Spoilers: Cogenitor, small one for The Crossing. Parts of this chapter refer back to things that happened in chapters 7 & 9 of this story.
Ch 11 Between A Rock And A Heart Place
Hoshi Sato sighed, as she stretched and pulled herself out of bed. She'd thought she'd learned her lesson, when her one love affair in graduate school had ended leaving her broken hearted. Since then, she'd made it a rule to always sleep alone. The intimacy of waking beside a man she'd made love to the night before, was too dangerous to a heart she wanted to protect at all costs. She didn't count her visit to Risa. That liaison had been limited to a forty-eight hour shore leave, which she'd dismissed as quickly. Unfortunately there had been nothing casual about the time she'd spent with Trip Tucker, so she knew there wasn't going to be anything easy about getting over him.
She'd spent the long lonely night tossing and turning, while her head had argued with her heart. By morning she was so confused nothing made sense anymore. When Sam had died, she'd told her heart to take a flying leap, so she wouldn't have to endure mornings like this. She's buried herself in her professional life and found joy in complex languages. Then Trip had come along and her brain had fallen asleep on the job. After fighting the inevitable for over a year, she'd jumped in with her eyes closed and her heart wide open. She had given him free reign of her emotions and her bed, and now feared it was time to pay the piper.
Their argument had come out of nowhere, but it had been intense enough to make him walk out. Part of her wished she could take back what they had said to each other, but being a woman who knew the importance of words, she was wise enough to realize that they shouldn't be erased. This morning it felt as if her heart was bleeding from sharp angry cuts, and it was hard for her to catch her breath. She thanked God her job was mentally demanding; it would help her make it through the day.
Twenty minutes later, as Hoshi entered the Mess Hall, she came face to face with the man who was at the root of her troubles. He was leaving the Captain's Mess and looked as tired as she felt.
"Good morning, Sir," she whispered, as she ducked her head and quickly slipped past Trip. To her mortification, her eyes had begun to glisten with tears. The last thing she wanted was for him to see her cry.
"Hosh, you don't need to call me that, we're not on duty, yet." He felt terrible. There was an ache somewhere in the region of his chest, where his heart had been. It'd been there each time he awakened, reaching for her slim compact body, and found himself clutching only air. "Please, Hoshi, talk to me. I don't want to spend another night like I did last night."
She took a deep breath and turned to face him. What she had to say was going to hurt and she hated having to say it. "I don't thing we have anything further to talk about. I'm not going to change my mind, and somehow I don't think you're going to change yours." She couldn't believe they were fighting over something as childish as another couple's attraction for one another, but this went deeper than that. Trip was being prejudice and narrow minded. Those were basic traits she wanted nothing to do with.
"I don't know, I just don't know anymore!" He ran his hand through his hair in frustration. Part of him knew she was right about T'Pol, but it went against his grain to trust anyone of her kind. "I know she's your friend, darlin'. She was there for you when Jon and I almost got sent to Canamar, and you're right she was upset when the Klingons had him, but when I think of how close the Vulcans came to closin' down the Warp 5 program, and the two-faced way they dealt with Henry Archer, it's hard for me to trust her."
"Trip you can't blame all Vulcans for that. Besides, she's changed a lot in the last two years. If the Captain trusts her and cares about her, can't you give her a chance?" A stray tear slipped down her face, but she refused to look away from blue eyes that were still filled with confusion and anger.
"Oh Darlin'" He whispered as he ran his thumb over her damp cheek. "You're too important to me to let anything come between us. How bout if for the time bein' we agree to disagree, and I'll try to cut her some slack."
Even as Hoshi nodded 'yes,' a little voice in her head whispered, 'be careful,' but she chose not to listen to it. She let Trip pull her into the deserted pantry off the galley. Her mind was filled with the scent and feel of him as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him so tightly her feet left the deck. When his mouth covered hers, she forgot why she'd been angry with him in the first place and basked in sensual joy.
As he kissed her, all Trip could think about was how sweet she tasted and how much he'd missed having her beside him the night before. Her small hands clinging to his back excited and calmed him, at the same time. Their tongues danced and played, in a frantic attempt to make up for the last few hours. When they finally broke apart they were breathless and shaking.
