Chapter Fifteen
Blanks

General Malcolm Reed

Tucker is sitting there staring at me with the air of a gambler who has just put all his cards on the table. I wonder if he really expects me to trust him when he's just demonstrated that he can cause me to die a slow, horrifying death at the touch of a button.

Obey? I'm good at that. I learned hard, I learned fast, and I learned well. Among the other lessons I learned at the same time and in the same way, and which I haven't forgotten either. 'Trust', however….

…Well.

Once again he seems to be waiting for me to speak, so I do.

"How, precisely, do you propose to 'use' me without employing coercion?" Try as I may (and do), I can't keep the bitterness out of my voice. I realize confrontation may not be the wisest tack to take at the moment, but he's just promised me certain death if I fail to comply with his wishes, and then swore a solemn oath not to try to coerce me into doing anything for him! When he throws a promise like that out there like it's nothing, I can't imagine he expects me to just pass over it without comment – even if it does give him the pleasure of thinking I was deluded enough to believe him. I'm not surprised he can't see the lie his actions give his words. I've always suspected some of that delta radiation penetrated his brain.

"I'm just gonna ask ya," he says in what I suppose is meant to be a reassuring tone. "That's all."

"Ask me what?" I'm nothing if not persistent. Ask any one of a number of people who tried to withhold information from me over the course of my career. I'm sure you could find at least one or two still alive if you tried hard enough, though I definitely wouldn't vouch for their mental stability.

"We'll get to that," he says.

'We'll get to that'? What kind of answer does he think that is? Why the mystery? Bloody annoying gargoyle git. I'm beginning to wonder if he actually has a clue what he wants to do with me. Maybe this is all just his idea of a stonking great joke, to be played at my expense till he gets bored of it. I roll my eyes, and it hurts, so I close them briefly.

"I'm not sure to what 'use' you could put me," I tell him. Once again I can't keep the bitterness out of my voice; I've been rescued only to be 'used' again, it seems, though at least I don't suppose Tucker will shag me to impregnate me with a little Tucker monster. So if he doesn't want me for reproductive purposes, and presumably he doesn't want to shag me for entertainment (though having watched some of those tapes I'm not entirely sure that's out of the question, and it would certainly open up some interesting avenues for revenge), that leaves the only use I can think of: power. And however suicidal it may be of me to mention a few unpalatable facts at this juncture, I wonder if he really has thought this thing through. So I continue, in the hardest voice I can muster, "I've been out of circulation for the best part of a year, as best I can guess – I don't know. It could be more than that, I doubt if it's less. Half of the time I didn't even know what fucking planet I was on, let alone what day it was. Nobody bothered to keep a mere incubator up to speed with anything. So I very much doubt I have much influence left."

He starts to giggle, and I have to think that he's lost what little there is left of his bourbon-soaked, irradiated mind. Lucky me, to be rescued from the clutches of Doctor Frankenstein only to end up at Igor's mercy.

Though people who giggle at secret thoughts beside someone who's their prisoner are not particularly reassuring. I'd like to think I never actually got around to giggling (I'm really not a giggling sort of person), but I know perfectly well just how menacing a secret smile can be.

Then he addresses me directly, with an air of probably spurious sincerity. "You still control about two-thirds of the MACOs. It's only been the past two or three weeks that whispers of 'Where is Reed, really?' have hit the grapevine, an' nobody's answerin' that question. The whole time you were playin' incubator, Em an' Alpha were puttin' out bulletins in your name. They actually had someone design 'em a program where they could sit in front of a vid screen an' have a live conversation with someone, an' at the other end of the transmission, people'd be seein' your face an' hearin' your voice. It even translated Spanish for Em, in case she slipped up."

"Why would they do that, and how would you know?" I demand, suffocating a tendril of hope before it can slip even a single tiny root into the never-very-fertile soil of my imagination.

