FOUR
It was Malcolm. She told herself it had to be, because any duplicate or hologram or . . . whatever . . . would almost certainly be an identical replica. A carbon copy, made to look and sound and move as much like the original as any replacement could do, to take his place exactly and infiltrate his life. At least . . . so she had always been taught. So she had come to expect, the moment it dawned on her in that awful scratchy slow-motion, that the laugh she heard was his, even though it couldn't be. She had held that remote possibility, that this was a hologram or an android or any of the other myriad impossible technologies she had read about, and in its own way, it had made her feel brave when she first heard that awful chuckle so like her husband's. She had been so certain that it would be the one or the other. Or a practical joke. Or a mistake.
Never, in her wildest moment of blind instinctive panic, could she have envisioned this.
It was Malcolm, and it wasn't. The similarities in him somehow seemed more alien, more unreal, than the differences.
It was his face. It was his square brow and his straight nose and his oddly drawn cheeks; the high, proud cheekbones and the scarred mouth. His elegant neck. Enough, more than enough, to make the man staring back at her Malcolm's identical twin. But the eyes that glanced querulously between the two of them were like lightning on a muggy day, and brief glimpses of a deep, almost luminous violet flashed from below his typically lowered eyelids. Five times brighter and more powerful than even Malcolm's brilliant eyes had ever been. Quicker. Deadlier, although she dismissed the thought as it came. Malcolm had always been deadly, in his way, and she had known it. Whoever this man - if he was a man - was, he only failed to mask it so cleverly as her husband did. Every braced muscle in his body quivered with tension, the glare cutting through her as it glanced to her and away. Her presence seemed to agitate him. Whoever he was, he looked almost . . . afraid of her.
"H-Hoshi?" he stammered, and the voice that emerged from those familiar lips was his, to the last tiny hitch in the final syllable as he said her name. The way he said it on those days when he couldn't believe she was his. She said nothing. She couldn't.
He appeared to gather himself almost at once, and shook the too-long hair back from his forehead and from those penetrating, inhumanly violet eyes. He let his left hand fall, limply, at his side, and a thin stream of red like a scarlet ribbon wound its way down his wrist and along the curve of his thumb until gravity pulled the drops to the ground. He was shaking, and the hand that held the weapon trembled violently.
"Who are you?" Archer demanded hotly. Hoshi might have been impressed at her captain's unusual mastery had she been in any presence of mind to take in more of this freakish circle than what her eyes could see - after all, Captain Archer was the only one of the three not armed. His phase pistol remained securely tucked into his uniform.
"And where's . . ." But she couldn't bring herself to finish that question. Asking it, making it tangible, was too much like admitting that something had happened to him. Whoever - whatever - this being was, she was convinced he wasn't any more than a surface copy - a lookalike. She had only to look at the high boots bound with string around the calf and the billowing sleeves tied with dirty rags to know he had not come from earth, and had little to do with Starfleet. The unkempt hair and the thin bluish smudge of stubble beginning on his cheeks and jaw indicated that if he had ever been in any way affiliated with a military faction, that affiliation had long since ceased. She knew as sure as she knew her own name that Malcolm would never neglect his grooming like that. She had never seen him with stubble, except for the one time he had been . . . dead.
She wouldn't let that thought go any further. Not now.
Could Malcolm have a twin he had never thought to mention? There was so much even she didn't know about him, so much. And it was the only conclusion which made any sense, regardless of logistics. Regardless of the fact that no twin could be here, in this system, farther than any human had travelled before Enterprise arrived.
He turned those electric eyes on her, and in every flinch and every twitch of his cheek she could see how much it cost him to do even that - to look at her. It had to be a twin, had to be, and nothing but a DNA test would convince her otherwise. Surely only a flesh-and-blood human man could look so . . . so devastated. But then . . . but then, surely only Malcolm ever looked at her that way.
The haze pawed sickly at her skin and everything began to blur into a muggy coloured mist of shapes and movement; blackness closed in around the kaleidoscope until those blurs had shrunk to a single eye-hole like a knot in a wooden door . . . then she was falling, and felt arms catch her deftly before she hit the ground.
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Six months ago, the night after the escape through the waterfall
They have seen nothing of each other since their return to Enterprise, and maybe that is to be expected, and in some mad, indefinable way, for the best . . . she has reassured him, as best she can, that there is no ill will, that she can't hold his decisions in that bunker against him . . . but there are moments . . .
