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Beta'd by BookQ36, to whom all due thanks as always!

Much later that evening, Trip's door chime sounded as he was slowly toweling himself dry after taking a shower in Rostov's quarters – his own bathroom had been one of the minor casualties in the Xindi attack, and they'd got the head working after a fashion, but the shower cubicle was history.

"Come," he called, trying to summon up enough energy to be interested.

It was Malcolm.

The Brit's arrival was a surprise, on one front. After returning to the ship with the news of the Xindi weapon's destruction and the Captain's demise with it, Reed had simply vanished to his quarters and locked himself in. After half an hour he'd re-emerged, handed over a PADD containing a report that could have been written by a machine and debriefed to his superior officers with a face and voice from which every trace of emotion was missing. After all these years they'd learned pretty well how to read Malcolm's expressions: sure, he always tried to keep everything buttoned down, but he was sometimes not nearly as successful in hiding what he felt as he probably hoped. This time, there was just nothing there at all. He would have conveyed more emotion if he'd been running a successful but not particularly interesting combat simulation in the Armory.

Now, he pulled himself into a parade rest posture that was completely unnecessary and stared at a point just over Trip's left shoulder. "You asked me to bring you a souvenir, Commander." He relaxed one arm just long enough to slip a hand into his coverall pocket and bring out a small metallic object. "Mission completed."

Tucker held out a hand and the object dropped into it. Some sort of relay, torn from a damaged control panel at a guess. He'd asked for it on impulse as Malcolm joined the team that was flying off in pursuit of the weapon, wanting to actually hold in his hand some concrete evidence that the thing on which he'd focused so much smoldering rage for so long was finally toast. Maybe then he'd find some closure, some consolation for losing Lizzie and all the other casualties of the probe: seven million of them, not counting the twenty-seven members of the crew who wouldn't be returning to Earth with their comrades.

But now, as he finally held it in his palm, all he could feel was that he'd a thousand times rather have had Jon back than a piece of metal. First Lizzie, now Jon. Before he could control the pain, or even realize what he was saying, the unforgivable words burst out of him. "Goddamn it, why didn't you bring him back instead?"

Malcolm didn't move. Only his eyes widened fractionally.

"Permission to return to my quarters, sir." His voice was still utterly devoid of emotion. His face was a blank, with those wide eyes gray and glassy in it. The answer was in his report. He had nothing to add. He'd obeyed a direct order from his commanding officer, with witnesses to testify to it, and the mission had been a success. No tribunal in Starfleet would find him guilty on any charge.

Arguing was beyond Trip. He gestured dismissal wearily, sitting down on his bunk. He dropped the souvenir on to the night-stand. The fact that he hadn't even said 'thank you' for it was a minor blow to his conscience that he was too punch-drunk to feel as he listened to the footsteps retreating down the corridor.

He pulled on a pair of briefs and lay back, staring at the ceiling. Moments later it dawned on him that Malcolm's quarters were down the corridor to the left, and the footsteps had gone right.

His guts congealed into a cold morass of horror. He jumped up off the bed, and punched the door button. The corridor outside was deserted.

It didn't even dawn on him that he was once again running round the ship barefoot in his underwear as he raced in pursuit. The tactical officer knew the layout of the ship as well as he did. There would be no pause for thought, no indecision. Once Malcolm made up his mind, he would go for it.

But which deck would he choose?

He took a guess and flung open the nearest access hatch. It would buy him a couple of meters that might compensate for the long, wasted seconds he'd lost. He threw himself down the ladder, missing rungs, half falling out of the hatch on the next deck just in time to hear the clang of the airlock door closing.

The lights on the console as he reached it told him the locks were being activated. Frantically he punched in the counter-instructions, but he was too late. As ship's security officer, Malcolm had the jump on him with security codes that could lock practically anything. He'd used one of them now. Through the observation port his face was pale and purposeful, concentrating only on the control panel inside.

Sonofabitch!

Trip hammered on the reinforced glass with both fists, yelling orders and obscenities. The man inside must have been able to hear the racket, but he didn't look around. The readout started to fall as the atmosphere began venting.

"God damn your sorry ass, when I get you out of there I'll kill you myself!" screamed Trip.

