Star Trek and all its intellectual property belongs to Paramount. No infringement intended, no profit made.

Beta'd by MizJoely, to whom all due thanks!

Author's Note: Rating for the occasional use of bad language and non-graphic sexual situations. This is the follow-up to 'Thicker Than Water', and will make no sense if you haven't read that story first.

After all this time, it feels so natural.

They are still the same team, and take him back without any particular rancour, though not without gibes – nothing he hasn't expected, and nothing he can't deal with. The difference between the atmosphere here and that aboard Enterprise is oddly stimulating; Jag has forgotten how little formality is observed here, and for all that by nature he's far more comfortable in a disciplined environment, right now he needs freedom in order to make some adjustments that will be extremely painful. Ironically, it's the closeness of his friends – his family, in all but name – aboard Enterprise that make it imperative he separate himself from them for a while. They care too much. And while he knows that his old team also care, they're far better able to cope with the craziness that results as a backlash from a particularly difficult op. Possibly he should have warned Captain Archer that there might be mental consequences for him too, but Archer has Phlox looking after him. Jag, on the other hand, was always a loose cannon at the best of times; and if there's one thing Enterprise doesn't need, it's a head-case in charge of Tactical.

There has only been one change, and for a moment it startles and angers him. He should be ready for it, but he isn't, and there's a long pause in which they stare at each other, the ready hostility apparent in both of them; meeting unexpectedly in the narrow confines of the corridor they stand almost eye to eye, like two stranger cats with arched backs and flat ears, ready for battle.

With Pard dead and him gone, the team would have been under-strength. Of course they'd had to bring someone in. 'Puma', Leo had told him calmly, as the freighter went to warp. She'd kept out of the way during the trip from Farlaxi, but that would no longer be possible. The two of them will just have to get along.

No more than that. They aren't children or prospective marriage partners, so there are no introductions. They have to find their own relationship. Nobody will cosset them or put either of them on the 'Naughty Step' if they don't behave nicely. They don't have to like each other, and quite frankly nobody will care if they loathe each other, as long as when it matters they can work together like parts of a well-oiled machine.

Her height doesn't intimidate him, though as a rule he doesn't go in for statuesque women; he prefers them petite. Her hair (he has to admit it, if only to himself) is beautiful – thick clusters of burnished chestnut that tumble around her shoulders. It's her best feature by a long shot. Not the most determined admirer could truthfully describe her as a patch on Pard; at best, she's plain. Not ugly, true, but ... well, forgettable. Not a bad trait in a Covert Ops specialist, maybe, but one that he irrationally resents, and he makes little effort to hide his disdain.

In other circumstances, he'd be more diplomatic. He rarely sets out deliberately to offend, and he's long ago grown out of valuing a woman only for her looks. Now, however, he's too ready to take exception to an interloper, however illogical that may be; and, raw and bleeding with his own pain, he doesn't give a damn either for his own unpleasantness or for what she thinks of him. The Section has done this to him, has forced him to revert to Jag; they can damn well live with the consequences!

But even though she isn't beautiful, it takes very few days for him to realise that her expertise in weapons and explosives is very nearly the equal of his own. A talent that could go far towards establishing a bridge between them, if they wanted it to.

But she isn't Pard, and almost in the first instant mutual hate sparks between them.

Well, fine. He can live with that. So, apparently, can she. As he fits back into the team as though he'd never left it, they simply ignore one another when they can and behave with painstaking civility when they can't.

The 'job' of which Leo has spoken to Captain Archer is real enough, but apparently there is no particular haste for it to be done. En route to the world in question the freighter calls in at a planet whose occupants are of a particularly hospitable disposition, and the crew are given three days' shore leave. Jag's three days pass in a haze of hard alcohol and soft flesh, where if anyone hears the name he sometimes gasps out they don't care. He comes back on board afterwards and vomits copiously on the floor of his cabin before sleeping for twenty hours and coming back to himself, to find that his best shirt has been dropped deliberately and precisely in the pool of vomit. He cleans both of them meticulously.

