Second Chances: Chapter 37

A/N: I know I could have recycled another AU I've written for another story over the years, but why do that when I can invent yet another?

Stardate 51157
March 2374
U.S.S. Voyager
Delta Quadrant

It was the crying of a child that awoke Lt. B'Elanna Torres, but it wasn't the cry of a two-and-a-half-year-old who had fallen out of her bed or had a nightmare. It was the cry of an infant.

"I got him," a voice grumbled next to her, and she turned in bed to see Tom dramatically flinging back the covers and groaning as he got up to get the baby. He yawned once, but was already making cooing noises as he lifted the infant from the bassinet and slowly made his way toward the replicator. He was good with Izzy, a natural father, just like B'Elanna knew he would be.

Except that wasn't Izzy. He had never met Izzy. And they weren't in their apartment on Mars.

She looked around her surroundings. They were clearly in a ship's quarters—Voyager? There was no way to tell from bed—but larger than the quarters she had woken in the day before, and with a viewport. There was a bassinet in the corner of the room, and next to it, Tom in a rocking chair, holding an infant and a bottle and looking like he was barely awake.

"Tom," B'Elanna said. "Something's wrong."

He snorted. "The kid doesn't sleep. That's what's wrong."

She smiled slightly, remembering when Izzy was an infant and her similar dislike of sleep. "No," she said a second later, shaking her head. "Has there been anything unusual in the last few days? With me?"

"Hard to say," he said. "Neither of us has been sleeping more than fifteen minutes at a time."

She shook her head again. "No, not that," she said. "There was some sort of quantum fissure. I belong in an alternate universe. Yesterday, that Tom said they had had a different version of me every day for the past week."

He stared at her for a minute before shaking his head and rubbing his eyes. "If this is some sort of joke, I haven't had enough sleep in the last six weeks to figure out the punchline."

"Not a joke," she assured him. "Where are we? Is this Voyager?"

Tom looked up, confusion clear on his face. "Yes," he said slowly.

"Where are we?"

"Our quarters?"

"I mean," she said quickly, "where is the ship?"

"B'Elanna," he said, exasperated. "I haven't been on duty in six weeks. I have no idea what our current position is."

"I'm not trying to be difficult, Tom!" she snapped. "Are we in the Delta quadrant?"

"Yes." He paused, then sighed. "I really am not awake enough for this," he muttered. "And quantum mechanics gives me a headache, so if you had some sort of nightmare and need my help sorting it out, please tell me know so I don't have think about alternate realities."

"Not a nightmare. Not a joke," she assured him, then finally got out of bed. "Where do I keep my tricorder? I can prove it." At least, she thought she could. She hadn't even thought about quantum mechanics since she had to take it at the Academy and wasn't sure if she remembered how to set a tricorder to scan for quantum signatures.

"Your tools are probably still in your office," he said with another sigh. "My tricorder should be in the closet. On the shelf. Or the floor. I can't remember."

"At least that part is the same," she muttered. Her Tom was neat, but had a tendency to put things in a place that made sense to him at the time, but then forgot what that place was or why he put it there.

She found the tricorder on the shelf in the closet and reconfigured it in the way she thought made sense. She scanned the room to get its quantum signature, then turned the tricorder on herself and heard it beep to signal the detection of a different quantum signature. "Well, shit," Tom muttered, then rubbed his eyes again. "Okay. What do we do now?"

She felt a rush of love for this man; as tired and cranky as he was, he believed her and wanted to help her, and then felt a rush of disappointment. This wasn't her husband, wasn't her life, and she didn't know how she had gotten there or how to get back. "I don't know," she admitted. "I just… appeared in an alternate universe yesterday. And then appeared in this one today."

"Should we go to Sickbay?"

She frowned. "Do you think there are any experts in quantum mechanics in Sickbay?" she asked, genuinely curious. It wasn't like she had bothered to get to know any of the doctors or nurses on Voyager before it departed, and had no idea what any of them knew.

"Doc's a lot of things, but I doubt that," he agreed with a sigh. "I think Captain Janeway would be the best bet, but it's… Computer, time?"

*The time is 0347.*

"Right," he said, sighing again. "Too damn early." He glanced down at the baby in his arms and frowned. The child didn't appear to care. "Well," he said, looking back up. "How about some coffee while we wait for a reasonable hour?"

They got their coffee and moved to the living area, settling into the couch and chair. At some point in the conversation, B'Elanna had taken the baby—Ben—from Tom. She hadn't enjoyed the newborn period and was relieved that Izzy was a little bit more independent every day—even though that came with "a lot more opinionated every day"—but she did like those little infant smiles as he tried out different facial expressions and those tiny little fingers and toes. "I had post-partum depression when my daughter was an infant," she said to Tom. "I feel like I missed out on the fun parts of having one this little."

"If there are fun parts, we haven't hit them yet," he grumbled. "He doesn't sleep, he eats all the time, and he has three lungs and isn't afraid to use them."

