Author's Note: Something I found in my drafts folder while looking for something else. Or rather two somethings that I found, both partial answers to a prompt sent by Photogirl1890 probably two years ago. I grafted them together and sent her the result. She was kind enough to beta her shamelessly belated gift and so posting it here as well for anyone who might care to take a look…
Arcs
"I don't have time for this."
Tom means to give her some space, to try again later. He reaches out to grab her hand – to give a quick squeeze before getting back to his own long list of repairs - and stops dead.
Because there is blood on her knuckles.
"What happened to your hand?"
B'Elanna snatches the hand back, covers the blood on the knuckles of her right hand with her fingers of her left. "Nothing." Tom's eyebrows climb. "I mean," she gestures before again covering her hand, "we got shaken around a lot down here. You know."
"And that caused you to throw your fist into a bulkhead?"
Two crewmen pass between them; that's all the time it takes for B'Elanna's confusion to morph into quiet fury. "Back off, Tom."
"What the hell did Burke mean to you?"
Somewhere in Tom's mind he knows that he's crossed a line – crossed it a couple of steps ago in fact. And, anywhere else, they would already be at each other's throats. But they're in Engineering and its chief remains dangerously quiet.
"Fuck you."
She spins on her heel, melting into the composed chaos of her staff and her engines. Swinn and Mendez close ranks behind her, blocking her from view, leaving Tom standing alone and ignored.
…
A year ago would he have left it at that?
Had he? Had he walked away – let her walk away – when she was bloodied and wounded?
Hell, a year ago he hadn't even noticed the blood.
But it isn't a year ago and he finds her deep in the guts of her ship, somewhere along Jefferies tube 47 between the ninth and tenth intersects. She has a flux coupler in hand and is standing under an open panel, but she's staring into space, unmoving.
"B'Elanna?"
She starts at the sound of her name and then, with a snarl, reaches up to the open panel and becomes very busy with the work she was ignoring a moment before.
"How'd you find me?"
"We're on a ship; you have a communicator."
She grunts. "You wouldn't get a clear reading on me down here." He guesses she'd made sure of that. "Who gave me up?"
It had been Carey, who had also noticed his chief's bloodied knuckles and drawn conclusions similar to Tom's own. But the information had come with no little reluctance and at the cost of a more than well-deserved berating for the boorishness of Tom's earlier behavior.
"Now you know I'm not going to tell you that."
She responds with a barrage of muttered Klingon and the tool she is using slips, causing a cascade of sparks to explode over her hands.
"Fuck," she yelps, slamming into the opposite wall of the narrow space as she jumps back, clutching her now twice-injured hand to her chest. Tom winces but dares not move toward her to help: the next move needs to be hers.
He waits, giving her what time and space he can, bracing for whatever she has to throw at him.
Instead, she gives a half-strangled sob and slumps down onto the floor of the tube, her spine hunched against the wall, her knees drawn to her chest, still cradling her hand.
It's as much of an invitation as he's going to get. He folds himself down on the floor beside her, ignoring the protest of overly long limbs.
"I'm sorry," he says.
She nods, not looking at him. "I know."
"I saw the blood and I stopped thinking. I never should have…"
"I know," she repeats, but now tilts her head and shifts tired eyes toward him. "It's okay, really."
And maybe it is.
"Can I see your hand?"
To his surprise, she holds it out to him. With herculean effort, he manages not to react as he examines the cuts and bruises and now the burns.
"I assume you brought a dermal regenerator?"
Tom looks up in further surprise: he had, but with little to no expectation that she would let him treat her injuries.
She shrugs almost imperceptibly. "It hurts."
He nods and reaches into his jacket pocket to extract the instrument and a small flask.
"This might help with the pain as well." He unscrews the top before passing it for her to take awkwardly in her left hand while he begins work on her right.
She sniffs the contents. "Drinking whiskey in a Jefferies tube. Do I even want to know how many regs this violates?"
"Probably not." His attention is on her hand.
Shrugging, she takes a long swallow. He's done what he can with the dermal regenerator. Returning it to his pocket, he gives her a long look.
