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"It's like we're driftin' apart, Jon. It scares the hell outta me."
Admiral Archer clasped his hands on his overloaded desk and gaped at the man slumped opposite. "You and Malcolm? Trip, have you gone crazy?"
Blue eyes dulled with exhaustion met his and with an inward sigh Jonathan Archer steeled himself to play marriage counsellor again. He'd first started doing it, he remembered, over thirty years ago; long before Charles Tucker the Third and Malcolm Reed had gotten around to the actual marrying bit at all.
"I'm serious, Cap'n." The old nickname had stuck through the decades and usually it made Jon smile. Not this time; not with the speaker twisting his fingers and rocking, consumed by despair in the middle of his airy top-floor office. "It's like he don't have time for me anymore. Hell, even in bed..."
"Hold it right there, Trip." One aspect of his friends' lives had never been up for discussion between them; Jonathan valued his hide far more than to let Starfleet's most fearsome figure catch him speculating on his nocturnal activities. "Don't you think you're getting a little carried away? You and Malcolm have been married twenty-five years, unless I dreamed the surprise silver wedding party the kids threw you last month."
"Twenty-five years, three kids an' more happiness than I used to think was possible." The admission only made Tucker's full lips tremble more. "Hell, before they showed up, I'd 've said nothin' could ever come between Mal an' me."
"Are you sure anything's really changed?" Looking at the haggard shadow before him Archer regretted the doubtful words, but he just couldn't believe a couple of newcomers could possibly drive a wedge between the happiest, if most argumentative, couple he'd ever met.
"Ah'm sure." Trip didn't try to blink self-pity's moisture away. "Hell, first thing in the mornin' he's outta bed an' downstairs - did he do that when Charlie was a baby? No way! No time to nuzzle anymore, and when he comes home from work it's the same - a change of clothes an' boom! He's out with them. I'm an afterthought. Heck, we haven't even gotten frisky this week, an' you ask if I'm sure things've really changed!"
"I'm sorry, Trip." If there was one thing he did know about their sex life, Archer acknowledged, it was that it was a damned active one: he'd seen honeymoon couples less amorous in dark corners than his two friends. "It's just - well, at the party last month Commodore Reticence got up on a table in front of two hundred people and announced you were the love of a thousand lifetimes and his reason for living! You're telling me now, after all those years, he's gone and changed his mind? I'm sorry - I can't believe it!"
"A month ago they weren't around." With his bottom lip sticking out, Charles Tucker III reminded his firstborn's godfather of CT4, aged three-and-a-half and with a tantrum about to break out. Dropping his head into his hands, Jon expelled a desperate moan.
"Trip, come on! I realise Armstrong and Gagarin are demanding a lot of Malcolm's time, but whose idea was it to give him two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels as an anniversary present because he's never had a pet and he always wanted one? If three children couldn't come between the two of you, don't you think it's a little unlikely a couple of dogs will?"
"You've not seen him with them!" Truculent to the last, Tucker threw up his grease-stained hands and yelled right back at a superior officer in the middle of Starfleet Headquarters. "He even lets the little bastards sleep on our bed, and you know he never allowed the kids t' do that! It's all ooohh, come here Gagarin my little prince! And Armstrong! Come play in the garden with Daddy! Trip, start running their bath will you, the little demons are filthy and I don't know how that happened! Hell, maybe if he didn't go rollin' around in the dirt with 'em every night they'd stay clean longer!"
"I think you're just jealous because he doesn't roll around in the mud with you any more!"
"You're damn right I am!"
Standing on either side of the desk, palms flattened against its smooth surface, the two men leaned closer as they hollered until they were at a range of centimetres. "I have never heard anything so damn childish!" Archer bawled. "Even from you! Dammit, Trip! Have you even talked to Malcolm about this?"
"How can I when he's always runnin' around the woods with those fuckin'dogs?"
The anger drained out of the older man and he slumped back into his seat, holding his head as if it ached. "Maybe you should, because I'm guessing he has no idea you're feeling this way."
Deflation was as contagious as anger. Trip slouched into the chair opposite, letting his long hands dangle between his thighs. "Yeah, well he's not been payin' 'nough attention t' notice if ah'd grown another head, has he?"
Before the one he possessed could explode, Jonathan flipped the comm unit on his desk. "Archer to Commodore Reed."
"Reed here." The response aimed for crisp, but came out distracted. "Oh! Admiral I'm sorry, for a moment there I didn't realise... what can I do for you?"
"How about coming by my office and picking up the miserable package by my desk that belongs to you?"
"Trip's with you?" All attempts at professional distance dissolved, the familiar rich voice flooded with such emotion it even penetrated Commodore Tucker's wretched bubble. "Oh thank goodness, I've been looking everywhere... Ryan told me he'd left his communicator on his desk and vanished, and nobody seemed to have a clue where... is he all right?"
"You been worried 'bout me, Mal?"