The battering from the Xindi weapons had hardly left a centimeter of the ship intact. One corner of the control panel sat on a wall that had buckled as a bulkhead gave, and as a result there was a tiny gap underneath it. He'd hardly noticed it as he'd slammed in the override codes, but his fingernails drove behind it now, finding a weakness. Using more strength than he'd known he possessed he ripped the panel bodily away from the wall. Brute force beat even security codes when you were at this depth of the machinery, and he tore out live circuits without hesitation, feeling rather than hearing the inbuilt safety devices kick in to prevent the whole deck depressurizing.

The door opened. Air swooshed into the airlock to equalize the atmosphere, but there hadn't been nearly enough time for enough to be lost to allow the outer door to open.

As Trip lunged into the opening inner door a small figure flew at him, fists flying. There was no science in the attack at all, just insane rage. He met it with what was momentarily almost its equal fury. He might not have been any match for a department head who was at the top of his game, but when it came to a punch-up with a crazed insubordinate junior officer who'd just disobeyed a string of orders in the effort to commit suicide, he was just dandy.

They traded blows, fast and furious. Malcolm landed an uppercut to the jaw that sent Trip reeling backwards into the corridor, but forgot to keep his guard high as he followed up. A scything right hook landed on his cheekbone and fairly spun him around, sending him staggering into the wall with blood spraying from the cut it had opened up.

He pushed off from the metal and came charging back in for more, head lowered like a small enraged bull. Instead of hitting him again, however, Trip took the blows to his ribs without resistance and just flung his arms around his opponent's body and upper arms, grappling with him.

Malcolm squirmed in a frenzy to get free, landing a flurry of relatively ineffectual blows on his shoulders and back. Had this been an ordinary training bout the armory officer could have used any of a dozen moves to free himself and if he'd done so now most of them would have been painful for his opponent. The fact that he didn't showed that something somewhere was appallingly wrong, though he continued to hit and struggle, snarling breathless and impotent curses. The tactical officer's body was made of solid muscle, but Trip held on relentlessly. Even at close quarters the impacts of the bunched fists on his back weren't pleasant, but he detected a helpless diminution of the intensity of the strikes.

The note of the moan of frustrated fury from the dark head trapped close to his ear was changing. He shoved his captive off balance, pushing both of them back into the airlock. A man as private as Malcolm wasn't going to want witnesses to what was coming.

Enough of the circuits remained intact to shut the door.

The world as he knew it completed its collapse. Malcolm, the ship's self-control freak, the uptight Brit with the upper lip made of reinforced duranium, simply came apart in his arms.

He wasn't noisy about it, though. There was no yelling and screaming; perhaps even in this extremity that would have been too much like making a parade of it. He simply cried, most of what words he used indistinguishable from the stifled sobs. Nevertheless, Trip who knew him so well by now could make an extremely accurate guess at the core of the agony. He could conceive no possibility of forgiveness, from Trip or from anyone else, let alone from God who had stood by and let this happen. Certainly there would be none from himself who had never found any for his own failures. This, the crowning failure of them all, was past any absolution. If his worst fears had been put into words it would have been that he should walk away from his own task and leave his captain to do it and die; drowning by slow degrees would have been infinitely preferable. The fact that he had been obeying orders would be no excuse whatsoever, set against a catastrophe of this magnitude. Sheer stunned horror would have carried him as though on auto-pilot right up till the point where Trip had demolished the disbelief with that one vicious demand that echoed with such appalling accuracy the accusation that would have been boiling up in his own soul ever since. 'Goddamn it, why didn't you bring him back instead?'

The guilt of his own complicity in this collapse knotted Trip's tongue briefly. But they'd been through something like this once before, had had to build and explore their friendship during a period of difficult mental problems neither of them had initially recognized as post-traumatic shock following their close call with death in Shuttlepod One. It was precious to both of them. The thought that only good luck and a piece of buckled metal had saved him from losing yet another of his closest buddies through letting his tongue run loose was enough to choke him all over again. He'd lost too many already. He wasn't about to lose this one.

"Goddamn it, Malcolm, I never should've said that," he muttered into the dark hair. "If anyone could'a saved him you would've. He ordered you to leave and you had to save the others. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"He said he wasn't planning to die." The words came disjointedly into the hands that covered his face, shaking. "It should have been me. Planting sodding explosives, for God's sake! They're my job! Why didn't he let me do it? Couldn't he trust me with something that bloody simple?"

It was the question that had run through Trip's stunned brain as he'd scanned through the report, and he'd been trying without success to find an answer for it ever since. Now, however, a glimmer of what felt like a likely explanation came into his mind.

