Disclaimer: Refer to Chapter 1.

A/N: Thanks goes to my beta reader Kat31. Thanks to everyone who reviewed.

Chapter 10

"Please, God, tell me I'm dead."

Jon smiled at the groan that came from the pathetic figure on his bed. Trip groaned again and burrowed his head further into the pillow.

"I'm glad to finally see you awake, Trip," Jon said at a normal volume.

Trip winced. "Too loud. Oh, my head, it's going to explode." He supported his head with his hand.

"Phlox left this earlier, his guaranteed hangover cure." Jon grabbed the hypospray from his desk and walked over to Trip. He pressed it against Trip's neck and activated it. Trip's eyes were clenched tightly shut. "It should start working in a few minutes," Jon said comfortingly, resting his hand lightly on Trip's shoulder.

He sat on the bed and waited. Trip's tense body gradually relaxed and his eyes opened. "Feeling better?"

"Yeah." Trip turned slowly and pulled himself up in the bed to lean against the wall.

Jon started laughing.

"What?" Trip said grumpily.

"Your hair, nice look."

Trip glared at him while trying to fix the problem. Jon chuckled again. "Trip, stop. You're making it worse."

"Well if I had a mirror…"

Jon abruptly stopped laughing, remembering his fright at seeing the cracked mirror in Trip's quarters. "I'm not sure whether I could trust you with another mirror, you've already got seven years bad luck."

Trip looked uncomfortable and avoided Jon's gaze. "You saw that, huh?"

"Yep."

Trip shifted on the bed. "I was angry," he admitted, "and the mirror was a convenient target."

"Because you were angry with yourself?"

"Partially," Trip agreed. "Could I get some water, Captain?"

Jon reached for the glass on his desk and handed it to Trip. He drank slowly and briefly pressed the empty glass against his forehead.

"Trip, do you remember what you told me last night?"

Trip's eyes became watery. "Do you mean me pouring my guts out to you about my family, or asking whether you were propositioning me?" He giggled, slightly hysterically.

"Don't try and change the subject, Trip, we need to talk about this. Why hadn't you told me before?" Jon tried to keep the hurt that he felt out of his voice.

"I don't have to tell you everything, Jon. There are things I don't want to share with anyone. I don't want pity, or people to think, 'poor little rich kid, Mommy and Daddy didn't love him'."

Jon softly said, "You also didn't want to risk anybody telling you that it was your fault that they didn't care about you."

Trip thought for a few seconds. "You might be right. I don't know, I just accepted what Mother was like, it didn't really hurt me that much." He took a deep breath. "But Father was never there, and that did hurt. So, I started acting out."

"You wanted his attention," Jon surmised.

"Yeah. I got myself kicked out of the private school he was sending me to-"

Jon was curious. "How?"

"By being obnoxious, hyperactive and getting into fights. There was some talk that I had ADHD, but Christina managed to convince my parents not to put me on meds. Then I changed my accent." Trip smiled slightly.

"You did what?" Jon had trouble believing what Trip said.

"My accent was very much like my father's, but it had started to evolve a bit because I was living in Florida and Christina was Southern. My grandfather didn't like that, so I helped it along, even exaggerated it slightly." Jon could picture Trip doing that.

"And James and Lizzie picked the accent up off me. I don't even know whether Father really noticed, but Grandfather certainly did." Trip grinned.

Jon shook his head admiringly. "You are a brat."

Trip turned serious again. "I started to think of Christina as my mom and Mark as my dad when I was around five or six. I never really used it much out loud."

A memory finally clicked for Jon. "It was Christina who said that you should be an architect and Mark who said you should be an engineer."

Trip looked slightly puzzled. "Yeah, but I don't think that I've ever told you that." He paused. "Sim?"

Jon nodded. "Trip." He hesitated. "You haven't actually said what your parents were really like. I mean, how they acted towards you."

Trip rubbed his eyes. "Mother never had anything to do with any of us. She liked to be the center of attention, there was always something wrong with her. Basically she's a hypochondriac. Father was…" He sighed.

"Father was just never there. He was always away on business, and if he was ever home it was only for a few days. Until I was fourteen." Trip's voice was bitter. "He was home for a year then, not that I got to see him."

"Why not?"

"Because I was in Canada." Trip spoke quietly and looked down at his hands.

"Trip, look at me. Look at me." Trip finally met Jon's eyes, his expression sad. "Why were you in Canada?"

When he finally spoke, Trip's voice was flat. "Overall, I was an anxious child. I used to have all these thoughts that if I didn't do something or watch out for them, something would happen to my family. As the years passed, the thoughts became more authoritative."

He was staring past Jon's shoulder as he spoke, and Jon found it disturbing.

"If I didn't check all the windows three times a night, someone might break in. The thoughts, the voice, was starting to control what I did." Jon felt a chill run down his spine. His friend hadn't been mentally ill, Jon would have known it.

"When I was thirteen, Christina and Mark just suddenly weren't there. The voice told me that it was my fault, that I hadn't been good enough, done what it said. It told me that if I ate my piece of pecan pie that night that James and Lizzie would go too." Trip had started rocking gently back and forth.

"It escalated from there; if I didn't get down to a certain weight, something would happen. And even when I was losing all the weight, all that I could see in the mirror was a fat, ugly kid who nobody should love. That nobody had loved, that was why my parents wanted nothing to do with me, why Christina and Mark left."

Jon struggled with what Trip said, most of it sounded so unlike the Trip that Jon knew. "You were anorexic?"

