Day 8: Evening

It wasn't until they had finished eating and putting the younger children down for their naps that Torres got the opportunity to talk to Admiral Owen Paris alone. As luck would have it, he was the one to suggest they take a walk through the wooded land behind the house, probably to discuss some project that one was working on.

He barely had the chance to open his mouth to begin talking before B'Elanna cut him off. "We have a problem," she said bluntly.

He blinked a few times. "Is the new drive still giving you problems? I thought you had corrected for that with the—"

She shook her head brusquely. "No, nothing to do with work." She took a deep breath, unsure of how to proceed. "I don't belong here," she finally said in a rush.

He again blinked in surprise a few times, processing her words. "B'Elanna," he said slowly, "you know we've always thought of you as part of the family, even before you and Tom got married—"

Again, she shook her head. "No, that's not what I meant." She sighed deeply, then stopped walking to turn to face him. "Admiral, there's been something going on, some sort of quantum flux. I don't know what it is or what caused it, but for more than a week, I've been going from one reality to the next, and all of our attempts to get me where I belong have just sent me into a new reality, into a different B'Elanna Torres' life."

He raised his eyebrows at both her words and the rush she had said them in. "You haven't called me 'Admiral' off-duty since you were a third-year cadet."

She shook her head quickly. "I've never even met you until today," she said. "In my reality, I'm the Chief Engineer aboard Voyager."

At the sound of the ship that he believed to have been his son's coffin, his expression changed into one of concern. "B'Elanna," he said gently, "I know Voyager's disappearance was especially hard on you, being that you were pregnant with Izzy and everything else that was going on, but I thought you stopped having the nightmares a year or so ago."

She had no idea what nightmares he was talking about, and sighed deeply at the realization that he wasn't believing what she was saying. How different this Paris is than the one I'm used to, she mused. Not willing to give in, she shook her head again. "No, this isn't a dream, or a nightmare, or a fantasy. More than three years ago, Voyager was sent to the Badlands to capture the Val Jean and rescue Captain Janeway's chief of security, Lt. Tuvok. In my reality, and possibly yours, both ships were pulled into the Delta Quadrant by a dying entity who called himself the Caretaker. He was looking for a potential mate, and he was pulling entire ships from all over the galaxy to his array whenever his scans revealed a possible match. The Val Jean was destroyed during a battle with the Kazon, who occupy the same area of space as the Caretaker and the Ocampa, the people he was trying to protect. Instead of throwing all the Maquis in the brig for the seventy-year journey home, Captain Janeway combined the two crews into one crew, one Starfleet crew, making Chakotay her first officer. We've been steadily making our way back to the Alpha Quadrant since then."

He took a few seconds to process her story. "But you weren't on Voyager," he pointed out.

"No," she said quietly. She didn't remind him that she was talking about alternate realities and that there was another version out there who could have been. "I was on the Val Jean." It took a moment, but then she saw the expression on Paris' face when he realized she had been Maquis. When he didn't say anything, she continued. "You can take me to Starfleet Medical, have them run whatever scans they need, but they're going to find that my quantum signature is different than everything else around us. I don't belong here. All I want is to get back to my reality, to my ship. I'm not a quantum physicist, and my best efforts haven't exactly yielded promising results. If I'm going to get back to where I belong, and get your B'Elanna back to you, I need your help."

He stared at her for a long minute before he turned slightly and started to walk again. Torres followed silently, waiting for him to respond. "I'll do everything in my power to help you, B'Elanna," he finally said. Looking down slightly, he added, "Deep down, I have this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that what you're saying can't possibly be true, but you've never been anything but honest with me, not since that day during your Junior Survival Training when you nearly bit my head off." He turned to her and smiled at the memory, but that smile faded when he realized that the expression on her face meant that she had no idea what he was talking about. "How about this? We'll look over your research and calculations, and I'll see if I can figure out why it hasn't been working. Then tomorrow, we'll go into Starfleet Medical as well as the quantum physics labs and do full scans and see what we can find. Then, we're going to need to give you a full debriefing."

"Debriefing?" she asked with a frown. "What for?"

"Because," he said, not looking directly at her, "if your Voyager was lost in the Delta Quadrant, there's a chance ours was as well. We need as much information as we can get if we can even hope to find ours." Finally looking her in the eye, he quietly added, "There's a two-and-a-half-year-old back at the house who has never seen her father. If there's a way we can change that, I'm going to try to find it."

---

True to his word, Owen Paris spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening going over calculations and schematics with his daughter-in-law's counterpart, trying to find what she had missed. "This is impressive work," he said, taking a break to stretch his legs and refill their coffee mugs.

She gave a low chuckle. "Believe me, most of it isn't mine. I've been doing all I can to just understand it all."

He smiled in reply. "If I didn't believe you fully before, I do now. I see a lot of Kathryn Janeway in this. And even more Tom." His voice lowered as he said his son's name, his eyes fixed out the window of his office. It was a few more moments before he spoke again. "Kathryn was a bright student, a promising pupil, but quantum theory wasn't her thing. She much preferred the 'get your hands dirty' side of science. And Tom," his voice trailed off again before continuing, "Tom was an astrophysics major because it made him a better pilot. That, and he already knew how to do most the calculations, so he was essentially learning half of the material his classmates were learning."

Torres smiled at his wry tone. She had no doubt that these Paris men were as agonistic toward each other as the ones in her reality, but these two had obviously learned to get past it. She opened her mouth to ask about it, but Nicki stuck her head in the door to Owen's office before she got the chance. "B'Elanna," she said, her tone slightly halting. "It's time for Izzy to go to bed, and she wants you to read her a story."

