Tucker
It's been a good day.
We didn't get around to doing much, mainly because Hoshi was understandably tired from the flight from Japan. It'll probably take her a day or two to get over the jet-lag, so we'll take it easy. Tomorrow I'll drive the three of us down to one of the coastal marinas, hire a decent boat and take us out for the day – I asked Mal yesterday if he was okay with that, and he said he reckoned he could put up with it if he had to, which I'll take to be his British equivalent of enthusiasm. Hoshi can sunbathe and rest, and he if he doesn't fancy fishing (I'd imagine if he's afraid of drowning, scuba diving is out), he can just sit in the shade with a book and a few bottles of that disgusting warm beer he likes and make sarcastic comments, especially if I don't catch anything.
If I'd thought about it earlier I'd have rung Michael and hired Sea Witch for the day, but he's usually booked up weeks in advance in the summer. The tourist trade is picking up again, and now we don't have to sit waiting for the next attack, I suppose it's human nature that people want to come look at the Trench. Me, I think they're damned vultures, but they're good for the economy, and the devastation from that blasted Xindi probe will affect the state for years.
Still, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to pick up a boat somewhere, I know a few guys around the smaller marinas who probably won't be as busy as Michael. I've come out in the cool of the evening to the out-house where the family's fishing gear's stored. It's been a couple of years since I touched any of my stuff, but hell, I'm sure I never left it in this mess. It's worse than those goddamn Christmas tree lights that wrap themselves in knots while they're put away in the garage.
Hoshi and Mom are talking in the kitchen, recipes and that. They'll probably be at it for hours, so I can spare the time to get everything ready.
I'm busy trying to disentangle a bunch of spinners without getting any of the hooks in my fingers when a movement across the yard catches my eye. I've moved to the window to get the best of the daylight, otherwise I wouldn't have seen Mal walking towards the stables.
Well, he can go where he likes, and I know of old that he's the kind of guy who likes nosing around the place. Not that it's likely he's checking the place out for threats (what danger could there be around here?), but I guess old habits die hard, and maybe he's bored or something. He was quiet all afternoon, but he's probably still tired from last night, and he didn't get a nice dry nap after lunch like most of us did. Went out walking and got himself caught in a thunderstorm instead and came back in looking like a drowned rat. Said he'd fallen asleep and by the time he realized, it was too late to get in out of it anyway. Mom fussed over him and said he'd catch his death, which was kind of comical, seeing him standing there being all embarrassed at dripping on the floorboards.
Damn. I get a hook in my thumb anyway, like I usually do when I don't concentrate properly. Lizzie says…
I stop my train of thought right there. Hard.
I can hear her voice now. I know exactly what she always used to say. Serves you right, Trip, think of how the poor fish feels.
We used to argue about it, about how a fish's mouth is made of hard bony stuff. They eat other fish, for God's sake.
She never would buy the idea.
I put the spinners down and suck my thumb till the bleeding stops, which is only a few minutes. Then I go and look for Malcolm, because I want to think of something other than Lizzie's voice, which that damned weapon silenced forever.
This turns out to be a mistake.
Somehow I hadn't allowed myself to remember that she had a horse. A pretty little girly palomino mare she called Sunshine. She didn't get to ride it much lately, but the folks kept it anyway for when she came home on holiday.
Ain't no Sunshine when she's gone.…
If I'd thought about it at all I'd have imagined they'd have gotten rid of it. Sold it, given it away, shot it even. Dad's not usually sentimental about animals. He has a shotgun and a license, and does what needs to be done.
The sudden gloom inside the stable after the bright evening outside makes me blink for a moment. Then my eyes adjust, and I see what I don't expect to: Malcolm, standing beside the stall, and the horse inside it. The creamy mane and sweet pricked ears, and Mal's hand running steadily and gently down the broad forehead with the smudged star off-center.
He looks like he's a long, long way from here, and when he hears me – I make some kind of noise, I don't know what – he jumps like a scalded cat. Sunshine throws up her head in response, and backs away, snorting nervously. She's lost weight, I can see her ribs and pelvic bones too clearly. Most likely that's why she's in here instead of out in the paddock with the others: Dad's trying to feed her up, probably got her on some special diet. The feed bucket's full. She's not eating.
Ain't no Sunshine when she's gone….
God, how I hate that song.
"Bloody hell, mate, you could blow a whistle or something instead of creeping up on me like that." Malcolm tries to make a joke of it, but he's as nervous as the horse. Then he recovers himself, and looks at me more closely. "Come on. Sit down."
There's a straw bale lying on the floor a bit away from the others, and he guides me to it and sits down with me. I say 'guides me', because by this time I can't see where I'm going.
