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"Lieutenant, we could get this sorted a whole lot quicker if you'd quit actin' like an ass!"

Malcolm's face paled with anger, and he stopped himself with difficulty from lunging forward across the chief engineer's desk and retorting in kind. "I'm sorry that's how you feel, Commander." His voice, when he finally spoke, was arctic. "I won't take up any more of your time, then."

Commander Tucker – definitely not 'Trip' at the moment – seemed almost disappointed that he refused to join in. As Malcolm rose from his seat, the PADD with its despised modifications in his hand, the blond American looked up at him. The blue eyes were sparking with surprise and anger.

"Malcolm–"

"I believe my duty shift finished fifteen minutes ago, sir. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Oh-eight-hundred prompt, on the Bridge." And not a second earlier. Sir.

Trembling with suppressed rage, the tactical officer pressed the door control of the office. As he crossed Main Engineering, a couple of the crew there greeted him. Normally they'd have done no more than nod respectfully, but now they spoke to him. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing he could put his finger on, nothing that – even in his present mood – he could reasonably take exception to. Except that the fact that they were talking to him at all was an irritant, and it was all he could do to reply civilly. He made his escape as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, nobody he encountered in the corridors made a point of trying to engage him in conversation. He walked with his head down, pretending to study the schematic on the PADD, to warn others off. Although it was no more than a pretence – he was far too angry to actually look at the thing – the shred of a solution to the problem he and the chief engineer had been arguing about came into his mind, so that presently he really did start to pay attention. In different circumstances he'd have turned around and gone back to Engineering; Trip was never too busy to be interested in technical discussions, even when his shift too was over, and there had often been days when the two of them had still been talking when they finally got around to going for their evening meal. But that was before–

He shut his mind off that avenue of thought. Hard. And fast.

He rounded the next corner, thinking closely about the technical issues rather than the other things he definitely didn't want to think about.

It was because he was paying far more attention to the contents of the PADD than to where he was going that the collision occurred. A slight figure in Starfleet blue with green piping and a single rank pip was heading in the other direction; and since she too was absorbed in the device she was holding, she wasn't paying attention either.

Lieutenant Malcolm Reed and Ensign Hoshi Sato usually maintained a proper and professional distance. This was in order with everything the regulations demanded. However, the regulations were weak on how to react when a PADD and a portable UT didn't provide enough of a barrier between two people in a hurry.

The encounter was brief. They both said the correct things. His gaze flicked away from her face so he wouldn't have to see the concern in it; the concern that had been there since–

He walked away quickly. The PADD hadn't been damaged, he was relieved to find. His fingers flicked from one diagram to another, and in his mind he built up another possible way to get what he wanted. It would take a lot of work, and he didn't pretend to the level of expertise that (he nearly thought Trip) Commander Tucker possessed. But this one looked a lot more feasible than the previous one had done.

Still, the other hadn't been that bad. Not nearly bad enough for–

His fingers clenched on the PADD.

Whatever had possessed him to weaken so far as to actually call another human being 'my friend'?

He should have known it was a mistake.

A terrible mistake.

Reaching his cabin, he stripped off his uniform and consigned it to the laundry chute. He glanced at his computer screen and saw an incoming message from his superior officer. No. From Charles Tucker to Malcolm Reed. The designation was specific. Personal and professional communications had their own inboxes, though it was rare indeed that this one ever had anything in it.

He deleted it, unopened. In a spare half-hour he'd once designed a mini-programme that made unwanted mail envelopes explode instead of just disappearing off the screen, and now he took a juvenile pleasure in watching the detonation.

Following his usual habit, he went straight into the shower.

The water sheeted over him and he felt nothing. Nothing except anger. Anger was the only fuel on which his mind was running these days, and he was having more and more problems keeping in control of it. His body was just plain tired – hell, he was exhausted, because he hadn't had a decent night's sleep since–

Perhaps he should go to see Phlox.

The insidious thought prompted a wave of such furious rejection that he actually spun around in the shower cubicle so fast his feet slipped. I've had enough of him poking and prying–

–And if he pokes and pries hard enough and deep enough and long enough, maybe he'll find–

Anger was dangerous.

Anger opened too many doors he'd locked long ago–

The cage–

"'My friend'!" He didn't know he'd spoken aloud until he heard the jeering, jarring ring of it echoing off the Plexiglas.

Trust nobody.

Cold. The searing, bitter cold of space, eating its way through the shuttlepod. Prying with sly, knowing, patient fingers through the single blanket and the inadequate clothing beneath, until it found flesh on which to feed.

Grief. Fear. Guilt. Desperation. And anger, always anger. Of all the engineers in all the shuttlepods in all the galaxy I get to die with, it has to be with you, Commandah bloody Tuckah. You with your pan-fried catfish and that bloody drawl. 'Keep yrrr shirrt awn, Loo-tenant!'

