A/N: Former readers from here may have noticed most of my stories have disappeared. They are all publicly available on "archive of our own dot org (slash) users (slash) Nynaeve" (remove the spaces). I don't know if I'll be as faithful updating here, but I'm putting up some of my T or lower rated stories and just recommend you check my complete collection on AO3. Peace out.
Original Pub Date: 9/3/2012
A/N2: Written for the VAMB Secret Summer 2012. The request was for a proto-P/T relationship fic - this is my first P/T fic ever, so I hope you hear their voices loud and clear :) Read, review, but as always, enjoy. For Dax's10thHost.
"This man is my friend…"
The back of Tom's head itches, and while he knows it's psychosomatic, he scratches anyway, tussling his short blond hair. Feeling the solid flesh of his own skull instead of the jagged metal edges of the clamp reassures him that he's not hallucinating. He has no scars thanks to modern medicine; no evidence of his ordeal, save for snippets and flashes, and the cacophony of voices that fill in the gaps. "This man…" One voice rises to the surface, and the words echo vibrantly above the din, bouncing back and forth in his thoughts. Tom motions towards his empty glass on the bar. Sandrine's is empty except for the holographic bartender who pours him another drink, a real one. The alien liquor, courtesy of a rare peaceful trade stop, reminds him of whiskey with more of a fruity aftertaste that lingers after each sip.
Footsteps intrude upon his solitude and they stop suddenly at the threshold of the bar.
"Oh. Sorry. I saw Sandrine's was running and I thought…" B'Elanna sounds apologetic, and he slowly turns around. She seems softer without her uniform and he's drawn for a second to the curve of her hip where a white shirt brushes along the edges of brown pants. If she were to lift her hands, he wonders if he would see forbidden skin.
Tom shrugs. "You can stay if you want."
She hesitates and he thinks that she might leave, so he returns to his drink. He feels a sense of mild surprise when a barstool slides across the uneven wood floor and she takes a seat next to him. He raises an eyebrow.
"Can I buy you a drink?"
B'Elanna glances at the clear bottle, three quarters full of amber liquid. "Sure." The bartender sets another glass down.
"…my friend…"
"I had trouble sleeping," he states abruptly, staring down at his glass, interrupting the memory that is stuck on repeat. Harry had felt incredible shame at having merely entertained the notion of relinquishing Tom to the thugs in the prison. Tom had tried to assuage the younger man's guilt. If he himself were a better man, he would have told Harry that such loyalty was better spent elsewhere.
"I can imagine." B'Elanna sniffs her drink and tentatively tastes it. The flavor clearly appeals to her and she takes a bolder sip. "It's smooth."
"I thought I ought to bring out the good stuff, to calm the nerves. The Doc says it'll be a few more days before the full effects of the clamp wear off." It's the best explanation he has. Tom's not interested in baring the gory details of his stay in an Akritiri space prison. Not to her anyway. Another bubble of a memory floats to the top and he remembers pulling apart an important device and thinking that B'Elanna would have known what to do.
"It's way better than blood wine," she quips with a half smile and he can't help but glance down first at her lips; his eyes then involuntarily trail down her neck, to the hint of cleavage that teases him. He stares longer than he should and he clears his throat.
"No offense, but just about anything is better than blood wine," he lamely recovers. His wit is dampened by muddied brain chemistry.
They fall into another silence before B'Elanna forges ahead, and Tom wonders why she's trying at all. She leans forward onto the bar. "Harry seems to be doing okay."
"He's tougher than he looks."
Tom kicks back the rest of his drink and reaches over to pour himself another. The bartender grunts as though offended, but he's a hologram and Tom doesn't much care. B'Elanna nods and shifts on the stool. He doesn't want to drive her off, but he doesn't know what to say to her. His memories are sharp jabs, moments in time strung together like beads, each one with its own lack of context and offering little clarity into a situation he probably ought to be glad he doesn't recall all that well.
"…nobody touches him."
"I'm not that kind of man," he confesses. The words tumble from his lips and seem to spill all over the front of him. He winces. His brain is fuzzy from the alcohol, but the sentiments inside him have been pushing against his rib cage, desperate for a voice.
