"I'll be reporting for duty tomorrow morning, sir. Please ensure you record the period since our return to the ship as deductible against my leave allowance, and thank you for allowing me to take it when it was needed."
Jon tried to catch his tactical officer's gaze. It was turned towards him as the man spoke, but he didn't flatter himself that it was actually focused on him.
Maybe it was watching a Vulcan D'Kyr-class cruiser vanishing among the distant stars.
"I think you need a little while longer, Malcolm," he said gently. "I want you to get a good night's sleep and then go down to Sickbay. I've ordered Phlox to give you a full evaluation before you return to duty."
The gray gaze returned to him slowly, as empty as a husk. "I'm perfectly able to take up my duties, sir. There's no need for me to trouble Doctor Phlox."
"That's my decision to make, Lieutenant. Report to Sickbay as ordered, and until I receive Phlox's report, consider yourself suspended as temporarily unfit."
Once upon a time it would have mattered; once upon a time he'd have cared. Now, looking into his tactical officer's almost blank expression, the captain had the eeriest feeling that nothing at all would ever truly matter to Malcolm Reed, ever again.
"Yes, sir," he said listlessly. "May I have permission to return to my quarters now?"
"I want you to catch something to eat tonight. And if you think you may have trouble sleeping, get something to help you."
"Sir." It was an acknowledgement of the order, no more. Maybe he'd eat, maybe he wouldn't; maybe he'd sleep, maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he wouldn't give a damn either way.
"Granted." Wearily Jon watched him walk away, wishing for some kind of a magic wand he could wave to put everything right. That was one of the burdens of captaincy, he'd found: the inability to disconnect from his crew's troubles. But if anyone could possibly get into the armored fortress that was Malcolm now, he was damned if he knew who it could be.
After all that had happened between them on Farlaxi Station, it sure as hell wouldn't be Jonathan Archer.
Relations between him and his tactical officer had always been … 'careful' at best. Now, with so much of Malcolm's past torn open to view, a revelation that had undoubtedly been utterly traumatic to the deeply reserved Englishman, the chances were that he'd reflexively close up worse than any clam, wanting his wounds left alone.
"Guess I'd better get back to Engineerin' for a while," said Trip at last.
The captain nodded. He feared even Trip wouldn't get through to Malcolm while the Brit was in this mood.
Trip's despondency was visible as he walked in the opposite direction. At a guess, he wasn't giving up though; sometimes it just took him a while to get himself all worked up to act, but once he was moving you didn't get in his way.
Now only T'Pol was left. She watched him seriously.
"Sometimes I think you Vulcans had the right idea about emotions," he sighed.
"We feel emotions, Captain. We simply do not allow emotions to rule us, for if they did they would overwhelm us." She looked in the direction Malcolm had taken. "I wonder if it would benefit Lieutenant Reed if I tried to teach him some meditation techniques?"
"Maybe later, T'Pol." He was touched by her understated sensitivity, but the Vulcan detachment from emotions often left them stumbling in the effort to understand them in Humans. "Right now, I think he just needs to be on his own for a while."
She inclined her head. "If you believe I may be of assistance, I would be glad to help. I believe that this episode has been deeply traumatic for him."
"You got that right." He paused. "When you left the Bridge, was that freighter still shadowing us?"
"Yes. Do you wish us to increase our speed and attempt to lose them?"
"No. Not yet," he said slowly. "I don't know why they're still here, but I don't think they're any threat to us." With a glance around to make sure nobody was in earshot, he lowered his voice and continued. "They work for Section 31. Malcolm used to work with them, and called them for back-up when we went to Farlaxi. Just as well he did, or we'd have been halfway to Q'onos by now."
As an ex-member of the V'Shar, she would undoubtedly be familiar with the existence of the Section, and the episode where Malcolm's involvement with it had been revealed would certainly not have escaped her memory.
A slight frown creased her brow. "Then why are they still waiting?"
He said nothing, but stared back at her.
Somewhere deep in his soul, he was beginning to be afraid that he knew.
Trip worked late that night, trying to iron out the problem with the power supply to the Armory – or at least, if he couldn't work it out completely, to try to reduce it into its component parts, so that when he and Malcolm finally put their heads together they'd stand a decent chance of being to work something out that would be satisfactory to both of them.
Well. Satisfactory in that the Brit wouldn't grouse for more than a day over not having enough power for his department to do its work properly, and that the warp engine would be able to cope with the additional load without effort. Malcolm's indignation was far less dangerous than strain to the engine, in that when he finally gave up and shut up the net result was peace, as opposed to the sort of silence that means 'we're not going anywhere for a while and you'd better pray you have the spares you're going to need to put this right.'
He was so absorbed in his work that he missed dinner – a fairly frequent occurrence, and one which he only noticed when the growling of his empty stomach distracted him from the schematics.
A glance at his chronometer told him that the best he could hope for was supper. He sighed, switched off his PADDs and his desk computer, and walked out through Main Engineering, garnering the usual reproachful stares of the Beta Shift crewmen who knew he should have been out of here hours ago.
