There being nothing to be achieved by lurking around outside Sickbay and further antagonizing his CMO, Jonathan returned to the Bridge. T'Pol went to the Science Station, saying she needed to study the reports from Engineering on the condition of the shuttlepod; there were reports waiting for him in his Ready Room – one thing that never, ever varied was the number of reports that apparently required nothing less than a captain's signature to pass muster – but right now he couldn't imagine himself sitting down and reading more than a sentence of the first.

But there seemed little point in sitting in his chair when there was nothing to see and no orders to give, and no prospect of anyone saying anything he needed to hear. So, the Ready Room it was.

But once in there, he regretted his decision. It was always a little cramped, and whoever had designed the height of the ceiling had plainly not given a moment's thought to the possibility that the captain who would one day occupy the room might be taller than your average ten-year-old. Although it had been irritating at first, he'd gotten used to it, and most days he just ducked his head in the appropriate places without much thought.

Not today.

Today he felt caged in. His grief was tearing him asunder. He'd sent Trip out in that shuttlepod and Trip was dead. He'd hired Malcolm Reed to keep his crew safe and Reed had murdered one of them.

He pulled up the reports on his Tactical Officer and started going through them. School reports, outstanding, Academy reports, outstanding. Qualifications, top in every field. Then you hit the brick wall. Classified, classified, classified. Personnel reports, redacted. Commendations from his commanding officers, redacted. Verified by Starfleet, true, but who had those officers been? Where had he served? What he done, dammit? Where had he served? Where had he been?

Who was he?

Jon rested his elbows on the desk and dropped his head into his hands. He should be acting like Captain Archer, not Captain Ahab. He'd always been driven by his emotions (AG had warned him about that, back in the day, late one memorable evening at the 602 Club), but he'd believed he was getting better, was starting to act in a way more in keeping with the rank he occupied. A captain should think with his head before his heart, and though he'd probably always be driven by his gut feelings to some extent, he thought he was getting that aspect of his captaincy under control.

But how were you supposed to keep your feelings under control when your best buddy had been just … slaughtered? By his own junior officer, a guy who'd always led you to believe his whole soul lay in keeping the ship safe?

What did you have to be to kill a man like Trip, a man you'd worked with and eaten with and watched movies with?

What sort of a mask did you have to wear, to cover that sort of evil as successfully as Reed had done?

Innocent till proven guilty. The inescapable words rang in his head, their note as false as that of an ill-cast bell. The beat of his heart said killer, killer, killer.

He'd never been good at patience. But Phlox couldn't protect Reed forever.

And then – however the revelation might wring him – he'd find out what had happened, if he had to tear the Brit limb from limb to get at the truth.

=/\=

But time had to be got through somehow, so he tackled the reports after all; tried to be interested in the fact that crew efficiency had improved by 0.42% in the previous month, and that Crewman Shelley had reported a recurring squeak in the flooring on E Deck (presumably the one in here had migrated). Astrometrics had handed in a preliminary report on the composition of the largest asteroid in the cluster Enterprise had been investigating when they'd had that encounter with the Tesnian ship, apparently claiming it contained news that would rock the scientific community back on its heels – he'd pass that one on to T'Pol when all this was over with, maybe it'd rock her back on her heels but it sure wasn't doing anything for him right now.

Reports, reports, reports. Read and forgotten, scanned without seeing, words, words and pictures, when all the words he could hear were Trip, Trip and all the pictures were of his buddy sprawled dead across that damned bench, his face still frozen in a grimace of pain and terror.

He couldn't sit still. He abandoned the reports and paced around his Ready Room instead, smashing his fists against the walls occasionally. This captaincy was all he'd ever wanted, the culmination of his father's dream; and it had cost Trip his life, at the hands of his own junior officer.

The chime sounded. "Sickbay to Captain Archer."

He almost leaped across the room to answer it. "Archer."

The voice at the other end sounded tired but resigned. "Mister Reed is ready to speak to you now, Captain. Whenever it should be convenient."

Yes!

He covered the distance to the door in two strides. The heads around the Bridge came up like those of startled deer, but he had eyes only for T'Pol. At a guess she was still going through those reports. It wasn't like Vulcans had close friends, or grieved at a death; death, after all, was inevitable, so wouldn't they consider grief 'illogical'?

