Backpost: Fracture

Posted on Tue Feb 17th, 2026 @ 10:48pm by Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai & Commander Karim

Mission: Port of Call
Location: XO's Office, Deck 2
Timeline: Mission Day 0 at 1000

[XO's Office, Deck 2]
[Immediately following Formalities]
[1 Day Out from Talbeethia]

---- PREVIOUSLY ----

“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 has 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.

---- AND NOW ----

The tone of her voice, blessedly, hid much of the surprise she felt. It wasn't unwillingness to engage in that exact moment so much as the recognition of a thing speeding up rapidly toward an unknown--one which she hadn't expected to face within a manner of minutes.

Drawing a deep breath, Emni nodded and extracted herself from behind her desk, coming around and settling in the chair opposite Karim. She shimmied the chair sideways until she was facing him and then pulled herself closer, her knees brushing against his own. It was well known, or well enough, that a mind meld required not only physical contact, but for him to be able to reach her face, so she leaned forward as well, settling her elbows on her knees.

For a moment she wasn't sure where to put her hands. It felt odd to cross her arms when they were this close, but resting them on his thighs--the only place that would naturally make sense if they weren't crossed--felt invasive. Then again... nothing about what they were about to do could be called anything other than invasive.

"You mentioned setting anchors. How do I do that?" she asked, eyes on his face, studying his demeanor, his emotional make up, and his expression with intensity as if she were afraid to miss an important detail. As she spoke, she slowly began deconstructing what was left of her emotional defenses. It took her a moment to remember when she'd last been fully and completely without them. It was a rarity evoking intimacy in a way that she suspected Karim did not fully grasp.

Karim did not shift when her knees brushed his. The contact registered, was presumably assessed, and categorised in a way not vocalised.

"Do not remove your defences entirely," he said quietly. "You are not required to offer me your unfiltered interior. An anchor is not absence - it is structure."

His hand lifted with measured precision, fingers hovering briefly before settling against the familiar Vulcan contact points at her temple and cheek. The placement was exact and clinical. His other hand remained steady, palm resting lightly against her forearm to stabilise alignment.

"Select a memory that affirms continuity," he instructed. "Not the moment of fracture. The moment after. The first decision to continue. Hold it as reference. If my pattern destabilises, return us to that point." His eyes held hers, steady, unblinking. "If you feel acceleration, narrowing, or recursive compression that is not your own, disengage as best you can. You are not to hesitate."

Silence settled between them, not empty but compressed. The air seemed to narrow. His posture did not change, yet something in him aligned with unmistakable intent. The office, the ship, the galaxy, all receded to irrelevance in the face of what he was about to permit.

A mind meld was not conversation. It was not metaphor. It was structural surrender of cognitive boundary; it was exposure without rhetoric. There would be no abstraction inside it. No diplomatic phrasing - not distance.

When he spoke again, his voice was lower, steadier, carrying the full weight of decision.

"My mind to your mind."

A fractional pause, but it was not hesitation.

"My thoughts... to your thoughts."

The sensation of the moment would later be difficult for Emni to explain. It was as if they moved through a lens as she tried to zero in on the type of moment Karim had requested. The sudden influx of his emotions, while not unexpected, was distracting and for a moment they wavered between two points, scenes blurring and pulling taut for several moments until finally settling into the moment she had chosen.

Though she didn't recall this detail often, it had been a gloriously warm sunny day. The kind that begged for walks outside, open windows, and cool drinks on the porch. It should have been a day full of laughter and ease. They were not, however, outside. Nor were they at ease.

Before them a living room coalesced. Two Romulans, a woman and a man, sat side by side, on a couch. The woman's face was tight with worry while the man’s was unreadably stony. Across from them Emni saw herself, perched on the edge of the cozy yellow chair that they had picked out several summers earlier at a second hand store. The sun, spilled across the room from open windows, cutting warm yellow patterns across a room designed expressly for that kind of warmth.

She stood behind herself, next to Karim, and so her own face was hidden from view.

The emotions crashed down on them next. Tension and fear were like thick cords while hurt and betrayal ran like spilt blood, cold and messy. There was an anticipation in the air and also a noticeable absence--the feeling of a void. In her memory the absence had felt like a very loud silence. On this occasion, in order to get their words out right, Jori and Sulli had shielded her entirely. Had it been any other moment she might have been proud of them. Shielding an empath, let alone one you are intimately linked to, was a difficult task.

