Second Chances: Chapter 4

A week had gone by since Admiral Owen Paris had appeared at the Theoretical Propulsion Group lab with two other admirals, and Lt. B'Elanna Torres still found herself trying to grasp the idea of this new normal she had found herself in, one that somehow included a pregnancy without including Tom. In that week, she had another obstetrics visit with Dr. Yamisuko, where he frowned disapprovingly of her weight loss—"You're in your second trimester now. You should be gaining half a kilogram a week, and you've lost two since your last appointment."—which got her angry response that he should see how much weight he would gain when faced with losing a spouse. He dropped it, but judging by the message from Dr. Gault that appeared the next morning, decided to take it to someone with more authority. She ignored that message, just as she had been ignoring all the messages that had come in during that week. She couldn't deal with sympathy, not from anybody, not right now.

The only thing she still had was work, and she immersed herself in it, putting in longer hours at the lab than she ever had before, mostly because everyone she worked with was too afraid to tell her to go home. She didn't know what she would have said to them if they had tried; would she have pointed out that she no longer had someone to go home to? Be honest and say that work was the only thing that kept her from screaming at the top of her lungs or putting her fist through a wall? Try to convince them that she cared more about her experiment than her health, her baby, her missing husband?

She had had a headache for the better part of two days that she was trying to ignore through work as she set up another experiment to test the reaction speeds of a warp core to the new dilithium substitutes being created elsewhere in at UP. She was about halfway through with the vector analyses needed to create the experiment parameters when her vision suddenly went dark, and the next thing she knew, she was on her back in the infirmary. "What happened?" she asked, her voice sounding thick to her own ears.

Dr. Yamisuko appeared in her line of sight. "How are you feeling?" he asked, not answering her question.

"Confused," she replied, trying to sit up. His hand stopped that idea.

"Relax, Lieutenant," he encouraged her. "You passed out at your workstation. We're still trying to figure out why. Did you have breakfast this morning?"

"Yes," she informed him, annoyed at the continued questions of her eating habits. Seriously, didn't they have anything better to talk about at the Mars Station infirmary than how much one pregnant lieutenant ate? "And dinner last night," she continued, sure that that would have been his next question.

"Hmm," he replied, studying his medical tricorder. "Your hormone levels are fairly erratic. Since you're the first pregnant hybrid patient I've seen—"

"When can I get back to work?" Torres interrupted, this time successfully sitting up. Dr. Yamisuko looked surprised at the question.

"I've already arranged transport to Starfleet Medical," he informed her. At the look on her face, he quickly added, "Dr. Gault thought it would be a good idea for you to be under observation for a few days."

"A few days?" she echoed in disbelief. "I can't spend a few days in the hospital! I have work, there are experiments that need to be done—"

"You're sixteen weeks pregnant," Dr. Yamisuko interrupted. "You have a baby that is depending on your continued health and safety. You can't afford to be putting off medical care for your work."

Torres flushed at his implication that she was putting her work before her child, before she realized that that was exactly what she was doing. "A few days," she acknowledged through clenched teeth.

Little did she know just how many days those 'few' would be.

The medical transport to Starfleet Medical was uneventful, except for the realization about halfway between Mars and Earth that this was the second time in her life that B'Elanna Torres had been on a medical transport to Starfleet Medical. During the first, she had been in stasis and nobody knew if she would survive the trip or what would happen when she arrived. This time, she was fully awake, and while fully confident that she would survive the trip, she still didn't know what would happen when she arrived.

It came as no surprise to her that Owen Paris was waiting at the hospital when she arrived. Guess patient confidentiality has a different meaning when your father-in-law is an admiral, she thought with a sigh. Fortunately, they whisked her off to a treatment area before they had the opportunity to say a word to each other, and she didn't quite know what to make of how relieved that made her. After his son, Owen Paris was one of Torres' favorite people to talk to. Even though she hadn't exactly acted that way the week before.

Dr. Gault did a lot of 'hmm'ing and 'ahh'ing as he studied Torres' test results and vital signs, surrounded by his usual group of adoring residents and medical students. Knowing the hybrid obstetrician's usual gruff manner, Torres was sure it was his medical knowledge they adored, not the man himself.

He soon ushered them out of the large room, securing the lock on the door after the last left before he turned to face his patient. For a brief second, there was an expression akin to sympathy on his face, before he just said, "Welcome back, problem child."

