Backpost: Formalities

Posted on Wed Feb 11th, 2026 @ 8:36pm by Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai & Commander Karim
Edited on on Wed Feb 11th, 2026 @ 8:44pm

Mission: Port of Call
Location: XO's Office, Deck 2
Timeline: Mission Day 0 at 0930

[XO's Office, Deck 2]
[2 days after Routine Interrupted]
[1 Day Out from Talbeethia]

Unlike her new quarters, Emni had been making use of the small spare XO's office for a while. It wasn't a particularly large space -- comfort and ease on a ship this size were reserved for the Captain's Ready Room. Her office was much more functional. It held the minimum requirements. A desk occupied the wall across from the door, two somewhat comfortable chairs in front of it that still leaned more toward utility than ease. A replicator on the wall was paired with a set of inset shelves. She'd included a plant as well, tall and spindly, in one corner. Behind her desk a framed poem, entirely in Rihannsu script, held a place of honor.

Until now any formal counseling sessions with Karim had been held in the comfort of their shared quarters in the communal space between bedrooms. It was already equipped with her kal-toh set as a potential interaction point and it felt more genuine than taking over the counselor's office just for this. Bracco had offered whatever support was needed, but still... that felt a step too far to her.

Now, though... The change in her living arrangements had unseated something. After that first night with Karim asleep on her floor the space felt too intimate. Too private. Something in the dynamic between them had shifted and with it she felt a need to create some formality in a scheduled counseling session. Something that wouldn't evoke sitting on her couch in off duty attire late at night while Karim acknowledged a heightened awareness of her proximity.

It had been innocent enough, but she'd found herself recalling the feel of his observation of her as much as anything else over the last two days.

The door to the XO's office opened without a chime.

Karim had keyed the access panel himself, entered without ceremony, and closed it again behind him with the same care. No hesitation. No visible urgency. If there was relief in having arrived, it did not surface.

He wore only his uniform undershirt and trousers. No jacket and no combadge clipped. The fabric sat neatly against him, freshly laundered, seams aligned. His hair was still damp at the nape, combed back rather than precisely set, as though he had stopped short of completing the ritual once it crossed from necessity into presentation.

He took two steps into the room and stopped.

Not to assess the space, it seemed. That had already been done, but to orientate himself within it. His posture settled into something deliberately neutral, weight evenly distributed, hands loosely clasped behind his back. He did not sit and did not ask if he should.

"I am not in acute distress," he said first, voice even, controlled. It did not sound like reassurance. "If that was a concern."

His gaze lifted briefly, not to Emni, but to the framed poem behind her desk. He noted it, then looked away again, eyes settling instead on the edge of the desk itself, the clean line where surface met air.

"I am aware this session was scheduled as counselling," Karim continued. "I should state at the outset that I do not expect it to be procedurally productive." A pause, more measured than dismissive. "That is not a judgement of your competence." His jaw tightened, just slightly, as though he had anticipated the need to clarify and resented it. "I have already identified the relevant patterns," he went on. "Environmental familiarity. Somatic dysregulation under constrained autonomy. Cognitive recursion amplified by proximity to unresolved variables." He drew a slow breath and let it out again. "None of that is opaque to me."

Karim waited a few moments and his eyes were cast down to his boots briefly, as if examining some imagined scuff, catalogued for later.

"What remains unresolved," he then said, "is whether continued participation in this environment is rational."

The word 'participation' hung there, carefully chosen. The Vulcanoid former counsellor shifted then, a subtle adjustment of stance rather than movement, shoulders settling back a fraction as if bracing against an internal counterargument.

"The Vidiian incident did not merely compromise my body," Karim said. "It altered the explanatory framework through which I interpret institutional purpose." His eyes lifted at last, not meeting Emni's directly, but passing close enough to register her presence fully. "Starfleet presents itself as a response to the unknown. Exploration as justification... Continuity through intent."