When we heard about the attack, I was just swallowed up with rage. That's all I could feel, all I could allow myself to feel. I wanted to find the people who'd killed my baby sister and vaporize them. All I wanted Malcolm to talk about was the weapons we'd use to take our revenge, and when he tried to talk about my loss instead I shut him up good and proper. Maybe that was the only way I could deal with it, the only refuge I had from realizing she was gone from my life for good. That she wasn't safe at home enjoying her career, designing wonderful buildings for people all over the world to live and work in, that she'd never meet some wonderful guy and get married and have kids, that she'd lost everything.
That she was dead. Incinerated, reduced to atoms. Somewhere out in that Trench is all that's left of her, maybe a few charred bones rotting in the mud. Chances are there's not even that much, and if there is we'll almost certainly never find anything. The recovery teams still get called sometimes, but they don't find much these days.
Now it feels like finally I can't hide from it anymore, and something inside me breaks open, unleashing grief I can't handle. The grief I've been keeping penned up for too long, because it was more than I could bear.
I'm holding on to him, my fingers gripping and twisting in his shirt, while I make noises into the side of his neck that hardly sound human. It feels like I'm crying from every pore of my body, because my baby sister was murdered and there's not a damn thing I can do to put the world right again, and her damned horse is pining for her and my dad's trying to keep it alive like she's going to come back for it one day.
She won't come back. She's never coming back, ever; she's dead.
She's dead.
Maybe everyone else has already gone through this. Maybe being on the mission, having some channel for my hate, enabled me to … well, put it off for a while. Delude myself I was coping.
In an ideal world, I'd have been able to share this with my family. We share everything, that the sort of family we are. As it was, I had other things to do, things that were important. Well, one thing really. Just one.
Revenge.
And that didn't work out either, not the way I wanted it to. My better side can admit that what we got was better than that: peace. We stopped the final attack not by destroying the weapon but by reaching out to the builders of it and convincing them they'd been had, that we were joint victims of those trans-dimensional bastards who designed the Spheres and created the Expanse. But that didn't appease the worse side of me, the side that still wanted to wreak some kind of retribution on the people who killed Lizzie. How many of their home towns were destroyed, how many of their families were slaughtered like goddamn cattle?
Not one.
Not. Fucking. One.
Jon says there'll be some kind of deal as regards compensation, some kind of acknowledgement from the Xindi of all the lives they shattered.
Like that's going to bring Lizzie back!
For a guy who's always treated emotional displays like they were the equivalent of gross indecency, Malcolm copes remarkably well. In that ideal world I mentioned I'd be able to share my sorrow with Mom even now, but at a guess her wounds have begun the first fragile steps towards healing. To burden her with this now would be to tear them open again, and it's probably just as well that the arms around me are Malcolm's. They hold me, and even rock me a little awkwardly, but they hold me tightly, and that's all I need right now. To my surprise, he doesn't even try to stop me, but lets me cry my cry out, even though his second shirt of the day's getting a soaking and normally I wouldn't want to even imagine the hissy fit he'd throw over his front being covered in snot and drool.
"That's her horse," I hiccup, when I can talk again. "Lizzie's horse."
"Oh, bloody hell." He strokes my hair gently, consolingly. "I'm sorry, mate. I should never have come in here."
"No." I shake my head, feeling my forehead rub his collar bone. "You weren't to … And maybe it was time."
"'Better out than in', as the actress said to the bishop."
He's such an ass. I start giggling wetly, and punch him in the ribs – well, I sort of smack him with my closed fist, and since my fingers take the brunt of the impact and his side is solid muscle, that wasn't the best idea I ever had.
"Ouch," he says, all sassy and sarcastic. "Nice to see all my self-defence classes on board ship weren't entirely wasted."
I look up at him. I know my face is a mess, and I know he doesn't give a damn. "You're such an arrogant asshole, you know that?"
His eyebrows shoot upwards, and his face takes on this snooty expression, kind of like T'Pol being handed a plateful of offal. "Oh, well. That's the attitude one has to expect when one mingles with the Colonials, I suppose."
I'm not having that. I clamp my arms around his ribs and push – hard.
He was probably expecting it but pretends he wasn't. We both fall backwards off the straw bale and land on the floor, which he complains is filthy dirty and now his head hurts because he hit it on it, totally because of some prat with more energy than sense, who he won't name names but isn't a million miles away…
We just lie there in the dusty straw and I listen to him bitching, just like we're back on board ship and he's bellyaching about the power I won't give him for the Armory. And as I watch him disgustedly picking stray bits of straw off his shirt, while steadfastly ignoring the great big god-awful wet patch where I cried all over him, I realize even more just how much I love him, and how empty my life would be without him.
And that I still don't dare ask what he feels about me.
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