Chapter One Hundred and Seventy

Hell Hath No Fury

General Malcolm Reed

Heigh-ho, another day in Sickbay. No, I'm forgetting; it's JSMH now. It's important to keep up as the world changes around one, otherwise one becomes obsolete at best and gets left behind, or a stumbling block at worst and gets removed, often in a violent and bloody fashion.

I suppose I should be grateful I'm actually seeing another day anywhere. When I saw that knife sinking into my belly, I honestly thought I was a goner. I've done more than enough killing to know where it was going and what it would do, and pity knows Liz had more than enough expertise to make sure it did.

Recovery from injuries like these is not achieved overnight. Lucas has been hovering over me like a bluebottle fly over a corpse (I hope that's not an apt analogy) and even in spite of his expert care there have been a few setbacks, but it seems I've finally turned the corner. I'm allowed out of bed now and again, and walking is less painful than it was, even without the high levels of pain medication I was on to start with. I'll be left with an interesting scar, unless I choose to have dermal regeneration, but so far I've refused to contemplate it; a refusal which has bothered old Lucas mightily. Trip isn't the only one around here who sees more than is currently convenient, and though I've tried to fob him off about it, the fact is that right now I want to keep the scar. I want to remind myself every time I look in a mirror what happens when you start trusting someone.

Trip visits every day, sometimes twice a day. He tells me what's going on, and sometimes I wish he wouldn't, because I feel so damned helpless lying here.

He tells me about Liz, too. About what she did when she found out she'd been taken in.

As little as I want to care what she believed of me, I do. As much as I tell myself I never want to set eyes on her again, I miss her. As much as I tell myself that whatever she suffered was nothing to what I did, I feel sick at the thought of her hurting herself. As vengefully as I've contemplated her trial for her attempted assassination of the Head of Imperial Security and her inevitable execution, I've prevented Burnell from starting the process.

If Friends are people who betray you, what does that make lovers? People you forgive for being gullible and foolish?

It wasn't so difficult in the beginning, when the drugs they pumped into me sent me to sleep whether I wanted it or not. I had an escape, a way out of the constant anguish, the storm of doubt and anger and the tendrils of idiotic hope that kept forcing their way up out of the ground I tried to stamp them into.

Now I'm recovering, however, I have no way out. I try to read or to watch something on a PADD or a video screen, but barely minutes have passed before I realise I'm not paying a blind bit of attention to what I'm supposedly looking at. My mind has gone back, whether I want it to or not, to Liz Cutler. My so-called lover, who ran a knife into my guts to give me a slow, agonising death because she'd been taken in by a woman she knew would be dangerous to have as an enemy, however charming she was currently choosing to appear. She might have been schmoozing us, for whatever reasons (now painfully revealed), but Trip wouldn't touch her with a bargepole. That alone should have told her something - should've told me something, too, I suppose, but when she extended her dinner invitation, I accepted it for both myself and Liz.

Still, if Liz had loved me she'd have trusted me, wouldn't she? She wouldn't have taken the word of that manipulative whore Hernandez and swallowed it whole. She'd have spoken to me – she'd have spoken to Trip – she'd have spoken to Anna (on second thoughts that might not have been such a good idea, because Hess would have believed every word of it), but she'd have done anything other than plant a filleting knife in my guts.

She didn't trust me. She heard the first thing that labelled me a liar and a bastard and she believed it.

Well, knock me down with a feather, says what passes for my honest side. I've no idea what could have given her that idea.

But she loved me, wails the side of me that fell for the whole damn thing. She said she loved me.

I distinctly remember the first time she said it, because I was so bloody livid with her! I was fighting and clawing my way back, trying to regain some semblance of my former self, and she'd left me completely undone with those three little words. And they'd hurt, because I knew I didn't deserve them; and knowing that, I realised that what I'd thought I'd felt from Alpha and Em had been a delusion.

Yet she'd said them anyway. Was that just insurance, something to get her into some approximation of safety when I was on my feet again?

It didn't feel like it. But by that time had I been so beaten down, so desperate for a lifeline, that when I heard it I believed it?

If something's too good to be true, it fucking well isn't true at all.

That had been one of my favourite maxims. I'd never known it to fail. But when Liz Cutler told me she loved me, I let it fly straight out of the window.

More fool me, wouldn't you say?

I should let the wheels start to turn that will end up with a treacherous bitch in front of a firing squad, with the whole world watching to see her get her comeuppance. It's not like there's no evidence; I even tried to watch it out of grisly curiosity, though I halted playback just at the last moment. As ridiculous as it sounds, considering I'm no stranger whatsoever to bloodshed and I honestly don't think it made that much difference that the blood involved was going to be mine, I couldn't make myself watch it. I felt … a vast sense of loneliness. Soul-destroying loneliness, that I'd only felt once before: the day I realised that nobody at all was going to stand up for me over the windflowers, that I was on my own, and that I'd better get used to the fact that there was nobody – nobody at all – who deserved my trust.

I suppose I can still say Trip's the exception to that rule. Inasmuch as I'm capable of trusting anyone, I trust him. But there's one significant difference between Trip and Liz.

I wasn't in…

The realisation makes me want to writhe, mentally and physically. I'm ashamed of my weakness and gullibility.

In love! For fuck's sake! What had I been thinking of? To allow anyone, anyone at all, that close to me – to let my guard slip, to believe for one fucking second that she was telling the truth!

