Backpost: You Don't Have to Do This Alone

Posted on Fri Jan 23rd, 2026 @ 12:36am by Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai & Lieutenant Commander Karim

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Senior Crew Quarters, Emni and Karim
Timeline: Mission Day 0 at 0000

[Senior Crew Quarters]
[Three days prior to At What Price, Advancement?]
[0330 Hours]

Lighting in the quarters Emni shared with Karim was low. They Sojourner had been underway from The Place of the Skulls with it's Chameloid refugees for just over a week and a half, making their way to Starbase 2 as quickly as they reasonably could where they would wrap up repairs on the ship, take a few days down time, and the Chameloids would disembark. With so many on the ship Emni was tired. It took that much more effort to shield emotions when the small Rhode Island class ship held so many in close quarters with each other. She felt like she was in a constant state of adjustment, up high when around crowds, but dropping down to assist with crew.

Since Karim's arrival nearly 3 weeks ago, she had tried several times to connect with him, but after the first day he remained largely reclusive. He was around, would come out and eat and be in the common room. But attempts to talk with him were rebuffed as much as he reasonably could. What had felt like quick progress that first day soon felt like a fluke and it was hard for Emni not to hold her defenses at their highest levels. Without them high Karim's agitation was significant enough to be 'heard' from her room.

Sitting up in bed, she rubbed her eyes. What had woken her now gave her pause. It was almost like a shout, sobbing on its heels. But there was no sound now that she was awake. She could barely hear the hum of the warp drive making her own breath sound loud in the space around her.

Still, she was sure she'd heard something. She stood, Kyi'i mrowling in protest when she climbed out of bed before stretching and with a feline yawn, returning to sleep. Slowly she pulled down her emotional defenses and... sure enough... there it was. It hadn't been a sound. It had been an emotion, strong enough to force through her defenses, even asleep. Something was wrong.

Quickly she left her room, eyes scanning the common area in the low light. When she didn't see him, she crossed to the opposite bedroom door and pushed the chime, requesting entrance.

No answer.

She repeated the action, just in case, but when Karim didn't answer the door, his emotional state shouting in her head, she moved into action.

"Computer, medical override t'Nai-Zero-Five-Eighty-Tango," she spoke, her voice just loud enough to pierce the darkness a moment before the door slid open to grant her entry.

"You have entered without my consent, Doctor," came a matter-of-fact voice from the darkness.

There were no sources of light in the room aside from that bleeding through from the communal area, although everything was, at least, meticulously arranged about Karim's quarters, as best as could be seen in the small space. The former counsellor was, himself, set upon the bed, legs crossed, his eyes clasped tightly shut. Despite the outward appearance of composure, both his emotional signature and the sweat trickling down his temple indicated quite the opposite.

"You didn't answer," she responded matter-of-factly as if that should be obvious enough reason for her entrance. Her heart was pounding, physical responses to the intensity of his emotion kicking in without her say so. Without thinking her hands balled into fists, nails digging into her palms before the physical sensation of pain brought her back to the moment. She paused in the doorway neither entering the space nor leaving, working to slow her own breathing while she began to erect a stronger defense against the onslaught of emotion emanating from the figure on the bed.

She could still feel her heart pounding as she stepped into the room, everything falling to darkness as the door whooshed shut behind her. "Computer, lights at 15%," she said, voice giving away some of the turmoil she was experiencing as she said it.

Mercifully, Karim did not decide to pursue an argument with Emni about the entry, but he kept his eyes clamped shut. There was a slight wobble his frame, as he was clearly committing himself to an intense focus of his own. It was not unknown for Vulcans to press themselves into this sort of state, dependent on their objectives, but the sheer volume of emotional distress was uncharacteristic.

"What is it that drives you, Doctor?" He said after a few seconds of silence, not reacting to the increased lighting in the room. "Why do you continue to rage against the storm?"

The question gave her a point to focus on--a channel through which to navigate the onslaught of Karim's emotional intensity that battered her defenses. Most emotional intensities were significant, but acted more like a wave, swamping her but receding just as quickly. Karim's emotions, however, were more like an assault... someone pounding on a closed door and threatening to keep doing so until the person on the other side opened it for them. That, alone, was testament to how significantly out of control he was in that moment.

She stepped closer to him, eyes scanning the room and landing on a chair that she drug to sit before the bed. She considered sitting next to him, but discarded the idea quickly, unsure if that kind of closeness might make things worse. "You'll have to be more specific," she said forcing her tone toward curiosity and away from the alarm she still felt.