"What?"
"What Harry did…" he trails off and sighs. "That's not me. He's a better person than I am."
"He's better than a lot of us," she agrees. "I personally blame it on his irritating optimism and his annoying habit of trying to see the best in other people."
Tom wants to laugh at her poke at their friend, but he can't because he knows it isn't true. There are some things that seventy thousand light-years can't erase. There isn't a good deed that he can do to make up for the lies he's told. The mettle of his character is worthless; it went down in flames when the fire got hot. That's why Harry's words play and replay themselves over and over, chasing him in his nightmares and tormenting him in his still-paranoid state. He hopes that when his psyche rights itself he'll once again be able to drown himself in humor and his devil-may-care attitude so that he can forget the kind of man he is and how it pales in comparison to the kind of man Harry has proven to be.
"I killed three people and then, when it counted, I lied about it," he recounts softly. He doesn't look at her. This is a confession that changes the game.
"In the prison?"
"In the Alpha Quadrant. It's why I was kicked out of Starfleet." An old memory of his father's disappointed visage appears and evaporates in seconds. "I was a cocky, arrogant son of a bitch, and I talked three of my shipmates into doing a stupid maneuver while on an exercise. I screwed it up. I was the only survivor and I pinned it on one of my dead friends."
B'Elanna sits as a statue, frozen. The details aren't in Voyager's database. His record simply says he was dishonorably discharged and that he was serving time in New Zealand because of his association with the Maquis rebels. The medical officer who could tell the tale has been dead since they ended up in the Delta Quadrant and Harry... Harry is the kind of man who would consider it his duty to his friend to avoid such scandalous gossip. No, this story has been his open secret; it's what makes Harry's actions dig deeper into Tom's soul, to the point that he can scarcely bear it.
"This man is my friend, nobody touches him."
"Harry is a better man than me," he repeats, his story reinforcing the statement, adding dimensions and contoured lines that weren't there before. "I needed to save my own ass, so I sullied the memory of another." In a swift movement he pushes back from the bar. He doesn't want to wait for her to do what he expects, which is to walk away. He's feeling downright sorry for himself and that adds to the twists and the turns that have been cut through his neural pathways by electrical pulses that continue to fire in paranoid and dark patterns.
He manages to make it to the door before B'Elanna calls out to him.
"Tom, wait."
Pivoting, he meets her eyes squarely. He's told her about the devil on his heels, about what keeps him laughing because he can't face the man in the mirror some days. Like these days when he's confronted with the very essence of that which he cannot find within himself. She's standing and she looks postured to fight because that's what she does, and where it used to make him stay clear of her, he has to admit he finds her spitfire hotter than hell, particularly when it draws her shirt taut revealing her form in all its allure.
"The Tom Paris I know… well he would have done the same for Harry."
"I'm not so sure."
"You're an idiot," she states bluntly, her fists clenched at her side. "You saved us when Seska stranded us on that planet. You were the one who figured out we had a mole. You…"
It's the way she pauses, the way she looks away and swallows, and suddenly his memories are shifted from the hellish prison he was in to a place where he sits across from a woman, terrified, because she's missing part of herself, literally. The vulnerability that he hasn't seen in a long time, that she keeps shielded underneath her ridges, peeks through.
"This man…"
"Will that ever make me good enough?" He can't look away from her and when she looks up, he fixes his eyes onto hers, because he thinks that maybe, just maybe, she can offer him some sort of absolution.
B'Elanna relaxes her hands. "I don't know. I'd like to think everyone has a chance to be better than they are. Than they were."
It's not everything he needs, but it's something, and it's enough for the time being. "Me too." Tom rubs the back of his head. "I… I need to get some sleep."
"Pleasant dreams," she offers, and it feels like a blessing rather than mere sentiment.
He lets his gaze linger for the barest part of a nano-second, then he leaves, and for the first time in the last few weeks, Tom feels a little closer to normal. More than that, he knows without a doubt that he wants to be better, and he even believes he might be able to pull it off.
"This man is my friend…"