There was quiet exhale, almost imperctible - and almost annoyed.

"In the Delta Quadrant," he continued his diatribe, "that framing weakens. The unknown does not recede. It proliferates. One does not impose order upon it; one merely survives successive encounters." His gaze dropped again, unfocused now, turned inward. "The Vidiians were not an aberration. They were coherent within their own logic. Starfleet's objection to them was moral, not structural."

He stopped there, visibly restraining further elaboration, perhaps realising he was rambling and talking too much. His emotions were gradually fraying again before Emni, and she could sense the frustration and self-destructive loop trying to reassert itself within him.

"I am not yet proposing resignation of my commission," Karim then added after a pregnant moment, his teeth almost gritted. The clarification was precise, deliberate - and unconvincing. "I am assessing whether continued affiliation retains explanatory power, or whether it functions primarily as resistance to... to inevitability."

Emni listened with the kind of infuriating calm that she imagined Karim might like her to possess with more regularity. She listened, and as she did so she gradually lowered the defensive layers of her empathic sense allowing greater quantities of Karim-originating emotion into her awareness. It was like sipping his reactions rather than having them forced into her sense to be gulped down.

He wasn't wrong. He wasn't in acute distress. She noted the positioning he chose -- not exactly regulation at ease, but not standing on any kind of formal rank-based attention either. The shower was notable too and the thought that he smelled nice flitted through her mind like a wild hare, chased promptly by the amused observation that he always seemed to encounter her in some state of damp lately.

It took her a moment to tamp down the chuckle that threatened to escape at the later thought.

There were other things too, though. Karim of before the Vidiian encounter had never been so hesitant to make eye contact. In fact, he had used eye contact more as a tool--something to be doled out only in precise amounts to effect the kind of interaction he wanted. The micro-expressions, too, gave away, the continued struggle between logic and reactionary emotion, picking up in frequency as his own argument seemed to unwind itself.

Finally, he came to an end and Emni chose the route that she suspected might be most annoying, but which seemed to her most correct.

"Good morning Karim," she said. "It's nice to see you this morning, too. Please have a seat. Can I get you anything?"

She stood, sliding gracefully out of her chair and moving toward the replicator.

Karim did not sit immediately. His gaze flicked to the chair only once. The assessment was immediate and he gave it an unflattering. He remained where he was, posture unchanged, hands still clasped behind his back.

For a moment, he said nothing. The silence was deliberate, contained, and faintly sharp around the edges. If there was irritation there, it was not directed outward so much as inward, at the recognition of the tactic and the fact that it had landed cleanly enough to register.

He then inclined his head a fraction, precise and contained, his voice and tone carefully managed to not exhibit any outward emotion.

"Very well, Commander t'Nai."

Only then did he move, not toward the chair yet, but a half step closer to the desk, as if redefining the terms of the space before conceding anything further. He gave one unreadable look to Emni and then did move forward and claim the chair. He looked at the poem behind her rather than its owner, but could not seemingly prevent himself from speaking again.

"Your cheap Terran idiom and tactic contrasts poorly against this more compelling choice of ornamentation," he said, although the way he regarded it made it plain he could not wholly decipher the language. Perhaps certain words shared roots he could understand, but the true meaning was lost on him without explanation.

Despite herself, Emni stiffened next to the replicator. She wasn't facing him, and for that she was thankful. Her gut told her that he hadn't meant to touch on a sensitive memory, but it was hard to deny it had all the same.

For the briefest moment the ghost of a finger pressed to her forehead accompanied the memory of venom-filled words.

...sickeningly human morality…

...mindless Romulan ‘doctor’...

No… she reminded herself… not venom-filled. Anger. Fear. The feel of a caged animal unable to escape a threat.

The moment, though intense internally, was barely a blip in her demeanor. Her shoulders released their momentary tension and she murmured an order to the replicator before returning to her desk with two glasses of water.

“Can you read it?” She asked, turning to glance at the poem behind her.