His hours cooped up in the Ready Room with only his anguish for company had ramped up his fading resentment against the Vulcan interloper on his ship, the XO who'd seemed more interested in defending the criminal than seeking justice for the victim. But as she looked up he saw the sternly-controlled sympathy in her eyes, and realized with a pang of shame that her conduct had indeed been more professional than his own during the previous visit to Sickbay; and resolved as he followed her into the turbo-lift that he'd do all he could to act as the captain he was supposed to be, no matter what the provocation to come.

Her initial, terse summary of the reports from Engineering as the elevator carried them down was illuminating. The shuttle had been undamaged apart from two tiny holes in the hull, suggesting something extremely small and of incredible density had passed straight through it, rupturing the larger of the oxygen cylinders. The holes had first been plugged from within with, of all things, mashed potato (presumably from one of the meals the shuttlepod carried as emergency rations), later replaced with valve sealant, but the loss of oxygen had been critical, the contents of that cylinder irreplaceable. It explained why the shuttlepod had been so bitterly cold; the officers inside it had clearly had to make the choice between keeping warm or diverting the additional power to the atmosphere recyclers in order to make their now desperately short supply of air last a little longer.

This would undoubtedly have been the incident that had forced them to the equally-desperate expedient of blowing up their impulse drive. With comms down, they had no way of alerting Enterprise to their danger. Their only means of signaling had been to use the one thing that would create an energy signature on T'Pol's scanner – a cry for help they didn't even know had been seen, or would be answered.

When Jon and T'Pol entered Sickbay, sure enough Reed seemed a little more 'together' than he'd done earlier; the shock was done with. Although he looked gray, when the interview began he spoke readily enough, his voice low and level. When questioned, he answered promptly and fully, though never – not once – giving any detail that could be described as personal. It was as though all the humanity in him had bled out into those damned recordings he'd made, and left behind a machine that recorded events without a single iota of passion.

"We've listened to the recordings you made, Lieutenant," Jon cut in, as Reed started to speak about the incident where the shuttle was punctured and the air cylinder rendered useless. "Seems like you and Commander Tucker weren't exactly getting along by that point."

He saw the swallow. The recital that had been steady slowed a little, as though the Englishman was now choosing his words with particular care. "I believe that the commander – took exception to my desire to avoid leaving unfinished business behind me. Business of a personal nature."

"Even with your parents."

Faint color had risen into the colorless cheeks at the mention of 'personal matters'; doubtless he'd never believed he'd still be alive when those recordings were played back. But at the mention of his parents it ebbed away again, leaving him the color of one long dead. "As I explained to the commander, sir, my relationship with my family was … not a close one. The crew of Enterprise was beginning to feel like the family I'd never had. And I believed – we believed – you were all dead."

That, at least, had the ring of truth about it. It tallied with the recordings, and unless Reed had intended from the beginning (for some incalculable reason of his own) to use the outing in the shuttlepod as an opportunity to murder his senior officer, there would have been no reason for him then to have recorded anything other than the truth as he saw it.

"So you quarreled."

"No, sir." The too-careful voice was still steady. "I would say that we came to a better understanding, actually. It wasn't a good situation to find ourselves in, and I won't deny that some of the things the commander said were personally hurtful. But he conducted himself for the most part in a completely professional manner."

"'For the most part'," T'Pol observed. "In what part do you feel that he failed?"

The saddest, bitterest smile Jon had ever seen flickered briefly across Reed's mouth. "We knew by then you were still alive. He never lost hope that Enterprise would come in time, at least for one of us. I think he simply couldn't bear to be cooped up with the Angel of Death – and told me so."

Jon shut his eyes. "And that was why you killed him."

The reply was too long in coming. When it finally came, it was no more than a whisper. "He tried to throw himself out of the airlock so I'd survive, and I stopped him. I was sure you'd come in time, sure you'd see our engine explode and understand … so I forced him down at gunpoint."

"You had no way of knowing that we had seen it, Lieutenant. You were therefore reducing your chances of survival." T'Pol sounded puzzled.

"Survival alone!" Muted fire flashed. "I told you, Sub-Commander, the crew – the ship's crew – were the family I'd never really had. And I told him– I said–"

"Go on, Lieutenant. You are under caution, and this is important," she prompted gently.

