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Beta'd by BookQ36 and VesperRegina, to whom all due thanks!

Years of having to wake fully alert on missions had taught Malcolm Reed how to almost anticipate the alarm clock in his sleep patterns. If it was important that he wake at any specified hour, no matter how early, then he could be confident that his body would be already emerging from slumber by the time the chronometer beeped to alert him. Today was no different.

"Time to get up, sweetheart," he said, stretching.

Hoshi, however, had not enjoyed, or rather endured, the same hard training. As he touched the base of the bedside lamp to provide orientation in the unfamiliar environment of their hotel room, he looked down at her and found that she was anything but alert. She was rumpled and sleepy and kissable, so he turned over, snuggled down and began applying unfair tactics to get her to wake up.

"Umm... Malcolm...!"

"Yes?" he replied, although not very clearly, because it's hard to speak properly when your mouth's already occupied.

"Do you always wake up horny at this hour of the morning?"

"Only when I'm with you." It wouldn't have been really appropriate on ops. The thought made him grin; pity knew what nickname the team would have slapped on him if he'd made a habit of that.

For several minutes they both enjoyed his method of waking her up fully, but then she said she had to go to the bathroom. He did too, of course, but it was 'ladies first'. Then they both had to shower; usually they'd have shared one, but that would have risked it becoming protracted, which today they couldn't afford. So he showered as quickly as he could and set about making breakfast while Hoshi took her turn.

Normally, of course, they'd have got up at a more reasonable hour and eaten downstairs in the restaurant. Today, however, given that they were going to be out and away well before dawn, it was hardly reasonable to expect a cooked breakfast to be provided. He'd had a word with the hotel staff, and the small refrigerator in their room contained what he'd asked for – butter and cheese. A loaf of brown soda bread on a cutting board with a knife and plates rested on a sideboard, and there were already provisions for making tea and coffee.

He worked swiftly, and by the time his fiancée emerged from the bathroom their makeshift breakfast was set out ready on a small table. If there had seemed any point to doing so, he'd have taken it out on the balcony, but the world outside was still dark and the moon had set. He'd opened the French door, however, and left it ajar so that the ceaseless soft susurration of the waves whispered in, along with eddies of cool, salt-laden air.

"Brrr!" Still slightly damp from the shower, Hoshi's skin was more sensitive to the slight chill than it would ordinarily have been. She whipped a fluffy dressing gown from its hanger and wrapped it around herself, though not before accidentally giving him a view that in different circumstances would certainly have merited further investigation. Her sly smile when he returned his gaze to her face made him wonder if it had been so accidental.

"Is this all we're having?" she complained playfully, sitting down and picking up her plate, on which three slices of bread, butter and cheese now rested.

"Emergency rations. Fat, carbohydrate and protein. Eat it and be quiet, Ensign."

She pulled a face at him and began eating daintily.

He started on his own, but the sound of the sea was making him restless. After a few moments he picked up his plate and moved to the French door, where he looked out across the darkness of the ocean beyond the balcony. The faint radiance of a sky pocked with stars was reflected in the surface of the water, and far out towards the horizon a lighthouse blinked once and then a second time before retreating into invisibility. Twenty seconds elapsed between each double flash; he'd timed it yesterday evening. Ships no longer needed lighthouses, of course; automated navigation kept shipping well clear of underwater hazards. Nevertheless some countries kept to the tradition, and it was good to watch its steady, reassuring blink, knowing that it kept the faith with all those centuries where only visual aids had kept seagoing vessels safe.

There was movement behind him, and then Hoshi's arms slipped around his waist.

"This means an awful lot to you, doesn't it?" she said softly.

"Yes," he admitted. He'd already told her something of the reasons, when planning this trip back towards the misty islands where he'd been born. They'd already visited England, where he'd shown her the house where he'd been raised and the schools and University he'd attended; now they were in Ireland, where Maddie was currently working on a restoration project on Dublin Cathedral. But today's outing was something deeply personal, a visit he'd long hoped to share with the woman he meant to make his wife.

"Then we'd better get ready. Time's wasting." She kissed him and then went to start getting dressed.