"No more than a Roman could read modern Italian," Karim replied simply, relying, despite his prior comments, on their shared understanding of Earth history to make his point.

She considered a moment, taking a sip of water more to buy time than anything else. Of all the people to share this with, Karim was both someone who might understand and someone who might deride.

And the words… almost as much as their author… were dear to her.

Standing, she removed the piece from the wall and set it between them on the desk, text facing Karim. This text she had memorized long ago.

“Beneath the moons,” she recited with a soft reverence, “the silver moss unfurls along a winding trail, where glowing trees in silence toss their thoughts into the starlit gale. Each step, a bloom of light and sound. Each choice, a song in crystal tone.The path is never truly found, yet never are we quite alone.”

When she'd finished she eyed Karim, curious more than anything, to see what he might say.

Karim regarded the text for several seconds in silence. Long enough to parse structure and long enough to recognise intent.

"It proposes continuity as consolation," he said at last. There was no heat in it, no challenge. "Companionship as mitigation. Choice rendered meaningful by the presence of a witness." His gaze lifted briefly, unfocused, then returned to the page. Whatever roots he recognised did not settle. "I do not reject the sentiment," he added. "It simply does not resolve the question of whether survival itself rational in an indifferent and doomed universe."

Emni shrugged. “It is poetry,” she said simply. “It is not attempting to resolve the question.”

He straightened slightly in the chair, his attention turning back to her.

"This is not representative of pre-Hobus Romulan philosophy," he said. "The Empire did not traditionally answer uncertainty with companionship. It answered it with structure, secrecy, and endurance." A pause as he thought some more, although a small shiver seemed to run along his spine as he considered. "The author is individualist," he added. "Marginal, perhaps. Reflective rather than strategic." His fingers rested briefly against the edge of the desk before withdrawing. "Who is the author?”

“You do us a disservice when you apply the philosophical leanings of the Empire to all Romulans,” she answered. The words were not defensive, but were guarded. A rebuke without real teeth.

For a moment she considered how long it had been since she’d breathed the poet’s name to another soul. What might she have thought to know that her wife held her so closely that even saying her name felt like a vulnerability. Loosing a breath Emni glanced from the flowing script to Karim. She was aware of being observed again along with the temptation to diminish what he could see. She did not relish whatever dismissal this information might bring.

Still, if she intended him to be open and honest then it behooved her to do the same. And it was not as though the author was someone illicit.

“The author,” she finally answered, “was one of my partners. My wife, Sulli. She was a poet in word, body, and soul. It was one of the things Jori and I loved most about her.”

For several seconds, Karim's attention fixed on her fully, no longer glancing past or around, but taking her in with an intensity that was unguarded enough to be noticeable. Something in his expression shifted, not softening so much as loosening, the rigid containment giving way to a quieter, more exposed appraisal. He looked, very briefly, as though he might speak to what had just been revealed. Not analytically and not defensively.

Then it was gone.

The moment closed down with visible effort. His jaw set. His gaze broke, returning to a neutral point on the desk. Whatever connection had nearly formed was folded away, pressed flat, deferred.

When he spoke again, his voice had recovered its careful evenness.

"I see," he said simply. A pause followed, shorter this time, but deliberate. "This is not a line of inquiry I am equipped to pursue without consent," Karim continued. His eyes lifted to her again, steadier now, professional without being distant, a glimpse of his former vocation, perhaps. "If discussion of the author would be of benefit to you, you may say so. You might even consider it relevant to my own treatment plan." Another beat. "If not, I will not presume further."

This time her response was easy. Their names spoken it was a simple thing to allow them to take up space in the conversation. “I would not have shared about them if I was not willing to grant you consent,” she said.

The miasma of emotion that had flowed through him while listening was fascinating. For the briefest of moments his attention felt as though it turned fully outward. Something warm and almost gentle surfaced between the jagged edges of self-reproach and existential anxiety. It was a different type of attention than he had paid while watching her from where he had perched on her couch, but not so different that it was alien. More sibling than stranger.

