Blue on Blue

Chapter Seven

Trip’s eyes snapped open. 

Low in her throat, T’Pol groaned.  This pain hadn’t been there a moment ago.  Should she detach herself from Trip’s mind before she caused him more harm than he had already undergone?

No.  The meld was not going wrong.  This was not her pain but his.  Now it had become theirs.  

She drew a balancing breath.  There were techniques she had learned as a child for controlling the perceptions of pain.  Trellium-D had not affected her ability to engage them.  Was it possible they could be used to steady both herself and Trip?

Our minds, our thoughts and our feelings are one.   Our well-being is without boundaries, our injuries are finite…  We can define them.

Nothing about this meld should be gratifying, but it was, as she became aware that her cloak of pain control had spread until it enfolded both of them.  Her muscles relaxed.  Though she sensed no great fear or panic in Trip centered around the pain, nonetheless, beneath her fingers, the lines of his face smoothed out.  Would this joining do as she had theorized and allow him to communicate with her beyond the fatigue and disorientation of the concussion? 

Our perceptions are one…

She was squinting against brightness, seeing her own heavy, grey-blue landing party jacket and oval face surrounded by a short cap of shining hair.  Her features wavered- doubled, tripled, doubled again, then came into sharp focus for an instant before the shimmering, prism edges returned. 

It was odd, seeing herself from his perspective for that one clear moment.  She had seen her reflection many times.  It had not looked so vivid. 

She had never given much attention to how she appeared to him.  She had acknowledged how well they worked together and how they shared a sometimes uncomfortable attraction for each other.  But she had not imagined how he saw the quick and keen intelligence glowing bright in her eyes or the strength and confidence in the set of her chin or the lift of her head.  She had never realized how he found her upswept brows and small, pointed ears so unspeakably beautiful. It was a disconcerting experience, and a strangely humbling one.

The observation was gone in a heartbeat as the connection deepened.  It was lost within the awareness that they had ventured into an uncharted territory to take a desperate gamble.  They could tear aside their most personal barriers and still not discover the captain’s whereabouts. An instant later, those considerations were replaced by the strange sense that they were, or that we are, conversing. Still, there was no clear distinction between them, though she was aware that some of the thought patterns were her own, while others had to be his.  There was no sense that time was passing as it did between the flow of spoken words; their communication was as instantaneous as thought itself.

That other meld had been nothing like this.  The ebb and flow between her and Trip was smooth and noninvasive.  She would almost have called it easy, except for the tug and hitch of neural disruption.  Perhaps, they could discover a way of working around that, if the degree of injury could be determined.

We will commence with a medical evaluation.

Even more than when she had activated the pain cloak, she sensed a profound relief pouring from him.

Right.  Go for it.  But hurry up, okay?  Captain’s waiting. 

There is a head ache?

Yeah, fierce.  Isn’t bothering us right now, though.

That’s because of  our connection.  How about neck, shoulders, arms?

Few scrapes.  No big deal. 

But the chest is. 

Yeah.  Right side. 

Breathe in.

Yeah, okay.

Breathe out.

Ow, yeah, we feel it. 

Most strongly here? 

Yeah.  Ouch.  Sharp.  Real… sharp.

Bone on bone? 

Yeah. Think so.   Ribs.  Feel like we got a couple cracked ribs.  Had them before once. 

The image formed of a blonde haired child.  He was crawling over sun-baked, smoky-grey tar shingles on a steep, slanting roof, then unfastening the outer housing on a water siphoning device.  Prying open the wire mesh beyond, he peered inside.  Moving too far out onto the eves for a closer look, he tumbled over the edge, a sudden prisoner of Earth’s gravity. 

What about hands?

There was a wave of impatience.  Come on, now!  That’s nothing to waste time on.  Bruised knuckles from where we dug the rocks to get free.

We?  Are we talking about this “we” here?  Or the “we”, meaning us along with Captain Archer?

Impatience gave way to regret as sharp as cracked ribs. 

Don’t know.  Don’t…

Perhaps we asked this too soon.  We must accustom ourselves to this meld, let our connection deepen before we retrace to that point.  We shall concentrate on the exact, the concrete.  Are there other injuries?

Right knee or maybe below it.  Something gave out there.  All one big ache right now, but there’s not much we can do about it for the moment.  Now how about- 

Can we move it? 

Hell, no, we can’t move it.  Wedged between couple of big rocks… Could be a lot worse.  Not pinned under them anyway. 

Then we are less buried in rubble than  wedged between stones, correct?  It’s  the pull on the ribs, the dizziness when we try to sit up or dig free that holds us here, rather than the weight of caved in earth.  

Yeah?  Tell us something we don’t know.

These are serious conditions, but nothing that won’t hold while we assess what the captain needs. 

Damn it!  We don’t know what he needs, or where he is! We don’t remember! 

But we believe we can determine his needs, that we will find him.  We will now go back to the last thing we do remember.  The captain was doing what?

He was climbing out of the shuttle-pod.  

Another image began to form.