"I know, because one of my people did the work for 'em an' he told me about it," he says, with an air of smugness that makes me want to throw the water jug at him if only I had the strength to lift the bloody thing. "'Why' is a little bit of guesswork on my part, but if I'm right, you can probably confirm it. The way I see it, when Em had us…take you…"

I'm gratified to see he is uncomfortable admitting to what they did to me. Surely he knows there will be repercussions, sooner rather than later if I can arrange them, but I will enjoy watching him suffer the anxiety of waiting to see what they will be. After all, now that he has apparently saved my life, I can hardly kill him; but I can certainly make him wish he was dead. His assistance rendered to those in charge during Project Pregnancy may have been compulsory, but that doesn't mean it's forgotten.

Or forgiven.

"…you had too many MACOs loyal to you to just snatch you out of the chain of command. It would have caused a power vacuum, an' the fight for supremacy followin' that would have seen a lot of your best people die, leavin' the MACOs weak. It would have taken the organization years to rebuild, an' Em an' Alpha couldn't afford that. Whatever they were up to, I suspect they needed the MACOs as their power base. Maybe that was one of the reasons they wanted you kept alive. But you're the real power in the MACOs, so they had to forge orders an' fake propaganda to convince the MACOs you were still in power."

I stare at him with a squint-eyed scowl. It doesn't improve his face at all, but it protects my still-sensitive eyes from the lights behind him.

For an engineer, he certainly has a startlingly accurate grasp of the realities of power. His reasoning's impeccable. And he's given me food for a great deal of thought, assuming of course that my brain can be coaxed into more reliable functioning than it seems to be capable of at the moment.

I won't say the words 'that was one of the reasons why they wanted you kept alive' don't flay something deep inside me that's still raw, but that's something I have to deal with alone and in my own time. I have had ample time to remind myself that 'love' is not a concept that would actually exist on Wolfplanet Mindfuck, and that my falling into it with Alpha was my fault, not his. So, painful as it is to admit it, Tucker has a firmer grasp of the realities of the situation than I do just at present, and therefore it will be as well if I keep that in mind.

"You're not as stupid as I thought, Tucker," I grudgingly admit. "That actually makes quite a lot of sense."

"I thought so," he agrees, so proudly it's almost comical; apart from his extraordinary grasp of all things mechanical he's such a charmingly simple fellow. "So, all we gotta do now is keep 'em satisfied that you're still in charge until you're well enough to get back to work, an' then you can step back into your old life."

"And you'd let me do that?" I ask suspiciously, not even trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice. What the hell, is he on something or does he think I came up on the down train?

"Under the right circumstances, yeah," he affirms, so airily that I nearly find myself thinking he might be telling the truth. "Matter of fact, I'm really kinda countin' on it."

At this point – I can't help it – the vista of possibilities open out in front of me. Em and Alpha are dead. All the powers of the Triad are now concentrated in me.

Hoshi never did get married. We were never going to allow one man that much power, and besides, he might have developed ideas about not being content with the limited sphere of command we allowed his wife. By which time, disposing of him might have become not only inconvenient, but difficult.

So. An unmarried Empress. I've reason to remember exactly what talents enabled her to climb so nimbly up the ranks, right to the point where she could slip out of one captain's bed into another as easily as exchanging one set of see-through lingerie for another….

If this has occurred to me, however, it will undoubtedly have occurred to Tucker too. I very much doubt if he will have had the same personal experience of Hoshi's horizontal expertise that I did (aboard Enterprise she made little secret of her opinion that his injuries made him repulsive), but I've no doubt at all that he would dearly like to sample it for himself. She was one of the hottest little bitches I've ever fucked, and having her made available on demand, exclusively to me, would definitely be a plus … alongside effectively absolute power, of course.

Hoshi shackled on one side of a bed and T'Pol on the other. It's enough to give me a hard-on.

However, this is not the time or the place to dwell on that intriguing possibility – for one thing, getting a raging erection would be damnably inconvenient just at this present moment, and for another that subject leads down corridors lined with razor blades lying in wait. With a terrified swerve I force my mind away from the curvaceous naked visuals and back to more pragmatic issues.

"Of course, if I don't co-operate, the right circumstances will never exist. Then what?"

It's probably not a particularly tactful question to ask. If I were firing on all cylinders, of course, I'd promise my complete cooperation, cross my heart and hope to die… and if you believe that you deserve everything that's coming to you.

