Title: Rose Among Dandelions

Author: Apocalypse

Fandom: ENT

Disclaimer: These characters belong not to me, though it grieves my heart greatly, but to Bermaga. Why? Because there is no justice.

Pairing: Reed/Sato

Warnings: Spoilers all over the place, up to "The Expanse (Pt I)" ...

Rating: PG

Summary: Malcolm contemplates his going-nowhere passion for the lovely linguist, among other things.

Author's Note: Dude. My first R/S fic. Weird.

She sits at her post, competent and serene: a far cry from the worried child she was when her feet first touched metal decks. He thought she was a fish out of water or, in his more flattering moments, a rose among dandelions. But now he knows better.

He didn't think much of her at first. She was just somebody, just another silly girl who didn't know what she wanted. A silly, frightened girl, young and delicate and thoroughly out of her element, who screamed and cowered in the face of the kind of danger that would be bread and meat to them out here. On a ship with no small measure of competent, beautiful women at the top of their fields, she was just another face, just another expert, less confident than most.

He'd been as friendly as he knew how to be, which admittedly wasn't saying much. He'd never got on well with people. He just hadn't got the knack. She'd been courteous to him, friendly in an almost detached way, as though she hadn't known what to make of him, either.

And then, the first away mission they'd shared. Not alone, of course; the captain had been just as eager for action as the rest of them, but in more of a position to allow himself the indulgence. He reserved judgment on that, on the captain's methods. He still does, or at least, keeps his complaints private for the most part. A Reed would do things differently, not like these eager-eyed Americans with their penchant for interference … but a Reed is not in command, and Malcolm can't help but wonder if it's better this way.

Dead bodies, hanging from the ceiling. It wasn't par for the course, but you didn't sign on for a dangerous adventure into outer space expecting cake and sherry from every quivering xenophobic you happened to pass.

The schoolteacher couldn't handle it. It was too much for her delicate sensibilities, he remembered saying at the time, relating the story to Mayweather in the mess-hall. He'd wondered then if she would make it out here. If she would go home.

And then he'd spoken to her about it, offered his commiserations as it were. The first rush of shock, of familiarity, of wondering if there wasn't more here than met the eye: she verbally lashed herself, her words hot with self-loathing and disappointment ... in a way that was so familiar, laced so intricately with a determination to fix things for the better, that he thought he might almost have been talking with a younger, female version of himself.

"You didn't scream," she said as the conversation wound to a close. "Next time, neither will I."

"Well," he'd answered, in his most awkward have-a-look-at-the-bright-side-will-you way, "hopefully we won't be running into any more aliens that want to turn our bodily fluids into sex drugs anytime soon."

Her little smile in the midst of her angry self-berating … sardonic but amused, an expression that had struck him as somehow mature, older than someone so obviously innocent ought to have been able to wear on her face. "Thanks, Lieutenant," she'd said. The tone had been dry: you're a lot of help. But amused.

He likes it when she thinks he's funny.

He wonders why he chooses this moment to linger on, now as he watches her almost two full years later as she fiddles with the controls on her communications board.

Perhaps it's the contrast …

That timid schoolteacher seems so far in the past to him now, he almost wonders if they're the same person. The captain, his fingers drumming on the side of his command chair, turns to ask her a question that seems rife with impatience; she answers collectedly, coolly, as though her superior officer's inability to deal with his own impatience is not at all her problem.

The captain is out of his chair, impatient, agitated; it's been a regular mood for him for awhile, since … the attack on Earth. The captain is not hard to read: He wonders what's coming, why they seem trapped in this calm before the storm, where the aliens are that they've been warned about.

He asks his bridge crew, over and over, if their monitors are picking up anything unusual, anything new to report. The answers are invariably in the negative.

He leaves the bridge, then, with T'pol in command: a silent presence, the Vulcan ice goddess with her odd way of sprawling in the command chair. Malcolm watches her for a moment, remembering things that disturb him endlessly.

A breathy, hungry, desperate voice, ringing in his ears: "I've seen the way you look at me …"

The endlessly unattainable had been in his grasp … and he'd found that somehow, strangely, he didn't want it anymore. Despite the undeniable hunger of his body to do what she asked of him, to take what she was suddenly, inexplicably giving, it was so easy to refuse, to do his duty and leave the honour of the subcommander intact.

Can he attribute that … to Hoshi?

No … not just to Hoshi.

The incident with the cogenitor creeps up on his memory as well: a fellow armoury officer, a like mind in many ways, although certainly much more sure of herself … a woman who knew what she wanted and was more than capable of getting it, and himself a willing participant in the process.

That wasn't the part that had touched him, however his physicality had been involved in it. The sex was as it always was: strictly physical, a release of the body, leaving him emotionally unsatisfied, as it always did … although physically he'd had something to smirk about for some days at least.

Not that there'd been much smirking.

He'd felt too guilty for that.

Commander Tucker is the closest friend Malcolm thinks he has ever had. Trip can open him up, with the easy grace of his conversation, his casual charm; Trip can keep his secrets with the integrity of a gentleman of the old South. They can tease and know that neither will be hurt. They can fight, and say truly horrible things to each other, and still know that they are friends. This is the kind of true friendship that Malcolm has never before known, and treasures to his heart more deeply than almost anything else that he has found aboard the Enterprise.

And when this friend, this true friend, this best friend above all best friends, with whom he shares everything … needed him, could have used his help, his advice, something from him, he'd been off chasing a bit of tail in the armoury.