"The only reason I'm here is because you pressured my usual obstetrician to put me on the transport!" she shot back. "Believe me, if I had my way, I'd be back at work by now."

"No, you'd be back on the floor after passing out after you threatened physical harm to your 'usual obstetrician' if he didn't release you," Dr. Gault replied. "Usual obstetrician," he scoffed. "I've been seeing you since you were a cadet."

"I was a cadet less than a year and a half ago," she shot back, even though she had been seeing him since she started at the Academy.

"And you've only been under Dr. Yamisuko's care for eight weeks, so I guess I still win that round." He took a seat on the stool in the treatment room, and Torres steeled herself for more bad news. In the five and a half years she had been his patient, the only other time Dr. Gault had sat down during an appointment was when he was explaining that if she and Tom wanted to have children, it would require a permanent Klingon mating bond that would make it impossible for her marry again if anything happened to Tom.

Thanks, Dr. Gault. Always a pleasure.

As it turned out, this conversation had a lot to do with that previous one. "It's those pesky Klingon hormones again," he began, before sighing and rubbing his forehead. "I really didn't see this coming."

"See what coming?"

"We knew that the biochemical reactions started at the time of bonding would be critical to fertility and the ability to carry a fetus to term," he said. She remembered that conversation in great detail, remembered repeating it to Tom in his apartment when they were still engaged and trying to figure out if they wanted to have kids or not. "I didn't anticipate that the continued presence of the male parent—"

"My husband," Torres interrupted. "The 'male parent' is my husband. Tom."

"Right," Dr. Gault agreed before sighing again. "The production of the hormones that assist in pregnancy—the ones I'm sure you're quite acquainted with by now—require continued boosting, for a lack of a better term, of pheromones. Specifically, your husband's pheromones. A poor analogy, but an analogy nonetheless, for lack of a better one, is the increased sex drive in human women during pregnancy."

"We are not talking about my sex drive," Torres said emphatically. That was not a conversation she was ever comfortable having, not even with her obstetrician.

"No, we're not," Dr. Gault agreed. "We're talking about the fact that you passed out at work this morning because your body is out of whack because your husband is gone."

She flushed at the word 'gone', thinking it to be one of those polite euphemisms for 'dead', before she realized that as far as Dr. Gault was concerned, gone on a mission had the same implications for this pregnancy as gone and dead. "So what do I do?" Torres asked. "I wish I could make Tom come back, I really do, but—"

"But Starfleet Command isn't optimistic that that's going to be happening," he finished for her. He softened, which scared her more than anything else that had been going on the last week; Dr. Gault was never soft. She doubted he was soft with his own children. "I know you're going through a lot right now," he said, his voice gentler than she had ever heard. "And I know the last thing you need is one more thing to think about and worry about. But we're going to figure this out. Between me and Dr. Hrom, the hybrid endocrinologist, we're going to make sure that you and your baby make it through the rest of this pregnancy without any problems."

The baby. In all of her rapid thoughts since Dr. Gault had sat down and started talking, she had forgotten that those hormones he was talking about were necessary for the baby's development. "The baby—"

"Is fine," Dr. Gault assured her. "Just a little bit of excitement, not much more than you give it when you insist on a second raktajino of the day." He waited for any other questions, and when she didn't ask any, gave her a thin smile and stood from the stool. "I know you have some family here waiting to see you. I told them to sit tight until we get you into an antepartum room, which should be within the hour. Then do you want me to send them in?"

She knew what family he was talking about, the only family who would be there: Tom's family, her in-laws who she had been avoiding for the last week. After her grandmother died the year before, the only contact she had with her own family was through her half-sister Navi, and she doubted the eleven-year-old would be here in the middle of a school day. "I guess I should see them," she said. Dr. Gault nodded once, not in agreement or disagreement, and headed for the door. "Doctor," she called out, stopping him. He turned, a questioning look on his face, and she bit her lip, not sure if she wanted to ask the next question or not. "The baby," she said. "Is it a boy or a girl?"

It was an agreement she and Tom had; she wanted to know when they found out they were pregnant, he wanted to be surprised. They compromised on finding out together when he returned from the Voyager mission.

Asking without him there was as close as she could get to acknowledging that he really was dead.

Dr. Gault knew the reason why she didn't already know the answer to that question, and again, the look of sympathy was there, but gone just as quickly. He smiled slightly at her. "It's a girl," he answered. "You're going to have a daughter."