. . . there are moments, rare and dismissed as they come, when she can't escape that nagging, undeniable fact. He almost let her die.
Twice now she has thought of visiting him in his quarters, against Phlox's admonitions that the lieutenant needs to sleep off the effects of the gas, but both times, something has held her back. Maybe an outsider would assume she was unsure of her feelings after that indescribably fantastical first kiss, that maybe she had been swept away in the atmosphere of the moment and had it been Trip, Travis, anyone, it might have played out the same. But she knows that isn't the case. She has never been one to make decisions quickly, never one to assert those choices . . . but this time she knows her own mind. That isn't why she hesitates outside his door now, the third and most committed time; that isn't why the bag in her hands nearly shakes out of her grasp and spills its hard-won contents across the corridor. She knows the attraction is only stronger now that she has been away from him for a day, dwelling on what has happened. But that one doubt won't go away, and she knows it never will, if she doesn't ask him. If she doesn't turn it out of its locked closet and into the open for them both to see.
She rings the door buzzer, and waits to be invited in. Maybe he will be asleep still, heavily sedated until his back is healed and the gas bled from his system by hours of outward breath and heavy sweat. Maybe she will be let off the hook, so the saying goes.
"Who is it?" comes a groggy voice from inside. It is muffled, as if he is speaking into his pillow.
"It's Hoshi. Can I come in?"
She expects him to say no, and it is only now that she realises that. All along she has been worried that she won't know what to say, linguist or not - it is only at the eleventh hour that she is forced to acknowledge she may not even be given the chance.
"Of course. The door's open."
That strikes her as odd for such a deeply private man, until she takes a moment to think it over from all sides. Of course; after being locked in a tiny cell for all those hours, cramped and helpless and sealed away from the outside world, the idea of being trapped again must be more than he is able to face. The idea of Malcolm Reed scared is still a strange one, although she has seen it, on occasion. She saw it on that wild hillside as the ranks of silent black figures closed in on them. When they plunged beneath the lake to hide. When he gave himself up for her.
And, long before that, when he stepped into decon to rid himself of alien cells invading his blood.
It is dim in his quarters, the lights half-lowered and the air cool, even a little chill. Again this almost strikes her as unexpected . . . but then she remembers how stifling, how hot, that cell had been, and she understands. It reminds her of movie night, on those rare occasions that she has been . . . except that there is only one figure in the dark. She can see his paler shape in the bunk, the blankets and sheets twisted around his legs and his head rested in his cradled arms. She is right about the muffled vibrato of his voice; it is only a marvel he hasn't suffocated himself as he sleeps.
He half-turns and raises himself on his elbows as she comes in, and she hesitates once more, unsure if she should go any closer. Unsure, desperately so, whether he would expect her to come any closer, and just what their relationship is.
"I brought you some chestnuts," she murmurs, and he gives an awkward little half-smile in return. Her stomach flips a little at that smile; he doesn't allow many to see it, even after so many months onboard. "I thought . . . well, I suppose it was my idea of a joke."
"Noted." That smile is fixed in place like the knowing, ambiguous grin of a cat that may purr or else scratch her eyes out at any moment. He looks almost contented, if in a little pain. He is wearing a ship-issue blue t-shirt under the sheets, but even through the cotton jersey she can see tiny flecks of crimson like red eyes seeping through where his wounds have rubbed, and let a little blood into the fabric. That crashed vehicle had really torn him up, and he hadn't said a word in the shuttlepod returning to Enterprise. How he managed to pilot it under the dizzying influence of that gas she will never know, but she takes a silent vow now to learn how to pilot one - you never could tell when her ability to fly a shuttlepod may be needed again. And in her humble opinion T'Pol, the only other member of the senior staff unable to pilot a shuttlepod alone, should think about it too. Maybe she could convince Trip or Jon to give the Vulcan lessons.
"You look rested," she says, carefully.
"Being unconscious for sixteen hours straight will do that to you."
