn’t feel like much help now. I know you miss him now–”

“You have no conception,” T’Pol snapped harshly.

“I think I do, maybe not in a Vulcan way, but I miss him in my own way. He was very close to me, too.”

“You do not understand,” T’Pol retorted and began to shiver. A shiver that turned into raging tremors. Archer stood hastily, convinced T’Pol was having a seizure.

“You’re going to sickbay, let’s go,” Archer reached for T’Pol, fully intent on carrying her if need be.

T’Pol at first tried to retreat but there was nowhere to go, her back to the wall. So instead, when Archer tried to take hold of her, she locked defiant, wild eyes on him. “You do not know!” she almost screamed, and she lunged at him.

She had looked so frail and weak, but even sick, Archer was no match for the Vulcan’s inherent strength. Taken by surprise at her attack, he was at her mercy before he would have had time to fight her off on a good day, anyway. T’Pol grabbed one of his wrists in a bruising grip, her other hand closed tightly around his throat, and faster than Archer could process what had happened he was slammed into the far wall of T’Pol’s quarters.

Archer blinked and gasped in surprise, too stunned and winded to try and get free. “T’Po...” he croaked and fought for air. She was inches from him, her face all he could see, and she was mindless in her grief. The slightest hint of bared teeth as she pinned him, then she released his wrist only to bring up her hand and press her fingertips to his face. “Ken-tor!” T’Pol growled low in his ear, an ominous rumble so far from the neutral timbre of T’Pol’s normally gently modulated voice.

Archer jolted and his mouth opened in a silent scream and his muscles locked as his mind was suddenly under an even greater attack than his body. At first it was only pain, every physical sensation of pain at once, burning and bleeding and freezing and aching in sequential nanoseconds of unbearable agony. Blackness flew at him, horrifying, empty pockets of nonexistence, and he felt them find him, seek him out, cling to him, and his soul was chilled to the core. Ice... it felt like ice, no warmth, no escape, no relief from the frostbite-sting in his mind. Black thicker than night imbedded claws in his mind, sliced into his consciousness, and Archer had never known such agony. Then he recognized something. An echo, a faint hint of harbor, a sense... of Trip. Trip was there, here, wherever Archer was... Trip was there! Archer’s mind tried desperately to call out to his friend, to touch him again and plead for his help all at once. The moment of elation was dashed by the blackness. It hung on the free-roaming memory of Trip, it infected him and spread from him. Archer tried, in vain, to recoil in horror. Trip’s essence was a hole in the blackness, a quantum singularity that sent out and took at once. Death. Death bled from the last vestige of Trip, and it was a contagion and it fed on the very life force of Archer. He could feel it pulling at him, and Archer tried to run, to escape, but to no avail. Archer was tethered like a snared animal, twisting and pulling frantically at the trap while screeching and crying, blood-curdling screams of primal terror echoing endlessly. There was nowhere to go. All was blackness, horror, and pain, and he could not fight that. He could not win against death, it was stronger than all that Archer had in him. There was no way to disentangle from the void of death that closed in around him in a claustrophobic fist, slipping past Archer’s feeble defenses by being Trip. Archer couldn’t shake free and flee. But there was the blanketing nothing of the black inside him. When escape was impossible there was only surrender, yielding to Trip’s presence in its new guise, and anything... anything, to end the terror of his now.

Archer’s mind was suddenly ripped free of the blackness and his thoughts spun, seeking purchase and anchor. T’Pol’s quarters coalesced around him as though part dream, part visceral, vivid detail unlike any moment before in Archer’s life. He discovered he could breathe and gulped for air. He welcomed the wall at his back as his knees wobbled and his balance titled nauseously. His senses rushed back at him and for a second he could only feel relief to be free of the blackness.

Archer didn’t see T’Pol standing only inches from him until she swayed on her feet. His eyes caught the movement and tracked it. T’Pol, visibly shaken, began to step away from him.