But what was her motive when I was at my life's nadir in the tank, pregnant with my colleagues' half-alien brat? Or before that, when I was drugged, helpless, so far gone I didn't even realise the flutter in my abdomen was the foetus; when I was so lost and desperate for any fragment of compassion that I called her The Nice One?

What did she get out of it then, when she was the one constantly caring for me in every way she could, when compared to me she was as free as the air and I was just a thing in a laboratory, a life-support system for the alien hybrid destined to supplant humanity?

Why did she risk showing me all the kindness she dared, when everyone else treated me with the derision my plight deserved – in their minds, at least?

Why did she stand there with tears in her eyes the day I was plunged into the tank and forced to drown, the only one of all the spectators who cared about what I was going through rather than the risk to the little bastard I was carrying? I can remember seeing her there, looking at me. At me, not the readouts or the mess of wires and stuff tangled around me; at me.

She had nothing to gain from me then, nothing to fear either. She could have stood back and applauded as I was made to suffer. Lucifer knows I'd earned it. Even Trip had laughed at first, though to give him his due, he hadn't laughed after he saw what the result of my captivity was.

But she was The Nice One.

I had no idea who she was, but when she was there I was less afraid. Even though she never spoke a word outside her duties – Phlox would have pounced on that like a terrier on a rat – I saw the smile in her eyes whenever nobody could see her looking down at me. I knew from the gentleness in her hands when she touched me that she cared.

She cared.

When I was friendless, powerless, when I didn't even know who I was or what was happening to me, she was there.

What the fuck! screams the voice in my head. Are you going soft again? After she damn near ripped your fucking liver out and made a casserole with it?

She was The Nice One, the other voice says stubbornly.

Lucifer, I'm back with Gollum and Sméagol again. As if I didn't have enough problems.

But even if I leave them to bicker, I know the one and only reliable guide to a person's character is the way they behave to people who have no power over them. I don't know what that says about me – well, I do, but that's not the point at issue right now – but the fact is that I have hundreds of hours of provable observation of Liz Cutler dealing with people who have no power over her; and not just me, but hundreds of patients who've been wounded in the Empire's service, who've owed their lives to her care. Patients who can do nothing for her or against her, who can't even help themselves; who would die but for her care.

I can't point to one person whom she walked away from and left to die. I've heard from Trip how she used to pretend to be so stupid she didn't know she was only authorised to give one shot of antibiotics to an infected person so she could get away with giving them the vital second dose and take the bollocking from Phlox when the bastard caught her doing it, then compound the error by pretending she didn't know or had forgotten that the same rule applied to the next patient. I know that Jeremy Lucas, who is probably the kindest and most capable doctor in the Fleet, thinks so highly of her he entrusted her with writing the new protocols in medical care that will save hundreds of lives each year when they're implemented.

When the emotion is stripped away, all you're left with is the evidence. And yes, I have ample evidence to the fact that Liz can be fooled, and that when she's upset enough she can do really, spectacularly stupid things.

Like most of the rest of humanity, in fact. Me included, if I'm honest.

I mean, it undoubtedly wasn't the brightest thing ever to stick a filleting knife in me instead of coughing politely at the appropriate moment and asking if I really did think she wasn't worth paying to fuck. If she'd got her timing right I'd have grovelled on the floor like a puppy dog as long as she let me shag her afterwards. Needless to say, there would have been developments after that which Admiral Erika Hernandez would not have found especially enjoyable, but Liz wouldn't have suffered, except if you count friction burns.

So, I discount the emotion – difficult, but it can be done. And I examine the evidence – of which I have more than enough.

Am I going to fling away what I have to believe is a genuinely kind woman, who was good to me when she had nothing to gain from it and everything to lose, for the sake of one mistake?

Yes. She meant to kill me and she damn near succeeded. And we know of old that 'hell hath no fury', and if the spoofing programme fooled a pack of highly suspicious MACOs, am I going to blame her for falling for it?

Well, OK, she knew me better – in one way – than any of the MACOs. She should have known better. She should have asked. But if fate had delivered Alpha and Em to me after what they did to me, then you can bet your last credit that I wouldn't have stopped at a filleting knife. I'd have thought that was far too painless. So I'm really not in a position to throw up my hands in horrified judgement at Liz's idea of retribution.

It's well into the early morning by the time this realisation finally dawns. I've tossed and turned for hours, fighting the pros and cons; sitting on my own little tribunal on the woman I…

The woman I love.

After all the pain, all the fury, all the anguish, I still love her. I can't forget everything she did for me. I can't deny her kindness to me. I can't be that much of a hypocrite.

I heave a long sigh.

If I can't forget her, then I have to forgive her.

It's not simple. Forgiveness for something this massive isn't something you do once, it's a constant, continuous process. There will probably be times when the resentment stirs, when I ask why she couldn't just trust me. But hopefully, if I stick at it, the times will get fewer, and finally they'll go away altogether. When I look back at the happiness we had, and at the wilderness that's my prospect if I give up on hope, I know I have to take the risk.

I've held off on asking to see her until I could come to a decision. I didn't want to risk being influenced by the sight of her misery. But that in itself is a pointer to how much a part of me she's become. I knew, even before Trip told me, that however much she felt killing me was the right thing to do, she'd regretted it as soon as she'd done it. Which, indeed, she proved when she handed me the knife and invited me to take her with me.

I'll ask Trip tomorrow morning if I can see her.

And, that decision made, I turn over and fall asleep like a child.

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