Chapter 1: Illicit Dreams

Bilbao, Spain, November 1st 2157

Malcolm Reed, Chief Executive Officer of "Reed Industrial Research and Production Corporation", woke up with a start and slammed his fist on the table in despair and frustration. The hope that working himself to shreds to get his fledgling company going would rid him of the forbidden dreams he had about T'Pol, or even of threesomes with her and Hoshi, had not come true. On the contrary, the harder he worked, the more likely he was to fall asleep at his desk and then end up having even more of them.

Once the dream-induced erection had subsided he stood up and looked out of the window. What had started as a small laboratory, bought from their remaining savings, was now a veritable small factory, providing jobs for eighty humans and a Vulcan intern who served as his personal assistant. He had come up with several prototypes for small force-field generators for civilian use, two of which were now in production and selling exceptionally well. But even with this success, the profits of RIRP were still somewhat modest. It was more than enough to pay infrastructure maintenance and fairly good wages to all employees, but his own salary was necessarily set rather low or he would end up cutting into the balance too heavily. Most of their private expenses were paid from T'Pol's generous Starfleet salary and Trip's disability pension. Especially the latter made him recoil in disgust at himself, as in return for partly living off Trip's disability benefits, the only thing he could bring to the communal table were illicit fantasies of shagging T'Pol.

He poured himself a glass of whiskey and downed it in one go, before taking a look at the schematics on his desk. It was his draft of a three mega joule variable force-field generator as specified in a tender invited by Starfleet. Considering that his company was a mere speck on the economical radar, he could only imagine that Falks had something to do with the fact that his company was even deemed worthy of being sent the official information. On the other hand, he had invented the whole bloody principle in the first place, and had worked on better generators two years ago when they were still repairing space stations for Starfleet. Coming up with a first prototype had been easy, but he had no idea how he would go about financing the necessary expansion of production facilities should he win the contract.

His office in Bilbao had slowly become more of a hiding place to him as their house in Morro Jable on Fuerteventura had become a place of sadness. Their new home was set in a lovely garden not far from the crystal clear waters of the Atlantic Ocean, but the atmosphere had grown more and more desperate with every hospital visit that they came back from with no news of improvement in Trip's condition. The engineer was still in the Intensive Care Unit at the Berlin Charité University clinic in the care of faithful Dr. Phlox, who had given up all other assignments in order to be able to care for the man who had been one of his most frequent patients over the years.

Malcolm had shirked some of the last few visits to the hospital as it became increasingly painful to see Trip literally decline before his eyes. The once muscular chest of his friend had begun to look fallen in, while his legs, immobile for over seven months, were as thin as other people's arms. It pained the Englishman beyond words to see Trip in such a state, and he had become too spineless to face the sight every day.

And somehow, which was almost worse, he had lost touch with Hoshi amid all this. Too ashamed to touch her, because of the guilt that he also had intimate thoughts of T'Pol, he had retracted into his time-honored shell, somehow contriving to ignore her increasingly obvious puzzled hurt. Had she but known it, he reasoned in the tortured recesses of his mind, he was doing her a kindness. After all, no sex was better than accidentally crying out the Vulcan's name while making love to Hoshi; how would she feel if in the throes of their deepest intimacy, she heard her husband speak the name of another woman? He longed for his wife's gentle touch, the overpowering force of her love whenever she kissed him, but he was trapped in his own self-reproach.

He downed another whiskey before answering the comms hail that had sounded for several seconds already. He pushed the button and Hoshi's face appeared on the screen.

"You look like hell, sweetie," he heard her say after a while of just staring at each other.

"Long day, love. But I have the prototype ready. Now it's just a matter of presenting a good case."

He could see her momentary frown that she smoothed away immediately. She didn't want a report on the state of business affairs. She wanted to know if and when he was coming home. He had not done so the last two nights. He looked over at the corner of his office, and the divan there on which he had spent two nights of very fitful and very lonely sleep.

"Want me to come over?" Hoshi asked softly.

Every fiber in his body was screaming, 'Oh God, yes, please come!' He wanted to beg her to make love to him without having to remember T'Pol's perpetually sad eyes. He wanted her to be the exorcist who freed him from the urge to console the devastated Vulcan by taking her in his arms. But he couldn't jump over his own shadow.

Shadows. His life had always held too many shadows. There had been a time when he'd thought he'd won free of them, but it seemed he was still what he'd always been – an unfaithful little shit who couldn't even keep his desire fixed on the woman of his dreams, the woman he'd promised to honor and cherish, forsaking all others. These exact words – as the Eldest Mother had pointed out – were never really spoken during their wedding vows. There had been – strictly speaking – not even a phrase that restricted those vows to Hoshi alone, but that were all semantics. The fact had been implicit for as long as wedding vows had been taken on Earth. There was no variant that amended them with 'or someone you cherish in equal love'.

