A/N: This takes place during the Season 4 episode "Waking Moments." For those who haven't seen the episode in a while, it opens with a handful of characters' dreams playing out simultaneously. This fic fills in the dreams we didn't see, from characters like Neelix and B'Elanna. (I know B'Elanna was working a nightshift, but she can still doze.)
Reminder: this episode comes right after "Mortal Coil," when Naomi Wildman is very young.
I don't own "Star Trek: Voyager."
"Torres to Voyager! I've lost helm control!"
B'Elanna fought frantically at the controls of the shuttlecraft, as the blue planet spun towards her at a terrifying speed.
"Voyager respond!"
Tom's voice drawled over the comm., "Yeah, yeah, give me a minute. Um…did you try…rerouting the subspace beacon to the…" His voice became feint and muffled, as if he were speaking over an old, barely functional audio.
"Tom I can't hear you!" B'Elanna cried frantically, as the planet sped closer. "Tom! Tom!"
Clouds rushed forward as the shuttle broke the planet's atmosphere, and for a moment B'Elanna's view through the windows was completely white. When the clouds cleared she was speeding towards North America. B'Elanna screamed repeatedly for Tom, for Voyager, as she plummeted towards what looked like a corn farm. She anticipated being killed on impact, but somehow, the shuttle wound up skidding through the cornfield, as if she'd come down from a massive sledding hill. Cornstalks broke and tumbled over the shuttle's windows.
She climbed out of the smoking shuttle and stumbled out into the cornfield, panting heavily. She attempted to contact Voyager through her comm. badge, to no avail. Something rusting in the corn behind her caught her attention.
"Hot damn, it jus' be rainin' cats an' dogs an' Klingants t'day!"
Whirling around, B'Elanna saw a stereotypical human farmer in bib overalls, aiming a plasma rifle at her.
"No wait!" B'Elanna's stammered. "I'm, I'm here in peace!"
Seeing that he wasn't going to lower his gun, B'Elanna tore into the corn field, just barely dodging the plasma blast. She raced through the field for what felt like several minutes, heavy wet corn slamming into her face and forehead ridges, before realizing she could no longer hear the farmer. Had she lost him? Carefully, she moved through the cornstalks, wincing with every twig and stalk that crunched under her boots.
A familiar laugh suddenly rang out.
"Tom?"
B'Elanna crept towards the voice, and parted the cornstalks to peer into a clearing in the field. The corn was pressed neatly to the ground in the style of the old crop circles Tom had been showing her pictures of in Voyager's database, the day before. It was hard to tell, but it looked like this crop circle was shaped like the symbol of the Klingon Empire. In the middle of the design sat a sofa from Voyager's mess hall, and on it sat Tom, with his arm around each Delaney sister. Behind the sofa stood Kes, massaging Tom's shoulders, her long gold curls ticking his face.
"Mom warned me not to hook up with B'Elanna," Tom said, as if venting some long-contained stress. "She never thought I had the constitution to live with a Klingon. Now I'm stuck with one for the next sixty-five years!"
B'Elanna stood frozen in the corn, unsure if she wanted to run into the clearing and start beating Tom to death, or just cry.
"Keep up, Chakotay."
"I'm trying, Father."
Chakotay followed his father through the twisted corridors of Voyager, both of them brandishing the spears their ancestors had hunted with. His father was so far ahead of him, Chakotay could barely catch the back of his hunting hat as he rounded the ship's corners.
"How do you expect to kill Cardassians and Borg drones if you can't even kill a deer?" his father scolded.
"I don't want to be a killer," Chakotay panted, finally catching up to his father.
"Oh?" Kolopak glanced over his shoulder, almost mockingly. "You don't want to be like your father? Maybe you'd rather take after your grandfather."
Chakotay grew sick inside. "I'm sorry!" he apologized frantically and pathetically, as if he were a nervous child. "I didn't mean—"
"Quiet!" his father hissed, narrowing his eyes down the corridor and readying his spear.
Chakotay followed his father's movement, and they headed down the hall towards the turbo lift.