"It's traditional," he says: "A drink to fallen friends."
She's already swallowed or he's sure she would have spit out her mouthful.
"Max."
He waits. Time and space; space and time. He's a pilot; these are his media. He waits.
"Not much of a friend," she finishes her own thought but takes another drink.
"He had been."
"Not at the end."
Her face is dry. He'd once thought B'Elanna Torres didn't cry; he knows better now. But her tears are rare, rarer even than that particular smile which he sometimes thinks is for him alone.
Or had it been for Max Burke as well?
Grow up, Thomas.
"Tell me about him."
She shakes her head, no.
"It could help."
She turns, her eyes bright. "Tom. You of all people don't want to listen to me talk about Max."
"I want to listen to you," he says, almost evenly. "About Max Burke or anything else."
She considers and then nods, handing back the flask.
Tom takes a healthy swallow.
"He was ahead of me at the Academy, going into his fourth year when I was coming in for my first." She tilts her head, thinking. "A year behind you."
Commander Maxwell Burke. First officer of the Equinox. Max Burke had been pinning on his third pip while Tom had been landlocked, staring up at the backwards spinning stars of the southern hemisphere. And he'd have been accepting his lieutenancy while Tom was drowning nightmares of spiraling shuttles with whatever local poison could be found on the cheap.
"How did you meet?" He fidgets with the flask in his hands, wishing he could somehow inconspicuously take another swallow. Or three.
"Running. The Decathlon team," B'Elanna clarifies and then almost smiles, caught in the memory. Tom's fingers crush against the hard surface of the flask. "He was the team captain and responsible for setting up training schedules for the first year cadets." She glances at Tom. "We argued. A lot."
"Why am I not surprised?" Tom manages to keep his tone light – there is a script to follow here after all - as something small and unpleasant claws its way through his gut and he unwillingly envisions where those arguments probably led.
"What was he like? Back then?"
B'Elanna turns away and that makes it a little easier. "Ambitious but easy going. Confident." She shrugs. "A natural leader."
Tom parses that: the math doesn't work out, not completely.
"Why did you like him?" He doesn't want to ask, doesn't want to know.
Another shrug. "He was a friend when I didn't have anyone else. Someone who wouldn't let me drive him away." One corner of her mouth quirks, hovering between grin and grimace. "He could even make me laugh, sometimes."
Fuck.
He takes a long drink of whiskey then and almost leaves. Almost sends her Chakotay or Harry or anyone else.
But then she pulls the flask out of his hand and takes another swallow herself. "What a fucking idiot I am. How could I not have seen what he was?"
He's back on script: "Maybe he wasn't that then."
"Of course he was. People don't change. Not that much."
And Tom's world freezes, time and space collapsing in on themselves.
…standing in the bright autumn Auckland sunlight, informing Janeway he has no problem helping to track down his Maquis friends…
…finishing off the last of his foul tasting Breshtani ale and surveying the dimly lit border colony dive for any opportunity to sell himself for another…
…his thumb hovering over the imprint button as he stares at the fabricated incident report, wishing that signing it could make it true…
"Shit. Tom – I didn't mean…"
Endless stars surround them as they float weightlessly through space and what time they have left slips away. "Do you think I've changed?"
Tom shakes his head. "It's okay."
"In his place, you could never have…"
"You don't know that. He thought it was a matter of survival." And for his crew, not just himself. How much had Tom done for so much less?
"He betrayed me, Tom. You would never…"
She stops. Tom can all but feel the late afternoon heat of the Auckland sun burning his skin. He holds her gaze. Steadily.
"Shit."
She slumps back against the wall.
Tom waits again as the universe slowly stretches itself back out. He considers the force of coherent tetryon beams that bend time and space to catapult starships across the galaxy and pull on the arcs of human lives, flexing and transposing until a hero becomes a monster and a dispossessed mercenary might find his way back to a family and a home.
At last, B'Elanna holds out her good hand and Tom passes her the flask.
She raises it in a toast: "To the Maxwell Burke I knew."
She takes a swallow and then hands the flask back to Tom who joins her in a tribute that is without absolution.