The rest of the team are unchanged: 'Spots', the electronics and engineering wizard who looks like a Viking and has an aviary in his quarters in which he keeps and breeds various breeds of tiny finches; 'Stripes', the pilot, whose narrow, pinched and oddly youthful features still give him a look of the Artful Dodger, and whose lucky woolly hat now boasts a violent orange darn on the left hand side of it; and of course Leo himself, whose massive presence broods over the ship even when he is absent, and who sees far more than is sometimes convenient, but seldom chooses to intervene.

Puma is, of course, their weapons and explosives expert. Her nickname is 'Paw', though in his own mind he refers to her dismissively as 'Tail'.

The crew have always taken it in turns to cook. Even Leo does so, presumably feeling less need to stand on his captainly dignity than Jonathan Archer does. Paw, it turns out, is good at cooking too. Even the prodigal son of the team reluctantly mutters praise the first time he tastes her handiwork, ignoring her baleful glance that wishes it might have poisoned him; and from then on the rest of the team benefit so greatly from their bitter culinary rivalry that more than one of them wishes it might be possible for it to become a permanent fixture – a wish that, imprudently voiced, earns the speaker the equal wrath of both antagonists.

The system where their task is to be carried out is not far away, but there is apparently some reason why their arrival has to be delayed – which explains in part the detour for shore leave. The freighter – originally christened simply the York, though as far as the official records go, that designation has been long since lost – establishes orbit around the innermost of three barren planets circling a nearby star. It's close enough for the solar radiation to be far too dangerous to leave the ship for any reason, even in an EV suit, but on the other hand the radiation will shield them from anything but an extremely searching scan.

Spots says that the hull plating will protect them for a few days if it has to, but that the environmental systems weren't built to compensate for these temperatures. They're just going to have to put up with being hot for as long as they hang around here.

'Hot' is hardly the word for it, thinks Jag that night, as he sprawls naked on his bunk, his hands lightly linked above his head to keep the undersides of his arms from touching his ribs; the dressings Phlox applied to his self-inflicted injuries are off now, but the healing cuts still itch a little, and the heat isn't helping. Even the viewing ports have had to be shielded to withstand the radiation, and for much of the time the ship is as hot and dark as an oven. All the power that can be spared from unnecessary functions has been diverted to the hull plating, so that even lighting is reduced to an absolute minimum. They are all having to drink constantly to prevent dehydration, and even as he lies here he can feel the constant tiny movement of beads of sweat springing out on his body and forming rivulets that trickle into the towel placed to protect the mattress underneath him.

Despite his weariness, sleep will not come easily in these uncomfortable conditions. His mind drifts back to Enterprise, thinking with some envy of his cool, air-conditioned cabin there. It's a measure of how different his mind-set is here that he'll sleep naked; as the Head of Security on board Starfleet's flagship, he would never have done so, however hot he became. If any emergency occurred, he wouldn't have to waste time getting clothes on, and even a set of blues would be sufficient to maintain the dignity befitting an officer.

Here, though ... he grins, wolflike in the dark. Malcolm Reed, that repressed, rigid monument to propriety, fighting to confine his energies into respectable channels so that they never got out of his control. You ought to sympathise with T'Pol, Malcolm, he thinks. The Vulcans keep it all buckled down too. And look what happens when the control fails...

He still remembers the First Officer's voice, breathy and desperate, inviting him to mate with her: 'I've seen the way you look at me...' Too damned observant by half, was T'Pol. Doubtless that was just another facet of Human behaviour she'd been conditioned to ignore: lust. Although the criticality of the situation at the time had enabled him to behave as the officer he'd been brought up to be, he'd paid for it that night and many afterwards when his imagination ran riot and his sex-hungry body tormented him with the craving for more than solitary relief.

Apart from that memorable occasion, however, she's never glanced in his direction. Perhaps it's just as well. He certainly doesn't envy Trip the dance she's led him.

There are other women on board. He's noticed them, even lusts after one of them – not that the desire is mutual. Nobody would have thought he did, though. He'd built his persona too well from the start, and hid himself behind it so effectively that he suspects few people even now actually think of him as a human being – more as a set of functions that occasionally become irksome. You've watched too many science fiction films.

He terrifies many of the junior members of the crew. He knows he does. He hadn't meant it to happen, but has no idea how to amend matters without losing their respect. As for his own team? He hopes none of them are terrified of him, but isn't sure. It isn't just romantic relationships he has problems with.