Trip finally looked steadily at Jon when he replied, "I am anorexic, I'm not cured." He let Jon think about it for a few seconds before continuing. "The school had noticed that I'd lost weight, they spoke to my mother but she didn't do anything about it. Our new housekeeper just acted like I was an attention seeking kid who'd stopped eating to cause trouble. It went on for quite awhile, until my father came home when I was fourteen." Trip stopped and really looked at Jon.

"I'm freaking you out, aren't I?" he asked with resignation.

Jon considered his reply. He put a hand on Trip's knee, giving it a slight squeeze. "A little. Nobody would suspect this if they knew you now, Trip. But I want to hear this, it's a part of you and you are my friend."

"Thank you, Jon," Trip said quietly. He gathered his thoughts before continuing. "It seemed like the minute my father got home I was in the hospital. They put me on a feeding tube, and I fought that. I'd throw tantrums when they tried to put anything in it. The voice could be so loud that I'd hit my head repeatedly against the wall to try and get it to stop." He cleared his throat, talking about it was hard.

Jon reached out and squeezed his hand reassuringly; his heart ached for what Trip had gone through.

"They got me back to what they considered to be a safe weight, and then they turfed me out. The hospital system isn't designed to cope with the long-term care a lot of anorexics need. At least now some cases can be controlled with medication; they didn't have that a couple of hundred years ago. People died."

Jon interrupted, "Yours couldn't?"

Trip shook his head. "I'm one of an unfortunate group for which the meds make things worse. I went home after the hospital stay, and we all tried to act like things were normal, but they weren't. I wasn't coping at all, I was virtually obsessive compulsive at that point. It just got too much."

Jon felt a chill run down his spine at Trip's soft words.

Trip looked down at his hands. "So, I went into my parent's bathroom and took a bottle of my Mother's sleeping pills. She hated having a hypospray, so she still used tablets. I counted them out one by one as I swallowed them. Luckily James found me, although I didn't think I was that lucky at the time."

"Trip," Jon forced the word out, his throat partially closed with emotion. He cleared it, and continued hoarsely, "That was why your father reacted the way he did at lunch."

Trip nodded. "After that, he sent me to a clinic in Canada that specialises in eating disorders." He paused, before continuing uncomfortably, "It was hard, and it wasn't until Christina came and saw me that I started to really fight it. It was a year before I was really well enough to go home. I got home, and Father left two weeks later."

"I'm sorry." The words seemed inadequate to Jon, but he didn't know what else to say. Trip flashed him a slightly bitter smile.

"If I focus on how much love Christina and Mark gave us over the years it doesn't hurt as much. Don't think that we weren't loved or fussed over, we were." Trip grinned. "And you don't have to worry about me, either. My anorexia is under control. I'll be fine."

"You haven't eaten over the last couple of days," Jon began.

"It's okay. I'll be seeing Phlox today, and he'll put me on an enforced diet, and go through our normal bimonthly psychology routine and weigh in a little early."

"Oh, I just remembered," Jon said. "He told me to make sure you had breakfast after you woke up. Then he wanted you to see him. Why don't you grab a shower while I get Chef to send us something?"

"Thanks, Captain, but I don't have any clean clothes."

Jon pointed to a pile of clothes and a towel on the floor. Trip nodded and dragged himself out of the bed, before grabbing the clothes and heading into the bathroom.


"Lieutenant!"

Malcolm winced at Travis' loud and cheery voice. He took another sip of his tea as Travis and Hoshi sat down at his table.

"Hard night, Lieutenant?" Hoshi said with a twinkle in her eye. "You know, I heard that Commander Tucker is back at work this morning." Hoshi looked down at her food. "Pretty impressive as he was apparently seen staggering away from your quarters last night with the Captain holding him up."

Malcolm couldn't help feeling a pang of annoyance. Trip was more drunk than he had been, and he was back at work. He tried to tune out Hoshi and Travis' words, his head really did hurt.

"Lieutenant!"

"Hmm, what?" He looked at Travis and Hoshi, before registering that the voice had belonged to Phlox.

"I said, Lieutenant, that I would like you to report to sickbay, if you would please."

He put the mug of tea down. "I'm coming, Doctor."

Hoshi gave him a sympathetic glance as he stood up to follow Phlox out of the room.

"Feel better, Lieutenant!" Travis called cheerily as he walked away.

Malcolm contented himself with imagining what weapon he would use to do Travis in.


"So, I said, in your dreams, and he left." Crewman King stopped moving, and Crewman Costello bumped into her feet. "Can you hear that?"

"No. You hearing ghosts now?"

King moved forward again and rounded the bend in the maintenance tunnel, before quickly back peddling.

"What?"

"Commander Tucker's up there," King whispered.

"So?"

"He's asleep, and Lieutenant Hess will kill us if she knew we woke him up."

"Of all the odd places to fall asleep. Are you sure that there's nothing wrong with him? He could have been hurt," Costello questioned quietly.

"He's drooling."

Costello giggled. "Definitely asleep then, what I'd give for a camera right now. We better let Hess know that he's okay though." She turned around in the tunnel, thankful that she was skinny enough to do so, and headed back the way they had come.

"How long do you think it's been since he really slept?"

"Too long."

"Anyway," King continued, "so the next week, he called me again."

Costello groaned. "And you said yes, didn't you."

THE END

Finally, it's finished! I can't believe that I thought I'd get this finished before season 4 aired! So, never going to start posting a long story before finishing writing it again, I'm really sorry that it's taken a year to write. But, muses are a fickle thing, and real life has a habit of getting in the way.

Thank you so much to everyone that has reviewed the story, I hope you enjoyed it. And thank you so much to my three betas over the course of this story, G.Eliot, sailor coruscant and Kat31. You are legends!