Disclaimer: I don't own Enterprise, or its characters. Right now, I'm annoyed with the people who do… for reasons I think most of you can understand.

Author's note: Yes, finally an update here! Sorry it took so long, but I had written the chapter, and the two betas I had at the time (I still have them, I just picked up a third since) had the same major problem with it, which is so rare that I decided it must be a problem, so had to sit down and re-write. And then I got hijacked by a few other things and lost the train of thought for this, but it's back now.

And yes, I do have a plan here… I'm just not telling everybody what it is.

Thank you to my betas: silvershadowfire, kate98, and gaianarchy… especially on the first go-round when you said it made no sense. Otherwise this would never have been written at all ;)

Oh, and sorry about the space breaks... it seems like every time I get something figured out that I can put in straight from Word, eliminates it. I don't like having to mess around with those stupid lines every time. (break) is a break in scene... the ampersand (&) is simply a break in time. Confused yet? You haven't even started reading.

Chapter 6: Fire and Flame

"Till I am myself again."
– Blue Rodeo

"…as I look in the mirror,
Sometimes I see traces of some other guy…"
– Blue Rodeo

He wasn't always Charles Tucker the Third, he wasn't always a Tucker. He'd been someone else, a name not on any Tucker family tree. McLaren. A crazy, overly-smart man from a crazy, overly-smart family, where along with a tendency to left-handedness, something else hid out in the genes. Something nobody believed in, so it couldn't be real.

"Hey! McLaren! You gonna do this or not?"

He blinked and stared down at his hand, feeling a physical pain grip his chest. It was a crime, damn near a sin to fold on a queen's high flush, but it was straight out stupid to keep playing when you didn't even know the name of the game, let alone what the bet was.

"Lemme guess… He's having one of his 'visions' again." The crowd laughed at the joke, though most of it was the uneasy 'I'm only doing this to make it seem like it's a joke and not out-and-out harassment' sort.

"Yo, Bobby, no cheatin' on the cards, huh?" A hand rattled his arm, trying to draw his attention.

I'm not… but he was… or wasn't he? "Sorry. Excuse me." He picked up the deck and slipped the cards into it then gave it a quick shuffle so they couldn't discover how good a hand he'd had. "I'm out, guys. Later." Everything about this was wrong… but right. Familiar. He was Bobby, and that guy over there was Jimmy Dickerson, the guy sitting next to him was Jake Holleran – outta New York originally – and beside him was none other than… Tucker. But I'm Tucker. Charles Tucker the… No… he was Bobby Mc… He knit his brow, trying to sort it out. That Tucker – Doug – had dark hair and dark eyes, like the side of the family not noted for its brains. He stood up and walked around behind one of the big fire trucks that dominated the area. Looking in the mirror, he confirmed it.

Yup… that's me, all right. The same blond hair – though cut differently, same high cheekbones, same chin and of course that nose. But grey eyes instead of blue. So if he was McLaren, and the dark-haired guy was Tucker… how in the hell did Charles Tucker III end up looking like this?

Does the term ex-wife mean anything to you? Nice to know he hadn't completely lost his old voice. Another anomaly surfaced. If this is genetic memory… and he and I are the same… how come if Sim knew everything I knew, I'm not remembering things about Bobby? The easy answer there, of course, was that Sim was a first generation clone and Trip was just the result of genes regaining dominance after several generations in hiding. Not everything's the same, either. Trip was right-handed, but Bobby's watch seemed to indicate the opposite. So really, who am I?

(break)

"This is odd, Captain." Phlox frowned over the readouts, checking them and the equipment for the third time. Trip's fever had fallen, but now there was a new concern. "It's as though his brain function has changed entirely."

"Didn't you say that brain damage was a possibility?" Jon didn't want to say the words, but he knew he had to face it. He ran a hand over his face, the exhaustion setting in again. He looked at DiLorenza, who'd dropped Trip's hand and now merely watched him.

"This doesn't appear to be brain damage, Captain." Phlox shook his head. "It's as though he's become a different person. The brain is functioning, but they're not Commander Tucker's brain patterns."

Now Jon glared at DiLorenza. "I suppose this is familiar to you, too."

She didn't answer, merely frowned.

"If you don't start giving me some answers, Crewman…" Jon left the threat hanging.

"I don't know, Captain," she finally responded.

