A/N: Thanks to everyone for the kind reviews! And a special shoutout to Juddysbuddy, who noticed one of my more subtle references to the series (i.e. why Tom is hopeless at temporal mechanics. Just another thing to blame his dad for...)

December 2363

Tom sneezed all over his console, obscuring his mother's face for a fraction of second until the environmental filter dissolved the mucous. "Sorry," he said.

"It's fine, darling," his mother said. "It's not like you sneezed on my actual face. But please get a tissue." She was smiling at him, but it was clear there was something distracting her. "Now there's something I have to tell you about Christmas."

"Me, too," he said, sniffling. "I was going to call you later to warn you I'm sick." Tom paused for a coughing fit. "It's some kind of Andorian rhinovirus. But don't worry, you guys can't get it - the doctor said that humans are only contagious before they show any symptoms. I didn't want you to take one look at me and put me into quarantine."

"Poor thing," his mother said. "The doctor can't give you anything?"

"No," Tom sighed. "I just have to ride it out. I have to tell you, though, I'm really glad I'm going to be home in my own bed tomorrow night."

His mother's forehead creased. "Darling, that's what I called to tell you. Your father has to take an urgent trip to Vulcan."

Despite his mother's concern, Tom was relieved to hear this news. Even though he wasn't taking a class with his father anymore, having Tom as a student seemed to trigger the Admiral in taking an even more active interest in his son's academic performance than he had before. Every conversation now felt like an inquisition, and Tom suspected Owen was talking to his instructors behind his back. It would actually be nice to have a quiet holiday with his mom and sisters, get fussed over a bit, be the baby of the family again.

Unfortunately, as she continued to talk, Tom realized that's not what his mother had in mind. His sisters had already made other plans, and his mother had even sent Bones, their elderly spaniel, off to stay with the housekeeper. Tom was on his own. "But why do you have to go? Last I checked, you resigned your commission over twenty years ago," he whined.

His mother gave him her disappointed look. Ugh, Tom thought, anything but that. "I know how hard you've been working, and I know you were looking forward to some time at home, but I have other priorities right now. Your father's going through a bit of a rough patch - do you remember Katie Janeway? She was involved in some sort of firefight near the Cardassian border. She's fine, but I think it's brought up some bad memories. He'd never want to let the 'Fleet down, of course, so he won't say anything to his colleagues. But he needs my support right now."

Nice that the Admiral can ruin my holiday even when we're not spending it together, Tom thought as he signed off a few minutes later. He had promised his mother he would find something to do with himself, but he was at a complete loss as to what that might be. If he wasn't sick, he might just hang out at Sandrine's the whole holiday - the proprietor had a certain fondness for him and his pool game was getting pretty good - but when he'd shown up there earlier today for a bowl of soup, she'd made him take it to go.

"I don't care if you're not contagious, chéri," she said as she rushed him out the door. "You look like death warmed over. C'est trés mal pour l'affaire."

Six months ago he would have called the Days as soon as he'd ended the call with his mother, but that terrible dinner last spring had made things uneasy between Tom and Elizabeth. He still exchanged messages and comms with Charlie on a regular basis, who had chosen to do his physical training on Mars, but he hadn't had any real contact with his erstwhile roommate's parents since that night. With no other options, Tom bundled himself up as best as he could and ventured outside for supplies - many shops would close early tomorrow for Christmas Eve, and if he was going to be alone, he might as well at least have some comfort food.

He hadn't yet made it to his favorite boulangerie when he heard someone call his name. He turned to see Elizabeth Cornwall waving at him from across the street. In his illness-induced fog, he just stared at her blankly as she made her way through the holiday crowds to his spot on the sidewalk. "Tom! I'm so glad I've run into you!" she cried cheerfully. "Happy Christmas!" She took a closer look at him. "Why, you look terrible."

"I'm sick," he said - unnecessarily, as he was soon beset by a rather violent sneezing fit.

"I can see that, love," Elizabeth said, amused and concerned all at once. "Why are you out of bed?"

Something about the understanding way Elizabeth looked at him always made Tom admit to things he had fully planned on keeping to himself, and he soon found himself telling her the whole pathetic story. As they talked, he found out she had given a guest lecture today at nearby Aix-Marseilles, ("I must admit, I had an ulterior motive in agreeing to it. I was on my way to look for you when you turned up all on your own."). He also realized she was gently guiding him back to Academy housing, ("You shouldn't be out and about in your condition."). When they reached the front door of his dormitory, she told him she'd come up with him to help him pack a bag.

"For what?" he asked, his voice growing more hoarse by the minute.

"You're coming with me. If you think I can have a nice holiday knowing you're here, alone and sick on Christmas, then you've got another think coming," she told him firmly. "Charlie and Mitchell would love to see you as well."