She rolls her dry lips together and casts an eye about his austere quarters, noting the mirror on one wall and the painting of the Enterprise beside it, the fastidiously neat shelf where his toothbrush and razor are kept, and the trophy she has never thought to ask about before today. It makes her sad in a way she can't explain - there should be more than this, photos of his family and his home, personal affects, those little things that have meant something to somebody, that are enduring echoes of the experiences gone. But there is nothing, and even his chess board is tidied away, out of sight. Just like the man himself, she supposes; the best parts are hidden away behind a blank exterior, and when he wishes he will bring them out, like the chess board and the card deck and his tantalisingly sexy red shirt. But it takes a special request to see those things, the little bits of Malcolm Reed that paint the real picture over the blank canvas.
"Was there something, Hoshi?" he asks, suddenly, and although she can't see herself she knows the colour has mantled on her cheeks and burned the coffee skin there a brilliant red like bloated rose petals in the full swoon of their growth. She can't hide her disquiet, not from him; just as he can't hide his own from her, despite his gentle smile.
"The captain has noted a commendation in your records," she ventures, having calculated this piece of news carefully to placate and even soften him. She knows his secret drives, his ambitions - it should please him, at the least, to think that Starfleet will recognise his efforts, and at the most it will reassure him far more definitely than she ever can that he has done his very best, and come out the victor.
His eyebrow tweaks upward, and for an instant she wants to ask him if he has been taking lessons from T'Pol - but she doesn't. There are more important things to be said. "I don't see that there's much to recommend me," he says, a little offhandedly. "Not if we both stick to the story we agreed on."
Her silence says it all, or maybe too much. He shifts his weight on his elbows, leaving two clear dents in the bunk where they have been resting, and turns his head fully to her. She notices he doesn't move his torso, as if it is too difficult for him . . . and she wonders, knowing she won't have the courage to ask, if he is injured more badly than she at first thought. "Hoshi?" he presses. She lowers her eyes. "Ensign. What did you tell him?"
"What you told me to," she stammers. "We stopped to take a look around, got caught in a storm, and found shelter till it cleared up. We were captured by aliens who held us for a day or so and then let us go. We don't know why."
He studies her as a jeweller inspects a diamond, searching for flaws, anything which may condemn it. Condemn her. Those aqua-lit eyes with their hint of grey are like laser surgery; they divide tissue from bone and bone from marrow. She shuffles her feet noisily, unable to meet them and not cave in.
"I see," he says, with that thoughtful, deliberate patience she knows so well is false, and brittle. A warning sign. "What is he commending me for? Finding a good tree to stand under?"
"Malcolm . . ."
"Don't 'Malcolm' me, Hoshi. You don't use my name once for months on end and then suddenly start peppering your speech with it? This is official business, Hoshi. Please remember that."
"You just used my name twice in as many sentences!" she retorts.
He lowers his eyes, at last, and one hand curls around his pillow and twists the corner fitfully. It as not as casual as he makes it out to be. "That's different," he mumbles.
"How is it?"
"Just is." He is playing the petulant little boy now - a state so much more genuine than his false patience, and so much warmer than his clinical anger of a moment ago. Somehow when he loses his temper she can never quite believe he's in control of it . . . but this teasing species of flirtation is one he has perfect mastery over, and something she can believe, and understand. "So what did you tell him? About my dashing heroism, I mean."
She smiles, and sinks down on the edge of the bed beside him. He obligingly makes room for her to perch. "That's it's not so dashing and calling it 'heroism' would be applying the word in its loosest sense. But seriously? I told him enough. Not about . . . what happened, or what didn't happen, in that bunker - and not about what happened in the forest, either, before you give me that look - but I told him how we had to hide from them. You remember? In the lake."
"Remember?" He snorts. "I'm still having nightmares about it. Sixteen hours of them to be precise."
She nudges his elbow with her hip, her hands wrapped around one knee. "See. Heroism. And I told him about the dashing part - about you dashing into danger to be a decoy for me. We both got captured anyway, he knows that . . . but that doesn't change it." She hesitates, looking down at him thoughtfully, tracing the line of his nose and his jaw and the curve of his mouth with her eyes, amazed at the intensity of his returning stare. He looks almost coy gazing back up at her, the dim lights casting nets of shadow through his long eyelashes and into the sockets. It should look spooky. But the idea of Malcolm Reed being coy is just too funny to find anything about him spooky tonight. She has something more to say . . . but this is hardly so pleasant as the first piece of news, and she doesn't know how. "Lieutenant, would you . . . would you have done as they asked, if I hadn't . . . if the EM barrier hadn't been operational, or I hadn't been able to tell you? I'm sorry to bring this up again, Malcolm, but . . ."
