Second Chances: Chapter 17

Stardate 49581
July 2372
San Francisco, Earth

B'Elanna Torres was curled up in a chair in the den, mostly focused on the reports she was reviewing, but part of her attention dedication to the sound of children playing out in the yard and part dedicated to how much her legs hurt. The Starfleet Marathon had been that morning, and just as she—and, she was willing to bet, Coach Ulshanov—had expected, Sydney had pushed harder than the planned pace. It was a gamble that had paid off, her first finish under three hours in a few years, although she had confessed immediately that it hurt and it was only her need to stay with her younger, marathon-distance-naïve sister-in-law—who had been doing all that she could to keep up with Sydney for 42.2 kilometers—that kept her moving.

And somehow, mere minutes after they crossed the finish line, Torres found herself agreeing to doing another the following year, as long as she picked the location. She really wished she knew why it was so hard for her to say no to members of the Paris family.

Torres and Izzy would be taking the shuttle back to Mars in a couple of hours, but the Wylands were staying a few more nights before the Pathrind departed again. Kajsa and Stephanie were enjoying playing with their cousin without all the distractions of everyone who had been at her first birthday party the day before, and B'Elanna was hoping that they'd tire her out to the point that she would sleep the entire trip back home.

Part of her couldn't believe that she had had Izzy for an entire year already—and that she had kept her alive that long—and part of her couldn't believe that it had only been a year. At times, she found it hard to remember what her life was like before everything had been scheduled around the needs of the newborn, then infant, and now toddler.

She returned her full attention to her reports and smiled slightly at what she saw on the next, one of ships recommended for decommissioning. The chiefs always reviewed the ships that came in for repairs and made recommendations regarding whether it should be repaired or scrapped. She had to review the reports and examine the ships herself, but had yet to disagree with any assessment the chiefs had made. She knew this one would be no exemption, because S-class shuttles had been phased out more than a decade before; any time one came to a repair company, it was removed from the fleet and replaced by something much more suitable to, well, any space travel.

With a slight smile, she sent the report over to Owen, sitting a few meters away in a chair of his own. He must have opened the attachment immediately, because she heard a snort of laughter a few seconds later. "I didn't know there were any Ses left," he commented.

"It must be one of the last ones," she agreed. She checked the report again, to see if she could figure out how it had escaped notice for over a decade. "It looks like it was in a retired admiral's private hangar. She died last year and her son just found it." She was a little impressed with said deceased retired admiral and the fact that she had hid Starfleet property—an S-class shuttle was pretty small, but still an entire shuttlecraft—for forty years after retirement. "It's going to be decommissioned. I'm going to request it, instead of sending it for scrap."

He frowned slightly, glancing over at her before skimming the report. "It's in bad shape," he finally said. It was; she doubted the thing had flown in the forty years in had been in that hangar.

"I figure I still have about seven years to fix it up," she said dryly, making him smile sadly. "It'll be a good project," she said. "I've never broken down a shuttle and built it back up from the studs before." She didn't say it out loud, but she wanted that shuttle, wanted to be the one to rebuild it, because S-class shuttles would always make her think about Tom's story of learning how to fly with his father, and she felt like fixing that shuttle up and making it able to fly again would be like bringing a piece of him back. The man loved anything that flew, but there was a special place in his heart for shuttles and other small ships; not only were they what he learned to fly on, but they were smaller and a hell of a lot more maneuverable than full starships, which gave him much more opportunity to show off his flying skills. He was always thinking of ways to "improve" shuttles to make them even more maneuverable, which usually involved compromises in systems that really shouldn't be compromised. He used to dream of designing his own shuttle from scratch; B'Elanna would warn him that he should keep such fantasies quiet at work, or he'd find himself reassigned from R&D's test pilot division to their ship design division.

And he loved tinkering with anything he could find to tinker with. She smiled slightly at the memories of lazy weekends in the Parises hangar, working on the family shuttle. Tom would tinker with something—usually something that didn't need tinkering with—and B'Elanna would insist that he stop and just let her fix whatever needed to be fixed, before he broke anything further. Or ended up changing something that resulted in someone flying the damn thing into a lake.

"It's going to be a lot of work," Owen said warningly. She snorted.

"I'm the commander of a repair company," she said dryly. "That would be pretty embarrassing if I couldn't repair a sub-warp two-seater."

"You already have a lot on your plate," he pointed out, "and you're going have a lot more, if this war with the Dominion goes the way a lot of people think it's going to go." She frowned, reading between the lines of what he was saying and not saying.

"Why don't you want me to do this?" she asked.

"I don't not want you—"

"Owen!"

Kahless. Why were the Paris men so difficult?

He sighed. "You said you wanted to live your life," he said. "I just want to make sure you're living your life. Not Tom's."

It was her turn to sigh. She didn't quite know how to explain this to him, this need to hold on to the things that reminded her of Tom, because she was terrified that by the time Izzy was old enough to start asking for stories about her father, that she wouldn't remember any to tell. But it was more than that; independent of Izzy, she craved things that reminded her of Tom, of the time they were dating and the fourteen months they were married, as if she needed to remind herself that those years had existed, that he had existed. It always brought her a stab of pain, which was somehow a relief. She didn't want to think about what would happen when the thought of him missing from her life didn't hurt anymore. "Going out in that shuttle when he was eight was one of his favorite memories," she finally said. Owen's sad smile returned.

"It's one of mine, too," he confided.

"Izzy's never going to know her father," she said, "but I want her to feel connected to him. I want her to have the opportunity to learn how to fly the same way her father did."

"I wish she could," Owen said, "because that would mean her father was still around to take her up in that shuttle and hand off the controls."