"Neelix…"
The soft, feminine voice echoed through the empty mess hall, causing Neelix to look up from the leola root stew he was preparing.
Squinting in disbelief, he whispered, "Kes?"
"Neelix, help me…"
"I'm coming Sweetings!"
Neelix didn't even bother to turn off the stove or remove his apron. He hurried into the hallway, looking frantically for the location of the voice.
"Neelix, I'm over here!"
He ran down the hall, following Kes's voice as if through a maze. He finally stopped at a hatch, where he heard her voice echoing from inside. "I've lost control of my shuttle…it's so cold…" Frantically, Neelix lifted the hatch and climbed into the Jeffries tube. He followed her mournful voice through a long network of Jeffries tubes, climbing up and down ladders and crawling through cramped tunnels, until finally he emerged into the tube junction. Kes stood before him in her old red, one-sleeved jumper over the gold undershirt. Her hair was cut short, as it had back when they'd been a couple, and she was smiling serenely at him.
"Neelix, I've missed you so much!"
Unable to speak, Neelix pulled her into a tight embrace.
"Kes," Neelix whispered, "Why did you leave me? Why did you leave Voyager?"
"Neelix, I have to tell you the truth," Kes said softly. "The reason I left Voyager…the reason I broke off our relationship … is because your cooking is horrible."
Suddenly, the small Jeffries tube junction was filled with a boiling hot liquid that reached Neelix's neck. It was like being in that Jacuzzi in Tom's Risa program, but the bubbling "water" felt oddly thick, and had a yellow-green tint. As the liquid rose even higher, Neelix struggled to stay afloat, floundering and splashing. Large, strangely shaped objects floated in the water, and when Neelix got a hold of one to use as a buoy, he realized that they were leola roots the size of young Alferians. Alferian hair pasta floated in the stew alongside the massive leola roots and giant bobbing vegetables. And the liquid was increasing in temperature, from hot to scolding. He was being boiled in his own leola root stew. And it was perfectly seasoned.
Seven of Nine was struggling to concentrate on her work in the cargo bay. This task was important, not only for Voyager's systems, but to prove her usefulness to her new collective. It was difficult to focus, with the black raven fluttering around her head, swooping repeatedly over her counsel inches from her face. Finally fed up, Seven reached out with her assimilation tubules, and made several attempts to stab the bird in midair. She missed every time, succeeding only in agitating the bird further. It began cawing loudly, the sound vibrating painfully in Seven's ears.
She finally retracted her tubules, and deciding on a new, more drastic tactic. Wincing as the raven continued to fly past her, she pried the lid off a nearby crate that she (somehow) knew contained a variety of weapons. She drew a standard phaser, and took aim. The bird continued to evade her, until she finally hit it with a stun beam. The raven jolted in midair, but then resumed its swooping and screeching.
Now thoroughly agitated, Seven heightened the setting of her phaser, to kill.
Clenching her jaw, she carefully took aim again. The bird was now flapping in front of the green glowing disc of her regeneration alcove. Seven fired. The blast went right through the raven, which then faded out of existence, as if it had been a nonsolid hologram or an illusion. The disc was cracked and sparking. Seven tapped her comm. badge, knowing she should alert Lt. Torres of the damage, only to find that her comm. badge wasn't functioning.
Then the alcove began to slide backwards into the wall, like the bookcase in Captain Janeway's Victorian ghost story program, and a secret passage was revealed. Seven found herself walking forward, into a Borg corridor.
Naomi was riding her "Ktarian rocking horse," as Mama called it, when her mother appeared in the doorway of her bedroom, smiling.
"Naomi, I have a surprise for you."
"What?" Naomi continued to rock.
Her mother reached out her hand. "It wouldn't be much of a surprise if I told you, would it?"
Sighing, the girl slid off her rocking horse, and took her mother's hand. Her mother led her into their living room, where there stood a man who Naomi had seen only in pictures. His cranial spikes and red-gold hair were identical to Naomi's, and he gazed down at her with gold Ktarian eyes.
"Daddy!" Naomi barreled into her father with a hug.