"I'd prefer someone stays with T'Pol. She's been quite unstable lately." He was still a good liar, too. His voice was commendably even. The sound of it made him feel sick with self-disgust.

His heart cramped when he saw his wife's accepting nod that came way too soon for his comfort. He knew that either T'Pol's condition was even worse than expected, or Hoshi had not even expected to be with him tonight and had just called pro forma to collect another polite 'no, thank you'.

"I love you," she said softly.

He wanted to reply, but the words stuck in his throat. He just nodded, and tried to smile, pantomiming a blown kiss as he closed off the link.

He downed another whiskey and started working on his business proposal to Starfleet. Getting this contract was something he could do to take his mind off the hollow grinding of uselessness and guilt that was the tenor of his life these days.

"Is he staying in the office again?"

Hoshi looked over at T'Pol and nodded sadly in answer to the question. Her heart cramped when she saw the utter sorrow in the Vulcan's eyes.

They had divided most of their days between visiting Trip in the hospital and getting started on their research. She had watched yet more of the life drain from T'Pol's eyes with every disappointing visit to the hospital over the last two months since the Marconi had finally reached Earth to transfer almost two hundred heavily wounded casualties to various clinics all over the planet.

Both she and her friend were people with little need for creature comforts, so even though T'Pol and Malcolm were the only ones actually earning money, they didn't need to be too miserly. The fact that T'Pol had taken to growing much of her food herself had helped a lot, too. Fuerteventura was dry and hot, making Vulcan plants thrive on the otherwise nutrient-poor soil of the island.

The house had needed little modification to facilitate the eventual return of Trip. One of the previous owners had been a quadriplegic, so despite only having two floors, the house was equipped with a large enough elevator to fit a wheel chair and there were no steps or kerbs anywhere in it. The only major changes they had made was the erection of a high, opaque fence around the estate and the exchange of one-way mirror glass for the originally plain glass in the windows. T'Pol, still stubbornly insistent and convinced that Trip would wake up, was hell-bent that nobody should catch even a glimpse him in his expectedly pitiful state. But with every passing day the wait became more and more of a burden for the Vulcan.

Hoshi sighed silently. For all intents and purposes the house was perfect to accommodate her habit of not wearing clothes at home, but it didn't feel as good anymore. Malcolm – on the increasingly rare occasions he could be bothered to come home to them at all – didn't even touch her; lately he seemed hardly able to look at her. The fact that Trip wouldn't be able to see her really sank in when she realized that she would never again notice the little looks he had stolen at her naked body, thinking that she didn't notice it. Hard on the realization of that came a wave of self-contempt: he'd lost his eyesight and all she could find to worry about was the fact that she wouldn't be getting any more illicit kicks from his admiration! Except for when she was going to bed she had all but abandoned her once favorite habit.

Three days ago a large delivery of five electric wheelchairs had arrived, paid for by Malcolm's company. In one of the rare times on which they could actually get Malcolm to talk about Trip, they had decided that they would produce a small number of prototypes, and once in use by Trip, would improve them until they worked perfectly for him. Once that was done, it was planned that Malcolm's company would mass produce them – another potentially lucrative source of income.

The reasons for that were obvious. T'Pol had discovered via her network of contacts that no fewer than two hundred humans alone had lost both sight and use of their legs in the fights with the Romulans. And neither Starfleet nor the Government was investing anything into research. Unfortunately, that arrangement was the most Malcolm had involved himself in Trip's recovery so far.

She sighed a second time, thinking about her absent husband. It wasn't so hard to see what he was running away from. He hardly ever talked about Trip anymore. He had visited him almost daily until recently, but it didn't take telepathic abilities to see how hard he was hit by Trip's physical decline. And there was still the sword of Damocles hanging over their marriage as she had not yet found the courage to admit that she had fallen in love with Trip; but then neither had her husband yet disclosed his own guilty secret – she had known for some time that he had also grown more than fond of T'Pol.

T'Pol had never shown any sign of feeling threatened by the knowledge that her mate was now desired by two of them. She had encouraged Hoshi to kiss him upon arrival or when leaving after hospital visits, and the fact that she let her visit him alone if her duty schedule did not allow her to come along was a great sign of acceptance. Normally she should be happy, but she couldn't shake the guilt of having betrayed the vows she had taken before Malcolm and the world. It was all a hideous mess.

It would have been easy to use the cheap cop-out and blame Malcolm for 'driving' her into the arms of another man, considering that currently their marriage existed merely on paper; but it would be patently unfair towards Malcolm as, first, the attraction to Trip had developed at a time when their marriage couldn't have been in better shape and, second, it would fail to address the reasons for their current crisis.

