I'm going to take a few seconds to answer some questions that were (probably rightly!) asked in the reviews. Thank you for the reviews, by the way! The parts in italics are supposed to bridge the six months between Incentive', my last long fic, and this one. They're there to hopefully shed some light on events leading up to the wedding that has just taken place in the prologue. Plus, some of this will be relevant later! The scars and the waterfall escape are both references to Incentive', so if you haven't read that, some of this may not make sense. The thing about the letter and Malcolm's sister will hopefully make much more sense as we go on . . . I'm planting seeds and just seeing what grows, I guess.
PART TWO: THREE WORDS
FIVE
Hoshi kicked her feet petulantly at a twist of blankets wrapped around her right foot; if she could have seen herself she would have thought she looked like Porthos dreaming about cats. Her leg wrenched violently and flung the covers aside, uncovering her to the hip, and peevishly she reached over with one arm and dragged them back again, lamenting the loss of the warm patch she had made with her body's flushed imprint. She felt cold at her toes and too hot in the head - and diving under the sheets until only the top of her head peeked out on the pillow no doubt didn't help matters - but she wanted to isolate herself. It was the only way she could think. It was the only way she could keep functioning at all, and not give in to the kind of mental shutdown that hovered a little below the surface like a sleeping shark in shallow waters.
He's not dead.
The captain had quietly insisted she try and get some rest despite her worries, and that he would keep the sensors running until he found something. That he wouldn't give up the search until he did, and that Malcolm would be joining her in no time. All she need do was keep the bed warm for him. She knew it was all they could reasonably do, at least until the lightning storms on Tut had flared their last, but still she felt that lying here under an avalanche of sheets was a betrayal, somehow. That she should just take a shuttlepod and trawl that jungle, alone if she had to, until she found him. She should tread and retread every inch of that insect-infested, snake-ridden ground if it would help, in the rain, in a hurricane if need be. He would be soaked and freezing and no doubt more than usually colourful about his complaints when they picked him up, but that wouldn't matter - that would burn itself out like a damp fuse, like the storms themselves, the moment she got him back to their quarters. If a hot shower didn't knock the rougher corners from her grouchy darling lieutenant, well, then there were other ways of warming him up. Ways that used less of the ship's resources and a lot more of hers. The bed was busted, but warmed or not, the bed needn't factor into the equation.
She smiled to herself, and curled her knees up to her chin like a sleeping cat on a rug. Being the first marriage to take place onboard a Starfleet vessel had its definite advantages; the novelty was still so new that she could get away with murder. None had dared disturb the honeymooners last night, or would dare to do so the next time they closed that door to the world. They had kept their side of the bargain, and professionally held their distance - their private time was their own so long as their duty never suffered. It had been as difficult as this before, each pretending the other's welfare mattered no more than any other crewmember's, but they had survived it. She could survive it again.
It was as their guest had said to her: He's not dead.
She had always known there would be risks involved in a relationship like this; and at last, she understood a little of the captain's initial reticence. Malcolm had never mollycoddled her, never allowed any illusions about the danger they faced every day, and in time, she had learned not to doubt his warnings. She should have been prepared for this.
She wasn't.
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If those three words are to mean so much in her future, then the three words he whispers to her one night as they keep their most-nightly vigil on the obs deck matter more. They sit as they always do, he squeezed into the far corner of the couch and she nestled in the crook of his arm, and on this night it is the peanut butter sandwich he chips away at so conscientiously. Occasionally he pauses to take a bite before placing it back on its plate on the side table. So far it has lasted him an hour and a half, and counting.
"All I can smell is peanut butter," she announces, and wriggles a bit.
"Sorry, I'm sure."
"It's horrible."
"Better not kiss me until I've brushed my teeth, then."
"I wasn't going to."
She twists herself comfortable and he looses his arm demurely a moment, letting her settle. "Nice to know where I stand," he says, completely deadpan. They lounge in companionable silence a moment while he quietly demolishes the remainder of the sandwich.
"Malcolm?"
He grunts in acknowledgement, and craning her head backward she sees he has his mouth full.