Vorik stepped into the stone fighting ring, readying his weapon. Against the blood red sky, Tom Paris glowered at him, twirling his own blade expertly. Vorik glanced at the seating area, where B'Elanna Torres watched her two potential mates with a solemn, almost challenging expression. She was dressed in the short, silver garment that T'Pring had famously worn for Spock's battle with Kirk. Her shapely bare legs were lined on the front with small ridges that mirrored those on her forehead, and it was all Vorik could do to contain his anticipation for running his finger up and down those ridges.
As the two men began to circle each other, Tom taunted in Vulcan, "Your fighting skills are as weak as your self control." It was almost surreal to hear Tom's distinctive voice speaking Vorik's native language so perfectly and fluently.
The blades finally clashed, and Vorik felt his blood rising with rage and excitement.
Tom's blade whooshed downward past Vorik's head, and the young Vulcan glanced down to see one of his own pointed ears lying in the sand, in a pool of green blood.
Tom laughed. "You can't win B'Elanna any more than you can keep the warp core from breeching!"
Feeling blood running down the side of his head, Vorik turned sharply to see Voyager's warp core sitting at the edge of the ring, flickering and smoking. Vorik dropped his blade and ran to the warp core. The readings on the console were speeding down the screen erratically. Vorik began working frantically to prevent the impending overload.
Crewman Chell had spent hours desperately combing the ship for a free lavatory stall. He knew he was already two hours late for his shift in Engineering, as well as the piloting lessons he'd accidentally booked with Lt. Paris for the same time slot. Reaching the lavatories of the ship's lowermost decks, Chell was now out of patience, and began opening each stall one by one, pounding the buttons of the wall panels with his blue fingers.
The first stall opened to reveal some brunette ensign he saw around the ship now and then, sitting on the toilet and staring ahead with boredom. Somehow, the top of her uniform perfectly covered her private parts from the angle Chell was looking at, and her pulled-down pants were still up high enough to hide her underwear. (Like something you'd see in a family-friendly holo-program.) Hoping she hadn't noticed him, Chell left her stall (without keying her door back shut) and moved to the next.
This one contained an enraged B'Elanna Torres (also answering nature's call in a family-friendly manner). The chief engineer's eyes widened with rage, and Chell quickly keyed the door shut on her murderous face.
In the next stall, Lt. Tuvok stared at him from where he sat like a statue on the toilet, and said, "Crewman, you are demonstrating rank insubordination."
"Sorry Commander!"
Chell feared his bladder would soon explode if he didn't find a stall soon.
The next was the first stall that didn't contain a shipmate doing their duty. Instead, the Doctor crouched over the toilet bowl with some test tubes, apparently in the middle of some kind of experiment. His face brightened at the sight of the Bolian. "Mr. Chell! You're just in time to join me in my analysis of Talaxian—"
Chell pounded the door shut, his dark eyes bulging with horror, rage and frustration.
He opened the next stall, and was immediately greeted by the piercing scream of little Naomi Wildman. Her mother, Ensign Wildman, was in the stall with her, and began shouting angrily at Chell for frightening her daughter during her potty training. Biting his blue lip, Chell keyed the door shut and moved on.
"Tom!" B'Elanna could hear her own voice cracking with the pain of betrayal.
"Who's there?" Tom called casually from the couch. "Rain?"
B'Elanna emerged into the crop circle, and Tom's face fell. Kes and the Delaney sisters gave her the same cruel, dismissive glares she'd received from classmates all through her childhood.
"Oh," Tom said, "it's you."
"Tom," B'Elanna found she was too hurt to be angry—yet. "I thought you said that you—that I was—"
The hum of an energy weapon powering up made B'Elanna whip around, to see the farmer aiming his plasma rifle at her face. But he'd changed. Now stuffed into the bib overalls was a hideous, reptilian alien, with jagged ridges running down the center of its forehead and neck. The hot blast hit B'Elanna in the face. Her head snapped back for a second, and then she tumbled forward, her forehead ridges smacking painfully against—
—her console.
