A/N: Oops. I did it again... forgot to update! What with one thing (Christmas and New Year shenanigans) and another (Philosophy and Ethics AS Level Exam, ugh) this sort of managed to slip through the net. But here we are anyway! Chapter Seven – and if you think I'd let any of the characters in this fic have a peaceful time after the fun they had on their away mission... think again! Ah, and for everyone who has been waiting for it; I finally present you with Trip's quarters...
Thanks to Bineshii, Exploded Pen, General Kunama, Begoogled, Lady Rainbow, and volley for reviewing the last chapter – I hope you all enjoy this chapter!
Disclaimer: I don't own Enterprise but the characters making up the "Quartermaster's Store" are all of my own (very humble) creation.
Chapter Seven
Feuding Gossip
Jill awoke and felt his breath, slow and shallow, tickling her face and wondered idly where Billy had slept that night. She turned, smiling slightly, to look at his face, half-smiling in sleep. Goodness knew he rarely smiled whilst awake.
A part of her wanted to ask what have we done, whilst another – far stronger part – was more than content to settle in the warmth of the morning. It was Sunday, and their only day of rest. Let the uniforms stay dirty, today.
Annan stirred, then opened his eyes. In the first daze of waking, he gave her a sleepy smile, but it faded as he sat up, his eyes darkening.
"Oh." He said. "Jill."
"Oh." Derner looked at him, the warmth suddenly expelled from the room, or so it seemed. Had someone changed the environmental settings? Beside her, Annan pulled away from a hand she had not even realised she had placed on his arm, and flopped back against the pillows, his lips set in a think line.
"God." He said, throwing the name of a deity in which she knew he did not believe with a bitterness she could not quite fathom. "What the hell have we done?"
She could feel the cool, textured sheets beneath and above her body. Suddenly she did not want to release them, for to do so would mean stepping out of a cocoon of ignorance that she had, until a few minutes ago, blissfully retained.
"Damn it," she said instead, her tone dry, "you beat me to it."
Silence. Not a lovers' silence, though they had experienced that type, the night before, both shaking with relief and the escape of what had seemed certain death. This silence Derner also knew, and she wondered if she should just get up and leave straightaway, to save Annan the bother of formulating the words.
"You should go. Billy will want to come in to get his clothes soon." Annan said, some moments later, and she snorted in the joyless triumph of having her thoughts verified.
"Going." She said, stepping out of the bunk with as much dignity as she could, clad only in a thin Starfleet-issue blanket. She picked up her clothes, blinking away the memories of their removal the night before, and entered the small closet-bathroom, dressing hastily and avoiding her own eyes in the mirror. When she stepped back into the main quarters, Annan was still lying on the bed, his hands folded beneath his jet-covered skull. His gaze was on her, and he frowned as she made for the door.
"Is that it?" He sounded mildly offended, and Jill turned, her brows knit together by the force of her own anger.
"I beg your pardon?" She asked, and Annan raised a single infuriating eyebrow.
"You made more fuss last time."
Last time – last time! For a moment, Jill allowed herself to imagine rising to that bait, but she did not. She merely stiffened her shoulders and threw the sheet she had been holding at Annan, so that it covered his slim, pale torso from view.
"Good morning, Crewman Henson." She said, and, hitting the door-release with slightly more vigour than was necessary, beat a hasty retreat. Only upon reaching her own quarters, to find Henny lying on the bottom bunk with the slight smile of dreamless sleep on her face, did she allow herself to show her pillow the depth of her anger, and a few tears along the way. The pillow, had it been able to talk, would probably have had a few words to say to Annan Henson.
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Catherine did not usually work on a Sunday – she was not that industrious – but for once she decided that the silence of her quarters – punctuated by Heron's snores – was probably not preferable to the relative peace and quiet of, say, the command crew's quarters, well overdue for a dust and sheet-change. The crew was split into three groups, each taking their day off on a separate day – dependent, of course, on if there was work which couldn't wait – and the command crew usually had Saturday off, so their quarters would be empty today.
Catherine decided to approach the quarters with her usual tactic – that is, leaving the best till last and getting the messiest over and done with. Unsurprisingly, her first port of call was Commander Tucker's humble abode.
"Ugh," she said, wrinkling her nose as she entered in the maintenance pass-code and crossed over the threshold into the cabin which the 'clean team' had long since given up trying to reform from its customary state of messiness.
