Chapter Text
When they get back to the ranch, things are different. Maybe it’s how Polly curled against him on the flights back, let him press his cheek to her short hair, but the next night, he goes to her bedroom door and knocks once, hardly loud enough for her to hear. She opens the door. “Trip?”
“Having some trouble sleeping,” Trip says. “Guess I got used to snuggling up with you at home. You mind humoring me?” He’s taken to worrying at the wedding band with his thumb. He should pull it off, now they’re not pretending for anyone anymore.
“That would be acceptable.” She steps aside to let him in and closes the door behind him, and he’s trying to figure out what he should say next when she pulls him close and kisses him, and there, that’s easy enough.
Nothing else about them is easy, though. They get three days together and then Garak wants Trip and Reed with him in New York City. There are big crowds outside the federal courthouse, cops hanging onto their batons a little too tightly, and Garak leaves Trip and Reed out there with a warning not to get arrested before he slips inside. He emerges that evening with his mouth very tight, the closest to genuinely angry that Trip’s ever seen him. “Don’t suppose you know what that’s about,” Reed says.
Trip’s been occupying himself talking to some of the protesters. “There’s a couple being tried for espionage in there,” he says. “Selling secrets to the Russians. Who knows, maybe they’re—like us, and Garak’s trying to help them.”
“Or testifying against them,” Reed says dolefully.
“No,” Trip says. “He’d never let his name get written down as somebody with something to say in an espionage trial.”
Whatever it is, it doesn’t last more than a day before Garak and Trip and Reed are halfway around the world. They spend nearly a month in Egypt, and when they fly back into Idlewild Airport, the New York Times for sale outside announces ATOM SPY COUPLE SENTENCED TO DIE. Garak’s expression never flickers, so either Trip was wrong or Garak already knew.
Polly’s just left for a different mission when Trip gets back to the ranch and he goes and lies down in her bedroom to sleep. She’s not sentimental, doesn’t keep much in the way of personal effects, but her clothes are in the dresser and the wedding ring he gave her is sitting on her bedside table. Lying in the bed is the closest he can get to her, anyway.
It’s five more months before they’re in the same place at the same time, long enough that Trip starts to wonder if he’s hallucinated all of it. But Polly knocks on his door when she gets back from wherever she’s been—somewhere sunny, from the shade of her skin—and says, “I hoped you would be here,” which is just about as much of a declaration as Trip could hope to get from her.
They manage to cross paths closer to once a month after that, though sometimes Trip thinks that that’s about as frequently as Polly would tolerate anyway. She gets twitchy if he’s too openly affectionate, even when there’s no one around but Katie and Chakotay. He does his best to respect it, but they have so little time together that he wishes he could at least say, “Pol, I’m headed to bed,” and get something other than a blank stare and “Good night” until she sneaks in later.
He almost ruins it. Garak sends the two of them out on a mission, simple retrieval, but Trip has the data in hand and the other man who’s after it gets the drop on Polly, holds a gun on her and says, “Give me the file or she dies.”
“Under no circumstances,” Polly begins.
“Let her go first, then I’ll give it to you.”
“Set down your gun and the file and back away. I’ll let her go when I pick them up.” The man knows he’s got Trip, too.
“Mr. Tucker—”
“All right.” Trip sets both down on the ground very carefully. “If you hurt her, you’d better kill me—” He steps back.
The man steps forward, dragging Polly along with him. He scoops up the file first, and that’s his mistake, because Polly slips out of his grasp, snatches up Trip’s gun, and shoots the man twice in the head. “We need to go,” she tells Trip. “The sound will attract attention.” She tugs the file from the man’s limp grasp and they run like hell.
At the safehouse, Polly gives him her coldest stare. “That was unacceptable.”
“I knew you’d get the gun,” Trip says. “I never would’ve done it otherwise.”
She peers at him. “I don’t believe you.”
Trip doesn’t believe himself either, and that’s dangerous. “Information is—fungible. We aren’t. We go after so many things, and every one of them is important, but one of us is worth more than any individual target—”
“No,” Polly says. “That line of thought is unacceptable.”
“Losing you would be unacceptable,” he says without thinking, and steps toward her. “Pol—look, I’m just saying, I made a judgment call.”
“Your judgment was impaired,” Polly says, but she doesn’t pull away when he rests one hand on her shoulder and cups her cheek with his other hand. ATOM SPY COUPLE SENTENCED TO DIE, he thinks, and pulls her close against him.
“It won’t be,” he promises. “It won’t happen again.”
“You are less than convincing,” she tells him, and then she kisses him anyway.
