Second Chances: Chapter 18

Stardate 54468.8
October 2377
U.S.S. Voyager
Alpha Quadrant

"Do we seriously have an S-class shuttle?" Lt. Tom Paris asked excitedly. After a pointless and very distractible senior staff meeting at 0800, he met up again with B'Elanna, Izzy, and his father for breakfast, before they went their separate ways for the duty day—B'Elanna to engineering, Owen back to Captain Janeway's ready room for more planning of Voyager's arrival back to Earth, Izzy to her tour with Naomi Wildman, and Tom for a quick nap.

"'We'?" B'Elanna echoed with an amused look. "I'm the one who rescued it from the scrap yard, broke every system down to its base parts, repaired or replaced almost every single component, had to figure out a way to transport it to Earth, had to find a hangar space for it on Earth, and put everything back together again. You'll be lucky if I let you look at it."

"She barely lets me look at it, too," Izzy reassured him.

"You were my biggest helper on that repair," B'Elanna pointed out to their daughter.

"But nobody else helped you," Izzy pointed out, seeming confused. She turned back to her father. "Mom says I can fly it someday, but she says it isn't ready yet."

"Sorry I'm so concerned for your safety," B'Elanna replied. She smirked over at her husband before returning her attention to her daughter. "But now you have an actual test pilot around, so we can make sure it's ready to go."

"I'm your guinea pig?" he asked with a smirk of his own.

"I think flying newly repaired ships before anybody else is actually in your job description," she pointed out. "You saying you don't trust my engineering?"

He snorted. "If I didn't trust your engineering, we'd still be somewhere in the Delta quadrant." He had a hard time believing that that's where they were only twenty-four hours before; so much had happened since then. "It's just... been a long time since I was a test pilot." The last six and a half years had been spent on Voyager, and while there were certainly moments—and months—of excitement, for the most part, he was just a chief helmsman.

More than half of his career had been spent doing the job that he had been so unwilling to do that he stopped talking to his father for almost a year because of their fight about it. And now sometimes he forgot that he had had another job before it. He just didn't think of himself as a test pilot anymore, and it was almost surreal to realize that that was still what B'Elanna thought of him as. The last time he had been a test pilot had been…

And then he remembered that he did have a much more recent stint as a test pilot than when he took Voyager out for an ill-fated shake-down cruise. "We're going to be staying put for another day or two," he said thoughtfully. "If there's nothing going on this afternoon, I'll ask Captain Janeway if I can take Izzy out on the Delta Flyer."

"The Delta Flyer?" Torres asked.

"Your husband's girlfriend," Lt. Carey said lightly, hearing the tail end of the conversation as he approached their table. His eyes widened as he realized that he probably shouldn't make such jokes to a lieutenant commander in front of an admiral.

Fortunately, B'Elanna smirked at the joke. "Ah, right, your shuttle."

Paris gave her a put-out look. "The Delta Flyer is much more than a shuttle," he said indignantly. B'Elanna chuckled.

"I told you to be careful with those ship design dreams," she teased. "I'd love to see it, when we get the chance, but that's probably not going to happen until we're back on Earth." She stood from the table and gave Tom a quick kiss before dropping another on top of her daughter's head. "Enjoy your tour and don't break your dad's shuttle."

"It's not a shuttle!" he called out after her as she and Carey headed out of the mess.

Lt. Paris entered the mess hall after his nap to find Naomi Wildman and Izzy giggling in a corner table, a kadis-kot board between them, a reddish gold head leaning close to one covered in dark curls. "Ladies," he greeted with a nod, which sent them both into a fresh round of giggles.

"Hi, Lt. Paris," Naomi said. "I'm teaching Izzy how to play kadis-kot."

"Who's winning?"

"I think Naomi," Izzy replied. "But I don't really know all the rules yet."

"It's easy once you get the hang of it," Naomi said. "We can play later if you need to go."

"Dad said we're going to go out in the Delta Flyer," Izzy said excitedly. "Do you fly?"

"No," Naomi said. "My mom said I'll learn when I'm older."

"I've never flown a real ship," Izzy said. "The flight league only lets kids fly in simulators until they're ten. But I'm the best in my age group. I broke the record for five- and six-year-olds right after I turned six." She grinned up at her father, the same victorious grin her mother had when she won an argument, before turning back to Naomi. "I broke my dad's record."

"And you still have a lot of records to go before you get all of them," Paris reminded her. He had thought he would be sad when the oldest of his records, from the simulator division of the same junior flight league Izzy now competed in, had fallen, but when B'Elanna had laughingly told him via the datastream that Izzy had broken the record by 1.2 seconds, he felt mostly pride. And some sadness; not at the fallen record, but at the fact that he hadn't been there to coach her.