He scowls at me for a long minute. At least I think he scowls. Between the radiation damage and the botched surgical repair, that could just be his normal, neutral look.

Finally he says in a weary tone, "Believe it or not, Reed, I have no intention of killin' you. I don't want to harm a hair on your head. The only way you could possibly make me hurt you would be to threaten someone else when I was out of reach of a phase pistol set to stun."

At this point my instinct for self-preservation decides quite unilaterally to go AWOL. "So, I could say, 'Phantom, you forgot your mask,' or refer to you as Quasimodo, or observe that, 'I didn't realize the Empress had taken to throwing masquerade balls. Oh, it's just you Commodore Tucker,' and you wouldn't want to hurt me?"

It seems when I'm 'in,' I can still be quite the obnoxious bastard, when I want to be. It's a relief to know something of myself remains, after all.

Tucker folds his arms and squints down at me. I blink up at him insolently and try not to show the discomfort of the gritty sensation behind my eyelids as they slide closed and open again. Tucker's expression makes him look strangely reptilian. The blue eyes glitter like shards of glass. The longer he glares at me, the more I worry that I may have pushed him too far. When I break eye contact, it's not entirely because my damaged eyes are hurting, though I wouldn't admit that to him on pain of death.

Finally he responds, and his voice is rough with repressed anger. "I never said I wouldn't want to hurt you, only that you couldn't make me do it."

Something about his tone makes me feel as though I've just cheated death yet again, and I wonder if he crossed his arms to keep himself from striking me. Then he's gripping my chin, almost hard enough to hurt this time, forcing me to meet his gaze once more.

"You wanna die, Reed?" he says with all the venom of a pit viper. "You can take care of that yourself, if that's really the best you can do. Soon as you get your strength back, pick a direction an' start walkin'. Once you get out of range, that little button in your chest will drop you like a fuckin' rock."

I don't respond because there is nothing to say to that. I am completely and unequivocally his prisoner, and impotent hatred wars with my reluctant, dragging sense of gratitude. The device he has implanted in me enslaves me to his will as effectively as any bonds, drugs, or blackmail. In a way he's no better than Em and Alpha, but I don't think it would be wise to tell him that.

Yet.

"If you won't tell me why you…" I swallow hard. It's difficult to admit what he's done for me. I'm uncomfortable contemplating the debt I owe him because there's no telling how he'll choose to collect. "…why you saved me, can you tell me how?"

He stares at me a little while – calculating, I'm quite sure, the risk involved in giving away any of his secrets (I've no doubt he has more than one). Finally, he lets go, sits back, and asks, "What one thing is more prevalent in the Empire than duranium?"

I close my eyes and groan. I'm starting to feel very tired and in no condition for games. "Don't give me a fucking riddle. All I want is a straight answer."

"All right, short answer is engineers," he says. "We don't just build starships an' manage warp reactors. We fix anything that's broken. We're like ants. We go anywhere an' get into everything, an' nobody blinks, 'cause everybody needs their gear to work. Warp drive overload? Send in the engineers. Turbo-lift stoppin' between decks? Call out the engineers. Drinks dispenser servin' your tea too hot? Page an engineer.

"After you miscarried, an' they … did it to you the second time. You came back to sickbay screamin'…"

"I recall as much as I want to of what they did to me, thank you, Commodore Tucker," I snarl at him. Given my situation, I probably shouldn't be so brusque, but I can't help myself. Even after all this time, I can … remember. With such clarity that every time my thoughts stray in that direction I don't know whether I'm going to howl or ejaculate. This time, assured of my inability to resist, they had me put into the bed, where they joined me.

Fear, abyssal. Lust, irresistible. Pain, inescapable. Pleasure, unbelievable. Betrayal, absolute.

At a guess, several hours passed before the blank-faced lackeys were summoned to retrieve what was left of me, sliding me from between two naked, sweat-slicked, satiated bodies. Maybe it was loss that set me screaming as they placed me carefully back on the gurney for return to Sickbay, or maybe it was relief; I was hardly sane enough to know one from the other by that point. I'd screamed often enough in the interim, for one reason or another, though that didn't stop anything.