He did the same, though he raised a sardonic eyebrow when he saw that she was putting on make-up. She already knew that where they were going would have very few visitors indeed at such an ungodly hour of the morning, so why she was bothering to impress a few seagulls – which were about the only souls they were likely to encounter – was beyond him. Still, this was one of the womanly mysteries which he'd had to learn to live with. She'd apparently taken no notice whatsoever of his informing her that without any make-up on at all – and better still, without anything else either – she was still the most beautiful woman in the world for him.

As they slipped out of the hotel front door into the silent street, his chronometer assured him that they were in good time. He knew pretty accurately how long it would take them to make the climb, but he'd had to factor in that they'd be moving over rough ground in poor lighting conditions. The moon would have helped, if it had still been up; the starlight did something, but not much. He sighed inwardly for conditions like those on worlds in more densely star-populated regions of the Milky Way, some of which Enterprise had visited. It had been a long time since he'd regarded Earth's night sky as 'full of bright stars', though he still thought of it as beautiful, because it was the sky of home.

They walked rapidly along the dark streets. It wasn't long until the buildings fell back and gave way to more open country. There was very little traffic along the road they were now following; only the odd flitter sped past, with its running lights warning pedestrians of its presence. Flitters too had automatic navigation, so there was no need for them to have headlights; you simply keyed in your destination and the onboard computers did the rest.

"Have you heard from Trip?" enquired Hoshi. "The last time I heard from Travis, they were cooking up this crazy scheme between them to run some modifications on his flitter. I think they must be kind of bored."

Malcolm grunted. "They were and they did. Travis disabled the nav-computer and fitted a manual steering wheel, and Trip redesigned the electronics. And like the pair of nit-wits they are, they used the HQ flitter-park as a test track."

"Oh, no." She gurgled. "Let me guess."

"Admiral Gardner's."

"NO!"

The captain suggested it might be a good idea if they didn't show their faces at HQ for a little while."

"As in, not till they ship out again?"

"Something like that." He grinned.

A gap in the wall on their left beckoned.

"This is where we turn off."

"Malcolm." Hoshi peered at the track in front of them. "I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this goes through woodland. In the dark. And I'm not trying to be a party-pooper here, but aren't we risking a couple of broken ankles?"

He grinned. "A tactical officer is always prepared." He delved into his rucksack and brought out two pairs of Enterprise's night-vision goggles. "I even got the captain's permission to borrow them."

"I'd love to know what reason you gave him." She gave him the puppy-dog eyes.

"I said they were a vital part of a romantic operation." He contrived to keep his face straight, with something of an effort.

She giggled. "I'd love to have seen his face."

"It was rather comical." As a matter of fact, Archer had just been taking his first swallow of coffee at breakfast, and had choked on it. Malcolm had timed his request perfectly to achieve that effect, though his expressions of remorse afterwards had been beautifully simulated. Even now, few people on board ship knew that he had a lively sense of humour; his keeping that fact very well concealed was one way of ensuring that his practical jokes hit with maximum impact.

The goggles made a huge difference, of course. Now she'd be able to see the track clearly, just as he could: winding off to the left towards the belt of woodland whose trees he could now make out individually as opposed to forming one big block of darkness.

"I knew I put my make-up on for something," she remarked, glancing up at him cheekily.

"It doesn't stop me appreciating the rest of the view." He kissed her lingeringly, even though the goggles bumped a bit. Then, realising that time was getting on and didn't stop for snogging, he led the way on to the track.

It was just as well that he'd thought to bring the goggles. Although reasonably level, the path was only of flattened earth and therefore had tussocks of grass in it as well as the odd large stone firmly embedded here and there. Out in the open they could have managed well enough, now their natural night vision had adapted to the loss of even the minimal street lighting, but once they got into the woods they'd have had to walk with extreme care. The path was open enough, leading upwards in a series of lazy zig-zags through the trees, but water coursing down it when it rained had worn grooves in the earth, and around the edges trails of brambles lurked to snag the unwary traveller.

"Onions!" said Hoshi, startled, stopping just inside the woodland's edge. "I can smell onions! Or is it garlic?"

"Ramsons. Wild garlic. Edible in a salad, if you're interested." He pointed to the thick green leaves, broken where they'd been trodden on. "Though I wouldn't recommend those particular ones."

