Disclaimer: The standard disclaimer applies. I wrote this last year when I first found myself irredeemably fascinated by Malcolm Reed, Hoshi Sato, and the idea of childhood encounters signalling the start of something big . . . but I don't own anything except for the Dark Man. He's all mine!
Rating: PG
Codes: R, S, Tu
Author's Notes: This is a repost of something from last year. Some people may recognise it, and anyone that's reading Parallax' may be interested in this as part one of the three-part saga. You know that sounds far more important than it really is! Never mind. Enjoy.

ACID SKIES

Malcolm Reed watched the storm apathetically through the steamed, rain-streaked window, listening absently to the gale that was blowing in the stone-paved courtyard outside. It slammed against the sleek buildings and drove hapless jetsam, leaves and shards of broken fencing, along before it. Was there a race out there, he wondered, that could control the weather? Could they one day develop the technology to control the weather, as they had developed artificial gravity, faster-than-light-engines, protein resequencers? It was only more atomic structure, after all. Heat was only the motion of the atoms, cold their stillness. As a boy he would never have imagined any of these things to be possible, the stars merely unreachable pinpricks in the night sky, and yet here they were, their vessel carrying eight-three men, women, and aliens to destinations such as this, the institute he and the away team had landed at nearly a day and a half earlier—a Vulcan science institute in the Hermesian System. Or was it Her-met-ian? He would never have Hoshi's ability to reproduce these unfamiliar names, wrapping the words effortlessly around his tongue as she seemed to. Could they one day develop a translator so infallible, so instantaneous, that they wouldn't have to? He didn't know . . . but just because they had never done these things before, it didn't mean they couldn't. After all, they had never before tried.

When the call came two days ago, Reed had sat at his station on the bridge with only one ear open and neither eye sparing a glance for the viewscreen. Captain Archer had begun the discourse, and Subcommander T'Pol had resumed it when the Vulcan physicist on screen interrupted the captain's cold welcome. The matter, as much of it as Reed had noted at the beginning, had been more to her way of thinking than the captain's, and the rest of the bridge had been a little complacent about the hail—it was unlikely to greatly affect any of them but the captain and T'Pol—until Reed heard his name mentioned, and jerked his head up from tactical with a snap.

Taking my name in vain, sir? he had inquired, wishing he had paid better attention before now, and embarrassed to see that T'Pol, at least, had entertained the same thought. Her eyebrow had tweaked almost imperceptibly into a thin arch.

Just arranging a little planet-side parley I think we might need you for, Archer had replied, with that quiet, graciously tolerant twinkle in his eye. The captain was truly inspiring sometimes, the way he accepted and allowed that his crew would not always remember their professional etiquette. The Vulcan institute on Devoli V —

T'Pol interceded pointedly.

— VISAC, have a proposition they would like to put to us. They seem to consider it a matter of security. Which means I might have to disturb your daydreaming for a day or two. There was the smirk Reed had known was coming, twitching at Archer's top lip with slow relish.

Aye, sir.

That had been yesterday evening, ship's time, and he, the captain, and T'Pol had taken the pod to the institute, arriving a full day ahead of the institute's head of communications. They had been invited to look around the complex, an offer T'Pol had accepted for the sake of genuine interest, and the captain for purely polite ones. Reed had respectfully declined. As he had already reminded himself tonight, science and linguistics were hardly his strong suit. Instead, he had made a study of the institute's defenses as he had been assigned, ensuring the meeting's exclusivity was maintained.

Reed turned away, casting a tired eye over the austere Vulcan accommodation he had been assigned for the stay. It was serviceable, and as far as he had yet investigated, lacked nothing in the way of necessities. There were two exits, a must in any unfamiliar surroundings, a way of retreat in case of a hostile advance, and that was really all he could comment on. He couldn't offer an opinion of the slim, spartan bunk, as he hadn't slept a wink on it since they landed, and he couldn't compliment their chef on the food, because he hadn't yet stopped to eat.

All work and no play, Lieutenant, he began, but left it unsaid and unthought, shying back from it, his mouth and his brain seeming to make a silent agreement to push it back where it belonged. There were worse things in this world than taking your job seriously.

Like not being prepared, for instance.

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It had happened when he was only six years old. He hadn't remembered it, not till the day when he braved the storm at the Vulcan Institute of Science And Communications, but it had happened . . . the more he thought about it later, the more he was certain of that. It had happened. Perhaps he would never have remembered, and the memory would have remained suppressed along with so many others . . . but even the slightest disturbance can sometimes wake a slumbering spark. There had been a storm that day, the storm. He assumed it was the storm at VISAC, years later, that had disturbed the memory and tossed it up like a pebble in a swift-moving stream.