B'Elanna awoke to find herself in Engineering. She was working the nightshift, and she'd dozed off. Glancing around, she saw no one in the sparsely populated engine room had noticed. All of her engineers seemed too exhausted or distracted with their own tasks.
Breathing deeply, she gripped the edges of her console and stretched her back, catlike. Earlier that evening, before her shift, she'd been reading about the Federation's first encounters with the Klingons, and the infamous Broken Bow incident. Under no circumstances would she let Tom find out about this dream; he'd laugh his ass off.
But he hadn't betrayed her. Tom hadn't parroted her father's words about her mother. And neither Kes nor the Delaney sisters had ever, nor would ever, look at her with such distain. Kes had always been kind, and Megan and Jenny were both friends. And she was going to meet with Tom for breakfast in just a few hours. After that, she'd feel better, and her day would turn around.
Chakotay and his father finally had the fawn cornered in the turbo lift, their spears ready. The young deer stared up at them almost pleadingly, and Chakotay turned to his father to see if he was really going to kill it. But his father was gone, replaced by an alien from a race he'd never seen before. On instinct, Chakotay stabbed at the alien with his spear.
The movement of his own arm jolted Chakotay awake, and he found himself sitting up in bed, holding an invisible spear. He quickly brought his hand to his temple, realizing he had a throbbing headache. Replaying the dream through is mind, he realized most of it wasn't too difficult to decipher. He smiled to himself, realizing the obvious response he should've given to his father's scolding: "No; I just want to be a scientist like my mother." Obviously it didn't matter, because it wasn't really his father who'd said that, it was Chakotay's own subconscious.
But what part of his subconscious did that bizarre alien represent? Was it simply a mesh of all the adversaries he'd encountered, in the Maquis and out here in the Delta Quadrant? It had looked so distinctive. It stood clear in his memory as if he'd seen it in person, while the rest of his dream was rapidly beginning to fade as usual.
He sank back into bed. He could analyze his dream in the morning. Right now, he had to get some sleep. Or try to at least.
Clinging to the giant leola root for dear life, Neelix searched the soup-flooded junction for Kes. He couldn't find her anywhere. He called her name several times, looking around frantically, until he finally saw her pale hand reaching feebly up from the boiling stew.
"I'm coming Sweeting, hang on!" Neelix kicked his legs furiously, padding forward on his leola-root float.
Her hand vanished back underwater—well, understew—just as he reached her. Neelix could just barely make out her shape floundering below, the colors of her red and gold dress barely distinguishable through the foggy, gunky soup. Neelix reached under and grabbed her wrist. It was a difficult balancing act, trying to lift Kes up with one hand and cling to his float with the other. But somehow, he managed to lift her up out of the liquid…
…only to find that it wasn't Kes. The clothes were Kes's, but the person in the one-sleeved jumper dress was a large, gangly looking alien, with spikes running down the center of its face. Too shocked to even cry out, Neelix lost his grip on both the alien and his "buoy," and tumbled backwards—
—into a tangle of sheets.
He was in bed, in his quarters. He was dry. The smell of perfectly seasoned leola root stew was gone. Kes was gone, almost a year now, and she'd left to explore her powers, not because she'd disliked his cooking. Had one of his fellow shipmates experienced this, Neelix would have told them without missing a beat that they should feel relieved, overjoyed even, to know that this had been nothing more than their own irrational anxieties cumulating into a bad dream. But, as often happened, Neelix found himself unable to heed his own advice.
Seven moved slowly down the dimly lit corridor, her eyes trailing the sight lined against the walls; rows of Borg alcoves, where a different member of Voyager's crew each stood regenerating. All were still in uniform and retained their hair follicles, but their faces were pale, and sported some combination of cybernetic implants.