"Darlin' if we didn't have to be on duty in about five minutes I'd show you how much I really missed you." His voice was husky with emotion and desire. It had amazed him from the very beginning how the small woman in his arms could awaken things in him that he'd never felt for anyone before. She wasn't the type he usually dated, but she owned a piece of his soul, and he was afraid all of his heart.
"I think you just did." Hoshi gulped as she leaned against him. Still dizzy from the emotional onslaught, she was unable to support her own weight.
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Three Weeks Later:
Enterprise was in orbit of a huge gas giant, to gather data. While there, they had made first contact with another species, the Vissians, who were also researching the phenomena.
T'Pol lengthened her strides to keep up with Captain Archer's much longer ones, as they moved down the corridor. Both had places to be and things to do, but for the moment were enjoying the silence of each other's company. The Vissian captain had invited Archer to join him in a three-day study of the stratosphere of gasses, which left T'Pol in charge of the ship as well as her usual duties as Science Officer.
Jonathan stood back to let her precede him onto the lift. He could tell something was bothering her by the way she studied the Padd in her hand. She may have enjoyed the last few weeks of Frankenstein movies, but he doubted there was anything about the names of the films on the list he'd given her, which would catch the interest of a Vulcan.
"Ensign Sato checked with the Vissian ship, and was told that communications will not always be possible with your craft." Her stomach tightened as she thought of the small pod he would be boarding, to go deep into the inner workings of the turbulent gas. Extreme temperatures and the corrosive nature of unidentified gaseous elements, on a ship whose stress factors were unknown to her, were variables, which made his venture an unreliable one, in her opinion.
"Don't tell me you're worried about me." A smile crossed his face as he turned and looked at the slim woman beside him.
"Worry is an unproductive Human pastime….." She turned to meet his gaze and felt a lump rise in her throat. "Enterprise has only recently gotten you back." Her eyes were large and dark, as she remembered what it had been like when he was being held by the Klingons. She had spent too many nights walking deserted corridors looking into every nook and cranny of the ship, until she realized that what she was looking for was not onboard, but in a cell on the planet below.
Archer quickly stopped the lift in mid-decent and let his valise drop to the floor. "I'll be perfectly safe, I promise you. 'Enterprise,' will not have to do without me." 'And neither will you, T'Pol.' He thought as he cupped her shoulders. All the times he'd wanted to hold her close, and hadn't, he'd used that gesture. It had been calming to them both, though he couldn't help wondering what she'd do if he put his arms around her and held on very tightly, for just a moment.
"You have always kept your promises to me, Jonathan. I shall expect you to continue to do so. It would be unfitting for Earth's first warp 5 star ship to have a Vulcan captain." She felt him standing close to her, but it was not just the tactile sensation of his hands on her shoulders. If she did not know it was impossible for a Human to do so, she would be sure his mind had whispered her name.
"Most unfitting." He murmured------
"Reed, to primary lift." Malcolm's accented voice filled the small space and made its two occupants jump apart. "Is there a problem down there?"
"Everything's fine, Lieutenant. I was giving the Sub-Commander last minute instructions, Archer out."
"Yes, Sir." It was obvious to the Weapon's Officer that the COM link had been hastily terminated at the other end. With a frown at the captain's odd behavior, he looked up and met Hoshi's soft expression.
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Hoshi's head pounded and she fought to keep from crying, as she knelt beside Trip and put her arms around him. "I'm so sorry it turned out this way, but it's a lesson we can all learn from." The engineer was sitting on his bed with his face in his hands, totally distraught.
"You're sidin' with her!" He accused. His eyes were damp, and his heart heavy. While Archer had been exploring the gas giant, Trip had tried to do a good deed, but it had blown up in his face.
"I'm not siding with anyone." She swallowed the lump in her throat.