A plate of half-finished pan-fried catfish proved to be the source of the offensive odour, though as she tipped it away, marvelling at the interesting red-and-green patterns of mould upon it, Catherine did wonder what kind of emergency must have occurred for Trip Tucker to leave anything but the barest of bones from the meal that was famed to be his favourite. Very few other members of the crew actually favoured the fish, but the chef knew his priorities – feed the commanding officers well first, then deal with likes and dislikes of the common rabble.
"The man must have something wrong with his nose," Cathy muttered, and she recovered a worryingly crispy uniform from the side of the bed and frowned at the brown and black marks covering it. Holding it at arms length – she wouldn't put it past any of Tucker's rubbish to contain something live in it – she dumped it in the large mess bag she had brought precisely for the purpose. The next quarter of an hour continued in peaceful, if slightly malodorous, silence, and Cathy nodded in satisfaction when at last she had cleared up enough to actually see the floor.
"Coffee cups," she muttered, collecting an armful of the offending items and dumping them in her bag, "why can't the man take them back to the mess hall? He has legs, doesn't he? Though," she glanced into one of the cups and closed her eyes at the sight of the inch-thick, oddly-glowing sludge within, "if he waits long enough they'll probably grow legs and take themselves."
She paused, realising that she was not only talking to herself, but was also doing so in a style and tone far more suited to a certain Miranda Heron. She shook her head, before turning to strip the mattress and change the sheets. She exited the quarters ten minutes later, only a little worse for wear, and glanced down at the next name on her list. Ensign Dalton, a new recruit and, at twenty, still retaining all the hygiene and tidiness habits of a teenager. It was enough to make her think longingly of Charles Tucker's chamber of forgotten mugs and impromptu scientific experiments.
Then again, Catherine thought, glancing into her bag and hastily closing it again as a cocktail of delicate aromas wafted up to her nose, maybe not.
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Billy returned to the quarters he shared with Annan Henson, intending to spend the morning reading on the comfort of his bunk, then saw the look on Henson's face and decided that he needed to re-evaluate. He could either beat a hasty retreat – which was probably safer for his short-term health – or he could stay and talk with Annan about it, which would probably in the long-term save him an awful lot of self-pitying rhetoric from his infuriating, intelligent, and undeniably attractive bunk-mate.
"You did it again, didn't you." He said, sitting on the sole chair and raising an eyebrow at the suddenly black face on the lower bunk. "Fu – messed her around." When Annan made no response, he exclaimed: "For goodness' sake, Annan, she deserves better than this – than you!"
"Yes." Annan nodded, infuriatingly. "She does. Which is why I sent her away."
Billy resisted the strong urge to put his head in his hands and groan loudly. Whatever people said about his general clumsiness, at least he didn't possess Annan's seemingly self-destructive attitude towards relationships. Annan caught his look and sat up in bed, his expression a little wild.
"I'm not good enough for her!"
Billy turned away from the splendidly black hair and flushed cheeks, and picked up a PADD without even looking at what was on it.
"You," he said softly, "have serious problems with your self-esteem."
Annan snorted.
"And you," he said, rising, dropping the bedcovers and stalking to the bathroom to dress, "have serious problems with your nose. Keep it out of my business."
Billy said nothing, merely stared harder at the PADD to distract him from the sudden desire to follow Annan and tell him exactly what he thought of him, his self-esteem, and his apparently private business.
He almost laughed at the title of the 20th century book which Annan had loaded onto the PADD: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
"Mars and Venus aren't inhabited," he muttered, grinning slightly.
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Cathy sighed in relief as she reached the last cabin on her list – Lieutenant Reed's. The man was scrupulously tidy (a sign, Miranda had always said, of serious emotional problems), and the Quartermaster's crew had very little to do in his cabin save change the sheets and check the cupboards for any lurking, torn uniforms. Cathy had a sneaking suspicion that he sometimes hid them to save total exasperation from Miranda's team.
Sure enough, she entered to find the room as tidy as she had left if the last time she had entered it three weeks ago – the bed made with neat, military folds that rivalled her own. Only the desk was untidy, cluttered with PADDs which Cathy couldn't help but glance at as she piled them up. One was the report regarding the previous day's away mission, and catching sight of Henny's name Catherine perused the lines with morbid interest.
"Crewman Mackie," Reed had written, "conducted herself with professionalism and extreme level-headedness in a potentially dangerous situation. Upon realising that she was the only individual in a position to defend against our attackers, she..."