Most people, I'd imagine, would turn away from me now. I'm all too aware that too many things are probably showing on my face, things I'd rather have kept private – I blink furiously, dreading that he or anyone else should see me weep. Tucker, however, looks at me gravely, and to my surprise he puts a hand lightly on my upper arm, and leaves it there for a moment before releasing me with a faint squeeze that even despite my mortification I find absurdly comforting.

"Yeah, well, much as I hated you…"

"Hated?" I want to bite my tongue. I should not be interrupting this man who has so much power over me, but the past tense takes me so by surprise that I blurt out the one dubious word before my brain engages.

He gives me a look I can't define. It might be some kind of smile, but I can't tell for his ruined face. His voice sounds…amused? …definitely, I think he's amused, when he says, "Malcolm, you an' I have a lot to talk about, but for now, just shut up an' let me tell my story, okay?"

For the life of me, I can't explain why I do what I do next. It's an innocent, childish gesture so completely uncharacteristic of me that I should be embarrassed. I press my lips into a thin line, raise one hand to my mouth, and pantomime zipping it shut. He gives me that might-be-a-smile look, and this time there is definitely a sparkle of humour in his good eye. He actually laughs aloud.

"All right, I'll try bein' brief," he says. "I'll admit I kind of enjoyed watchin' you suffer at first, but after the second time, after they… an' after the pink pool an' all that, well, I sort of lost my stomach for it. It took me a while to form a plan, but I made up my mind that, if the opportunity came up, I was gettin' you outta there.

"If I'm bein' completely honest, at first it was just for the satisfaction of bein' able to kill you myself," he admits, and oh, the things I would do, if I could do, for that admission, "but hell, no human bein', no matter how rotten, deserves what they were doin' to you."

I keep my mouth shut, but my head snaps around to look at him in astonishment. Perhaps I misheard, perhaps I'm finally losing my mind, but no, it's written all over his ruined face, it's even in his posture. He actually felt sorry for me! Who in the fucking Empire feels sorry for me? If I had any strength at all, he'd be dead now. How dare he feel sorry for me?

"By the time that machine SNAFUed on them, I had about three different plans in mind, dependin' on the opportunity that presented. But then you, with your 'End of Humanity' crap, which, believe me, we're gonna talk about later, put a wrench in my plans. I was pretty proud of that little explosion I set up for you. I know how much you like 'em. I thought it was a fittin' send off. What I didn't tell you was, I put a five-microsecond delay in that circuit, an' a signal relay, on an old disused diplomatic frequency."

I'm bizarrely touched by the thought that he designed an explosion especially for me – I'd respond with a bashful 'Aww, you shouldn't have!' but I don't think he'd buy it. Though I'm loath to admit it, I'm extremely impressed that he could not only do it at all, but arrange 'on the wing', so to speak, for it to be set off on demand by the person it was designed to kill. He managed to make the reconfiguration look like it was all part of the work he was summoned to do, and also extemporize a fluent spiel of nonsensical technobabble for Phlox encoded with instructions telling me how to trigger it. I'm beginning to realize that Commodore Tucker might just be a bit more competent than I thought, and I wonder again why I am alive when I so grossly underestimated a man who has such good reason to want me dead.

"Then I had one of the technicians who just happened to be a friend of mine hit you with a little strontium-89 in your medication, an'…"

"You irradiated my medication?"

I bite my lip and remind myself I should not be yelling at this man. I should not be interrupting him. I should not look at him crossly. I should notbreathe too loudly, on the chance it might irritate him. He effectively holds my heart in his hands, and I should not do anything to provoke him.

"Will you relax?" he says, fortunately sounding only mildly peeved. "It was an extremely low dose, just enough to tag you, an' it only has a half-life of 50 days, so you're not gonna glow in the dark forever. Your total exposure was about the same as three years of ordinary background radiation, which is still less than an average scan in an imagin' chamber.

"It releases gamma rays, which are so common in the background spectrum that we don't even scan for them unless there's a specific reason," he continues, without giving me time to mention that the injection of a radioactive substance into the body results in a much higher effective dose to the vital organs than a gentle shower of the same amount of diagnostic radiation flowing over the same body in an imaging tube. I don't know that he, as an engineer, would be aware of this phenomenon; I only fully comprehended it when I began to look into developing side arms that would fire a radioactive pellet, a project which I abandoned when I discovered the prohibitive expense, in terms of both credits and payload space, of properly storing the ammunition.

