After all, there's no such thing as an original plot these days...the only originality comes from the way a writer perceives and expresses that plot from their experiences.Trip never makes a promise that he doesn’t keep.
***
For all intents and purposes, Trip was dead. For all intents and purposes, his burned body lay in the coffin being lowered slowly into a six-foot deep opening in the ground.
T’Pol’s gaze dropped to her feet, staring at the grass beneath her shoes as if it were a fascinating new specimen of sentient life. The green blades swayed in the cool, fall Florida winds. She could almost hear their sorrowful keening as they mourned the departure of a fellow sentient creature.
T’Pol heard a choked cry and her gaze flew to Catherine Tucker, who clutched her husband and looked for all of the world like a woman battered to within an inch of her life.
A lump formed in T’Pol’s throat at the sight. She longed to soothe the woman’s broken heart, to tell her that Trip wasn’t dead. “He only needs to appear so,” she would say. “The mission he has been assigned is very hazardous and he is required to give up his identity for it.”
Had she not known this, she wouldn’t have survived the agonizing loss herself. After the incident in which she’d locked herself in her quarters for several days and refused food or comfort, Jonathan had confessed the entire scheme to her.
Anger. That was the first of many very Human emotions that had overcome her control. She’d wanted to scream at him and had been sorely tempted to wrap her hands about his neck. Despite T’Pau’s healing of her synaptic pathways, she often found particularly strong emotions more difficult to control than they had been prior to her use of Trellium.
Anger. Trip had taught her about anger. It was a sensation caused at its core by pain. That, he’d said, was what made it such a volatile emotion. The more pain the individual experienced, the greater the need to strike back at the person or thing taunting them. He’d taught her to analyze the reasons why she felt this emotion. At that moment, it had been a combination of elation that he was not in fact dead and hurt that her Captain and friend had allowed her to suffer so long.
From the first, she had been torn. Her logical mind reminded her constantly that he was dead; and yet, she still felt his presence like a ghost’s touch within her mind. The vague hope that the comforting thought gave her conflicted with the reality her mind forced upon her in private moments, driving her to the brink of insanity and back again.
Why had he allowed her to suffer such cognitive dissonance?
He hadn’t spoken a word to her since that day. Each time she attempted to capture his gaze, he glanced away and proceeded to stride past her.
She gathered a handful of dirt from the pile beside the grave and moved to stand at the very edge of the opening. She stared at the wooden box that sat on the floor of the opening and slowly loosened her grip, allowing the earth to slip from her hand.
“Parting from me and never parted, never and always touching and touched,” she whispered in archaic Vulcan. “Beyond life and beyond death; beyond tears and beyond fear.”
She stood in still silence for several moments before turning and departing from the gravesite, clutching the IDIC symbol tightly to her chest.
***
Hope you enjoyed the preview!! Should be posting the whole story soon!
That was certainly a powerfully emotional scene with T'Pol. I hope you'll be posting the rest of this story soon please.