"Sure," she said softly. She glanced over at Admiral Paris, not quite sure of what to do.

"Go with Green Eggs and Ham," he said with a grin. "It's her favorite, even though I'm sure she has the entire story memorized."

She grinned back. She knew the story; Tom had read it to her while he was agonizing over what he would use to make a holodeck program to give Naomi Wildman for her last birthday. She had chuckled at the rhymes and ridiculous drawings on the PADD, and he said that anything that could get the Chief Engineer to laugh like that deserved to be chosen.

After reading the small girl the story, she sat and watched her counterpart's daughter twist into a comfortable position, her teddy bear tightly in her arms. "Mommy?" Izzy murmured.

"Yes, Izzy?" she asked. She still wasn't sure what she thought of the nickname, but apparently, it's what she liked to go by.

"I love you, Mommy," she said, her voice heavy with sleep.

B'Elanna reached down and touched the girl's cheek. "I love you, too, honey," she replied, bending down to kiss her lightly on the forehead.

She watched her sleep for a few more minutes before returning to Paris' office, finding him again engrossed in the calculations. "I think I figured it out," he said excitedly as she entered.

When she didn't say anything in reply, he glanced up to see her looking thoughtfully at one of the pictures on his shelf, one of her and Tom at some indeterminate point. They were both in civilian clothes, both smiling at the camera. He was standing behind her, his arms wrapped around her waist, and she was leaning back into his chest, her hair brushing past her shoulders, as long and curly as she wore it as a cadet. "How did this happen?" she asked, picking up the photo for a closer look.

"That was a week before Tom left for DS9 with Voyager," he replied. "You had just found out you were pregnant with Izzy, and you were both so excited about it that instead of telling me and Alicia over the comm, you took the shuttle from Mars to tell us in person. He was worried about you, which you hated. He was about to tell Captain Janeway to find someone else to pilot Voyager into the Badlands, but you would have none of that. You told him that you weren't going to break, and that ship needed some hothead with his piloting skills, and it was only a three-week mission anyway." His voice grew thick at his last words, finding himself unable to look her in the eyes.

She gave a weak smile as she returned the picture where it belonged. It certainly sounded like the Tom Paris she knew. "I mean," she finally said, "us meeting, getting married. How did that happen? In the life I know, Tom and I didn't meet until our ships were taken into the Delta Quadrant."

He thought about what to say for a minute. "It's a pretty long and complicated story," he said, "most of which I wasn't really privy to. But you met at the Academy, when he was a first classman and you were a plebe. He was your student company commander." Well, that's certainly different, she thought. Her company commander during her first year at the Academy was a stern Vulcan woman who didn't take too well to Torres' frequent temper flares, feeling the need to write her up for each one. If she had someone with a sense of humor, someone capable of rolling with the punches, someone like Tom, maybe she wouldn't have left the Academy. Apparently, she didn't, she reminded herself.

"But how did we… I mean, aren't relationships between plebes and leadership…?" she trailed off, not knowing if that was one of the things Admiral Paris didn't know about.

Well, apparently he did. He smiled at her. "Oh, believe me, there was no relationship between you as a plebe and Tom as your company commander, but despite how much you two fought, you somehow became friends, or something close enough to it. In fact, you were, in some roundabout way, the one who convinced Tom to take the posting as a test pilot, instead of on the Exeter. Honestly, part of me thinks he took it to keep himself closer to San Francisco, to wait for you to be open to the idea of a relationship with him." She flushed at those words; her Tom was doing essentially the same thing, years later on a different side of the galaxy. "It took awhile, though," Paris continued. "In fact, it wasn't until after you left the hospital, after we returned from Junior Survival Training. Tom liked to joke that you were only with him as a way to get to spend time with me, something about us science types always sticking together." Although wary about what she had been doing in the hospital after a Survival Training course, she smiled briefly at the admiral's words; Tom said the same thing when Harry and she went off on one of their tangents, getting excited about something related to engineering. "You were married less than a month after you graduated from the Academy, and you both went to work at Utopia Planitia, him as a test pilot and you as a junior engineer."

"So different…" she murmured, trailing off.

"You and Tom aren't together?" he asked, slightly confused.

"No," she said, shaking her head slightly. "Life turned out quite different for both of us, and we both have a lot of baggage to deal with, but he's trying. He's really trying. And I think… I think I'm starting to fall in love with him. I just don't know if I should." She said the last part quietly, not sure why she was saying so much to a man she only knew from the stories of a jilted son.

"I won't pretend to know anything of what either of you has been through," he said. "And if things are so different, I won't pretend to know anything about my son's past or his actions, but I know him, and I know that he would never do anything to intentionally hurt you. He's not like your father, B'Elanna, I know that. He may fight with you, but he'll always fight for you."

His words surprised her, and it showed on her face. "I guess that's true," she said slowly.

"I know it's true." He glanced down at the PADD with his corrected calculations, and turned it off. "It's getting late, and it's been a long day, and tomorrow's going to seem even longer. We should call it a night."

She nodded; it had been a long day, but she wasn't ready to go to bed just yet. "Do you think there's any more of that cake?" she asked. For some reason, a good scientific discussion—one that had little to do with quantum theory or alternate realities—was just what she needed at the moment.

He grinned, knowing what she was thinking. "I'm sure we can scrounge up something."