And in that second Archer understood everything. He had been in a Vulcan mind-meld before, and only belatedly did the way T’Pol’s fingers had splayed on his face make sense. He knew he had been in her mind, he knew that the fear and pain and resignation had been hers... and he truly understood because while he stood before her, spared, she continued to languish and flounder in that space within herself. For her she was truly trapped in her grief, punished for her love for Trip beyond any human ability to comprehend. She had been right, he’d had no idea.

Archer swallowed and tried to stand up straight.

T’Pol did not manage a full step away from him before her strength failed her and she went down. T’Pol slumped to the ground in a graceless, hunched sitting position at Archer’s feet and she trembled and clutched her hands together in a futile effort to regain her control.

Archer slowly knelt down before her.

T’Pol flinched and looked fleetingly at him. “I... I’m sorry.”

Archer didn’t say a word. Instead, he reached out to her. T’Pol leaned away at first, but Archer was stronger than her resistance, and he closed his arms around her and pulled her toward him.

T’Pol stiffened and tried to fight him but she was broken and ended up held to his chest. Archer hugged her tightly and T’Pol shook and mumbled her apologies for her assault on him, but Archer didn’t care about that. After what he’d experienced, he couldn’t care about himself without feeling like a self-absorbed child who would wail for a splinter while others bled to death around him.

“It’s going to be okay, T’Pol,” he said lowly into her hair as she clawed feebly at his arms, though whether to free herself or cling to him he wasn’t sure.

Chapter 3 (Conclusion)

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A whole mess of folks have made comments

Damn. This sure is an angsty one, MissAnn. Beautifully done, however gloomy. Keep the chapters coming. It's compelling.

Wow, MissAnn! That was just BLACK... I can absolutely see this as the aftermath of Trip's death. Excuse me while I go try to translate the Vulcan now... :) Very, very compelling.

Well look what the Beebs left us with their final episode of Enterprise. A future that is utterely depressing and without hope. I have pretty much discounted TATV so I find it difficult to accept that Trip is dead. I also find it ridiculous that Trip and T'pols relationship was over. I can't imagine T'pol being this devastated if they had ended their relalionship 6 years previously, even with the bond. T'pols grief is really heartwrenching but Archers seems very hollow in comparasion. His friend of 18 years is dead and gave his LIFE for him, yet all Archer can say is that he will miss Trip and will in time get over it. I really don't like the idea that it is Archer who is comforting T'pol considering it was his dumb ass decision that led to Trips death. Though I still don't think for a moment that Trip would have killed himself in such a pointless way as shown in TATV just so Archer could read his speech. I look forward to see where you are going with this.

That is exactly what grief and love feel like. You've snared the emotion into words perfectly.

Your description of Archer's reaction to experiencing what's going in T'pol's head was frightening and very effective. She sounds like she's having a psychotic break... is this supposed to be what every Vulcan goes through when they lose a bond mate, or is it particular to T'pol due to her T-D damage? I'm finding this a fascinating story. Please continue.

Very powerful.Really a dark chapter of what T'Pol was going through losing Trip.Archer had no idea of what he was talking about his grief being like hers.One request could you post in future chapters english translations of the vulcan words it would make it easier to understand what T'Pol was talking about her state of mind.

Miss A that certainly was dark. While I would hesitate to comment on another's grief, I have to wonder that T'Pol would be so grief stricken if the bond had been allowed to languish for 6 years?? Maybe I read it another fanfic, but I would have thought unnurtured the bond would fade.

Again, as much as I enjoy your style, anything that finalizes Trip's death for me is two thumbs down. Trip lives!

