Disclaimer: Star Trek belongs to Paramount/CBS. No copyright infringement is intended.
A/N: This was written for the 2015 VAMB Secret Summer exchange. Nynaeve506 requested: "A Paris/Torres story where B'Elanna finds herself envious of what Tom had in terms of family and that creating tension for them." This is a series of three missing scenes set in the middle part of season four.
My most grateful thanks to Delwin for beta reading, for the title suggestion, and for the nudge I always need to sign up for anything involving a deadline.
Dissonance
1. Post-'Random Thoughts'. Stardate 51386
"By the time I'd gotten to about thirteen, I'd started wishing that he'd be off-world on my birthday. What teenage kid wants a boring dinner with their parents with their dad using it as an excuse to review the previous year's academic achievements and set standards for the next? Where's the fun in that?"
B'Elanna tried to focus on her food and tune out of Tom's recollections: a difficult task given the lack of any other audible conversation in the now sparsely populated Paxau Resort program. Harry, sitting beside Tom and diagonally across the table from B'Elanna, chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of Jimbalian toffee tart, nodding along as Tom detailed the Paris family birthday traditions: a frosted chocolate cake, baked and decorated the previous day by Tom's mother or, on his mother's birthday, by one of his sisters, would be unveiled at breakfast time then hidden away again until the evening; old-fashioned paper cards would be opened at the table as the family sat together eating a breakfast of bacon, eggs and waffles. Presents were withheld until the school day was over, to be unwrapped in a controlled and pre-prescribed order as the evening's dinner roasted in the oven. To B'Elanna, it really didn't sound all that bad. In fact, it sounded quite appealing, and the more Tom rambled on in such a negative tone, the more irritated she became.
His pizza devoured down to the tiniest crumb, Tom pushed the empty plate aside and reached for his sizeable dessert. "It was the thought of the cake that got me through my father's sermons," he went on, before the chewing gum-like consistency of the tart – one of Neelix's concoctions which had, in this instance, served as Ensign Golwat's birthday cake – temporarily silenced his tongue.
They'd been late to the party: Tom held up on the bridge explaining a new navigational protocol to Crewman Grimes and both Harry and B'Elanna consulting on a problem with Gennaro in the geology lab. Most of the revellers had now called it a night. Golwat herself had overindulged on fermented Gallia nectar and had last been seen stumbling her way to sickbay, propped up between the strong arms of Vorik and Freddy Bristow.
Before her arrival on Voyager it had been nearly twenty years since B'Elanna had herself been gifted with a birthday cake. Miral Torres had never been an enthusiast of such 'frivolous human traditions'. The only anniversary B'Elanna's mother had deemed worthwhile was that of her own Rite of Ascension, a day that, on Qo'noS, would have been spent enduring a ritual of chanting and painstiks in the company of close family and friends. While B'Elanna had never (despite her mother's urging) undergone the rite herself, she'd still been obligated to celebrate the anniversary of her mother becoming a fully-fledged Klingon warrior. The only similarity the day bore to a typical human birthday was in the presence of candles – stinking kor'tova candles – and special foods. With the exact ingredients for her recipes rarely available on Kessik IV, Miral had substituted whatever she could source locally – ingredients that sometimes looked suspiciously like fishing bait and, at best, like the sandworms Principal Skinner would let his students feed to the grammar school's pet Entakian waterfowl. The painstiks had, thankfully, been omitted from proceedings, replaced by her mother's determination to torture herself by forgoing sleep for seven days straight. By the end of the week she'd been even more irascible than usual. And there was certainly no fun in that.
"B'Elanna?"
Looking up with a start, she met Harry's quizzical gaze. "Hmm?"
"I said: aren't you having any dessert?"
She glanced down and across at the multilayered slab on Tom's plate. At the steak knife he required to carve it up into bite-sized chunks. No wonder Chell had lost a molar.
"I think I'll pass, thanks," she replied, not even sure she could finish what was left of her salad. Besides the potential health hazard presented by the tart, at some time in the last five minutes she'd lost her appetite. And, thinking about it, she'd really not been all that hungry before beginning her meal.
"Another cocktail then?" Tom asked, beckoning to one of the resort's scantily clad female holograms who sauntered over with a tray of extravagantly garnished drinks that smelled strongly of real alcohol.
"Actually … I'm feeling pretty tired." Taking one last forkful of her meal, B'Elanna pushed back her chair and rose to her feet. "I'll see you in the morning."
Tom frowned. "But, I thought we were going anti-grav sailing out on the lagoon?"
"Tomorrow, maybe," she told him, before wishing both of her dining companions a good night and setting off towards the holodeck doors.
She wondered, at times, how differently her childhood might have been if she'd had a sibling or two. Her father might still have left – in fact, he might well have left even sooner – but, with a brother or a sister, B'Elanna would not have been the only human-Klingon hybrid in the colony. In the schoolyard she would have had an ally. And her mother would not have been the only other soul on the planet with an innate anger management issue – the only other person who could understand the struggle that B'Elanna faced just to get through a day without giving in to that inbuilt instinct to lash out at the slightest affront from one of the humans.
Tom spoke more freely of his sisters than he did of his parents. Like him, they'd been subjected to the same high expectations of their father. Like him they'd been encouraged to see the Galaxy in the same way that their father did. Encouraged to take responsibility and to revere Starfleet's ethical principles, in particular, the Prime Directive. But wasn't the pressure to succeed from a father with good intentions better than a complete lack of paternal guidance? Better than abandonment?
Entering her quarters, B'Elanna wasted no time in getting ready for bed, but, when her head hit the pillow, she found that sleep would not come easily. Tom's words had struck a nerve. Admittedly, given the day she'd had, she was already feeling hypersensitive: Carey had made the mistake of comparing the appearance of an oddly shaped meteoroid they'd beamed aboard for analysis to a Terran turtle shell. Then, she'd overheard Ensign Rollins telling Ensign Jenkins that one of the Klingon romance novels he'd 'accidentally stumbled across' when searching the ship's library for reading material had left him wanting an engramatic purge. B'Elanna could, on reflection, see both those incidents for what they were: not slights intended to upset her, merely comments spoken innocuously by persons ignorant of her presence or of the hurt that such statements might cause. But Tom … Tom should have known better, shouldn't he?