"Isn't it 'thing'?" Tom asked.

"You're missing the point, love," Elizabeth told him. "And it's definitely 'think'. Come on, now."

Less than an hour later, Tom found himself curled up next to Elizabeth on a luxury shuttle heading over the Atlantic. The remaining awkwardness between them was dissipating quickly, and Tom was feeling drowsy. When she offered him her shoulder as a pillow, he took advantage almost immediately.

"Tom, I want to apologize. About my terrible behavior during dinner last spring," Elizabeth said quietly.

Oh, hey, awkwardness. I was wondering where you were, thought Tom as he sat up. "It's fine," was all he said aloud.

"It's not really. I'm not saying I don't violently disagree with your father on most things." Tom snorted at this. "But we were guests in your home and, as Mitchell likes to remind me, sometimes it's more important to be polite than it is to be right. Only sometimes, though," she winked at him. "Now put your head back down."

Tom complied. "You wrote my mom a letter to apologize," he said after a moment.

"I did."

"She appreciated it. My father still refuses to mention your name, though." He wondered if he should say what was really bothering him.

"I'm not surprised," she said with a small smile.

"You never wrote me," he blurted out sulkily.

"Thomas Eugene Paris!" she declared, causing Tom to jerk his head off her shoulder again. "Don't look at me like that, of course Charlie told me your middle name. And I made numerous attempts to contact you - you didn't return any of my messages! To you, I wanted to apologize in person. This is simply my first opportunity. Don't be such a child."

"Sorry," he said, rapidly filling with guilt at how he had ignored her the last several months.

"Oh for goodness' sake, it's fine. Now put your head down. We won't be in Boston for over forty five minutes and you can have a bit of a nap."

As soon as they arrived at the Days' house in Cambridge, Elizabeth sat him down with a bowl of tomato soup and then packed him off to bed, with a strict admonishment to both Mitchell and Charlie that they leave Tom alone to rest. He woke up twelve hours later on the morning of Christmas Eve to find that, while he wasn't fully recovered, he was feeling far better than he had the day before. Not well enough in Elizabeth's opinion, however.

"But I love skiing!" he complained when he found out Mitchell and Charlie were going off to Maine without him.

"And you'll love it just as much in two days' time when they go again, and you are well enough accompany them," Elizabeth said as she hustled her son and husband out the door, Charlie making faces at Tom behind his mother's back. "You can keep me company here, where it's warm and dry."

In the end, Tom had to admit it was pretty nice. They drank tea, and decorated cookies, and Tom convinced her to share numerous embarrassing stories about her son, (it didn't take much encouragement). Ancient holiday music played in the background, and it reminded Tom of past childhood Christmases when his relationship with his parents was far less complicated. As the sun faded into the dim light of a winter afternoon, he realized he wasn't as recovered as he thought, and Elizabeth sent him back to bed to rest before "the boys get home, and don't give you a moment's peace."

Despite Elizabeth's concern, when Tom emerged from the guest room a couple of hours later, he saw Charlie working quietly in his room on his latest engineering project, and he heard Elizabeth and Mitchell having a hushed conversation in the kitchen. Not wanting to disturb them, he sat in front of the fireplace in the living room and watched the twinkling lights of the tree. As Charlie's parents conversation grew more heated, however, it got harder for Tom to pretend he couldn't hear them.

"You don't know the whole story, Beth." Mitchell was saying. "There might be a very good reason she had to go. And it's not like Tom is a helpless child."

"Julia made it very clear at that dreadful dinner that she still thinks of him as a child," Elizabeth snarked. "And if Tom isn't helpless, Owen Paris certainly isn't either. She seems like a nice enough woman - why would she possibly want to stay with that awful man is beyond me."

"Beth, I'll say it again: you don't know everything there is to know about Owen and Julia Paris," her husband said patiently. Tom's stomach sank when he realized this was clearly not the first time Mitchell and Elizabeth had discussed his family. "You went into that dinner looking for a fight, it's not really fair for you to be upset that you got one."

"But I didn't get one - he ran away! So much for his almighty principles," Elizabeth said scornfully. "And frankly, I know all I need to know about Owen Paris. What Tom himself hasn't told me, Charlie has. He pushes that boy far too hard. If Tom doesn't learn to stand up to him, he's going to break, Mitchell. Mark my words."

Tom didn't know if he was angry on his father's behalf, humiliated that Elizabeth thought his psyche was so fragile, or grateful that at least someone understood how difficult things were for him. He did know that he needed to get out of this room before anyone noticed he was here. He stood too quickly in his urgency, and stubbed his stockinged foot on the heavy wooden table in front of the couch. "Shit," he spat out involuntarily as the pain shot through his foot.

"Oh, Tom." Elizabeth said sorrowfully, as she appeared in the doorway of the living room. "I suppose you were here all this time."

