'GRRAaaaaaKKK' shouted Torres through clenched teeth, fighting the urge to writhe as sharp pain flashed once again across her ribcage.
'Please try to hold still, Lt. Torres,' intoned the Doctor in a singsong voice.
'Next time you might be more careful about where you aim that thing!' replied B'Elanna, testily.
'Next time, YOU might be more careful before you decide to go abseiling in the Hamar Mountains with the safety protocols turned off,' retorted the Doctor with an annoying smirk in his voice.
'Shut up, or I'll disengage your vocal matrix.'
'May I remind you, B'Elanna, that I am currently the one with a molecular scalpel in my hand, and that last time you decided to play nurse, you left the skeletal regenerator on the 'Human' setting, thus weakening your bone structure by 23.7 percent. I am therefore left with no choice but to re-break your entire ribcage—unless you want to do so yourself the next time you bend down to crawl along a Jeffries tube…'
Gritting her teeth, B'Elanna lay back on the biobed. For five weeks she had been forced to pay regular visits to Sickbay as the Doctor gradually restored the Klingon DNA she had inadvertently deleted with the skeletal regenerator. No wonder she had been so badly injured in the holodeck accident: by that time her upper body was barely Klingon at all. How could she have been so stupid?
As she had every day for the past weeks, she replayed the events in her mind, searching for a way to understand what had happened. Deep down, she had known that something was going wrong, but the attraction had just been too great: just one more dive, just a thousand metres higher… Had she wanted to kill herself? She was frightened to admit that she was still not sure. When the simulated Delta Flyer had thrown her from her seat, she had just been trying to do her duties; but then she had woken up in Sickbay to discover that more than the Delta Flyer had fractured: the people she had trusted the most had broken into her most private spaces.
In that moment she had despised Janeway. Despised her Starfleet principles. Despised her for trying to help, for thinking that she could even begin to understand what it meant to lose your friends-all of them-in a hopeless battle; how it felt to have your hopes built up again then thrown away. She had even hated Tom: the admiral's son had never had to prove that he was Starfleet material, whose family would welcome him with open arms back to Earth, who had never had to prove that he was as strong as a Klingon, had never had to prove that he belonged.
After a long, haunted night in her quarters it was Chakotay who had surprised her. Not the Chakotay of Voyager, but the old, Maquis Chakotay. As he walked through her door and dragged her onto the holodeck, she had seen something light up in his eyes, the vibrant, uncompromising anger that had driven him again and again into battle with the Cardassians, and which he had silently—and too easily, she had thought—put aside when he pulled on the Starfleet uniform and stood at Janeway's side.
Standing again in front of her former captain, B'Elanna had suddenly felt embarrassed: embarrassed that he had understood, embarrassed that he had had to rescue her like he did when she was thrown out of the Academy all those years ago, embarrassed that she had disappointed him. But she had seen something else in Chakotay's eyes, too, as he surveyed the dead Maquis bodies. Fear. Real, cold fear. Not of the danger outside, but of the danger within. At that moment, she realized that he understood her better than she did, and was afraid for both of them. She bit her lip, wishing that she could erase the holodeck program, erase the bad news from Starfleet, erase, erase…
As she opened her eyes, B'Elanna saw the clock tick closer to 08:00 and started to fidget. 'Doctor, have you finished already? My shift in Engineering starts at 8 hundred hours and I have a slipstream drive to decommission...'
'Lt. Torres, I quite understand your desire to leave Sickbay before Lt. Paris's arrival. I wish that your concern was justified. Luckily for you, however, I forsee little danger of Lt. Paris breaking his usual habit of arriving several minutes late with an implausible excuse that all the turbolifts were busy. Would that I were wrong…'
The Doctor stood back, looking smugly satisfied with his handiwork 'All right, you are free to go. Please report back tomorrow at 07:00 hours, and we will begin work on your epidermis.' Cursing him under her breath, B'Elanna strode towards the door, hoping that the Doctor was right about Tom. He knew, of course—all of them did. And he was trying so hard to make things better, asking her how she felt, treading carefully in conversation, and he had even replicated her a bunch of Talaxian irises. But it was so difficult to talk when you yourself didn't even understand what was going on. Gradually B'Elanna's concentration at work was coming back, but she still sometimes felt like throwing the tricorder down and leaving Voyager on the nearest freight transport, and she knew that it showed.
Outside Sickbay, B'Elanna stood impatiently outside the turbolift. Perhaps Tom had been right: the lifts certainly seemed busy at this time of morning. When the doors opened, she stepped inside, noticing Naomi Wildman in the other corner of the lift, a PADD and a Flotter doll wedged under her arm. B'Elanna smiled briefly, then looked straight ahead, trying to clear her mind. Naomi must be on her way to her morning lesson.
Suddenly, B'Elanna heard a giggle. Out of the corner of her eye, she was aware of Naomi looking at her; when she looked down, she saw Naomi quickly look away. Damn, thought B'Elanna—had the Doctor spilled hypoglue on her collar again?
'What are you looking at, Naomi?' she asked.
'Why is your face bumpy?' blurted out Naomi.
'My face?' said B'Elanna, putting her hands to her cheeks... 'Oh, you mean these?' she said with some relief, indicating the ridges on her forehead. Naomi nodded. 'That's because I am half Klingon.'
'What's Klingon?' asked Naomi.
'Klingons are people, like humans, and Talaxians, and Vulcans, and Ktarians… Some people say that Klingons are the strongest people in the Alpha Quadrant'
'Is it true?' asked Naomi, wide-eyed.
'I'm not sure…' answered B'Elanna, hesitantly.
'Don't you wish that you could make your face flat? I wish my face would be flat, like Captain Janeway… I'm going to be a captain one day' said Naomi, wistfully.
B'Elanna was silent for a moment, thinking about her broken ribs. How ironic that the skeletal regenerator had finally done the job of years of childhood wishing. 'Sometimes I do wish that I looked like other people on Voyager. But lots of us here look different from all the others: me, and you.. and Neelix, Seven of Nine, Tuvok… And I think you definitely look like a captain…' The ends of Naomi's mouth formed a faint smile, and she waved goodbye to B'Elanna as she left the turbolift towards the quarters that served as her schoolroom.
B'Elanna watched as Naomi walked round the corner. Things had been so simple at that age. Why were they so complicated now?