Why doesn't that come as a surprise? "Crewman. Your boss, my friend, may be dying. Any help you can give us would be greatly appreciated. Do you understand that?" He couldn't stop the sarcasm. He didn't want to anymore, either.

"Yes." She didn't change expression or inflection.

"Now what do you know about this?"

"I don't know, Captain."

Jon blinked. "You don't know what you know?"

"No, Sir."

That is a legitimate answer, Jon. Just because most people won't admit to it doesn't mean that it's not legitimate. He had to remind himself that this was another one of Trip's strays. It was something Trip had a reputation for: collecting the odd and unwanted from all the other teams and assembling them into something even better than the best. In some ways, he was a better communicator than even Hoshi. It was as though he had an instinct for understanding, and asking the right questions. "Is there anything you can think of that would help explain this?"

She looked straight at him, the first time she'd done that. Her eyes trapped his and he found himself unable to move. Suddenly the Crewman was in charge here, not the Captain. "Belief."

"Belief?" As far as Jon knew, Trip wasn't religious in any way. "Trip's not…"

"His mind believes…"

"Of course!" Phlox's head whipped around. "Psychosomatic illness. I don't know why I didn't think of it before." He frowned. "That doesn't explain the virus, though. Usually when it's psychosomatic there is no underlying illness or organic reason to explain the symptoms. Unless, of course, Commander Tucker's body is manufacturing the virus. That could help explain why it doesn't seem to be contagious. It might be targeted for him alone, it might not even truly be a virus. This is astounding, Captain. I don't believe that such illnesses have been studied to great extent in humans. They are far more common in species like Vulcans where the mind/body discipline is much stronger. Of course, Vulcans rarely have the emotional issues that tend to go along with such illnesses…"

"This is Trip! Not some goddamned study case!" Jon rounded on Phlox now. "He's sick! He could be dying, and you're acting like it's the best thing that ever happened to you!" He took a deep breath, trying to regain control. "This is not in his head, this is real."

"The symptoms are real, Captain. He believes he should be ill, so his body creates the illness."

"I don't care what the goddamn cause is, I want him better."

Trip twitched, his left hand folding and unfolding. Underneath the spots, his skin began to darken, save for a two-inch wide band around his right wrist. Other subtle changes began to transform him: his jaw jutted forward just slightly, giving him an even greater expression of stubborn determination. He shifted in the bed, almost seeming to gain muscle mass.

"Astonishing. It's almost as though this other brain pattern is taking over Commander Tucker, completely. His body is reacting as though he were someone else."

"I don't want someone else, Doctor. I want my chief engineer." This was insane. How could one person literally turn into another? Wasn't there some rule of genetics that said who you were was who you were? Not entirely, of course – certain traits and habits were developed, sure, but these were drastic physical changes in the course of a few seconds. Especially that tan. Trip looked like he'd just spent months exposed to heavy-duty U.V. rays, not like he'd spent the last several years locked in a 'tin-can in outer-space' as he'd once referred to the original design of the starship. Even decon doesn't get you like that.

The alarms sounded again as Trip's brain-patterns went from crazy to outright psychotic. Then his eyes flew open and Jon felt his mouth go dry. I thought his eyes were blue. Instead, the irises seemed to have turned greyish – metallic and cold. He didn't appear conscious, though. Then the impossible, again: twin streams of smoke streamed from his nostrils as his eyes narrowed, focussing on something no one else could see.

A crazy question came to Jon's mind, but the only one that made any kind of sense. Who are you?

(break)

It took two drags for him to even register that he'd taken a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. Smoking's that automatic for me? Now there was a scary thought. I'm a fireman. Firemen smoke. No… I'm an engineer and Starfleet frowns on that sort of thing. Except wasn't playing with anti-matter just an advanced form of playing with fire? And all that plasma… wasn't fire-control a big part of an engineer's job? Wow. His instructors had been impressed with his composure when things burst into flames – could this be why? I've never been afraid of fire. Respectful, yes, but not afraid.

Another memory popped up, this one from Trip's life, not Bobby's. I could've been a hero. Probably would have been, if he'd stuck around to answer questions. But he shouldn't have been out where he was, when he was. Out past curfew: the Academy would have never let him move on if he got caught for that again. But when that lady started screaming… he hadn't thought, just went in to the burning building that everyone else was trying to get out of. He'd just known that he'd find the kid under the bed. He got her out, dropped her with her mother and took off. All the way home he'd tried to convince himself he hadn't done it – the hangover the next morning gave him another excuse.