It had taken Malcolm almost four months to work through the aftermath of his mind-rape by the section and the cold-blooded murder of Tolaris. She wasn't sure that he had really put all that behind him forever, but at least the nightmares had stopped. But how was she supposed to help him overcome the current crisis? Sure, it could become better once Trip woke up, and Phlox's recent message that they would now start to induce the waking-up phase made that a rather hopeful prospect. But would Malcolm really cope better with seeing Trip working around his disabilities? Considering that she could barely cope with the reality of his blindness herself, it didn't sound realistic that Malcolm could. And neither she nor T'Pol had a solution ready to help Malcolm, even though all four of them had promised to look out for each other. Leaving Malcolm alone with his problems was just another notch on her guilty conscience.

She shook herself out of her thoughts and saw T'Pol ready to go downstairs for the night.

"T'Pol," she called out softly to stop her retreat. "I would like that you sleep up here today."

"I will get a pillow and a blanket," the Vulcan agreed with a nod.

"No need to, our bed has everything and I've changed the sheets and covers today."

Seeing the surprised look on the Vulcan's face, as she obviously realized that Hoshi had meant sharing the big double bed, she provided the explanation.

"T'Pol, we've both been sleeping lousily lately. After such a long time neither of us is used to sleeping alone. I've heard you cry yourself to sleep last night and it broke my heart. And we both know how far your control must be gone to make you cry openly. We've both promised each other to stop at nothing to help Trip. And that includes taking care of his wife."

She saw that T'Pol was too tired to argue and just nodded instead. Standing up, she took the Vulcan's hand and wrapped her in a hug. The gentle consolation, which was more or less the only intimate touch her friend had 'enjoyed' in more than half a year, was too much and the other woman broke down almost at once, weeping. Hoshi held her gently as T'Pol failed to fight the tears.

T'Pau walked along the narrow corridor towards the only door from which light still emanated at this late hour. She would have to speak to Malcolm about the security measures in his company. The fact that he as a former security officer had not trained his security staff enough to know the company rules was worrying. It only strengthened her impression that he was not himself lately.

Since an internship was mandatory as part of her schooling, Malcolm had hired her about a month ago. She would probably be the first Vulcan ever to serve her internship in a human factory as opposed to one of the many spiritual retreats or shipyards on Vulcan outposts. So technically, she had the right to be on the premises, but the security detail at the factory entrance should know that workers who were not part of production were not supposed to be inside the factory after 10pm. It could land him serious trouble with the authorities.

She entered the office unasked and gasped in shock when she saw a nearly empty bottle of hard liquor on his desk. Malcolm was still working on some sort of document, but she doubted the quality of the result would stand up to scrutiny. Since she was responsible for proof-reading company communication, she had noticed that over the last ten days some of his documents had been written in unacceptable quality, requiring a lot of correction.

"Would it not be better if you stopped writing documents while inebriated?" she asked when he didn't acknowledge her presence.

"T-T'Pau," he said, his speech slurred from the influence of ethanol. "You're not supposed to be here this late."

"Tell that to your security detail at the entrance," she replied and brazenly shoved him back into his chair when he got up, most likely to call – and probably dismiss – the security employees currently on duty. Robbed of his balance by the debilitating substance he'd consumed, he fell back onto his office chair heavily. He glared at her, but she held his infuriated gaze.

His face, for once unguarded, showed too clearly the extent of his distress. He looked haggard and ill. He was unshaven, and that, for a man who'd always taken some pride in always appearing scrupulously neat and tidy, told a tale in itself.

"What are you doing, Malcolm?" she asked more gently, deviating from the formal 'Mr. Reed' she used during work hours. "Your wife, T'Pol and Charles are depending and relying on you and you inebriate yourself, putting the company's competitive chances in danger by producing incoherent documents that take me hours to correct. Do you really believe poisoning yourself will solve the problems that you face?"

"Is this you or the Eldest Mother talking?" he returned sourly.

"I can think for myself," T'Pau answered, and sat down not far from him. His gaze was unfocused but remained aimed in her direction. She judged him to be not completely inebriated, although she wasn't sure if that was a good thing, considering the amount of the substance he had already ingested.

"It's just a bloody mess," he admitted and she could see tears threatening to flow; a loss of control which he tried to disguise by pushing a shaky hand across his eyes. His normally strong emotional restraint was all but gone under influence of alcohol.

She reached over and took his hand, which prompted him to look up at her and pull his hand free.

"I don't think that's a good idea," he said with a bitter, exhausted smile. "With my luck I'd end up falling in love with you as well."

"That's, how would you say, 'bollocks'," T'Pau insisted and got a slightly more genuine smile in return at her use of invective – surprising, to say the least, in a Vulcan. "First of all, I'm way too young and second, I'm not T'Pol."

Her words had evidently touched a nerve. His mouth tightened. His eyes held her off like leveled blades.

"Don't tell me the Eldest has given you all that palaver about how irrelevant our wedding vows are too. They aren't irrelevant, dammit."