Fade into you (Part 2)

Posted on Mon Apr 13th, 2026 @ 2:39pm by Commander Atna & Lieutenant Commander Intharia T'Zor

2,802 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Histories
Location: Science annex 5, DS13
Timeline: Between Mission 1 & 2

The blue glow had faded from T’Zor’s palm, but the room still felt lit by it. Mounted tricorders, harmonic equalisers and other more sensitive specialist equipment scrambled to make sense of the mass effect fields the eezo in her body allowed her to produce.

Neither of them had moved very far since the practice began. They had shared shallow touch-telepathy briefly after T’Zor did a first test to match yesterday’s results. Atna remained beside the instrument cart, one hand resting lightly on its edge as a fixed point she would not be dislodged from. T’Zor stood on the mat in the center of the annex, shoulders loose by effort rather than nature, watching her with a smile that was only partly teasing now.

“Well,” T’Zor said, softly enough that the quiet laboratory seemed to lean in around the words, “either your telepathic guidance is working, or I’m better than I thought at this.” They had not addressed their mutual telepathic discovery during yesterday’s session, beyond the effect on her biotic abilities and how they expected those trends to be reflected in the results.

Atna considered the matter with an expression severe enough to suggest she actually meant to classify it formally. “They are not mutually exclusive concepts,” she observed.

T’Zor laughed under her breath. “You really are lovely when you’re being grim.”

Atna’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “I reject the classification that I am now or have ever been ‘grim’.”

“Well, ‘Vulcan’ may be an appropriate synonym.” T’Zor said in a way that she knew was painfully asari.

“Then you understand the term well enough to know that lovely is equally inappropriate a classification as grim.” Atna said with cold neutrality.

“You really don’t take compliments well. That must be difficult, given how much there is to compliment.” Thari retorted a slightly patronising and flirtatious response.

Atna did not respond at once. The pause itself said enough.

T’Zor stepped off the mat and came closer, not enough to crowd her, only enough that the sensors and trays and diagnostic padds no longer seemed like the center of the room. “We haven’t talked about the fact that I felt something yesterday, something you maybe didn’t intend to reveal. You felt it too.”

Atna met her gaze. “Yes.”

It was such a Vulcan answer. No evasion. No embellishment. No shelter from the fact itself.

T’Zor’s expression softened.

“And I think maybe you’re still deciding whether that invalidates the scientific merit of our biotic experiment or any potential academic record.”

“I am deciding whether it compromises my objectivity.”

“And?”

Atna’s voice grew quieter. “It may.”

“Is that an issue for you?”

“In this context? No.” That one word hung between them, warm in spite of its precision. “Your results are 15% better on focus and manifestation. You’re improving at an astronomical rate. By these preliminary metrics, at least.”

T’Zor folded her arms loosely, though more to contain her own rising anticipation than to present any kind of argument. “You said a limited contact might help observe how my concentration forms. It did. My control improved immediately.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re now wondering whether a fuller exchange would produce clearer results.”

Atna said nothing.

T’Zor smiled. “You are.”

“I am.”

“And you would like to suggest it in the driest possible terms so that if you happen to lose your composure, you can at least claim you were acting in the name of research.”

For the first time since they’d met, Atna looked almost embarrassed.

It appeared on her face only as a stillness that arrived a fraction too late.

“That is pessimistic.” Atna countered.

T’Zor’s smile widened.

Atna drew one measured breath. “A full meld would allow better translation of conceptual structures. Your descriptions of biotic cognition remain metaphor-heavy. Direct exchange could reduce ambiguity.”

“Mm.”

“It would also permit comparison between your species’ telepathic architecture and Vulcan methods.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And,” Atna said, with visible determination, “it may clarify why the prior contact produced such an immediate increase in field stability.”

T’Zor tilted her head. “And it doesn't hurt that you're looking forward to it.”

Atna held her gaze.

“You have a Vulcan’s perceptive skill,” she said.

For a long moment T’Zor only looked at her.

It would have been easy to make a joke then. Easy to soften the edge of the moment, to let it become banter and delay and cleverness. That had been her habit with difficult things for a very long time. Not dishonesty, exactly. Just pacing. Control by brightness.

But what she felt from Atna was not brightness. It was discipline held open by intent. Caution, certainly. Curiosity, undeniably. Attraction, yes. Fierce and unmistakable beneath the masonry of Vulcan restraint, but not hunger without thought. What Atna offered, even now, was the most refined caution in any number of possible forms.

“If we do this,” T’Zor said, “we do it properly. No half-measures. No holding back. No obfuscating detail or event. If something cannot be shared, withdraw completely.”

Atna inclined her head once. “Agreed.”

“And you tell me what a Vulcan full meld feels like before you put me through one.”

Atna’s posture eased by some minuscule degree. “That is reasonable.”

