Posted by Ensign Kastarak (Doctor / Counsellor) in Private Mess - A Little Suffering is Good for the Soul (tag Kastarak)

Posted by Lieutenant Commander T’Aria (XO / Navigation Officer) in Private Mess - A Little Suffering is Good for the Soul (tag Kastarak)

Posted by Lieutenant Symar (Chief Medical Officer) in Private Mess - A Little Suffering is Good for the Soul (tag Kastarak)
Posted by… suppressed (4) by the Post Ghost! 👻
(Snip, snip!)

His silence reminded T’Aria that it might be discomfiting to stand in the centre of a dimly lit, cold room and talk about it. So, she took the lull as her cue to let him get situated while she retrieved teabags and cups from the adjoining galley.

“Please, have a seat…” she lifted a passive hand to the nearby table, “I will return with your tea, shortly.”

There was something comforting about T’Aria’s suggestion. He imagined her not as a colleague, but as something else. A friend. At the same time, she felt closer to him than a mere friend, as if they were siblings in a way. Humans were full of metaphors of relationships. Kastarak remembered sayings like “brother from another mother” (it was not the case of an adoption), “hey bro,” and religious congregations addressing the congregants as “brother,” “sister”, and “sibling”. “We are all children of God, even you,” a woman on the streets on San Francisco had told him out of the blue. Yet another metaphor of siblinghood.

It was only recently that Kastarak had begun to understand the significance of such a metaphor. And here, T’Aria, performed the duty that had been his father’s, back when his father was alive – when Kastarak had been emotionally dysregulated and logic failed him, Father had stayed up at night with him, boiled water in an open fire, and Kastarak had felt a soothing serenity slowly coming over him through the wood turning into charcoal, the shapes in the fire, the sound of the kettle going to simmering, boiling, finally whistling…

Kastarak and T’Aria were not in Father’s garden, but the sensation was as if they had made a fire in the cold night, and put a kettle right on the fire, seeing the shapes of the fire causing them to focus and bring serenity to them.

T’Aria hesitated before turning on her heel to approach the galley.

As a child, her grandmother would prepare a blend of Favanit petals and Redspice to soothe her on nights when terrors toyed with her young and irrtational mind. Their subtle sweetness and spice felt like a warm hug, easing the shivers that made their desert home feel like the Andorian Tundra, and comforted her into sleep. Her terrors faded into memory, but she held onto the medicine for moments of emotional tension – moments like these, where she wanted to help her friend feel comfortable… secure. Favanit and Redspice were just re-emerging on New Vulcan along with an array of native plants. They were hard to come by, but T’Aria hoped suspected Sega’a had something comparable in stock – something familiar.

Her pantry-searching lasted mere minutes before she came across a shelf of bagged and loose-leaf tea housed in tinted glass containers. She traced a finger over the labels until one poorly-named “Vulcan tea” popped out to her. T’Aria took the jar and opened it to see if she could smell what was in it, but there was too many other aromas to confirm whether she was sensing its contents or those aroud her. It wasn’t important. Removing two bags, she set them aside and replicated two cups of 85 C water to steep. T’Aria took the cups and returned to Kastarak, placing one next to him before taking a seat nearby.

Kastarak took the cup, bowed his head slightly, as if in thanks, and hugged the cup with both his hands. The tea was not what he had expected, and there was a cacophony of aromas.

He took a small sip. Still a little too hot. The flavour was not entirely foul, but it was not a flavour he would seek out again – unless he needed to relive this moment. It depended on how the rest of his and T’Aria’s “talk” would go.

T’Aria sat in silence for many seconds, unsure of what (if anything) to say, until she landed on something simple and direct:

“How are you feeling?”

— T’Aria

Logic dictates that in this situation – when both Kastarak and T’Aria had taken great pains in making the meeting happen, understanding the need for them to undergo a debrief of their experience in quarantine while ill with the Romulus-originating flu – honesty (with as little as possible self-censure) would be the most fruitful cause of action.

“I am frustrated,” he replied after a while, his voice as emotion-less as Vulcans would normally come, but there was a clear tone of honesty. “I have not been able to achieve a total state of serenity, logic fails me, and our experience has caused me to relive the loss and pain of the destruction of our home planet even more vividly than usual,” he said, suddenly becoming quiet, being at loss for not remembering the collective word used for the destruction of Vulcan. Did his people use a word for it? Was it even logical to have a word for such an emotional event for a people that collectively tried to appear even more emotionless than before, to out-Vulcan the Vulcans of yore? There perhaps was no word, since all words would be emotional. Yet – an emotional word had been apt now. The Calamity? The Great Loss?

He sighed.

“How are you feeling?” he quickly retorted.

– Kastarak

T’Aria fidgeted with the teabag, dunking and lifting it with the slightest plop when it hit the water, but her gaze never strayed from Kastarak. His honesty relieved her, but there was an unfathomable sadness between them. Grief, perhaps? She could not tell if the sentiment was his or hers, but it seemed wrong to separate the two. They lost their homeworld. Worse, they lost their loved ones and community to a vicious act of vengeance. Vengeance that did not belong to their people.

There was nothing complicated about it, but the emotions were indecipherable.

