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He’s on the ground. He isn’t quite sure how he got there. It’s rough and uncomfortable, there’s something pressing into his lower back, but he finds he doesn’t really mind. Well, more like he doesn’t really care. He feels strangely subdued.
There are voices all around him, faint, indistinct, but he catches snippets of things that sound familiar.
Suddenly there’s a hand on his shoulder and a voice in his ear, louder than before, the words still unclear to him. A spasm of pain rips through him as he comes back to himself in a rush and he cries out, shifting, and the movement only makes it worse.
“…alright. Don’t move. Trip, can you hear me?” He can hear the voice with startling clarity and his mind immediately puts a name to that accent.
Malcolm.
He thinks he might try to say it out loud. There’s a strange pressure on his chest, and the name comes out as a mono-syllable pathetic whimper. He still can’t see. Wait—that’s because he has his eyes closed.
He doesn’t want to open them. His eyelids are so heavy.
“Don’t try to speak,” Malcolm tells him, and then there’s another voice, farther away and Trip can’t make out what they’re saying, but he hears Malcolm’s response, the lieutenant’s voice harsh and tinged with desperation: “I don’t care how you do it—just go!”
Rough gravel against his cheek. He feels strangely cold yet hot at the same time, the pain growing distant.
He should be concerned about that, shouldn’t he?
“No, dammit, Trip, stay-”
Relief floods him instead. Settling low in his chest—or maybe that’s something else, he can’t tell.
“-not letting you do this-”
All this time, all he wanted was for the pain to stop. His constant, unwanted companion throughout this entire god-forsaken mission.
“-get him back to the ship, use the-”
And now finally it can.
Trip exhales, shallow and shuddering, and lets it all go.
Death used to scare him. On some level it still does—humans, by nature, are often scared of death. The unknown at the end of their entire known existence.
After the Xindi attack, Trip stopped being afraid. He didn’t let himself be afraid. There was so much death that it just didn’t seem so scary anymore. He buried any remaining fear deep where even he himself could not touch. It was a fact of life. People lived, and people died. It was just a matter of when.
He thinks his time has come. He’s teetering on the edge of darkness and light; he has no body, no limbs, and few thoughts. Maybe he can hear voices around him, but they quickly echo and fade into peaceful, blissful silence.
It stays that way for a long time.
Then a faint sound whispers in his ear. He opens his eyes to find himself bathed in light, and when he looks down he sees his arms shimmering into view. There is no familiar weight to them.
Despair rushes over him, and he can’t place why for a second. No, he thinks. This isn’t what I wanted. I wanted it to be over. Is the universe this cruel? Must it make him suffer further?
The sound from before comes again, louder this time. Trip’s breath catches (he barely registers the fact that he’s begun to breathe again). He knows that sound.
Windchimes. Like the one on the patio of his mother’s house.
The warm breeze comes next, threading playfully through his blond hair and caressing his skin, the touch eerily human-like. In one blink he’s regained his arms, and in the next he’s regained his legs, and on the third blink he’s standing up in an expanse of pure white space. There is no up and down as far as he can tell.
“Trip…”
He whirls around. There’s no one there, and even though he knows it’s impossible his heart begins to pound. No way. No. It can’t be. She…
“Over here, Trip.”
Trip spins around again, so fast he almost overshoots. He stumbles backwards in shock. A house, his childhood home has materialized in front of him, fuzzy around the edges in a dream-like way that should strike him as odd but doesn’t. And there, sitting on the porch steps, is Lizzie.
“I…” Trip doesn’t get the words out. He isn’t sure exactly what he wants to say anyway.
Lizzie sighs and stands up, and as she moves to approach Trip, Trip takes an instinctive step back. This isn’t real, he thinks.
“You’re right about that,” Lizzie says, startling him. “Well, sort of.”
Trip’s mouth moves soundlessly for a second. “Sort of?” he repeats.
“This isn’t not real,” Lizzie says, “but it isn’t exactly real either.”
“That makes no sense.” Trip shakes his head.
Lizzie smirks. “Not when you keep thinking with your head, Trip. Where’s my brother who always thought with his heart first?”
Trip ducks his head. “That sort of thing… gets people hurt,” he whispers.
“Don’t they always say love and pain are two sides of the same coin?”
He can feel her hand on his arm. God, he misses that. Tears spring into his eyes and he wipes them away quickly, then steps back. “What is this?” he asks, regaining some semblance of composure. “Am I… am I dead?”
“Not yet.” Lizzie’s smile turns apologetic. “That’s entirely up to you.”
The silence between them is broken by the gentle song of the windchimes swaying in the breeze.
“What happened to me?” Trip’s voice has turned raspy with swallowed tears.
“An away mission. Don’t you remember?” She steps forward again and lays both hands on her shoulders. The touch is impossibly warm and solid. “You were sent to collect information about the Xindi, only it turns out-”
“He didn’t have information at all.” Trip swallows. “There was a shootout.”
Lizzie nods solemnly. “You were injured. You’re back on board Enterprise now, but it… it doesn’t look good, Trip.” She pauses. “Can’t you hear them?”
“Hear what?” Trip asks, brow furrowed.
“You’ll hear them soon. Trip, why are you here?”
That question stops Trip in his tracks. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”
Lizzie shakes her head, lips pursed, and she won’t meet his eyes as she says, “Only you know why you’re here.”
And suddenly it dawns on Trip. I gave up. He doesn’t say the words but he can tell Lizzie hears them anyway, for her blue eyes fill with tears and she nods.
“Why, Trip?” she whispers.
Trip clasps his hand over top of her own, hanging his head. “I didn’t want to feel it anymore,” he says.
“Feel what?”