"Yeah," Tom muttered, rubbing his injured toes.

"I'm sorry, love. You shouldn't have heard all that," she said as she came around the couch and tried to help him sit back down.

Tom pulled away from her. "You shouldn't have said it at all. You don't know what you're talking about." OK, I'm going with angry at the moment.

"I know that you never really wanted to join Starfleet," she said calmly as she sat down on the sofa. "And I know that your father pushed you to do it anyway. And that he's still pushing you to do what he wants, not what you want."

"It wasn't like that," he seethed. "I made the decision to apply to the Academy. Yeah, it's because of what he wanted but it was my decision! You don't understand anything."

"So why don't you explain it to me?" She patted the cushion next to her. "Please. I hate for you to be angry with me. Help me understand."

Tom knew Elizabeth cared about him. Even more importantly, he knew she was one of the only adults in his life - maybe the only - that actually listened to what he had to say and thought it worthwhile. He sank into the sofa. "This may take awhile," he finally said.

"We've got oodles of time," said Elizabeth. "Mitchell's on cooking duty tonight, and he's a fussy chef. He'll probably need Charlie to re-program the replicator to make the right sort of mushrooms or some such before he's done."

Tom took a deep breath. "It happened during my last year of high school, before the Academy…"

"I won't be gone very long, Tom." Julia Paris was rushing around the kitchen - picking up her purse, putting it down, riffling through a drawer, then a basket on the counter; all this interspersed with a good bit of staring blankly at the marble counter, as if she was trying to make something she needed appear via force of will. "Thank you for skipping practice to be here. I asked your grandmother to change her appointment, but she insisted. I'd just feel better if someone's here with him. Just in case he...well, just in case."

"Mom, it's fine, really. I don't mind." The teenager leaned casually against the refrigerator, holding out her comm device for when his mother realized that's what she was looking for. "There's something I want to talk to him about anyway."

His mother stopped her frantic pacing. "Oh, darling, I don't know if that's a good idea. He's still… He's not really himself, yet. I think it's best that you just leave him be. He knows you're here - he'll tell you if he needs something. But otherwise…" She spotted the comm device in his hand. "Ah! Thank you, darling! But promise me you'll just leave him alone?"

"Sure, Mom. If that's what you want." He grabbed an apple from the basket on the counter and bit into it. "Hey, you should take Grams out for tea, or shopping or whatever. Take a break. You've barely left the house for weeks. I don't need to be anywhere."

"No, it's better if I stay close. I'll just bring your grandmother to her appointment and then home, and I'll be back." She kissed Tom on the cheek. "Thank you again, darling. And close your mouth when you chew."

Tom waited until he was sure she was well on her way, then dug into his bag for the PADD. He knew his mother didn't want him to go up there, but if she knew the news he had, he was sure she'd change her mind. It didn't feel right telling her yet - his father should be the first one to know. Tom smiled. His dad would be amazed, he was sure, to find out what his son had managed to accomplish without a single member of the extended Paris clan finding out.

Right before his father left on the mission that would end in his capture, he and Tom had had an ugly, knock-down, drag-out fight - the worst they'd ever had, and that was saying something. Since the day a very young Tom Paris visited his father at HQ and performed better than many first year cadets in a flight simulator, Owen started planning his son's career in Starfleet. The problem was, he never bothered to ask Tom what he wanted. After years of dropping hints, complaining, balking but ultimately just following the path his father set before him, something snapped in Tom and he told his father he had no intentions on applying to the Academy. That went over about as well as could be expected.

So when his father and one of his junior officers went missing, Tom was filled with guilt. Their last conversation had been one in which he basically rejected everything his father stood for. Afraid he'd never get to see his dad again, and frustrated that he was unable to help with the rescue effort, Tom took himself down to HQ and met with the commandant of the Academy, relying (successfully) on his last name getting him a meeting. By the time of Owen's rescue, Tom had already completed the entrance exam.

Life was hardly back to normal, however. His father had been hospitalized for nearly a month after Starfleet had gotten him back from the Cardassians; even now that he was home, he rarely left the bedroom he shared with Tom's mother. Tom suspected that Julia wasn't even sleeping in there anymore - one early morning when he was sneaking back into the house after a night out, he spotted her making the bed in the guest room.

He tried to ask her how his father was doing - if he seemed like he was getting better; but his mom always just put him off. She would just repeat the party line that Owen was getting the help and support he needed from Starfleet, and Tom's only job was to work hard at school and make him proud. He tried to talk to his sisters about the screams he had heard at night and how many times he heard his mother crying alone in a locked room. But neither of them lived at home anymore, and they seemed to prefer to bury themselves in their studies and accuse Tom of being overly dramatic rather than hear the truth of things.

