Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Six

'As If We're Friends'

Commodore Charles Tucker III

For once in my life, I'm too shocked even to curse.

I simply can't get my brain around what I've seen happen.

Cutler – well, I'll deal with her later. Right now all that matters is Reed – Malcolm – Mal, who just folds up with hardly a sound, scarlet welling out around his fingers.

I reach him in time to control the fall, help him lie back, look around wildly for anything I can use to press against the wound till Jeremy Lucas can get here. I refuse to believe what my brain is telling me, that nothing is going to save him, that even Jeremy can't work miracles.

We've seen some astonishing things happen on Jupiter station in the past few months, but miracles … they're in a class of their own. It's way too early for one of those. Way, way too early.

"Hold on, Mal!" I tell him wildly, grabbing him by the shoulders. "I'll get Doctor Lucas–"

His right hand shoots out and grabs my wrist. "Don't bother," he gets out.

"Jesus Christ, don't quit on me! It won't take him a minute to get here!"

A smile twists itself across his mouth. "It's a minute wasted. Do me a favour instead."

I open my mouth to argue and shut it again. Then I scrub my hand across my eyes and snarl, "What's more important than tryin' to save your life, you stubborn little asshole?"

He doesn't answer that. Instead he points waveringly to the door. "Beer. A couple of bottles. Bring them in … put them down on the table. Then sit down." He gasps for breath; it's coming shorter already. "As if… as if we're friends…"

I don't have the first fucking idea what this is about. But I know he's running out of time – fast – and this must be something that means a whole lot to him.

I push the bitch who's murdered him out the door and shove her away down the corridor before I turn and run to my quarters. Luckily they're not far, and I have a refrigerator unit just inside the door, stocked ready for the nights when I've worked long hours and need a beer to wash away the fatigue.

T'Pol sits up and stares as I grab the first couple of bottles to hand. A part of my mind notes she doesn't look nearly as surprised as she ought to, considering my left wrist's covered in blood. I'll find out about you later, but meanwhile I'm back out the door again and racing back to the conference room, praying to any god who may be listening that I'll be in time.

I'll never know what it's cost him, but he's rolled onto his side so he can watch for me. His hands are no longer pressing against the saturated tear in his T-shirt; probably he hasn't the strength left. And the blood still wells out of him, spreading in a ghastly stain through the carpet.

I make myself saunter, like it's any old day like any other. Swinging the bottles by their necks so the heat of my hands won't take the chill off them.

He's always belly– bitched about Yanks and their horrible cold beer.

I drop them on the table. Casually, so they clink together. The condensation runs down them in beads in the warm room. "Want me to open yours now?" I suggest as I drop into the chair.

There's something in his face now – something I'll probably never be able to explain even to myself. Sure there's fear; he knows he's dying. But underneath the fear and the pain, there's this ….

… Peace? Contentment?

They're not words I've ever associated with Malcolm Reed. But they're there all the same as I lift the first bottle and tap it smartly against the edge of the table to knock the cap off.

I turn to hand it to him. Not that he'll be able to hold it, let alone drink it, but you know.

His gray eyes are still fixed on me, but he's not seeing anything anymore.

I sit and look at him, and the whole world dissolves behind my tears.

With a gasp that's nearly a shout, I sit bolt upright in bed.

I'm so utterly swallowed up in the experience of having watched the only man who can save us bleed out while I played some stupid charade with beer bottles that I simply can't process where I am or what's happening.

Beside me, T'Pol sits up too. Her grip on my arm is painful – presumably she's been startled out of her sleep too, and thinks I'm the one who's had a knife stuck in him.

My yelp makes her release me pretty fast, but she's now crouching beside me like a sehlat, protecting me as we both stare around at the empty bedroom.

"What happened?" she asks at last.

"A nightmare." I push trembling hands through my hair. "Just a goddamn nightmare. But it was so fuckin' real…"

After a last suspicious glare around, she reaches for my psi points, presumably to calm me down after my illogically extreme reaction to nothing more than a bad dream. I feel her fingertips slide on the sweat on my skin.

"My mind to your mind…"

I yield to the contact gratefully, wanting her steadiness, her reassurance that none of this is real, that I'm not experiencing some psychic message telling me that up in Sickbay the lines on that monitor have suddenly flattened out.

She ought to say something like that, something I can grab hold of, but instead she frowns. Still, after a moment I can feel coolness and calm spreading through my mind, like an ice cold beer on a hot day, and some of the rigidity seeps out of my body.