Emotions simmered in Seven's chest, as she passed each one. Commander Tuvok, the only crewmember to see the remains of her childhood home, and the first to hear her emotional confession about the night of her assimilation, now stood regenerating, with a silver web of implants running along the left side of his face. Her eyes moved on to Harry Kim, with his right arm severed below the elbow, ending in a skeletal Borg claw. She recalled Kim's embarrassment in the mess hall, that night she'd confronted him about his attraction to her, and realized the young ensign would never experience such emotions again. Nor would Lt. Torres experience her animosity towards Seven, or her passion for Lt. Paris, as the half-Klingon now regenerated with a twin pair of Borg wheels on her cheek and a long ocular implant jetting from her eye. Next to Torres was Commander Chakotay, with a segmented tube cutting into his tattoo. Seven replayed his voice calling out her human name when he severed her from the Collective. The next alcove seemed empty until her eyes traveled down to see Ensign Wildman's offspring Naomi Wildman, her faced covered in implants. The child's mother regenerated next to her.
Seven's emotions came to a boil when she reached Captain Janeway, the crewmember she currently interacted with the most. The captain's left eye was covered with a flat ocular implant, a thin tube extending from it and ending in her neck.
Seven would have remained staring that the captain for an indefinite amount of time, if not for the flash of orange out of the corner of her eye that caught her attention. In the alcove next to the captain stood an alien who was neither a member of Voyager's crew, nor a victim of the Borg. Seven didn't recognize his species, and unlike the Voyager crew, he had no Borg implants. And his eyes were opened, boring into her own.
Seven's own eyes flared opened.
"Warning! Regeneration cycle incomplete!"
Ignoring the computer, she left the alcove, not wishing to return to "sleep" any time soon.
Naomi, her mother, and her father played hide and seek in their quarters, until all three grew tired and took a break for a snack. Naomi munched her cookie while watching her parents cuddle on the couch. When they began kissing, she made a face with her tongue and looked away, despite knowing in the back of her mind that she wasn't truly grossed out by her mother finally being able to kiss her father, like parents in stories did. She popped the last bit of her cookie in her mouth, and brushed the crumbs off her hands over her plate.
"I'm done!" she said, turning to face her parents.
Her father was gone, and her mother was now passionately kissing a monster.
Naomi screamed.
"Naomi, it's okay, it's just a dream."
Her mother was already right over her bed when she woke up. "It's okay Naomi, I had a bad dream too," her mother said, holding her. "That's why I decided to come check on you. I dreamed I went to tuck you in and…"
"What did you dream, Mama?"
Her mother didn't answer right away. "I'm not sure I can remember it anymore. Why don't you tell me yours?"
Naomi poured out the story to her mother. When she reached the part with the monster, her mother's face changed, and she asked Naomi to describe what the alien had looked like. Naomi didn't give it much thought; grownups were always asking her seemingly unimportant questions. But for the first time Naomi could remember, her mother allowed her to stay up all night, and stayed up with her.
An idea suddenly occurred to Vorik, one so obvious he was astounded he hadn't thought of it earlier. He began rapidly typing a sequence into the console that he (somehow) knew would "kill both birds with one stone," as his human comrades would say.
Behind him, Tom Paris scoffed. "How long did it take you to figure that one out? No wonder B'Elanna never—"
The warp core suddenly emoted a plasma burst that hit Paris directly in the chest, sending him skidding on his back across the stone arena. The warp core itself, meanwhile, flickered back to its usual state, the smoke finally clearing and the alarms ceasing. Vorik heard the voice of Voyager's computer announce, apparently from thin air, "Kal-if-fee complete."
Vorik triumphantly turned around to see his new bride striding across the arena towards him. B'Elanna's face was covered by an elegant veil that matched her short silver dress. She raised her first two fingers as she approached him, and he mirrored the action, to join in the Vulcan bonding touch. With his free hand, he threw the veil off her face, and found himself looking at the grotesque face of a barely humanoid alien.
After Vorik awoke, he meditated for two hours straight.
Two more affronted shipmates, a snoozing security officer, and a disturbingly pink human backside later, Chell was still searching for a free stall. Virtually every stall contained someone on the toilet. He keyed the next one opened, and Harry Kim screamed in terror, wide-eyed. He opened the next one to find Captain Janeway reading from a PADD and taking a long sip of coffee, going "Aaaaah" while a long fart echoed through the stall. In the next stall, Chakotay said conversationally, "The Ancient Romans used to shit in groups in opened-aired stalls, using a sponge for a—" Chell keyed the door shut.