Wow. That was good. I mean, not GOOD, good, but... wow. Continue, this is just... wow. :/

Yay, this was EXCELLENT! I love dark and Angsty, now if only Trip wasn't dead. BOOHOO! BUt I am also not a fervent anti Archerite. He's annoying, but he and T'Pol DO have a connection no matter what.

while i am glad that jon is concerned about tpol i dont like how he seems to be hardly grieving at all. plus how he isnt assuming any responsibiity for trip 's death.
and if one accepts the abomination then yes jon bears a great deal of responsibility and so does malcolm.

where in the hell was the security teams. did jon let things get so lax on enterprise that they dont show up for almost ten minutes.
and he is the more experienced officer.
the ass let himself get knocked out like that .
but we dont hear a single i feel responsible for trip's death out of him..no real remorse at all.

and i dont see the real archer being that way.
i dont see him being so well trip was my friend and i miss him but yeah we will get over it soon.

that dosnt really jive with the archer we saw in similitude, desert crossing, or even in storm front.
remember when archer attacked silik.

it just felt cold that it took tpol forcing a mind meld on jon to get him to seemingly feel real grief about trip's passing.

Re: Pookha -- Well . . *ahem* Considering the way all the characters were portrayed in TATV, somehow Jon not grieving too much just about makes sense.

Now, the Jon from the /rest/ of the series, yes. Grief, heartbreak, anger, etc. *sigh* I hate TATV. We should make bumperstickers.

Anyhoo, this was fantastic, Miss. Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking, excrutiatingly dark . . I'm tempted to guess where you're going with this, but I'm also very willing to just take the ride. Great fic already, and it's only the second chapter!

This one excellent, of course, MissAnn.

But is Trip really dead in this one?

God I hope not!

Other than that, your writing is brilliant and a pleasure to read!

Wow. Powerful description of Archer's glimpse of T'Pol's internal maelstrom. I hate to see her in such agony, yet I'm glad Trip (and their bond) is not being dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders. I hate that we were ever even given the 'development' that they weren't together at the end - with the demise of both the bond and Trip. Thanks for salvaging the bond, at least.

Looking forward to seeing where this is going (...Vulcan is on the flightplan, eh?), but in a way, I'm bummed to think she'll terminate the bond (can you do that post mortem?) - Not that T'Pol should suffer the hell that she's in now, just that I hate that Trip can be purged from her like that - kinda like "Eternal Sunshine...Mind" -

Wonderful writing - thanks for cluing Jon in on reality.

Now, if only I knew what all she said in Vulcan...I could only pick out the nouns from other fics...what was the rest?

I am enjoying this angst-fest. Though I must admit I hope there's a ray of sunshine of some sort before this all ends.

"On 09 June 2005 at 04:53 AM Ludjin said:
Re: Pookha -- Well . . *ahem* Considering the way all the characters were portrayed in TATV, somehow Jon not grieving too much just about makes sense.

Now, the Jon from the /rest/ of the series, yes. Grief, heartbreak, anger, etc. *sigh* I hate TATV. We should make bumperstickers.

Anyhoo, this was fantastic, Miss. Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking, excrutiatingly dark . . I'm tempted to guess where you're going with this, but I'm also very willing to just take the ride. Great fic already, and it's only the second chapter!"

ahh but this is a fic based on the finale.
sigh..

yeah jon was as much out of character in it as trip, tpol, and even riker were.

i was just sorry and a little suprised to see it carried through here.

Ok wow! This is just about how Id imagine T'pol actin after Trip dying. Vulcans emotions are very strong an overwhelming and she basicaly let her control down to let Trip in cause her love for him was so strong,, I really doubt that she would want to sever what was left of their bond in order to live,,, the pain she must be feeling sounds worse then death,,, Im suprised that she hasnt blamed Archer for Trips death,,,Of course those Vulcan words might just be sayin that so I dont know,,, I just hope that T'pol suffering ends soon,, but I dont want Archer to force something on her just for his own selfish wants. Cant wait for the next update. :)

Angsty and excellent! I don't care for the premise either (Trip is DEAD in this story!), but I'm drawn in and completely absorbed by the story. I'm looking forward to the next update.

Oh the angst! Great stuff here, really. I loved the meld and the way you described what kind of darkness she is falling into. I have a guess as to where this is going, but I'm not gonna make it. I'm hoping that there will be some ray of sunshine, but I'll be reading either way. You've got me hooked. :)