Disclaimer: I don't own Star Trek. I just like playing with it. I don't own lematyas either.
AN: This is a rewrite of TTP from the perspective of Malcolm's father. As such, it is also a very dark story. Reader discretion is advised. This will make more sense if you've read TTP, but it can also stand alone.
Terra Prime springs upon an unsuspecting Earth like a lematya that has lain in ambush for exactly the right moment, when its oblivious prey has wandered close and turns to look in the opposite direction. It digs its claws in with a firm, inescapable hold, drawing blood, a blood that bleeds out in the green and blue of Vulcan and Andorian blood and in the red gore of the humans who resist this sacrilege. And while Earth still reels, Terra Prime solidifies its grip on the entire solar system.
The first of the bones to crunch under the constricting grip of the beast is the starship Enterprise. On the live broadcast that Terra Prime usurps, billions of Earth citizens watch in numb horror as their pride and joy, their posterchild of innovation and of human resilience and ingenuity, is destroyed in a blaze of red-orange weapons fire. Many weep openly for the destruction of ideals; others gather in mobs and throng the streets, shouting with enraged exhilaration and hunting down the remaining invaders, those with blue and green blood, those with noses and ears and foreheads shaped differently, those who have been gathered from the distant reaches of their birth planets by the same idealism and optimism now lying shattered at the feet of the predator.
But greatest by far in number are the citizens who stay indoors, who bar the windows and the entrances against a world that has exploded into madness. These are the men and women who hold no grudge against the off-worlders who seek the friendship and strength of the human race; they are the ordinary families who bear no ill will but yet cannot, will not subject themselves to the implications of defying Terra Prime.
Stuart Reed is one of billions who watch the destruction of the ship on live broadcast. He is one of billions, and yet one in a billion, because with the death of the ship comes more than just the fall of the ideals of hope and honor and pride he has so long believed in and fought for; with it, for him, comes also the fall of a son, a man who he has watched from a distance he himself created, a distance which is unbridgeable but has done nothing to dim the love and pride Stuart feels for a man with the spirit to stand up against the disapproval of the father whose respect he always craved above all else.
Stuart Reed watches the destruction of the ship without blinking, without turning aside in horror as do his wife and his daughter, and he burns.
One day of terror turns into two days, into two weeks, into two months, and Terra Prime subjugates the Terran system. The national governments of the world writhe in helpless fury, but with Paxton's superweapon aimed directly at Earth their resistance is, in its effect, token at best. Gradually, it becomes clear to the citizens of Earth that Terra Prime is a beast much larger and uglier and more widespread than Paxton's rebel group: it is a mindset, a gnawing fear and prejudice that transcends ethnicity and nationality and boils down to the core of human weakness. It is a product of the human fear of the unknown, and if the people who support Terra Prime are in the minority, they are a powerful minority and enough to throw the cities and countries of Earth into chaos under the new regime.
Behind doors bolted and barricaded against this chaos, Stuart watches the life drain out of his wife, bit by slow bit, and he is powerless to stop it. The spirit that has survived almost forty years of marriage to him has been shaken and damaged by the loss of her only son. Stuart nurses her as best he can, but she fades despite his care like a dying flower.
She dies quietly in her sleep, while Stuart is downstairs preparing a meal he knows she will refuse to touch.
It is not until three months after Terra Prime is overthrown by a shadowy organization that refuses to identify itself other than as a submerged branch of Starfleet, not until two and a half months after the horrors of the prison camp newspapers call the Dome are exposed to an appalled Earth population, that Stuart learns his son is alive.
He receives a call from an unrecognized source, and when he accepts the call he finds himself face to face with a blonde woman of about forty whose name he never afterwards remembers. She explains to him that St. Martin's Hospital has managed to identify one of the survivors of the Dome being cared for at the hospital as his son, Malcolm Reed.
When Stuart's mind is sufficiently recovered from blank shock and incredulity to provide him with any words other than a stammered "thank you," he questions her choice of words. Identified his son? It sounds as if Malcolm is already dead.