"Have you noticed anything funny about the captain recently?"
He swallows, and stares off into space a moment. "He has sent Trip on a lot of away-missions alone recently. Is that what you mean?"
"Maybe. He's sent Trip practically everywhere on his own and us . . . well, he never sends us anywhere together, does he?"
"Can you blame him? Look what happened last time."
She pedals her heels a little against the rumpled couch, and pouts, hoping to elicit some sympathy from him. He is in one of his facetious moods, she can tell. He will deflect her gradually more intimate banter with these lifeless, dry comebacks, his spine rigid and his face devoid of any and all expression . . . but then he will break into that smile, that wickedly wonderful smile, and stoop over her and imprint his warm lips on her forehead with a laugh that shatters all his former blandness into scattered shards. With that kind of payoff in the offing, she is willing to wait out this little phase.
"He can't hold that against us forever. I mean . . . I can't help but feel a bit overlooked, sometimes. I do have legs, you know. I can walk. And thanks to somebody not a million miles away I can fire a phase pistol pretty straight now."
"But could you fire it at me again?"
It is so soft and so unexpected that her brain stutters like a broken engine, attempting to convince her she hasn't heard him say it. She flounders wordlessly for only a moment before he saves her the humiliation, and continues.
"He told me right at the beginning that he wasn't ready to allow any personal feelings to jeopardise the crew. Think of some of the life forms we've met, Hoshi. Things that can take over a human being, things that can use us as leverage to get something they want . . . things that quite literally stop at nothing. If your duty called for you to sacrifice me for the sake of the crew, could you do it? As easily as you might any other member of the crew?"
He squeezes her tightly in both arms in the wake of this, letting her know he expects no reply. He must know, as she does, that there is nothing to say to something like that. Once she had shot him . . . but could she do it again, now that things have changed?
She twists in his lap, and looks awkwardly up at him, suddenly shy. Is he smiling? There is a slight curve to his lips, but in such a way that she can't be sure. His eyes are deep and dilated in the dim lighting, as dark as the ocean he loves and hates so much. Contradictions swim behind them. He almost let her die, once. She knows what he is saying, and what it falls to her to do now. She barely recognises this young woman that has made a life for herself in space, that expected to teach and to one day meet some quiet intellectual that would understand her work; maybe somebody that owned slippers and liked to take his dog for a walk. Who is this confident Ensign discussing the dangers of deep space with a man best known for blowing things up?
"So you're saying he won't put us in that position. Is that it?"
He leans over her and presses the kiss she has expected since this conversation began squarely between her eyebrows. "Bingo." He brushes her hair idly aside, and she wrinkles her nose, embarrassed and flattered in one fell breath. "The captain made me promise him we wouldn't let it affect our work, Hoshi. Keeping us apart in these situations is his way of making sure we don't have to."
She sighs, and her toes kick again. It is getting to be a habit.
"So yes, " he says, finally. "I have noticed the captain behaving oddly. But I know why he has to. It's something we have to accept, Hoshi. That you have to accept." He shifts, and now he is looking firmly into her eyes, caught in his grasp so that she has no choice but to meet it. "I want to make a go of this, Hoshi. You have no idea how much. But . . . but if we do, you have to know that it won't be easy. We're not like other people. We put our necks on the line every day, me more than anyone. If you let me, I promise you I'll make it as good as it can be. But it's not safe, Hoshi. "
She says nothing to this revelation, so serious, and so sudden. She can't.
He pulls her closer, and plants another kiss, this time on her mouth. "It's not safe."
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Hoshi rolled over on her back, nudged down the covers, and stared at the ceiling. It was no good, lying here like this, waiting for news. Much as she could understand the secrecy the captain had chosen to bring their new house guest aboard under, it had put her in a unique position, and one that left her utterly unable to do anything but what she did. She understood his reticence - her own experience of Starfleet and the Vulcans matched the captain's, if only vicariously - but that did nothing to make this inactivity any easier. This waiting. The only shred of empathy and faith she had managed to find had been from the one person least qualified - and least expected - to give it. The man that had sat so placidly wearing her husband's face on the journey home had done what her captain could not.
