Chapter Text
Reed tackles him as he turns for the door, all unbroken momentum and fury. They hit the deck together, hard enough to knock all the breath out of him.
Hayes is getting sick of this.
It’s one thing for her not to like him – as much as he wants her to – but this is something else entirely. The anger she throws at him feels old, personal, like it’s been sitting inside her, waiting for somewhere to land.
He rolls them, limbs tangling, fingers scraping for purchase, and feels her elbow drive back into his kidney, sharp and deliberate. The pain that flashes up his spine, white-hot, makes him swear. She knows how to fight dirty.
“Cut it out!” He hisses, audible in the space between them.
But she just twists up her face in something like disgust and throws her body out of his hold. Irritation wells up in him, and it’s that – that and her refusal to back down – that makes him kick out when she rolls too close to his feet. The heel of his boot catches her hard, just above the eyebrow leaving a deep, welling cut.
He doesn’t have time to feel guilty; her elbow slams into the same kidney again, as soon as she comes in reach, harder and once again deliberate. Nausea accompanies the throb of pain and he swallows it back.
He needs to end this.
It’s a little difficult to push through the sheer number of injuries that she’s already done to his body, but he’s experienced worse, and they don’t stop him from surging forward to take her down properly.
She fights back, but he manages to pin her; balancing his weight on her wrists, pinned above her head, and her legs, where he's kneeling. She attempts to buck him off, using every trick she knows, but after a few seconds he feels it. The moment the realisation sinks in.
She might be well trained. She might be one of the best fighters Hayes has ever seen.
But he has several inches and a few pounds on her.
Bigger, heavier, and right now gravity is on his side.
There’s nothing she can do to move him. Her jaw tightens, frustration flashing in her eyes, and Hayes allows himself to feel almost smug for a moment.
“Get off.” She snaps.
This close, she smells faintly of coffee, and Hayes briefly entertains himself with the idea that she drinks so much of the stuff it's infused into her blood, seeping out of her pores.
“I don’t want your job.”
She glares at him – flushed from the exertion of fighting, bruises already forming on her skin. “Then why are you here?”
“Because I was fucking ordered to be!”
The space between them is small, filled with both of their heavy breathings and the anger still emanating from both of them.
“Look,” he says, breathless. “I don’t want to fight you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She grits her teeth. “You are kneeling. On my calves.”
And, yeah, that’s probably going to leave some extra bruises.
"Well you're not going to stay put otherwise, are you?!"
She bucks again, regardless of the fact they both know it won’t work. “Get off.” She repeats, infusing the Lieutenant into her voice, turning the demand into an order.
“No.” he snaps back, the irritation returning, full force. “I’m keeping you there until I’m satisfied.”
He means with the situation, with an agreement to work together, with any form of truce, but something flashes behind her eyes that looks like fear and he realizes their position. Realizes the threat that could have been present in his statement and rolls off her, trying not to feel guilty.
Reed sits up as soon as she’s free, eyeing him, but she doesn’t attempt to restart the fight, and she doesn't try to leave either. Not that Hayes would have stopped her from leaving.
He throws an arm over his eyes. “I don’t want your job.”
“You said that already.”
“Just making sure it goes through.”
She’s silent – not unmoving, he can hear the fabric of her pants moving as she shifts her position – and it takes a lot of effort not to look at her.
“What do you want?”
“What do you want?” he counters.
Reed doesn’t respond for a long moment – long enough that he thinks she’s waiting for him to answer first.
“I want everyone to survive this mission.”
He takes the arm off his eyes and turns his head to look at her. She’s frowning at the floor, not quite slumped over, but the constant tension that he’s come to expect from her is missing, suddenly.
“Yeah. Me too.”
She doesn’t look at him, her lips parts, as if she’s about to say something else, but the Red Alert cuts through the room before any sound emerges.
“Shit.” He mutters, rolling to his feet before he can think about it.
When he glances back, Reed is still on the floor, listening, waiting to see if any other information will come over the comms. It doesn’t and she takes his outstretched hand with only a split-second hesitation.
“Weapons.” She tells him, turning for the armoury. She doesn’t quite glance back, but her head turns slightly towards him as she walks. “Cover my left?”
It’s only later – much later, after even more injuries, when the exhaustion is finally settling deep into his bones – that the weight of that question hits him.
Sickbay is bright, and almost too quiet after being stalked by the noise of the alarms. There’s people already there – the smell of burnt flesh only brings back the nausea Hayes felt from being elbowed in the kidney – and Phlox separates the two of them almost immediately.
Not only separates them, but has them ushered to almost the opposing ends of Sickbay. Hayes can’t tell if it’s suspicion at how they got their injuries, or simply the Denobulan’s standard procedure, but he doesn’t like how abruptly Reed is moved out of reach.
The force of it surprises him.
His injuries are unpleasant, obviously not caused by the borders, but uncomplicated. Bruises, a cracked rib and a fractured finger that Phlox straps up with an unimpressed click of his tongue. The damage to his kidney is the worst, but he knew that already, and Phlox reassures him that it’ll resolve on its own.
