Banana What?
Summary: After the events of Repression, Janeway comes to a decision: why get angsty when you can get even? Silly, silly, silly. Part one of two.
Disclaimer: Everyone in this story is the creation and property of the folks who came up with them. This story is making absolutely no profit, and not just because writing generally needs to be good to make money.
Author's Notes: I've developed something of an addiction as of late to dramatic, angsty post-Repression fic, so I thought I'd try my hand at my own. This is what came out. Sigh.
Janeway was pissed, in more ways than one.
The first was (nearly) entirely her own fault.
She had known, even as she was doing it, that downing very nearly a bottle of red wine by herself would not qualify as one of her more intelligent decisions of the week, but this had been quite easily the most awkward evening she'd ever had that didn't involve naked bath time baby photos or Cardassian bondage techniques.
The parts of her first date involving her mother and the baby albums beat out an hour meticulously avoiding the crazy-Bajoran-shaped elephant in the room, but only just.
Her goal in essentially chugging the first four glasses had been to grease the wheels of conversation, so to speak. After all, tension between the former Maquis crewmembers and…well, everyone else had been understandably high as of late, and she had the uncomfortable sensation that she hadn't exactly been helping with that, what with the whole utter inability to think of a civil non-work-related word to say to her First Officer and close friend of the past seven years. Maybe a little bit of liquid fortification would bring something to mind that amounted to more than "Hi," or "Um," or occasionally "Pass the salt."
However, somewhere between that third glass and the inevitable mad dash for the restroom, the second form of pissed-ness had begun to manifest itself, and a particularly severe belligerence had set in, upon which she had decided petulantly that if he thought that a lousy pinot would make up for a bloody mutiny, that was just fine, but she sure as hell wasn't sharing.
For the most part, Chakotay had seemed at peace with her decision, although once or twice he'd gotten that little between-the-brows wrinkle that meant he wanted badly to say something. This was, incidentally, generally after she had forgone the glass altogether and begun simply chugging from the bottle. Each time, he had seemed to think better of it when she had attempted to skewer him with a look, and had just gone back looking at her like she'd just tossed a whole basket of kittens out a window.
It was at about this point that he had given up – got the hint – and muttered something about leaving her to get some rest.
And although she had fully intended to go directly to bed upon his departure, he had made that infinitely wiser course of action impossible by suggesting it, and she had headed directly for the replicator and blown a good week's worth of perfectly good coffee rations on an oversized novelty bottle of scotch.
Unfortunately, this was about the point that she had begun to really think about the events of a few days ago, which led to her current state of full-on frothing rage.
It seemed, sadly, that no matter how much she wanted to blame the wine, she had been carrying a good deal of completely unfair resentment over the whole mutiny with a side of attempted-murder thing, and it wasn't buried nearly as deeply as she had hoped.
She wondered vaguely if the aforementioned frothing state of mind was some sort of defense mechanism, but quickly dismissed this idea. Nope, no devastation or unease whatsoever, she was just pissed.
Somewhere between the fourth and fifth gulp, she arrived at the undeniable conclusion that all this high-road crap was just that.
Oh, yes; he needed to suffer.
Two more guzzles later saw her attempting to leap to her feet, in practice sort of sliding from her couch to land in a heap on the floor, as the beginnings of a Brilliant Idea began to form.
Since he had taken her ship, she would take something of equal value to him: his peace and quiet.
But how to best go about it?
Develop a sudden interest in a hobby involving hammers and chainsaws?
Too dangerous.
Generously loan her quarters to one of Voyager's many amorous young couples for a little noisy wall-sex for an evening while she spent another night curled up on the couch of her ready room?
Too messy, and too much potential for debilitating back pain – both for her and the young couple.
Finally get around to learning an instrument and teach herself the bagpipes?
This one had potential, she mused, but from what she could recall of Harry's struggles to save up for his clarinet, bagpipes could cost a lot of replicator rations, and for some reason, she was a little short.
Oh, shut up, she snarled at the little voice in the back of her mind pointing emphatically to her rapidly disappearing beverage.
Meanwhile, this new form of annoyance by sound had merit. A little tampering with his computer, a few new additions to his musical selections, an infinite-repeat command with a lock that he would be unauthorized to override, and life would be jolly.
Well, not his life, she thought with a happy grin. It occurred to her briefly that this newfound sadistic streak might be cause for concern, but she quickly drop-kicked this notion directly out of mind.
It would be easy enough to pull off – the plan, not the drop-kicking. Ever since the Borg had helped them switch Voyager's woefully ineffective operating system from Windows to Linux during their brief alliance, the various parts of the ship were actually working compatibly with each other, which made things much easier. As an added bonus, the hours and hours she'd spent tucked away in cozy, pseudo-romantic settings with Seven of Nine in the past few years had even enabled her to use said operating system.