How did one describe that pain? The pain of losing a planet that nursed thousands of species, from the tiniest eukaryote to the greatest Sehlat? The pain of losing the sacred desert lands from which cultures, rich with tradition and ceremony, were cultivated and sustained? The pain of losing millions of creatures, their katras left to wander without relation to Mount Seleya, lonely and lost? The pain. It was no wonder he fell silent, and she was at a loss for words.

ooc: aw <3

T’Aria did not sooner respond when he threw her back her question back than when he greeted her in the gym. Only, this time she wasn’t sure how to approach the question. Would her answer help him or worsen his conflict? T’Aria shook the thought away. He honoured her with openness, and she would do the same, despite the risk.

“I find myself thinking about home,” she spoke as if processing each word when it touched her tongue, “on Vulcan. Our ‘experience’ made me realise how little I have dealt with that loss… and the guilt. Starfleet made it easy to dissociate and focus on everything happening here. There was always something happening on Chernov. It is not so simple now.”

Kastarak nodded lightly and slowly, and empathized with every word. He wondered whether it had been easier for him, for her, and for Symar, if they had been assigned onto different ships – being the only Vulcan on each, being free to explore their new post-Vulcan identity unhindered by community and constant reminder of their loss. But could they, even then, escape the pain and trauma? The loss of family, friends, and more so: culture, identity, sense of meaningfulness. He had read about survivor’s guilt in his psychology books, and never before applied it to himself. Did he share in it? Did T’Aria? Symar’s situation must have been so different, he thought, having been intimately violated by the same species that had destroyed his anchor, his planet, his friends and family. Kastarak sighed, and took another sip of his odd-tasting tea. Its chaos reminded him of Sega’a, which added a presence of comfort to the conversation.

T’Aria stole a few seconds of thought from her teacup.

“When you try to meditate,” she continued with nearly undetectable gentleness, “what do you see?”

“No matter what I meditate on,” he said, pausing for a second, “I am disturbed by images of my mother, my father, and my three siblings… their faces becoming blurrier and blurrier for each day, and it is as if I do both wish to not be disturbed by seeing their faces, but at the same time, I try to focus not to forget them. But at this point, I do not even know if the faces I see are really their faces, because I cannot remember what they actually looked like any more.”

He took another sip, buying himself a few seconds of composing himself again. He could not purge his feelings now, he did not wish it, but he needed to compose himself so not to injure the moment.

T’Aria reached out as if to say ‘I’m here’, but hesitation crept in, and her hand landed only halfway between them.

“How well do you remember the faces of Hanesh, and your other siblings? How do you honour their memory? I cannot find that anything I do honours them, it only brings me away from them.”

Kastarak looked away, he could at this moment not meet T’Aria’s eye contact. He looked at some pots hanging on the wall by the kitchen, noticing that they were not aligned symmetrically, or in order of size. Another one of Sega’a’s doings, he thought. He missed Sega’a now, Sega’a would have given him a hard slap on his shoulder, bordering on painful, and that momentary split-second moment of physical contact would have given Kastarak a much-needed dose of oxytocin to get by another moment. Sega’a’s smile would help, too.

– Ensign Kastarak (physician and counsellor)

T’Aria had retratced her hand and dug her thumb into a notch in the wood, distracted.

How well did she recall her siblings’ faces? Her memories of them were unremarkable and marred by a blue-white film reminiscent of holographic displays and subspace communiques. Did she know their faces well enough to commit them to memory? Even before, her siblings were separated by space and time. Prisu always claimed Hanesh and her were ‘unforeseen’ as evidenced by the 31yr gap between them and their closest sibling, Evoras. Their memories were hazy, and their faces little more than rock pinnacles in a sandstorm. She didn’t remember them well. That did not mean she mourned their loss any less, but they did not hold the same space in her thoughts as Kastarak’s siblings did in his. Except for Hanesh.

“Hanesh did not make it easy to forget his face,” she muttered. “I used to mistake my reflection for him. Sometimes, when I am weary or unmeditated, I still do. We were much younger than our other siblings. We did not know them as well as we knew each other, so their faces faded from memory much quicker than I expected.”

She took a soft breath and lifted her attention fully to Kastarak, hoping that a kernel of this was helpful.

“You already honour your siblings,” she said. “We are the aggregate of everyone we have encountered, love and lost. I honour my family through the behaviours and beliefs I adopted from them. Evoras collected teas, each with its own story, and shared them with us in her brief visits home. Those teas were her connection to the cultures she studied. I add to her collection with each mission. Romar taught us Vulcan before Federation Standard. He spoke a S’Lara dialect, not Raal, and emphasised the central syllable in every word. I do the same. Senva stitched their clothes with a technique our grandmother considered ‘improper’ and ‘untraditional’, but it held better. Hanesh did not trust sandworms. He believed, however illogically, that they were tricksters with uncanny intelligence and capable of more than they let on…”

T’Aria did not realise the smile, so faint and easily mistaken as a natural twitch, tugging at the corners of her lips.

”…I do not share his belief, but I carry it. Through these pieces, however small, I carry them all. I honour them.”

“How do you carry your siblings, Kastarak?”

— T’Aria