"Just a nightmare, then," I say, with the best attempt I can find at a grin.

She doesn't answer immediately, but strokes my hair back from my wet forehead with her free hand.

"It is a nightmare, right?"

When she still doesn't answer, I turn my head towards her. "T'Pol, what aren't you sayin'?"

She sits back, though her fingertips are still resting lightly against my face and I can feel the contact with her mind.

"It's not a nightmare," she says at last, quietly. Then, as fear rushes up in me, she stills it again. "It's more complex than that. If I had to describe it, I'd say it was a dream – a happy dream. But it's not your dream."

Not my dream? I project bafflement. Who the fuck else's dream would I be having? And who in hell would be happy at the thought of Malcolm Reed dying while I waste the last few seconds of his life fetching beers?

Oh, no. No. Not Hernandez. No. Don't say I've got that bitch in my head.

"No." T'Pol's other hand catches at my jaw, steadying what threatens to become a full-blown panic attack. "It's not hers. It's his."

'His'?

–Malcolm's?

"Sometimes, just occasionally, things can travel through a mental bond – things that matter to us. Our dreams, in the deepest sense of the word. I think that this must have happened between you and General Reed. Without his intention, perhaps even without his knowledge, he shared something with you that concerned you individually. Maybe, even then, he wished that such a friendship with you could be possible."

"The kind of friendship where I'd just let the guy bleed to death?"

"The kind of friendship where you interacted with him naturally, as a friend rather than an enemy or even a subordinate. Remember that up to that point, he had probably never had anyone who had spoken to him simply as another human being for whom they felt affection. He was a monster, but monsters are the loneliest creatures in the universe. He wished not to face death never having experienced that simple human connection at all, even once."

"Jesus Christ." I have to swallow, hard. It was awful enough just seeing the guy pinned down on that bio-bed, alone in the world but for one insignificant ensign who could do nothing much for him except change the dressings where the straps keeping him prisoner chafed his skin. Imagining now the world of absolute isolation he must have lived in even before then, the gulf he must have felt between himself and the rest of humanity – I don't know how he could have borne it without going insane.

But he'd touched me. In the dream, at least, he'd touched me. That had been all he wanted before he died – to be normal.

As she gently releases the contact between us, I shove the heels of my hands against my wet eyes. "I suppose Lucas would've called if anything had happened," I mutter.

"Of course."

"I've got to go up there."

"Of course."

The depth of understanding she conveys in those two words is surreal. For someone who doesn't do emotions, she sure as hell understands them well enough sometimes.

It's the small hours – at a guess, somewhere between two and three hundred hours. If I don't get a few more hours' sleep, I'll feel like crap in the morning. But if I'm going to get any more sleep, I have something I need to do first.

I don't bother getting dressed. I just pull on a dressing gown and pad out the bedroom, heading for the turbo-lift.

I guess a few people I pass do a double-take, seeing a tired, unshaven guy trudging through the corridors who looks more than a bit like their CO. But then I suppose most people have nights when their demons keep them awake, and the corridors are somewhere where you can just walk and think.

Jeremy Lucas, God bless his cotton socks, hasn't even gone to his own quarters to sleep. He's had them rig up a reclining chair beside Mal's bed, and is fast asleep in it, ready to respond if one of those alarms goes off. He looks cute enough to make me smile, like some giant teddy bear lying there with his mouth just a little bit open, and giving gentle, snuffly snores.

But it's not Lucas I've come to see. Mal is still lying there exactly as he was when I left him earlier on, pale and unmoving, with the little clouds of condensation coming and going on the inside of his oxygen mask.

I pull up a spare chair and sit on the opposite side of him.

I know he's in a coma, that he can't hear me or anything else. I know the drugs that are being drip-fed into him for his own good are keeping his higher brain functions suppressed so that his body can concentrate on healing itself. But all the same, I take hold of his hand and squeeze it gently.

"I'll make sure you get those beers, Mal," I say softly. "An' don't you ever feel ashamed that you let me see that, 'cause I can't imagine how lonely you must have been all these years. But you've got a friend now. Don't you ever forget that. Even if… even if you can't make it back to us, don't you ever forget that."

There's no response, of course. But now I've glimpsed this strange, precious insight into the way that minds can connect in ways that are so much more mysterious than I ever imagined possible, I'm not about to believe that there's no hope at all that somewhere, somehow, my message has gotten through.

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