Yes, a simple matter. However, there was a distinct risk of her subtle attempt at vengeance making its way outside of the two of them, with his overwhelming tendency to call immediately for Lieutenant Torres whenever anything went wrong around the ship.
He was hardly unique in this, she knew – it seemed that the poor woman ended up getting dragged into the middle of all manner of malfunctions, from exploding warp cores to clogged toilets. Just the other day, she'd had to sit on her hands to keep herself from lunging for her combadge and plaintively calling for B'Elanna's help when she'd accidentally replicated a live chicken instead of the bowl of chicken soup she'd been trying for.
Incidentally, sitting on her hands had made dealing with a spooked, rampaging chicken a lot more difficult, but eventually she'd figured out how to throw a shard of broken coffee mug with sufficient force and accuracy to behead her feathered friend, with her foot. Unfortunately, this had all but used up her meager supply of self-sufficiency, and Torres had received a sheepish call moments later, inquiring as to whether she had any experience in plucking a chicken.
Perhaps this over-reliance on Lieutenant Torres was rooted in the undeniable fact that even simple malfunctions aboard Voyager had an overwhelming tendency to spiral wildly out of control and cause something far more dangerous and usually engineering-related, even when rampaging poultry wasn't involved.
"Just my luck to end up with such a lemon," she muttered resentfully, and then froze in horror as she realized what she'd just said.
Scurrying toward the nearest bulkhead, arms outstretched, she attempted to enfold her poor, maligned ship in an apologetic hug.
"I didn't mean it, sweetheart," she burbled. "You know you're the bestest ship ever!"
Content that peace had been made, she staggered purposefully from her quarters in search of B'Elanna.
After all, if the poor girl was going to end up dragged into the middle of this anyway, it only made sense to warn her in advance.
When looking back in later days upon the whole misadventure, Janeway would admit that the first major surprise had been how readily Lieutenant Torres had jumped on board.
"—so he won't be able to turn it off. I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep it going yet, but—"
"Count me in."
She blinked, startled.
"Well, actually, I was going to handle it myself; I just wanted you to be aware that you might be getting an angry comm call in the wee small hours of the morning. You have my full authorization to ignore it and go back to sleep. You can even call him names first, if you want."
B'Elanna glared fiercely.
"Captain, with all due respect; you come in here, drunk off your ass, and tell me that you're planning a pretty evil prank on one of my oldest, closest friends—"
"I don't think it's completely unwarranted!"
"—and you're not even going to let me help? I don't think so!"
Deeply touched, Janeway gave the younger woman a slightly teary smile.
"Have I ever told you how glad I am to have you for a friend, B'Elanna?"
B'Elanna considered this.
"No, actually."
Janeway frowned.
"Are you sure? Because I thought I had."
"Nope," B'Elanna replied with a shrug. "You've told me I'm a brilliant engineer with a hell of a left hook, and I think you said I've got a sweet, sweet ass last time you had this much to drink, but you've never called me a friend before."
"Well…" She shoved the bottle of whiskey at her chief engineer. "Here. Alcohol speaks louder than words, and I only share my whiskey with friends."
B'Elanna accepted the bottle and peered dubiously at the contents for a long moment, about a scant half pint of the tawny liquid sloshing around. She was pretty sure that it had been close to half full when Janeway had showed up this evening, and statistics on backwash floated unappealingly through her mind.
Finally, she shrugged and downed the contents in a few hearty chugs before catching her captain's startled eye, laughing sheepishly, and handing her back the empty bottle.
"That's amazing! Is there some kind of trick to it?" Janeway finally asked, voice filled with awe.
"I think it's genetic," B'Elanna replied, giving her hand a slightly awkward consoling pat. Then she leapt unexpectedly to her feet. "Okay, let's go!"
"Where are we going?" Janeway asked as she was dragged bodily from the room.
B'Elanna grinned wickedly.
"We're going to find Tom. He knows all the best annoying songs."
"He does have a particular gift for the annoying," Janeway agreed, nodding thoughtfully.
"Yeah," B'Elanna huffed. "Tell me about it."
If the first surprise was how enthusiastically Lieutenant Torres had hopped onto the Make-Chakotay-Suffer train, the second was how adamantly Lieutenant Paris opposed the whole thing.
After all, he had been shot in front of his own wife, who had then proceeded to just sort of kick him into a pile in the corner, stomp on his head a few times, and then scamper off to evict the Starfleet portions of the crew.
Somehow, she would have imagined that he might approve of a little light vengeance against the man who had authorized both the face-stomping and the eviction.
However, it seemed that Mr. Paris was much less adept in the fine art of holding grudges than she was.
"Come on, B'Elanna, we can't encourage this!" he muttered urgently to his wife in between careful glances at Janeway.
B'Elanna pondered this for a moment.
"I see. And…why the hell not?"