Then – the airlock.

He couldn't even have said why the gesture had ignited such fury in him. Nor why it still did. Although his conscious mind had recognised it as an act of self-sacrifice on his senior officer's part, it hadn't been his conscious mind which had reacted with utter outrage. It hadn't been until then that he'd been forced to fully realise how deeply he'd committed far too much of himself to the connection with this man – this man who wouldn't face death with him.

Trust nobody!

He found himself lying flat on his back on the bed, adrenaline raging through him. Pard was straddling him as she always did after a mission. She leaned down and bit his jaw, and he cursed and laughed, burying himself in her softness. Then she straightened up, and straight black hair swung free around her shoulders, and there were three neat round bullet-holes in her naked torso, and Hoshi looked down at him and screamed, but there was no sound...

He flung himself off the bunk, and found himself on hands and knees on the floor. He glared around the cabin and snarled softly. My name is Jaguar. I have no friends. Friends are people who betray you.

Hoshi.

The physical contact with her had reopened old wounds, wounds that had hardly begun to heal again after being ripped open in The Cold. He knew she was vulnerable. He could stalk her, using the camouflage he knew so well, the shadows of 'friendship', of 'caring'... she would be like any other prey, soft and scared. A challenge. He wondered if she'd scream when he finally pounced...

Appalled, he scrambled back on to the bed. Sick and shaking, he wound himself in the blanket. Thinking like that about a junior officer, a member of the crew he'd signed up to protect, and a woman who was his ...

I have no friends!

He sank his teeth into his forearm, hoping the pain of the bite would give him something to hold on to.

Cold, he was so cold. Inside and outside. He needed someone to hold, but Pard was dead, the only woman who could meet him on his own terms, who knew what he was and neither judged him nor rejected him.

He should eat, but yet again he wasn't hungry. Nowadays he was missing more meals than he turned up for, and he was losing muscle mass. His uniform was starting to hang slightly loose, and exercise tired him too quickly. And he knew the signs: tonight was going to be yet another shambles of a night's sleep, riddled with nightmares from which he'd wake trembling and sweating, always going back to–

The comm chime sounded, jerking him upright, wild-eyed in the semi-darkness.

Lord, let it not be Hoshi – soft – vulnerable –!

His own voice let out a single mew of horror at the thing he'd become. Moisture trickled down his face, and he didn't know whether it was water or sweat.

But the training of the years stood him in good stead. Mechanically he ran a hand through his hair, wiped his face with the blanket and then pulled on a pair of tracksuit bottoms. Even as he stood up he felt the identity of Lieutenant Malcolm Reed closing back around him, hiding him. Protecting him. And others.

It wasn't Hoshi.

Commander Tucker stood there dark-eyed, leaning against the door-jamb.

"You deleted my message, Malcolm."

His voice was quite calm. Flat calm.

Too calm altogether.

The tactical officer stared back at him silently. My friend, indeed. And that's Lieutenant to you, Sir.

Trust nobody.

The commander pushed through the doorway and looked at the tangle of bedclothes. Looked at the bare forearm with the perfect set of teeth-marks in it.

"This has gone far enough." Tucker's statement was flat, as though it was no more than a comment on some kind of not-very-interesting engineering experiment that hadn't worked.

Anger was breaking the tactical officer open again. Anger and something else, something he couldn't and wouldn't acknowledge. Still without a word, he walked past his superior officer, slithered on to his bunk and took up position in the farthest corner of it, knees drawn up and arms around them. As a position it was nakedly defensive, but Jag's eyes glittered up at Commander Tucker across the barrier.

He expected the other man to start arguing, to try to justify his insult, to rail at him for deleting that e-mail without even reading it. But instead, the American simply sat down on the bunk as well. After a moment, Tucker's elbows came to rest on his knees. The blond head drooped forward.

"Malcolm, I'm tired." A pause. "I'm tired. And I'm sorry."

Justificatory bluster or aggression, he could have coped with. This simple apology bewildered him, so that he blinked at the bowed shoulders and couldn't imagine what to say in response.

"We were both in the wrong," he got out eventually, and waited warily for the trap to close, for the slamming down of the fist of authority on a junior officer daring to criticise the action of a superior.

"I'm not talkin' about just now." The southern-accented voice was dull, but he couldn't tell with what. "I failed you then and I've been failin' both of us ever since."

There was another, longer pause. He bit down on an instinctive, automatic reply that would have been no more than a dressing placed on a wound that was going septic. A ... friend ... deserved more than that. Deserved honesty, however harsh.

They'd both avoided what needed to be faced. In more than one way.

"Your behaviour was inexcusable." Malcolm spoke evenly. "My parents would have had to live with your childish abuse of my character for the rest of their lives. Whatever I did to deserve it, that was a level to which you should never have stooped. However 'cranky' you were at the time."

Tucker nodded silently.

