Detailed Summary - Voyager has returned after six years in the Delta Quadrant by using a Coaxial Drive (drive from Vis-A-Vis) to traverse the final 40,000 light years. Tom Paris never made it onto Voyager. He was detained at Auckland and forced to serve the remainder of his sentence. Finally out of prison, Tom joins Lieutenant Commander B'Elanna Torres and Lieutenant Junior Grade Harry Kim, just back in the Alpha Quadrant, on the project to refine the Coaxial Drive for fleetwide use, as their resident test pilot. Will it be tension or sparks that fly as the former Maquis/former Starfleet joins the project?

Disclaimers - Paramount owns Star Trek. What, you didn't know that? I'm just a humble fan borrowing the characters for fun. While Paramount owns the characters, the ideas are mine, so please ask permission before taking them elsewhere, and always keep my name attached.

A/N - Thanks to Lady Arreya and starrylaa for their beta.

Starting Over

By Riss

"Personal Log: Thomas Eugene Paris, Stardate 54250.9. It feels nice to finally be home. It's been seven years since I've been free to wander around the Alpha Quadrant. More if you want to count the years I was drunk all the time. Things sure have changed a lot around here. But one thing always stays the same: even though it's been almost nine years since I've been in this house, it looks exactly the way it did the day I stormed out of here, vowing never to return. I never thought I would be coming back here. Home. My father's house. We finally made our peace about three years ago. After over three years in prison, Mom dragged him along on one of her visits. She told him she was too weak to go by herself, so he had to come along.

For the first time in years we actually talked. At first it was just hello and how are you, but even that was something. After all, we hadn't spoken to each other at all in years. And by the last year I was in there we were having conversations about the future and whether I was interested in joining Starfleet as a civilian pilot. It wasn't a miraculous change, but by the time Mom was too weak to come every month, he was coming to see me on his own.

I guess I should place this log in context, considering I haven't done a log in about nine years. I was released from prison exactly four days, five hours, and fifteen minutes ago. I served my entire seven year sentence, without a day of leniency. They even changed the probation I was supposed to have after being released into additional time in Auckland. Dad thinks that someone on the rehab commission had a grudge against either him or me to be so immobile on the sentence. The first couple of years were hard but after the Dominion wiped out the Maquis, tensions calmed down at Auckland. Everyone, both Starfleet and Maquis, was losing their friends in the war. It brought us all together. I still wasn't really popular, being considered a traitor to both sides, but life improved a little.

On the home front, Mom's doing better. She's still weak from the Zando virus, but the new treatment seems to finally be working. She has danced at two of her children's weddings and maintained, even during the worst of her disease that she would be dancing at mine. Stuck in prison with years to go, it seemed impossible. But now Josh and the other doctors are giving her years rather than months. My sisters were both married while I was inside. As I walked out between the doors of Auckland, I was greeted by two nieces and a nephew. Both my brothers-in-law seem to be really great guys. Josh, with his neurological virus specialty fits well with Moira's studious nature. Apparently they met in medical school, though they didn't get close until Mom started showing symptoms. Now, they have a two year old son with a little girl coming in about three months

Kathleen is still as wild as I remember. She may have been the oldest, but that only meant she broke the rules first. Marrying Ethan has done little to change her. Their advanced research in ancient archeology has them traipsing all over the Alpha and Beta quadrants. Their twin daughters are five years old, speak at least three different languages fluently, though it might be four by now, and have spent over half their lives outdoors. Last night the five of us ended up camping out in the backyard, since we all thought the beds were too soft.

Possibly the biggest news in the quadrant is the return of the Starship Voyager to the Alpha Quadrant last month. Still in command was Captain Kathryn Janeway with the former Maquis Captain Chakotay, as her First Officer and chief pilot. I even heard about it in Auckland the afternoon they came back. They had been presumed lost for four years until they made contact from the Delta Quadrant a little over two years ago. It seems they finally perfected an advanced coaxial drive a few months ago, cutting the final 40 years of their journey down to a few months.

It looks like I'll be getting a chance to play with the drive. Dad told me yesterday that Starfleet wants to hire me on as a civilian test pilot for the Voyager project. He took me over to one of the flight simulators the day after I was released, as a kind of getting out present. He submitted my scores for consideration to the piloting division, and even after seven years without flying, I was in the 95th percentile. While not as good as I used to be, it was still the best score by a non-Starfleet officer, and one of the best they'd ever seen. There was heavy damage to Voyager while in flight, so they need a good pilot while they work out the problems with the coaxial drive. Apparently they were only able to use it a few minutes at a time and it took weeks to reset, so Starfleet is hoping to overcome that problem. Flying a ship that jumps through folds in space is quite an upgrade to trudging through life in prison.

I almost ended up on that journey. Captain Janeway actually came and offered me a job as an observer while she looked for Chakotay's Maquis base. However, someone on the rehab commission changed their mind just as I was boarding the shuttle for my transfer to Deep Space Nine. Despite what my father later told me was pulling in every chit she could, Captain Janeway had to leave for Deep Space Nine without me. I never found out why they stopped me from going, but it was probably a good thing because I needed to do some more growing up before getting out of that place.

