Chapter Sixty-Nine

Misunderstanding

Commodore Charles TuckerIII

It's a total coincidence that I'm passing the door of Reed's quarters just as Liz comes out of it.

The first thing I see is that she's rubbing her wrists like they've been hurt, and as she raises her head I see she's been crying.

In that moment I want to go into that room and tear the evil little bastard's head off. He's been up to his old tricks again, has he?

I snatch her hands up and glare at them. Sure enough, the skin on the wrists is slightly reddened, like they've been gripped by someone who didn't give a damn if he was hurting.

"What the fuck–?" I start furiously, and take a stride towards the door, my fingers already feeling for the button on my control cuff. I should never have given the sonofabitch the chance; he was never going to change. I should have left him there to die with the others, and good riddance.

I'm going to teach him a lesson, and if it kills him, well, tough!

Next thing I know, the floor flies up and hits me in the back, and little Liz Cutler who wouldn't say boo to a goose is sitting across my chest with my throat in a chokehold. Her wet eyes are blazing at me.

"You so much as say one word about him, Trip Tucker, and so help me I'll throttle you!"

Well, I'm not having that. Obviously she was paying attention during self-defense lessons, but then so was I.

I'm so mad I don't make the allowances I normally would for the fact that she's about two-thirds my weight. She goes down hard, and I hope the bang of her head on the deck plating might have been hard enough to finally knock some sense into it, at least as regards that vicious little fucker in there.

No such luck. As I get to my feet, still intent on marching into the room and giving Reed's equivalent of a heart a little excitement by way of a lesson on what not to do to a woman who's done nothing but try to help the ungrateful bastard, she whips around, grabs hold of my leg and bites it just at the bottom of the calf muscle.

"SonofaBITCH!"

She may not have the teeth or the jaw power to actually bite a lump out of me, but it sure feels like she's tried, and of course with the jerk she gives my leg as she grabs it I fall over again, hitting the bulkhead on the way down. I start to wonder whether the Stockholm Syndrome that Miguel keeps muttering about is actually closer to bat-shit crazy.

By this time I'm in such a temper that I actually have my fist clenched when it dawns on me that if I did that I'd be no better than Reed himself. That thought acts like a drenching with cold water, and gritting my teeth I sit up and try reason instead. "Liz, I know you've done your best, but I think this proves we're all wastin' our time. I should've known better than to even–"

"HE – WAS – CRYING, Trip!" She screams it into my face. "He was crying because of the pain he's in. He wasn't trying to hurt me. He would never try to hurt me now, never!

"You want the truth? I pushed him. I hurt him. I tried to make him do something he wasn't ready for. He's so hurt inside, Trip, he's so broken by what they did to him, and I won't let you hurt him anymore. So don't even fucking think about it!"

Well. That puts a whole new slant on things, though I look hard at her to make sure I'm not being fed a line here, that she's not making excuses for yet another dose of Reed's cruelty. But I know her well enough to see she's absolutely genuine, and in the circumstances, her biting me was pretty justified; I was about to risk killing a man for something he hadn't done.

Still, this development could have a lot of significance, for us as well as for her and Reed, so I haul her up to my office and call Miguel to a teleconference on one of my secure channels to see what he makes of it.

Now I know there are all kinds of rules about patient confidentiality and that, and normally I'd back down to Miguel when he says sternly that this is a matter between a patient and a medical professional so I have no legal or ethical right to be involved. But it seems to me right now that this is something that could have consequences for a whole load of people other than Reed and Cutler. I have to make the decision whether or not to kill a man who has the power to make things a whole lot easier for us or to see us all put in front of an execution squad, and whatever's going on in his head is something I figure I desperately need to get a handle on before I make the most terrible mistake of my life.

So no, I'm not in the mood to back down, and the three of us have an argument which mostly consists of me shouting and Miguel snapping and Liz yelling at the both of us and bursting into tears occasionally.

Luckily it doesn't go on that long because I hate to see women crying, so when she does it the third time I pull her in and hug her. She tries to punch me in the ribs a couple times and then hugs me back, and I look at Miguel (who's still scowling at the both of us out of the screen) and apologize.

"Look, I know your code of ethics means a lot to you," I tell him. "An' that's one of the things that puts you in a whole different class to the usual Empire hack. But you tell me if I've ever asked you to bend the rules without a damn good reason.

"I'm not askin' to do this because I enjoy pryin' into people's private lives. If it was just a case of Liz jumpin' on top of him an' the two of them goin' at it like bunny rabbits, well there's nothin' I'd want to know less about. But you know an' I know that time's runnin' short, an' the stronger he gets the more dangerous he is if we can't turn him."

Liz sniffs a few times and then dries her eyes and blows her nose with a Kleenex. "I think he has a point, Doctor," she admits.

Miguel's obviously mollified by her agreement. It was her privacy as much as Reed's that he was protecting, after all. And he knows just as well as I do that we don't have infinite time, though I've carefully kept it from him what the alternative will have to be if we can't find a way through Reed's defensive armor. Hell, I wish it was possible to just lock the guy up somewhere safe and comfortable and throw away the key, but I know in my heart of hearts that even if we somehow snip the sting off this particular scorpion there's never, ever, a guarantee that he won't find a way to grow another one.

"Okay," he says reluctantly. "Sit down in front of the screen, the both of you, and Liz, you tell me exactly what happened. Trip, you can listen, and if there's something really important you want to ask, you ask afterwards. But before we start, you turn off any recording devices there are in that room."