One stall left. This was it. He was clean out of patience. The next person, he was just going to throw out, whether they were finished or not.
The final stall opened, and he found Seven of Nine—fully clothed—working on the toilet with some engineering tools.
Glancing over her shoulder, the former drone said coldly, "This lavatory is in need of repair. You will select an alternative john to deposit your blue deuces, Crewman."
Hollering a string of Bolian curses at her, Chell seized Seven by the arm and thrust her out of the stall, keying the door shut behind her. Finally he began to undo the front of his pants…but stopped, when he noticed a strange reflection in the toilet water. Was that a Cardassian face? Trembling, the Bolian looked up, to see a tall alien glowering down at him. It wasn't a Cardassian, but it was almost as ugly.
Chell burst awake. Then he scrambled out of bed, made a beeline for his lavatory, and didn't give the alien another thought for the rest of the night.
After the staff meeting, B'Elanna was immensely relieved to know that her anxiety dream had been induced. Although it was just a dream either way, it was liberating to know that the uncomfortable images hadn't come entirely from within her. On her way to the mess hall, she caught snid-bits of other crewmembers' encounters with the mysterious alien.
"I went to tuck Naomi in, and he was in her bed," Sam Wildman was telling Tabor.
The young Bajoran replied, "I saw him in the warp core. I tried to alert security to an intruder, only to find I'd pinned my earring to my uniform instead of my comm. badge…"
B'Elanna stepped into the turbo lift, where the Delaney sisters were relaying their experiences with each other. Jenny was visibly working not to laugh, while her irritable sister described her dream, almost accusingly.
"You stole all the men on the ship, except one, which of course was the alien." As her sister and B'Elanna snickered, Megan shot a look at the chief engineer. "It's not funny!"
B'Elanna exchanged a glance with the other twin. "What'd you dream Jenny?"
Jenny shook her head. "I was playing Harry's old 'Beowulf' program, and the monster was the alien. It was really frustrating, because I kept swinging my sword into his head, and he wouldn't even fight back. He just stood there staring at me."
By the time B'Elanna was in line at Neelix's galley her mood had improved drastically from all the amusing stories. She caught the end of Tal Celes's nightmare, as the young Bajoran woman told Neelix.
"…so after tearing the whole ship apart, I finally thought to look here in your fridge, and I found one slice left. I reach out for it," Tal's brown eyes were wide, "and it's swiped from under me by an ugly alien hand, and I look up, and this hideous horn-faced thing is eating my Andorian pie!"
"That. Sounds. Terrible." Neelix said with genuine sympathy.
Tal's friend Billy Telfer looked nauseated. "I was in Sickbay, and the Doctor told me," Telfer momentarily fell into an unconscious impression of the hologram, "'It's a medical mystery! You've contracted every disease in the known galaxy at the same time!' and started talking about how famous this was going to make him. So I got frustrated and tried to reprogram him—I don't know why—and he wound up turning into the alien."
Behind her, one of B'Elanna's youngest engineers, Crewman Xiong, was describing a typical "pop quiz" dream to a friend.
"Commander Chakotay decided to pop-quiz everyone on the ship on every detail about their station. And for every question you got right he'd take off one item of his clothing, but if you got a question wrong he'd start telling an ancient legend. And the questions didn't make any sense…"
B'Elanna was momentarily taken back to what she now thought of as her "imaginary one-night stand" with Chakotay, when that alien made the crew hallucinate two or three years ago.
"…and I finally hit the jackpot question—"
"Which was?" the friend she was talking to asked.
"…something like, 'What do you never say to a Klingon at lunchtime,' and I just said, '…hi?'" B'Elanna could only imagine what her own face must look like right now. Xiong continued. "I guess that was the right answer. So he took his shirt off from behind, like," Xiong mimed the action, crossing her arms over each other, "but when he pulled it off, it was the alien. And his spikes ran all the way down his body, and he was all bumpy and scaly, it was disgusting."