"Nobody would have guessed you were emittin' them unless they were scannin' you specifically for gamma radiation," he blathers on smugly, and I decide I'll just have to hope that whomever he had dose me was trained in administering radiopharmaceuticals and understood there was a stated or implicit order not to harm me. "It also had the benefit that any side effects could be associated with whatever Phlox was doin' to you. We had a cloaked shuttle orbitin' the station. It scanned sickbay for a concentration of gamma radiation an' locked the transporter on to it. When you tripped the circuit, in that five-microsecond delay, the signal relay told the transporter to engage, an' it beamed you out."

He sits there looking self-satisfied, and he has every reason to be. His story, if it's true, is quite remarkable.

"You have a shuttle?" I ask, more than slightly astonished. Even I didn't (or don't, it's hard not to think of myself in the past tense after being out of circulation for so long) have my own shuttle. There was a pool of six available to those of us in the upper echelons of the MACOs, but only Alpha had a personal shuttle kitted out to his specifications. The interior was all pristine white, upholstered in silk and leather, with the benches in the back opening into a surprisingly comfortable king-sized bed.

I remember that bed. Even now, the thought of it roils inside me, unbearably sweet, unbearably painful. The smell of his aftershave was dusty-sweet, like rosemary crushed between the fingers. I licked his mouth, begging, surrendering…. Trusting.

Tucker nods. Still smug. Honestly, I could slap him, except that if I somehow managed to sit up straight I'd probably fall over. I'm appalled by how much effort even the smallest movement costs me now.

"How?" The Empire keeps very careful track of its shuttles. If the commodore were allowed one for his personal use, I doubt very much that he would be allowed to ever cloak it from the scanners.

"Salvage," he says, and I frown because even salvaged parts of vessels are logged and stored and used to repair other ships. He must see my confusion because he goes on to explain, "A ship comes in with a shuttle too damaged to repair. We log it as totaled an' replace it. My guys dismantle the totaled shuttle, log the parts we're scrappin' an' the ones we're savin', an' maybe a circuit board or a transceiver or a pilot's chair gets logged in the scrap column by mistake. A few days or weeks later, that same part mysteriously ends up…well, let's just say, somewhere else. Took me three years, but I got my own shuttle, off the books, an' she's got a transporter an' a cloak. You can't beat that with a stick."

I have to ask. His vanity couldn't possibly resist. "What did you name it?"

"The Lizzie," he says, holding my gaze.

It takes me a moment. I lower my eyes, hoping to conceal the fact that I'm coming up blank, and try not to wince at the pain this causes as they move behind my lids. At first I think of Cutler, but she's Liz, not Lizzie. Then I nod, remembering.

"A tribute then," I say, "to your younger...?"

"Youngest," he corrects me. "I'm the oldest, she was the baby, of six."

I remember, almost too vividly now, coming across a drunken Chief Engineer Tucker weeping in the observation lounge of the Enterprise, lamenting his 'baby' sister who was killed in the Xindi attack on Earth some years back. I ordered a couple of my security officers to drag him back to his quarters and pour him into bed. Even I couldn't come up with a cutting quip on his state of intoxication; the man was so bereft it would never have found its mark. From the depth of his grief, one would have thought the sister was still a child, so I was surprised to learn some time later that she was in her twenties when she was killed. Of course, having cut virtually all ties with my family many years before, I was hardly a fit judge of the proper degree of mourning for a sibling of any age. I merely found his behaviour dangerous, disgraceful, and irresponsible.

How the Xindi ever got into the Terran system is beyond me; at the time, the people in charge of security honestly believed our security systems were impregnable. Tucker and I were still stationed on Enterprise together and our mission took us nowhere near their course or Sol when it happened, so there was fuck-all we could have done about it. Still, I remember him mourning her as if he was to blame for her death. At the staff meeting the next morning, he was a miserable bastard, so it was business as usual again. The day the news feed told us that the Xindi home planet had been blasted to smithereens in reprisal he took ten days of the leave he had owing and went on a bender that passed into legend even aboard Enterprise; Archer scowled, but Forest was still in charge in those days, and he shut one eye to it.

