Admiral Paris was a no-nonsense kind of person. He did not indulge in pointless hope and idle fantasy. So when Voyager went missing, he considered the possible outcomes, and assumed the likeliest one: his son was dead.
As months went by, worried relatives of the missing crew would contact Starfleet, asking and asking again for any news or hints that their loved ones could still be brought home safe, but Admiral Paris would only shake his head with impatience. Because it was pointless. They were gone. They were not coming back. There was nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise. The one sensible thing a person could do under those circumstances was to mourn, find closure, and move on.
Admiral Paris had lived and fought through a war, and mourning was not new to him. He found, however, that mourning a comrade was different from the weight of a son's death. The truth was, he was not prepared for it. He had not considered it. It was silly, really, because Tom had always been a risk taker, even as a child, and a Starfleet commission came by no means with a guaranty of dying of old age. The possibility had always been there. Perhaps he had believed that smile too much. Tom always smiled like he was invincible.
Had always smiled.
Whatever the reason, Admiral Paris had lived with that certitude, the obvious fact that his son was supposed to have a future. Looking back, every interaction with him had been motivated with thought for his future. Striving to make him work better, try harder, build a successful career and a good character. At every scolding, every lecture, whenever Tom's gaze would blank out in passive hostility, he had been thinking: "I will make a man of him. He will thank me later."
Later.
There was no "later" now. There never would be.
Even before that, Tom's life had not quite headed in the way he had wanted it to, anyway. Everything he had done, everything he had said, all of his careful plans, none of that had kept Tom safe. He had derailed from the way traced for him, so badly that it seemed he could no longer be saved.
But would it have made a difference, in the end? If his son had boarded Voyager as an officer rather than as a prisoner informant, would it have changed in any way the way Admiral Paris felt about his death?
Six months previously, he would have said yes. He would have said that it mattered, that it was better to die with pride rather than shame. But that, too, was indulging in fantasy. Rank was of little consequence on a grave. Only one thing was truly important: Tom Paris was supposed to have a future. Any future. And now he didn't.