"Hoshi—" There is that hitch in his voice, that one she never expected to hear from him, but which has only become more frequent as they got to know each other. The way his throat fails him when he says her name that way. "Hoshi, please don't ask me that."
"Why? Because you don't know?"
"Because the answer is no, Ensign." She stops dead at the return of his anger in that sudden cold statement, knowing it isn't aimed at her. He has turned his flushed face into the pillow again and gingerly she reaches out, and rests her hand on the back of his neck. His pulse is pattering frantically under her hand, and that in itself is a miracle; for someone so defensive, so paranoid, as Malcolm, allowing her to touch that most vulnerable artery is the surest sign she has of his changed feelings toward her. All she needs, in effect, to know that he won't push her away again.
"I just had to know, Malcolm," she says, gently. "That wasn't an attack, it was just a question. I told you I don't know what I would have done. It's not about you. I don't blame you for wanting to do your duty, I just had to know. You can understand that, can't you?"
"I hate my duty." He spits the words into the pillow like gunfire, and doesn't turn back to her just yet. "I hate having to always do what I'm told is right, what everybody else thinks is best for me. I joined the Navy because it's what everybody else wanted, what I had to do. But it wasn't what I wanted. I'm sure you can see that judging by . . . well, what happened." With a viciousness she hadn't expected from him he twists his head suddenly, and she gasps as she realises why his voice has been sounding so blurry, so unsteady in his throat. His eyes seem so much bluer when they are holding back tears. "It never is."
She reaches up, ever so slowly, and grazes the back of her knuckles down his cheek. The touch is as tender as her tone is exasperated. "It might be time to change that. Grow a backbone and decide what you want to do. Now do you want these chestnuts or not?"
He sniffs, and his odd, breathless little chuckle bubbles up again before he can stop it. "You're beautiful when you're angry, you know."
"Malcolm! Of all the old, ridiculous clichés in the universe . . ."
"I'm traditional, Ensign. Apparently, anyway."
There is a silence, and for all the prevaricating, she feels she has got her answer. He is looking at her with such fervour as it goes on that she begins to fidget, embarrassed by the attention, secretly drinking it in. T'Pol never got stared at like this. No, siree.
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The starry blackness and scattered flurries of light passed almost before they had taken hold - she had not fainted as she feared she would, had only faded out and lost her grip on consciousness for a second or two, and for that, she was grateful. Now was no time to act like a spineless little girl, not matter how sudden the shock.
As the shimmering, viscous air and glossy turquoise flora of the clearing came back into focus, Hoshi felt a hand brush softly across her brow, smoothing the escaped hair from her face, and another clasped at her ribs, the arm it was attached to circling her back. It was all that kept her upper body from the ground, and had broken her fall.
The captain must have been quick as a snowball downhill to reach her so fast, and catch her like this before she fell backward into the drift of crackling skeletal leaves. He had been some three metres away and yet . . .
Hoshi choked the thought dead as her still tenuous grasp of reality solidified like jello in a mould. Though her ears had always been her sharpest sense, her crowning glory, the remainder of her senses were far from dull, and her sense of smell especially so. The scent that surrounded her was scrubbed and natural, free of that spicy/woody aftershave now sitting in her new bathroom on Enterprise, but never could she mistake the honest smell of skin and sweat and testosterone beneath it, the smell that came so clearly to her now. The hand stroking her brow slowed but did not subside entirely, although her hair was firmly brushed away by now. The skin was a little rougher, the fingers a little calloused, but she knew that touch as well as her tongue knew the shape of her own teeth.
She shuddered and tried to start away, everything that had led up to her collapse slamming back in like a rip tide . . . but her limbs were weak as damp paper and she could only fold back into the pleasantly muscular arms supporting her, and try to remember to breathe.
"Step away from her," she heard the captain say, very slowly, and there was a dry crunch as he took a step towards them. She strained to focus on the direction of that sound and saw Archer, closer than she remembered but still a good two metres away, and she felt the muscles in her mysterious catcher's arms and chest harden instinctively, then lower her gently, so very gently, to the ground. And as he scrambled away she swore she heard a tiny gasp in his throat, and something like a muted, hasty apology, so barely murmured even her discerning ears almost let it go.
