#this also feeds into my 'mind melding as a coping mechanism' headcanon for obvious reasons

[bumblingbabooshka]

[Guy who is bonkers voice] Hey, do you want to hear my thoughts about Tuvok/T’Pel and the solitude of the Delta Quadrant vis a vis Tuvok’s identity? 

You’re a hero for actually clicking read more. So. I was thinking about marital bonds and how they’d like, definitely permanently affect your identity. 

These are the vows Tuvok and holo T’Pel recite before starting their pon farr mating. They give to and receive from one another ‘All that they are’. A vulcan marriage is ideally two people becoming essentially one mind in two bodies - that’s how close they are and that’s how Tuvok existed for sixty seven years. And then the delta quadrant. And now he’s a singular person.

I wonder how drastically changed he would feel. Off-balance. Would the world seem dull, shallow?  In my mind I pictured this: Janeway makes him a certain type of tea without even thinking about it and he accepts it in the same way, both of them continuing a conversation they were having. Then, strangely, Tuvok finds he doesn’t enjoy the tea. It’s...fine. It’s acceptable but not satisfying. Then he realizes that it must have been T’Pel who enjoyed the tea so much it gave him pleasure to drink it.  Because the person known as ‘Tuvok’ who existed for sixty seven years is half T’Pel. And vise versa. Does T’Pel in the alpha quadrant try to listen to a gardening show she used to like only to find it unbearably flat without Tuvok’s joy and interest there? And that doesn’t mean they aren’t separate people with their own desires, goals, and personalities - it just means that they were also inexorably (or so they believed) conjoined. Their experience of the world was always shared with each other after their marriage.  If Tuvok liked a color it didn’t mean T’Pel would like it too - but it meant T’Pel would be there to have an opinion which would inform Tuvok’s one way or another. His thoughts are half hers. Were. Now in the delta quadrant he’s truly alone. He has no familial bonds. It’s just him, one mind and one body. All the strings that connect him have been severed. 

The experience of being married, having kids, having a family - is not just physical or emotional but like...ha, wow. Tuvok was so right “It can’t be described as an emotion, they are part of my identity.” Tuvok is Tuvok because he’s also kind of T’Pel and all his children. It’s literally an attachment, a web of love and connection through which identity is derived.

And the tragedy of being Vulcan is that I’m sure there’s no way anyone aboard Voyager except him would be able to understand this great loss. In fact, if I want to scream, I’ll imagine Tuvok trying to explain all of this to Janeway and Janeway saying something about how this might be a new opportunity. A chance to discover who he really is. And instead of trying to explain that that was who he is - that human individuality is not something he strives for and is in fact something that has always seemed profoundly lonely to him (and which is now profoundly lonely to experience). Instead of explaining that his identity being linked to T’Pel and beyond did not make it any lesser, in fact made it richer, - he just says ‘Perhaps.’

I wonder if some things are a slow decline into silence. I wonder if for the first few months aboard Voyager he would sometimes have thoughts which seemed out of place, ‘wrong’ somehow. Maybe he’d see a snail and think “Oh, how lovely.” and then it occurs to him that he’d never say that and doesn’t actually think it’s appealing at all - however, it’s something T’Pel would think. And then slowly over the course of those months those moments occur less and less frequently. Maybe near the end he tries to force it, tries very hard to remember what T’Pel thinks of this...what would she think of this? If she were here what would she say? Then eventually he realizes its not T’Pel. It’s just more of him. A dog chasing its own tail. He realizes he’s being childish, emotional, illogical. He stops. He lets the silence consume him. He’s one body now. One mind. One train of thought. A solitary, fractioned, identity floating in strange space, trying to make itself whole. (Or perhaps not? Maybe the lack is comforting, since it’s all he has of her now. Does he worry that if he becomes ‘whole’ there won’t be room for her? He’d tell himself not to, of course. Worry was an emotion.) It’s lonely. (And here he reasons that loneliness isn’t an emotion, not this loneliness. This loneliness is almost physical. It sits on his chest. It makes his body heavy.) But he will bear it.