After that, they don’t go on missions just the two of them—whether Garak realizes something or they’re just fortunate, Trip thinks it’s for the best. But it means more months with only a few days together here or there, until he’s starving for her every time they do get to see each other, until they start to get a little less careful—
“I’m pregnant,” Polly tells him one day. Her face doesn’t give away anything about how she feels about it.
Trip stares at her long enough for disbelief to give way to— “We’ll get married,” Trip says automatically, and there’s some relief in that, knowing exactly what to do in the circumstance. He wishes she weren’t so damn hard to read. “Pol, say something. Are you—happy?”
She exhales slowly, and the shakiness in that breath tells him that she’s about as shit-scared as he is. “About the thought of marrying you, Mr. Tucker? I’ve already lived for some time as your fiancee.”
“Ha, ha,” he says, and dares to pull her into a hug. It’s only been two months since they last saw each other, but his mind still tells her that she feels a little different in his arms. He doesn’t ask how—they were careless, the last time—or are you sure, because Polly never would have breathed a word if she wasn’t sure. He kisses the top of her head, just because he can, and slowly she wraps her arms around him too.
“I will endeavor to be,” she says against his neck.
“We’ll set up a place back home,” he promises. “My momma can help out, she’ll be over the moon to have a grandbaby—”
Polly stiffens in his arms. “Move to Florida?” He feels her draw in a long breath. “I am unwilling to commit to such a change.”
Trip releases her. “What—what did you think we’d do? Drag a kid around the world with us?” It’s not like it’s escaped him, what this will mean for Polly—for the work that both of them do. It’s not a good time to bring a baby into it, and he can’t help thinking, after all these years, he finally did get a nice girl in trouble.
“I think it unwise to make any rash decisions,” Polly says carefully. “Such as relocating a significant distance.” He can’t help feeling like she’s carefully not saying, Or marrying you.
He knows it’s the wrong thing to say, but he tells her, “I’m crazy about you, Pol. I don’t want to be—all over the place like this anymore, seeing each other a couple days at a time and then months in between. I want—” He can feel her closing off, drawing away from him. “Look, we don’t have to move to Florida, okay? We’ll figure something out. You and me and the baby.”
“We have time.” Polly’s voice is deeper than usual. “We have—months yet. There is no need to take action.”
“But you’re going to—take it easy, right? Nothing dangerous?” He can’t help saying these things that he knows she’ll hate.
“Trip.” She looks up at him with those steady dark eyes and something turns over in his stomach. It hasn’t escaped him that she hasn’t said anything about how she feels about him. She hasn’t even agreed to marry him. “I understand your concerns.”
He wants to find some way to insist that they figure it out now. Time has never been kind to them and by his count they have about six months before there’s a new person and it’ll be three of them, three of them against a whole world of all the terrible things humanity is busy dreaming up. He wants Polly to agree to marry him—she doesn’t have to take his name or anything, just marry him—and maybe they’ll stay on at the ranch, maybe Chakotay would help him build a little house for the three of them, and they’ll pick out a name for the baby. He wants, at least, to ask Garak not to send her out to do anything risky, full stop. “All right,” he says. “As long as you understand.”
Trip gets sent out again before he has time to work on convincing Polly. A couple weeks in Bolivia, no problem, except with how all he can think about is getting home to Polly. He almost screams in frustration when he gets back and Chakotay says, “She went out two days ago” before Trip can even ask.
Polly’s starting to show when she gets back. Maybe not to anybody who isn’t quite as familiar with her body as Trip is, but he thinks he can see it. “How was it?” he asks that night, when they’re in bed together.
“I took no unnecessary risks,” she says stiffly.
“Thanks.” He kisses the back of her neck and then asks, “Can I?”
“Can you what?”
He places his hand very tentatively on her abdomen, and after a moment, Polly’s hand settles atop his. “Yes,” she says belatedly. “I assume you wish to name the baby Charles, if it is a boy?”
“Charlie’s nice for a girl.” He feels—is she laughing? “Miss Charlie Tucker the Fourth? You don’t like it?”
“Perhaps something more traditional,” Polly says. “I am partial to the name Elizabeth.”
“If I’d had a sister, my momma was going to name her Elizabeth.” He thinks his momma would’ve liked having a daughter. “She’d be over the moon to have a granddaughter Lizzie.”
“Elizabeth,” Polly corrects.
“Sure, on her birth certificate—”
“Do you struggle with polysyllabic names? Pol, Trip—it’s a wonder you don’t refer to her as Liz instead.”
“Lizzie is polysyllabic,” he points out, and kisses the tip of her ear, which always makes her shiver a little. “It’s settled, then. Charles for a boy, Elizabeth for a girl, we’ll let Reed pick the middle name.”
“We will not.” Polly’s voice is getting sleepy.
“How about Garak for a middle name. Never would’ve met each other without Garak.”
