Sorry about any delays from here on in, but it's exam time, playoff hockey time, and 40 hours of work a week really cuts into any time left to do any writing.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters (well, possibly Toby, but I don't really think she could be owned by anyone). Nor do I own the songs quoted, which is why I attribute them to the appropriate artists. The story (insomuch as there are any original stories left) is mine. This is for entertainment purposes (mostly mine, but hopefully yours as well) only.
Technical notes: Thanks to some great criticism, anything that appears inside square brackets [ ] from here on in qualifies as flashback. Hope this helps everybody keep things straight.
As mentioned on Chapter 1's notes: if the history does not seem to line up with an official history, there is one big reason – I am not strong on these characters history past what is in the show. Please then, take it as you will: an alternate history (a la Harry Turtledove), or simply events that a person doesn't always like to think about, let alone discuss with others. No one is a single entity. We are all amalgamations of previous experiences, other people's influences, and our own biochemistry. Since I've been using music quotes, I'll use another here: "You were never the same way twice."[1] None of us are. Mirrors don't always tell the truth.
And now… on with the story….
"Well, I wouldn't quite go that far."
Trip jumped. There was no one else in the room, but he definitely heard someone. A sharp laugh formed a reply to the comment, and he realised that both had come from the intercom. Somehow the doorbell had malfunctioned, broadcasting a conversation from the hallway outside. It was, like yesterday's incident with the bike, something that should – technically – not happen.
I don't need any of this. Too tired and frustrated to track down a gremlin, he simply unscrewed the panel and disconnected the wires. Acting on a non-existent safety feature, the door slid open.
"Fucking hell."
A passing crewmember looked over in shock, then seeing who uttered the comment looked away even more quickly. No doubt one more little thing to be added to the list of transgressions against him. An officer, maybe, but certainly no gentleman. Refraining from comments that may infringe on the rights or sensibilities of others – wasn't that in one of the anti-harassment manuals? Taken broadly that could eliminate almost every phrase in the lexicon of human interpersonal communication (hell, even "human" could be taken the wrong way), but he was pretty sure that even taken narrowly, his last statement definitely fell under the category of phrases to be avoided.
"Like I give a fuck." Nothing else about him these past couple of days had lived up to the epitome of a Starfleet officer, so why should he start now? Instead he reached into the narrow opening and grasped the edge of the door with his fingertips. Planting one foot on the inside of the doorframe he pulled, letting his frustration fuel his efforts with adrenaline. The door resisted for a moment then flew closed, nearly catching his hand in the process. "Son of a bitch!"
Well, the door was shut now. He stood for a moment, shaking, then walked over to the desk and sat down. As he did, the lights dimmed and the room grew colder. Great. Maybe he should take this as a sign. Engineer can't handle the machines, time to hang it up and go home.
"Are you trying to tell me I wasted my time?"
He spun around in the chair, unable to believe what he heard, and now saw. It couldn't be, not here, millions of miles from Earth and ages away from…
"That's right." She grinned, the grin that said she was pissed off, but also had a joke hiding somewhere up her sleeve. She could pack more information into a single grin than most people could in a ten page essay. "It's me. Your first victim."
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"Toby?" She looked like she did when he last saw her, well not quite when he last saw her, but close enough. "It… I… You…"
"Try to string a phrase together, Trip, it's not all that difficult. All it takes is a subject, verb, and object, with maybe some adjectives thrown in there. A good one would be 'Hello, Toby, long time, no see, I thought you were dead.'"
He nodded, his mouth dry. He didn't believe in ghosts, and here was a story that would make Travis fall down in worship. It had to be the strain. The events of the past few days and the fact that he hadn't been eating; this had to be a stress induced hypoglycaemic hallucination. There was no other reasonable, logical explanation.
Toby (or Toby's image) placed a hand on her chest and stepped backwards, feigning shock. "What is this? Charles 'Trip' Tucker the Third, thinking like a Vulcan? Looking for a logical explanation? Well, to paraphrase Dickens I am not a bit of undigested beef or a piece of potato, or any lack thereof. I am exactly what I appear to be, you just happen to have gotten yourself into a state where your mind no longer wants to work hard enough to exclude reality."
"I didn't say anything," he countered, his natural combativeness overtaking some of his shock, "So you've got to be in my head."
"You didn't have to." Debate was one of Toby's favourite pastimes too; maybe that was why he was so interested in people who would argue with him. "Despite the opinions of your poker buddies, you are an astonishingly easy read. You would rather be crazy than admit that you might be talking to a real, dead, ghost." She leaned in closer, her mis-matched eyes boring into his. "Insanity's not going to make me go away, Trip. I'm here for the duration, like it or not. You, and me, buddy until we get this whole thing sorted out. Got it?"