And then the jagged edges seemed to close over it. The reproof like a denial of entrance as though the softness had failed to meet a criteria and thus could only be turned away.

“This is your session,” she continued, “if you would like to talk about my partners or poetry or the ill conceived philosophy of the Romulan Star Empire we can do so. You're not required to report to me… just to be present with me and willing to work through any difficulties as we go.”

Karim inclined his head once, acknowledging the consent without comment.

“The temporal overlap is not incidental,” he said. “The Hobus event dismantled two structures simultaneously. One institutional. One personal.” His gaze lowered briefly, thoughtful rather than evasive. “For many Romulans, the Empire functioned as a primary framework of coherence. It provided hierarchy, obligation, and continuity. In some respects, a more rigid and therefore more legible system than the Federation’s recent philosophical drift.”

A pause, then his eyes lifted again, steady.

“When that structure collapsed, it did not merely create political displacement. It forced an existential recalibration.” His fingers flexed once against the arm of the chair before stilling. “You lost individuals who gave shape to your life at the same moment an entire civilisational narrative failed.”

He did not frame it as sympathy. He framed it as causality.

"I am interested,” Karim said, more quietly now, “in how you adapted to that absence of structure.” Another beat. “Whether you replaced it, resisted it, or learned to function without it, in your words. Not as was seen in your psychological Starfleet profile when you commenced as CMO."

In an entirely Vulcanesque shift, one of Emni's eyebrows crept up. She hadn't considered that Karim, after this much time, would remember her psych profile from the time they both served on the Adelphi. It was one of the few places in her record where Jori and Sulli were mentioned, though the express details were not a part of the record. It was merely acknowledged that she had been married to them both, had separated before leaving Romulus, and that both her partners and the majority of her immediate family had chosen to stay with their home. They were all marked as deceased with the same date as every other Romulan whose wholeness had shattered when Hobus had been lost.

His attention remained on her, intent but unpressured.

“How did you cope with that shift, Commander t’Nai?”

She opened her mouth to answer him and the words did not come. The answer was too complex. She had grieved their loss for years before they died. Mourned her home and her people even while hope still struggled to control her thoughts. And then it had happened and she had barely functioned for weeks. Until a friend had demanded entrance to her dorm and forced her to leave.

She sighed. “That is a difficult question to answer.” Her gaze dropped to the poem, considering. Gently, she ran a finger along the very edge of the frame.

“We knew that Hobus was unstable long before the nova. The coping started when I chose to live rather than die. But it was an accomplishment over years. One that bore as many failures and successes,” she considered him, thoughtful as she tried to work out a way to answer him that would not diminish or trivialize the struggle. “Even now it is not a perfect thing.”

Emni hesitated, looking at her glass as if it might hold answers for her. She did not drink, though. Her pause was less avoidance and more an absence of effective words. The struggle played across her face, open and honest–all pretense discarded.

“There are still times when I am unsure how I survived it, Karim,” she said finally. “And I would not have survived it without the people around me. I don't want to minimize how hard it was. Losing… all of them… my home… my family… my people… it was as if a part of my soul had to be rewritten. I wish you could have known me then… so you could see what I mean. I had to relearn who I was”

Karim held her gaze as she spoke, longer than he had allowed himself to look at her in the preceding moments. Something in her last words landed with unexpected force. Not the grief itself, but the precision of it - of an identity altered at the level of structure.

For a fraction of a second, his composure slipped.

"Then I could-" he began, and stopped.

Emni's brows knit at the half formed utterance. Something she had said clearly struck home. She was quiet though. Patient.

The interruption was not external. It came from him. His jaw tightened again and he appeared to grind his teeth subtly, his breath recalibrating as the implication of the thought fully registered. When he spoke again, the words came slower, measured back into alignment - sounding more himself.