Only six, when it happened. Still very young, too young to understand that it was worth remembering, but old enough to be afraid. He had hidden in the closet to get away from the storm.

Most six year olds had a comforter, he supposed. A blanket, mostly, or a toy so dog-eared and manhandled that it was hard to tell what, exactly, it had started life as—but Malcolm had the closet. He would climb in there and hide, when the silence at dinner became too heavy for him to breathe through, when his report card slipped even once below the expected, but never openly demanded, A'—when the rain beat against the house this way and the wind shrieked like an animal in pain. He would have been amazed if someone had told him most parents went to their children when it thundered and lightning tore the sky; amazed . . . and disbelieving. His disbelief, he supposed, was what made him close himself off the way he did.

The dark was comforting, in here. It was the safety of ignorance, of hearing the roar of the thunder and the scream of the lightning, two ancient gods spoiling for a rumble in the sky, but being unable to see it. Unable to see the way the clouds hung low over the earth, the black curtain kissing the horizon away to the west, the way it almost looked as if the sky would come crashing down. In here, with the door pulled closed, he had no way to measure the nearness of the white-hot bolts as they lanced down, incinerating the roofs and trees they struck. In here, it was just black, and the sounds seemed to be coming from very, very far away.

Malcolm had dragged his bedclothes into the small space with him and sat cocooned in the top quilt, heat simmering in his muscles, his skin drenched with icy rivers of sweat. His bundle of sheets clung to his feverish body like damp paper.

He sat trembling in his own sweaty imprint, waiting for the quiet to come. If anybody had asked him if he was scared, his answer would have been a soft, uncompromising no' . . . but, to his own mind, yes, he was scared.

Moments before he had thought he heard something stir in the next room, his parents' room, the thin wall barely containing the sound—his mother, he knew now, making a hesitant move to come in to him. But the move had halted, and then been withdrawn hastily at the faint murmur of his father's voice. Malcolm could imagine, all too well, what that murmur had entailed.

There had been an answering murmur, muted, too dim for him to make out the words, but he could tell by the creak of their bed as his mother climbed back in that it was subservient, subdued, and accepting. She wouldn't come into his room again until the morning.

Malcolm bedded down for the night in the bottom of the half-empty closet, and did what every Reed had been encouraged to do for centuries—he made the best of it.

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As Reed closed the outer door to the plaza behind him and stood bracing himself on the step, a heavy gust of shrieking wind and rain slapped all the breath from him. Across the square, the young tree saplings leaned away from the gale, bending like rubber, their topmost leaves scraping the flagstones with reaching, brittle fingers. The gutters surged with foaming water, the drainage system gurgling desperately at the onslaught as the storm beat the square into a crazy world full of funhouse mirrors and drunken slants. For a logical race, the Vulcans had certainly chosen an unsuitable planet for a science outpost. Perhaps a part of their program was a study of the weather.

He shrugged deeper into his sopping Starfleet-issue jacket, and stepped out of the shelter of the building into the plaza. The wind nearly drove him off his feet. Reed hunched his shoulders, tucked his head into the wind, and began to walk to the institute's central building.

An underpass wouldn't exactly go amiss around here, he thought, dryly.

Lightning lit the blackness with intermittent flares of blue-white, stark and harsh in the dark. He saw not a single living thing in his short journey. Not a bird, human, or Vulcan. Though, he smirked, there was probably a fish or two in water that deep.

The shock of suddenly walking into a pocket of calm almost stunned Reed into a gasp of surprise. One second, rain pounded into his shoulders and head, his hair plastered to his brow like shrink-wrap, his clothes listless swaddles of blackened fabric clinging to the hollows and curves of his body; the next, the rain had stopped. The wind had stopped. The air around him was warm. It was as if someone had drawn a line in the street over which the weather could not pass.

Reed frowned and glanced about in confusion, seeing the clear, calm air about him, tasting the freshness of a storm passed, hearing the rain from far away. He took a step backwards, hardly believing he was actually testing this supposition like some wet-eared Starfleet cadet. The rain struck him again the second he did it. He stepped forward again, and the rain stopped. Across the plaza, the drill of hard white raindrops continued to pound into the symmetrical flagstones, onto the roofs of the single-story laboratory blocks . . . but where he was, the night was perfectly fine.

It was impossible.

Reed cast his eyes around the square, sweeping the far side and the little huddles of lightless silk where the sputtering exterior lamps did not reach, looking for any sign that he was being followed. Being watched. That someone with the ability to command the elements had cast a disquieting pocket of static around him. But why? Why would anyone do that?