"I'd take some back for T'Pol but I don't suppose they'd last till we see her again."

"Probably not." Enterprise had been recalled because of the latest rumours about the Romulans, along with several other vessels. He hadn't bothered looking up for the ship in orbit, however, because she was off at the Jupiter yards getting upgrades. Captain Archer was still at HQ, immersed in official talks; T'Pol had gone to Vulcan, presumably for more of the same. The rest of the crew were taking advantage of the lull to snatch their accumulated leave allowances, which was why he and Hoshi had caught a Transatlantic flight and were spending a few days in the British Isles.

The two of them began following the track upwards. It was an easy ascent, the looping of the path helping to keep the gradient gradual. After a while, they reached the upper edge of the wood, and found a gateway that led onto a far broader trail that bore straight upwards towards the summit of the hill. This path was uncompromising, seeming to have been imposed on the land by some unfriendly giant hand, unlike the way through the woods which ambled to and fro as if more interested in the journey than in actually getting anywhere.

"This is new," said Malcolm in a low voice; more from a mild reluctance to disturb the silence unnecessarily than from any expectation that there was anyone around to hear him. "When I was here before, the path just kept going off to the left. I remember it, because it went through a load of gorse and bracken, and the horse-flies bit the b... bit me a lot."

He sensed, rather than saw, her smile, because she put her head down to hide it. His attempts – sometimes rather belated – to keep his language relatively polite in the presence of a lady, in accordance with the Reed tradition, weren't always successful. When ladies were not present to be offended, Royal Navy slang had been in common usage in his childhood household; for example, it was not at all unusual to hear a report of high winds in from the Atlantic being described in such picturesque terms as 'It's blowing a bastard off the Pond.'

"Well, there shouldn't be any flies about at all this early in the morning. That's one good reason for getting up before dawn. Though there'd better be another one, Malcolm Reed, or you're going to hear about it for the rest of the day!"

He smiled down at her gently. "I'm confident you'll think it's worth it."

"Malcolm." She took his hand. "If this means as much to you as I think it does, then whatever it is, I'll think it's more than worth it."

A glance forwards and upwards told him that time was getting on. The sky that had been uniformly dark was now slightly paler, and the skyline of treetops above and in front of him was now visible against it. "We'd better get a move on, if you're up for it."

"I can keep up." They grinned at each other, and set off at a good pace up the path. Now that they were in the open they had far less need for the goggles, but they were still useful to show up unevennesses underfoot.

The top of the path gave way to broken rocky ground, where a few sparse coniferous trees made a copse, and then beyond that their way suddenly narrowed and led between high stands of gorse bushes. Their speed dropped accordingly. Malcolm took the lead, and did his best to hold back the more aggressive gorse twigs from whipping back after him and hitting Hoshi – though she seemed more worried by the potential presence of spiders than the possible scratches from the spiny bushes.

"You've gone through all we did in outer space and you're worried about spiders?" he teased.

"Not many of the things we met out there got into my clothes by accident and started tickling me."

"Well I did, but that wasn't by accident."

"No, and you weren't tickling, as I recall."

"I certainly wasn't trying to. I had much more interesting things on my mind."

"We all know what's on your mind."

"Yes. Explosions. I'm very good at causing explosions. I believe you found that out fairly shortly."

She burst into giggles. "I was never able to go back into the Observation Lounge afterwards without thinking of it."

"I was never able to go into the Observation Lounge afterwards without getting a –"

"MALCOLM!"

He threw back his head and laughed. It felt wonderful, just being able to laugh aloud for joy and not care who heard it. "Come on. Just the last bit now, and then you can have a rest."

"A rest! I'll bet I beat you to the top."

"I'll bet you don't."

When they reached the far side of the gorse patch the track got a little steeper and more treacherous, until it joined what looked like the remains of an old cart track buried among the waist-high bracken. How anyone had ever got a wheeled vehicle up here was something that boggled the imagination, but the rusted remnants of what had once been a gate still adhered to a stone pillar, proving that the track had once led somewhere.

"Nothing there. We go this way." The path took a sharp left turn, and a minute or so later emerged onto relatively open ground, where it began bending strongly to the right around a large rocky outcrop.

