Malcolm and Hoshi: The Missing Scenes

Demons

The transporter still wasn’t his favourite mode of transport, but it had the one advantage of stealth.  An undercover operative uses whatever tools will get the job done, but as he stepped off Enterprise’s transporter padMalcolm Reed shuddered slightly with a dislike for the process he couldn’t overcome, however often he used it.

He had to change out of these clothes, and as soon as possible – not just because he should be in uniform back on the ship, but because proximity to Harris now made him feel physically sick.  The contact from his old boss had ruined his life, at least in one respect.  Hoshi still hadn’t spoken to him, except on matters that pertained to their working relationship.  He didn’t know if or when she ever would.  He felt again the corrosive loneliness that had comprised his existence when he first came on board, except then he hadn’t even understood what it was.  Now he did.  Not that it improved anything, knowing.

The captain would want whatever information he’d been able to extract as a matter of urgency, but even there he suspected it was wise to get changed first.  The shadow still lay between himself and his commanding officer too, to a lesser extent – not a surprise at all.  It wouldn’t be exactly tactful to show up in the Ready Room in the working clothes of his former occupation.

Strange, he mused, as he made his way to his quarters.  Even on board ship, dressed this way he found it difficult to revert to his real identity as a ship’s officer.  Perhaps it was because he had been in Covert Ops for so many years, and some of them had had a profound influence on his character.  He found himself, however absurdly, weighing up the ways in which he could escape from any particular area, and slowing up whenever he heard footsteps along an intersecting corridor so that whoever might be approaching could pass without seeing him.

He reached his room and, still in that odd, wary frame of mind, checked that the corridor was empty before he thumbed the door control.

His first thought was that he should have changed the access code.  Why hadn’t he?

Because you were a fool who couldn’t let go of a dream, sneered the inner self who’d been gloating over his well-earned downfall.  Well, you’ve been expecting this.  Just try to keep some bloody dignity, will you?  At least till she’s got it over and done with, and dumped you.

She was perched on the edge of his bunk.  Shards of blue light refracted off the thing she held between her fingers.

He’d been hoping against hope that she’d just throw it away.  To have her hand it back to him would be agony, but he’d accept it quietly, like a gentleman.  At some point over the next day or so he’d find time for a little target practice, and nobody but he would ever know.  Just by itself it would probably be too tiny for the targeting sensors to get a lock on, but he could put it in a box, along with a few dreams to be vapourised along with it.

He wanted to say something, but couldn’t.  He stood mute, awaiting sentence and execution.

After what seemed like several hours she looked up at him.

“This is so ... difficult,” she said at last.  “Malcolm, I’ve tried to get over you.  Over who I ... who I thought you were.  Now everything’s changed, and I don’t have any maps.  And I don’t know what to do.  And I don’t know who you are.”

“Whoever I am still loves you,” he said through a dry throat.  “But I don’t know if that’s enough.”

She pointed to the chair by the desk, and he sat down.

“Covert Operations,” she said in a low voice.  “Tell me.  Please.  The truth.”

“I can’t.”  He saw her flinch, and winced himself.  “Not the details.  A lot of it was ... classified.  Sounds glamorous, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  Dirty, dangerous sometimes, boring a lot of the time ... it wasn’t something I deliberately set out to take up as a career.  Things happened.”  He was silent for a moment.  As he’d told the captain, he’d been young, eager for excitement.  It hadn’t been until later – much later – that he’d begun to understand the true cost, and to know that for him, it was too high. “And when you’re in, it’s hard to get out.  ‘Facilis descensus Averno; sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est.’” ‘Easy is the descent into Hell; but to retrace your steps and escape to the heavens, this is a task, this is work.’  Even if she hadn’t studied Virgil, she’d understand the Latin. 

“Did the captain know?”

“No.  It fell under the blanket heading of ‘Security Operations’.  In all honesty I was surprised they let me go as easily as they did.  I suppose that was me being naïve.”  He smiled bitterly.  “They weren’t letting me go at all.  They were just putting me where I’d be useful if they needed me.  They turned me into a ‘sleeper’, and I didn’t even realise it.”

“But why didn’t you tell anyone?” she cried.  “Why did you just let them use you?”

“Hoshi.  You’ll never know how much I wanted to.”  He leaned forward, trying desperately to make her understand.  “They told me that I’d be saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and that Phlox wouldn’t be in any danger.  That speaking out would spoil everything.  I had to make the call, had to decide what to do for the best.  They’d never let me down before, and there were times when I’d had to rely on their information for my life.  I didn’t know – I just had to trust them.”

“Instead of trusting the captain.”

“I know.  God only knows how much I’ve regretted it, how I’ve wished I could turn back time and do things differently!  But I’ve made that one mistake.  I swear to you now, as I’ve sworn to the captain, I’ll never make another.”

“So you’re over with them for good?”  Her gaze roamed dubiously over the black leather jacket, the anonymous dark trousers and shirt, the slightly dishevelled hair.

The temptation to take refuge in lies tugged at him again, and with an actual physical shake of the head he threw it off. 

“That’s what I’ve been down to Earth for.  To talk to my old boss – on the captain’s orders, to see if we can find anything out from them about this Terra Prime organisation.  He wouldn’t talk to me for nothing; he said the price was my coming ‘back in the game’.  But I’ll tell that to the captain at once, when I report to him.  And if I get any more ‘instructions’, Captain Archer will be the first to know about it.  And what I do about them will depend on him.”  He glanced at her. “If you doubt me, I’ll ask for permission for you to be present when I make my report.  There’s nothing in it you shouldn’t hear.”

She looked down at the ring in her hand.

“Being – in Covert Operations – I suppose it meant that you had to be good at pretending.”