"I don't think it was anythin' to do with not trustin' ya," he said slowly. "I think in the end it'd just gotten too personal for him to let go of it, to you or anyone else. The whole 'Xindi Weapon' thing was his job. He just needed to be the one to put the last nail in the coffin." He stared unseeingly at the wall, trying to think his way into those last few moments of his old friend's life. "That's all he's thought about all this time. That's the responsibility he's had weighin' on him till he couldn't think about anythin' else, that's what's cost all these lives, all these people under his command. People he brought to their deaths. I think that got real personal to him. It would to me." A pause. "It did to me. After we got the news about that probe, if I'd had a button I could've pressed to kill every damned Xindi in existence I'd've pressed it. And I damn well wouldn't have let anyone else do it for me."

"You wouldn't have, you know, Trip," said Malcolm softly. "You just don't have that kind of vindictiveness in you."

"Maybe I didn't once. But a thing like that changes ya." He sighed. "And I'd've taken out good guys like Degra if I had. When Jon brought him on board it was all I could do not to punch his lights out."

"Like I tried to with Hayes." A fresh constriction passed across the tactical officer's face at the memory of another death. "I was a right bastard to him and he died bringing Hoshi back. On my orders."

"He died doin' his job, Malcolm. Completin' a successful mission, rescuin' a pretty woman." A sly blue glance confirmed his suspicions that the other man was fully aware that Hoshi was a pretty woman, and disliked having that fact mentioned by a possible rival. "I always thought that one reason you and he got on each other's nerves so much is that you were so damned alike. Both of ya knew just which buttons to press. And he pressed yours just as hard as you pressed his."

"He did, didn't he?" A woeful, rueful grin that still had a certain battered charm appeared. "Almost as well as you do."

"Commander's privilege," Trip said smugly. On that thought a more worrying realization came to him, and he felt wincingly at the places on his body where bruises would already be blackening. If T'Pol offered him a neuropressure session any time within the next few days she was infallibly going to notice those, and then the cat would be out of the bag big time. Malcolm could probably come up with some plausible reason for his visible bruises, because the armory officer practically had a season ticket for Sickbay anyway, but with the two of them showing wear and tear the Vulcan was more than capable of putting two and two together. And the sort of remarks she was likely to come up with if she arrived at the answer 'four' would just about ruin the sort of cozy atmosphere he had in mind for his next visit to her quarters. Not to mention the fact that as acting captain of the ship she was even less likely to turn a blind eye than Jon had been.

He lifted his head, searching for inspiration, and realized that the two of them were in full view of anyone passing who happened to look through the glass observation panel. Considering that they were sitting on the floor, and that he was in a state of advanced undress and grasping a male colleague who was in a state of evident distress, that would not be the best thing for either of them. He knew full well how fast rumor could go round this ship.

"'Fore we do anythin' else, I think we'd better get outta view," he said, nudging Malcolm to draw his attention to the situation. "Else I'm gonna get real talked about."

Reed raised his head too, and glanced around. A wry grimace crossed his wet and bloody face. The contrast between his own failed suicide and Trip's potentially achieved social ruin as an assaulter of junior officers was evidently too absurd to contemplate.

"Sorry, Trip, you're just not my type," he said.

"Damn. But hell, Hoshi's got first dibs on you anyway." With a wink and a grin that was unabated by the glare he received in response to this sally, Trip stood up and moved to the comm panel, taking care to stand in the corner so as to be out of view while he spoke. "Tucker to Hess."

"Boss?"

"Anna, I want you to do somethin' for me, don't ask any questions, and then forget all about it afterwards, okay?"

"I just knew this was my lucky day." The grin was audible; he was relieved beyond words that her sassy sense of humor had somehow survived the Expanse intact. "Your quarters or mine this time, Boss?"

"I am so gonna fire that woman," he growled in an aside to Malcolm, who had evidently just discovered that grinning in his turn was now rather painful. Then he returned his attention to the com panel. "Just go to my quarters, get me some clothes and then bring them to the port airlock on F Deck. Then just throw 'em through the door and walk away. And if you take one look I'll bust you down to crewman and you'll be scrubbin' out the Jeffries tubes with a toothbrush for the rest of the mission."

"Sure, Boss. On one condition."

"What's that?"

"Next time you organize one of these weird parties you remember to invite me." The link closed on her laughter.

"I take it she knows how to get into your quarters," murmured Malcolm.

"Not officially." Trip slid down the wall, landing ungracefully on his ass in the corner. "You'll notice she didn't say she couldn't."

