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x-x

Blood has its own smell...thick and cloying, the metallic scent of iron. It was in the air around Malcolm as he lay on the plaza, staring up at the clear blue sky. Someone was shouting, frantic calls indistinct, one blurring into the other, impossible to understand. He closed his eyes and watched as Trip left the table with a smile. Turning away, his friend entered the restaurant and walked towards the toilets. Someone was shouting...

Malcolm woke with medics around him, holding him down on a bed. He'd just been with Trip, and now he was...where was he? He blinked several times and remembered in a rush. Hospital, he was in hospital, and Trip was...

Trip was dead.

He sucked in a breath and it burned his throat. His eyes tracked one medic as she injected something into an IV line that was snaking into his arm. She said something, her voice calm and controlled, and the other medics released him.

His throat was sore.

Someone touched his arm. It was Trip. Trip, who was quite obviously dead, and Malcolm scrambled back in alarm.

"You're fine," Trip said calmly. Or maybe it was the medic? Malcolm wasn't sure. Trip's hand moved from his arm to the bed beside him, and Malcolm watched it move as heaviness flowed over him. "You're fine," Trip, or the medic, repeated.

Malcolm felt the numbness returning. "Fine?" he asked, his voice coming out hoarse and strained, all but gone. "Oh. All right."

x-x

Malcolm woke soaked in sweat. He'd had a nightmare.

Actually, he wasn't sure it was a nightmare. Something about Trip...no, that wasn't quite right. Now it was a half-remembered blurring of dream and reality, already slipping away, best set aside and forgotten.

Turning his head slowly, he saw that he was now in a fairly large, long room with several dozen other patients, the mix of locals and aliens filling every bed in the space. It was a different room from the one he'd been in before. He'd...there had been something. He thought he remembered something about an operation. He'd been hurt, that much he could remember.

Meaning to move his sheet aside and check his injury, he lifted a hand and it floated up slowly, hanging suspended for a second before it dropped back to the mattress. He heard a giggle, only realising afterwards that it had been him. All right, then. He was, perhaps, a bit loopy, most likely thanks to the IV dripping into his arm. At least it was leaving him pain-free, and his breathing was certainly better.

The sunlight was streaming through the windows lining the wall in front of him, and he could see smoke coming up over the top of the buildings beyond the garden outside. A plume of smoke roiled against the bright sky, and now, focusing on it, he could catch its acrid scent.

Not much time had passed. But with no ID on him, and no way to communicate with anyone here, and with all the frantic activity, and so many injured, how would Enterprise find him? How could he find them? They needed to know about Trip.

In a flash he remembered the waiting room and what he'd seen on the monitor. Enterprise thought him dead. Thinking that, would they continue searching, or had they already given up? How long would they even remain here? He assumed they'd continue helping with the relief effort, but there would be a time when they'd have to leave.

Trip had been so bloody excited about this shore leave, and now...

Malcolm closed his eyes against the memories. After a while he drifted, the drugs making him sleepy and a bit unfocused. He felt something touch his arm and he jumped, pulling away from the stimulus, heart pounding and breath coming in frantic gasps. Eyes open, he realised it was a medic. Christ.

She wanted him to get out of bed. Right. Okay. Yes. He could do that.

She helped him sit, then deftly arranged the IV so that the pole was beside him. She had him up and out of bed before he even knew what was going on, hand firmly at his elbow, and he took his first shuffling steps. Passing the bed beside his, he kept his eyes averted. It wouldn't be Trip there, or in any of the other beds, and he'd rather...just for a few moments more, he'd rather not know that.

x-x

Malcolm shuffled towards the door on the far wall, his left hand wrapped around the IV pole beside him. This was, he believed, his fourth day in hospital, and each passing day had found him stronger. By his third day he'd been able to make it all the way to the end of the ward and back, with a bit of assistance.

Passing the last bed he turned, almost bumping the medic trailing him. "Sorry," he murmured, hoping that she'd understand his meaning, if not his words. She smiled and he looked away, noticing another patient standing near them and blocking their path.

Malcolm gasped and took a quick step backwards, almost tripping in his haste. He felt a steadying hand on his elbow - the medic - but he couldn't tear his eyes from the person in front of him.

It was Trip. Trip, standing there, quite obviously dead, his skin suffering the effects of several days... Malcolm tore his eyes away. Not possible, this wasn't... Trip was dead, and this, this "not-Trip" wasn't there. Couldn't be there. He risked another look, only to find Trip staring at him accusingly.

Malcolm felt a gentle tug at his elbow and he turned to see the medic there, her concern clear in her expression. She tugged him forward and took a step...right through Trip, who disappeared as she passed.

Malcolm shrugged out of her grasp. Heart racing, he stepped a wide path around where not-Trip had been standing. He looked back over his shoulder as he passed the spot, and kept walking.

The medic returned her hand to his arm, asking him a question Malcolm couldn't understand. Malcolm simply shook his head and kept eyes firmly forward until they had returned him to his bed.

Hallucinations. Nothing he couldn't deal with. Traumatic events tended to stick with him. Like after the shuttlepod, with Trip. That had been bad. He got himself through it then, he could get through it now.

Just...

Malcolm ran a trembling hand through his hair.

...Just from the shock.

x-x

Hitting a button on the wall, Malcolm waited for the automated doors to open. He swung his arms a bit while he waited, glorying in the feeling of freedom. He'd forgotten how much having an IV could limit your movement.

Today was the first day he'd been allowed to take his obligatory walk without an aide at his side, and, free of his IV as well, he chose to go in an entirely different direction. Instead of walking down the ward to the far door and back, he instead went through the doors nearest his bed.

He heard the doors click, and they opened before him with a soft, mechanical hum, revealing another ward, equally as full of patients as his. He started walking, focusing on the soft conversations around him, the flap of his own slippered feet against the floor as he moved. His hearing was now significantly better. He still had no idea of the meanings of the words swirling around him but he was grateful to at least be able to hear them.

He smiled when he heard someone drawling to one of the medics, and her giggling back. Then his heart skipped a beat, and he froze in his tracks.

He hadn't hallucinated since that day on his walk. He hadn't had nightmares, either, in over two nights. He'd thought that he'd been getting better. He'd hoped...

Malcolm turned his head in the direction the voice was coming from, and he actually, physically, could not breathe at what he saw. Hand to his throat, he finally took in a great whooping gasp, eyes wide and staring. Then the eyes of everyone in the room were on him, and the medic was up and at his side in a flash. She sat him in a chair before he knew it, and there were people buzzing around him, and Trip's worried face peering down from over their shoulders.

Trip's worried, living face.

x-x

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