He had said nothing on the way back but three little words. Three words, when he should have been pleading his case, making threats or explanations, attempting to convince them that he would be no danger to them. If she could have studied him on the way back, waited on his expression and poise as her captain did, it might have made sense of his silence. It might have qualified those three words and his puzzling acceptance of everything happening around him, like the still heart of a cyclone. She had never seen a man so saturnine - and that beggared the question, all over again, if he was even a man at all.
Those three words were all that Hoshi needed to hear; perhaps they were all he needed to say.
He's not dead.
She wanted to believe him. She did believe him, but it was neither the words themselves nor the whispered sincerity of the claim that made her feel that way; she believed that her darling ambitious lieutenant wasn't dead because he wasn't the type. He had been in more life-and-death situations than any of them, and come out unscathed. Even when he had died, when she had felt the life slipping from him by her own hand and seen the blood and warmth flooding from his pale face, he had come back. She had once asked him what had made him fight so hard that day almost a year ago now, the day that she had shot him; he had buried his nose in her hair and said that he had a lot to live for.
"He'll be all right, Hoshi," Archer had said from his seat at the rear of the shuttlepod. Somehow he failed to convince her. Her own captain had failed to convince her, when three words from a stranger had drawn out her trust at the drop of a pin. Archer had asked her to pilot them back to Enterprise, and she knew why he had done so. She had been grateful for the monotony, for the routine of procedures and controls. They, at least, had been the same as on any other day.
"I know, sir," she had replied.
"It's just a matter of running a sensor sweep for his biosigns and beaming him up. We'll have him out of that storm in no time. Boy, will he be mad."
She nodded, evasively. He was most likely holed up in a cave somewhere, waiting for the storm to pass before contacting them for a pickup. Crewmembers had been out of contact for far longer than this without undue cause for concern. The scanner must have been wrong, maybe due, in part, to the weather's interference. Nothing worked properly when it was soaked.
He'd be okay.
It was only as they neared the shuttlebay that any of them spoke again; even Captain Archer had refrained from firing the questions she knew he wanted to, and had merely sat in grim silence guarding their guest until the yellow docking lights of the ship's underbelly flooded into the shuttlepod's tiny cabin. Archer had ordered her to take them in, but not to open the doors until he gave the word. She had done so, and sat in stunned silence, waiting for him to say something further. Looking back, she recognised that shock, that pervasive, wordless apathy, for what it was; grief. She had not allowed herself to see it, because grief meant she was not nearly so certain of her husband's safety than her outward demeanour would allow. She couldn't be feeling anything but slight worry and a little impatience because all this was was a change in plan. Nothing more. He was just late. And the captain was right - he would be mad when he got home.
Having his perfect double staring so fixedly at his stained old boots did little to settle her. The inarguable equation existed, and it would be foolish to deny what was sitting right in front of her; her Malcolm had vanished as this one had appeared. It didn't take a genius to figure out the two incidents were almost certainly related. But this couldn't physically be him, even considering the unique possibilities of time travel . . . he would have said so, he would have laughed and explained just how he came to look so different and what had happened to his uniform. To his eyes. His hair. He would be treating her as his wife, and Archer as his captain. He would have looked at her in that hungry way of his, letting his eyes skate over her every curve, a grin spreading slowly across his face.
This man was afraid of her, and afraid, even more, of the captain. He didn't look at her that way because he didn't look at her at all. He sat with his powerful eyes cast down, but watchful under the lowered eyelashes. There was something about the subservience that she could not wholly believe in.
"Hold on, Hoshi," Archer had commanded with a raised hand, as she reached for the gullwing hatch controls. "We need to decide what we're going to do with him."
Hoshi swung the pilot's seat around sharply to face them, and palmed her still-damp hair smooth against her scalp. The clasp had held as they dashed to the shuttlepod in the sudden downpour, but barely. "What do you mean, do with him?"
"I mean we can't just march in there claiming that this is a double. He'd be snatched by the Vulcans for scientific study before our feet hit the deck. No, we've got to get him onboard without being seen. Keep this to ourselves."