"The security on this ship."

"Malcolm?"

"Yes?"

"Shut the hell up."

"Yes, sir."

While they waited, Reed got up and walked over in his turn to the other corner, where he pulled down the top of his jumpsuit, took off his undershirt and wiped his face with it, wincing when the fabric brushed the cut on his cheekbone.

"Sorry," said Trip, noticing the grimace. "But you hit me first."

"According to regulations, you're supposed to court-martial me, not punch me back."

"Couldn't resist. I've been dyin' to do it for years."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it." He rolled his neck and fingered the bottom of his jaw, wincing in his turn. "Just let's hope we can get away without T'Pol findin' out about it."

"Oh, damn. I hadn't thought about that." Malcolm had already been chewed out once for brawling with Hayes; it was unlikely he'd relish a second tongue-lashing, this time from the acting captain, who wouldn't mince her words either. Trip naturally hadn't been privileged to hear what Jon had had to say on the subject, but he knew the captain had been incensed. Two such dressings-down for the same loss of self control and consequent conduct unbecoming an officer should certainly be avoided if humanly possible.

"If she does, I'll say I started it." Trip couldn't quite keep the note of resignation out of his voice. After all, it was the truth from one viewpoint – he had started the quarrel with that godawful question. Thinking about it still made him want to rip out his tongue. The abrupt and unscheduled end to a pleasant spell of neuropressure that would result from this confession seemed a small penance for something like that. And he hoped and believed that he had enough influence with her to persuade her that the fight had been unpremeditated and personal, a venting of unbearable stress over an issue that was now closed. Surely she knew as well as he did himself that the pressures they'd all had to endure over the past weeks and months would cause anomalies in more than just the fabric of space.

"It's not true. I struck you first." He could tell even without looking that Malcolm had that damned British 'death-before-dishonor' expression of his on his face.

"Malcolm."

"What?"

"I told you to shut up."

"But I –"

"SHUT UP!"

The opening of the door broke an aggrieved silence. A coverall and an undershirt sailed into the room. "Hope the party was fun, Boss!" said a stage whisper from the corridor outside, and then footsteps retreated back towards the turbo lift as the door closed again.

"I'm gonna murder her then fire her." He made a dive for the clothes, retreated with them into his corner and began to pull them on.

"You can't sack somebody who's dead."

"If you don't shut your mouth I'll test that theory on you."

Another offended silence descended.

He pulled up the zip, straightened his hair and heaved a sigh of relief. "Now at least one of us looks respectable."

"They do say appearances are deceptive." The snipe was breathed just loud enough to be audible.

"An' another thing they say is that failin' to obey a superior officer when he keeps tellin' you to keep your mouth shut can get you court-martialed!" In actual fact he'd have been worried if he'd succeeded in shutting the other man up: a snippy, argumentative Malcolm was on the road back to normal. "Come on. We just have to get out of here without anyone seein' us and we're okay. If Phlox asks what happened, you fell over somethin' in the Armory and I'm escortin' you up to Sickbay." He lifted a warning finger, and the lips that had opened on 'He won't believe a word of it' closed again. "We were fixin' some damage in the Armory and you fell over somethin'," he enunciated clearly.

He knew there was another snappy comeback on the way; equally, he knew that that was just Malcolm's way of trying to cope. As the two of them turned towards the door he reached out and took the other man gently by the shoulders, a gesture that normally he would not have made, knowing Reed would have been deeply uncomfortable with it.

"It's gonna be tough, Malcolm," he said softly. "But we did what he wanted. Now we've just gotta go back to Earth and get on with it. At least it's still there for us to go back to."

An almost imperceptible quiver of grief ran through the shoulders under his hands. "It shouldn't have happened like this."

"No, it shouldn't. But a whole load of things in life don't go the way they oughta. We've just gotta roll with the punches."

"I hope they bloody remember what it cost."

"Whatever it cost, I know Jon thought it was worth it."

The sigh seemed to come up from the bottom of Reed's guts. "I suppose that's something."

"Not a lot, I know. But yeah, it's somethin'." He gripped the shoulders briefly, then released them. "Now, Loo-tenant, you an' I have an appointment with Phlox."

"Bloody hell."

"Unless you'd rather leave the evidence for T'Pol to see as soon as you walk on to the bridge tomorrow mornin' that is."

"Oh." A pause. "Er, lead the way, Commandah."

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