Author's Notes: FINISHED! I never thought I'd do this fandom, but here we are. Thank you for the lovely encouraging reviews, and please don't stone me for the ending...
Charity
Trip's awake and in pain even as the lights come on: unprecedented. A good omen. He eases painfully off the bunk bed, wincing as his feet hit the unyielding tile and a stinging rattle passes through his joints.
Cauley wakes up then, with a blank, unintelligent gaze that he's come to recognise. He reaches out and pushes her shoulder, hard; she doesn't blink. He grabs one of her fingers and twists it 'til it almost breaks; she gasps and yanks her hand away.
"Ouch!"
He sighs in relief, and slumps against the post of the bed – he feels like an old man, tired and sick; his chest hurts like hell for some reason. Cauley glares at him from under her straggling, dirty hair. "You hurt me!" she snaps, clutching her abused hand; then she blinks and looks around as if she hadn't realised where they were. "Morning?"
"Yeah," he says hoarsely. "Listen, Cauley: whatever happens today, stick with us, all right?"
"You hurt me," she repeats sullenly.
"Ensign Cauley," says a cracked, authorative voice from the top bunk. "You were just given an order."
Cauley starts, still rubbing her finger; then, to Trip's surprise, she nods and stands aside, saying "Yes, sir," in a dazed voice.
Malcolm almost crumples as he hits the floor. Trip, startled, takes his arm and helps him stand. His face is chalk-white; his teeth are clenched. Trip opens his mouth to call the whole thing off, to damn well order him to just fucking lie down and stop— "I'm fine, let me go," Malcolm hisses.
Trip gapes at him. The floodgates swing wide open at those two words, and more memories crash into him than he can possibly understand or make sense of at once: those words, and faces, and places, and colours, so many different colours that he'd almost forgotten existed outside this sterile whiteness. His grip on Malcolm's arm tightens painfully – he wants to tell him what he can remember, wants to tell him before he forgets again, and maybe they'll tell them something, maybe they can make sense of them – but then the guard walks past, and it's time to go.
Malcolm brushes Trip's arm as he limps past, an unobtrusive, reassuring touch. They shuffle out, convincingly docile, into the glaring white corridor and join the lines.
And it's so easy once they're out there, to crunch a few toes (of any shape and number), to kick some ankles, to surreptitiously shove the guy in front – though plenty don't react at all, some just needed that little extra hurt to push them over the edge, to break the hold. Some gasp and some growl, some start chattering bewilderedly in their own bizarre language. Soon enough there's a dozen aliens in the throng who are suddenly awake, alert, and pissed as hell, and that dozen turns into twenty, and that twenty into thirty, and pretty soon there's full-scale fights breaking out all over the place. He realises that some were already awake, like they were, faking it – he recognises the Klingon from the day before, angrily backhanding a Denobulan woman. In minutes, before the guards have realised what's going on, the clean, white, brightly-lit corridor is alive with screaming, heaving, scuffling bodies.
Trip finds Malcolm somewhere in the centre of it all, frantically looking for Cauley; they find her in a scrum of stick-thin creatures who are grabbing at her arms and hair, screeching at her in some clicky, unintelligable language – she elbows her way out on her own; they grab her and run.
"Stay in the middle," Malcolm says hoarsely. "Keep running and for God's sake don't split up, whatever you do."
Trip's not sure that Malcolm's in any shape to run; Trip himself can barely breathe through the fire in his throat, so he has no idea what's keeping Malcolm going, except sheer fucking stubbornness. Shit, knowing him, that might be enough.
God, he hopes it's enough.
Pushing roughly through the crowd, sometimes reaching out and grabbing an arm when one of them gets too far ahead or strays too far to the side, they see the end, and a long, dark corridor beside the hall where the lines file in in the morning – he can hear screams coming from inside, but it doesn't matter now, they have to get through that next corridor—
Even when his eyes adjust, it's barely light enough to see. The corridor is long, very long, and labarynthine, twisting and curving every which way, sometimes sloping upwards, sometimes sloping down. They run, and after a while the sound of the fight behind them fades away completely; all they can hear is the sound of their footsteps, echoing ominously in the dim, cool tunnel.
They turn a hairpin corner, and for the first time, there's a branch in the path. Straight ahead – a curve a little further on, white light again – or to the side, a narrow way, dark like the path behind. Which way? "In there," Malcolm croaks suddenly, nodding to the side passage. Trip's not certain; he's sick of the dark, but Malcolm grabs his arm none too gently and yanks them inside, and just around the corner.