But maybe I didn't. Maybe he was running off someone else. Maybe that was what instinct really was: a memory from the genes that bypassed the conscious brain and just propelled action. Which still doesn't explain why I'm here.

Remember… the voice echoed in his head again. His voice? Or was he… No, I'm going to work off the assumption that I'm not crazy. Not necessarily a good assumption, but it served as a starting point. Remember what? Remember the first fifteen digits of pi? Remember that cigarettes caused cancer, not just to the smoker, but to everyone around him?

Remember to be careful not to touch. Not to touch what? Hot objects? Live wires? People kept telling him that all the time. That didn't mean he listened.

He left the firehouse and walked outside into the bake-oven of a Floridian summer. Now this I've missed. Nobody understood why he didn't like deserts – they thought a hot climate was a hot climate. But deserts were a dry heat. Everybody said that was easier to deal with, that it was the humidity that always got you, but dry heat sapped him like that. Funny we don't often land in swamps, though. The last swamp he was in… that was way back when he'd been on the lam with Katiaana. She'd hated it, but to him it was just like coming home. Right down to fighting with the girl. He found himself tempted to just stay here forever. Hide out in the past and not go back to the grief that was his present future. Here things were so much less… complicated.

You don't really believe that, do you? Of course not, but it was still tempting. And Jon'd be the first to tell you that I'm not so good at resisting temptation. It remained one of the straining points in their friendship. Hell, it was one of the straining points in every friendship he'd ever had.

Except one. He gritted his teeth, refusing to let himself cry. Toby'd never been judgemental about that – if anything, she was more impulsive than him. She'd taught him how to be impulsive, really – taught him that sometimes you had to let go if you wanted to stand any chance of having fun. Let go, Charles Wallace. Not that his middle name was Wallace, but ever since she read those books she'd been dying to call somebody that. She said he fit the bill.

Except I'm not smart. Smart wouldn't have gotten himself mixed up in romantic complications with another species. Alien. Alien species. He found himself wanting to start giggling, more out of hysteria than humour. Never quite considered that cliché before.

"Let go," he murmured. What was that story? The kid was becoming someone else or something… Become.

"Right." He took a deep breath. His mother warned him about this: that one day he'd get lost in his own imagination and never find the way out. But what did he have to come out to? The fact that he allowed something significantly lower than his brain to consistently make decisions for him, to the point of hurting the only people who believed in him when even he couldn't? No, he wasn't smart. More like an engineering idiot-savant with emphasis on the 'idiot.' He stopped remembering that he was Charles Tucker at all and that he ever had been. He allowed himself to become lost.

(break)

He swore and punched the console. This wasn't happening. The odds that the com system would go down now…

They say it's viral. Just drop out a remote messenger and…

Alarms began to ring. "Shit!" The commands on the screen in front of him scrambled and turned hot pink on a bright pink background. Somehow the virus managed to get in there, too. He abandoned the station and its glowing accusation. Bad enough that he couldn't communicate, but it would be worse to have Lieutenant Hess find him and break his bones for breaking another part of the computer. If Commander Tucker were in charge, he wouldn't have the same worries. He could deal with Commander Tucker. Lieutenant Hess was a loose cannon without her senior officer keeping her in check. She was even worse now that he was sick. Not only that, but Commander Tucker was a nobody. He could be dealt with, removed if necessary. Hess was too well connected all over the place. If anything happened to her, there would be… ramifications. She was also smarter than Commander Tucker, a genius, actually. Too smart for her own good.

(break)

"Spreading? What do you mean, it's spreading?" Jon forced himself to take a deep breath. "Lieutenant, I don't want to hear…"

"Beacons, torpedoes, shuttles… we can't launch any of them sir. And…" Hess took a deep breath of her own. "And I hope that the computer doesn't figure out that we can use the phase cannons as a signalling system…"

"What?" Jon tore his gaze away from Trip to look over at Hess. "What do you mean…"

"I think this virus is specifically targeting communications methods, Sir. It's trying to hold us incommunicado." Hess shook her head. "I just wish I knew why."

"Right." He had a feeling Trip might know the answer to that. "Keep working, Lieutenant."

