Written for Delwin who writes so beautifully herself.
Ties That Bind
"Ow! Damn it! Ow!"
Harry Kim let go of his burden and bent down to rub his injured foot. After his initial outburst, he did the rest of his swearing under his breath. Even though she was on the other side of the galaxy, it was a habit, deeply ingrained, to protect his mother's ears from profanity.
B'Elanna Torres stuck her head out of the shuttle. "You okay, Starfleet?'
Seconds later, Tom Paris arrived from the other direction. "What's wrong, Harry?"
"Stubbed my toe," Harry admitted sheepishly.
B'Elanna shook her head and disappeared back into the shuttle.
Tom chuckled and continued across the compound to Harry. "I'll give you a hand. You go have a seat." Tom picked up Harry's discarded force field generator and headed down the nearby embankment. They'd already set up generators along the other sides of the campsite. This was the last one needed to complete the circuit.
Harry limped over to find a suitable rock to sit on. He had plenty to choose from. This planet had them in abundance.
Along with rocks of all sizes, the planet featured dust, spindly shrubs, a surprising number of edible tubers and a deposit of low-grade pergium. Pergium was in rare supply in this part of the galaxy. They would make do with whatever they could collect here until they located a better source. The pergium and the tubers were the reason that they'd come to this poor excuse for a planet. The dust was the reason they were temporarily stuck.
"I don't see why you're bothering with a defense perimeter," Harry called down to Tom. "The planetary scans we ran before the mission didn't find any life forms large enough to be dangerous. There was nothing toxic either."
"We weren't the only ones interested in that patch of vegetation we harvested," Tom shouted back. "Something has been digging around those roots, something with strong claws. A creature with claws that powerful doesn't have to be big to be dangerous. We don't want it sniffing around for the tubers we brought back to camp for supper."
"We didn't set up a defense perimeter with those kind of readings when I took the survival course at the Academy," Harry argued.
Tom shrugged. "The Starfleet course doesn't cover every possibility."
"I got an A," Harry countered, upping the ante.
Tom waved off Harry's A. "You had Professor Klegg. Anyway, Academy grades don't carry much weight with the creatures out here in the Delta Quadrant. You can't expect them to play by our rules. Do you really want to get stuck inside the shuttle for the next forty-eight hours? You're the one who keeps complaining that we didn't bring a portable sonic shower."
Harry rubbed his foot again. "Fine," he grumbled. His hands, knees and boots were covered in dirt. He felt grubby. He hated feeling grubby.
Tom grinned. He'd seen this before. "It'll all be worth it, Harry. The pergium will come in handy on Voyager and you know you'll be glad of the fresh food."
"I won't be so glad once Neelix dresses it up with Talaxian spices."
"There is that," Tom admitted. "At least we can eat tubers down here without Neelix's 'improvements'."
"I guess so," Harry grudgingly agreed. He wasn't trading in his grievances yet, not for the mere promise of food. He would have been more comfortable with the rest of the crew gathering plant samples on the planet in the next system. That planet was much cleaner than this one. It not only had fresh food, it had grass, trees and running water.
Harry couldn't understand why the Captain had insisted on him coming along with Tom and B'Elanna. Both of them had specific jobs to do. Tom was here to pilot the shuttle. B'Elanna had an onsite assessment to complete before they mined the pergium. His own role on the mission was less clear.
Harry suspected that Captain Janeway had sent him along mainly to act as a buffer between his two crewmates. Tom and B'Elanna had a professional relationship built on mutual respect. It was their personal relationship that had its rough spots.
Harry watched Tom initiate the pulse that activated the generator. Tom dusted off his hands and called up to Harry. "How's the toe now?"
"Getting better."
"I'm going to check the other generators to make sure that they're aligned properly. Hobbling down here won't do you any good. Why don't you go keep an eye on the campfire?"
"Sure thing," Harry agreed.