The woman explains, gently, but with the air of one who has had this conversation too many times to become emotionally invested, that Malcolm has been mentally affected by the experience and it was only by a chance photo identification from an electronic newspaper article that his identity has been discovered, because he is unable to identify himself.
Stuart does not go to visit his son. For the first time in his life, he experiences fear that cannot be fought or ignored or brushed aside. He wonders if this is what Malcolm felt at the prospect of following his father's footsteps in the Navy: a crushing, overwhelming dread, the sensation of being trapped and unable to escape.
Madeline goes to California, where the hospital is, and Stuart cannot forgive himself for allowing his daughter to go where he himself fears to tread. She comes back changed: older, and a little broken. Stuart later finds out his son did not recognize her, and her visit had left Malcolm so agitated he tried to choke himself on the IV tube. He knows she will never go back because Madeline has a husband and a family and a life and and for those reasons she must grieve her brother and leave him behind forever.
One day, late in the evening, a man comes to Stuart's door, a man with a tired and lined face much older than his years probably are. He introduces himself by the name Harris, and says he is a former superior of Malcolm's.
He is intentionally vague as he speaks about Malcolm's service under him, and gradually Stuart realizes the man is leading him to guess something which cannot be spoken aloud: that Malcolm, in his time with Starfleet, was not simply another pampered officer up until his service on the Enterprise; that he was, in fact, in the secret service of the same unnamed organization responsible for the fall of Terra Prime; that in his time, Malcolm fought and won longer and harder and more terrifying battles than the only one he lost, the battle against an inborn fear that made Stuart reject his son as a coward.
Harris says Malcolm was a brave man, and a noble one, and "damned honorable."
This is something Stuart already knows.
Harris does not mention St. Martin's Hospital, or California, and it is this omission which makes Stuart realize why the man is here. He's here to make peace for a man under his command, a man for whom it is now too late to make his own peace.
"Why are you doing this?" Stuart finally asks, when the other man turns to go. Harris pauses to consider the question.
"Because I still owe him," he answers at last, and walks away.
When Stuart enters the hospital room, he is greeted by the regular, predictable sterility of hospital cleanliness and order. The room is clean and small and utterly bare, and he notices nothing except for the grey eyes fixed on his face with startling, unerring clarity – and Stuart knows the diagnosis, and he knows there is no possibility of Malcolm recognizing anyone, but the moment his own gaze meets that glazed and drugged but surprisingly steady, childlike stare, he sees that Malcolm knows him. He sees it in the fractional widening of the eyes so exactly like his own, in the stiffening of the skeletally-thin body, in the sudden clench of the fragile hands, thin as a hatchling bird's claws, on the blanket.
Stuart knows at that moment that he will never forgive himself for this: that the reaction he elicits in his son is tension and anxiety, not pleasure and relief.
He knows, too, he will never leave Malcolm again.
The first few days are terrible, because Malcolm is silent and afraid and tracks his every movement with scared, uncertain eyes. The nurses of the hospital – overrun as it is with other patients, as catatonic or more so than this one – show him how to care for his son: the food he must eat, the IV cord that seeps a steady supply of numbing drugs into him, the pills that will stop him trying to strangle himself again. Stuart learns it all and day after day repeats the same motions, feeds his son with a patience he never had when Malcolm was a child, and maybe in a sense this is a blessing because perhaps Malcolm is a child again, a frightened and hurt child who has been raped by an unforgiving universe and can no longer bring himself to believe in goodness or hope.