He whimpered, pulling back in his chair, his fingers digging deep into the armrest. Fear washed away disbelief, and was followed by the certainty that whatever was to come, no matter how bad it got, was somehow less than he deserved. Even if his former best friend had a new role as avenging angel, he'd certainly done enough to merit it, and more besides.
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["My God, Trip, you are so drunk. I don't fucking believe it." Toby tugged at his arm, trying to pull him away from the crush of partiers. "Your Dad is going to kill you."
He shook her off and grinned, well past the point of worrying about minor things like the future. "No way. We won, Toby, we won!" And won they had, the state football championships were theirs to savour, all thanks to the efforts of the school's star quarterback, one Charles Tucker III. He had a right to celebrate tonight, even his Dad would agree with that. Anyway, since he'd gotten his life back on an academic track, their relationship had improved immensely. He threw an arm around Toby's shoulders and hugged her tight to him. "We are the greatest."
"You are the drunkest. You can't even stand up straight." She pulled out of his grip, shoving him hard for good measure. She chewed her lip, tears in her eyes. In this light, surrounded by this group she looked even younger than she was, a little kid invading a world of grown-ups. This past year had been hard on them, on their friendship, as the two years between them assumed the proportions of a huge gap it had never been before. He was seventeen, in the prime of his life; she wasn't even old enough to hold a job. Her role of friend was shifting to one closer to the one Elizabeth held: beloved younger sister. Until now, he didn't realized how much that hurt her. But that was how he felt. It didn't mean he didn't care about her, it just meant that he… well, he had other friends, other interests. Girlfriends.
"Toby…"
"Forget it." She spun, walked, and then ran away from him. He watched her go, torn between chasing her down and…
"What's up?" Suzie Benton, one of the cheerleaders, came up behind him and looped her arm through his. "Come on, we're missing you back here." He let himself be led back into the throng, and buried himself in the celebration. Yet in the back of his mind a little voice nagged. You wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her.
Three days later, and she still wouldn't answer her phone; her grandmother would only tell him that she wasn't there. He went by her house, but she wouldn't come to the door; even at night no light shone in her room. Toby was gone. As quick as she'd come into his life she vanished, and with less explanation.
"Tell me if you hear from her." Trip stood on the porch of Toby's grandmother's house, unable to meet Mrs. Howard's eyes. "Tell her I'm sorry, that I was stupid and I shouldn't have acted like that." He half hoped that Toby herself was hiding inside, was listening to everything to everything he said. How could have he just let her go like that? Toby was the reason he wasn't in jail or dead. She had been his confidante, his counsellor, and his booster. Yet she'd chased him down with a problem of her own, and he hadn't been there for her, wouldn't help. Worse than that, but the problem wasn't born on the night of the party: he realized that it had been building for a while, but he had been too pre-occupied with his own life to notice.
"Excuse me." The soft, polite voice caused both of them to jump. When Trip turned and saw the uniform, saw the car that stated rather clearly that this car was from the Bay County police department, his heart stopped beating and the band he thought he'd lost tightened in on his head. The sun stopped putting forth heat, he shivered in the 34 ºC temperature.
Oh, God, no. No, no, no, no, no. Yet he knew that the answer was more than likely yes. No other reason for a cop to show up, so polite and sombre.
"Mrs. Anita Howard?" The officer glanced at Trip, unsure who he was, only seeing a teenager in a state of panic.
"Yes?" She stepped forward, her face set tight and broadcasting that she knew as much as Trip did, that they didn't need this woman to tell them anything.
"Mrs. Howard, I regret to inform you…"
Trip felt the sun black out, saw the world disappear from his eyes and felt it tip like a surfboard catching a bad angle on a wave. He didn't hear the words that were being said, heard nothing but the screaming in his mind. Finally, mercifully it stopped.
He didn't go to the funeral; they wouldn't let him out of the hospital even for that. Any kind of stress related loss of consciousness had to be taken seriously, the doctors told him, even with modern medical techniques the human psyche was a potent, barely understood thing. The skull fracture and brain injury he received when his head hit the railing hadn't helped any either.
Toby wouldn't have wanted one anyway; she shared her grandmother's belief that death didn't end everything, that it was just another event in life. Still, he found himself needing something, some way to connect that she really was gone, not coming back. Somehow he found himself in their tree house, the one they'd built themselves. It had been their place, for no one else.
