Reed
It's done.
I wove my web of lies and half-truths as skilfully as a spider, and tangled Trip and Hoshi up in it like willing flies. Their trust in me is restored, and they never dream that their confidence in my integrity is a reproach that I can hardly bear.
As I hold them to me, my feelings are dual and bitter.
I wanted to tell them the truth. Oh, how I longed to unburden myself, to confess what I was and explain the whole monstrous trick that's been played here, from the unexpected ailment befalling the local pastor down to the emergency services which arrived so promptly and with such remarkable lack of fanfare on the scene of a crime – not to mention the 'district nurse' whom I recognised immediately from those first cruel days after my awakening in the lab beneath Starfleet's HQ. It would have been relief indescribable.
But the cost of that relief would have been too great. I suspected from the start that Trip would catch on that he was the lever that Carl had used against me, and I saw all too clearly how the burden of it was weighing him down. He held himself responsible for every stripe on my back, and he'd never have forgiven himself for it. Instead, somehow I was able to fashion a story that could fit the facts and free him at the same time. If I say so as shouldn't, it was pretty damn good, at that.
(I used to be a dab hand at this sort of thing. Lately I've got rusty. Heaven knows what kindly angel unlocked my tongue on this particular occasion. Pard, perhaps. She used to be pretty decent at it too; it was a very useful skill in the Section. Amazing what you can do when your life depends on it.)
So, my secret past endures. Will I ever find the right time and sufficient courage to reveal it in all its ugliness?
I suspect not.
But until I do, the trust and honesty that Hoshi so eloquently and fairly demanded are not possible.
Are love and deceit compatible? Can one live an honest life with a secret like mine 'safely' buried?
I don't know. For the rest of my life it will be there, like a trapdoor under my feet, waiting to open and plunge me back into hell. But until it does, that's where it will stay. Hoshi and Trip are creatures of the light; I don't think they could bear to know the depth of the darkness I used to belong to – and perhaps still do, in some hidden core of me.
I ought to tell them. I know, from the relief that I felt among the guilt and the pain, that letting them go was the right thing to do. They don't love me; they love a construct of my making, a man incapable of the things I've done too often, too easily and all too well. They love a man who doesn't actually exist at all. But I simply can't find the courage to make that severance final. I love them, and weak and selfish and deceitful as it proves me, I can't bear to let them go.
Some day the secret may yet come out. But as I hold them, thanking a God I don't believe in that we've all got through this more or less intact, I'm certain of only one thing.
It won't be today.
The End.
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