"I hope you don't mind if I keep this." Sheepishly Davis tucks the "apartment" crate under his arm, rather embarrassed about the craftsmanship now that his senior officer is reporting back for duty. Reed offers an unruffled shrug.

"If you think Suzie will like it."

"Sure she will," Davis assures. "Although frankly, I think she'll just put her mouse colony in there. The dollies were setting up house in their cage when I left home."

"Ah." Awkwardly Reed flushes. It'll be awhile before the lieutenant gets used to his own shoe size, Davis suspects. "I'll have to return Hoshi's tea set. Can't seem to find the teapot anywhere."

"I hear the captain is to blame for that one," Davis says, chuckling. "Hoshi already retrieved it from the replicator tray. You can polish off the rest of the set before giving it to her."

"Is that so?" Absently Reed scrubs at his ear, muttering something about 'Osmodian eel slime.' He was only recently released from sickbay, after a thorough examination from Phlox declared him to be "Perfectly healthy, if a bit clumsy due to accustoming to a larger mass." Davis can almost imagine that finding the lieutenant in the control panel was a figment of a bad dream. He shut Eddie up before the lad could spread any rumors to the contrary. No one needs to entertain such unqualified fears.

"You're sure you don't want one of us to clean the replicator for you?" Davis offers. "The doc said you might still be a touch sensitive to certain cleaning agents."

"Does everyone in engineering fret about my allergies?" Huffing, Reed pauses at the mess hall door, jabbing the panel with a sort of high-minded satisfaction. "I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself again."

"The captain seems to disagree," Davis dares to quip. It's been three days since Reed's miraculous return, and Captain Archer is still hovering. He's responding worse, if possible. than when Porthos caught that bug. Davis isn't so sure he blames him. A man tends to watch his feet a little more until he remembers that the "Reed Alert" is merely a prank carried out by whichever cheeky crewman snitched a tiny pair of ear mufflers. (Commander Tucker has already sworn to boot the guilty crewman out of an airlock if he can't find a way to dismantle the alert system - he hasn't received any thanks from Reed, either, after the lieutenant learned the origins of the magenta lights glowing in one room or another. If Davis didn't know better, he'd suspect that Reed was toting the signal device in his pocket just to mess with Tucker's head.)

Dangers and premonitions aside, it's good to have the lieutenant back. Davis shakes his head, watching his armory officer take apart the replicator, a bucket of suds sloshing at his feet. "Guess no task is too small for an officer."

"Quite the contrary," Reed says, narrowing his eyes as he scrubs at a stubborn clump of black. "I never leave a task unfinished."

"How about fixing that Tactical Alert?" Tucker pipes in, barely glancing up from the datapad he's ferociously tapping at while he stuffs runny eggs and hash into his mouth. "Captain about fell out of his chair when it went off accidentally."

This is definitely the point at which Davis makes his gracious exit. Leave the two senior officers to bungle their way through this argument. They'll stow it eventually, although a few soap suds might find their way into the commander's eggs, whilst the replicator might accidentally spray coffee grounds in the lieutenant's hair. The important thing is, Davis has fifteen minutes before his next shift.

That gives him a lot of time to start running before the chief engineer learns that he tweaked the tactical alert system to sound like a wailing cat.


In the captain's ready room, unnoticed by any save the stars and the unseen beings surrounding Planet Q, Captain Archer leans back in his chair, his eyes fixed on a very small table that now serves to hold his coffee mug. He won't quickly forget the events that shook him out of his quintessential delusion. In a time of heedless panic, he forgot what it meant to defend the weak and the helpless. In turn, he became the tyrant, backstabbing those who had saved his crew.

Never again.

Taking one last, pondering look at the blue-green planet, Archer shuts down the viewscreen and activates the channel. "Archer to Bridge: take us into warp."

It's time he set an example for the next generation.