After a few seconds of breathless waiting, Trip says, "Wh—"
"Ssshh!"
And then he hears the soft clack-clack-clack-clack of trotting guards, coming up the hallway where they'd been running, not ten feet away. Jesus, Trip thinks, if we'd been five minutes slower…
The tunnel is dark, but they're used to it by now, exhausted and shocky and scared out of their wits – in truth, they hadn't envisioned making it this far, and they won't know what to do if they actually manage to get out. It doesn't matter. They keep going, quieter now but just as hasty, up and down and around weird twists and rises in the passage.
At the top of a steep incline, Malcolm staggers and crashes to his knees, retching violently. There's nothing to bring up, Trip knows, because neither of them have eaten since the day before yesterday; he drops down beside Malcolm and holds him until it subsides. He can feel his own limbs shaking as it is, and there's something thick and copper-tasting in the back of his throat. His hands and feet are bleeding profusely; his chest and throat are fire.
Malcolm coughs and rasps for a few seconds more, then swallows hard a few times, bows his head and wipes his mouth roughly. Cauley is against the far wall, watching him with puzzlement and vague concern. "Sick like Jasper?" she says quietly. Trip whips his head up furiously, ready to tear her head off; but at that moment, Malcom pulls out of Trip's arms and staggers to his feet, leaning heavily against the wall.
"Sick like Jasper," he echoes hoarsely, passing a hand over his eyes. "No. No."
Even in the dimness, Trip can see the dark smear at the corner of his mouth, and the glistening stains all over his fingers.
It's only a little further before they reach a wider corridor again. They follow it – staggering, barely able to move still, let alone run – until they see, ahead, a door. It's a swing door, an old-fashioned swing door with a handle and everything: incongruous, puzzling. It opens with a hard push. On the other side is a vast hall, like a cargo bay, also dimly lit, and something hidden behind the wall makes the air rumble and the floor vibrate. This is it. The end of the road.
"Where now?" he says. He can barely hear himself over the noise.
Then Cauley points. On the far side is a stairwell – he hadn't seen it before; everything in this damn place is white – but seeing it, he follows it upward with his eyes, and up, and up, and up…
"God," Cauley mouths.
Right at the top of the far wall – on the last landing of the zigzagging stairwell, so far away he can hardly see it – a tiny circle of yellow light, like sunlight.
"God," she repeats. "Please."
And they move for the staircase, trudging towards the far wall, full of hope – they're going to get out. All that matters is they get there. Don't think about the climb. Don't think about the pain. Don't think. Just get there. He can almost feel the sun…
Suddenly, the humming in the air increases; the floor shudders with bone-rattling force, pitch and volume increasing until Trip cries out in pain, eyes scrunching shut, hands over ears. He can barely hear Malcolm shouting at Cauley, telling her to run for it, for Christ's sake, run, run! And when he looks up, she's disappearing between two metal gates, yellow-and-black, forty feet high, sliding out of the wall, disappearing between them on the other side and leaving them behind. He stumbles and reaches for Malcolm, and they collapse together into a shouting, crying heap, robbed of breath and freedom.
"No," says Trip, shaking his head vehemently; he can't even hear himself. "No, no, no!"
The gates close at last, crashing together with a horrible finality; it might as well be forever. He almost cries when he see there's numerals on them, recognisable numbers. The roar subsides, bit by bit, until he can hear the distant footsteps outside. The sudden quiet rings in his ears.
"Do you remember what what we did before we were here?" he says faintly. He's so dizzy he can barely see, not that he's trying much. Christ, it hurts to breathe.
"We were… on a ship," Malcolm says haltingly, and sniffs, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
"There was a war," Trip remembers. There's shouting out in the corridor.
"And then we came… home…"
"Home," Trip says. "That's right."
They're facing the looming gates, not looking at the guards approaching them, weapons no doubt pointed at their unprotected backs. Malcolm's eyes are closed, dark lashes on ash-white skin. "At least Cauley got out." Every time he inhales, the blood bubbles audibly in his tattered lungs.
Trip rests his chin on top of Malcolm's dark hair, and holds him until the last, stuttering breaths have died away. He closes his eyes, rocks the body gently, letting them approach and circle him, not looking, not caring. The last thing he hears, far away from himself, is:
"Tch. I told you our humans would get out first – how much was it we bet…?"
Never mind.
END