Jonathan Archer heard the small hiss of agitated breath through the ether and had to turn to hide his jaw-splitting grin. "Darling, we were supposed to meet for lunch half an hour ago. When you didn't get in touch... good Lord, if there's one person I know who could get abducted by three-legged, hairy aliens in the middle of Starfleet's own compound, it's you! I've been bloody frantic, thanks for asking!"
"Aw, Mal!" A dazed smile broke over Trip's handsome face, smoothing out the lines of exhaustion to leave behind only the deep laugh lines left by the years of love and shared mischief. "Really?"
"Of course, you great daft oaf." Oceans of adoration softened the insult and brought tears to the eyes of both hearers. "Don't let him move, Jonathan. I'll be there in a minute."
The comm. cut just before Trip Tucker's whoop of exultation could ring through Starfleet's hallowed halls. Out of his seat in a trice, the engineer dragged his best friend to his feet and swung him, sending PADDS scattering from the desk in all directions. "You hear that, Johnny? Mal was worried 'cause he couldn't raise me on the comm! He still loves me!"
"As if he could ever stop, you dozy blithering wassock." Leaning on the Admiral's doorframe with his arms crossed and his head cocked, the recently-promoted Commodore Reed smiled tenderly at the exuberant engineer. His expression sobered as he considered the meaning of his husband's cry, closing up in a way Jonathan Archer hadn't seen in decades to the stony façade Lieutenant Reed had presented in his early Enterprise days. "Admiral - Jon - am I missing something?"
"Only me bein' the biggest jerk in the quadrant again, babe." Dropping his old friend like a sack of rotten vegetables against the man's own desk, Trip crossed the room in three long strides to sweep his startled spouse into a crushing hug. "I thought - I mean - aw shit! I'm a jealous fool, that's all you need to know, but if you're still worryin' about me, it doesn't matter. Have I told you lately how much I love you, Mister Reed?"
"Not in a while, now I recall; but I rather think I've been a tad remiss myself." When, Reed wondered, had those grey smudges formed beneath too-sunken eyes that lacked their old, ineffable sparkle? "What's the matter, love? What's upsetting you? You haven't been sleeping well, I know..."
"You noticed?"
"Sparing the Admiral's blushes, but we have been sharing a bed for thirty years." Malcolm slanted a wry half-smirk his way, and Archer made a point of covering his ears. "And your hair always stands on end in the morning when you've been tossing and turning. I - I know we're not very good at talking sometimes, but..."
"Oh Malcolm!" Shame that he could ever have doubted the most loyal man in the world refilled tear ducts Trip had been sure could cry no more. He squeezed the smaller man tight enough to make him grunt, burying his face against soft dark chocolate hair still untouched by grey. "I've been a fool, and I'm sorry! I thought - those damn puppies - I figured you didn't
"Oh, love!" No, he didn't need, Archer thought, to clarify; Malcolm Reed never required more than a minor push to find the right answer for himself. "As if a couple of yapping mutts could ever take the place of the most precious creature in the universe! Jonathan, will you excuse us, please? I believe I have an apology to make, and it really ought to be done in private."
"Now listen here, Malcolm Reed, if there's any apologisin' to be done, it's on my side!" It was as if a thick smog had suddenly cleared over the bay. Trip could recall clearly the troubled early-morning glances and the eager invitations to join those long rambles through the woods with their two boisterous black-and-tan spaniel pups. His husband had never cut him out.
Malcolm loved him too much for that.
"Hmm, in that case, perhaps we should stop by engineering so you can pick up your communicator, then give ourselves the rest of the day off? Mutual apologies really have to be done in private."
"Yeah, and they can take a while, too."The laugh-lines around his husband's expressive grey-to-blue-and-back-again eyes deepened with a full-blown, promising smile and wrapping his bigger hand around the Englishman's, Trip cast an absent-minded grin back into the spacious office while being hustled out of its discreet second door. "Uh - guess we'll see you for Hoshi's party Friday night?"
"Travis would have our hides if we missed it." Mayweather's decision to name his youngest for their much-loved communications officer had guaranteed the child favoured status with all her Starfleet "uncles" long before Hoshi Sato and her family had died in a sustained Romulan attack on Indura Colony five years before. "And so would Hosh."
"She's much scarier than her father," Malcolm added happily, nuzzling into his partner's side. "If we take the pups with us, she might let us slip out early?"
"And why would we wanna leave a party 'fore it winds down, Commodore Reed?"
Jonathan Archer chuckled to himself as his one-time Armoury Officer's coy response floated up the back stairs, known only to a favoured few, which led from the offices of the admirals to Headquarters' rear exit. "Because I might have plans for a party of our own, Commodore Tucker. If Hoshi babysits the boys and Jamie sleeps over at his big brother's digs - as you promised he could, if I remember correctly - you and I can have the house to ourselves for a whole weekend. Sound good to you?"
The ground floor door cut off his friend's response, but Jonathan could guess it. With a rueful smile he gathered up his scattered reports and settled down to work.
Trip and Malcolm were still okay, and that meant all was well with the world