“Good. Because asari joining tends to begin like falling through a high-speed hot spring waterslide and remembering all the best things you never lived.”

Atna absorbed that with the faintest lift of one brow. “Fascinating.”

Atna considered, then gestured toward the meditation mat. “Sit.”

T’Zor lowered herself to the mat, legs folding beneath her. After a moment’s thought, Atna did the same opposite her, spine perfectly straight, hands resting on her knees as she sat atop them.

The contrast between them was one both appreciated. T’Zor sat with an ease that was real but never fully formal, all old confidence and fluid posture and the graceful looseness of a body that had learned long ago it could be beautiful without permission. Atna sat like the centreline of a temple.

“Before we begin,” Atna said, “you should understand that a Vulcan meld is not merely telepathic speech. As the prior link was brief and in real time, the meld can feel like hours or months of years condensed into a moment. It is to experience one’s mind laid out as shared circuitry, to feel discipline and unity of self as a physical constant. Focus like you have never known over things you have never seen. A deliberate opening of pathways that are otherwise kept contained to ensure definition between self and other. Thought, memory, emotion, sensation. All may become legible.”

“Legible to both of us?”

“Yes.”

“That’s intimate.”

“Yes.”

No embarrassment. No apology. Just truth.

T’Zor felt her heartbeat quicken again.

“I should share then that asari joining isn’t exactly tidy either. For us it’s… not only memory or language. It’s the patterns of eternity we never knew and can’t understand outside the moment. Identity in motion. You don’t just see what someone remembers, you feel the shape of how they are. Which parts are old, which parts are wounded, which parts they’re trying not to look at.”

“Not unlike some of the better recreational pharmaceuticals, then.” Atna suggested when T’Zor paused.

“It can be ecstatic,” T’Zor went on. “It can also be overwhelming. Especially if both people are trying to stay separate and merge at the same time.”

“You have done this often?” Atna asked.

“Joining, yes. Like this?” T’Zor smiled faintly. “No. Never with a Vulcan. Never with anyone quite so determined to turn growth into a research methodology.”

Atna ignored the tease on principle. “Then caution is warranted.”

“Agreed.”

The room had grown very still around them. DS13 still thrummed beyond the walls, but here the silence felt curated, as if even the station understood this was now less a test than a threshold.

Atna lifted her hands.

Slowly, so there could be no misunderstanding.

T’Zor mirrored her.

Their fingers met.

At first it was no more dramatic than before: skin to skin, warmth to warmth. But this time neither withdrew at the first flare of awareness. They remained there, left hands lightly clasped, while Atna’s breathing slowed into measured cadence and T’Zor let herself follow it. Not to match, that would have been too deliberate, too studied – but to accompany.

“At the beginning,” Atna said, her voice low, “I will guide. If the structure destabilizes, withdraw to surface identity. Hold to your name.”

T’Zor smiled faintly. “You make that sound like I could get lost.”

Atna’s thumbs shifted very slightly against the backs of T’Zor’s hands. Not quite a caress. Certainly not an accident. Voices felt distant. Old memories felt flittingly near.

“It is not unheard of,” she said.

Then Atna leaned forward.

Her fingers rose to T’Zor’s face, precise and cool against her temples and the neural touchpoints, and when she spoke the old Vulcan words they did not sound ceremonial so much as inevitable.

“My mind to your mind,” Atna said, and T’Zor felt the first true opening begin, “your thoughts to my thoughts.”

The world gave way.

Not vanished. Reconfigured.

The room dissolved first into lightless geometry, a brief sensation of all things becoming outline and potential. Then came the flood.

Not one current, but two.

T’Zor felt Atna’s mind as living architecture: fierce control, yes, but alive with it. Discipline not as emptiness but as pressure contained behind beautifully fitted walls. Desert heat. Stone under bare feet. The endless austere gold of Vulcan horizons. A child racing an impulse-cycle over open ground, tasting dust and freedom and the small private joy of speed before duty reclaimed the day. The ache of expectation in a house full of achievement. The first comprehension that excellence could become a cage if one let other people define its dimensions.

And Atna, in turn, received T’Zor not as stone but as a sea of starlight. Hot jungle recovery camps on newly terraformed worlds after the war and frozen supply posts. The long, exhausted tenderness of helping worlds survive themselves. Thessia’s grace haunted by everything it had lost. Earth. Oxford. Laboratories and lectures and the relief of finding that intellect could be another kind of service. Then the pulse of exploration, the irresistible instinct that had driven T’Zor to follow impossible dimensional technology into the unknown, and the shock of being trapped, condensed, made helpless, carried across realities until she emerged on DS13 trying very hard to seem curious rather than afraid.

The exchange deepened.

Language became insufficient almost immediately.