She forced herself to snap out of the aftershock, and dragged herself upright, squinting against the light. She felt a little bit concussed, which was ridiculous. Everything was moving slowly, in a fluid, underwater way.
Archer was beside her in an instant, his eyes never leaving the third of their mysterious party. He extended a hand absently to her and helped her to her feet, and she accepted, her face a fiery, anguished red. She could tell from the way her dry cheeks burned and felt so tender to the touch.
The man that looked like Malcolm and smelled like Malcolm and whose touch was his only so much more wistful and reverent had backed away on his haunches and was crouched, poised and coiled like a cornered dog, a couple of metres away. His eyes were lowered and the long black lashes flickered now and again, concealing that impossible colour beneath. Otherwise his face was almost morbidly still, cold and unmoving as marble. She had seen that look, too, a hundred times or more; but she was not used to seeing it from him anywhere but the far corner of the obs deck couch and without a glass of whisky in his hand.
She waited, for once unable to speak, and was more grateful than she could ever hope to communicate when the captain asked her question for her - the one that had been pressing in the draughty corners of her mind like a broken bedspring in her back all along, and which had to be asked, and soon. Should have been asked already, if she had not been such a predictable weakling, and caused a scene like that.
"Where's my officer?" Archer barked. He stooped and with one hand always free and his eyes fixed on his target, retrieved Hoshi's fallen phase pistol. He handed her his scanner and she stared at it, dumbly.
"Scan for biosigns. Especially human," he ordered her, quietly. With trembling hands, she did. But she already knew, in her heart, what she would find.
Three. Only three. Herself, the captain . . . and this man that defied every rule of physics she had ever learned.
"Well?" the captain repeated. Those violet eyes flashed upward, in a moment almost too brief to see, and his gaze alighted on her with that moth-wing sensation she knew so well; when her Malcolm did that, she could read his mind behind every flicker.
She stopped dead, and the scanner nearly fell from her numb hands. All at once, she realised what she had unwittingly just said to herself.
Her Malcolm. She had called her husband her Malcolm. Already, on some level, she believed what her eyes told her, and not what her head insisted was correct. This stranger was Malcolm Reed. He just . . . wasn't her Malcolm Reed.
"You can relax, you know," she heard herself saying, in a voice remote and intangible as the horizon and untethered from her vocal chords, somehow - she couldn't feel them in her throat or taste them in her mouth, only heard them at the same time as the people she spoke to. "He won't shoot."
Archer looked sideways to her in surprise, but she didn't repeat or negate the statement, and he didn't argue.
"But you have to answer my questions. And I'll know if you're lying, believe me. Deal?"
He hesitated a moment, his stare darting from her to the captain and back again. He had dropped his weapon to catch her - a sacrifice she would be a fool to ignore - and had little choice, she knew, but to agree. He nodded, slowly.
Hoshi sank to her knees in the snapping mulch, bringing her eye-level to his, dropping the scanner in her lap and holding her hands out a little, away from her body. "I'm not armed, okay, and I expect you to do the decent thing and not go for any other weapon you might have hidden in those sleeves. The Malcolm Reed I know wouldn't dream of it. So if you're who I think you are, you won't, either."
Behind her, Captain Archer had fallen silent. She couldn't see him but she assumed he had kept his phase pistol steady, as a precaution, because she saw the bright eyes look briefly over her shoulder to him, and then settle back again. He hadn't backed away as she knelt, and that was a start. She felt almost dangerously light-headed, sick with nerves, and her back was an icy river of sweat under her uniform - but she had to do this. Delirium would just have to wait.
"Why did you attack the captain?" she asked, softly. His face gave away nothing the captain would see. Nothing a security team on Enterprise would hold him accountable for. He looked like a child caught planning something good, only to be falsely accused of quite the reverse. The one time that she had seen that look on Malcolm Reed, three months ago now, he had asked her to trust him. He had a surprise for her and she must either trust him or spoil it all.
She had brought her hands in and touched her wedding ring before she even knew what she did. "Okay. All right, okay, not the best place to start." She sighed, and tried again. "Can you tell us what you're doing on this planet?"
