Sato
The first whisper of rain on the veranda roof wakens me.
Everyone else sleeps on.
I run a swift head count. All the family are present. Even that horrible cousin of Trip's has come back, so presumably he decided not to try fishing after all. He's lying in his chair with a half-finished can of beer slipping out of one hand. His head's tipped back, his mouth's open and a line of dribble lies on his jaw and neck like the glistening trail of a snail. His breathing's loud, but at least he's not snoring. Yet.
Malcolm's lounger is still empty.
My chronometer says more than an hour has passed, and punctuality is one of Malcolm's obsessions. You'd think 'Thou shalt turn up at least five minutes early for Bridge Duty' was the Eleventh Commandment. Actually it probably is, in his bible. I can't remember how many times he's given me The Look as I dash to my station with seconds to spare, and Travis hides a grin as he looks down at his helm controls. (T'Pol doesn't say anything, but I know she's just watching everything and probably thinking the Vulcan equivalent of 'Business as usual'.)
The bad feeling deepens. Well, yes, I know that we're on holiday, and 'An hour, max' doesn't mean here what it would aboard Enterprise. It's perfectly possible that Malcolm has just found a comfortable patch of shady grass and nodded off, and that I'm worrying over nothing. If that's the case it'll probably take a couple of minutes for the rain to work its way through whatever tree he's under and wake him up, and then he'll dash back to the house before his clothes get spoiled.
The rain gets heavier. In the distance I hear the first rumble of thunder, and already there are pushes of the fresher air from the advancing cold front.
No Malcolm.
Maybe he's hiding out somewhere till it passes over. Storms here are fierce, but they don't last long.
The anxiety in my chest makes me too desperate to wait. Gently I detach myself from Trip without waking him.
There are umbrellas in a stand in the hallway, but toting an umbrella in a thunderstorm isn't the best idea, even though there are plenty of trees about which would hopefully present a more attractive target for lightning. Luckily, the Tuckers have been decorating one of the bedrooms this week and off to one side of the veranda there's a neat pile of painting accoutrements waiting to be used again. Including a rolled-up tarpaulin.
I make the best use I can of the overhang of the eaves to get as far away from the veranda as I can before I unroll the tarp. To me the sound of it slithering open is deafening, but there's no sign of movement from the Tuckers.
The lake's no more than a stone's throw away. Part of the shoreline is clearly visible between the trees.
Wincing from the thought of what the soaking will do to my new sandals, I pull the tarpaulin over my head and scurry down the lawn. The cover saves me from the worst of the soaking, but I have to see where I'm going, and for all that I hold the edges of the plastic together as best I can, I can feel the hem of my dress starting to get heavy and slap wetly around my ankles. A voice inside me is scolding me for ruining my clothes when it's practically a certainty that I'll find our ultra-prepared Tactical Officer sitting snug and dry in some bolt-hole ready to laugh his socks off at me when I turn up panicking like a mommy who's mislaid her toddler, but another, louder voice is screaming Hurry, hurry, hurry! And that's the one I heed as I run down the track towards the lake, choking down the urge to call out his name because that terrible feeling inside me says there won't be any reply…
I find myself running down the shoreline towards the water almost before I expect to, and the pain of the gravel spewing into my sandals makes me stagger. Nevertheless, my frantic scan of the edge of the lake shows me the jetty a little distance away, and sitting on the end of it a motionless sodden figure in beige clothes.
I'm so relieved I almost sob as I scramble back towards the grassy bank-top. He's alive, and that's all that matters. Something is wrong, something's terribly wrong, but he's alive. Anything else, we can fix. I don't care what it takes. I love him and Trip, and I don't care who finds out about it. I just want him to be okay.
Still, it doesn't take an engineer to see that the jetty's in a dangerous condition; I'm surprised he's gone out on it at all, but maybe that's another of the pointers to how wrong things are with him. Nipping my lower lip between my teeth (Okasan always used to scold me for that, saying it would spoil my looks), I take off my sandals and shake the gravel out of them before I start walking carefully along the planks, keeping to the side where the wood looks just a little sounder and I can see the line of the metal rail underneath.
I'm pretty sure he knows I'm here, even though the sound of the wind in the trees and the rain hitting the lake is a wall of noise in my ears. As I get closer I see he's sitting cross-legged as though he's meditating, but I can't believe that a Tibetan monk could achieve such a trance that he wouldn't even know he was out in a thunderstorm. And Malcolm, as I have every reason to know, is no monk.
By now my dress is past saving anyway. With only a little grimace I sit down on the wet planking beside him and hurriedly throw the tarp over the both of us.
I want to open with some cheesy line about him developing pneumonia, but the truth is I know he probably won't do any such thing. It's more than likely he'll catch a cold and turn grouchy about his blocked nose, but that's about the worst we can expect. (If all I have to worry about is a blocked nose and a few sneezes, I can live with that; after all, a Malcolm feeling sorry for himself is a Malcolm more amenable to being tucked into his bunk and offered strenuous exercise to help him sweat the fever out.)
Basic Starfleet training tells us to establish our situation before we act, so it seems like a good idea to take a good long look at my companion before I say anything.
Well, he's wet. He could hardly be wetter if he'd been dunked in the lake and fished out of it again, but he seems utterly unaware of it. He doesn't even acknowledge my existence, just sits there staring blindly into the water, and his face is absolutely rigid as though he can see something horrible down there beyond the dimpled surface that he can't look away from.
"Malcolm, talk to me," I say gently.