A small sob bubbles up from her lips as she observed the scene. It wasn't, she realized, exactly what Karim had asked for. Perhaps because she had already chosen her path even before this first fracture in her life. She'd made this decision many times, and would have to make it again many more, before it well and truly took hold.

"Their names," she said softly, surprised to find that she could speak to Karim at all, "Are Jori and Sulli. My husband and my wife."

The room held. Karim did not recoil from the density of it.

He absorbed it with clinical stillness, though something within him tightened in response.

"I know who they are," he said, and the statement carried recognition rather than discovery. His gaze shifted slightly toward the seated figures, then toward the version of her perched on the edge of that yellow chair. Analysis threaded through shared perception. "This is the first severance," he continued.

The air between their minds narrowed. She would feel it now more clearly than before. His composure and his restraint, not as stalwart as it had been before, perhaps. And beneath it, involuntary irritation at deviation from instruction. Not at her grief, but at imprecision.

"This is not the reconstruction," he said, quieter and sharper.

Yet, moisture gathered at the lower rim of one his own eyes, held by surface tension alone, even though they were not physical manifestations. It did not fall and he did not acknowledge it. Still, the pressure behind it registered in the shared space like contained voltage.

"I asked for the moment after," he reminded her.

The pressure between them shifted then, especially in Emni's mind. Not yet forceful and not violent. It was directional, for lack of better terminology, like a hand being grasped by a parent to guide their child more firmly forwards. It was a narrowing of cognitive field. An insistence. He did not tear the memory away, but he leaned into it, applying deliberate weight toward progression.

"Advance," he commanded, with more than just tone and words.

As if of its own accord, time sped up--or at least the perception of it. And with it the wash of emotions. The crest of grief that had, on that day, broken her so thoroughly, broke over them like a wave against grains of sand. It wasn't the grief of one, but the grief of all three in the scene that was speeding ahead before them as all barriers between them were dropped and they grieved together for what was gone.

Had they been in the waking world Emni would have had to catch her breath at the weight of it and even then the immensity of the feeling nearly countermanded the command Karim had given, slowing them for a long moment before, as the time progressed, the grief narrowed down to one--her own.

The Romulan found herself wishing she could close her eyes, gather space from the immensity of the moments spinning out in front of them, but she couldn't and as speed gathered up, everything once again blurred... until it all stopped suddenly.

The new scene, Emni recognized, was several days later. They were in a bedroom and before them she lay, curled in a ball, under a pile of blankets. The sense that time was running down the way sands flowed through an hourglass pressed in around them as her grief, still raw and jagged, but now pressed against deadlines, settled on them both.

"This is my grandmother's house," she said softly, more to identify than anything else. She assumed, now, that Karim knew what she knew.

As they watched, the younger Emni on the bed drew in a deep, shaky, breath. She released the hold on her legs, slowly lowering them until she was laying full out on her side. Several moments passed and as now-Emni considered she recalled the war that had been taking place in her head. Her grandmother, too, had wanted her to stay, but had thought that the way to keep her was to let her go play doctor with the resettlement efforts so that she would see what she was missing and return. Kaleh t'Nai had been clear about her desire for her granddaughter to stay and clear about her willingness to help her go.

The choice remained with Emni.

A rap on the door startled the young woman in the bed. "Are you awake child? You'll miss your shuttle if we don't leave soon."

From beneath the edge of the blankets dark brown eyes rimmed with red peered at the door. "I'm awake hru'nanov!" she called in a voice that scratched from the ravages of tears. The emotional signature that had snuck up on her was firm and resolved. There was no room for sadness in her grandmother. Only a deeply held confidence that Emni would return. She was unphased and the clash between then-Emni and Kaleh t'Nai was heady.

A sound behind the door said that the older woman stood waiting, shifting on her feet until, finally, she left, taking her confidence with her.

A moment later, the mess of emotions that was then-Emni's grief seemed to still. They were still there, roiling and loud. But a throughline made its way between the masses of fear and loss the way a shaft of sunlight cannot be denied in a dark room. A shuddering breath followed the change and then then-Emni was climbing out of the bed, stripping out of rumbled sleep clothes and pulling on a crisp blue tunic and dark leggings with serviceable boots. She ran fingers through tangled hair, working to settle it, and then finally hefted a duffel that had been sitting on the room's only chair.

She walked past Karim and now-Emni, and opened the door.

For several suspended seconds, the scene stabilised.