"Well you should be, and it should be me! What they were doin' to that poor Cogenitor was awful. I was doin' what Jon would have done if he'd been here, but that Vulcan called him back to Enterprise, then filled his head full of her non-interference ideas. I just know it!" His emotions had been on a roller coaster for the last twenty-four hours, but had plummeted to the basement, when he'd learned the being he'd tried to help had committed suicide, rather than continue its life as it had been before he'd shown it all it was missing.
"Trip, you're wrong." Hoshi moved in closer and held his face in her hands. It was breaking her heart to see him this way, but he had to accept responsibility for his actions. "No one makes-up Captain Archer's mind for him--"
"Oh yeah!" He cut in. "The Jonathan Archer I knew would have given the Cogenitor sanctuary, not sent her back. That was T'Pol's doing."
"You're missing the point." She stood up in exasperation, her temper beginning to edge out the sympathy she'd felt for Trip. "A ranking officer made a decision and you disobeyed it. If you'd listened to the Sub-Commander in the beginning, none of this would have happened."
"Are you telling me you think it's right the way that poor thing was treated?"
"Not by Earth standards, but we can't judge other cultures by ours. Understanding that is part of belonging to a community made of other species with other values." She whispered. "Your heart was in the right place, but you made the wrong decision."
"I can't believe you're sayin' that! She's been manipulating him from the beginning and now it seems as if she's gotten to you." Trip missed his friend and couldn't believe that the man he'd known for so many years wouldn't back him up in this situation.
"Well you better believe it Trip Tucker, because we're out here with just ourselves to depend on, and she's one of us, whether you like it or not! You're third in command. That makes you extremely influential, but you don't like or trust the First Officer, and you let it show every chance you get." She saw him open his mouth to interrupt her again, but her anger had boiled to the surface, and she refused to let him. "I grant you, she and the Captain may have become closer than is normal, but we're over 100 light years from Earth and it's anybody's guess when we'll return. He's your friend, I'd think you'd be happy for him."
"You're twistin' this all around." He frowned at her.
"No," she shook her head. "I don't know what's going on inside your head, but you're refusing to see the truth. Somehow your animosity toward the Sub-Commander got all wrapped up in your desire to help the Vissian Cogenitor. If it had been Captain Archer, instead of T'Pol who had given the order to stop interfering, two days ago, before things went so far, would you have obeyed?"
"That's not the point." He reached for Hoshi and tried to pull her close, but she squirmed out of his arms.
"Yes it is. It's very much the point." Despair filled her heart as she realized they'd been over this ground before. "I can't do this anymore, Trip. I love you, but I can't keep on fighting the same fight over and over again. I think we need to go back to a strictly professional relationship."
"You're blowing this all out of proportion." He felt his breath catch as Hoshi pulled further and further away from him. His mind couldn't grasp the thought of a future without her in it, but he couldn't see his way clear to change his mind about what had happened either
"No, I'm not, and the sad thing is you don't see it." Tears filled her eyes as she turned and headed for the door. "You've got to get this straightened out, and do it soon, before you do more damage to your friendship with the Captain and to yourself." She turned back to make one last effort to make him understand. "You're calling into question the loyalty of our Second-In-Command, I believe that could be considered mutiny? And by doing so, you are questioning the Captain's judgment in keeping her in that position, again a mutinous act."
"Are you quite finished?" He glared at her. How dare she accuse him of mutiny, when he'd only been trying to help?
"No, I am not." Hoshi squinted up at him and hoped he had the sense to listen to what she was saying. "What you're doing is a danger to moral, your own career, and a general pain in the ass, Sir!"
"That will be all Ensign." He dismissed her through gritted teeth.
"Yes, Sir!" She turned smartly and left him alone with his consciences. She'd assess the damage to her heart when it began to beat again. For the moment it was only a gapping hole in her chest.
………………….
Something kept tickling at T'Pol's mind, as she tried to read. Three times in the last fifteen minutes she had put her book down and listened. She nodded to herself as she assessed the sounds from the engines, but they were not the source of her distraction. The last three days had been unsettling, but she had spent extra time in meditation, so her emotions were as smoothly controlled as the warp drive. With an elegant shrug of her shoulders she went back to the book that Ensign Sato had lent her.
