Brandy and self-pity

Stripped down to his uniform tank and slacks, Rai had slumped over his desk with a glass clutched in his hand and a bottle of Andorian brandy. There were no tears, just overwhelming guilt and remorse.

He could probably feel T'Pren before she even told the panel to alert him to her presence. There was a very, very distant hurt, but mostly there was concern, determination, and resignation. The half-Vulcan outside Rai's door wasn't looking to argue, whatever she wanted.

When he opened the door, he would find her expression matched her feelings almost exactly. She was dressed again, an oversized shirt and leggings, and she had the edges of the blanket from before clutched in her hand, holding a bundle of something light but oddly shaped. Her hair was loose and wavy around her face, but she'd tucked pieces of it behind her ears so that the points were visible. And as soon as the door was open to her, she pushed inside, without waiting for arguments or greetings.

"I'm sure you have a lot to say," he said, turning in his seat to make eye contact. His eyes were bloodshot, he clearly hadn't slept. "Let me have it, then."

Instead of saying anything, T'Pren spread her blanket out on the floor, revealing the cheese and bread and honey and jam spread from the picnic that never happened. When she stood back up, she leveled a look at Rai that would not take no for an answer. "Eat," she ordered, brows lifting in challenge. "Start with the bread."

Without looking to see if he'd done what he was told yet, she went to the replicator. "Two Vulcan spice teas. Hot and very strong."

"Ugh, I'm not hungry," he said. He immediately contradicted himself, plopping down on the blanket, and sinking his teeth into a square of cheese.

When the drinks were replicated, T'Pren glanced over her shoulder to see what the Captain was doing and rolled her eyes. "That's not bread," she pointed out bluntly, bringing the cups to the ground and setting one directly in front of Rai. The other one she left on the floor while she made a sweep of the room, collecting anything that even looked like alcohol or that it had once contained alcohol.

"You're sobering up," she ordered as she rifled through his things. "I'm installing an Artificial Singularity Drive tomorrow based on Romulan schematics that I barely understand because I'm a science officer and we have no chief engineer and once I turn it on, we can never turn it off again. So I need you as sober and not hungover as I can get you."

As she lectured, her heart began to thump a little more heavily against her ribs and it was clear the hurt was closer to the surface than she was letting herself notice. "And you definitely don't get to tell me you don't have feelings for me and it was supposed to be fun -- which it was -- and then come back in here and wallow in self-pity. You can at least show me enough respect to bear your pain earnestly."

She finally turned to look at him, her green eyes flickering with a fire that was both hurt and anger. "Although, quite frankly, I can only think of one reason for you to be moping that I wouldn't find insulting."

Rai had stuffed a hunk of bread in his mouth. "Oh?"

"What kind of response is that?" T'Pren asked irritably, bending down to pick up her own cup of tea and sitting at his desk rather than on the floor with him. Her ire seemed to drop with her into the chair, leaving only a thin layer of anger on top of the open wound and her vulnerability and care for him. Her expression softened.

"I have feelings for you," she stated matter-of-factly, her voice a little thicker but still determined and frank. "Romantic feelings. And I'm sorry that it's not what you want. And I'm sorry that I ruined something you wanted to be light and meaningless." Her cheeks turned gently green as the lump in her throat rose. "The only other time in my entire life that I've had feelings like this were for the Vulcan boy who tried to escape. The one who was executed. Never once before and never once after until you. And I'm sorry that it complicates things. I truly am." She glanced down at her tea and took a sip to steady herself, to collect her emotions so she could make sure to say everything she needed to say. When it slipped warm down her throat, she took a deep breath and looked up with helpless affection at Rai. "But I'm not sorry for feeling this way about you, Darren. I'm not. You're incredible. You're so compassionate it actually wounds you. You care about the people around you more deeply than anyone else I have ever met. And I don't know that I could have gotten through these last two weeks without you. I really don't."

The lump grew and she had to pause, pressing the heels of her palms against her eye sockets and carefully regulating her breath.

He swallowed the bread roughly and washed it down with tea. "I care about you very much, Pren. I just didn't mean for you to fall for me. I can't reciprocate-- I don't."

"Do you think I meant to fall for you?" Pren asked with an edge in her voice. "You can't control what I feel anymore than I can." She rolled her eyes at what she'd just said and let out a rough laugh. "Maybe if I were more Vulcan, I could have controlled it. But I also think it's the Vulcan in me that doesn't know how to be that intimate, that connected, without feelings like these."