She laughed. "Izzy was the same way," she informed him. "Now she's an opinionated two-and-a-half-year-old who still doesn't like sleep and eats more than a person her size should be able to."

"Izzy?" he asked with a small smile.

"Isela Miral," she said, and the smile turned sad, and then quizzical.

"I miss your grandmother," he said. "She was a lot of fun." B'Elanna smiled and nodded. "But Miral?" he continued before she could comment on her grandmother. "That's surprising."

"It was too little, too late," she confessed. "I found her on Qo'noS a few months after the Voyager in my universe disappeared, when I was pregnant with Izzy. I had forgiven her for how she raised me. I thought we could have some sort of relationship, but she died a few months after that in a lab accident."

The confusion deepened on Tom's face. "You were raised by your mother?" he asked.

"Your B'Elanna wasn't?" she asked in return. He shook his head.

"She lived on Earth with your—her—father and step-mother," he said. "She spent school holidays on Qo'noS with your mother until she was fifteen, and then they stopped talking. She tried to reconnect after…" his voice trailed off, trying to figure out how to explain that. "That's a long story," he said a second later, "but Miral wouldn't see her. It's been ten years since they spoke."

"John raised her?" she asked, her mind still stuck on that piece of the story. There was a John Torres who had stood up for her, maybe been as good of a father to her as he was to Navi?

"That's how we met," he said. "John and Ananti moved into the neighborhood right before they were married. You were—she was—on Qo'noS and came back a week later. I was twelve."

Which would make her eight. She had literally grown up with Tom, right down the street. She pictured the Parises neighborhood, tried to figure out which house her family would have moved into. "Ananti?" she asked.

"Your step-mother," he explained, and she shook her head again.

"John married T'Pana, when I was about eight," she said, more to herself than him. Apparently John Torres was good for about three years between marriages, in any universe.

"Ananti was B'Elanna's kindergarten teacher," Tom said. "That's how they met."

"And Navi?" He looked at her, confused. "My half-sister," she explained, and he shook his head.

"Her sister's name is Kaia. Deven is their little brother."

"Kaia and Deven," she said, trying out the names.

"I have a holo," he volunteered, getting up to retrieve it. John she recognized, and herself. Ananti was a stunningly beautiful woman with a shy smile and with thick dark hair and deep brown skin, and Kaia and Deven, maybe ten and seven, seemed like a mix of their parents. They all seemed happy, all five of them, and for as weird as it was to see a holo of half-siblings she didn't know, her eyes never strayed far from her own face, from the happiness and lightness she saw there, and she couldn't think of a time in her own life that she felt the way that B'Elanna looked. She had certainly been happy, but... she couldn't explain the difference. She just knew that there was a difference.

And even though it wasn't her universe and she had no intention of staying, she felt a pang of loss that Navi hadn't existed.

"How did we end up here?" she asked, handing the holo back to Tom, not wanting to look at those people any more. "On Voyager," she elaborated.

He took a deep breath. "That's a really long story," he began.

"We have time before the captain wakes up," she reminded him, and he slowly nodded.

"I don't know where to begin," he confessed, and she gave him a minute to sort out his thoughts. "I crashed a shuttle on Caldik Prime," he finally said. "People died. Friends. I almost died, and the day I was released from Starfleet Medical was the same day as Deven's birthday party. I was sitting on the porch, drinking a beer, when you turned the corner from the transporter station. You had beamed over from the Academy and dragged me to the party. It didn't take much convincing; your dad was manning the grill, and he makes an amazing carne asada." He was confusing pronouns, but she didn't correct him, more interested in the story than in making sure it was correct. And John was pretty good at the grill. "We stayed for about an hour, and then beamed over to this bar I know in France." She was sure he was talking about Sandrine's, but again, didn't interrupt. "We had wine, then some more wine, and there's a room over the bar where we stayed the night." She didn't know if she looked surprised at that, but he quickly said, "It wasn't the first time we slept together—that ship sailed years before—but was the first time we spent the night together. We spent the night talking about life and death and doing the right thing. I don't know if she knew I was thinking about falsifying my testimony or not, but she convinced me not to."

He had gotten a slap on the wrist from the inquiry board, and had developed so much anxiety at the helm that he couldn't bring himself to fly. They gave him an assignment in the Ship Loss Investigation Center, investigating crashes during his rehabilitation, and it turned out, he was good at it.

And then a newly-promoted Lt. B'Elanna Torres struck a senior officer while on duty, and instead of getting drummed out of Starfleet, they gave her the option of making it look like she resigned, while going undercover with the Maquis. "I messed up," he confessed. "I accused her of taking the easy way out by leaving Starfleet instead of facing her punishment. She tried to tell me what was happening but couldn't tell me, and I didn't understand what she was saying. And then the Val Jean disappeared and Dad told me everything. I volunteered to fly Voyager on the rescue mission. It was the first time I had piloted a craft—of any size—since the crash, but I had to find her. Even if we all died looking."

He didn't give her an opportunity to say anything before he stood up, taking a still-awake Ben from her arms. "C'mon," he said. "Let's get dressed and go talk to the captain."