He huffed, as scornful a laugh as she had ever heard even from an Englishman, and they were quite renowned for it. He stole a look at the turquoise sky now amassing a shroud of marine-hued rainclouds overhead, and she followed his gaze, both spellbound and on her guard. "I was hoping you could tell me. I assume . . . I assume you know who I am?"
"I know who you look like. But that's not the same thing. Is it?" She watched him carefully, hoping to startle something incriminating, hoping to see something she could dislike or distrust, and needing to see it . . . but again, she was disappointed.
"You tell me. Things aren't always what they seem," he replied, with that gentle laughter. And his eyes stole, very slightly, over her shoulder again. "I know who you are, Ensign. I know that you're the youngest of a large family and I also know that the Enterprise is in orbit waiting for you to return. I can name every crewmember down to the captain's dog. And if you scan me you'll see I'm very much human. Because that's what you were thinking, isn't it? That I might be a hologram, or a clone of some kind. Maybe a shapeshifter. Stranger things have happened at sea."
As he stared without guile into her fixed, questing eyes, his soft, breathy voice skipping over her nerves like rainwater, Hoshi found that as uncomfortable as seeing his face under different hair or feeling him touch her with rougher fingers was, she could look back at him. Because his eyes were altogether alien from the ones she knew. They met hers steadily and if either of them flinched, then Hoshi feared she may have been the one to do so.
They were his eyes. So different, so changed, and yet, still his.
"Malcolm," she whispered. "I don't know where you've come from but if you know anything, anything at all, then please tell me. Do you know where . . . where the Malcolm Reed I know may have gone?"
Something sharpened in his face and turned the usually kindly lines into scored granite. She had seen children look that way when their mothers told them the antiseptic wouldn't hurt, that little bite of wounded trust that hurt more than the pain itself. "If you are Hoshi Sato and if . . . if you're anything like I remember . . . then you won't push me to tell you anything that's not mine to give. You say that you know somebody with my name. I can only assume we have something in common. If that's the case, then you'll understand how careful I have to be. You'll accept that I can't tell you, just yet. Maybe never."
Archer spoke up for the first time since this interrogation began. "You're not going anywhere until you do, Mr Reed. Unless coming back to my ship under guard qualifies."
Hoshi stood, her legs unwilling to support her - and although her instinct was to turn on the captain and emphasise just how fiercely certain she was, she couldn't look away from the tensed figure in front of her. "He'll come. You don't need to restrain him."
He nodded, but he looked unsettled. Even . . . scared.
She could count how many times she had seen Malcolm Reed scared on one hand. It was only one of the things she loved about him. But she checked herself, hard. This may look and sound and in every physical way correspond to her husband - but it wasn't him. The man she loved with such fierce pride was missing in action. Wherever he was, she knew he was no coward.
"I appreciate your opinion, Ensign, and I'm sure you're right, but I'm not willing to take that chance," Archer returned, grimly. Hoshi's phase pistol had not relaxed in his hand, even after the threat of attack had apparently passed. "Those bindings on his arms. We can use them to tie him, just till we get back to Enterprise. Take this." He held the phase pistol out to her, but their prisoner darted backward, and the heat pouring from his altogether vicious stare startled her. His wary eyes never left Archer.
"No," he snapped. "Her."
Hoshi nodded. Softly she crept towards him and although he cringed, like a kicked puppy seeing a bad master coming home, he remained where he was, and allowed her to untie the rags holding his sleeves in check. She tried to be gentle as she loosened the strip from his injured arm, and tried harder still not to notice the blood seeping through his shirt in twisted, tangled streams . . . and when she bound his hands behind his back, she was careful not to pull the knots too tight. She thought she saw gratitude in the unreadable mask he wore, but she couldn't be certain. Of anything.
She stepped back from him and Captain Archer gestured with the phase pistol for him to walk ahead of them. He obeyed placidly and with startling grace. Hoshi fell back, and when the captain halted with his brow furrowed deeply in inquiry, she could only swallow.
"You did good, Ensign."
"Just keep that man away from me," she spat. "I'll do my bit, sir - but keep him away from me."
Archer nodded, and walked after their prisoner into the beaten undergrowth that was the path. After a moment, putting as much distance between herself and them as she could, Hoshi followed. The storm broke as they left.