Karim stood beside her in the bedroom at her grandmother’s house and absorbed the moment of settlement with unnerving clarity. The grief was still present, sharp and unsoftened, but it had direction now. It moved somewhere. It did not consume. He felt the throughline she had found, that narrow shaft of intention cutting through chaos. His gaze fixed on the younger version of her as she rose from the bed, and in the shared space his focus intensified until it seemed almost unnatural.

Something altered in his eyes.

The dark of his irises deepened, swallowing colour, flattening into a depthless black that did not belong to Vulcan or Bajoran physiology. It was not her doing. It was not empathic reflection. It was concentration taken too far, cognition compressing inward until it eclipsed surface detail. She would feel it as gravity. As scrutiny without softness.

"This is the pivot," he said quietly within the meld. "You do not resolve the grief. You proceed despite it."

He followed the movement of her younger self toward the door, tracking the decision as if it were a theorem proving itself line by line. He felt the external anchor of her grandmother’s confidence. He catalogued it. External stability reinforcing internal motion. He began mapping it.

Then the edges of the room failed.

The yellow chair from the earlier living room sat inexplicably near the foot of the bed. Its worn cushions were wrong for this space. The light shifted, briefly becoming the warm slant of golden hour before snapping back to morning grey. The scent of incense threaded through the air though none burned in this house. A small stone rested on the bedside table that had not been there a moment before, one edge worn smooth from repetition.

Karim’s concentration did not lessen. It fractured.

He reached for the structural layer and instead found multiplicity. A Starfleet Academy room - Emni's - overlaid itself against the bedroom walls. A wooden chair creaked somewhere out of sight. Laughter, distant and human, pressed faintly against the boundary of the scene. Emotional signatures tangled.

"No," he murmured, more to himself than to her.

A presence formed in the far corner where shadow gathered unnaturally thick. Tall. Robed. Severe. A Vulcan master stood observing, hands clasped behind his back, eyes narrowed in exacting disapproval. The gaze did not belong to her memory. It belonged to judgement. To failure. To the aftermath of therapy that had not cured but exposed.

Karim attempted to excise it.

The air shifted again.

A sharp, metallic scent cut through the room. Burnt circuitry. Ionised polymer. The wall near the wardrobe darkened and split with the impression of impact. A body resolved against it in flickers, an outdated uniform scorched, skin cracked and blackened. The Starfleet engineer’s outline wavered, half-shadowed, face indistinct as if memory refused full reconstruction.

The bedroom was no longer singular.

Light thinned. Temperature dropped. The sense of deadline that had driven her younger self toward the shuttle twisted into something else. Footsteps sounded behind them though no boards creaked. Measured. Unhurried. Clinical.

A figure detached itself from distortion.

Pale skin stretched too tightly over angular features. Surgical instruments gleamed in elongated hands. The Vidiian surgeon advanced without haste, as though the room were an operating theatre and they were merely delayed patients.

Karim tried to speak. To reassert boundary. To collapse the superimposed layers and return to her chosen moment.

The surgeon did not stop advancing towards him.

For the first time since contact, his composure failed entirely.

The scream that tore free of him was raw and uncontained as he backed away, hands scrabbling.

It happened so quickly and yet Emni felt each widening crack in Karim's control as if it were in slow motion. It was like watching something disastrous, complete with deadly consequences, but from enough distance that she could do nothing to stop it. She was an animal, frozen in bright lights as something barreled down the track, unseeing, uncaring, and incapable of stopping.

He had warned her not to remove her defenses entirely, but it had seemed necessary at the time. For her to truly help him understand the nuance of her choices there could be no line in the sand keeping him out. It had been too subtle a thing. Now, though, she understood his trepidation. The scream that tore from his lips--or at least appeared to in her mind--had weight and depth. It flattened her against the changing wall of the space they were in, pressing on her as if panic had become incarnate and would force the air from her lungs.

Emni's own need to panic flared hot and bright--fear wrapping around her in a chokehold. What had she done? What had she agreed to? But then-Emni's thin thread of certainty lingered, and now-Emni launched herself at it, grabbing for the emotion-made-manifest as if it were a lifeline.

"NO."

The word, she realized after it was out, came from her, a vocalization of years and years of muscle memory that fell into place. In her mind's eye she envisioned an arch. She crafted it with care, adding detail and clarity and placing it between herself and the spectre of the Vidiian that now stalked toward her. She didn't think. She didn't plan. She simply acted on instinct, drawing forth mental image after mental image to clarify and confirm and then several things happened at once.