"You've probably noticed that I'm not in the habit of making a parade of my feelings," the tactical officer went on, still holding hard to his control. "I made those recordings because it – because I didn't want to die owing debts. Things I should have said and didn't. Staring your own demise in the face makes you realise what matters, doesn't it? But I had to make them – I had to say all those private things – in front of an audience." A quiver of pain and rage insinuated itself into his voice, and he stopped again until he was sure it had only been an aberration. "I had to admit that I'd been a failure at relationships, that I hardly talk to my own family, that I was an emotional incompetent. I hoped you'd at least do me the courtesy of keeping your mouth shut while I bared my soul to the shuttle logs.

"I realise how tiresome it must have been, listening to my long list of failures. I'm sure it's perfectly understandable that you'd rather I'd just had one sweetheart that I could send a nice, long, loving, sentimental message to. So much more in keeping with the standards of a gentleman, don't you think? And you could have sympathised with that so much more easily. Instead of which, you got the reality. Maudlin Malcolm Reed, spilling his guts over his pathetic excuse for a love life–" He caught himself up on a gasp, feeling the bitterness start to spill out, beyond his fragmenting control. He'd tried to make contact, tried to find warmth, but Jag no longer knew how. Trust was agonizingly difficult, especially with women. In his desperation he'd once even tried to achieve contact elsewhere, but his conditioning and his body had conspired against him, and since then there had only been loneliness and using. Pard had filled the gap; there was no love, but there was understanding and mutual need, and that had been his bulwark against starvation.

Here on Enterprise, however, the human hunger for contact had driven him to entrust someone, even against his will, with his fledgling attempt at simple friendship. Trip Tucker's warmth had drawn him in, more than half-reluctant, both repelled and intrigued by the American's untidy and generous camaraderie. Slowly and inexorably the ice had begun to melt. Over the months he'd rediscovered the art of banter over off-duty meals, of sharing time in the gym and the odd bottle of beer in each other's quarters. Not to mention the pleasure of stretching his mind to keep up with an intellect that sometimes awed him even now with its grasp of technical matters.

Women were off-limits. The anti-fraternisation regulations saw to that, and he'd learned how to cope in the only way possible. Friendship, however, was encouraged. (More than he'd thought advisable at first, in fact. He still shuddered at the prospect of an invitation to share breakfast with the captain even now, though thankfully Captain Archer appeared to have abandoned the idea.) And in friendship – tentative enough at first, but slowly putting down roots in soil that had been barren for years – he found the warmth he so desperately craved.

The warmth that hadn't been proof against The Cold.

He'd anthropomorphised it, over those long hours in the shuttlepod. Had envisaged it slithering around the outside of the tiny craft, sniffing against the welds and inspecting the rivets, and peering through the windscreen at the two men inside. It was infinitely patient; it had all the time in the world. Sooner or later it would get what it wanted. A human body is around sixty percent water on average, and water freezes well above the mean temperature of space.

He found that he was shivering convulsively. The temperature controls in his cabin had been raised to a level that before The Cold would have had him sweating continuously. Now he couldn't even feel warm.

"Malcolm."

"Wh-what?" He should say 'sir', but his mouth wouldn't form the word, because his teeth were chattering too badly.

"I can't change what I did. I can only regret it. And I do – more than you'll ever know."

Trip had sat up and turned around. The blue eyes were now sad, but they were also resolute. "I failed you then, Malcolm, but I'm not failin' you now. I'm relievin' you of duty, as of now. You're comin' with me to Sickbay."

–What?

Something too close to panic washed over him. "You can't."

"Yes, I can. I've already spoken to the cap'n. We're both grounded."

Words failed him. Even expletives failed him. He simply stared.

"We're not copin', Malcolm," said Trip simply, gesturing at the bedclothes and the bitten arm. "I haven't wanted to admit it either. And you're an even more stubborn-assed son of a bitch than I am, so one of us has to see sense. Guess it's me this time." He stood up, walked to the chair and picked up the tracksuit top that had been draped neatly across it. "Get yourself dressed."

No reply. No movement either. This was not happening. In another minute ice crystals would begin to crystallise across the monitor, and their breath smoke out in clouds on the freezing air; and Trip would topple over, a two-metre block of ice, and as the body hit the floor it would shatter into a thousand shards, and he'd wake up again to a cabin that was deathly cold and blankets welded to him by his own sweat, and even the shower turned up to maximum would feel like splinters of hail–

He watched the other man numbly, waiting for the freeze, the fall. Instead, Trip turned his head and spoke. "You asked me back there how much I trust you. I think I told you, plain enough. Now it's my turn, buddy. How much do you trust me?"

There was no possible answer to that question. Trust nobody. But a friend – human and fallible, but a friend nevertheless–

The bunk creaked slightly. Trip had sat back down on it. His proximity was terrifying.

"I know, Malcolm." His voice was very soft. "I was out there too."

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