“The pain,” Trip says miserably. “So much of it, and it’s only growing. We’re losing more and more people every day. Not just that, we’re losin’ what makes us human! We’re out here to fight a war we know damn nothing about and I can’t- I can’t-” His voice hitches on a sob and he buries his face in Lizzie’s shoulder, tears soaking her sweater as his arms wrap tightly around her. Even if it’s not real, he just wants to hold her one last time.
“I know it’s selfish of me,” he whispers. “But I just wanted it all to be over.”
Lizzie pulls away, fingernails digging gently into his arms. “You’re darn right it’s selfish,” she chastises, “but I don’t blame you. Anyone else would probably do the same.”
Malcolm wouldn’t, Trip thinks, somewhat bitterly.
Lizzie only smiles. “Malcolm. He’s your friend, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.” Trip pauses. “Er, he was.”
“What do you mean ‘was’?”
“I… I pushed him away.” Suddenly they’re sitting on the porch steps again, and the white around them has turned to a soft sunset glow. “He stays with me when he has to, but other than that…”
“So seeking you out in the mess hall, hauling you to the gym, that’s all out of necessity?”
Trip doesn’t have an answer to that.
“What about Jon?”
It’s jarring to hear Archer’s first name come out of his sister’s mouth. The surprise doesn’t last long, however. “I think I’m losing him too,” Trip says.
“I see.” Lizzie tilts her head a fraction of a degree. “And you think letting yourself die is going to pull him back to where he’s supposed to be?”
“I thought we already established it was a selfish decision,” Trip snaps without malice.
Lizzie hums. “Do you want to know what they’re all doing right now?” When Trip doesn’t reply, she answers anyway. “Malcolm’s still got your blood underneath his fingernails. I don’t think he’s slept in two days.” Trip winces at that. “Doctor Phlox is working around the clock to keep your body functioning on life support. You flatlined twice. You scared him a lot.”
“I didn’t mean to…”
“And Jonathan Archer?” Lizzie meets his eyes, his identical blue eyes. “He thinks it’s his fault.”
“What?” Trip blinks in surprise.
“He thinks it’s his fault the two of you have drifted away the past year. If you die, Trip, I don’t think he’ll ever quite forgive himself.”
Trip is quiet, fiddling with his hands which are suddenly dirt stained. “You think I should go back,” he says quietly.
“That’s up to you,” Lizzie says. “I’m just laying the facts out in front of you.”
Trip nods. The windchimes have gotten louder, their song less elegant and precise. It reminds him of the beginnings of summer storms. “I just… it feels like the universe has decided it has it out for me. Anything I do, it’s just gonna beat me down again.”
“Then prove the universe wrong,” Lizzie says firmly. “Don’t let it laugh at you.”
“It won’t change anything, Lizzie.” Tears threaten to choke him up again. “There’s still a giant trench carved into the Earth. There’s still seven million lives we can’t get back. And you’re still…”
“Oh, Trip.” She reaches out and takes his hand. “It’ll change so much, I promise. I want you to live for me. Not die for me.” She steps back and gestures vaguely with a hand. “And they all want you to live, too. Can’t you hear them?” she asks again.
And suddenly Trip can hear them, the voices overlapping into noise but he knows who they belong to, and if he strains his ears he can just pick up snippets of what they’re saying.
“…pull through, always-”
“Don’t want to lose-”
“Best friend I-”
“…do without him?”
And the windchimes are getting louder still, clanging against each other until it’s not even music they’re making anymore, and beside him Lizzie is smiling as she slowly fades, and Trip can feel the weight of her hand leave his. Desperately, he reaches out-
“Live for me, Trip,” he hears her voice on the wind, blending in with the chimes.
And Trip opens his eyes.
All he sees is white. He can’t feel his body. Dim horror wells up within him – did he die after all?
But no. He blinks, and his eyelids move, though languidly, and he realises the whiteness he’s seeing is the ceiling. Sickbay’s ceiling, to be exact. He shifts slightly, can feel a slight twinge in his arm. An IV. That explains why he can’t feel anything.
The memories return, disjointed and strange. He can remember being in two places at once. Malcolm frantically barking out orders while simultaneously reassuring Trip that he’ll be okay; and then his sister sitting on the porch steps to his house, smiling at him. A jolt as the shuttlepod hit some turbulence, but at the same time he’s standing on air and there are tears running down his face.
A weird dream he had? No, it feels like more than that. There’s a lightness in his chest that wasn’t there before; a spark alighting in what used to be fast-burning embers.
He’ll figure it all out later. He’s too muddled right now.
He turns his head and Malcolm comes into his field of view. The lieutenant is rumpled; his hair mussed, days worth of stubble on his face, dark shadows beneath his eyes. He’s scrolling through something on a PADD and mumbling to himself. Evidently he hasn’t noticed Trip watching him.
“You look like shit,” Trip rasps.
Malcolm drops the PADD. It clatters noisily against the deck plating, but only Phlox’s creatures react to it. “Trip?” Malcolm’s eyes are wide. “Oh, good lord. I thought you were…” He swallows thickly, doesn’t finish his sentence. Doesn’t need to. “Er, how are you feeling?”
Trip considers this. “I guess I’m hooked up to some kind’f drug?”
“Several,” Malcolm says with a wobbling smile. “That weapon was… impressively devastating. Phlox said there was some nerve damage from some kind of electric shock- er, but I won’t go into details.” He reaches out and touches Trip’s arm. “The important thing is that you’ll be okay.”
“Yeah,” says Trip, eyelids already drooping. “’m okay.”
He can hear Malcolm’s soft chuckle. “Don’t fight it, Trip. Get some rest.”
The gentle song of distant windchimes lull Trip to sleep.