"Race you to the top!" cried Hoshi, obviously sensing by the levelling of the gradient that they hadn't far to go now.

"Hoshi, you'll break your ankles in this light! Hoshi–!" But it was too late. She'd already sprinted ahead, obviously pinning far too much faith in the ability of her goggles in the thin pre-dawn light to show her the way clearly.

He broke into a run after her, and stopped two paces into it when loud noises from the rucksack he was carrying reminded him that he'd brought up a bottle of wine and two glasses. He'd wedged them apart with a few napkins before setting out, but his preparations hadn't been adequate to withstand the jouncing about at the run. He'd be lucky now if he wasn't carrying a bottle of wine and several dozen broken shards.

"If you break both your legs don't come running to me!" he shouted unromantically after her, the irony quite deliberate. He squatted and opened the neck of the rucksack, feeling the contents anxiously and with extreme care, expecting at any moment to feel a sharp edge slice into his fingertips. He didn't seriously expect her to come to any harm, and he didn't care if she did get to the summit before him, but he desperately wanted the glasses to be intact. It was part of the plan he'd been evolving in his mind, and every detail mattered.

Whatever guardian angel was on duty in that particular part of the world on that particular morning had evidently intervened on his behalf. By some miracle the glasses were both intact. He felt more deeply into the recesses of the rucksack, and found two other objects. One was a scanner (also borrowed from Enterprise, much to the captain's added bemusement), and the other was something he'd had delivered very secretly to the hotel the day before, and smuggled into their room while Hoshi was enjoying an hour in the sauna downstairs. He might have been able to bear taking turns to swig wine from the bottle, but the contents of this particular package featured in a plan that would have been completely ruined by the merest possibility that it might have become contaminated by slivers of broken glass from above.

Feeling slightly shaky with relief, he straightened up and began walking more sedately along the path. Exactly as he'd remembered, it curved around the outcrop, passing a low white wall that protected walkers from the drop on the left hand side, and then opened on to a low saddle of about fifty metres between this rocky height and another, nearer the sea, which was the one he was aiming for. A slight figure was picking her way up the rocks of that other height, evidently thinking he was close behind her.

"Silly mare," he said fondly, watching her scramble to the top and look around to see where he was.

"Yoo-hoo!" Her voice came across to him. "Told you I'd beat you!"

"I was handicapped!" he yelled back, lifting the rucksack. "Take your bloody goggles off before you go blind!" For now that they were at the very top of the hill, the light was growing stronger every minute, and he followed his own advice in a hurry. The sensors built into the goggles had been compensating for the reduced demand, but they were incapable of stopping working altogether.

He paused to allow his own eyesight to adjust, and then quickly found a way down off the path onto the saddle, which was covered in thin turf dotted with patches of heather. Having satisfactorily established her superiority, Hoshi came back to meet him just as he reached the foot of the last piece of rocky ground before the top.

"I didn't turn around," she said breathlessly. "I thought you'd be right behind me."

"I have my reasons," he responded, and kissed her. "Come on."

They scrambled up together, laughing, and moments later they emerged on to the stony plateau at the summit.

He caught his breath. The view was just as he remembered it: the coast curving away north in a long, softly sweeping bay, until some point of land cropped out to end the bay abruptly. Further north, far beyond that, a long and far larger jut of land reached out into the sea, its darkness relieved by lights now starting to look thin as the pre-dawn light began flooding into the sky. When one looked back, the town they'd come from was an indistinct area of half-seen shapes, threaded with sparse rows of street-lights, and beyond them fold on fold of hills was growing out of the darkness, putting on the first infinitely faint suggestions of green. Southward, the coastal massif continued for at least several kilometres, merging into the dim distance.

At the very highest point of the plateau stood an old concrete plinth. Stumps of corroded metal rods in the middle of it said that one day, long ago, something had stood here, but whatever it had been had vanished long since, probably at some point during one of the wars which had taken Earth's civilisation to the brink of oblivion.

At a guess, sunrise was perhaps ten minutes away. He led Hoshi quickly to the seaward side of the mount, finding a grassy apron that offered comfortable lying, and they both sat down. He put the rucksack between them and brought out the bottle of wine and the glasses. The other things would remain in it for a while longer.