Five minutes later she closed her copy of Lord Of The Rings. She could not keep her mind on the older style English. It was highly illogical, because she found the book fascinating, but something was breaking her concentration nonetheless. Her mind kept wandering back over the last three days.
The incident with the Vissians had been particularly disquieting and emotionally upsetting for the Humans involved. But her mental shields were firmly in place, so why did she still pick up residual emotional vibrations from the exchange between Captain Archer and Commander Tucker? The part of her that was still loyal to the High Command was able to look coolly and calmly at the situation as another reason why the volatile Earthers should remain in their own solar system. But there was another part that could only see the tragedy of the loss of a life, and wonder how it could have been prevented.
She took a deep calming breath and touched the center of her being. In the past that had helped her regain focus when it had been askew, but tonight it did not. All she found there was the image of Jonathan Archer's face filled with guilt and disappointment.
Rising quickly, she pulled a quilted robe on over her green silky pajamas and headed out the hatch. For once she did not analyze her motive. She just acted. Over the years, when she would look back on that night, she was never sure what had been going through her mind at the time. She would have a clear recollection of sitting in her quarters and the next thing she would be sure of, was that she was standing in Jonathan's open door.
"Did you need something, Sub-Commander?" His voice cracked when she stepped into the space between his bed and desk. It was late, and T'Pol was the last person he'd expected to see, but the one he'd most wanted too. He'd been laying on his bed tossing his ball in the air, trying to get his racing thoughts to slow down enough to sleep.
"I thought…I wanted to…" For the first time in her life she found that words failed her. 'Why had I come, what did I think I could accomplish by being here.' For a flash she saw herself lying in the bed that was beside her. In her mind she was looking up at Jonathan, his face close to hers and she could feel every inch of his skin against her body. It was dark and she was unsure of were she was, but his voice was soothing and quiet, as he spoke words that made no sense: 'it is imperative that you do nothing to change the timeline…."
"No," she whispered as she shook her head and buried the images that were trying to break through to her conscious mind. "It was only a dream."
"T'Pol, are you all right." Jonathan rolled off the bed, while tossing his ball aside and reaching for the woman who had turned suddenly pale.
His touch made her blink, as she used all her mental efforts to tuck away any residual from the Wisp induced dream that had surfaced. "I am fine, Captain."
"Are you sure? Do you need Phlox to take a look at you?" He didn't care if the doctor had assured him that the Pa'nar Syndrome would no longer kill her, he worried about her anyway.
"The Doctor would be no help." She steadied her voice and told him the truth, as she understood it. "I have discovered even Vulcans are not immune to the flashbacks that all of the crew who were inhabited by the Wisps, have experienced. I am fine." She nodded, as she felt her mental walls strong and erect, once again.
"Flashbacks? I thought you'd successfully kept the Wisp out?" He'd known some of the crew had had problems. It hadn't been anything that affected their work, so he'd left it in Dr. Phlox's capable hands. But this was the first he'd heard that T'Pol had been experiencing them.
"I did," she raised her brow and stood her ground. This was not an area she wished to discuss or remember. "The alien tried to use odd thoughts to make me drop my guard. It was a matter of blocking them, as it is with the flashbacks."
"So you treat memory much like you'd treat emotion, you submerge it?" Suddenly Archer was no longer thinking of the Wisps that had tried to take over Enterprise, but the events of the last few days.
"In my case it used false memories, so to deny their existence was only logical." She nodded as her eyes strayed to his desk and the book of Surak's teachings that lay open. 'He was reading it!' She felt a moment of…of…something odd and very foreign. It reminded her of the sweet gooey taste of pecan pie, or the warm salty crunch of popcorn, but it was a mental response, not a physical one.
"What if they're real?" His voice shook with pain as he remembered his best friend telling him that he had interfered with the Vissians because it was the example Jonathan had set.
"When the memory is real, just as with emotions, one must first accept it then move through it in order to rise above it."
"How very Vulcan!" Jonathan snorted, and turned his back on the cool calm woman who had the power to set his heart on fire, and wished that just once he had her control of emotions.
