Malcolm and Hoshi: The Missing Scenes

The Augments

“All safe?”

“Yes.  All done.  He’s back in Starfleet custody, thank God.”

Malcolm sheds the last of his clothes and slips into the bunk beside me.  I can feel the difference at once: that tension that’s gripped him throughout the time when Arik Soong has been aboard has gone, the awful responsibility sloughed off his shoulders at last. 

I know perhaps better than anybody how mortified and enraged he was when Soong slipped out of custody.  He took it as a personal insult.  I honestly believe that if the ship hadn't set out in pursuit he’d have gone AWOL in pursuit all by himself.  Sometimes it worries me a bit that there’s that obsessive streak to him; it surfaces now and again, like a shark’s fin in a smooth sea whose surface I can’t see through.

So I naturally expect that now that the runaway is safely back in his ultra-secure Starfleet jail and the Augments are history, I’ll get my former lover back.  I wait for him to start touching me, kissing me, setting me on fire the way he knows so well how to do.

But it doesn’t happen.

He just lies there on his back, staring at the ceiling.

Now if I’m honest, I prefer it when we share my cabin.  Okay, it’s smaller (lieutenant cuts ensign) and has the disadvantage of being in a more crowded area of the deck, so we have to be extra careful there’s nobody about when he leaves to return to his own, as well as being extra careful not to let our, ah, enthusiasm run away with us.  But its real advantage, to my mind, is that it has a viewing port.  Even now the vista of all those stars sliding by can be pure magic.  But not as magic as seeing what I dreamed about for so long.

He has a beautiful body.  I could spend an hour just looking at it, admiring how toned it is, though obviously I enjoy even more getting a practical demonstration.  Tactical officer?  Malcolm Reed has tactics I’d never even heard of before.  And we won’t get on to the weaponry. 

But tonight what captures my attention even more than his beautifully toned body is the expression on his face.  Fatigue is etched on it, but frankly I’d be astonished if it wasn’t.  The last few days have been impossibly hard on him.  I wouldn’t even be all that surprised if he was too tired for sex, just wanted some good old-fashioned cuddling as he went to sleep – the sound sleep he’s been missing out on ever since Arik Soong came aboard.  I could put up with that.  Cuddling Malcolm is one of life’s pleasures as far as I’m concerned.

It isn’t just fatigue, though.  It’s sadness.  And I can’t for the life of me imagine why he should be sad.  After all, we did what we set out to do.  The Augments are gone, Soong is back in prison, and the ship’s safe.  We can get back to being a ship of exploration at last – return to what we signed up to do all those years ago.  It feels like half a lifetime.

“Malcolm?”  When he still doesn’t look at me, I touch his mouth gently with my fingertips.  “What’s wrong?  Is it something you can talk about?” 

He turns his head at that, and his gaze fixes on me with something like bewilderment.

“Hoshi.  I’m ... I’m sorry.  I just feel so stupid.”

Whatever else I was expecting, it wasn’t that.  I prop myself up on my elbow to look down at him in concern.

“This isn’t about me, is it?”

“No!”  His response is quick and emphatic enough to reassure me.  “No, love, never.”  His arm goes around me and pulls me in close, and I’m so relieved that I just drop my head on to his chest and wait for him to go on, if he wants to.  And if he doesn’t, that’s fine with me as well.  Sometimes he just prefers to work things out on his own.  At any rate, we’re together, and he loves me, and I can hear his heart beating steadily and strongly behind his ribcage, so pretty well everything is okay in my world as far as that goes.  Though like any woman, I don’t like it when my man’s so evidently upset about something.

He’s silent for so long that I think he’s not going to speak at all, though he’s not asleep; his fingers are playing with my hair, teasing out the long silky strands.

“I watched the security recordings just now,” he says at last, in a voice so low I can hardly hear him.  “You’ll have heard that Malik was killed here on Enterprise, of course?”