"There is a method by which I could know," Karim said. The admission was quiet, careful, the insinuation enough without naming the process precisely. "Directly. Without reliance on reconstruction or language." His eyes did not leave her now, though the intensity had sharpened rather than softened. "I am aware of the ethical weight of that statement."

His eyes twitched slightly and briefly wandered once more to the Rihannsu poem, then quickly to the kal-toh set, before returning to the recently-minted executive officer.

"You have described an experience that resists articulation," Karim continued. "I recognise that limitation. But, I am not necessarily requesting this." He corrected himself with visible precision. "I am simply identifying it as the only means by which the knowledge you reference could be shared intact." His voice lowered slightly. "If this suggestion is unwelcome, it will not be repeated. I... I acknowledge I am not at baseline, and cannot wholly account for all variables."

He looked now to the floor, as if maintaining eye contact was now a struggle he could not quite match.

From the depths of a memory now more than a few months old Emni pulled the wizened face of Dr. Cowell. She couldn't even remember the name of the place they'd gone after spending seven hours surgically replacing Lenek's missing organs. He had been easy, if sarcastic, company then and she'd asked him about Karim. His suggestion of telepathic intervention had been, mostly, tongue in cheek, but only mostly. Some part of it, she'd known then, had been a legitimate suggestion. But things had shifted so quickly between Earth and Risa. And then Karim had left to seek out care on Vulcan.

"You want to use a mind meld?" she asked, tone carefully neutral. She needed him to be clear about this if she were truly going to consider it. "To meet my younger self?"

There was no judgment in the question. Barely any trepidation, though she would have been lying if she didn't admit to some. It was merely a request for confirmation.

And a bid for time to think.

Karim lifted his head at the question, though his eyes did not quite meet hers.

“Yes,” he said. “A mind meld.” A brief pause followed, the word clearly weighed rather than reflexive. “Not to encounter a fixed version of you, but to observe the continuity you described. The process by which identity was reconstructed rather than replaced.”

His gaze dropped again. “It is the only method by which that knowledge could be apprehended without distortion.”

"If I agree, what steps would you need me to take? I'm not sure the... structure... I use to hold other emotions, yours included, at a safe distance..." she stopped mid-though, pausing only a moment before picking up again. "I cannot turn off my empathetic nature, Karim. Will that pose any problem?"

“There are prerequisites,” Karim continued, tone more formal now. “You would need to establish internal anchors prior to contact. Not barriers.” He considered her carefully. “Your empathic nature does not prevent the meld, but it will amplify exposure. You will perceive my cognitive state without filtration. If that becomes untenable, we should seek to disengage immediately,” he said. “I will not override that and do not believe it would be difficult. If these conditions are unacceptable, we will not proceed.”

"I am less concerned about experiencing your emotional state than you experiencing mine," she said with quiet concern. The emotions you would like to observe, are volatile. How will I know if it is you that needs to disengage?"

The question hung there for a moment. Emni waited for the kind of reaction she was used to from Karim -- deflection, pride bordering on arrogance, even dismisal

Karim thought for a moment, one eyebrow nudging slightly off-kilter from its partner.

“I am not entirely certain,” he said at last. There was no defensiveness in it, only precision. “I have not conducted a meld with an empath before.” A fractional pause. “I will recognise destabilisation in you. You may not recognise it in me.”

His gaze steadied on her now. “If my cognitive pattern begins to fragment, I expect you will feel the rupture before I articulate it.” A breath. “I have sufficient faith in your judgement to act on that. And in my own restraint not to resist you.”

"Then I accept the conditions," she said. Her tone had shifted to match the formality of his own. "When would you like to start?"

“Now,” Karim said.

The word was neither abrupt nor dramatic. It was simply decided.

"Now..." Emni echoed.

---- TO BE CONTINUED ----

** A counseling session with **

Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai
Executive Officer and Part-Time Counselor

Lieutenant Commander Karim
Counselor, Diplomat, Patient