"Yes, Sir." She sounded subdued, not at all her normal self, not at all the person to whom Trip had so quickly become attached. Theirs was an odd relationship, Jon realised. She wasn't the type of person Trip normally chose to be friends with and they were closer, in some ways, than they almost could be and still stay platonic. And the attachment had been quick…it was as though Trip fastened himself to her in the first instant they met. He was rabidly defensive of her too, as though he'd found something in her he'd lost and was afraid to lose it again. Even T'Pol hadn't been able to change that, much.

T… Of course. Jon dismissed Hess and quickly hit the comm. What they needed was inside Trip's head… who better to get it out?

&

"Captain…" T'Pol stared at Trip, almost nervously for her. Maybe it was the thought of disease, maybe it was something else, but she looked as though she didn't want to touch him.

"I don't recommend this," Phlox agreed. "Commander Tucker's brain patterns are…" he seemed strangely unable to find the words to describe it.

"Doctor, we need to know what's going on. Enterprise is a sitting duck right now. A mind meld…"

"Allow me to rephrase that." A fourth voice entered the conversation, familiar, yet belonging to a stranger. The tone carried more steel than Trip's voice had ever managed, and the accent was heavy enough to slow the words down into a deep, emphatic drawl. Jon stared at the bed, at the apparition that still wasn't conscious but somehow managing to voice his opinion. Trip… but not. "No."

(break)

He flicked the lighter in his fingers. On, off. On, off. Light, no light. Fire… potential for fire. Future fire? Past fire? The binary had become unstable, insufficient. The sci-fi writers were wrong. Computers would never rule the world – logic was unable to account for everything. There was never just a one and a two. There was always at least a three.

"Philosopher Bob thinks." He heard a voice beside him but ignored it. Philosopher Bob. When did thinking become an undesirable attribute? When the 'intellectuals' stopped doing real work and started looking down on everybody who does. It used to be that the craftsman and the tradesman were admired for their skill. Now, it seemed, being able to build something was a sign of stupidity. A man without a university degree was thick-headed, or slow. Smart people went on to higher learning… they didn't do jobs like this.

But everybody needs to feel superior. So the tradesmen struck back, labelling thought as something somehow unworthy of a 'real' man. They were afraid of it and the threat it offered. A thinking working man was a misfit now.

Industrialisation probably had a lot to do with it, reducing the need for manpower by replacing it with machines. Would computerisation worsen the problem? Look at us now. It was only the eighties and already the new class system had developed and the rebellion was building. Where will we be in a hundred years?

He stared down at the polished surface of the lighter and caught a glimpse of something… white lights streaking past on a black background. Odd. Odd, but not unusual. Just another glimpse out of time.

"What's the matter, Bobby? Seein' ghosts again?"

He glared at the intruder. "Get lost, Tucker. I'm not interested in you." Bad enough stealing a man's wife, but did you have to make fun of him, too? Why was it that people seemed to think that sort of thing was okay? The worst part was how they'd done it behind his back – she hadn't even had the guts to tell him things were over. Then again, you'd think I would have noticed. That was another family attribute, though. Sensitivity to the world, and a total oblivion to things happening around them. Psychic ain't omnipotent. If it was… hell, they'd know better than to become psychic.

Seein' ghosts. If only that was it… if only that was the total extent of things. He could live with seeing ghosts.

"Tell us the future, man." Once Tucker had hold of a humiliation, he never let it go.

"I don't do that." Bobby tried to keep his temper. Getting violent wouldn't help, not here. Tucker could be violent too, and as much as he hated the man, he wasn't going to hurt him. God, it was tempting though.

Not that Tucker really believed Bobby was psychic, it was just a joke to him, a nasty game of one-upmanship. If Tucker had found that little girl, it would have been brains that was the cause, but Bobby had done the finding, so it couldn't have been smarts, not even for Philosopher Bob. He just had no idea that he'd hit on the truth.

"What's the matter? It only work on Mondays?"

Bobby tried not to think about it, tried not to wonder what would happen if his kid got stuck with this too. No way Tucker would explain it to him – from here on in the truth would be lost in favour of insanity. Son-of-a-bitch.

"Allow me to rephrase that. No." As he pushed his way past Tucker, he thought he saw something reflected in one of the upper windows of the firehouse. Just a glimpse, but he could see her clearly. A red-headed, pug-nosed girl stared down at him for a second, then was gone. He could almost swear she'd been pounding on the window, screaming for help.

What the hell?