Harry gingerly made his way around the boulders scattered along the edge of the large, rocky plateau where the shuttle had set down. This was their secondary landing site. The primary site near the pergium deposit was several kilometers away at the base of a steep cliff. There had been no chance of landing there once the engines got clogged with atmospheric dust. It had taken great skill for Tom to guide the shuttle down to one of the few flat, open spaces here. They were making the best of things, moving ahead with the second stage of their mission while B'Elanna purged the shuttle's systems of dust.
Harry stopped at the natural stone hollow where they'd built their campfire. A healthy pile of dry woody stems sat close at hand. It had been warm enough during the day, but was cooling rapidly. It would get even chillier after sunset. They had enough wood in the pile to keep the fire burning through the night if necessary. Right now the campfire heated a large pot balanced on the improvised tripod set to the side of the heat of the flames.
Harry found a sturdy stick and lifted the lid from the pot. Tender chunks of yellow, red, orange and pale cream bubbled in a tangy broth. The aroma was rich with a subdued spiciness that smelled inviting. Harry replaced the lid and settled himself on one of the larger rocks near the fire.
Tom completed his circuit and climbed up the hill. He could smell the odor coming from the stewpot too. It didn't smell quite so inviting to him. "Harry!" he shouted. "Get the pot off the fire. The stew is burning!"
"What? Are you sure?" Harry scrambled to pull the pot away from the flames. "I just checked it a minute ago. It was fine then. How do you know it's burning?"
Tom pulled the sleeve of his uniform over his hand and lifted the lid to check his creation. "The smell, Harry. Can't you tell by the smell?"
"No. Sorry. I didn't spend a lot of time in the kitchen when I was growing up," Harry explained. "My parents didn't let me. My dad did most of the cooking."
Tom grinned at that. He couldn't picture Admiral Paris puttering around their kitchen at home.
"How come it burned so quickly?" Harry asked.
"This wood's combustion properties are erratic. It was hard to set up a constant cooking temperature." Tom pushed the vegetables aside with a long spoon. "Don't worry. It's not too bad. Only the bottom corner is burnt. The rest of it is still edible."
In fact the salvaged stew was mouth-watering, savory, luscious. B'Elanna soon deserted her engines to join them to eat. Unlike Harry and Tom, B'Elanna had spent the afternoon inside the shuttle crammed under consoles. She appreciated the fresh air, the warm glow of the fire and the Neelix-free meal.
B'Elanna chatted companionably with Harry while they both ate. Harry was one of the few Starfleet officers she counted as a friend. For B'Elanna, being with Harry was like going back to a simpler time, a break from her weightier past.
It didn't escape Tom's notice that B'Elanna was different in Harry's company, more relaxed, more open. Of course, that changed soon enough if he joined in.
"The stew is good, isn't it, B'Elanna?" Harry threw out a hint for her to say something nice to Tom.
"Not bad," she acknowledged grudgingly. There was no reason to puff up Tom Paris's ego by complimenting him on his cooking. "It would have been better if the bottom hadn't burnt."
Tom glared at Harry, but didn't say anything in front of B'Elanna to implicate his friend in the charring of the stew. Harry was one of the good guys. He had a knack for making friends. He drew people to him, got them to like him without working at it. He had certainly won Tom's friendship. Tom's early days on Voyager would have been very lonely without him.
Harry eyed both his friends and frowned. He wasn't clueless. He felt the strain in the group's dynamics.
It was funny. From the outside the three of them looked like what Tom described in Old Earth terms as the 'cool crowd'. Harry didn't have a lot of experience being cool. He kind of liked it. He kept trying to include Tom in the conversation. But his efforts fell short. Tom and B'Elanna didn't exactly snub each other. They spoke when there was something to say. They just didn't make a comfortable threesome. Eventually Harry had to accept defeat.
After that, Tom had little to do but eat his own dinner and watch Harry and B'Elanna enjoy their easy camaraderie. From his vantage point on the other side of the fire pit, Tom could see a smudge on B'Elanna's face. She must have brushed her hand over her forehead while she was working. It was cute. Tom was tempted to reach around the fire to wipe the smudge away. However, he was fond of his arm and preferred not to have it ripped off. It was safer to channel his interests in directions where the brush-off wouldn't be so painful.