But his father had come down for dinner last night, and was enough like himself that he had asked Tom how his grades were and talked with him about what he was studying in history class. Owen said that he might even make it to Tom's parrisses squares tournament next weekend. That's when the younger Paris knew it was time to give his father the good news - Tom had gotten the word two days ago, but had been waiting for the right opportunity to share it.

He knocked softly on the bedroom door, and found it cracked open. "Dad?" he called out softly. "Can I come in?"

His father was sitting in his chair by the window, looking out at the view of the bay. "What is it, Tom?"

"I have some news," he said hesitantly. "I think you'll be pretty happy about it." He approached the chair slowly, chastising himself for his nervousness. It's just your dad. He's still the same person. He handed his father the PADD. "Maybe you should read it yourself."

His father studied the PADD silently while Tom fidgeted. Why won't he say anything? he fretted. He's had time to read it five times over by now!

"What is this, Thomas?" Not exactly the proud congratulations he'd been expecting.

"Um… my acceptance letter. To Starfleet Academy." What the hell? Could he not read it? What did those bastards do to him? Maybe things were worse than Tom realized.

"Yes, I know that. I'm not an idiot," Owen snapped. "I mean, why the hell do you have one?"

Tom stepped back involuntarily. His father had high expectations for his children and was frequently stern and impatient. But Tom had never heard him speak to any of them like this. He tasted bile in the back of his throat and swallowed hard. "I applied right after you were... after you went missing. I thought this was what you wanted. That maybe…"

Owen threw the PADD onto the floor. "What I want is for you to stop being so damn flighty. What happened to the Naval Patrol you were so passionate about?" he sneered. "My God, Tom, do you always plan on being so aimless? Why don't you try following through on something for a change?"

Tom hurriedly snatched the PADD off the carpet and started to back out of the room. "I'm sorry, Dad. I didn't mean to bother you."

"Wait."

Tom froze.

"I'm sorry." His father was silent for a long moment, and Tom wondered if that was all Owen was going to say. "I didn't mean to say those things. I'm… I'm not in a very good place right now."

"That's OK." Tom whispered.

He heard a choked sob come from the chair. "Please go," his father pleaded.

Owen stayed in the bedroom for the rest of the week and much of the next one. He didn't make it to the tournament.

"I'm so sorry, love," Elizabeth said with compassion. "I had no idea."

"No one did," Tom said quietly. "It was classified. No one even told me or my sisters much of anything; I just pieced together what I know from eavesdropping, hacking into my mom's comms, that sort of thing." He stared at the flames and the logs crackling in the fireplace. "A few weeks after that, he came downstairs and went back to work like it never happened. It was so surreal - we all pretended like it was just another day, like nothing had changed." Tom sighed loudly. "Anyway, that's why he's like he is. And why I ended up at the Academy. It's not that bad, really - lots of people would kill to be in my position. And I do love the flying. I'm good at it, too."

"But is Starfleet your passion, dear?"

Tom stood up and crouched in front of the fireplace, using the old fashioned iron poker to jab at the flaming logs. "What difference does it make? Maybe I don't even have a passion. My Dad was probably right - I would have gotten bored in the Naval Patrol after a month and ended up at the Academy anyway."

"I don't think you really believe that," Elizabeth said. "Tom, I don't doubt that your intentions were good in going to the Academy. And I don't doubt that your father loves you and wants what's best for you. I'm just not sure he knows what that is. Or even that you know what that is."

"Oh, and I suppose you do?" Tom retorted.

"No, I don't suppose I do," she said, laughing a little. "I suppose I'm being a frightful old busy body. But I do know that you can't live your whole life based on getting someone else's approval. And if you do, someday you're going to wake up and wonder who you are and how you got there."

Tom shrugged, honestly not sure if he was annoyed with Elizabeth because she was dead wrong about him and his father; or because he knew she was right. Mitchell broke the silence between them by announcing dinner. Tom felt Elizabeth come to stand behind him.

"Truce?" she said. "It is Christmas, after all."

When Tom stood and turned towards her, he found himself once again completely disarmed by the genuine affection for him that he saw in her expression. She knew the moment he broke and wrapped him in a warm hug, something he hadn't had from either of his parents in what felt like a long, long time. Tom sighed. "Truce," he agreed. "I know you mean well. I just think I need some room to figure this all out for myself, you know?"

"Well, on that we are very much agreed." Elizabeth smiled up at him. "Now let's go see what Mitchell's been up to in there."

The Day family had a long standing Christmas Eve tradition of having a quiet moment of reflection and gratitude before starting their holiday dinner. As Tom took Elizabeth's and Charlie's hands to complete the circle, he knew what he was most grateful for was finding this family - people that didn't care what his last name was, and didn't have any expectations for what he should become; but rather accepted Tom Paris for who he was now, warts and all.