Committed to the Wind

Author: JohnO/Elessar
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Star Trek: Enterprise, and all characters are owned by Paramount Pictures. Neither profit was made, nor infringement intended – only one of many tales of the star-crossed lovers (literally).

Summary: This was originally without a title, but some last minute inspiration and major additions provided one. It takes place after Terra Prime, weeks after Elizabeth’s funeral, on the tail end of Trip and T’Pol’s shore leave. I’m also still planning to update the AU, I’m sorry it’s not here yet, but somehow this came easier. It's in third-person omnicient, so don't get confused on whose perspective it is - it's mine =). It’s a little rosy, I’ve been reading Shakespeare.

Many thanks to JustTrip'n and Lys for their time and patience!

Vulcan Spring, 2155

“This is as far as the shuttle will take us,” T’Pol said to Trip, tilting her head in the direction of the window.

A cloud of orange dust swept up from the hard Vulcan surface under the back blast of the landing thrusters, swirling into a plume around the Vulcan shuttle. T’Pol stood as the floor shuddered and halted, signaling them to depart. Trip nodded and shouldered his large Starfleet duffel, turning sideways to fit down the aisle, while T’Pol easily snaked her slender body through the narrow passage.

A blistering wind stole the air from his lungs as Trip neared the front of the bus and the Vulcan atmosphere bid ‘hello’. T’Pol’s red, short-sleeved civilian shirt and fitting khaki pants showed off her deceptively lean (and secretly powerful) body, the collar dipping just high enough to be Vulcanly, just low enough to have distracted Trip throughout their descent. Trip stepped off the shuttle to find T’Pol gazing across the landscape at a distant spire.

“That’s it?” Trip asked in disbelief, raising an eyebrow as he jammed a finger across the crimson red sky. “I don’t remember it being so high…”

There was a long pause.

“No,” T’Pol said, turning towards him. Her eyes fell first on his hair, traveled down to his eyes, studying his nose, his lips, his cheek… She took a steady breath and found his eyes once more.

“My mother’s home is there,” she said, turning to point in the opposite direction from the spire of which he inquired. Trip squinted into the sun to follow her finger. A white and green dot stuck out atop a slowly climbing bulge in the terrain a few kilometers away. An alabaster pebble on an endless desert floor.

“Ya gotta’ be kiddin’? Why’d we stop here?” Trip asked, confusion slipping into his voice.

The shuttle rose loudly behind them, kicking up dust and drowning out Trip’s voice as his lips moved. Neither of them moved for several moments. When T’Pol didn’t answer, Trip chewed his lip, betraying an unconscious sign of irritation while T’Pol continued to simply stare at him. He was beginning to wonder if this had been a bad idea.

Then, T’Pol blinked.

“It is a great tower, built approximately eighteen hundred years ago, during the time of Surak,” she said, folding her hands at her back as she paced beside Trip, her eyes falling to her native dirt. Trip sighed, conceding silently the desertion of his question.

“Do you recall asking me of my, ‘honeymoon’?” T’Pol asked, her voice becoming softer. Trip’s aggressive posture softened and his arms fell to his sides as he stepped tentatively towards her, his interest piqued.

“Yea… You said Vulcans don’t have honeymoons,” he recalled, rolling his tongue along the lower lip. T’Pol turned her face up to him and blinked, admitting her slight deception. “This tower is the closest thing Vulcans have to your concept of a… ‘Honeymoon’,” T’Pol said with slight amusement.

Trip chuckled. “What’s it called?”

T’Pol lifted an eyebrow curiously, but didn’t seem inclined to answer.

“We have one too,” Trip bragged, hoping it would coax an answer. “Skylon Tower, overlooking Niagara Falls in Canada. It’s a big tourist stop for newlyweds. There’s a revolving dining room at the top, even an orbital observation deck on the new upper level. So what’s this one called?”

T’Pol hesitated, reconsidering the wisdom of this disclosure, “The name translates roughly as…”

“‘Surak’s Bedchamber, ” T’Pol informed him. Trip’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, perilously holding back a guilty grin with all his strength. Trip glared at himself, clearing his throat and turning his gaze once again to her, steeled in sincerity.

“It was once considered…” T’Pol paused, searching for the right words. “It was once part of the bonding ceremony to consummate the joining of two Vulcans atop that pier,” she said, turning once again towards the distant peak. “After climbing the peak together, the new bonded pair would spend one year living in the surrounding caves. For almost two thousand years, it was considered one of the most sacred of sites,” T’Pol recalled. Only the uppermost balcony of the hidden, mountainous residence could be seen from where they stood, but the image reached back deep into her memory. A deep warmth lent from Vulcan’s innards, the acrid sting of sulfur-tinged gasses in her nostrils; rising from the planet’s core, they betrayed its fiery past, before its people walked upright, resisted wantonness and embodied the very same baser vivacity and unpredictability. That mountain was Vulcan.

“Did you go up there?” Trip asked, drawing T’Pol from thought. Not a leaf’s breadth had the words traversed the air of his lips when pierced, he stung with regret as T’Pol turned her jaw sharply in his direction. He feared his tongue ventured too far.