It’s not irony, or at least not much; half a day is easily long enough for the scuttlebutt to get around the ship.  You can’t have the Augment leader get a hole blown clean through him without someone talking.  And Malcolm knows of old that Travis and I ... well, we like to know what goes on around the place.

“Ye-es,” I say a little dubiously.  “You’re not going to tell me you’re sorry about that, are you?”

A short laugh.  “Hardly!  I’d feel more grief for a rattlesnake.”

This is getting more and more mysterious.  I lift my head again and peer at him.  “Well I know you didn’t kill him, because you were with us on the Bridge when it happened.  I took it for granted it was one of the MACOs. So what’s the problem?”

“It wasn’t one of the MACOs.”  His voice is even quieter than before.  “It was the captain who did it.”

“The captain?”  I’m so astonished that I sit up with a jerk, though I remember to keep my voice down. At a guess, this isn’t something he’d want broadcast around the ship, and I won’t be spreading it around.  “Captain Archer killed Malik?”

“Yes.”  His gaze on me is steady, but it’s filled with something I can only describe as horror – and grief. “He shot him in the back, without giving him a chance to surrender.”

It takes me a little while to get my head around this information.  I try to picture it, and I can’t.  Jonathan Archer is no cold-blooded executioner.  Or is he?  He’s not the man he was before the Expanse touched him.

“I’m sure he thought it was the right thing to do,” I venture at last.

“It was absolutely the right thing to do.  I’d have done it without a second thought.”  Something about his flat voice chills me for a moment, but I’ve had to learn to cope with the fact that his duty sometimes requires him to be something completely different from the kind, gentle man I’m in love with.

Then I understand.

“You just hate the fact that the captain could do it.”

There’s a long silence, and then he laughs, a laugh that breaks in the middle as though he’s close to tears.

“‘Beware what you pray for, says God; for you may get it.’  I’ve spent all this time wishing he’d learn, wishing he’d get real.  And now he has.  And as I watched that recording I found myself wishing to God I could turn back time and make him what he used to be again.  As maddening as he was, there was something about him I envied.  Something that wouldn’t shoot a man in the back.  Not even an Augment.”  His hand comes up and slips gently down my side, but there’s nothing sexual about the movement; it conveys only loneliness, and an inability to reach out across the gulf that has suddenly opened up.  “I shouldn’t have come here tonight.  You don’t deserve to suffer for my bad mood.”

“Malcolm Reed, if you ever say that again I’ll ... well, you’d better not say that again!”  I drop flat across his body and stare into his eyes.  “If you’re upset I want to be there for you.  Just like you would for me!”

He smiles.  It’s not the most genuine smile I’ve ever seen, but it’s there.

“Hoshi, what did I ever do to deserve you?”

I pretend to think. 

“Well, nothing since you came on board Enterprise.  Maybe you were really good in a previous life.”

The smile’s gone in an instant. 

“I think we can rule that theory out.”

“Hey!”  I’m finding that lying on top of that toned body is giving me some really unsuitable ideas.  And I want so badly to wipe that terrible, frozen look off his face.

I don’t think talking’s going to do it.  So, time to deploy some of the more underhand tactics I’ve learned from him.

He holds out for a while.  I’ll give him that.  He’s been trained to resist interrogation, after all.  But he hasn’t been trained to resist Hoshi Sato when she’s really determined.  And I’m not convinced he really wants to anyway. 

After a while, he’s obviously not thinking any more about Captain Archer shooting a man in the back.  Oddly enough, though, I find it a bit difficult to stop thinking about it myself.  I still can’t imagine it: Jonathan taking aim and pulling the trigger without a word of warning, and with the cold look of an executioner on his face.  Maybe that was the expression he wore when Sim had to die to save Trip – or, more accurately, to save the mission. 

To paraphrase an old saying: ‘You can take the man out of the Expanse, but you can’t take the Expanse out of the man.’

Malcolm just found that out.

I just didn’t expect it to hurt him so much.