Harry finished the last of his delicious stew and settled back in bliss. "Now this is what I call camping. Of course, it would all be better with sonic showers. I can't believe Captain Janeway sent us out without them."
"We'll rendezvous with Voyager well before we turn into derelicts, Harry," Tom assured him.
Tom knew all about about Harry's fastidiousness. Personally, Tom didn't get it. He'd loved the times when he could escape the confines of the Paris household and run around outdoors. Still, Harry was his friend. Tom cut him some slack on this.
On the other hand, this facet of Harry's personality was new to B'Elanna. On Voyager most of their interactions took place while on duty. Harry spent the majority of his free time with Tom Paris. She took advantage of this opportunity to ask, "Didn't you play in the dirt when you were a kid, Harry?"
Harry shrugged. "No, not really. My mom is a wonderful woman. She has a full time job and works hard to look after the family and the house. I never wanted to make her work any harder by creating a mess."
Then he smiled. "Sometimes, though, my dad would take me out for a walk in the woods. He'd let me sit in the leaves and kick around in the dirt. But we'd always stop at my aunt's house for a shower before heading home." He looked down at his uniform in disgust. "We didn't have to wait three days to get clean!"
"Your dad and mine had something in common," B'Elanna confided to Harry. "My dad would sneak me out to his favorite fishing spot whenever my mom would go on one of her 'B'Elanna must learn to be Klingon' rants. He'd tell me that I was not to even think about gagh when I put the worm on my hook." B'Elanna smiled warmly. It was a treat to share a pleasant memory of her father with a friend.
Tom was intrigued and leaned closer.
B'Elanna had briefly forgotten that she and Harry weren't alone. She bristled when she noticed Tom listening. She glared to keep him from laughing at her.
He didn't laugh.
She couldn't make out what he was thinking. It disconcerted her more than she liked, so she threw out a challenge. "You sneak away from home with your dad, Paris?"
Tom's expression closed down further. "Not really. He was away a lot. Starfleet you know."
B'Elanna frowned and eased back on her hostility.
The easing encouraged Tom to continue. "My mom didn't mind if I made a mess outside, as long as I came in through the mud room and used the back stairs to get up to my room."
B'Elanna and Harry exchanged looks that said as clearly as words, Back stairs? He grew up in a house with more than one set of stairs?
Tom shifted uncomfortably. He was once again reminded of how much in his past made him an outsider. He picked up a longish pole and stirred the fire to have something to do. It was getting dark. He could feel the added chill in the air. Stars sparkled brilliantly overhead in a sky that showed no sign of hazardous dust clouds. Tom searched for another topic. "So, how are the engines coming along?" he finally asked.
"I've got at least eight more hours of purging to do," B'Elanna informed him.
Tom winced. That was more than he'd expected.
B'Elanna nodded. "It's slow going. The process can't be rushed. What's frustrating is that we could have avoided this whole problem if we had the time and the resources to implement a design change that I developed for shuttle engines when I was at Starfleet Academy. In simulations it cut down engine contamination by twenty-eight percent."
"Impressive!" Harry observed. "How come I don't remember ever hearing about it?"
"Because the idea never went anywhere. Not after Professor Chapman gave me a B for my work."
"You're kidding!" Harry protested.
"I wish," B'Elanna replied. "He docked marks because I didn't document my work according to standard Starfleet protocol. With only a B on the proposal, no one took it seriously."
Tom whistled. "Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater."
"Yeah," B'Elanna agreed.
"Well," Tom said. "We'll just have to make do with what we have. Tomorrow Harry and I will harvest the rest of the tubers while you're busy with the engines. That way we can lift off and transfer to the primary site as soon as the shuttle's systems are clear. B'Elanna, do you foresee any additional problems with the engines when we do lift off?"
"No." She shook her head for emphasis. "The atmospheric dust clouds that we flew into seem to be temperature related. They begin to form after midday when the sun is hot enough to warm the planet's surface. The warming air carries dust with it as it rises."
Tom nodded. "Like the dust storms on Mars."
"Exactly. As long as we time our flights to avoid those conditions, we'll be fine."