" Okay, first of all, look at her," Tom replied in a whisper.
B'Elanna looked accordingly, and suppressed a snicker at the sight of her captain attempting to start a bar fight with a nearby article of furniture.
"My money's on the coat rack," she confided.
"I don't know; the coat rack has the whole impervious to pain thing going, but the captain's pretty impervious too, when you make her mad enough. Although granted, the coat rack hasn't been drinking. That we know of, anyway…" Then, as he realized what he was saying, he shook his head, exasperated. "Look, the point is, she's not exactly thinking clearly."
"Or at all," B'Elanna added as Janeway threw her arms around the coat rack and offered a teary apology.
Nodding his emphatic agreement with this, Tom took the temporarily bipolar redhead by one arm and maneuvered her toward the couch. Hopefully, she wouldn't decide that it was 'looking at her funny' or something – he didn't particularly want to replace the whole room tonight.
"I know she knows that this wasn't anyone's fault," he explained to B'Elanna over his shoulder, "and once she's finished starting something with the furniture, she'll realize that. But in the meantime, do you really want to get behind a scheme to punish Chakotay for something he had no control over?" When his loving and beautiful wife continued to stare at him flatly, he sighed impatiently and continued. "B'Elanna, we had to sit through eight sessions of couple's therapy before you could stop being angry at yourself. It took hours of beating me senseless with a Wiffle bat before you could even look at me!" At this, he stopped and frowned. "Hey, wait a second; how did beating me up help you come to terms with letting me get hurt?"
"Beating you up is a cure for everything, Tom," Janeway informed him kindly from the couch.
"Thanks, Captain," he sighed.
"She's right, but that's not the point," B'Elanna said impatiently. "Look, I know he's feeling guilty as hell. That's why we have to do this!"
Tom considered this for a long moment.
"I don't follow."
"Right now, they won't even talk to each other because she's too mad to make the first move, and he knows she's mad and he's trying to give her space, because he feels terrible and he doesn't want push her, but she doesn't know that, and she's resenting the hell out of him because he hasn't bothered to say anything, and she thinks it's because it hasn't occurred to him to feel any remorse since technically, none of it was his fault, which she knows, but she can't quite make herself believe completely, which is making her even madder, because she feels like she has no right to feel this way, and now she's defensive too."
Briefly considering drawing up a map to better visualize this bizarre tangle of emotions, Tom nodded slowly.
"Okay, I get that – I think. But – and I can't believe I'm saying this – I don't think playing obnoxious pranks on Chakotay is going to make anyone feel better. Except possibly me, but I'm already feeling pretty good since we've stopped the Wiffle bat therapy."
"It will help! It'll make him so mad that he'll forget how guilty he feels, and they'll have one really good knock-down, drag-out fight, and everything can get back to normal!"
Tom sighed, casting a dubious look at his captain who, if her expression was anything to go on, was happily plotting the messy, painful death of the man in question. Or possibly pondering the best way to disassemble his television set from six feet away.
"Either that, or we'll be cleaning their blood off the walls for the rest of the trip home."
B'Elanna shrugged.
"Yeah, or that."
Tom rubbed a hand wearily over his eyes.
"Okay, look; I know there's nothing I can say that'll talk you – or you—" he added over his shoulder at Kathryn, who paused in her careful inspection of the thing on the bottom of her shoe and looked up questioningly. "—out of this, so I'm just going to go with it and deny my involvement later."
B'Elanna snuggled affectionately against his shoulder.
"Thank-you, honey! So," she continued excitedly, "what song should we use?"
"Well," Tom said thoughtfully, "we've got a long list of options. There have been a lot of annoying songs through the years. Now, are we going for loud?"
"Loud, but not too loud. I still have to live next door," Kathryn replied.
"With the hangover she's going to have tomorrow morning, we'd better make it the sound of silence," Tom muttered to B'Elanna.
Kathryn made a derisive gesture, somehow managing to nearly lose her balance despite being seated.
"Simon and Garfunkle? Come on, they're hardly annoying at all!"
Tom shook his head helplessly.
"Geez, she really is drunk."
"Should we feed her?" B'Elanna asked, eyeing Kathryn nervously. "I don't really want to clean regurgitated banana pancake out of the carpet all night, but it might sober her up a bit."
At this, Tom stopped short and turned to regard both women.
"Ladies," he said, a slow grin creeping over his face, "I think I've got the song."
End Notes: Geez, I think I've got every cliché in the book here. Also, I don't know where the idea came from that everyone on Voyager is totally dependent on B'Elanna to do everything. If anything, it's Seven of Nine. But I like the mental image of B'Elanna trying to pluck a chicken better. And anyway, if there's one thing I've learned about fanfiction, it's that what happened on the show has little bearing on anything.
Also, I don't entirely know what to make of my overwhelming obsession with getting Janeway drunk. I'm thinking of seeking help.