"You think of everything." She smiled lovingly at him.

"Wait till I make sure I've brought the corkscrew before you say that." He pretended to hunt through his jacket pockets, and waited till her expression became one of comical apprehension before finding it miraculously in his jeans pocket instead. "Oh! Fancy it being in there!"

"Malcolm Reed, you're a rotten tease!"

"Oh, I'm a tease, am I? And what were YOU doing in that dressing gown this morning?" He grinned, and she slapped him playfully. "Watch out, if I spill this I'll make you pay for it."

"You could try." Fortunately she was suitably sobered by the threat to withhold further hostilities, settling instead for sensibly holding the glasses steady while he poured the wine into them – the turf seemed level enough, but there was no point in taking risks.

The glasses filled, he handed one to her, set the bottle and the rucksack aside, and moved over to put his arm around her. In front of them the light was growing ever stronger, and the sea was taking on colour: mostly green, infinitely dark, patterned here and there with tiny pale frills of foam. He didn't taste the wine, but sat looking down into it for a moment before he began to speak.

"I came here once before, years ago," he said, in a quiet voice. "I'd been ... in a dark place for a long time. I felt lost. Dirty. Hopeless. I was someone I didn't want to be, but I couldn't imagine any way to change. Every so often I'd cut loose, go on the rip, get more damaged and get reeled in again, just because the ... they were the only people who wanted what I was.

"Then one time when I'd slipped the Section's leash I came to see Maddie. I don't know what I thought I was doing, what it could possibly have achieved. Apart from upsetting her, of course, but I was past caring about that... I got on the train, smashed out of my brain; passed out, missed the station and woke up down there." He nodded in the direction of the town. "I didn't know where I was or what I was doing. I just wandered about, lost, in the middle of the night, wanting everything to be over. I even tried wading into the sea, but that didn't work." He stopped, laughing painfully. He'd been too afraid of drowning even to commit suicide.

Her arm tightened around his waist, but she said nothing. He forced himself to continue.

"I don't know why I climbed up here. Why does a drunk do anything? Because it was there, I suppose. It's bloody steep in parts, coming up the front way. In hindsight I'm amazed I didn't fall down and break my neck. But I got up here somehow. Stinking and snivelling. I was a right wreck."

He stared out to sea. A line of 'mare's tail' clouds had appeared just above the horizon, and they were now tinted with gold. The clear bowl of the sky had taken on an apricot hue.

"Anyway, I got up here. I sat down just about here and cried, because everything was so beautiful and I was so wrong and I didn't want to be part of anything any more. And then the sun came up.

"I knew you're not supposed to look directly at it, so as soon as it was over the horizon and in the sea-haze I looked up, above it. And there was this one bright object, too big to be a star. I thought it was a planet. Then I realized it was moving. And by the size, it was a starship."

A spark of gold now lit on the horizon and a path of fire ignited on the dark surface of the sea. Somewhere on the cliffs below them, a seagull cried, its voice piercing and remote.

"And I felt – I've never known why – that somehow, somebody was showing me something. That there was a way out. That I had to 'face the light and let the shadows fall behind me'. That I could have a future."

He turned away from the brightening, dazzling gold and looked into her eyes. "I never dreamed that that future could hold anything as precious as you, Hoshi. But now I have you I'll never let you go, never let you down. I'll love you till the day I die. And that's why I wanted to bring you here, to tell you that and make you that promise. Hoshi Sato, I swear to you, I love you with everything that I am. You're the whole world to me."

Tears were leaking down her face, for his pain and his redemption; for the moving star above the sunrise that had offered him hope when he had nothing. He kissed them away.

Then they drank the wine, which still had a little of the chill left on it from a night in the refrigerator; and though in defiance of the gathering threat of war their first toast was to their future happiness, they clinked glasses afterwards to 'absent friends'. The sun rose further, and although it was now impossible to look at it directly they shared the joy of seeing every moment how the jewel colours of the sea brightened and changed, and how the mare's tail clouds slowly grew more and more attenuated and then vanished altogether. It was going to be a beautiful day.

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