For a long time I used to wonder what my life would have been like if I had joined Voyager. She said I would have been an observer. After we learned a few years ago that they were still alive, my questions resurfaced with even more unanswered puzzles. Would I have been the observer the entire trip, or would I have been integrated into the crew like the Maquis? Would I have even survived the journey to the Delta Quadrant and back? My first few years in prison were pretty bad, but on a ship where I helped lead them to the Maquis, I can't even imagine the hatred.

Anyway, I get to go to work tomorrow at Starfleet Headquarters. The message Dad brought back from Admiral Sedek, head of Starship Research, says I'll start out by studying Voyager's systems. Guess all that engineering stuff I studied while at Auckland will come in handy. I'll be reporting to Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres for a briefing.

The name sounds familiar, and I wonder if she could possibly be the woman I met back in the Maquis. Beautiful and spirited, she rejected me constantly and called me a pig, making her contempt for me extremely obvious. Even though I got nowhere with her, over the years, I found myself thinking about her.

Over the last seven years as I've had a lot of time to think about the type of woman I'm looking for. While at the Academy I usually went out with whoever my dad would approve of and since the accident, I was more interested in getting sex than having a conversation. I've realized that physical attractiveness doesn't mean everything. I need someone who can keep up with me and keep me on my toes.

I used to needle B'Elanna back in the Maquis because I enjoyed the way she would turn it around and come right back at me. I flirted with her, but never really tried to get her into my bed because I knew I wasn't good enough for her. But if I'm honest, she was the star of a lot of my dreams while at Auckland. I do hope it is the same woman. Even if all I can be is her friend, I have a feeling that she is someone I want to make an important part of my life. After all, it'd be nice to have someone, other than my sisters, keep me on my toes.

Back when I first arrived at Auckland I was so bored. I started out there just fixing whatever they handed me, but that was too tedious. After about a year I became good friends with Harry Higgins, a former Starfleet engineer, who decided he could make a lot of money working for the Maquis. Starfleet caught him just after he remodulated a weapons array to destroy the entire Cardassian population of Rossic VI, so he's stuck in there for life. He arrived the day after my shuttle flight was canceled and immediately caught my attention. I was half drunk on the homemade brew that one of the other prisoners was selling and he still was laughing at my jokes. We became friends when he stood up for me against the Maquis.

But, he was as bored as I was in that place. After we dissected every B-movie we could remember from the 20th century, we decided to start trying to build some of the sci-fi concepts. While most of them wouldn't work, about six months ago we installed a prototype of a drive which uses the same principles as the slipstream drive which Voyager seemed to have used to cut ten years off their journey prior to working on the coaxial drive. We actually called it hyperspace drive, in honor of one of the better sci-fi movies from that century.

Last I heard it was still sitting at the Daystrom Institute undergoing testing. Maybe now that I don't have that darn anklet they'll let me take it for a spin. Too bad Harry won't be able to join me. He helped me stay sane in that place. He was my friend even when all the Maquis told him to stay away. I'm not going to miss Auckland at all, but I'll definitely be going back to visit him.

Harry, Harry, Harry... One minute he is acting like the most naive person in the entire quadrant and the next he's smuggling in anything and everything on the prison's banned list of substances. If you wanted anything from mini-holoprojectors to warp engines, he could get it for you. He didn't even care that I was a traitor, no matter what anyone else said about me.

But as much as I'll miss Harry, it feels great to be on the outside. The first night out I took Dad with me to my old hangout, Sandrine's. I couldn't believe how much he and Sandrine had in common. We spent hours just talking about obscure French history. Turns out that while at the Academy Dad dated a girl who did a semester in Marseilles and knew the previous 'Sandrine' pretty well. He even used to hustle people in pool, making more than enough to pay off his hefty bar bills.

I realize now that Dad didn't want me to be just like him. He wanted me to avoid the mistakes he made. Now we understand that we were both wrong. I didn't respect how hard he tried and he could only see that I was making the same mistakes he did. I may not become the next Admiral in the family, but today when I thanked him for helping me fly again, he had a smile on his face I hadn't seen since I was ten years old.

The afternoon that the guards laughed in my face as they told me my flight to DS9 was canceled, I wanted my life to end. How could I have anything to look forward to as I was returned to the cell where I would spend the next six years of my life? But now, while I wouldn't want to relive them, I can now say they have changed me for the better. If I had gone with Voyager I would probably still be the selfish, arrogant pig I was when Captain Janeway visited me in Auckland. Without Harry I don't know…"

Tom abruptly stopped and turned toward the door with a glare as a female voice suddenly filled the room.

"So how was the sex at Auckland?"

A/N - Hope you're enjoying this story. It's been a number of years in the making. Please review, and let me know if you have any suggestions.

I will be posting a timeline of Voyager episodes where Tom was an important character as they occured in this story in my profile. I hope to have it up within the next week.