Pard came to him in this bed. His mind draws her straddling him, lithe and naked; his hands rise to cup her breasts, and close on hot empty air. She'd liked to be the one in control, and mostly he'd humoured her. Now and again he'd asserted himself, and then they fought like tigers, using teeth and claws, half in lust and half in earnest. The end was never in doubt, and sooner or later his grunts and her yowls would announce his victory to anyone who cared to listen.

On one of those occasions, it must have happened–

"Crew to briefing." Stripes's voice sings out over the comm. "Pussy-cats all, come out to play..."

Jag pulls on a pair of briefs that technically bring him into the 'decent' category, if no more. It's too damned hot to wear anything else.

The others evidently think the same as they assemble in the briefing room, blinking in the unaccustomed light there. Spots has been working out, regardless of the heat; his body is glossy with sweat, like something in a bodybuilders' magazine. Leo is an ebony statue, dwarfing Stripes beside him, who is still wearing his woolly hat and has evidently been doing a crossword puzzle. He still has the PADD in his hand, and peers at it from time to time throughout the briefing, sucking his stylus thoughtfully.

And as for Paw ... a barely-adequate orange two-piece emphasises rather than hides charms that have been quite effectively disguised by the loose tawny coverall she usually wears. She walks fluidly, like the big cat she was named for, and her glare is as hostile as bared fangs when she sees him openly watching.

He smiles back, lazily. You show, I look. Better than I'd've expected, too. Live with it, Tail.

The chairs around the briefing table are as uncomfortably hot as everything else on the ship. Leo has made bacon sandwiches; he's probably just left the rashers outside for a couple of seconds. The bacon will exacerbate thirst, but it helps to restore salt lost through the constant sweating.

Jag begins to wolf his before the bread dries out in the heat.

"Time we started making plans," rumbles Leo, taking his seat. "There's an election taking place on a planet called Traan II. We have to ... intervene."

"Bit of a change for us, hey, what?" Stripes is from Ohio. His assumed British upper-class accent always was (and still is) execrable. "Can't go taking out politicians, dear boy. Not done."

"Oh, I don't know." Spots cuts in lazily. "Quite a few I'd like to take out, if it came to that." He whistles, and one of his tiny finches whirrs down from a cable high above and perches on his finger, investigating the sandwich.

Jag thinks of V'Las and says nothing, but tears the bacon savagely with his teeth.

"I know it's not normally our sort of job," Leo continues. "I don't care for it myself, come to that. But it's not our place to decide, just to get it done."

"Any reservations?" asks Paw. She doesn't mean 'reservations' in the sense of 'doubts' of course; she only wants to know if any caveats have been issued as to collateral casualties.

"None other than the usual." 'The usual' simply means 'keep it tidy'. No more bodies than necessary, no evidence left behind, no fingers left attached that could point to Starfleet.

"I'll send what we have to your PADDs. Familiarize yourselves. It'll take us about two days to get there and then we have three to get our ideas fine-tuned and get ourselves into position."

"Why does the Section want this ... politician ... taken care of?" Jag breaks his silence. He's been watching the finch, and suddenly his hand shoots out and closes on it before the minute bird can take flight. Spots looks down impassively. He knows it won't be hurt.

Tiny. It's so tiny, imprisoned between his fingers. Tiny and alive, its little heart beating frantically. Its head pokes out between his thumb and index finger, and tries to peck him.

Keri would have been enchanted with it.

On that thought he opens his hand. The finch flies back up to the cable and swings on it, scolding him.

Leo's saying something about 'minerals' and 'affiliation', but Jag's no longer paying any attention. He went through a phase at one time of bringing back unusual pieces of weaponry as trophies from ops, as well as a few antiques he brought with him from Earth, and they're still on display here and there around the ship – maybe left 'for luck', or just nobody's bothered to throw them away. There's an antique Lee Enfield rifle on the wall of the briefing room and he takes it down and begins stripping it. He's irritated to find that it's received expert care in his absence; it's still in absolutely perfect condition, immaculately cleaned and oiled.

Forty-eight cakes and a rabbit.

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