"The Terran philosopher Marcus Aurelius stated," Karim began, through a few sharp intakes of breath, "'Let each thing you would do, say or intend be like that of a dying person', to be indifferent to that which makes difference... yet he also discussed the oblivion of existence. Surak stated, 'There is no other wisdom and no other hope for us but that we grow wise', yet counselled the destruction of ourselves for others." Finally, his eyes, red and bloodshot, opened, and he locked them upon Emni. "What do you live for - which oblivion or destruction do you avoid or accept?"

The Romulan held his gaze, the layers of not only the differences in their upbringing, but that of their experiences weighing heavily on her. The onslaught of emotion remained high and she fought the urge to grit her teeth. "I..." She began voice soft, though an undercurrent of something steely ran through it, "I have already lived through both destruction and oblivion and was able to neither avoid nor accept it." Images of her own grief, the moment she knew that Jori and Sulli and her family were lost to the universe, reared up as fresh as though it were yesterday.

Her doctor neutral mask slipped and her eyes flashed anger and grief. "What is left behind in the wake of those things is only myself and the next right thing... Whatever that may be. Sometimes it is as close as simply taking the next breath. Others it is as significant as using a medical override to break into a friend's room."

"You judge purpose by the merits of continued existence or a shared experience?" Karim asked, his voice slightly shaky. Another trickle of sweat slipped its way down the side of his face, edging just shy of his eye. "I know you are keenly aware of the mortality that faces us all. Our existence is a quirk of nature, fleeting against the broader universe. Every action taken, every life saved or child born, or even every war lost or planet destroyed - it is all met by oblivion, eventually." Karim's closed his eyes again but he kept his head inclined towards Emni. "Logic dictates we pursue the most efficient path. And oblivion is inevitable."

"Efficiency itself is often a matter of perspective," Emni shot back. Her own emotions were at play now, twinning with Karim's own in her head in a way that was difficult to parse. "Just because oblivion is inevitable does not mean we need to run headlong at it. Oblivion is part of a cycle. Nothing more than that and nothing less. It happens with the same inevitability that life does. And love. And loss. And the urge to urinate. And to procreate. All of those things are inevitable. Do you run headlong at those with the same fervor you seem to believe you should run at oblivion?"

The challenge was sharp, and whilst there was a definite spike within the troubled former counsellor, his eyes remained sealed. "You trivialise the predicament," Karim replied, his tone taking a slight edge, although it in no way yet surrendering to anger. "All life is set to dissipate and, eventually, all that can house life will disappear. Memory will be as meaningless as time will become, incapable of recording and immaterial within a void." He then shook a little and he loosed an exhausted sigh, as if finally releasing an intake of air he had held for too long, and with it, his eyes opened again. They had grown redder in the short time they had spoken, but his shoulders and body were now looser, as he placed a hand on the carpeted floor to support himself. "I cannot find what you mean; I try, but it is not there."

His eyes were now almost pleading as he looked to Emni, but his voice still carried the stern weight of a Vulcan resisting his emotions. "It is impossible to not be aware of finality, yet to continue struggling against its inevitability. Even this," he gestured towards an old book, open beside his bed, written in a Vulcan script, "promises no purpose nor value. Every quirk of nature, every evolution, an accident or happenstance to prolong life in some form within a decaying bubble, growing ever smaller."

"Your fallacy is where you are focusing your attention," Emni responded, an edge still in her tone. With Karim's exhale, she too felt the weight of exhaustion and fought to keep her shoulders from slumping with it. She knew what he was describing. She had lived it--lived in that space of trying to find the why when everything that had ever mattered seemed to be gone. She knew the very void he was staring into and it was all she could do not to shout at him to look away. "I trivialize nothing. Until you have lost what I have you are not in a position to claim that my take on this is trivial." Her tone held a hurt to it, one that surprised even her. She spoke of this loss so infrequently that to have it referred to as he was was nearly infuriating.

One breath in. One longer breath out. The Romulan worked to compose herself, using her parasympathetic system to control her emotional response in the face of Karim's onslaught. She eyed him then, holding his gaze and seeing the pain he felt even though he might not ever admit to that being the case. Very slowly she reached out, placing one hand on his leg, eyes never wavering from his gaze. "If you only focus on what is far ahead of you Karim, you will entirely miss what is around you now." She waited for him to flinch away. "Now is the moment that you have. Now is the moment that matters. Oblivion comes for all of us, but it is not here now."