He gives me a Look before I can even think about pretending there aren't any. There are monitoring devices all over the station, mostly as part of the defensive network, and as he knows that as well as I do, there's really no point in bluffing.

The monitors being disabled (I'm too honest for my own good, because I know he'd buy it if I said there were only two, but in fact there are three), I point Liz to one of the chairs at my desk and, telling Eloise that the two of us are not to be disturbed unless something on the station is literally about to go critical, I prop myself in a corner out of the way and prepare to be part of the furniture.

In actual fact, it doesn't take long. I can understand by the end of it why Liz was a bit embarrassed over admitting what she'd done, and it takes some getting my head around exactly why she did it. To me it sounds like plain asking for trouble, and it's probably just as well I didn't walk in there when Reed had her hands pinned behind her back, because I'd have punched first and asked questions later. But I get the feeling that she wasn't as upset by it as I'd have expected, which is a worrying thought I'll maybe have to discuss with Miguel later. My conscience isn't easy over the use we're making of her, even though she's probably the world's most willing sacrifice.

It kind of upsets me when she talks about how he cried, though. I doubt whether tears have come easy to Malcolm Reed for more years than I care to imagine, and though I walked in and found him falling apart that one time when he thought he was alone, and for sure he cried when he and Daddy had that heart-to-heart talk that I still wonder about, the fact that he's so hurt he more or less cried himself to sleep holding a woman's hand for comfort has got to be really significant.

And he let go of her voluntarily, and covered her up like the gentleman he isn't … and I suppose telling her it was nothing to do with her was his way of apologizing if he'd hurt her feelings by saying no. That in itself really shocks me. I can get that after what he went through with the other two he'd be real nervous about sex, but caring about how his reaction affects the woman? I wouldn't have thought he had the machinery.

"I thought it was what he wanted." Liz lifts waterlogged eyes from the last in a line of drying operations. "He'd been … well, flirty… and …" Her voice, which had been dogged, gets defiant. "And if he had wanted to, I'd have been happy to let him!"

Miguel's been watching her carefully through all this. I see a worried frown deepening on his face, and I know he's thinking Stockholm Syndrome again.

Liz glances over at me to see what I'm thinking, though she probably guesses already. Her lower lip wobbles pitifully. "But when it all went wrong, all I could think of was that I'd misread him, that I'd been thinking more about what I wanted than what was good for him. And I ended up hurting him so badly…"

"Ah think we can accept that he found the experience traumatic," agrees Miguel. "But in actual fact, it may also have been cathartic. He's been violated physically, mentally and emotionally, and from what little Ah know of him he'd ordinarily find it very difficult to release the reaction from it. He'd be more naturally inclined to internalize it. Left to himself, he'd recover, regain power, and become completely normal again – right up to the point that something tipped his trigger, and then probably hundreds, if not thousands, of people would die. Ah'd certainly recommend a session with Doctor East." He looks hard at Liz. "For both of you.

"Ordinarily, Ah wouldn't tolerate a member of my medical team sexually propositionin' a vulnerable patient, let alone approve of it, and Ah'm sure you above all people are aware of the dangers. But your relationship with General Reed is quite unique, especially now the tables have turned the way they have, and we can't exactly describe him as an average Joe in terms of either his experiences or his mental construction. He seems to have some kind of feelin' for you. Maybe you're the only possible route he has back to humanity."

That idea seems to brighten her up some. It brightens me up some too, because the chances were starting to look bleaker and bleaker for a good outcome to what in all honesty was a pretty insane gamble to begin with – risking everything I'd been working on so hard and for so long, basically on the strength of three words from a desperate man in a terrible situation.

"That doesn't mean you have carte blanche to molest the guy," Miguel adds with a dry smile. "Ah admit we may need to find unorthodox methods to help him, but he's still a patient and he has rights. Try to bear that in mind next time."

Liz nods contritely and leaves the room, probably anxious to get a wash before she goes back to finish her shift. I hug her as she leaves, then wait till she's had time to get well clear before I walk back over and sit opposite the screen still occupied by my brother-in-law, who gives me a 'don't push your luck' expression.

"I'm not gonna talk about Reed," I say, holding my hands up. "Well, not directly. Tell the truth, I'm more worried about Liz."

I know by the way his mouth folds in that he is too, but that he doesn't want to talk about it.

"'Stockholm Syndrome'," I pursue. "I read up on it. It's a variation of 'Battered Person Syndrome', an' hell, if anyone's got a right to suffer that, she has."

"It refers specifically to an abduction relationship," he says stiffly. "From what little Ah've been able to discover, Reed effectively made her his sex slave."

"It was a lot worse'n that," I retort – the comparison between my ownership of T'Pol and Reed's treatment of Liz makes my skin crawl, and I'm in too much of a hurry to distance myself from it. "Truth is, if it'd just been the sex I don't think anyone much would've batted an eyelid.

"I suppose that's what worries me the worst. He wasn't just a horny bastard – I think out of the two of us, I'd have had him beat hands down. He got his kicks out of fear as much as sex." I hesitate. "But if Liz is sick – if she does have this Stockholm Syndrome – what's her chances of gettin' over it?"

Miguel doesn't answer for a moment, but pretends to study a PADD. Then finally he looks up, and his expression is serious, almost sad. "Trip, in the last analysis that question is for her to answer. Maybe she calls it love."

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