For a couple of minutes he doesn't say anything. He hardly even seems to breathe. Finally, "It's over, Ensign."
Whatever I was expecting to hear, this wasn't it. I just sit there staring at him, while the water runs out of his hair and down his face, and he doesn't even blink it away.
This change – this sensation that someone took the real Malcolm Reed away and I'm talking to some awful stranger wearing his face – is so overwhelming that I simply can't process it. What the hell has happened over the past hour to the man who left the veranda?
"You can't do this," I say at last. Which is such a cliché, but it's all I can think. Dumb, too, because he can, and I know that, and he knows that, but I just don't want to admit it.
He turns his face towards me, and the look on it is one I've never seen before. Gone is the tenderness, the passion, the playfulness, the friendliness, the protectiveness, anything at all that I've ever seen there. In their place is a cold ruthlessness that doesn't give a damn how I feel. The face of an executioner stares back at me from the man with whom I was thinking of planning a future. "I made a mistake. I should never have let myself forget the rules … become involved. And now I'm setting matters right. It's over. It's as simple as that."
"'Simple'?" At first all I can feel is pain, but at that word it's swallowed up in a volcanic rush of fury. "That's the best word you can find for it, is it, Malcolm? That's all we are to you … a mistake?"
I want to believe that something – Regret? Remorse? – flickers behind the gray glass of his eyes; that for just the barest sliver of time, I recognize him again. But there's not even a hint of softening. He's as hard and implacable as a glacier as he turns away from me again. "I naturally regret any unhappiness this may cause you."
Bastard. He doesn't even have the decency to say it to my face! He stares at the other side of the lake, and speaks like he's dictating a letter to someone he's refusing to lend money to.
If I obeyed my first impulse I'd put both hands to his back and send him head-first into the water, hoping to hell he'd drown in it. That said, it'd be tough on the Tuckers, having that amount of pollution in their lake. As for any alligator he happened to encounter, well personally I'd feel sorry for the alligator which ate this poisonous little reptile. He'd give a saltwater crocodile the bellyache.
'First impulses are usually the wrong impulses.' A certain English guy of my acquaintance first taught me that expression when he was taking the senior officers through tactical drill aboard Enterprise. Not that shoving him into the lake head-first feels like a wrong impulse right now – in fact it feels like the best idea I've had in years – but I struggle to control my rage. Nothing about this is right. This is not Malcolm talking, and I won't damn well believe he could do this to us. Something's happened to him, something that (in his standard stubborn-assed way) he's just dealing with on his own. I don't, I won't believe that he could just decide 'That's it, it's over.'
Well. I pause, revising that. Maybe he could, because he's a worry-wart and he's been scared from the start that it'd end in disaster. But end it like this, with this brutality, without giving a damn for either my pain or Trip's – no. Not in a million years. No.
No, Malcolm Reed. You can sit there doing your damned Terminator impersonation for all you're worth and I'm not buying it.
But on the other hand, if you think I have you'll forget about me. You'll think I'm off your case. And happy in that certainty, you'll think Trip and I are going to take solace in each other and just be sorry you're not at the other damned end of the planet. That will give you the free hand you evidently want, and you won't be worrying about us at all. With any luck, you'll forget about both of us completely.
You've done too good a job, my tactical friend, my cunning lover. I don't take anything at face value anymore – not even you.
The movement of his head as he turns it to look at me again is like watching one of the phase cannons rotate on its mounting. "You may as well go back to the house. I told you. It's over."
"Fine." I use his word deliberately as I backhand him across the face. The print of my fingers flames against his colorless skin. "Go to hell and be damned, you asshole. I'm just sorry we wasted our time on you."
He's really good at this. His eyes don't even flicker this time. But as he turns away again, I see the tiny betraying movement of a single muscle in his jaw.
He knows he's done it. He turns the movement into a spiteful little grin instead as he pantomimes rubbing his cheek. "Go fuck your other lover-boy instead. I'm sure you won't miss me for long. The two of you can have an entertaining time comparing notes on what a little shit I am."
"Wouldn't waste the paper on you."
Dragging the tarpaulin off him again, I spring to my feet. I don't have to pretend to be furious, I damn well am furious – furious that yet again he can't trust us, that he can't confide in us, that he's trying to take something on all by himself instead of sharing the burden with the people who love him. But there again, I might as well be furious with him for having black hair, because this obsessive protectiveness is who he is. The person I'm really furious with is whoever's got some kind of leverage on him and is using it to break us apart. And in view of the fact there's only one person that I know of who spoke to him in the short space of time when he apparently 'changed his mind', then I've definitely got my suspicions of who's to blame.
"Have a nice life, Malcolm," I spit. Then, before I can get too far into the swing of acting the betrayed lover, I turn and march back towards the house. I'll have to hope I can get upstairs and have a shower without anyone seeing me, there's no other way I can account for being soaked to the skin. I can say I spilled a glass of wine on myself or something, and had to change. My dress and sandals – ah, whatever. They'll dry out I guess. Right now I have much more urgent things on my mind than clothes.
Out-tactic'ing the best Tactical Officer in the Fleet. Yeah, Hoshi, you haven't set yourself much of a job there. But maybe Trip'll be able to help. Unlike some people around here, I'm a believer in the old saying about a shared problem. And Trip didn't get where he is aboard Enterprise by being dumb. Actually he's one of the smartest people I know, and he's going to get the works as soon as we're alone together – if not exactly the sort of works he'll probably be expecting.
So hang on to your illusions a while longer, Malcolm.
You don't get rid of us that easily.
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