Karim became aware of the contact a fraction of a second after it occurred.

Not as an intrusion, nor as threat.

His breath caught, shallow and sharp, and for an instant every reflex trained into him since childhood demanded withdrawal. The muscles in his thigh tensed beneath her hand, the familiar impulse to create distance coiling and ready - and then, just as deliberately, he did nothing. The moment stretched. Sweat gathered along his brow, another slow track slipping down his temple, but he did not pull away.

His eyes lifted to hers.

The intensity there was not accusation or reassurance. It was presence - steady, unyielding, unromantic. She was not attempting to 'solve' him. She was not demanding resolution. She was simply there, anchoring the present with the same quiet stubbornness she applied to a failing patient who refused to stop bleeding.

Karim swallowed. The motion was visible, controlled with effort.

"You describe a condition," he said at last, voice hoarse but measured, stripped of its earlier edge. "Not a justification." His gaze did not leave her face now, even as the tremor in his hands subsided by degrees. "You do not deny oblivion. You merely... postpone engagement with it." A long pause followed. His breathing slowed - counted, regulated - and his shoulders eased a fraction, as though a load had been set down rather than removed. "Then," he continued, quieter now, almost reluctant, "it is... sufficient."

The word clearly displeased him. It sat poorly in his mouth, unsatisfying and incomplete, offering no elegance or certainty. His eyes flicked away at last, breaking contact as he looked down at the floor between them, at the simple reality of carpet, shadow, and the book lying open beside the bed.

"For now," he added, not defensively, but with precision.

His hand shifted, fingers spreading against the floor to steady himself, grounding rather than bracing. He did not remove her hand from his leg. He did not acknowledge it further. The storm within him had not passed - but it had ceased battering the doors of his ailing mind.

"Ok," she said simply, feeling the exhaustion tighten its hold on her even as the maelstrom of Karim's emotions in her mind's eye began to quiet. Like all storms it did not disappear. The conditions around it merely changed and that perhaps only temporarily.

And in the aftermath of the tempest's destructiveness it was possible to breathe, to assess, and to rebuild.

For several long steadying breaths the Romulan sat there, hand on the leg of the Vulcan next to her, merely existing. And then she withdrew her hand, settling it in her lap, and cast a practiced clinical gaze over Karim's physical state.

"Take a shower, Karim," she said, not critically, but gently as a suggestion. "Drink some water. And sleep." She shifted onto her knees and then climbed to her feet. "Sometimes small physical comforts can help calm our minds."

Looking down at him she considered his posture, hand splayed on the floor, eyes trained on the carpet and wondered if he had even noticed the removal of her hand. She waited only a moment longer for a reaction and then turned and moved to the door, unable to simply leave without asking. "Is there anything else you need?"

Karim did perhaps notice the absence of her hand.

Not immediately, maybe - not in the way he would have noticed its presence - but more as a loss of warmth, a change in pressure, an absence that arrived without warning. His fingers flexed once against the carpet, subtle and involuntary, before stilling again.

He did not look up as she spoke, but her instructions were sensible. Mundane and entirely beneath the scale of the thoughts he had been grappling with moments earlier. And yet, perversely, they landed with more weight than any philosophical argument could have.

"I am aware," he said quietly, after a few beats. The words were not dismissive, nor defensive - they were simply factual. "Hydration and rest are statistically correlated with improved emotional regulation." Another pause. His jaw tightened, then released. "I will comply."

The phrasing was deliberate. It preserved autonomy without rejecting care.

When she asked her final question, though, he hesitated.

Not long - but long enough to be noticeable.

"No," he said at last, still not meeting her gaze. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, voice lower, stripped of its usual sharpness, "Not at present." Only then did he lift his eyes briefly toward her - not to hold them, just enough to register her presence - before looking away again. "Good night, Doctor."

"Good night, Karim," she answered softly choosing familiarity where he had chosen distance. She hesitated, looking him over one last time as if confirming to herself that he would be alright.

And then she stepped out of his room, returning to hers with a sigh and the kind of tiredness that came with expelling great effort.

Still, it was a long time before she fell asleep.

---
A glimpse into the past by:

Lieutenant Emni t'Nai
Acting Executive Officer

Lieutenant Commander Karim
Diplomatic Liaison - On Medical Leave