“No. In recent centuries, Vulcan scholars have declared that the ritual represents a vestige of emotion and…sentimentality. The sanctuary was closed to pilgrims long ago.”

Trip folded his arms in dismay and turned up his nose. “Well that sounds typical a’ Vulcans,” Trip grunted, moving forward to position himself next to T’Pol and gazing at the tower. T’Pol lifted an eyebrow in his direction.

“No offense,” he offered weakly, cocking his head in a sheepish grin.

“I mean, I think it sounds… neat,” Trip said, immediately regretting the simplicity of his words.

Trip stared, watching her eyes glint in the bright Vulcan sun, her lips twitch with emotion, and her eyelids widen slightly. It had taken four years but he had learned the tongue of T’Pol’s unspoken language.

Her voice grew quieter, as if afraid that others might overhear.

“When I was younger, my foremother, T’Len, took me to the caves for my kanifur.”

Trip looked back at her in confusion.

“It is the first ritual of maturity,” T’Pol explained. “T’Len insisted, against the rules of the High Command. She could be… obstinate,” T’Pol said with a hint of satisfaction. Trip’s brows wagged as a smile played on his lips.

“Sounds like another Vulcan I know,” Trip grinned. His smile faded as T’Pol’s eyes shone with something, perhaps pleading. Standing next to her, his hand migrated gracefully, as if by instinct, to the center of her back and made one, gentle circle. Her back was firm and muscular beneath the shirt, but he briefly felt her shutter with a vulnerability that belied her physical strength and emotional resistance. As the blades of grass embrace the first day of Spring with such fervor as to relieve them of Winter’s frigid yoke, so too did Trip’s fingers shake imperceptibly against her body, radiating care and love to the envy of even Vulcan’s blazing glory. So too he melted that frigid casing.

“She insisted it was important to understand the true nature of the Vulcan spirit, beyond the literal teachings of Surak. When I asked her to explain, she would say only that ‘the IDIC has no end, that its name is only a shadow of its true meaning’,” T’Pol related with poorly hidden frustration before pausing, her brow turning upward into thought.

“Those were Surak’s own words, and did little to resolve a youth’s confusion,” she said, breathing light sigh. “I never believed I would find that understanding… I thought, perhaps, she was simply incorrect – a remnant of an older and less disciplined school of Logic.”

“Until I married Koss,” T’Pol added, surprising Trip. “I spent the two weeks before I returned to Enterprise, meditating inside the chamber, alone. I knew… when I returned,” T’Pol paused. She seemed to gather strength, chambering both logic and emotion in a single round and pulling the trigger.

“I realized I did not wish to be up there alone. I…wished,” T’Pol used the human word, realizing that no emotionally sterile substitute would suffice. “…that you had been with me to perform the rite,” T’Pol consented, closing her eyes in a long blink. Trip chewed his lip.

T’Pol swallowed hard. “After losing Elizabeth, it is only logical to bond with my real mate.”

During a long pause, the gaze of T’Pol’s hardened brown eyes lost focus on this world, communing with her past, her future, her mother, and her daughter. Trip’s arms outstretched, and in an almost unperceivable motion, their bodies came to rest against one another. Trip’s young, but work-worn fingers reverently closed in around her shoulders and held her. Puzzles of the mind, and matter, but all the more profoundly, of the soul: the two fit together, held together by connections where others saw only missing pieces.

“Let’s do it,” Trip said suddenly, his eyes flickering up at the distant peak.

“All of it,” he shook his head. “And I mean all of it, all of it,” Trip repeated, cradling T’Pol’s chin and blanketing it with a grin that would forever take up residence in her life. Though she could not, would not emulate it, that emblematic gestalt of things unquantifiable would be forever painted with clashing colors and undisciplined strokes upon her memory. He seemed almost a gleeful child, dashing along the walls of some ancient monasterial art collection with a giant brush, innocently defacing its perfection with one, thick, audacious blue streak. Disarmed of any recourse, she only awed, respectful of that which she could not comprehend.

“I wanna’ marry you.” Trip confessed, obliterating all pretense.

His voice cut through the air, its edge serrated with such emotion, such conviction that it sobered T’Pol like the cold of space. The cold receded, routed by Summer's searing swath to make her at home, inside, where now he too, lived. A Vulcan’s voice couldn’t do that. The comforting, definitive Logic of her existence couldn't do that.

She looked up at him, and for once felt truly glad of the unhinging presence of the human’s mind in contact with hers. In a single moment she realized the perfectly Logical asymmetry, and dared to wonder, wish, if that quirky hypothesis now tantalizing her talents had once, too, tricked upon a sitting Surak, as he meditated any one of many endless nights. Had he then awoken, dared to dream, what’s more, to write and teach, those words of wisdom, recorded in the Kir’shara and discovered after years of hiding?

In one’s mate will be joined both logic and emotion.

Her lips parted just slightly and the wind swirled in a ruthless howl about them, kicking up dust and capturing the brief, simple words that escaped her.