He’s sent away with instructions to rest and a vial of something unpleasant smelling.
As he leaves, he catches sight of Reed. The bruising on her skin is stark under the cold lights, and she’s sat perfectly still, jaw tight and hands folded, as Phlox shines a light into her left eye.
Hayes watches longer than he means to.
Back in his quarters, the adrenaline drains away all at once, leaving him restless and exhausted. And he doesn’t know what he wants to do. Well, that’s not quite true; he knows that he wants to see Reed again, wants to check over the injuries he left on her body.
But Phlox had told him to rest.
He finds himself outside Reed’s door before he can talk himself out of it. Before he can let himself think that she might not want to see him.
When he lifts his hand to knock, the door slides open before his knuckles can make contact.
Reed stands there in casual clothes instead of her uniform, hair loose, posture less rigid than he’s ever seen it. She looks as startled as he feels.
Hayes’ hand drops back to his side before he realises what he’s doing. “Hi.”
She blinks. Once. Twice. “Uh.” And then steps aside, gesturing him in.
Reed’s quarters are almost like he expected – sparse, neat in the way of someone who doesn’t accumulate things – except…
“You don’t have a window.” He says, instead of anything else. Instead of explaining why he’s there.
It’s a stupid observation, but the blank wall catches his attention, and he can’t look away from it.
A soft sigh comes from behind him and he turns to see her sitting on the edge of her bed; she nudges the desk chair with her foot – and unspoken order, or maybe just a suggestion. He follows it regardless.
“I requested a room without one.” She pauses, frowning faintly at the wall, as if weighing up whether the explanation is worth the effort.
Hayes stays silent.
“I get motion sick. The movement of the stars – especially at warp – makes it worse.”
“Oh.” He turns that over, mentally flipping through her file. “Aren’t you from a—”
“Navy family?” she supplies. “Yes.”
There’s something in her tone, in the set of her jaw, that makes it clear he shouldn’t push it, so he doesn’t. “How’s your eye? I saw Phlox looking at it.”
The look she gives him is almost amused, though he can’t tell why.
“Your kick,” she taps the bandage on her forehead, a block of white covering the wound he’d left, “managed to detach my retina.”
He exhales slowly through his nose. Guilt presses sharp and stubborn against his chest, like a cracked rib. She doesn’t seem interested in an apology, no matter how much one presses at his lips.
“You told me to cover your left.”
A small, crooked smile tilts her mouth. “It was a little blurry.” And then, with the efficiency he’s come to expect from her, she changes the subject. “Your injuries?”
“Well,” he grimaces, taking stock of the pain again, “I’ll be pissing blood for the next week or so. You caught my kidney pretty hard.”
She hums, thoughtful. “That was intentional.”
“I figured.”
She just looks at him for a moment; he can feel her eyes tracing him like a finger. “Phlox is going to report us to the Captain. I told him how we got the injuries.”
“Right.” He leans back, not quite wincing when the back of the chair digs into the bruises. “How do you think that’s going to go?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s not the answer he’s expecting, and it must show on his face because she sighs and looks away.
“I haven’t done anything this stupid before.”
It’s probably as close to an apology as he’s going to get from her.
“I could have walked away.”
Mallory sighs again, scrubbing a hand over her face. “In case you’ve forgotten,” she says, dry, “you tried to. I tackled you.”
He huffs out a quiet laugh. “It was a pretty good tackle.”
And she smiles at that – small and fleeting, only faintly amused. It’s gone almost as soon as it appears, her expression settling back into something thoughtful, guarded. But the moment lingers; it burns itself into Hayes’ memory, right alongside the sudden, overwhelming certainty that he wants to spend the rest of his life trying to make her smile like that again.
“I don’t want your job.” He says again, earnest enough to surprise himself.
“Yes. I figured that out the second time you said it.”
She ducks her head slightly, biting her lip, and her hair falls forward, obscuring part of her face. Hayes has a sudden and vivid urge to reach out and tuck it behind her ear.
He keeps his hands firmly where they are.
“I was unprofessional.” She says. She won’t meet his eyes; her hair’s still over her face. But she’s sincere. “I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did.”
“I shouldn’t have let myself react to it.”
The hair is shoved back from her face, revealing a faintly irritated expression, lips pursed. “Will you stop trying to… I don’t know. Whatever it is you’re doing.”
“Taking partial responsibility?”
“Yes. That.”
“No.”
The way she sighs is expressly annoyed, but she doesn’t kick him out, and she doesn’t react otherwise.
“I am partially responsible,” he insists, “I went over your head about those training sessions, and I started you on a high level of that training programme.”
The outraged expression on her face might have made him laugh under other circumstances, but he’s busy bracing for her to hit him again. It would be deserved.
Her face twists, like she’s thinking it through – there’s a brief moment when he sees triumph at being right – and then she bites her lip to stifle a smile. “I knew there was something wrong with that.”
“I thought you were gonna hit me again for that.”
The supressed smile twists up again, to something bright and genuinely amused. “No. I think I did that enough already.”
And he can’t not smile back.