Cathy put the PADD down, her cheeks flaming as she thought of what Miranda Heron would say if she knew that she had been reading what was essentially private material. Pushing the PADD away from her reach, she turned to the bed and, with slightly more force than was necessary, picked up the quilt and shook it out. Something fell out with a faint ping, and Cathy bent down to pick it - whatever 'it' was – and stopped in astonishment. It was Henny's ring, a thin gold band which she always wore on the index finger of her left hand. Cathy had asked about it, the first time she had met Henny:
"You married?" She had asked, glancing at the ring.
"No," Henny had laughed, shaking her head, "otherwise I'd wear it on my ring finger. It was my mother's. She died and – well, I wear it now."
"All the time?" Cathy hadn't said she was sorry, because she saw something in Henny's look that made it unnecessary. At her words, however, Henny's eyes had crinkled at the corners.
"All the time – except when I'm in situations which I wouldn't want my mother seeing."
Cathy had laughed, at the time. Now she sat down on the floor, looking at the ring and trying hard not to think about what situation might have arisen in Lieutenant Reed's quarters to have made Henny take it off.
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Malcolm Reed was in the armoury, more or less minding his own business – and his own cannons – when Trip Tucker walked in, a smirk flickering on his face.
"What are you up to, Commander?" Reed asked, faintly suspicious. If the man wanted to ask him to run the armoury on even less energy –
"I might ask you the same thing, Loo-tenant." Trip said, still smirking, and Malcolm threw him an even more suspicious glance as he turned back to the console, squinting slightly at the dense readout.
"Oh, yes?" He had the slight feeling that Trip was in the mood to take a circular route to get to his point, and decided to listen with only half an ear. He was therefore more than a little surprised when, after humming and 'hah'ing beside him for a short time, Trip asked:
"So, when you planning to see Miss Mackie again?" It was the tone, more than the words, which made Malcolm whirl around in astonishment.
"What?"
Trip looked a little surprised, too, at Malcolm's response, but continued valiantly, though looking a trifle uncomfortable even so.
"Well," he said, "rumour has it she spent the night in your cabin, but..."
Malcolm was very glad he had paused to listen before taking a swig from a nearby water bottle, for as it was he choked slightly before staring at Trip in utter miscomprehension.
"I – what?"
Trip held up his hands a little defensively, and Malcolm realised he had taken a step towards him. He subsided, shaking his head in astonishment.
"She came for a chat, Trip, and was gone by twenty-two hundred hours. God, this ship's rumour mill can make a sordid love affair out of anything!" He paused, frowning slightly. "I don't suppose you have any idea who initiated this rumour, do you?"
Trip shuffled a little, frowning in what Malcolm knew to be a delaying tactic, At last, he said reluctantly:
"Crewman Manning, I heard. She works in the Quartermaster's store. Apparently she's been going around in a bit of a tizzy complanin' that you, uh, took advantage of Mackie when she was in a, ah... fragile state."
Malcolm nodded. It had been Manning who had sent him that note, and he had replied, jovially: well, if this was where fraternising with the crew got him, he knew what he would do if another note were to arrive. He was about to tell Trip exactly what he thought of Manning and her gossip, when in burst that self-same Crewman, blonde-air streaming with a righteous fire and a formidable expression upon her face. Even Reed stepped back slightly as five-foot nothing worth of raging woman strode up to him and stopped barely a metre away from him.
"May I have a word, Lieutenant?" She said, and Malcolm, horribly aware as he was of the curious glances of his crew, could see little to do in the face of her apparent fury save nod in acquiescence. "Good. I need to talk to you about Henny. The thing is - "
"About that, Crewman -" Malcolm attempted to interrupt, but Manning merely raised her voice and he subsided, shrugging at Trip.
" – the thing is, I'm aware that she's very pretty and all that, but I don't think it's really terribly professional of you to sleep with her, especially considering what happened on the planet yesterday, and I..." the crewman trailed off, her fury apparently burned out, leaving only an expression of slight confusion as to what she was doing in the armoury upbraiding a superior officer. She seemed to re-gather her confidence, however, as she reached into her pocket. "Well, Lieutenant, I think you should talk to her – and give her this back, she left it in your cabin." And with that, Crewman Manning dropped a thin gold ring into his hand and turned on her heel, leaving an extremely bemused Lieutenant Reed behind in the muttering company of half-a-dozen highly curious armoury crewmen and one intensely amused Trip Tucker.
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A.N: Please review, if you've forgiven me for taking so long to update!