The Vidiian in Karim's hellscape stepped into the archway she had constructed.

And he screamed.

The scream sounded like Karim, but could not have been, as a forcefield snapped into place within the arch, stopping the Vidiian nightmare in its tracks. Walls fell into place on either side of the arch, but Emni did not see them. Instead she had turned, bodily--if one could say they had done so in a psychic space like this-- and flung her arms around Karim, dragging him against her and holding him tightly, panting with the exertion of doing so.

For several seconds the scream of the Vidiian, caught in the forcefield, rang out.

And then everything was silent except for the ragged breathing of the two Vulcanoids in the center of a small walled alcove.

Karim did not resist the hold when she pulled him against her. The impulse to recoil flickered and died almost immediately, as though some other structure had taken precedence over reflex. His breathing was uneven at first, sharp and shallow, but it began to lengthen with deliberate control. Inhale. Exhale. Not forced, but regulated.

The alcove held.

He became aware of it not as barrier, but as architecture, and for Emni, it was as though she could sense and detect everything as he could, blurring the lines entirely between their perceptions since her intercession.

The mindscape that had shifted around them was now ordered and deliberate. It was protective without collapse. He felt the force of her intervention not as dominance, but as a welcome and comforting design. The Vidiian presence receded to abstraction, trapped beyond structure rather than fought directly.

His hands, which had been clawed in instinctive defence, slowly unclenched against her shoulders. The tremor in them subsided and the shared space between them thinned.

The bedroom dissolved first, then the Academy overlay. Each layer retracted not violently, but as if dismissed consciously. What remained for a final suspended moment was the narrow throughline Emni had chosen earlier; the act of rising... the decision to move.

Karim focused on that.

When the physical world returned, it did so without jolt. The office reassembled around them in muted clarity. The chair legs beneath them were solid. The deck plating was steady, with the barely-perceptible thrum of the vessel's mighty systems pulsing around them.

There was sweat along Karim's brow and at his temples. Tear tracks had dried along his cheeks. His breathing, however, was calm.

Calmer than it had been before contact, and calmer than Emni had seen for a long while.

The former counsellor did not immediately withdraw his hand from her face. When he did, it was slow and measured. His gaze lifted to hers, and though fatigue shadowed it, something else had shifted. The sharp angular pressure that had defined him earlier was absent. In its place was a steadier, quieter centre.

"I exceeded tolerance parameters," he said, voice low but even. There was no defensiveness in it - only assessment, and the smallest glimmer of apology.

He regarded her own tired features for a moment longer, and in that look there was an unfamiliar softness of perception. Beneath it all, faint but unmistakable, was a current of empathy in his telepathic field that had not been there before, and concern threatened to crease his expression as he examined her.

The reassertion of Karim's control of the mind meld had felt like the release of a pressure valve, the hiss of released steam escaping slowly even as Emni held the small space intact around them. Held him, intact, to her while his body--whatever that correlated to in psychic reality--regulated and the layered images began to recede. Even when all that was left was the golden glimmer of certitude she had clung to in order to produce her emotional defenses, she still held the wall in place.

When the room around them coalesced, reality reasserting itself almost as if it were the fabrication, Emni realized that she, too, bore signs of tears--still damp tracks on her face met the tip of his lowest finger. Her throat ached as if she had, perhaps, screamed her refusal in reality too, and a deep weariness felt as if it settled over her. Grief, too, clung like an unwanted guest. She had not felt the raw grief of her loss like that since long before Eisn nova'd--hadn't known it still existed within her like that.

With the grief, though, flared a defiant and fiercely protective sense of connection to the man across from her. The intensity of it overwhelmed and then ebbed as she recognized the shift between them. Yes, she was still his caretaker and he still her patient, but something else lingered.

"It's ok," she answered him. "I..." she stumbled in her words, voice cracking slightly. "I wasn't aware I could extend that protection to you. How do you feel now?"

Her empathic sensitivity told her much. He had, for the moment, stabilized dramatically. The prowling sense of doom that nipped at his mind was quiet if it wasn't absent entirely at least for the moment. But she needed to hear him say it too. To anchor them both back in the physical moment.

Karim seemed aware first of the contact between them. The warmth of her hand beneath his, and he seemed to notice the faint tremor in her breath. He drew in a slow breath and released it with measured control.