"True, and it has taken us centuries of discipline to do it." She placed her hand on his shoulder. "Jonathan, please." Her palm tingled where it came in contact with his t-shirt, while a voice inside of her head yell at her to be careful.
"Please what?" He turned suddenly very aware of her presence. He'd heard too many stories over the years about Vulcan telepathy, and his experience the morning he woke in Sickbay was too fresh in his memory to make him comfortable. Had she read his thoughts? Had she been inside his head and he hers that morning? He'd been able to convince himself it was all a dream, but when her hand had rested on his shoulder he felt her in ways that didn't make sense.
"Please let me help you." Her words were breathy and for once her face wasn't a mask, but Jonathan doubted she realized it.
"There is nothing you can do," he sighed. "Edmond Burke, a 17th century English politician once said, 'the only thing necessary for evil to triumph, is for a good man to do nothing.' The part of me who is just a person, a citizen of the universe believes it, but as Captain of the Earth Star Ship Enterprise, I can't act on it, or condone it."
"It is not easy when your beliefs run contrary to what is right." It had only been because she had read historical records of errors the Vulcans had made in early first contacts, and her experiences dealing with a multitude of different species that had allowed her to appear to remain indifferent to the plight of the Cogenitor. "There is another Earth saying, that I believe is more apropos. 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.' It was the wisdom, which Commander Tucker lacked. This was only a first contact, which could have led to an exchange of diplomats. Then over time the plight of the Cogenitors in Vissian society could have been addressed, but because of what the Commander did, all that was lost. He attempted to save one individual at the expense of thousands in the future."
"'The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few, or the one?'" He quoted from The Teachings Of Surak. It went against all that he believed. "I'm sorry T'Pol, but the individual is important too."
"You are correct, but one needs to choose when to act. The Vissians would have fought to get the Cogenitor back and their technology is vastly superior to Enterprise's. We would have lost." She reached for him and laid her hand on his arm. "Jonathan you did the only thing you could have done. Let us hope that in a hundred years or so, another better contact will be achieved."
"An optimistic Vulcan? I thought that had been breed out of your species." His words snapped out. He was in pain and resented the fact that T'Pol could speak logically and coolly about a decision he'd agonized over.
"I will say good night and leave you alone with your self-pity, Captain." She turned quickly, his words had been as unexpected as the physical pain they caused.
"Wait, please." He didn't want her to leave and frantically searched for the correct thing to say. "You've been a help, but how did you know I needed to talk to someone." It hadn't been just anyone he'd needed to talk to, it had been her, but he knew she wasn't ready to hear that yet.
"I do not know." A slight frown marred her brow. 'How had she known he needed her?'
"T'Pol, I know I'm not the captain the Vulcans would have liked for Enterprise, but have I really made that many mistakes when dealing with other races? Have I really messed up so badly that Trip would think I'd advocate interfering the way he did. My God, to hear him talk, I've been running around the quadrant playing sheriff. Trying to enforce Earth's beliefs on all the species we've met."
She put her hands on his shoulders. It was a posture he had used with her, when she needed his support the most, and it had always been helpful. She hoped her touch would do the same for him. "Humans are an emotional, opinionated people, and there have been times where we did not share the same priorities. Because of this you have not always made the choices I would have made, but you have always tried to take into consideration the consequences before you acted. You are a good captain, Jonathan Archer, it is one of the reasons I have stayed on Enterprise."
"Thank you." He covered her hands with his and let her touch calm him as it absorbed some of his pain.
"Ease your mind, Jonathan." She whispered. "Ease your mind."
For an instant they stood together as one being in two bodies, then T'Pol withdrew her hands. With the loss of contact they fell back into themselves. Both stepped back and blinked. The Human wasn't sure what had happened and the Vulcan refused to acknowledge it.
That night Jonathan slept peacefully. He dreamt that he was holding onto one end of a rope and T'Pol the other. It was a rope that would stretch and bend but never break. Somewhere deep in his sleeping mind he realized that they were attached forever. The knowledge soothed and reassured him as he turned over and slept a dreamless sleep for the rest of the night.