There’s something else, though, that he might not get another chance to ask. “I—” it feels small and stupid and a little too personal, but it’s lodged itself behind his teeth and she’s looking at him expectantly.
“Why didn’t… I mean, were we not living up to your expectations or something?”
Mallory wrinkles her nose, looking away. “I didn’t really have any expectations.”
“Oh.”
That… sort of hurts for a moment.
Her gaze flicks back to his face, taking in whatever expression is there, and then down to her hands. “I didn’t ask for the MACOs,” she explains. “The Captain did.”
“Oh.”
“He didn’t consult me either.”
There’s something in her voice that catches on the last word – not quite anger, not quite resentment. Like an old fault line briefly exposed, a buried hurt stirred up and left behind.
“I thought he didn’t trust me. And I took it out on you.”
He should say something reassuring, or maybe something to say that he’d realised that was what she was doing. Anything about the situation at all. What he actually says is—
“Will you go to dinner with me? A date?”
It’s like the question has been sitting, patiently, on his tongue, letting other words go past it until it can’t hold back any longer.
Mallory stops – she hadn’t been moving so much, but the sudden stillness is obvious – her mouth half-open. “What?”
He must grimace or something. “Sorry, that was…”
“Unexpected.”
“I was going to say inappropriate.”
She’s squinting at him when he looks up again. “I literally just beat the shit out of you.”
“I think that was mutual.”
“I kind of wanted you dead.”
“Wanted? Past tense?”
“A date?”
They’ve clearly reached a stalemate, neither knowing how to respond to the previous question.
“Yeah,” Hayes says, eventually, “a date.”
“Why?”
That question throws him – he’d been expecting anything else, a yes or no, a question about his professionalism, even a question about whether he thinks the mess’s food is good enough for a date. But ‘why’ wasn’t something he’d been prepared for.
“What do you mean why?”
Mallory shrugs, looking away from him and to the wall where the window would be. He wonders if she regrets the lack of window now – the lack of something else to look at.
Words almost crowd up his throat in an attempt to get out. “Because… because…” and instead of saying any of them, he just waves his hand to encompass all of her.
She just stares back. There’s something in her eyes that he can’t identify, but the lack of an answer is probably answer enough.
“Look, I’m sorry.” He stands up. “I won’t ask again. And… I won’t let this interfere with us working together.”
“Can I think about it?”
Hayes had been heading for the door, expecting that to be the last of it, but her quiet words have him spinning back around. “Uh, yeah. Of course.”
“Thank you.” She won’t meet his eyes again, but he can’t tell if that’s a bad thing or not.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Probably in the Captain’s ready room.”
Right. They still have that to get through.
“Want to get breakfast after?”
Mallory still doesn’t meet his eyes, but she does smile, just slightly. “Sure. He’ll probably tell us to get along anyway.”
*
“Settle it!” Archer snaps, the residual fury from his lecture still present. “That’s an order!”
Hayes fixes his eyes on the wall over the Captain’s shoulder. Still, it’s Reed that responds first.
“There's no problem, Captain.”
“It’s settled, sir.”
Archer stands in front of them, looking between the two for a moment, but he seems more focused on Reed – for a moment, Hayes thinks he’s about to pull out “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed,” as much as a lie that would have been.
“How are the drills going?” He asks instead, tone settled into something more reasonable.
“Good, sir.”
“Very good, sir.”
He can’t quite help side-eyeing Mallory’s addition to his own statement, but Archer doesn’t seem to notice, distracted by the intercom and Phlox’s voice telling him the alien has awakened.
Neither of them move as the Captain leaves. An almost painful silence descends over the room.
“Think we’re dismissed?”
When he turns to look at her, she’s already looking at him, a faint light of amusement in her eyes that tells him that was a joke.
“I think the other option is to stand here until he comes back.”
With the night to develop, the bruises on her face look even worse, but that doesn’t stop a tiny smile from tugging at her mouth. “That could be a while.”
“And you did promise me breakfast.” He’s about to gesture for her to leave the room first when she frowns slightly, tilts her head.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“About breakfast?”
The faintly bemused look that crosses her face is beautiful. “About what you asked. A date.”
“Oh.”
There’s another silence as she looks out the window at the stars, brow faintly creased.
“You can say no. I can take it.”
“It’s not that.”
Despite himself, something like hope rises in Hayes’ chest. “It’s not?”
Mallory looks at him again. “This mission is important. And… dangerous. And we can’t afford to be distracted.”
“I understand.” The hope fades again, leaving a small pit of rejection.
“But...” she hesitates, her lips forming words for a few seconds before she continues. “if we make it back to Earth.”
He knows he’s smiling, almost stupidly, but he can’t help it.
“And if you don’t change your mind—”
“I won’t change my mind.”
She frowns at him. “If you don’t change your mind, then… I’d like that. Dinner.”
“OK.”
“Stop making that face.”
“What face?” He’s still smiling, wide enough that it’s pulling on the bruises on his face almost painfully.
“That face.”
“OK. Breakfast?”
She nods in acquiescence but pokes a finger in his face as she goes past. “Face. Stop it.”