“No,” Polly murmurs.
“All right, all right, don’t get so worked up about it,” he teases, and he’s probably imagining it but he thinks he feels a little kick beneath his hand.
* * *
POLLY ILL RETURN IMMEDIATELY. Trip gets the telegram at the tail end of a mission and Garak and Reed get him all the way back to San Francisco, to the UC Medical Center, in a matter of hours. He stumbles into Polly’s room to see perfect blankness on her face. “What happened?” he asks. When he grabs her hand, she doesn’t squeeze back.
“Labor was premature,” she says. “There was no a heartbeat.” Her voice is flat.
“Jesus, Pol—” He presses her hand to his mouth to keep from saying anything else. There’s a howling inside of him, a cry that started the moment he saw the telegram and has only grown louder since. There are tears on his face and he wants to crawl into the bed with Polly and hug her to him, tell her that she’s not alone in this and that he’s sorry and that he loves her and thank God he didn’t lose her too. But he doesn’t want to risk hurting her, so soon after, and he’s never quite managed to tell her that he loves her, and so all he can do is hold her hand to his mouth, to his heart.
The Happy Bottom Riding Club burns down a month later. Polly won’t talk to him or touch him and Trip has been climbing the walls at Katie and Chakotay’s, and when he hears about it, he phones Mayweather in town and says, “Feel like flying someplace warmer?”
“For one of you folks, always,” Mayweather says. People have been very gentle with Trip lately. “Let me get her fueled up. You want to take a look at the latest modifications?”
“Always.”
It’s a cool morning, fog hanging heavy. They drink black coffee as they wait for it to clear. “My brother wants to know if I’m going to go home and take over the garage,” Trip says into the silence. “He’s written me three letters hinting at it.”
“Are you?” Mayweather is a year younger than Trip, safe from Korea thanks to some kind of medical condition he’s never explained. “My father always thought he’d run the Mayweather Air Company with me and Paul, once we got old enough.” Mayweather tells a lot of stories about his father, but they’re always tinged with regret, like their final parting was pretty rough. Trip hasn’t asked more than that.
“Leave Polly? Leave my work?” The irony doesn’t escape him that not too long ago, he was telling Polly they should move to Florida. Mayweather is quiet, but Trip can almost hear the words he’s told his own damn self too many times: there’s no reason you can’t get married anyway. She probably would’ve agreed to marry you eventually anyway, no reason this should change things. But it does, that’s the hell of it—every time he looks at her, he sees the life they’d just started to dream up, the child they were going to be raising together, and it hurts. He thinks that maybe she hurts the same way when she sees him, because lately he never catches her looking at him at all. “Bert doesn’t want me to move back, anyway,” Trip says. “He just wants to know I’m not going to come back expecting to be the oldest son again.”
Mayweather laughs quietly. “Should be easy enough to reassure him of that.”
Trip looks down at his hands. He’s picking up strange new calluses, living full-time on the ranch, working with Chakotay. He doesn’t know how much longer he’ll last here if Polly keeps making it clear she doesn’t want him around. “Not as long as our momma is alive.” The fog has cleared enough for them to take off, so he climbs into the passenger seat and watches Mayweather run the preflight checks. “How long d’you think it’ll take us to get to Muroc?”
Mayweather gives him a sidelong look. “Edwards? Couple hours, if the weather holds.” Shit, of course he knows it’s Edwards Air Force Base now. Edwards died in one of those monstrous YB-49s just a couple months after he left. “Tucker—I don’t know what’s happening in your head, but you have to get it clear.”
“Yeah,” Trip says. “Yeah, I know.”
There’s not much left of the riding club but burnt-out husks of buildings. It’s a cold day and Trip stands there with his hands jammed in his pockets and thinks of that first night with Polly, here, just after Captain Yeager broke the sound barrier.
“It’s a damn shame,” someone calls, and Trip turns, squinting behind his sunglasses. “You finally show up back here and you’re just a little too late for another drink from Pancho.”
“Georgie?”
“We were all wondering where you went,” Georgie says. He looks exactly the same as Trip remembers him, down to the squared-off haircut and the funny reflective goggles he wears sometimes. “When the wonder boys disappear, people talk.”
Trip shakes his head. He has four or five ready stories that he uses in circumstances like these, but somehow the only thing he can bring himself to say is, “Do you remember Polly?”
Georgie’s silence is resounding, but Trip isn’t fooled. Finally, he says, “That girl you kept putting off marrying?”
“Yeah,” Trip says numbly. “She was pregnant.” He’s not sure he ever even said it aloud to anyone else. The others just sort of seemed to—know.
“Then? Or now?” Georgie’s voice is kind, like he already knows the answer.
