Chapter Text
"So, are you gonna take your shore leave with your boyfriend or what, Clarence?"
Cas looks up from his PADD and arches his eyebrow at Meg. They're in sickbay, and alone, and he's meant to be working while the rest of the crew takes their shore leave—at least, that's what he told Doctor McCoy that he'd be doing, and as a matter of personal preference, Cas likes not lying to his superior.
"I wasn't planning on it," he says with a huff. "There's nothing wrong with using my shore leave to stay here and work on my paper. Getting the honor of writing up the case with Commander Spock and his father could make my publishing career."
Shaking his head, he scribbles down a note in the margins of his document. "Besides, there are Klingons on the station. I would prefer to avoid the Klingons if I can help it. Which I can. By not going to the station. …And I still don't know who Clarence is."
Meg narrows her black-irised eyes at him and wrinkles her nose. "Well, there's nothing wrong with being upset about the Klingons. I mean, I can't stand them—the thoughts and feelings they radiate when you try prying into their skulls? It's all blood-wine this, and honor that, and brutal aggression, I could totally lose my mind if I had to work in close contact with any of them."
"I'm not upset about the Klingons. Perhaps you should avoid using your telepathic abilities so unethically," Cas points out. It's not that he doesn't like the Enterprise's new counselor—on the contrary, he finds Meg quite engaging and more than deserving of her position, despite the rumors that she obtained it entirely through nepotism—but he's never met a Betazoid who's so willing to use their telepathic abilities on unsuspecting, and sometimes unwilling, people.
Come to think, he's never met a Betazoid who's quite as sardonic as Meg, either. Most of the Betazoids he's ever dealt with have been kind and peaceful to a fault—they're almost as bad as the Risians with their what's ours is yours nonsense. Not that Cas particularly condones violence, as that would be illogical, but he appreciates that Meg isn't quite as much of a pushover as some of her fellows. He likes the way she looks at people like they're challenges to be taken on, and he likes the way she smirks at him without any remorse for anything she's said. Even the parts where she's admitted that she uses her powers unethically.
Regardless, Cas sighs and tells her, "I imagine that your natural empathic abilities often make themselves useful in your line of work, but it might behoove you to, for instance, not go around mentally spying on the Klingons. Actually, it might behoove you to never be around Klingons in the first place, considering that they are a bunch of foul-smelling, imperialistic barbarians. Avoiding them as a matter of principle ought to be a simple question of logic."
"Like I could help them being around while I was serving aboard the star-base. It got used as a diplomatic hub—you do know that the Organian Peace Treaty was signed on my old star-base, don't you?"
"Well, that still doesn't mean that you should pry into their thoughts and feelings without consent."
"Like I can just turn it off, Pretty Boy," she snaps and rubs at her temples. "I mean, I can filter out most things, so it's not like I'm spying on people or reading their minds without their consent. But I get low-grade emotional readings off of basically everyone—especially off of Klingons, because they feel everything so much more intensely than the average humanoid. At least it makes reading people easier, which, just between you and me? Makes my job a lot simpler."
"How fortunate for you," Cas supposes and shrugs. "It must be doubly fortunate for you that you choose to spend so much of your free time with someone whose emotions are biologically suppressed, if not outright absent."
"I've never actually met a Vulcan who didn't experience emotions to some degree, which includes you. Besides, I've read the brain-scans from your last physical. Your mesiofrontal cortex, while perfectly healthy, is so much less developed than the typical Vulcan's, even less than Commander Spock's. Must be the high concentration of human DNA you've got." She smiles at him, but there's absolutely nothing pleasant about it. She smiles like a piece of broken glass.
Cas huffs again and tightens his grip on his stylus. "Perhaps, but that just raises the question of why you felt the need to snoop into ship personnel's physicals in the first place."
All Meg does in response to this is shrug and tug on the hem of her science-blue dress. "Well, sweetheart, I had to familiarize myself with anyone who could possibly require my services," she explains, drawling as though Cas should have inferred this on his own. "Reading up on the personnel files was one of the first things I did when I got aboard the Enterprise. Which would be all the proof I'd need that you are upset about the Klingons being around. Never mind the part where you're just radiating irritation."
"I imagine that this generally happens when I'm working on a paper. Word choice tends to be difficult, and then there are the other matters of stylistics, and fitting in all the relevant information without overloading the reader, and making the case seem—"
"And it has nothing to do with being in close proximity to the people who blew up your parents?" Meg purses her lips, tucks some of her long, black hair behind her ear. "Well, I suppose that Captain Koloth and his men probably aren't the ones who actually blew up your parents, but still. Do you really expect me to believe that you don't have any feelings whatsoever about being around Klingons, in light of your history with them?"
"I don't have a history with them, Meg. Yes, Klingons killed my parents, but I don't have any feelings about them. When I call them foul-smelling, imperialistic barbarians, it is based solely on my own interactions with them and my knowledge of Klingon conquests within the Alpha Quadrant, not on some emotions that I'm meant to have about something that happened before I was capable of forming coherent memories." Never mind that, regardless of his underdeveloped mesiofrontal cortex, Cas's emotions are still suppressed, to some degree, on a biological level.