A short shower and change later, he was in the Mess Hall. As it was in the middle of a shift, he had it pretty well to himself; luckily, there was enough in the chiller cabinet to ensure his growling stomach would be quieted. He helped himself to a cheese salad. Coffee – probably not the best idea if he wanted to sleep anytime soon; maybe a dessert?
There were a couple of slices of pie in the cabinet, plus one portion of pineapple cobbler that sat untouched all on its own. Everyone who'd visited the mess had left it, but the person for whom it had been universally intended simply hadn't turned up.
But more telling still than the untouched dessert, a plate of cup-cakes sat on the top of the cabinet. It was plain that some had been taken, but enough remained for some of the remaining crew to have one when their turn came to eat.
Chef rarely had the time to indulge in such small treats; with eighty-three crew to cater for, he was more accustomed to catering in volume. The time required to cut and ice each small cake would have been too great – besides which, the somewhat haphazard look of the little confections suggested that they were very much the work of an amateur. Trip had done his share of helping out with home baking in the Tucker kitchen in his youth, and knew at a glance the way that some cases hadn't been quite filled enough while others had overflowed on to the cake trays.
Sonofabitch.
His mind painted the picture of the fair head and the dark one bent over the cake cases, solemnly cutting the tops in half and placing them on the icing to make butterflies. But superimposed on it was another pair of heads, his and Lizzie's, because in the Tucker family it was Lizzie's privilege to decorate the pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving; when she was little he'd helped her out with carefully transferring the delicate pastry leaf-shapes from the floury table to the baking tray on the blade of a spatula, because she wasn't grown up enough yet to hold them steady all by herself. Even later, it had been a little annual joke between them; the whole family had made a point of being home for Thanksgiving, and at some point he'd ask Need a hand with that decoratin', Pumpkin? And she'd say Need a hand with that engine, Trip?
Just when you think you finally have your grief all sorted out and dealt with, life has this wonderful little trick of finding another way to break it open again. He hadn't thought of the Thanksgiving pie ritual in years.
When the Xindi had attacked Earth, he'd lost Lizzie. He'd lost the kid sister who'd mattered to him the most of all his siblings, and for a while he'd lost himself too, drowned in an ocean of grief and rage for which the only imaginable cure was vengeance.
Jon had been too burdened with the terrible responsibility of his mission to find the weapon to be able to take on the task of trying to help with personal issues. With the survival of an entire planet resting on his shoulders, he'd become an automaton, driven only by the will to succeed at any cost to himself or others.
That had left only one man, already crippled by his own emotional isolation, to plunge his hand under the waves, trying to offer a drowning man something to hold on to.
And Trip had spurned him – thrown his awkward kindness back in his face, publicly, with all the viciousness of which he was capable. Yelled at him for all to hear, and walked away, leaving him humiliated and hurt, suffocating the small inner voice of decency that said Malcolm hadn't deserved that.
Well, Malcolm's home hadn't been destroyed, had it? England was just the same as it always had been, and the Brits had gotten away scot-free. What did Malcolm know about his agony?
They'd flown down together earlier, stood on the brink of that unimaginable gash in the earth and stared out across the charred, stinking chasm where the town had used to be. 'Millions of people' wasn't real to Malcolm, was just a number his brain couldn't compute, whereas for Trip it was so immediate his heart couldn't cope with it. And just a couple of hours later, he'd turned on the friend who'd stood beside him in front of that obscenity and lacerated him, because he didn't know when to mind his own goddamn business.
Now, his appetite suddenly gone, he turned away with no dessert and went and sat down at one of the tables. He forked the salad slowly into his mouth, staring at nothing.
He didn't know much about this mission they'd just completed. The captain had told him and T'Pol that he'd had orders to help Malcolm retrieve a kidnap victim, which was a ways out of their usual duties, but normally he'd have expected this to be something the tactical officer threw himself into like some kind of planning exercise, deploying his well-trained team in support. Nothing had worked out that way. Malcolm and Jon had left the ship, alone, and when in the frustrated search for clues Trip had used his command override code to enter the Brit's cabin he'd found a sealed envelope laid neatly on his desk, marked If appropriate.
In an electronic age, an envelope. The writing on it was neat and careful, giving away nothing.
It hadn't been 'appropriate' yet, so he'd left it there, albeit with something of an effort. He'd gone away and barked at Anna, who'd barked right back at him and saved him a piece of pie later that evening when once again he'd been late for dinner and it seemed likely all the desserts would be eaten before he got there. Damn, he hated it when his people understood him so well.
Abruptly he stood up.
Malcolm hadn't known when to mind his own business. Or maybe he had, but figured that friendship was more important than discretion. It had cost him; he hadn't made the mistake twice; but he'd still been there, waiting silently to be needed – the 'friend that sticketh closer than a brother.'
So maybe the details were vague. But one thing was crystal damned clear.
If there ever was a time when Malcolm Reed needed help, then that time was now.
And he was going to get some.
Whether he liked it or not.
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