Atna felt what biotics had meant in T’Zor’s body since youth: not a trick, not a weapon first, but a second musculature of intent, a conversation with mass and motion. She felt the intuitive way T’Zor sensed direction and pressure, the almost playful certainty with which an asari mind could disagree with gravity. T’Zor felt, with equal force, what telepathy cost a Vulcan and what it made possible: the precision, the care, the danger of truly touching another consciousness without losing one’s own shape.

And beneath all that, because neither of them was actually skilled enough, or willing enough, to keep it out, they felt the attraction. Magnetic. Electric.

Not as a sudden spark. A current.

As recognition. A reflection of the same hidden light, like seeing the other’s face in a mirror with the same longing.

Atna’s first true impression of T’Zor on the station, obscured at the time by professionalism and the novelty of her arrival, now returned sharpened and undeniable: her voice, her intelligence, the constant movement in her expression, the effortless warmth she extended even when stranded and displaced. The absurdly immediate awareness that she was beautiful, followed by the equally immediate decision to ignore the fact.

T’Zor felt Atna’s side of it with such clarity it nearly broke her concentration: the attraction there from almost the beginning, reframed and restrained and categorized into irrelevance because that was what Atna did with dangerous things. Not denial. Containment. The dry admiration she would never have voiced. The fascination with T’Zor’s mind. The sharp physical awareness she had deemed inconvenient and therefore unworthy of discussion.

Through the meld, Atna realized she had not hidden it nearly as well as she had believed.

Through the meld, T’Zor understood that what looked like coldness in Atna was often mercy, control so that others would not be burdened by the force of what she felt.

The emotional impact of that understanding hit them both at once.

The structure slipped.

For one startling instant their consciousnesses folded harder into one another, Vulcan rigor and asari openness ceasing to alternate and instead colliding head-on. Memory became sensation. Sensation became want. T’Zor felt herself as Atna felt her: vivid, clever, difficult to ignore. Atna felt herself as T’Zor felt her: frozen fire, effortlessly excellent, exhausting only because of how hard she worked to remain Vulcan.

The room came back in fragments.

Air first.

Then the shape of their bodies.

Then the realization that they were no longer sitting apart.

At some point during the meld, neither of them would later be able to say when, they had moved forward on the mat until their legs interlocked and their hands had shifted from temples to shoulders to wherever they had instinctively needed to anchor each other. Their faces were mere centimetres apart.

T’Zor opened her eyes.

Atna was very close.

Closer than Vulcans stood to colleagues. Closer than scientists sat for discussions of field harmonics. Close enough that T’Zor could feel the altered cadence of her breathing.

For a moment neither spoke.

Then T’Zor, voice rougher than before, whispered, “Well.”

Atna’s hands remained at her waist, not possessive, not tentative, simply there. “That was… clarifying.”

T’Zor laughed softly, a little helplessly. “That is the driest possible summary of what just happened.”

Atna’s gaze did not leave hers. “Yes.”

There was no room for banter left now. No room for hiding in it.

T’Zor lifted one hand to Atna’s cheek. The Vulcan stillness that met the gesture was not withdrawal. It was attention refined to a point.

“I know you felt that,” T’Zor said quietly.

“I know you know I felt it too.” Atna clarified.

“Yes. And it isn’t something glib or tawdry. It’s a real feeling. One worth time and attention. But only if you want it." Thari said.

“Yes.”

“If you give me one more one-word answer, I may be forced to conclude Vulcan passion is a myth.”

To T’Zor’s delight, that almost drew a smile, an involuntary response that all took place in the eyebrows.

“It is not,” Atna said.

“Good.”

Then, because they had already crossed the far more frightening threshold, T’Zor leaned in the last inch and kissed her.

Atna froze only for the space of a breath.

Then the control did not vanish. That would not have been Atna. It changed purpose. No longer a barrier. A vector. She kissed T’Zor back with the same concentrated intensity she brought to everything she truly chose, one hand rising from T’Zor’s waist to the line of her back, drawing her closer with a care that was somehow more profound than hunger would have been.

When they parted, it was only far enough to breathe.

T’Zor rested her forehead against Atna’s and laughed once, faintly, in disbelief. “We were supposed to be working on biotics.”

“At present,” Atna murmured, her voice lower than T’Zor had yet heard it, “I believe we have identified a new variable that may improve performance.”

T’Zor smiled against her mouth. “Scientific breakthrough.”

“Yes.”

“Terrible complication.”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to keep investigating?”

Atna’s answer came not in words first, but in the return of her hand to T’Zor’s face, in the slight closing of distance, in the utter absence of hesitation now that the choice had been made.

“Yes,” she said.

And this time, when they kissed again, it was with the shared and wordless understanding that whatever they had opened in that room was not going to fit back inside professional convenience, or procedural curiosity, or any other careful little container either of them might have preferred.

It had begun, as both of them would later admit, in the interest of simplifying communication and improving T’Zor’s latent abilities.

It had only briefly remained about that.

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