Leaning back, propping herself up with her palms on the desk, and crossing her legs, Meg drags her eyes up and down over Cas's frame like a phaser sweep. "So, have you heard anything from your sister lately? She was shacked up with a sculptor on Risa last time she sent you a transmission, right? But hopping around deep space stations before that? Who knows, maybe you'll run into her…"
Cas tosses his stylus down to the desk, huffs as he clicks off his PADD. "Anna got a very important grant to teach and study painting at one of the art academies on Risa, yes. That her girlfriend is a sculptor has nothing to do with anything. And if I agree to go spend some time on the station with Dean, then will you please stop asking me all of these invasive questions outside of the context of therapy sessions?
Really, if they were in a therapy session, Cas wouldn't mind everything that Meg's asked him so far today, but since they're supposed to be spending time together as friends at the moment, he can't think of anything more annoying. Pretending to consider his request, she combs a hand back through her hair, ties it all back into a ponytail, and says nothing for long enough that Cas considers snapping at her.
Then, finally, she tells him, "Sure, Clarence. I'll stop trying to get to know you better if you take some time off to go dork around the station with your boyfriend."
Which, Cas supposes, settles the matter. The only thing he needs to do now? Is go find Dean and catch a ride over on the transporter.
***
What Cas and Meg generally don't talk about, in therapy or out of it, is the fact that she's on the Enterprise because of Dean, because of Dean's family situation.
In fairness, that's not entirely true. In fairness, the entire crew of the Enterprise has been through a great deal in the past year-and-a-half, from their encounter with Khan Noonien Singh to their dealings with the contagion around Psi 2000 to their confrontation with the Romulan vessel near the Neutral Zone. There have been more than a handful of occasions when crew members nearly died, and plenty more when they took casualties. Cas has seen exposed bones, and phaser burns, and more than his fair share of dying people. There is nothing about their mission that particularly promotes emotional health.
But also in fairness, the lid blowing off of the Winchester scandal is what prompted Starfleet to probe into all of what's been going on aboard the Enterprise in the first place. They said that Dean's psychological and emotional upset, while due in large part to his father, could never have reached the apex that it did without being exacerbated by the conditions aboard the Enterprise. And that inquest is what resulted in Starfleet Command appointing Meg to be the new ship's counselor. The position was created specifically so that she could join Captain Kirk's crew as the resident provider of psychological care during a difficult and incredibly taxing mission. Supposedly, she's going to alleviate things around here, to some degree.
Supposedly, she's going to take some of the weight off of Doctor McCoy's shoulders, especially since he has no formal mental health-related training and doesn't particularly enjoy serving as a counselor.
It really isn't that Cas objects to Meg being here. He doesn't even mind that she sometimes comes off like she's just waiting for someone to write a case-study on for one of the Federation's myriad psychological research journals. For the most part, Cas has nothing but respect for Meg—but there's still the issue of how she insists that allowing himself to fully experience his feelings is what's best for him, that at least acknowledging them would help him a great deal, though she never specifies what it's meant to help with.
She doesn't know what Cas has had to live with, though. Oh, she might know it, intellectually, but she's never had to live with it herself. She's never had to be too illogical and too emotional for Vulcans, but too cold and too rational for humans. She's never had to deal with her foster brothers telling her that she'll never fit in anywhere, that she'll always be stuck between two worlds and unwanted in both. She's never had to bite back on her righteous indignation, keep herself from punching someone, because that action would just prove that she's not really Vulcan—not Vulcan enough to count as one, anyway.
She's never had it thrown in her face that emotions are more trouble than they're worth, and she's never had a point made out of how logic, while ostensibly easier than feeling, has its own difficulties.
Cas stops in his quarters on his way down to Engineering, tiptoes over the different things that Dean's left lying around the floor and changes out of his scrubs, and he almost gets out of there fine—until he makes the mistake of looking in the mirror. Why he even has the mirror is beyond him, it never accomplishes anything, just makes sure that his hair's in-place (as in-place as it ever gets) and that he's some kind of low-grade irritated with everything. Even his reflection is an amalgam—his ears pointed but not quite pointed enough for Vulcans, his cheeks prone to flushing in a shade that can't decide if it's green or red…
If violence weren't so illogical, if it weren't guaranteed to make his life harder with all the explanations he'd have to give to Meg and Doctor McCoy and Nurse Chapel and probably Commander Spock, Cas would punch the mirror for all he's worth. He'd smash into it until it shattered, lodging hunks of broken glass in his fingers and making him flinch just to avoid getting them in his eyes. And then he'd laugh until his throat ached and his diaphragm begged him to stop, because finally, he'd have beaten a reflection that never really looks like how he wants to look.
But all he does today is glare at himself and huff. He can't punch anything today, much less anything that would hurt him too much in return—he has some shore leave to go take. And who knows? Cas might even manage to enjoy himself, if he's going to be with Dean.