Harry watched his friends weave this part of the conversation without him. While the topic was engines and flight his intervention wasn't needed. He held his tongue and waited until they reached the end of their discussion.
On cue, almost as if something else had been waiting for the discussion to end too, a loud scratching followed by a sharp crackle and hiss splintered the brief silence. The three officers jumped to their feet, Harry still not as agile as Tom and B'Elanna.
Tom waved B'Elanna to his right, Harry to his left. He stopped at the edge of the low plateau and shone his beacon down into a puddle of black. The puddle dissolved into a mass of miniature creatures that might have been cuddly if they didn't have sharp claws half the length of their bodies. They nosed blindly along the other side of the defense perimeter, retreating from the light of Tom's beacon.
"Well, well, well," Tom commented. "It looks like our too small to be dangerous creatures have an army."
"Where the heck did they all come from?" Harry wondered.
The creatures moaned and shook their heads as the added light from two more wrist beacons hurt their eyes. They backed off and scattered into a night that was quiet and empty once more.
"Underground probably. They appear to be nocturnal," B'Elanna noted.
"Makes sense," Tom agreed. "We didn't see any of them during the day and they obviously don't like the light from our wrist beacons." Tom swung his beacon up and down the line of generators. "The defense field has stopped them from exploring any farther in this direction, at least for now. Still, it would be wise to keep the fire going tonight. We'll take turns monitoring the fire and sleeping in the shuttle."
"Good call on setting up the defense perimeter, Tom," B'Elanna offered in approval.
"Yeah, good call, Tom," Harry seconded B'Elanna's praise. They turned back to the campfire. "I guess it's lucky that you did well on the survival course too. What grade did you get, A plus?"
Tom stiffened. "Not exactly, Harry."
B'Elanna's interest was piqued. When they were sitting by the fire again, she pressed Tom. "What did you mean, 'not exactly?'"
Tom shrugged and didn't say anything.
B'Elanna and Harry waited.
Tom sighed. They weren't going to let this drop. Well, B'Elanna had shared her personal stuff in front of him. Maybe fair was fair.
"Most of my class took the survival course with Professor Klegg. She believed in encouraging effort with top marks. A few of us had a scheduling conflict and had to take the course the next semester. That's when she was on sabbatical and another professor filled in. He had a different philosophy. I can still remember his speech. He said that he expected everyone to come through the tests successfully. That was a given. He didn't believe in rewarding cadets with high marks for doing the expected. Learning how to survive was more important than any grades we would ever receive."
"So what happened?" Harry asked.
"We took the survival test on Tilkis Prime. You know the site. Dry, desert-like conditions, sort of like this," Tom commented. "Much hotter, though." Tom grimaced. "It was hard going. We weren't allowed to bring much with us and the resources on the planet were limited."
Tom paused. Neither B'Elanna nor Harry interrupted him.
"The team was well into its third day. We'd set up our safety protocols, found water, food, mapped out an exit strategy. Everything was working out. Then the site was hit with an unexpected seismic event. The resulting landslide caught two of our team members. We scooped out the pulp from the rigid cactus tubes that are native there and used them to funnel fresh air down to them. We dug them out with our hands and used the cactus casings as splints to support broken arms and legs while we carried them back to base."
Tom examined the specks of grey dust that clung stubbornly to the palm of his left hand. "We were relieved when we all made it back safely, proud of ourselves too." He closed his hand and looked up. "My team got a B plus for its resourcefulness and ingenuity."
"That's not bad," B'Elanna commented.
"I got a B minus." Tom added.
"What? That doesn't sound fair!" Harry protested.
"I was team leader. The professor said that while we were to be commended for how we dealt with the accident, the fact remained that two team members were injured under my command. He said that one of the lessons a Starfleet officer has to learn is that the leader is responsible for everything that happens on a mission."
"You should have appealed his decision," Harry argued.
"That would have been awkward," Tom commented dryly. "The professor that term was my father.
"Awkward' described the ensuing silence as well.
"Anyway," Tom continued after a few minutes. "That was a long time ago and Professor Klegg was back in class the next term."