“You wouldn’t get far if you didn’t have a certain degree of ability for it,” he said wryly.  Then he caught her drift, and paled with horror.  “Hoshi, no.  Don’t even think that!  What we had – none of it was a pretence, not one damned word of it.  When I came on to Enterprise I wanted to leave all the dishonesty behind, to forget it had ever happened.  I wanted to do a job I could take pride in instead of being ashamed of.  I didn’t want you – soiled by what I’d been, when it was all in the past.”

“Except that it wasn’t.”

“No.”  He sighed.  “I suppose none of us can ever really escape the things that made us who we are.”

There was a little silence.

Then he lifted his head from a contemplation of the floor, and spoke again.  “I suppose what it boils down to is whether you believe me.  And considering the fact that I’ve proved that I’m a damned liar, I’m guessing the answer will be ‘no’.”

Her eyes fastened on his, and they were enormous.  “Malcolm, did you ever lie to me?”

“No.  Not once.  Not ever!  And especially not when I told you I loved you.”  He put all the passionate sincerity of which he was capable into the words.  “If you ... if you feel you can’t trust me, if you can’t believe in me any more, I’ll understand absolutely.  Perhaps we can still be –” the word stuck in his throat – “friends.”

“‘Friends’?” she echoed.  “Malcolm Reed, I didn’t come here to decide whether we were going to be ‘friends’!  I have all the friends I need, thanks.  What I want is the man I fell in love with.”

“He’s still here, Hoshi.”  His hands gripped the desk so hard his knuckles gleamed white, to stop himself jumping up and launching himself at her.  “I haven’t changed.  You just know more about me.  And I’d still die for you.”

She bit her lip, and held her hand out with the ring in it.  “I guess anything worth having’s worth taking a risk for.  If you still want to ...”

He dropped to one knee in front of her.

“I swear, never as long as I live will I tell you anything but the truth.”  He took the ring, kissed it and slid it gently back on to her finger. “And I love you, Hoshi Sato.  More than you’ll ever know.”

She leaned down, and their lips met.

It was at this precise moment that the comm sounded.  “Archer to Lieutenant Reed, report.”

Mouthing unheard curses, Malcolm scrambled to his feet.  “Reed here, Captain.”

“I’ll be in the Ready Room in five for your report.  Meet me there unless there’s a problem at your end.”

“Roger that, sir.”  With a roll of his eyes, he began stripping off his clothes; a process that Hoshi watched appreciatively, at least up till the point where he scrambled into his Starfleet uniform, when she pretended to be disappointed.

“I’ve missed you so much,” he said, kissing her again as she stood up and fastened the top button of his shirt while he pulled up the coverall zip.  “Any chance of a date later on?”

“Oh, I might find the time.”

“I’ll make it worth your while if you do.”  He put his arms around her and kissed her a third time, lingeringly, just to give her an idea of how worthwhile it would be.

“Uh-oh.  Dispose of the evidence.”  When they finally parted she whisked a paper tissue out of the box on the table and wiped her lipstick off his mouth; he was thankful she’d noticed, as the captain wouldn’t approve of that if he saw it, not when they were both supposed to be on duty.

“Good thought.  I don’t want rumours about me flying around the ship,” he grinned.

“Only the ones I actually start.”  With a demure smile she pressed the door control.  “Now we’d better get to the Bridge.  My break finished two minutes ago, and Captain Archer won’t thank you for keeping him waiting.”

“No.”  He checked the coast was clear, and they both emerged into an empty corridor.  Practice had perfected the separation from their personal to their professional selves, and it happened now almost without thought.  “Let’s hope we get some concrete leads on this business soon.  For Trip and T’Pol’s sake.”

“You didn’t find anything?”

“Hints, really.  But they might be somewhere to start.”  He sighed.  “A baby.  Now that complicates everything.”

“We must find her!”

“‘Her’?”

“Trip talked to Phlox.  It’s a little girl.”

“My God.  They must be worrying their wits out.”  They reached the turbo-lift, and he pressed the call button.  “I’d like to say things could be worse, but I’m not sure how they could be.”

“We will find her.  We have to.”

“We’ll do our best, love.”  Still not quite daring to believe he could, he slid his arm around her waist as they got into the lift; they were alone in it, and he couldn’t prevent himself from slipping back into intimacy just for a moment, purely from the giddy relief that she’d forgiven him.  “Trip as a daddy, eh?  I’d have thought one scare would have taught him a lesson.”

“It’s not funny,” she reproved him.

“No, it isn’t,” he said contritely.  When he’d finally discovered the details of what had really happened to Trip aboard the Xyrillian ship, he’d gone to make emphatic representations to the captain that they should once again set off in pursuit of the aliens, this time to prefer charges of sexual assault and rape; and only when convinced that they didn’t stand a chance of finding them, and that Trip wouldn’t co-operate even if they did, had he desisted.   “But it’s amazing how these things always happen to him.”

“Be thankful they don’t happen to you instead.”

“You never know.  When we do get around to asking the captain to tie the knot for us, it may be my turn to be the daddy.”  He smiled at the thought, but banished it quickly.  That was for in the future.  Right now they had a job to do, and it probably wouldn’t be an easy one.

The doors hissed open on to the Bridge.  Decorously, Hoshi walked across to her station.  There was no sign of T’Pol or Trip; at a guess they were with the captain in the Ready Room, waiting for whatever information he might have been able to glean from Harris.  At that moment he wished he had more to bring them, but scanty as it was, it was still better than nothing.

A little baby girl in the hands of lunatic terrorists like Terra Prime.  He couldn’t be sure how T’Pol would have reacted to the news, but he knew exactly what it would have done to Trip.  He’d be tearing his heart out with worry till he could see for himself that the baby was safe and well, till he could hold her and protect her.  Hoshi was right.  They had to find her.

And pretty damn soon, at that.