T'Pol's sleep was a bit more restless. Her dreams were of an old Vulcan myth. It took place in ancient times, before Surak. The myth was of a scholar turned warrior, who had been badly wounded in an attack by a warring tribe. Their healer had been killed in the battle, and another one had been sent for, but it would take the medicine man many hours to make the journey. In the mean time, the scholar-warrior's life force was slowly being drained out of him. In a desperate attempt to save him, the dying man's mate bandaged his wounds, and held him through the long night. She grasped the thin cord that was their mating bond with all of her mental energy, to add her life force to his dwindling one, and shared his pain much like she had shared his passion during Pon Farr, thus keeping him alive until the healer arrived many hours later.
It was a fanciful myth that no Vulcan who believed in logic gave credit too. But to the sleeping woman there was something familiar about the story, something that caused her to toss and turn late into the night. Finally her disciplined mind took over and buried it, allowing her to sleep until morning. Upon waking she had no memory of the dream, only the odd sense that she had dreamt.
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Late The Next Evening:
Trip Tucker sat in the Mess Hall with a bottle of scotch, a deck of cards and music playing from his Padd. He'd lost five straight games of solitaire, listened to almost half the songs on the sound disk that Hoshi had made for him for his birthday, and hadn't bothered to count of the number of times he'd refilled his glass from the bottle of Jim Beam.
"Trip, do you think that's the wisest thing to do?" Jonathan Archer walked into the music filled room.
"Probably, not." He glared at Archer, unsure if he was addressing his friend or his commanding officer. Since the older man was in sweats and a t-shirt he took a gamble. "If ya care to join me, grab a glass."
"Thanks, I don't mind if I do." He reached into the cupboard next to the protein resequencer and pulled out a cup, too tired to go to the galley and find something more appropriate. "Are you doing all right?"
"As good as can be expected." Trip held up his glass and watched the lights in the room dance through the liquor. He wanted to talk to his friend about what had transpired between them, but it wasn't the kind of conversation that usually took place between men. He searched his mind for a sports analogy, but couldn't come up with one. "How bout you, how you doin'?"
"It's been a rough few days." Jonathan settled into the chair across from Trip and poured himself a liberal amount of whiskey. "It's made all the rougher, because the 83 of us on Enterprise, not only work here, but we live here, too." After T'Pol had left the night before he'd spent a lot of time thinking about his friendship with Trip, and how to preserve it. "If a program like this is going to succeed, we need to remember that we have professional lives as well as personal ones, and the dynamics can be different depending on whether we're wearing our uniform or our civvies."
Trip's glass hit the table in surprise and relief, scattering a half-finished game of Klondike to the floor. "Ya mean I didn't ruin our friendship completely?"
"We're friends as well as co-workers. The captain of a star ship is going to be a damn lonely person, if he can't keep his professional life, and personal one separate." Archer grinned at the younger man. "And I'd hate to think I was sitting here drinking with just anybody."
"It's a hard thing to get past, though." Trip picked up the fallen cards and gathered them into a neat stack. "At the time I thought I was doin' the right thing, but I wasn't, and it turned out to be real costly." He thought of the dead being, a damaged first contact, and the end of his relationship with Hoshi.
"A lot of what we do out here is hard." Jon took a long drink of scotch and looked deep within himself. "We're the first Human's out this far. There's no rulebook for us to follow. Star Fleet can give us certain guidelines, but they have the luxury of sifting through reports and using hindsight to tell us what we should've done. We're the ones who have to make moment-by-moment decisions and hope to God the answers we come up with are the correct ones. I used to say 'we're making history with every light year.'" He shook his head and smiled at his naivety, while he drank deeper from his cup. "But we're doing more than that. We're making the mistakes that'll allow our children and their children, after them, to go out into the universe with wisdom, and knowledge. Maybe they'll even have directives of some sort, so they can move freely though space without having to worry about causing harm, or doing damage."
"Ya mean like the Vulcans?" Trip frowned. He'd had a gut full of their ideas and ideals.