He talks to Malcolm, quietly and gently, although he knows his son does not understand the words he says. He speaks of the weather, of Madeline, of her job and her family, and of other things. He tells Malcolm of the death of Mary Reed, the woman who he thought he once had loved, though time had broken down that emotion and left her little more than a companion in living. He had cared for her, though, and as he speaks of the gradual wasting away of the woman bereft of her son and the sanity of her world, he finds himself able to grieve for the first time since her death. He weeps for her, and does not try to hide it from Malcolm, because maybe Malcolm's grandfather wasn't right about strength and showing nothing is where Stuart first began to go wrong. Malcolm speaks to him for the first time that day, and though the syllables he produces are jumbled and nonsensical there is a timid longing in his voice and face that speaks of a willingness to give a second chance.
Stuart tells his son other things, too, things like I am so proud of you and I love you so much, although he knows it is too late now for his son to understand. But he is not limited to communication through words, and when Malcolm no longer shrinks away at his approach Stuart begins to tentatively probe for the boundaries. It's painful, how much Malcolm welcomes his touch, once he is sure Stuart does not mean to hurt him. Has Malcolm always craved his affection this much? It is a question whose answer Stuart tries not to ponder, because no plausible answer can possibly give him relief.
Malcolm is calmest when he can feel Stuart beside him, physically. He likes to be touched.
Malcolm refuses to eat. This is, at least, something Stuart remembers from his son's childhood; he recalls Mary spending hours coaxing little Malcolm to eat just a few bites of something, anything. What he does not remember is how she did it. He was never around for that part.
There's a learning curve.
As a man, Stuart sympathizes with his stubborn son, because the admittedly highly nutritious mush the nurses provide for Malcolm's nourishment is about the farthest thing from food he can imagine. He tastes it once, and the stuff is as disgusting as it looks. He nearly spits it out before he realizes Malcolm is watching him with intense interest. It is the closest thing to amusement he has seen in Malcolm since he was a young child.
But the mush is there to stay, because whenever the nurses try to introduce anything more substantial, Malcolm grows sick and listless. His stomach can no longer handle real food, it seems, so Stuart makes the best of things with determination and patience in quantities he didn't know he possessed.
Malcolm, the doctors claim, is incapable of understanding or responding rationally to outside stimuli, but Stuart learns this is not quite true. His son is, at least partially, aware of his surroundings: aware enough to recognize the appearance of the covered dish that indicates another round of the hated mush as his cue to feign sleep as convincingly as possible; enough to hear footsteps outside the room and freeze, listening, until he is sure no fresh danger threatens.
There are good days, like when Malcolm consents to eat without a fight or almost-laughs at Stuart's reaction to the taste of the mush.
There are far, far more bad days.
Most days Malcolm lies motionless for hours, staring at the ceiling above him, unresponsive to speech and touch alike. His eyes are dark and haunted with terror and memories. Sometimes, he wakes screaming and thrashing against unseen foes until the nurses are forced to sedate him into a drugged haze that lasts for days.
For a while, Stuart tries to pretend the good days are not growing fewer and farther between.
He realizes, finally, that he is clinging to his son out of selfishness, out of a desire to make up for a lost childhood he will never be able to relive, regardless of how long he allows Malcolm to exist in this tormented, twilight state his sane self of long ago would have abhorred.
When he finally admits to himself what his Malcolm would have wanted, Stuart sits beside his son's bed and holds his hand and cries. Malcolm, of course, does not understand what is going on, but Stuart allows himself to pretend that the nearly-imperceptible tightening of the thin fingers on his is at once a forgiveness and a permission.
He writes to Madeline, explaining his decision and knowing she may never forgive him, and sends it by overnight postage so it will not arrive until it is too late for her to try to stop him.
The nurses protest his decision dutifully, but they do not truly disagree with him. They understand, and besides the extra bed will be welcome in a hospital already filled to bursting with these vacant victims.
Stuart insists on being the one to administer the overdose.
Cruelly, or perhaps blessedly, it's a good day. Stuart watches his son and talks to him and holds his hand, telling him over and over I love you, Malcolm, and I am so sorry.
Malcolm grows drowsy toward the afternoon, and Stuart kisses him gently on the forehead and helps him go to sleep.
Malcolm's face is utterly smooth. Stuart has never seen him look so peaceful.