The man in the bed looked down at his bandaged left hand. The fingers of his undamaged right hand were plucking distressfully at a stray thread he'd managed to pull loose. When he finally spoke, his voice was even lower than before. "I told him – that I'd invested far too much time in trying to understand him, and that I wasn't about to accept it was all for nothing."

There was a silence. Jon sat trying to process all this into a picture that made sense. He could believe without any difficulty that Trip had made the attempt to kill himself in order to save a junior officer's life, though the thought of the ultra-disciplined tactical officer effectively mutinying against it took some stretching of the imagination. He hadn't thought that the bond between the two men was anything like that close. Sure, they worked together reasonably well, but they'd only known each other for what – seven months? Hardly long enough to become anything like bosom buddies, given Reed's extreme reticence.

But maybe that was the real root of the issue here. A man like Reed keeps the rest of the world at bay so effectively that if ever his defenses are breached, he simply doesn't know how to handle it.

Since the start of the voyage, Jon had never really managed to get a handle on his tactical officer's inner workings. He was so much a walking rule-book that the man quite effectively hid behind the shell. That hadn't seemed to matter so much at first, because there was no doubt that he was an extremely efficient officer who ran a tight team and was respected by the people he commanded; his CO had hoped, however, that an opportunity would eventually present itself to get to know him a little better. Perhaps they could have breakfast one of the days, and see if casual conversation could get him to venture even a little way out of his shell. Sport might be an effective ice-breaker – all Brits were crazy about soccer, and the sports reports said the World Cup competition was running right now. The captain knew next to nothing about it, but was always ready to be interested if that was what it took.

Well. That was never going to happen now. But along with all the rest of his hidden side, Reed's sexual leanings were a mystery too.

Had he fallen in love with Trip?

If so, it was doomed. Jon was as sure as he possibly could be that Trip had been strictly heterosexual. But the idea introduced all sorts of ugly possibilities into the mix.

Reed could have been driven by the desperation of their situation into confessing his feelings for the other man.

If that had happened – how would Trip have reacted?

Under ordinary circumstances, there could be no doubt that however surprised he might have been he'd have handled the situation with professionalism and compassion; he'd suffered enough heartaches of his own to feel for another man's pain. Now, however–

Had some form of rejection led to tragedy?

Still waters run deep, was the saying. Reed was still, there was no doubt of that; his Starfleet records said he was also deep.

Deep enough to love in silence, showing nothing till there was nothing else left to show?

The fingers were still worrying and tearing at the thread. Jon stared at them, picturing them wet with Trip's blood.

"How did Commander Tucker react to your intervention?" T'Pol's voice was cool. How deeply he envied her lack of feeling.

The lieutenant rested his head back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. "He threatened to 'bust my ass back to Crewman Second Class for insubordination'."

Somehow the English voice had acquired the faintest hint of a Floridian accent. It was less the sound of the vowels than the speed at which he produced them, but somehow he conjured up the very picture of an infuriated Trip, leaning down out of the airlock to bawl out a junior officer who was defying him.

The picture was so real that Jon suddenly couldn't stand it anymore. The backs of his eyes were burning with unshed tears. "Stop the damned interview," he said huskily. "Just – just let's all take a break."

Reed said nothing. Phlox nodded, clearly relieved.

T'Pol surveyed him with eyes that suspended judgment on the frailties of Human emotion. "I believe that it would be in order for the interview to be suspended for ten minutes."

Jon didn't wait to hear any more. He walked out of Sickbay and headed for his private Mess, his strides down the corridors so long that she almost had to run to keep up with him.

She headed to the drinks dispenser, while he almost fell into a chair at his table. It was too late to stop the tears and he didn't try, but sobbed aloud into his hands.

The spasm was violent, but brief. He was already pulling himself together by the time she set down a mug of steaming coffee in front of him.

The stuff was too sweet, and so strong it was almost undrinkable, but as he sipped cautiously at it he could feel the heat of it burning down to his stomach, bolstering him. He watched her quietly take measured sips of her own drink – peppermint tea, by the smell – and was grateful for her practicality. She'd brought a couple of napkins from the dispenser and placed them silently on the table, and when he'd downed about half the contents of his mug he set it down and wiped away the worst of the evidence of his grief. There was a washroom a couple of meters away; when they were through here he'd pay a call and wash his face, make it presentable again before steeling himself to listen to the rest of the account. Because he was going to get through this – somehow. Today, right now. He couldn't face another hour, leave alone another night, not knowing why Trip had died.