“Now.” Trip’s voice is strangely shaky. “She was. We lost the baby.” There’s a roaring in his ears. “We don’t even really know what happened. One day she was fine, and the next day there was no heartbeat and Polly was in the hospital, and she won’t talk to me—”
Georgie puts a hand on his shoulder and Trip leans into the firm point of contact. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Trip realizes that he’s half-crying in front of this man that he only ever knew as a lie. He wants to say “It’s fine,” but it’s not. He can’t help feeling like this is the end of something—not just his hopes for their daughter, but the end of whatever possibility there was for him and Polly. “There’d be a place for you here, if you wanted it,” Georgie says. When Trip lifts his head in shock, Georgie squeezes his shoulder. “But I don’t think you do.”
“No.” Trip drags in a deep breath and scrubs his face clean with one hand. “No, I’m going to spend the night here, and then I’m going to go home and—” And he doesn’t quite know what, but he’s going to fix things somehow. That’s what he does, after all—he fixes things. He takes a bottle of whiskey out into the desert and finds a good rock to lean back against, and he stares up at the sky and watches Scott Crossfield hit Mach 2. He can imagine the cheers, the champagne, the dancing—wherever it happens now. The stars shine down bright on him and he thinks, we can work this out.
But when he gets back to Katie and Chakotay’s ranch, Polly is gone.
“What d’you mean, you let her go?”
Katie’s eyes go flinty when he yells at her. “I’m not her mother, Tucker. There’s a job that needs to be done. She took it.”
“She’s barely recovered—”
“The doctor said she was fine for active fieldwork,” Katie snaps.
“Polly needed to get out of here,” Chakotay says. He’s at Katie’s shoulder, just a half-step behind her. What must it be like, Trip wonders, to always have someone there to depend on? Someone to back you up? “She wanted something to do.”
“But I—” was going to fix things dies in his throat. “When’s she coming back?” He knows he won’t like the answer from the expression on Katie’s face. “Did she leave a note for me or something?” He hates the way his voice sounds. Of course she didn’t. Emotions aren’t one of Polly’s strengths, and she certainly wouldn’t leave a soppy note behind for him.
Trip mopes around the ranch for almost five months, working on improving it more and generally getting in everyone’s way, until he manages to provoke even Chakotay into snarling at him. “I need a change of scenery,” he tells Garak, when he can’t take it anymore. “Somewhere far away, somewhere different.” He liked New Delhi. Maybe Garak can find something for him to do there, half a world away from—everything. Where he won’t just be waiting for Polly to come home.
“I’ve been thinking of moving to New York,” Garak says instead. “Relocating my center of operations. Establishing a new cover. You and Mr. Reed could come with me.”
“A new cover?” New York isn’t exactly what he had in mind, but at least it’s on the other side of the continent from Polly.
“Yes. I think I’ll be a tailor,” Garak says. “I’m quite a good tailor, you know.”
* * * * *
Garak sets Trip up in a sixth-floor walkup in Spanish Harlem and says, “Who do you want to be?”
“I don’t need a story,” Trip says. “I’ll figure it out.” He meets the Puerto Rican family in the next apartment when he locks himself out and their teenage daughter Isa catches him breaking into his own apartment. He tells them that he’s a handyman—hardly needs to say that he was in the war, not when everyone was—and that his mother is back in Florida. He sets up a little refrigeration unit on Diego’s piragua pushcart, and that gets him a hearty dinner once a week and a friendly reminder not to get any ideas about Isa. “I’m working as a handyman,” he tells Garak, as they eat ajonjoli piraguas in the scant shade near the entrance to the marqueta. It’s too hot for enclosed spaces right now.
Garak nods. “A good choice,” he says, and takes another neat bite. Trip will never understand how the man can eat shaved ice without getting his face at least a little sticky. “Reed is arriving next week. I don’t suppose you have any ideas for him?”
Trip chose his new profession carefully—it gives him a good excuse to be just about anywhere, with any tools he’d like, and he can generally wrap up whatever he’s doing on short notice if Garak needs him somewhere. He tells the Reyes family that he has a sister in Virginia with a new baby, which gives him an excuse for his frequent disappearances, and his stories about the baby are all the things he imagined for his own little girl. “I’m sure he’ll find something,” Trip says.
Thankfully, Reed is the last of their group to follow Garak to New York. Katie and Chakotay are safe in California, of course, but for weeks after Reed arrived, Trip’s throat is tight at the idea that any minute, Polly might be the next to arrive. It still hurts to think about her, about the life they might have had if things had gone differently—he doesn’t even know which one of them to blame, but he suspects it might be him—and he doesn’t think New York City is big enough for the both of them, not right now.
Then.
Then Garak meets Julius.