Why, to get his attention, of course.

You've got it, he said into the white roar beyond his haven. As he stalked forward a few paces, looking for a shadow out of place, a movement in the dark, his pocket of stillness moved with him. It tracked him like a spotlight on stage—or maybe a police searchlight. Instinctively his fingers twitched towards the holster of his phase pistol. If you wanted my attention, trust me, you have it.

The lonely echo of the rain was his only answer.

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A sliver of faded moonlight cut through the closet's blackness like a neon blade. Through the chink in the door, the bare inch opened between frame and catch, an eye peered, restlessly.

Huddled in his damp, cool blankets, Malcolm shivered. Or was it really closer to a shudder? With that eye, that watchful, amber eye, like a lion's, he wasn't sure. At the first motion he had assumed, had hoped, that it would be his mother, that somehow she had achieved the impossible and won the argument—but that eye, so bright, so dark, so full of swarming shadows, had been nothing like his mother's. When the realization hit him, a yell formed and was strangled in his throat—consciously strangled. He wanted to call for his parents, to bellow intruder' at the top of his lungs; but the resonant echo of that creaking bed choked the sound, abruptly. For all he knew, they had given this person permission to be in here.

What are you doing in there?

Malcolm blinked, too intrigued to be afraid. The storm, he replied, snappily. I don't like it. It's keeping me awake.

The eye bobbed, as if the head it belonged to had nodded in acknowledgment.

Oh, come now, the voice whispered. Cool, tempting, tripping on Malcolm's heartstrings—or maybe just a vague sense of future memory—striking a chord that was both mildly exotic and eerily familiar. Teasing a broken key somewhere in the back of his mind. You're bigger than any storm. You must know that.

Malcolm replied, defensively. But it's still annoying.

The man—if the eye did indeed belong to a man, and wasn't just a phantom rattle in a sweat-soaked dream—did not appear to be bothered by a six-year-old talking to an adult that way, so petulant and sulky. Malcolm was somehow given the impression that it was almost . . . expected, somehow. He listened to the man's breathing, a rocking, lilting rhythm that clicked silently into place with his own muffled pulse in perfect synchronization. It was hypnotic, pleasant.

It was no dream.

Come out, the voice tempted. Look outside. See how small all of it really is.

Malcolm obeyed with an unquestioning eagerness he had never experienced in his life before. Every question he should have been considering and would consider the next day disappeared, evaporating like the rain on the window. He stood by the sill, his face reflected back at him in the misted glass like a pale ghost, a cheap imitation marbled with threads of trailing rain. Outside, the world stormed. The sky cooked in its own acid electricity. Lightning lit the landscape in one blinding shutter-flash; and then, darkness settled once more.

Are you still afraid? The voice delivered the words directly into his ear, breath breezing past his neck in a warm, sweet gush. It smelled faintly . . . chemical. Sort of fizzy.

Malcolm had discovered, looking outside, that he really wasn't afraid of the storm any more . . . but this man, this man who seemed to know just what to say and when to say it, to know what he was thinking, had already known that.

he stammered.



The man did not offer a name. He bent over Malcolm, slowly, carefully, that pocket of cold darkness sliding over him like a cool new sheet, and Malcolm reflexively thrust out an arm to fend off the man's long, pale hand as it reached for him, and placed it gently on Malcolm's temple. That this dark, swaddled shape in a long coat and faceless shadows could be here in his room at all was troubling enough. That he behaved as if Malcolm should somehow know him was worse. Malcolm stood his ground, trembling in his thin pajamas, and waited. After all, the echo in his head repeated randomly, Reeds didn't let any man stare them down.

There was a burning sensation like the tingle in his skin when he held an ice cube too long, and then, quick as it had come, it was gone. The hand touching his face moved away, still so slow and careful, and Malcolm saw a tattoo of an arrow across the fine web of bone on the back, an arrow pointing up into the darkness of the man's black sleeve.

M . . . mister? Malcolm asked, his stammer amplified now into a true stutter. W . . . what's wrong?

the man replied. Forget about it. You'll know, one day. When we're ready for you to know.

Those words stunned Malcolm into a paralysis that numbed all but his runaway mouth, but it was intrigue rather than fear that held the words in his head long after they were whispered. I . . . I don't know what you're talking about, he protested.

Moonlight and raindrop-shadows dappled the hooded face like a leopard skin. As Malcolm watched the man in the long black coat turned, and vanished from the room in a swish of whispering black silk.

Malcolm sat at the window all night, watching the town as lights winked in and out, watching the rest of the world sleep. Because, personally, he didn't feel very much like sleeping any more.

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