Malcolm and Hoshi: The Missing Scenes

Bound Part 2

Headache?

You’re goddamn right I’ve got a headache, Phlox.

Every woman on this ship has a headache. 

Three of them, to be precise.

There are times when I think every man I’ve ever known has his brains in his balls.  Today is definitely one of those times.

The captain goes over to the Orion ship to talk, and what does he come back with?  Three scantily-dressed, gorgeous slave women who now apparently ‘belong’ to him.  That doesn’t stop them from flaunting themselves at every male on the ship, though, including the Lieutenant Malcolm Reed who not so long ago asked me to marry him.  Seems like he forgot that fast enough. Some security officer he is, goggling at that woman’s breasts like he’s never seen a pair before.  Jeez, if his tongue comes out any more, he’ll trip on it.

Okay.  We haven’t talked yet.  I don’t know what to say to him.  I still haven’t got things worked out in my own mind, and till I’ve got that done I sure don’t want him messing with it.  Even after I’ve got it done I don’t know what’s going to happen when we talk.  But one thing I sure as hell don’t want is some other woman messing around with him.

I know we should be doing something about it.  Fighting back!  We’re Starfleet’s finest, right?  We’ve fought Klingons and Suliban and Reptilians and Insectoids; we’ve been in worse places than this and survived.  But somehow all I can feel is angry.  I can’t feel purposeful.  I want to do something and I can’t think what.  We women are all like ants when the anthill’s been kicked, wandering around ready to sting something, if only we could find something to sting.  We talk, but we don’t act.  Even Em confines herself to uttering strings of awful curses in mingled Spanish and Catalan.  We watch the men making utter fools of themselves, and we don’t do anything about it.  And in the meantime, the three Trojan whores stroll around the ship in their exotic splendor, and the self-satisfied complacency oozes from them in a way that makes me want to commit murder. If only I could summon up the will.

I’m in my quarters, seething over the whole stupid goddamn situation and my complete inability to do anything about it.  I open a drawer in my cabinet and take out the thing I’ve left there since that day I went down to the Brig and had my world torn apart.  I haven’t even looked at it since.  Now the blueness glints at me, stunning me afresh with its beauty; the smooth burnished curve of metal it rests on is cold against my hand.  I walk to the waste disposal chute and think about Malcolm, faithless to the captain, faithless to me, up there on the Bridge openly lusting after that Orion slut.  Maybe he’s had her already.  Maybe it’s only a matter of time.  She’s certainly sending out all the right messages in his direction, and hell, I don’t know who he is anymore.  I wonder if he does.  Maybe he’s sitting in there behind that mask I found so intriguing, gloating at the way we all fell for it.  Maybe he’s still just a sleeper, who’ll go back to lying low for however long, waiting for the next trigger.

I hold my hand out over the chute, fingers spread, palm upright, with the ring sitting in it.  I will my wrist to turn.  I want to watch that deep blue sparkle fall into oblivion.  I want the decision to be made.  I want the agony to be over and done with.

But it seems that my wrist has a mind of its own.  My hand hovers still, and the only movement is a slight shake, whether of anger or grief or something else I have no idea.  I can’t make the decision, in this or in anything else.

Finally, with a violent movement, my wrist turns.  But somehow my arm has jerked, and instead of falling down the chute the ring drops tinkling to the floor and runs in a little semi-circle round the stone with the pink lights waking in the heart of the blueness.

There are no decisions. No matter how much I want to act, the effort is beyond me.

I want to forget him.  No, I want to hate him.  I want to ball my hands into fists and pound them into his face, to make him feel some tiny part of what I’m going through.  When I look across the Bridge and see him sitting there looking like he hasn’t a care in the world, even smiling at that Orion whore, I could cheerfully shoot both of them with a Klingon disrupter and laugh.

I want not to care.  I want to just watch him making an idiot of himself and feel nothing but scorn, except maybe relief for the narrow escape I had.  The escape from marrying him, not knowing what he is – a traitor.  No matter what Captain Archer’s reasons were for reinstating him, I can’t get over what he did.

How could he do it?  How could he lie and lie the way he did?  And what other lies are there, down under the surface where everything he couldn’t trust me with is still hidden in the darkness I didn’t suspect?

My own blindness shames me; I was a lovesick fool.  In hindsight there were so many warning signs I didn’t see.  Maybe I didn’t want to.  Maybe that air of secrecy, of withdrawal, was too intriguing to resist.  Maybe I’m as much to blame as he is – after all, I was the one who dived across that lift and kissed him.  The memory of it makes me want to weep, but it’s not as painful as those of all the nights in his arms, where I thought I was in love with the man of my dreams.

Dreams.  Well, they turned into nightmares, and I can’t wake from them, no matter how I try.  Every morning I wake and find I’ve been crying in my sleep.  I get through the days in a daze, hiding behind the façade of a comm officer who doesn’t give a damn.

But I do.  I don’t want to, but I do.

I can’t forget the way he loved me, the way he held me, the things he said to me.  The way he made me feel like I was his world.

But Malcolm Reed is a liar.  Convicted out of his own mouth.

I watched him sit there and lie to the captain about those weapons signatures, and I had no idea.  How many other lies has he uttered?  When we were together, in our most intimate moments, was he lying then?  Was I just a convenient piece of tail?  A trophy?  What?

Would he ever have told me the truth?  Or if I’d married him, would I have gone on forever in the blissful ignorance I’ve been in up till now?

I want to ask him.  I want to tie him down in the captain’s chair and inject him with every damned chemical in Sickbay until he talks.  Until he tells me the truth – all of it, without any concealment, in a form I can believe.  But hell, that’s just another dream.  In the unlikely event I actually got him tied down anywhere, he’d just have to look at me with those mesmerizing eyes and I’d fall for it all over again.  Believe every word.  Every word fed me by a liar.

So.  It’s another day, and another chamber of hell, and so help me if that woman leans one centimeter closer to him next time I’m going to fly across the Bridge and knock her out.  If I can summon up the will.

In the meantime, I just sit in my quarters, staring blankly at the ring.

There are no decisions.

The agony will go on.