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Hoshi is still shaking when she gets back to her room, like maybe her body hasn't caught up yet that she's safe and it can stop with the whole wave after wave of anxiety. Everything is fine now, but she had to go down to the planet to help captain Archer negotiate through some tricky nuances of the local language after a misunderstanding made Trip get a sentence of thirty years hard labor. It's the kind of situation that she didn't want to be put in, but she didn't have much choice.
All she wants is to hide in her room and never have to leave it again, which is a ridiculous feeling, and she knows that she’ll feel better tomorrow, but that doesn’t help her now. At times like this, she can’t help but think that she shouldn’t have come to the Enterprise, that she doesn’t belong here. She’s trying to banish her anxiety, to learn how to not let her feelings get in the way, but it’s not always easy. She’s about to go to bed, possibly while telling the computer to turn off her alarm and not give her any notifications unless it’s an emergency, when she hears a beep at the door. While she would very much like to pretend that she didn’t hear that, it would only lead to whoever is there worrying about her, and she doesn’t want anyone else coming to check in on her.
Hoshi opens the door, and she’s a bit surprised to find T’Pol standing in the corridor.
“May I come in?” T’Pol asks, in that generally unreadable tone of hers.
Hoshi steps aside, allowing T’Pol to walk into the room and the door to close behind her. T’Pol wasn’t there when Hoshi was translating the negotiations, she was on the ship making sure that they would be ready for evasive maneuvers if the chancellor went back on his word and decided to attack them from the planet, so she has no reason to know how nervous Hoshi had been, trying to untangle a stress pattern that the universal translator was failing to catch. Maybe it’s just a matter of knowing her too well, but Hoshi would hate to think that her anxiety is so predictable.
“Do you need anything, or…?” Hoshi starts, not wanting to be rude, but she’s tired and she doesn’t want to have to face once again how unfit for space exploration her feelings are.
“I simply thought you might want… company, after what transpired on the planet,” T’Pol says, stepping closer to her, then sliding two fingers down the back of Hoshi’s hand, over her fingers, stopping for a moment before reaching her fingertips and letting go.
There is… something happening between them, ever since the first time that T’Pol offered to help her with meditation, but she’s not sure what it is, and neither of them has made any effort to define it. Hoshi wonders about it, at times. Despite her emotional control, T’Pol is the only one on the ship that Hoshi can trust to really not make her feel like there’s something wrong with her when she gets too anxious about the dangers of what they’re going through. She wonders what she makes T’Pol feel, not that a Vulcan would go around talking about her feelings, but maybe it’s because Hoshi understands her better than anyone else on the ship too. It would be impossible to know so much of linguistics without understanding culture too, and she speaks fluent Vulcan, even if T’Pol doesn’t allow herself to speak it with her.
“I was thinking of getting some tea, maybe relaxing with a book,” Hoshi says, realizing only as she does how true that is.
She thought that she would be planning on sleeping, but the truth is that she’s still too anxious for that. She won’t be able to sleep until she can calm down a little, and having T’Pol around might help her do that.
T’Pol doesn’t ask her if she would rather be alone, she knows that she wouldn’t. And in turn Hoshi doesn’t ask her if she would like some tea or how she would want it, because she already knows what Vulcan tea T’Pol favors. They have done this sort of thing before, and so she always makes sure to stock some of the tea that T’Pol likes, the genuine article too, which isn’t easy to get, but she had some contacts.
There’s not much space in their quarters, and although they could sit on the chairs by the small desk, that wouldn’t exactly be relaxing, and when Hoshi brings the tea, T’Pol is sitting on her bed. If they don’t ever talk about this, maybe Hoshi will never have to risk losing this, and she really can’t bear that thought. Whenever she feels lost or alone on that ship or while on an away mission, T’Pol is the one who can help her feel centered, back in control of herself.
Hoshi sits next to her, with a PADD in hand so she can choose something relaxing to read, and T’Pol places an arm around her, holding her close. With anyone else, she might have called this snuggling, but she doesn’t say so aloud. Just as T’Pol didn’t call what she did with her fingers when she came in a kiss, even though that’s the closest Vulcan cultural equivalent to what humans would call that. T’Pol might even kiss her later, the human way, she had done so before, or maybe Hoshi had, a conversation about cultural differences that escalated, which might work as an excuse once, but not for the number of times that they had done this.
At times, Hoshi feels a need to know what this means to T’Pol, what she might feel for her, but this isn’t one of those times. Right now, all that she needs is to have T’Pol close to her, to know that she isn’t alone, and that she has one person who understands her.