"I'm sorry, Toby. Can you ever…" No, he couldn't ask that. He didn't deserve that. "I promise you, I'll never do anything like that again." His voice shook and the tears were hot on his cheeks. "I'll take care of myself, too, just like you always told me to. I'm going to be an engineer, like Dad keeps saying I should. I know that's what you were always going to do with yourself, that you thought I'd be a better architect or artist, but I'm going to do this, because you can't do it anymore." He smiled, remembering how she had always been the one to solve the practical problems, to figure out how to get things done. The smile disappeared just as quickly. How come, if Darwin was so right, stupid people were the ones who got to survive? "I'm going to keep going, because I know that's what you would want." He held his hand out palm up, his half of the ritual they used to bind a promise. Hers should be wrapping around his wrist, gripping tight to seal the vow. He didn't tell her the other part, couldn't say what she'd hate to hear. You're the last person I'll ever care about, outside my family. I'm never going to hurt anybody like that again. The only way to avoid that risk would be to not get involved, not on that level. Fall in love, sure. But never, ever was he going to have a best friend again. Ever.]
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"Well, remind me never to piss you off." Toby shook her head, watching as Trip relived the past. "The amount of practice you get beating yourself up, I'd hate to see what you'd do to anyone else." She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped her fingers on her elbow like his mother used to when he'd hand her an excuse that she didn't believe. "And they actually let you into Starfleet?"
"They didn't exactly know what they were getting." Easy enough to fool the psych tests when you spend enough time studying them.
"So you're not a highly qualified warp-field engineer. What are you, then? An ice-cream vendor? A dog collar hole puncher?"
He gave her the look that Elizabeth always told him could break mirrors. "I was speaking of my qualifications as a human being, not my technical skills. I would think that you of all people would understand that."
She looked him up and down, like a scientist with a new specimen. "Let's see. Bi-pedal, no noticeable points on the ears, given the complexion I'd definitely have to say iron based blood. Four fingers and an opposable thumb on each hand, hands arrayed as opposites. Appears to be a carbon based life-form. Oxygen breathing. What are the missing qualifications again?"
"I'm talking on a basic, social level. Not homo sapiens as a species, but a member of society. Morals. Ethics." He spoke slowly, anger rising at her inanity. It sank again as he realised that it mirrored his own treatment of her, all those years ago. Your problems, so big, are just trivial.
"Oh. Ethics. Now we're on firmer ground here. Ethics have always been a specialty of mine, as you should very well know. I tried to instil a few in you, but it is becoming rather clear that I did an insufficient job." He winced as she spoke, but didn't interrupt, "So let us attempt to trace this back to the main problem, the one to which all others are merely symptoms. Are you, Charles Tucker the Third, also known as Trip, rank of Commander, Starfleet, chief engineer of the warp five starship Enterprise, are you a bad person?"
"Yes." He stared past her, at a point on the floor under the window. He couldn't look at her, couldn't face her.
"Whoa. You know that is the first time, in all the times I've asked that question, which admittedly isn't a lot, but is more than this once, that anyone has ever answered in the affirmative." Her voice lifted up, the light clear tones he remembered so well. " '…tell me how much do you think you can take, until the heart in you's starting to break, sometimes it feels like it will'[2] Oh, Trip, Trip, Trip. You just don't have middle gears, do you? It's either flat out, or in reverse. Good, or bad, right or wrong and nothing in between."
"Anything else is just excuses." He tensed as he sensed her coming up beside him.
"So, there's no balance in your life? No good you've done? You're unredeemable?"
He turned his head, "Don't get Platonic on me. And I'm not James Stewart."
" Actually it's Socratic. And this is not It's a Wonderful Life. I can't show you what history would be like if you weren't in it, because you are, and that's how it worked out. There might be some universe out there with no Trip Tucker, but this isn't it." She moved around, back into his line of sight. "I guess I just want to know what it is that makes you such a bad person."
He told her. About what happened to her, about the Cogenitor. "If I hadn't been so damned arrogant, if I didn't think I was so smart, if I'd even stopped to think about the consequences, she'd still be alive. Their baby would be born, everything would be better. Not only that, but Archer wouldn't hate me either."
"So that's it." She said it so softly he could barely hear. She paused for a moment, the two of them sharing silence. "Remember when you stole the NX prototype?"
He looked at her. "How come you know about that, and not about the other stuff?" He spoke bitterly, even more betrayed. She was playing him.
"Archer was talking about it to his dog, yesterday. I think he was blowing off steam." There was no indication in her tone of a lie, and he had to admit that Archer talking to Porthos wasn't out of character. Why that incident had come up he couldn't guess, but part of him wanted to know where this was leading.
"You did more than steal a ship that day. He was having serious doubts about the engine himself, about its viability. He loved his dad more than anything, and was having to face that his hero's work may have been vitally flawed. By insisting that it wasn't, by finding a way to prove that it wasn't, you gave him something more precious than anything in the world. That's what I'm here for."
"What?" He couldn't imagine what he'd done for the captain that was so important that it merited having a dead person show up to return the favour, but it couldn't be all that good. Especially not if he'd done it first.
"To give you back your faith."
[1] From Try, by Blue Rodeo. Available on their Greatest Hits CD.
[2] From I Go To Extremes by Billy Joel, available on Greatest Hits Vol III