"How do you generate the power needed for a cloak and a transporter in a craft as small as a shuttle?" I don't think it would be wise to stay with the subject of his dead sister, so I change it.

"That's a little trick I …forgot… to translate from the Defiant database," he says. "Maybe, if all goes well, I can explain it to you someday."

"I suppose, if I had any care to be polite, I should thank you for my life," I say, as I neatly file away his casual admission to withholding vital military information from the Empire. He might have saved my life, but as an officer of the MACOs, it's my sworn duty to see him tried for treason. "But I think I'll reserve my thanks until you can answer my initial question: Why am I alive?"

He stares at me for a very long time, even takes an indrawn breath once or twice as if he's about to answer then shakes his head.

"Malcolm, I can't tell you yet," he says. "Not because I don't know, mind you, but because tryin' to put it into words right now would be like… like describin' a rainbow to a man who's been blind all his life. We'll be talkin' more while you're here, so for now, just let it be enough to know that… I decided I didn't want you to die."

I have no idea what to say to that. I was never so vain as to think his every waking thought was consumed with plotting my demise, but when he had the opportunity to arrange things so that I could end myself in the depths of despair and grief, he saved me. I can't wrap my mind around it, so I just sit there, unsure whether that makes him unimaginably kinder than anyone would ever have expected or irredeemably crueller than even I could ever have possibly imagined, while he rummages around in the drawer of the stand beside my bed and pulls out some gauze pads and tape.

When I realize what he is about to do, I find my voice. And once again, pleading comes so easily to me that I'm ashamed of myself but I still can't keep myself from saying it.

"Please don't."

He sighs heavily. "I have to," he says regretfully, and even I think he's genuinely sorry. "Not just because my brother-in-law will give me hell if I don't, but because he's a good doctor an' I trust his judgement an' I believe him when he says too much light right now could permanently damage your vision."

He doesn't say it in so many words, but from what he has said, I infer that he actually cares that I should not go blind. I think I might be going 'out' again as that possibility seems just too enormous for me to contemplate. Of course, I remind myself bitterly, he has a 'use' for me. Presumably a 'use' that would be significantly reduced if I were to lose my eyesight.

By the time my eyes are bandaged, I'm definitely 'out.' He tries to guide my sightless fingers to the controls that raise and lower the head and foot of my bed and shows my hand where to locate and how to close around the call button if I should need anything at all, but when he asks if I understand, all I can do is mumble at him, my throat so tight it's all I can do to get words out at all. To my mortification, I hope he put a decent bit of gauze padding under that tape.

"That's all right," he assures me gently. "I won't leave you alone. I'll send Liz in to sit with you."

The fear I should experience with that threat is a strangely distant thing. I try to issue a protest, but it comes out a quiet moan. There are too many things for me to deal with already and Liz Cutler is another. She might take it into her head to do worse things than rectal examinations, God knows I gave her more than enough pointers. In my heyday I'd have lain back and dared her to do her worst, but right now I feel so utterly enfeebled that I can't feel any certainty that just one more blow wouldn't break me.

I'm not even sure he hears me. Surely, if he did, he would have responded in some way, but all he does is lower the head of the bed so I'm lying comfortably, pull the covers right up to my chin, and stroke my hair back from my face.

"Just sleep, Malcolm," he says, his voice sounding strangely kind. "You're safe."

=/\=

I'm not sure how long I lie there dozing, but when I hear the door swing open and can't open my eyes to see who's there, I go into full panic mode. The threat of blindness keeps my hands from the bandages (sight's the last sense a predator should lose) but I paw in blind instinct at the bonds keeping me tethered in place. Even the remnants of my pride can't completely suffocate a whimper of terror; I cower back towards the edge of the bed as footsteps relentlessly approach. If this was Tucker he'd have spoken to me at once – however much of a fool it makes me, I trust him that much. Therefore this isn't Tucker, and there isn't a soul I know who'd pass up the chance of hurting me while I'm defenceless.

