Don't You Walk So Fast

Rating: G

Date: 20090112

Genre: Drama, Songfic

Archive: Triaxian Silk, please. Other archives may request permission to archive or link to this story by email. (You’ll probably receive a green light.)

Disclaimer: Paramount owns the characters and background setting from Enterprise. The names and related intellectual property belongs to them. I just try to write an interesting story about them.

Summary: One day of the year, Trip always takes some time for himself to contemplate upon a past mistake.

The red sandstone beneath her feet felt warm as Lizzie sought her way over the barren lands surrounding her home. She could faintly hear the sounds of her father’s harmonica as he blew a sad little melody. It was a song he sang only one day of the year, every year for as long as she could remember with her nine years of age.

Clearing a rock, his voice, normally so warm and upbeat, drifted to her sounding unnaturally heartbroken. The sound brought tears to her eyes simply because of how sad and forlorn he sounded.

“… it got so bad I knew I had to leave …”

She could understand his words now, when the wind brought them to her. Trying not to let him hear her coming, she clambered up and around the rocks toward him.

“… my little daughter running after me, crying …”

Rounding a last bend to a decline in the terrain she found her father overlooking the plains in the valley below as he played his harmonica in between his singing.

“… my daughter cried: Daddy, don’t you walk so fast. Daddy, slow down some, ’cause you’re making me run, Daddy, don’t you walk so fast.” As tears created a path down her dust-covered cheeks she flung herself at him, unable to keep the grief he instilled in her under control.

“Don’t cry, Daddy, please,” she cried out as the surprised engineer caught her awkwardly in a hug. “Don’t be sad!” she sobbed.

And Charles Tucker the Third, known to most simply as Trip, looked at his daughter’s swollen green eyes and the tears running down her cheeks and gathered her wordlessly in a bear hug so tight she had trouble breathing. Instinctively he understood that she needed reassurance more than anything now and wordlessly he held her as he stroked her head and kissed her cheek.

Eventually her tears and hiccups subsided and he picked her up to take a good look at the face of his most precious possession in life. Her childishly elfin face, distorted by her crying, looked at him with awkward concern.

“Why were you crying, Daddy? Why do you sing that song when it always makes you cry?”

Trip looked at his daughter’s face and gathered her in another hug, this time for his sake more than for hers. Squeezing his eyes to keep the tears inside he needed to feel his daughter in his arms, feel her love for him pounding through her veins. How could he ever tell her that he’d once almost walked out on her? How could he tell that if it wasn’t for the memory of that song he might very well have kept on walking and have never turned back to her mother, his wife, to work out the differences between them as he did that fateful day?

How could he ever look her in the eye and tell his daughter how close he came to never having seen her again?

A/N: I guess it’s safe to say there are some songs I shouldn’t listen to ;( I’m not sure whether this is in character. I don’t think Trip would walk out on his family like that, but then again, everybody makes mistakes and sometimes we’re just too stubborn or scared to admit it. And I could certainly see him and T’Pol fighting so he’d considerwalking out on them.

Oh yeah, the lyrics come from the song ‘Daddy don’t you walk so fast’ (the Wayne Newton version).