Chapter 29 – Plasma Storms
A/N: One more chapter to go. Thank you all for reading and following along.
###
The plasma storm had begun hours ago and was only just starting to fade. The twins hadn't liked it at all. Asa refused to go in his crib, exercising his recently learned favorite word "no." And anything Asa did Aeryn had to do as well. Which meant her two youngest were curled up in their bed tonight, finally sleeping soundly despite the storm just outside the strong walls of the hull.
Kathryn was fairly certain that they had never had this problem with her older children. Anson and Iva had been born when Voyager was transiting a part of space that was prone to storms and subsequently had learned to sleep right through it. The idea that the twins were so unsettled by a storm had been adorable at first but now it meant that they were the only ones in the family who got any sleep at all. She wasn't sure how two small little bodies could take up so much room in such a large bed but they managed to do it. Just the other night Aeryn had literally kicked her father out of the bed. Kathryn had finally fallen asleep when she awoke to the sound of a thud as her husband hit the deck. He looked up at her with an exhausted smile and shook his head as he carefully climbed back into bed.
Aeryn had been a kicker from the beginning. Kathryn could remember so many sleepless nights when she was pregnant when the sharp kicks of one of the twins left her wincing as she tried to find a comfortable position. She had been surprised how little it seemed to bother her brother. She supposed Asa had had nine long months to get used to his aggressive little sister but it always make Kathryn gasp in alarm when she felt a tiny little foot jab her ribs or her bladder. The latter had been a whole new level of fun. It made leaving the New Year's Eve party because Maura had decided to kick her bladder seem like a walk in the park.
Aeryn was feisty; there was no denying it. But every now and then she would curl up beside her mother and hold on to her tightly. In the end, that was really why Kathryn didn't mind them climbing into bed with her during a bad storm. As Tom had put it, they were much more adorable when they were sleeping.
And they were strong sleepers. Once they were down, they were out. The only thing that seemed to wake either of them up was if someone tried to put them back in their cribs. Chakotay had built them for the twins when they were born. At the time, Kathryn had not been pleased that their entire living room had been taken over by wood and sawdust which had the wonderful side-effect of making her sneeze. She was so sure that the twins could just use the cribs they already had; really, they had four other children at that point, surely one of them had to have a crib still. But Maura wasn't yet done with hers and Anson, Iva and Rory's had all gone to various other crewmembers who were starting their families. Somehow the twins really did need brand new cribs.
And they were beautiful, just like anything her husband made. They reminded her somehow of something her mother would have loved, all natural and handmade. Her homesickness always got so much worse during her pregnancies. She wanted her mother there with her as she walked through a new phase of life. She wanted her mother there as they decorated the nursery and found a place for the mountain of baby things that her crew had seen fit to give them at the baby shower. Never mind that unlike the crib situation, they clearly had plenty of baby things ready to be rushed into service. But she was never one to dissuade her crew from throwing a party, even if it was at her expense. When she got those precious moments of screen time with her mother, Kathryn would dutifully show her each and everything that her crewmembers had so thoughtfully given them. To her credit, her mother would smile and laugh at the utter excess. She never once would ask when Voyager would be returning. Her mother had been a Starfleet wife long enough to know that if there was any good news Kathryn would have told her right away. She just told her daughter how proud she was of the job she was doing out there and how much she adored her grandchildren.
"Do you ever wonder when we'll get home?" she asked quietly, turning on her side to face her husband. Chakotay had been reading. He was always reading, she thought to herself. How he found time to read or even concentrate on anything was beyond her. She wondered if he had always been like that, reading late at night until he fell asleep, eager to get his hands on anything new to devour be it a technical manual or a piece of ancient literature. He had once joked that he had started reading in order to keep up with her. She wondered how much truth was really in that statement.
"Soon?" he shrugged. "Honestly, I try not to dwell on it too much."
"I know," she sighed. "I was so sure that we'd find some miracle wormhole or conduit or slipstream technology that would bring us home long before our family was so established here. None of them have ever known anything besides Voyager. Their world is so controlled, so defined by bulkheads of this ship." She reached down to brush Asa's hair out of his eyes. "The people that love them are so close by. They've never had to travel across a continent to visit family. They've never had to be separated from someone they care about because of a job or schooling. How are we going to help them get adjusted to the real world?"
Chakotay smiled. "I always imagined we'd just move right next door to your mom and that that would solve all our problems."
"Built-in babysitter," she laughed softly. "She'd love that, you know."
"I know. I've talked to her about it."
Kathryn raised an eyebrow. "You have? Where was I?"
"Off being the captain of something somewhere," he said giving her a funny look. "We've talked a lot about what our lives will be like when we finally make it back home. She wanted to know what she could do to make the transition easier for you."
"She knows this is a long way off at this point, right?"
"She knows," her husband assured her. "She just likes to plan ahead. It made me realize where you got it from."
"So, what did you tell her? About helping us transition, that is," she asked.
He put his book down and turned to face her. "I told her that it was going to be hard. There will be no way around that. We've been living in an isolated community for so long. Every one of our needs is met by Voyager and if it isn't we find a way to make it work. Once we get back, we'll both have to work in a place that isn't 100 yards from our quarters or where our children go to school. You'll go to the Admiralty, no doubt."
"No doubt," Kathryn laughed.
"Why are you laughing about that?" he asked with a smile as he adjusted the sleeping toddler on his chest.