Fight would always have been my preferred option, but too many months of inactivity and medication have sapped almost every bit of my strength; even if I weren't tied to this bloody bed, I've hardly the strength to stand up, let alone fight. The intruder stops beside me, and I know I will have to fight anyway as the option for flight has been taken away from me – it'll be a short fight and a losing one but it's all I have. A rush of adrenaline comes to my rescue. Thrusting aside the whimper (as if whimpering ever saved any of my victims!), the last instinct of the damned takes over. Though the eyes that might have reinforced the message are hidden, I play the only card I have left in my hand; startled myself by how threatening it sounds even now, I growl low and fiercely in my throat, trying to warn the enemy away.

"Hey," a soft voice soothes, "Hey." I know that voice, and I know its owner has reason to hurt me – more reasons than I could possibly remember. Lying here, I've remembered quite a lot of them, and for all that I berate myself ferociously for the coward I must be to have shown my fear so nakedly, God knows I'll have no right to complain when she takes revenge just for those. That, of course, is what she's here for.

Her tone doesn't change. "Hey, it's all right." Fucking liar – as if I'm going to believe that! Don't I know how the routine goes, soothing the prisoner into a false sense of security before the fun starts? Softening them up, making them believe they're safe before the first fist crashes into the relaxing belly?

A touch on my shoulder makes me yelp in fright, and in my extremity I fall completely into my wolf conditioning. I whip my head around trying to bite, but blinded as I am my teeth snap shut on empty air. She tries a couple more times to touch me. I snap and snarl frantically into the darkness, writhing on the bed, doing my best to keep her at bay. It won't work forever of course, she'll get me sooner or later, but at least I can have the dignity of putting up what pathetically little resistance I can still muster.

Then she grabs me by the head. Holding me on either side of my face, her fingers gripping my hair, disregarding the teeth that snap and snap again on empty air between her wrists. I reach up, trying to paw her away, but I'm too weak. My hands slide on her arms, too feeble to grip, let alone hurt.

My entire body is trembling with tension. She's going to hurt me. Her thumbs are in almost perfect position. One jab inwards, and my eyes – my eyes–!

Then something brushes against my nose.

When I don't respond, it happens again, and I realise she's rubbing noses with me.

Then I feel it. She licks my mouth.

I freeze, utterly confused. She hasn't hurt me – yet. She licks my mouth again, gently, and I can't help it: I begin panting, overwhelmed by a hope I daren't acknowledge, let alone grasp.

Once more, and then I lick her back. A quick, panic-stricken dab, whipping my tongue back before it can be bitten; still not daring to believe.

"That's it," she says encouragingly. "You're okay."

I pant at her again, still too frightened to even be grateful that she hasn't hurt me.

"Do you remember when we used to cuddle on Enterprise?" she asks.

I answer with a soft whine that wavers like that of a scared puppy, wishing with all my soul that I had the use of my eyes. No-one knows better than I do that words can lie, voices can lie, but this woman's eyes were windows whose curtains were never closed against me even when the only thing they held was terror of what I was going to do to her next. I do remember the cuddles, of course, and now in this abyss of loneliness and powerlessness the memory of them is painful, but words won't serve or save me here; I'm too far into the darkness for such complexities.

"I'd like to do that again," she says. "And you look like you could use a cuddle right now."

'I'd like to do that again'? There were times when I said that to her, as I said it to most of my victims, and I was never talking about cuddling. As for looking like I could use a cuddle, presumably that's much the same thing as 'you look like you're about to piss yourself', so I suppose I know what that looks like well enough, though it's been more years than I care to remember since I saw the expression in a mirror.

I can feel the warm moistness of her breath on my face, she's that close. She trusts me not to bite, and I don't. Her thumbs move, but they only stroke softly across my temples, a small repeated caress that after the first rush of fear I find soothing.

I want her to like me. I want her not to hurt me. So I lick her mouth again, very timidly.

Very slowly, she creeps up onto the bed and snuggles close.

I lick her mouth once more, grateful for her kindness. And daring – daring, for the first time, to touch hope.

When I am myself again, I am weeping in Liz Cutler's arms. She is threading her fingers through my hair and shushing me. I am too utterly shattered to even feel ashamed.

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