"How about you, Starfleet?" B'Elanna asked, deflecting attention away from Tom. "What stories of underrated achievement do you have to share?"
"Nothing really." Harry looked almost embarrassed. "I got all A's," he explained.
"Oh?" B'Elanna remarked.
It was Harry's turn to shift uncomfortably. "Well I worked hard for my grades."
Tom reached over to pat Harry's shoulder comfortingly. "We know you did, Harry. It's okay, really."
"I did have a tough time in Quantum Chemistry. I had to get extra help from my roommate and still only managed an A minus.
B'Elanna and Tom exchanged amused glances.
B'Elanna spoke up. "That is tough, Harry, only an A minus."
"Hey, my mom was really upset about it. She threatened to come to campus to talk the professor into changing my grade!"
Tom grinned. "I'd like to have seen that!"
"Come on, guys! Give me a break!"
Tom let him off the hook. "You're right, Harry. Everyone needs a break. I could have used one from all the ribbing I took over that mark. The toughest part was trying to explain my B minus to those who took the course with Professor Klegg. It was useless. Explanations sounded like excuses, you know?"
B'Elanna nodded.
"After that, whenever we went on simulated missions, I was the one who got stuck scavenging around the campsite, cleaning up, washing dishes - all the jobs nobody else wanted."
"There's nothing wrong with scavenging and doing dishes," Harry objected. "They're important jobs."
"True," Tom agreed.
"I would have done them if I had to."
"Did you ever volunteer, Harry?"
"Umm, no."
"I did an awful lot of dishes," Tom said quietly.
"Is that when you learned how to cook on a campfire?" B'Elanna asked.
Tom glanced over at her. "Well if I was stuck at camp anyway, I thought I might as well handle the cooking. Henderson, the only other one who regularly stayed back, was a lousy cook. I knew I could do better."
Harry moved his empty plate over to where B'Elanna had placed hers. "I for one am happy about that."
Tom made a self-mocking half-bow in Harry's direction. "My B minus is glad to be of service, Harry." Then he smiled ruefully. "The irony is that I did learn something useful from that grade. I learned that 'good enough' doesn't always make it in real life. I learned that the survival manual doesn't have all the answers you need. It helped me to survive later on when the stakes were much higher. I learned to improvise and to use my wits. I didn't rely on just what I learned in the Starfleet training course to pull me out of tight situations."
B'Elanna could appreciate that. Academic learning was one thing. But she'd learned first hand about real stakes and the hard lessons of survival. There were times when she'd learned too much. It had changed her.
She was still changing. At the moment B'Elanna couldn't help remembering what Captain Janeway had told her about Chapman writing a letter of support for B'Elanna if she ever reapplied to Starfleet Academy. "I guess if I'm being honest," B'Elanna confessed, "I have to say that Professor Chapman had a point about about using standard forms to communicate my ideas."
Harry raised his eyebrows at that.
B'Elanna ignored him. "Starfleet has a lot to learn about supporting innovation," she said. "But I do get better results with my engineering team on Voyager if I explain what I want using familiar terminology."
"Dalby too?" Tom asked skeptically. It was hard for him to buy that one.
"I didn't say it always had to be Starfleet terminology, Paris. That 'f-king thing in front of you' works too."
B'Elanna grinned, sharing the joke with Tom.
Tom grinned too. No pretense, no strings, just a broad smile.
Harry's head swung back and forth between his two friends. He wasn't sure what was happening. He knew that he suddenly felt less like the requisite buffer and more like a fifth wheel.
Tom broke the mood by placing his plate beside the fire. "I'll leave this here for now. I'm going to scout the perimeter, just to be on the safe side. I'll take care of the dishes when I get back."
B'Elanna brushed the last of the crumbs from her uniform. "I'd better get back to my engines."
"I'll give you a hand, B'Elanna," Harry offered as she passed by.
B'Elanna stopped beside the hatch. "No thanks, Harry." She smiled across at Tom, then winked at Harry. "You can do the dishes."
After a stunned silence B'Elanna heard a theatrical groan from Harry and a bray of laughter from Tom before she climbed, still smiling, back into the shuttle.