"I was always imagining that I'd be court-martialed for my many transgressions, the least of which is marrying my first officer," Kathryn said with characteristic chagrin.
"Ah," he nodded knowingly. "I don't think so. They've got an office with your name on it waiting for the day when you make your triumphant return."
"Whenever that may be," she groaned.
"Of course."
"What about you? What will you be doing in your fantasy?" she asked.
"Well, of the two of us, I am the most likely to face a court-martial…"
She reached over and gave him a playful slap, careful not to disturb Aeryn. "Very funny," she murmured. "Now be serious."
"All right then," he sighed with a dramatic sense of defeat. "I'll be teaching at the Academy. I'll be close by so I can come see you whenever I want. I'll make you guest lecture in all my classes even though we both know you don't know a thing about anthropology or archaeology. I'll watch from the back of the classroom as you tell my students about my great adventures sitting next to you for all these years. And…"
"Yes?" she prompted, her mind caught up in his vision.
"Well, I've always imagined you pregnant and complaining to my students that your condition is all my fault," he said with a laugh.
"Oh no…" she muttered. "Oh no. No no no no no….no." She shook her head firmly. "I will not be a pregnant Admiral."
"Do they even make a maternity uniform for that high of a rank?"
"Honestly, I don't even know," she admitted. "Can we just stick with a pregnant captain for now?"
He stopped and stared at her. "Kathryn…."
She felt her eyes go wide. "No, I'm not pregnant. Honestly," she said as she tried to reassure him. "I was just thinking one day…"
"I thought you swore these two troublemakers would be our last," he chided with a mischievous smile.
"Well, maybe," she blushed. "I don't know."
"That's okay," he leaned over to kiss her on the forehead. "I think we have our hands more than full at this moment." As if to confirm that statement, Aeryn sleepily grabbed onto her father's hand and rolled over, kicking her brother in the leg as she did it.
"What else did you tell my mom?" she asked quietly as she carefully moved Asa away from his kicking sister.
"I told her that we are going to need a lot of support," he told her honestly. "I told her that reentry will be hard. She knows what it is like for family members after a very long deep space deployment. Your father had several of those, didn't he?"
Kathryn nodded. "I was pretty young back then but he was gone for almost a year one time. I don't remember him having a hard time readjusting but I remember that most of his officers spent a lot of their free time at our home. I asked my mom about it once and she said that they just missed each other and needed to see a familiar face every now and then."
Kathryn smiled as she remembered. Their home in Indiana was large and had many extra bedrooms. Her mother and father had had a standing policy that anyone from his ships who needed a place to stay while they got back on their feet after a long mission was welcome for as long as they needed to stay. Their dining room table was always full of her father's officers, always eager to share their stories with Kathryn and her siblings. Most of the stories were comforting and reaffirmed her belief that her father could do anything; stories about power outages that a little creative engineering had solved, scientific mysteries that had the whole crew stumped until her father remembered something he had read long ago, and the wild antics of the younger enlisted ranks that the captain would occasionally join in.
Some of the stories were heartbreaking. The world of Starfleet involved loss, whether it was of time that could have been spent back home with loved ones, of community of those they had begun to rely on every day, or of life when an accident or incident took one of their own away forever. She had wondered how her father had managed to reconcile these two opposing aspects of the organization he loved so much. On the one hand, he had the chance to see things no one had ever seen before and work with some of the most talented and committed people on the planet. On the other hand, there was always the very real chance that something could go wrong and result in a devastating loss to the crew. Those two realities always seemed to be in balance with her father but it was something she struggled with her whole career.
Chakotay never had. She wondered if it came from his attitude of having nothing left to lose. He never dwelled on the morbid reality of their journey alone through unknown space. He kept that in his mind of course but he never let it overshadow the reality of the present: they were experiencing things no one else ever had and in a way no one would for decades to come. And he always knew they would make it back.
At first, she had been determined to put her own life on hold until they got back home, but he had helped her see how incredibly impractical and almost dangerous that was. Voyager was in the Delta Quadrant for good and there was a very real chance that it would be years before they made it home. He made her realize that she couldn't sacrifice her own happiness because of their situation. And, as he loved to remind her, he did have some ulterior motives for getting the captain to realize that she was allowed to follow her heart.
"When I learned about his missions and their long duration, I was so sure I didn't want to be a deep space officer, let alone a captain," she said, returning to the moment.
"What changed your mind?" he asked.
"Well, if you aren't in deep space there isn't much science to do," she replied with characteristic frankness.
"I suppose not," he laughed.
"I didn't want to be on patrol my whole career and I had been told that my diplomatic skills were most likely dormant, so that left deep space," she sighed. "But I never imagined it would be like this."
"Me neither."
"I mean, here we are, waiting out a plasma storm with our children. This certainly wasn't in the mission parameters," she said with a smile.
"I don't know what we did wrong with these two," he shrugged as Aeryn rolled off him completely.
"We never used to have these sorts of problems with the others," Kathryn agreed.
"No, never," he nodded. "We only had to deal with them sneaking out in the middle of the night and running all over the ship before we finally found them."
"I'd forgotten about that."
"They just wanted to help their mother focus on the present and not focus on when Voyager finally makes it home."
"I'll have to thank them for that someday," she smiled.
"When we finally make it home?" he offered, reaching over to turn off the light.
"Deal," she said with a laugh as the plasma storm faded away.
###