She dragged her hands down her face and looked Rai in the eyes again, shrugging helplessly. "I'm not asking you to reciprocate. I know you can't help how you feel either. But I need you to stop beating yourself up over it like you had any say in the matter because you didn't. And I need you to stop acting like it was all a big mistake because it absolutely wasn't."

"It was very nice while it lasted," he said with a half smile. "I don't want to lose your friendship."

T'Pren gave Rai a very dry, very flat, very sassy look in return. "You couldn't lose my friendship if you tried, you lush."

He snorted at her utterance of 'lush.' "Good. So where do we go from here? What do you want? Why are you here then?"

"I'm here because I'm your friend," T'Pren replied, getting a little more of that edge in her voice. "But we'll get to that. I'm not done."

She and her tea slipped off the desk chair and onto the floor, scooting over to the blanket and reaching out for Darren's hand. Her visage now was sweet and fond and open. "I need you to understand something very important."

The half-Vulcan watched the Betazoid carefully, her skin touching his to strengthen her ability to read him and their overall connection. "You gave me a gift. That intimacy. Your touch. It was a gift and one that I cannot begin to put into words." But he could feel, no doubt, how grateful she was for it and how much it changed her in so short a time in only positive ways. She was more confident, more calm, more centered in her body and in her mind. Happier. She smiled warmly at her Captain. "And if, in the future, you need me in any capacity, I will be here. However you require me, I will be here for you. And if you want to share that gift with me again at any point, I will be just as grateful and I will know exactly how you mean it. And if you don't, what you did give will just be that much more precious for its brevity."

Her green eyes searched his face even as she searched the connection mentally to make sure he got it. "So we're going to only be glad that it happened. Okay? It was wonderful and fun and exactly what I needed."

He nodded firmly, and hiccuped. "Agreed."

Most of T'Pren's anger had melted away by then, replaced with a pleased and relieved smile. She ran her thumb over the back of Rai's hand and squeezed it before letting go to pick up some cheese for herself. "Good."

The hurt was still there, just a little, but in the back-of-the-mind way that can't really be helped after any kind of romantic rejection. She sipped her tea and watched the Captain thoughtfully for a moment before she confessed her reason for being in his quarters: "I think we need to find a different way for you to cope, Darren. Something that doesn't diminish your capacity to lead this station and the Hippolyta."

"I've been doing fine so far, I usually don't let anyone close enough to notice. I was thinking of speaking to Akhil about this," he murmured.

"You've been doing very well," T'Pren agreed gently, sipping at her tea and studying him over the edge of the cup. "But you should talk to Akhil. And you can talk to me. Or, if you prefer, I can just come sit with you. Whatever you want."

The half-Vulcan paused thoughtfully. "Tal'Ara's probing for weakness. If we're ending..." She took a breath and let it out slowly through her nose. "If we're ending what we had, then we should go further. Your drinking. My fragility. Akhil's rage. We can't give her a way under our skin."

"You're right of course, I can't do this forever. I'll see Akhil tomorrow," he said. And he meant it. He could imagine Tal'Ara taking his life in a Shakespearean murder plot, slipping poison in his ear while he was drunk and unconscious.

"If we aren't all swallowed up into a rogue artificial singularity," T'Pren added brightly. She put cheese on bread and drizzled honey on top as though she'd just suggested it might rain. She took a hearty bite and chewed, watching Rai thoughtfully and soothing the wound that still throbbed under the surface.

"The good thing about no longer having secret trysts," she mused out loud, "is that now we can go to dinner together in public."

"I'd like that very much," he said, smiling softly. "I was mostly afraid I'd lose you. So we're okay then?"

T'Pren's brow knit at Rai's admission and she returned his smile with something between sweetness and sadness. "You're not going to lose me," she promised sincerely. The little lump in her throat made a comeback and the wound throbbed a little where her heart was.

She sipped at her tea so that he couldn't see the way her cheeks warmed. "We're more than okay. Just don't pull away from me, okay? Let me deal with my own feelings. But stay with me. Please."

"I will," he said. "Thank you for bringing the picnic to me." He shoveled brie into his face with drunken enthusiasm.

Rai's assurance that he wouldn't leave her or distance himself flooded T'Pren's heart with warmth, simultaneously aggravating and soothing the hurt. He received a small, vulnerable smile for his trouble.

"I thought you should have something in your stomach besides alcohol," she explained knowingly, sipping at her tea again.

After a moment's hesitation, she admitted, "The worst part is going to be not kissing you. It seems so normal and natural now."

"There will be plenty of people on this station to kiss, by and by," he chuckled. "I'm hardly the only game in town."