"How . . . how do we get him through decon, sir? You know Doctor Phlox likes to see us back on board personally. It makes him feel needed." But in the back of her mind, she had been thinking that as important as this mystery man was, as right and comforting as the captain's intentions were, this conversation was inherently wrong. They should be more concerned about their missing crewman, they should be planning a search, a sensor sweep, a rescue party. They should be down there, looking for him.
Now.
"Doctor Phlox is expecting three people in decon when we open those doors. You, me, and Lieutenant Reed." Archer cast a sideways glance at the silent third member of their return party; the object of it remained unmoved. "Does this look like Lieutenant Reed to you?"
There was a flicker of those lowered eyelashes and a flash of brilliant violet beneath. Except for them, for the hair and the outlandish clothes, he looked like their armoury officer in every way.
"Captain, we have to report Lieutenant Reed missing, we have to get a search team down there!"
"I'll take care of it, Hoshi. I haven't forgotten Malcolm; but we have a problem that needs to be dealt with any way we can. I've never heard of anything like this before, and I don't know how we're going to explain it in the end. But until then, I want to keep our options open. A few weeks back I had Trip reroute some of the controls for the sensor grid through to my ready room in case of emergencies. I can run a continuous sensor sweep from there until we find Malcolm."
She subsided meekly back into her seat, her grip unconsciously tensing on the armrests and boring ten tiny holes into the padded vinyl. She had seen Captain Archer take on entire governments for the sake of one captive crewmember, had seen him mount rescue missions the like of which had not been seen on Earth for decades . . . she had to trust that he could and would do the same again. He hadn't lost a crewmember yet - and she could tell from the sound of his voice and the crease in his forehead that he didn't intend for Malcolm to be the first.
"He doesn't look exactly like Lieutenant Reed," she complained, a little petulantly. "Phlox'll notice."
"There's spare uniforms in the locker back there. We can hide those clothes."
"His hair's longer. Not by much, but it's longer."
Archer reached over the back seat and snagged the water bottle she had carelessly thrown in earlier today, little expecting for it to be of any use. It seemed like lifetimes ago. Lifetimes best forgotten. "Phlox will know we got in a storm down there. T'Pol would have handed any planet side data on to him to run us through decon, and he'll expect us to be wet. You know what happens to hair when it's wet?"
Hoshi gulped back a sour bolt of disbelief that crowded her mouth. It felt like swallowing her own heart whole.
"His eyes," she choked, ineffectually. "His eyes are different."
Archer smiled. "Leave it to me, Hoshi. I'll take care of everything. You don't have to worry. Malcolm's tough. He'll be okay."
He's not dead.
And the captain had taken care of everything. Phlox had not suspected a thing - his only comment had been a slight concern for Hoshi's own elevated heart rate and increased perspiration levels. She had blamed it on the excitement of the day before, and be it by the sheer innocence of her big blinking eyes or merely lack of evidence to the contrary, Phlox had believed her. He was still reeling with the distinction of being the first Denobulan to witness a human wedding, and perhaps his mind wasn't on the task in hand.
He had believed all of them. After all, he knew Lieutenant Reed's medical history better than anyone; why should he question the hay fever attack the third member of the away team returned with? With his hair soaked against his scalp and his eyes tight closed against imaginary allergies, their visitor had looked one hundred percent like their armoury officer. Archer had half-carried and half-dragged him into decon, his battered old clothes exchanged for a spare uniform, and she had to admit their guest had put on an extraordinary show without question or complain of their methods. He had splashed water in his half-closed eyes to make them stream and sneezed convincingly throughout their brief scan for contaminants. Phlox had been content to administer a mild antihistamine and order him to bed to sleep it off.
The doctor hadn't seen what happened next. He hadn't seen the captain march the 'lieutenant' to Malcolm's old quarters and seal him inside. He hadn't seen Archer fetch a security lock from the armoury and bolt it on. But she had seen. The captain didn't know, but she had seen.
And she couldn't help but know, in her heart, that their visitor was no 'guest' . . . but a prisoner.