Chapter Text
Tucker's next stop was the old standby: porn. It didn't work.
In fact when he brought himself off watching the lucky bastard wedged between a pair of gorgeous Scandinavian twins, things got worse. Because the name he cried out, loud enough to be heard back on Jupiter Station, was Reed's.
He tried flirting with Hoshi on the bridge: hovering near her station, squeezing her shoulder and leaving his hand just a little too long when she translated another string of dog-like alien syntax without getting them shot up. The first time he did it she looked up at him as if he'd started spouting fluent Andorian.
The next movie night he slipped into a seat next to her. "You mind a little company, Hosh?"
"Not at all." She flashed him a cordial smile and shifted her popcorn bowl toward him. "Just try not to eat it all, okay?"
"Ah'll always share with you, darlin'." He batted his lashes extravagantly.
Hoshi's laugher rose over the opening titles. "I don't know what you're on, Trip Tucker, but you need to come off it fast," she announced.
"Just high on good company, Ensign."
Satisfied she wasn't taking his clumsy game seriously he complimented her new lip gloss on the bridge the following morning and invited himself to share her table at lunch, reducing her to side-splitting giggles with his overplayed gentlemanliness in fetching her tea and fine-cutting her meat.
All it got him when they returned arm-in-arm to the bridge was a sideways look from the captain's chair and another of those nostril-flaring, lip-thinning looks from the tactical console.
He was, Tucker congratulated himself, giving the lower ranks a laugh at his expense. And if it had the effect of driving Reed back into the shell he had occupied the first few weeks aboard, when only Travis had seemed capable of getting a smile out of his old friend, it also meant the Brit was actively evading Charles Tucker's off-duty company.
Leading him not into temptation. That was the whole idea, right?
When the Chief Engineer entered the mess, the Armoury Officer would make his excuses and leave, meal barely touched. He seemed to have changed his usual gym times; where they'd often arrived together before, Trip now got there to find Malcolm headed for the showers.
What the Southerner hadn't expected was the way that coincidence ruined his workouts. Too many images of that sinewy body under the water's flow meant a curtailed fitness regime and a rapid waddle back to the privacy of the senior staff deck.
Hoshi, he knew, laughed her ass off every time his back turned. Not so Daddy Archer.
*
"Commander. My ready room."
From the helm station Mayweather swung to make a discreet throat-cut gesture behind the captain's back. T'Pol bestirred herself to lift the tip of an eyebrow. Hoshi and Reed kept their eyes on their readouts. Exhaling between his teeth, Trip marched from his new station at the comms officer's shoulder, past his C.O. and into the execution chamber.
"What in hell are you thinking of, Trip?" Archer barely waited for the door to shut before launching his first salvo. "Hoshi's not some alien fling you can kiss goodbye and forget. She's a member of this crew and a senior professional colleague. You can't just - just toy with her like this!"
Indignation protected him from any finer feeling. "C'mon, Cap'n, you know I'm just kiddin'! Hoshi's like a little sister to me!"
Jade eyes pierced him with a narrow stare Tucker felt sure must be drawing blood. "Let's just say some people are getting misconceptions about Southern boys and their sisters," Archer grated, his knuckles showing white from clasped brown hands. "You may not care, but there are rumours going around the lower decks. I won't have scandal around my senior staff. You're just fooling around, but Hoshi's sensitive."
"Captain." Careful pronunciation to emphasise his seriousness. Tucker paused long enough to ensure the meaning wasn't lost on a man too agitated to stand still. "Hoshi doesn't think of me that way. Hell, she doesn't even see me as a man, I'm just Trip!"
"Are you sure about that? You're a good-looking guy, she's a beautiful woman, and..."
Uh-oh. You think I'm treading on your toes, huh?
Archer stopped his restless pacing - two strides one way, then two back to the other side of the tiny room - and scowled, as if his friend were somehow responsible for the betrayal of his secrets. "I don't want to see anybody hurt, Commander. Do I make myself clear?" he rapped.
"Yessir." Damn. Now he'd hurt Johnny; caused potential embarrassment for Hoshi; and made a damn fool of himself in the process. Time to come clean, Tucker.
"I got no designs on Hoshi, Cap'n." His shoulders slumped; at the back of his eyeballs he could feel a telltale, traitorous sting. "Guess you could say I'm hidin' behind her."
Ambient temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Archer's full lips thinned into a barely-visible line. "If you're trying to make me angry here, you're succeeding," he grated. "You're using her?"
"No!" Immediate outrage ran smack into guilty honesty. Tucker thrust a shaky hand back through his dark blond hair. "Yes. Maybe. I don't mean to hurt anyone. I'm just so damn confused!"
"You're not the only one," Archer growled, throwing himself into the single chair. "But I'm not worried about you. I've heard the scuttlebutt on the lower decks. You're going to make Hoshi's life difficult, Commander, and you don't want that any more than I do: do you?"
"No, Sir." He felt like a small boy; and what was worse, guilty as hell for making Johnny confront the uncomfortable truth of his feelings for a certain pretty linguist young enough to be his daughter.
It seemed unfair not to let out a little secret of his own.
"I've started havin' feelin's for someone." Now he sounded like that tongue-tied little boy too. Archer's bushy brows shot up.
"So?"
"Uh, well, it's not someone I ever 'spected to think about that way, and - well, between you, me an' Porthos here, I'm scared."
"Trip." For the first time his friend broke into a familiar smile, his hands flat and relaxed on the desk as he peered up at the younger man. "Whoever she is, she'll be flattered; and you know the anti-fraternisation rules don't count on my ship."
All the blood in his body flooded Trip Tucker's cheeks. "It's not a she," he whispered, fascinated by his scuffed toecaps.
Silence weighed him down. "Sorry?" Archer managed at last. Trip raised his head.
"It's not a she," he repeated loudly.
Not even when he'd been told he was taking a Vulcan watchdog along for Enterprise's first ride had Jonathan Archer looked quite so thunderstruck. "I didn't realise you were..." he stammered completing the statement with a helpless wave of the hand. Tucker shrugged.
"If it helps - neither did I. Hell, I'm still not sure I am, but I must be, right? I mean, straight guys don't get those feelings, do they?"
"I guess not." Whether from relief that Hoshi's honour wasn't threatened or plain shock Archer appeared to be relaxing, his chin coming to rest on steepled fingers as he considered his friend. "Any idea how the lucky man feels about you?"
Just when he hadn't thought it possible to blush deeper, Tucker did. "I'm pretty sure he's straight," he confessed.
Archer snorted. "Trip, until a couple of minutes ago I'd have said the same about you," he said kindly. The Southerner felt his lips twitch.
"Yeah," he agreed drily. "Guess life's full of surprises. I shouldn't be usin' Hoshi as a shield, Cap'n, and I won't do it again. But if you think flirtin' with her's gonna cause a scandal, just think what two of your male senior officers gettin' involved'd do."
Engrossed in studying his boots he failed to realise what he'd given away and missed completely the puling-together of the older man's thick eyebrows. "I'd better go," he muttered, heartsick and too tired to deny it. "I mean - permission to return t' Engineerin', Sir?"
"Granted, Commander."
It was the pity in those two words that kept hot colour in Trip Tucker's face all the way back to his own domain. That, he conceded, and plain embarrassment at the fool he'd made of himself. And it was all Malcolm Reed's fault.