Emni, too, was aware of the touch. When she had thrown her arms around him in the space of her memory it had been out a deeply instinctual necessity to shield and protect. But it wasn't her hand covering his to comfort, ground, and support. It was his hand resting gently on hers. For the briefest of moments her thoughts flickered to the warmth of that touch. Vulcanoids always ran warmer than other species and had it been anyone else his hand might have felt cold to her. Instead it was warm and gentle--far from what she might ever expected from him.

"I am stable," he said at last, giving voice to her thoughts.

The words were simple. Not defensive or performative. Observational, but with a softer tone than he generally employed.

He studied her face with unusual attentiveness, his focus not dissecting, but attuning. The edges of his telepathic field extended outward and brushed against hers with unexpected clarity. It was not intrusive, nor was it searching. It eas merely receptive.

A faint crease touched his brow.

"You absorbed significant emotional load," he said quietly. "That was not required by our initial agreement." There was no rebuke in it - only, it seemed, concern.

He paused, and something flickered across his perception that gave him the slightest hesitation. She felt him even more distinctly than she had before. A subtle echo of her steadiness resonated in his own mind, as though some portion of her internal architecture remained threaded through his cognition - and her empathy.

His gaze shifted minutely, recalibrating.

"I am… aware of your strain," he continued, tone still precise yet less severe. "It would be illogical to disregard it."

She was still as he spoke, studying him in term as if there was something new about him that required memorization. She hadn't frequently studied his face. Not for lack of opportunity to look, so much as acknowledgement of his own discomfort with eye contact of late. This, though, was like an unwrapping. Layers of defensiveness peeled away to reveal something else. It took her a long moment to understand exactly what he meant -- what her own empathic sense was clearly signaling.

His hand withdrew fully now, though he did not break proximity. He remained seated close enough that the space between them felt deliberate rather than incidental.

"You prevented catastrophic destabilisation," he added. The admission was measured. "Your intervention was effective - and I am grateful. I do not currently perceive recursive compression," he said. "The anticipatory cascade is… quiet."

He regarded her again, and the faintest trace of something more genial softened the line of his mouth, though it did not quite become a smile.

"How do you assess your own condition?"

Emni had the wild urge to reclaim his hand, as if there was something about the connection's intimacy that made the continued proximal change in her mind's eye feel more grounded. But, though her fingers flexed for just a moment, she did not move. Instead she opened her mouth to speak. Closed it. Opened again.

"I," she began quietly. Her voice was, indeed, raspy again reinforcing the likelihood that her mental shout had been physical as well. "I am drained." She watched his face, head tilting slightly as if some puzzle in this moment required addressing. "And relieved that you are as well. And..." she faltered a moment, words failing her as grief welled again fresh and jagged. Something pricked at the corners of her eyes and she worked to breathe through it, reminding herself that this was not fresh grief, no matter how near it felt. She had endured it before. She could again if she had to. "... the loss of that first... fracture... feels very fresh. It's a bit disorienting."

She pursed her lips before darting her tongue along them to wet them. "You can feel that, though," she said softly. It was not exactly a question. He had already indicated this new awareness. "I assume that is not a normal byproduct of a mind meld?"

"It is not typical," Karim said. His tone remained even, but there was a faint irregularity in it that suggested he was still calibrating to new data rather than presenting a conclusion. "A meld can produce residual alignment between psionic fields. Temporary. Occasionally persistent. However, this degree of empathic attunement is not a standard byproduct."

He paused, eyes narrowing slightly as he began to assemble a hypothesis. "Your latent Betazoid empathy is a distinct modality. Its transfer, even partial, would suggest an unusual compatibility vector. Possibly your predominant Romulan physiology and our shared ancestral... " The sentence did not complete. His focus shifted from theory to her, and the change in him was immediate. He was aware of the tremor under her composure, of the way the grief sat close to the surface, and of the fatigue that had begun to hollow her breath.

He reached for her hand again and took it. His fingers settled with quiet certainty, palm to palm, warmth steady. The gesture from Karim, especially lately, was not insignificant.

"You are more destabilised than I am at present," he said simply. There was no judgement in it. Only recognition.

His thumb moved once, a small, grounding pressure. He watched her with that same careful attentiveness, and the empathic slant in his awareness remained narrowly keyed to her alone. "You will terminate duty status for the remainder of the day and return to your quarters."

A fractional pause. His gaze held, steady and unblinking, but the line of his mouth softened almost imperceptibly.

"Doctor's orders."

----

A Counseling Session with Consequences by --

Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai
Executive Officer

Lieutenant Commander Karim
Counselor, First Contact Specialist, Patient