Malcolm is still disgusted with himself.

And then … the attack on Earth.

Malcolm can't help wondering if he damaged his friendship with Trip irreparably in the incident with "Charles" the cogenitor. Its suicide had hurt his friend deeply, changed his outlook on the universe in general and on his captain in particular; Malcolm wonders, if he had been more available for his friend at that first time of need, whether or not Trip would have been more ready to accept his empathy when the Xindi took out millions of human lives and stole the engineer's little sister away.

Now there is angry, vengeful, bitter Trip: a Trip Tucker Malcolm had never imagined could exist in his easygoing, cheerful, sometimes obnoxious best friend.

Malcolm is still his best friend; a Reed does not desert a sinking ship. Loyalty is everything, personal or professional.

The attack has changed so many people aboard the Enterprise. But not Malcolm. It's too strange, too abstract for Malcolm to understand. No one he knows has been taken. And the numbers … millions of people, killed … it's just too much for him to understand. Really, he doesn't need to. He's a soldier, fighting for a cause; the cause is freedom, the cause is justice, the cause is vengeance. He doesn't feel these things in the deeply personal way some of the others do. But he sees the pain in his best friend's face, watches his easygoing captain transformed into this agitated, angry, vengeance-driven person that he barely recognizes. And he's seen his fish out of water, his rose among dandelions, become a tigris in defense of the ship and its captain.

"Anyone who has a problem with Captain Archer and the Enterprise," she has said on more than one occasion, in a voice as hard as diamond, "will have to come through me."

Malcolm doubts that anyone will take her up on it.

He'd gone with Trip to visit the devastated remains of his Florida hometown. It hadn't been a good idea; it would bring home the images too hard, leave them seared into his friend's brain. Malcolm wonders what it's like – does Trip imagine her there, slipping into the chasm's mouth? Or touched by the same fires that hewed holes in the skin of the planet, perhaps … maybe he sees his sister Elizabeth with her flesh seared away, her bones melting in the intense heat of the blast. Maybe he sees his sister further away from the impact of the blast, fleeing for her life, knowing that death is coming but finding it inevitable … or trying vainly to save another's life, sacrificing herself in some way in the face of impending doom so that another could escape. Malcolm drops the chain of morbid imagination that he's been following; he has no way of guessing what's going on in Trip's head or what the deaths of those millions who were killed in the Xindi attack might have looked like.

Trip has not spoken much of his sister, neither before nor after her death. Malcolm has no idea what his friend sees in his mind's eye when he thinks of her.

On the return trip, Malcolm barely recognized his friend. The spine straight as though reinforced with steel, the eyes set at some distant point on the horizon – never looking at Malcolm, never looking back – the nostrils flared and quivering with suppressed anger and grief, his face frozen into a mosaic of vengeance.

Malcolm feels strangely adrift amidst these new crewmates. Only Travis Mayweather seems to understand.

"It's weird, isn't it?" he said softly to Malcolm over a half-hearted lunch the day before the Enterprise left dock. "It's just … weird."

Why Travis? Malcolm didn't know. Travis had lost family before, family he cared about deeply, so he could vaguely understand the losses of his crewmates, but he had no real identification with Earth as a planet. He hadn't been born there, he'd visited dozens of other worlds and spent almost as much time on them; he'd trained there for a brief stint before being posted to the NX-01, but that was all.

Malcolm wishes he knows the words to ask Travis what it feels like, being on the ship now. The rest of the crew have all suffered at the hands of the Xindi; their home has been violated. But not his home.

The rest of the crew … with a few exceptions.

Malcolm's glance slides away from his tactical board to touch on the woman in the command chair again. She is cool, serene, unconcerned, the essence of patience: a rock of Vulcan calm in a sea of humanity. Yes, she is beautiful … but he's come to learn that her beauty is like that of a finely constructed weapon, one that it is impossible to wield; it's the sort of beauty best admired … from a distance, not up close.

What are her motives? Why would she disobey direct orders from the Vulcan High Command to stay on board the ship?

Ship's gossip, according to Travis – Malcolm's source for all such nonsense whenever he happens to need it – is that Captain Archer has penetrated that façade of ice and logic and found a warm, yielding, sex-hungry babe beneath it. Travis's turn of phrase was remarkably adept; he found words to express both the rumour and his own somewhat contemptuous opinion of it at the same time.

Malcolm is inclined to agree with Travis. Between the captain and the science officer, he sees signs of nothing more intimate than a healthy respect between commanding officer and immediate inferior; a growing professional relationship with perhaps tinges of personal admiration but nothing even approaching a sexual or romantic level.

Malcolm also knows that he's hardly the person to go to for observations of that sort; but he feels adept enough to consider such an idea poppycock, at the very least.

Defying the orders of her home planet to remain aboard with her human crewmates … well, T'pol has certainly changed since the beginning as well.

Her contempt for humanity, the way she seemed to be barely containing her irritation with her assignment, replaced by the serene, patient logic … a woman of class and integrity who deals remarkably well with being trapped in a foreign environment, foreign culture, with the not unprejudiced eyes of a much younger species constantly on her (and often, on her posterior).

At first, T'pol was just … a sexy woman to fantasize about. Now she is a superior officer, a formidable creature in her own right, a person to be wondered about and probably never fathomed … with her own honour, which he has learned over the past two years of service is something to respect.