He goes to Leo's room late that night, moving as silently as an owl down the darkened corridor.
They have a code signal. His fingertips remember it, and are light on the smooth pale wood of the door. Maybe the man inside will already be asleep, but he doesn't think so. And his instinct is proved sound when the door opens to admit him.
He took a risk coming here alone, but this is self-evident and Leo has never wasted time by stating the obvious.
The lighting within is low, provided only by a lamp that has been moved close to the window so as to cast no shadows on the curtain. The decor is simple and comfortable. No form of entertainment media appears to be in use, but he is oddly taken aback by the simplest thing: a chessboard is set out on the coffee table, its pieces ready for the start of play.
Leo is sitting on the couch at the far side of it, massive and relaxed. The board is turned sideways on to him, so that the visitor can choose which colour he will.
Jag usually plays black, but after a moment's hesitation he turns the board to take white.
He opens with the Vienna gambit: dangerous, and more reckless than he normally plays.
Impossible that Leo does not recognise it. He responds carefully.
The pieces act out their little war, silent and hostile on the board. No time is allowed for long consideration. On Operations you often have only seconds – if that – to decide your next move.
Jag's play is risky. The stakes are high. He wouldn't play like this aboard Enterprise, where Malcolm is considered more of a master of subtle traps.
"Checkmate."
The white king has only one of his knights still in play. The last move made by the knight has left it facing backwards for some reason, so that he stares back at his king across an unfathomable distance. Jag contemplates the truth in that picture for a moment before idly flicking the knight over. The piece rolls around its base in a semi-circle before it comes to rest.
"I need to talk to you about the mission," he says at last. His gaze is fixed on the knight.
"Team mission, team discussion." There's no heat in the reminder, and Leo doesn't think he's forgotten that; it simply sets out the fact that no decisions which affect everyone will be made without everyone having a chance to listen to everything and then have their say. The final decision will be his – this is not, and never has been, a democracy – but he accords every member of the team their due dignity.
"I know. But I–"
There's a long silence. Jag doesn't fully understand why he's come here, and the chess game both settled and unbalanced him. There is something inside him that's suddenly fighting to get out, and if it doesn't it will quite probably kill him, but so utter a violation of everything he's become will quite probably kill him too. His left foot is tapping wildly. There's a glass of water on the coffee table and without asking he drinks it, which is rather a messy operation as his hand is shaking like a leaf. Tears would be some respite, but the agony is far too hard and deep for that; still, finally and almost against his will he has to face the fact that he's reached the point where he can no longer go on functioning without touching another human being.
Maybe for someone else, what follows would bring back memories of childhood, of being held and comforted. He has no such memories. His nightmares were faced down alone, for it was bad enough that he was a weakling in body without being discovered to be one in spirit too; therefore the sensation of pulled in to lie cradled against Leo's chest is so alien and bewildering that his last defences crumble. He speaks of Pard, and that's a mistake, for after Pard comes Keri, and once Keri is spoken of the dam bursts. Too much follows, far too much, from a man psychologically soiled and ethically compromised, whose entire concept of service paradoxically rests on the word honour. The Section took no account of that when they broke him for their purposes and set him at war with himself, and ever since he's been stretched on the rack of his dual identity.
On Enterprise he'd finally begun to mend after a fashion, gradually reverting to what he should have been, but he was still a pawn in the Section's game. If Joelle Grenham hadn't been an EM specialist working for Starfleet, Keri's kidnapping would almost certainly have been a mere footnote in the sorry tale of interstellar piracy, her fate unknown and largely unmourned. As it was, the value of her mother's potential contribution ensured that one man could be risked to save her – the one man with the best reason, as well as the best ability, to succeed, using whatever means were necessary.
Ironically, it was the Section's psychological training that had enabled him to get through the assessments for his post on board Enterprise without betraying the depth of the damage that had been inflicted on him; that damage, however, had been finally exacerbated beyond bearing by the vile part he'd had to play in order to rescue his daughter.
There had been other wounds inflicted on him in Starfleet's service, deep and vicious and unhealed wounds courtesy of the Expanse, where he became an accessory to torture, theft and murder before participating in a mutiny – itself an act that, however utterly necessary, rent his loyal soul to its core. Finally, at Azati Prime, he'd been unable to fulfil the duty for which he'd been brought on board, that of protecting the ship and his comrades. All his weapons skills had accomplished nothing as the enemy had begun ripping Enterprise apart. Twenty-seven deaths joined the weight on his conscience, and although the investigation on the ship's return home had cleared him of blame, and logically he agreed with that verdict, still it had not felt like absolution for his failure.
He'd put aside all offers of counselling, and here again the Section's training had both helped and betrayed him. He was too good at keeping up a front, at pretending to be someone quite different from the reality. Even the experts had finally accepted the 'fine' at face value and let him go, marvelling at his sang-froid, while he returned to the service of the ship, perhaps not even himself realising his strength was now fatally flawed. Then over the course of this final mission the whole horror of his existence as a Section operative had crashed down on him, utterly real and completely inescapable: the killing, the destruction, the lies and deceit, culminating in finding himself looking into a mirror from which a monster looked back at him.
The hand now stroking gently and rhythmically through his hair is puzzling, but mysteriously comforting. It doesn't stop while the words bleed out of him, not even the worst, and as long as it continues he can go on, even though now and again there are pauses in his narrative – not to evade, but rather to let him construct, the truth. The whole experience is surreal. Even sex has never been so intimate. He has never guessed that it could be possible for him to be so close to another person without feeling threatened in the slightest.
He doesn't know whether Leo regards him as a potential lover. Right now, as the last words sigh out of him into a gorgeous lassitude of spirit, the question is irrelevant. Finally, Jag has made his full confession, and a peace descends in which he is content to rest absolute trust in the man who holds him.
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