it may take centuries

[Open Spam]

[T'Pol can't recall the last time she was given a gift. She thinks it must have happened, at some point: it's highly likely her parents presented her with items for education. She doesn't recall them in detail, though. Faced with so many presents from a group of people who are, effectively, strangers, she stops trying to remember; the past is not important, the same as so many of these gifts are not important.

She doesn't put stock in material wealth, and never has. She understands it, certainly - well enough to use against others. But possessions have never been important to her. She hasn't owned anything in years.

So, really, she has no idea what to do with this new found wealth. Which means she's as clinically logical and practical about it as she can be. The clothing she inspects carefully for anything dangerous - satisfied with their safety, she puts them away, behind her duty uniforms. Not because she prefers the Starfleet issue, but because they are what is familiar. Another time, she will decide what she actually likes to wear for herself, but for now that lies unimportant. Everything else decorative and useless she puts away rather than hangs up, save for the Everstone from MewTwo. That she displays on her desk, the one decoration her quarters have ever seen.

Everything Vulcan is stored in a box and shoved into the back of her wardrobe. Old habits die hard, if they ever do. She almost regrets tucking away the wall hangings. It has been so long since she's been surrounding by anything but cold Earth blues. That is seized upon as unnecessarily emotional, though, and she shoves it away fiercely.

In the end, she returns to the clothing and grudgingly selects a sweater and jeans, annoyed to be accepting the gift. She doesn't like owing favors. But the temperature has reached intolerable levels, so she dresses more warmly, and heads out into the ship.

Most of her day is spent wandering, committing every inch of the ship to memory. She can be found in the halls, working out in the gym - from a corner, of course, where no one can sneak up on her - and, briefly, walking through greenhouse. Everything is too flush, there, the flora too Human; she leaves quickly. Come dinner time, she works her shift in the mess hall, following instruction in cooking. She's not bad at it, so long as there are directions. Cooking is a science of its own, after all, and she is predisposed. It's good that most meals are buffet style: serving she is much less predisposed to.

And at some point in the evening, she discovers that there are labs just beyond her reach. She loiters there, considering asking after the every day monitoring that must occur in there; instead, she waits for someone to let her in.

Much later, closer to the morning than the middle of the night, T'Pol leaves her quarters again when sleep eludes her. She winds her way up and down the Barge, eventually finding herself back in the dining hall. Finding it abandoned, she hesitates in the door way, glancing over her shoulder, up and down the hall, before heading for a table with a low burning candle. She pulls it toward her, staring at the flame and trying to meditate.]

[Private to Bucky]

Captain Rogers has volunteered you as my secondary warden.

[If he listens reeeeaaaaal close, he can hear the irony in her voice.]

[Open Spam]

[She is not dead.

It is the first logical, and yet supremely illogical conclusion that she reaches. Her slowly waking mind tells her that she is reclined, her back pressed uncomfortably against a bulkhead. She reaches for each facts, and cannot make sense of them: she is in pain. She is breathing. She is not trapped, beyond the heavy restraints still linking her wrists together. Beyond the bruises she can feel deepening, and the bones that may be sprained, and the blood creeping along her skin, she can hear the sounds of people moving about. She is not dead, and as that thought settles, she forces her eyes open.

She is not in the empty room Archer used for interrogation, either. It's a dimly lit hall, unlike any aboard Defiant or Avenger; it's nothing like any ship she's seen, and she can't decide if that is cause for cautious hope, or expectation of pain. When the first Humans stumble gleefully past her, T'Pol presses herself against the wall and decide it's most likely the latter. That they don't turn their weapons on her she attributes to poor observation, and takes stock of her injuries: the cut along her cheek must have opened again, and she can remember something slicing into her side before everything became blackness. She had thought it was the bulkhead exploding in, had accepted the fierce joy that had filled her when she realized the Defiant was on the verge of destruction. It hadn't mattered if it would take her with it.

That it hadn't was baffling. Inching to her feet, using the bulkhead to steady herself in lieu of having free hands, T'Pol pauses to steady her breathing. Blood covers her bare side, stark green against tan skin. Judging by the fact that she still defies logic and continues to breathe, her heart isn't been pierced: that's fortunate, perhaps. There are other injuries, more superficial - Jonathan Archer was not known as a kind interrogator by anyone, and though it was well known that Vulcan discipline makes physical punishment rather pointless, that has never stopped Humans from exercising their supposed superiority.

T'Pol can taste coppery blood on her tongue, and swallows past a wash of dizziness. The pain is tolerable. What is intolerable is not knowing where she is, or how she got here. She starts forward, unsteady at first but quickly regaining her balance. She cannot hide that she is hurt, but she can bury all weakness.]