"Not exactly," he smiled. "Humans think differently, so I don't believe we'll ever be just like them. After what I've seen out here, I like to think that some of their rules came from mistakes they made when they were in our position. One day Star Fleet will have ships all over the quadrant, when those captains look back I want them to see a past that made a difference, one that made it easier for them than we have it now."
"Jon, I gotta ask ya somethin' and if I'm outta line you tell me, but I gotta know somethin' for sure." Doubt still ate at Trip, and he needed reassurance from his friend. "How much did T'Pol have to do with your decision to send the Cogenitor back to the Vissian ship?"
"Nothing," he shook his head as he poured himself more scotch. "Right or wrong, the decision was mine to make. I'm the captain, and therefore responsible for the actions of everyone on Enterprise."
"But she did tell you what she thought, didn't she?" The younger man was grasping at straws as he realized the awkward position he'd put the Captain in. When it came time for Star Fleet to read the reports on what happened in the Vissian first contact, the Monday Morning Quarterbacks in San Francisco would call Jonathan Archer to task, not Charles Tucker III.
"She didn't need to, I already knew." Jonathan whispered as he thought about the woman who'd come to his quarters the night before. He knew without a shadow of a doubt, that as acting captain, she could have forced her will on Trip. If she had, her reasons for doing so would have been filled with logic, though in the end it would have boiled down to the fact that she would have done it, so he wouldn't have to. But she had been wise enough, and knew him well enough, to have left it up to him.
"Well she doesn't exactly keep her mouth shut when it comes to speaking her Vulcan mind." Trip poured them each one more drink, then screwed the top back on his bottle.
"No she doesn't." Archer laughed. "She'll advise, but she doesn't insist anymore."
"Not that it did her much good, even in the beginning!" Tucker huffed.
"No, it didn't. We're a stubborn lot. And somewhere along the line she's figured out that Humans have to make their own mistakes, if we're going to really learn from them. And she respects us enough to let us do so."
"You trust her don't ya?" Trip squinted at his friend, wanting to ask much more, but not daring too.
"With my life." Jonathan empted his cup and sigh. He hadn't had that much to drink in a long time and was feeling fuzzy around the edges. "Hell, after the last year I trust her with all our lives, and our futures." As he settled back in his chair, he really listened to the music that was coming from Trip's Padd. "That's not you're usual style." He frowned at the romantic ballad that was filling the air.
"Hoshi downloaded a bunch of songs for me from the computer." The younger man tried to shrug it off, but ended up grinning, warmed by the effort she'd made.
"It's getting late, were you supposed to meet her tonight?" They'd been talking for over an hour, neither paying any attention to the time.
"Nope." Tucker took the last swallow in his glass and gritted his teeth.
"You two have a disagreement?" Archer probed.
"Ya might say that." His glass hit the table, as he stood up and paced the length of the room.
"Have you tried talking to her about it?" Jon watched his friend pace. "Hoshi's always struck me as being kind-hearted and forgiving."
"Humph! That just shows what you know." Trip turned and frowned, fighting the urge to throw something. With his hands balled into fists, he finally slouched back into his chair, all the energy drained out of him. "I tried apologizin', but she doesn't want to listen to anythin' I have to say. Every time she sees me comin' she heads the other way, or worse yet, stands at attention and practically salutes me!""
"She means that much to you?" In the years he'd known the younger man, he'd seen women come and go. If things didn't work out with the one he was dating, Trip would shrug his shoulders and move on. But this time the engineer didn't appear to be going anywhere.
"Jon, I think I love her." He whispered; blue eyes filled with concern. He'd always thought love was an emotion that happened to other men. "What am I goin' to do?"
"If you really care that much about her, give her time." Archer whispered. His blood pounded because he knew there was a woman out there who probably held his heart, too.
"Is that what you'd do?" Trip looked up, suddenly realizing his friend wasn't just giving advice, but taking it as well.
"Yup, exactly." Jonathan nodded, his thoughts filled with green eyes that fought to remain cool and calm, but that often looked into his filled with wonder and caring.
To be continued