Her friend squinted. "So…what's the bad part?"
Xiong smacked her friend's arm angrily, as her friend began laughing.
Making a face, B'Elanna turned to Ensign Jenkins, Voyager's chief nightshift pilot, who'd also been listening to Xiong's dream. "What'd you dream Amelia?"
Jenkins' pale blue eyes widened. "Mine was surreal. I was working on a painting, trying to do a landscape I'd flown over earlier in the dream—some Class Y planet with gorgeous mountains—and it was like I couldn't keep control of the brush. It was so frustrating. And suddenly I found I'd painted—"
"The alien?"
"How'd you guess." The blonde woman smiled briefly. "Then it moved—made a face at me—and that's when I woke up."
"At least you weren't doing a nude piece. Were you?"
"No, thank God, it was just a bust."
B'Elanna spent a good hour listening to people's dreams, without revealing too much of her own to anyone. Her old Maquis comrade Marina Jor had dreamed about visiting her father on Betazoid, to find him having tea with "the alien" (as they were all now referring to the intruder). Joe Carrey had spent his entire dream trying to train the alien in Starfleet-standard warp core diagnostics, before noticing that something was off and waking up. Mortimer Harren's dream surpassed Jenkins' in surrealism, as he soared through the universe as a bodiless entity (a favorite recurring dream of his, he claimed), not giving the alien any thought until he realized he'd viewed it on five unrelated planetoids and one star.
B'Elanna was long finished with lunch before sitting down with Harry and Neelix to discuss their dreams.
"You first B'Elanna," Neelix coaxed.
B'Elanna realized that what she'd been able to keep to a minimum with her acquaintances and more casual friends, she wasn't going to keep from Harry and Neelix.
"Alright," she began. "But if either of you repeat this to Tom, I'll have you wearing your tongue for a bowtie…"
Not long after the mess hall conversations came a long, dizzying adventure through a shared dream. And after that, several nights of insomnia. B'Elanna and Tom reclined on the latter's sofa, having burned through seven rounds of chess and two bottles of wine. Tom had finally accepted, with surprising calm and maturity, that she wouldn't tell him her dream. B'Elanna then listened sympathetically, as Tom relayed his nightmare of dying in a shuttle crash (a common recurring anxiety dream for helmsmen).
B'Elanna sighed. "So, what now?"
Tom shrugged. "You tired?"
B'Elanna shrugged.
"You…wanna head off to the bedroom anyway?"
She shrugged again. They'd had so much sex in the last week, with the happy excuse of needing a way to exhort themselves into sleep, that both their libidos were all but wrung dry.
"Me neither," Tom sighed, reclining on the couch.
"I'm hungry," B'Elanna decided, resting her head against her fist.
Tom nodded. "Food sounds good."
"But I don't know what I want," B'Elanna said.
Tom pursed his lips. "I'm kind of in the mood for…corn."
B'Elanna froze, then glared up at him under her eyebrows.
"What?" he was so good at acting honestly bemused, she might have believed him, if she didn't know him.
B'Elanna cocked her head to the side, still staring at him.
"What?" Tom's straight face finally failed, dissolving into hysterics.
B'Elanna sighed through clenched teeth. "Harry told you."
Through laughter Tom managed, "O-only the Broken Bow part."
She didn't believe him. Of course, she'd left out the most painfully memorable part of her dream, Tom quoting her father. It would be years before she ever, if ever, opened up about her parents to anyone. Deciding she was sick of being negative for now, she rolled over on the couch.
"Corn on the cob does sound good right about now," she admitted.
A/N: It's funny, but although I dislike "Enterprise," the series' opening scene has kind of a classic feel for me. And once I got the idea for B'Elanna's dream it was impossible to resist.
On a final note: there are a ton of great stories on this site I would recommend, but at the moment, I urge you all to check out "Redemption" by CaptAcorn, especially if you are a Paris, Torres, or Paris/Torres fan. The story also fleshes out a lot of minor characters.