They entered the shuttlebay and headed over to where the Delta Flyer was parked. "Has your grandfather taught you about following a pre-flight checklist?" he asked.

"He said if you don't do it, you'll end up flying a ship into Lake Tahoe," she replied. He gave a snort of laughter.

"Well, he's not wrong," he had to admit. He handed her a PADD with the checklist for the Delta Flyer and they went through it together. She was a smart kid; he had known that from their letters over the datastream, but he had figured that would be the case from the beginning. She was B'Elanna's daughter.

Her eyes widened when they entered the ship and headed for the front stations. "This ship is so cool!" she exclaimed, her eyes wide at the sight of the tactical controls.

"It's going to be a lot different to fly than the simulators you're used to," he warned before they went through the rest of the pre-flight checklist.

He took the left console, which was the main pilot controls, but he had intentionally designed the ship to be flown from either station. "Have a seat," he said, gesturing to the other side.

"Are we going to fly it?" she asked excitedly as she sat. He looked over at her and smiled at how small she looked in that seat.

"That's up to whoever has the conn on Voyager," he replied. "Do you want to ask?"

"Me?" she asked.

"Why not?" he asked with a shrug. "I'll open a channel, and then you say, Voyager, this is Delta Flyer, requesting permission to launch. You got that?"

Her eyes were wide as she nodded excitedly. He opened the channel, and then gestured for her to speak. "Voyager, this is the Delta Flyer, requesting permission to launch," she said obediently.

*Delta Flyer, this is Voyager,* Commander Chakotay's amused voice replied. *Permission granted. Stay within transporter range, Miss Paris.*

"Aye, sir," she replied. Her eyes widened again and she turned back to her father. "I don't know how to launch a shuttle," she admitted. He chuckled.

"That's okay," he said. "I'll take us out. You don't have to fly if you don't want to."

He was teasing with that last line, and just as expected, she whipped her head toward him so quickly that her hair flew and hit her in her face. "But I want to!" she exclaimed as she swatted at her errant hair.

"Actual flying is different from simulators," he said, struggling to keep from laughing at the anguished look on her face.

"But Dad—"

And then he did laugh. "I'm joking, Izzy," he said. "I'll turn over the controls as soon as we're a safe distance from Voyager."

The look she gave him was a combination of exasperated, annoyed, and excited, and she must have gotten it from her mother.

He took the Flyer out and took it out a good distance from Voyager, and then cut the engines and came to an all-stop, Izzy almost shaking with excitement. "You ready?" he asked, getting an excited nod in reply. He transferred primary helm control to her console and switched it to manual control. "It's on manual, so the computer isn't going to correct your commands." She nodded again, this time impatiently, her hands hovering over the controls. "The conn's yours, so go ahead and go when you're ready." He kept his voice calm, but his hands were clenching his armrests, because he knew exactly how this would go.

As predicted, the ship lurched forward, the internal dampers not able to keep up with the sudden movement. Izzy made a yelping noise, her hands flying from the controls in surprise, and Paris was thrown back in his seat as the ship abruptly stopped. "Never take your hands off the controls," he said firmly. She turned to him, her eyes wide.

"Why did it do that?" she demanded.

"Because we're on manual," he said calmly.

"Why?"

"Because that's how you learn how to fly. You have to learn how the ship responds to your commands in order to learn how to give them." He stopped abruptly, remembering a conversation in a holo training suite a decade before, a half-Klingon plebe almost gleeful as she smacked him around with a bat'leth with the safeties low, because you can't learn how to block an advance unless you feel the consequences of those advances.

Well, it had worked well enough for him to ace that presentation for his combatives course. And apparently well enough for him to steal her teaching technique to apply to teaching flight lessons.

"Do you want to give it another try?" She looked hesitant, but took a deep breath and a slow nod. "Okay," he said. "Keep your hands on the controls, and let's do it gently this time."

They ended up spending five hours out on the Delta Flyer, and after the first few awkward attempts at controlling the shuttle, Izzy seemed to get the hang of it rather quickly and was genuinely disappointed when they got the hail from Voyager asking them to come back in for the night.

She was very excited to talk about her flying adventures with her grandfather and Captain Janeway; B'Elanna was, to no one's surprise, still in engineering and had made some vague statements about stopping at some point. After they finished eating, Tom and Izzy went back to his quarters to watch cartoons until B'Elanna was done. Even though he was pretty sure they'd both be asleep before she pulled herself away from whatever extensive diagnostic she was running.

Sure enough, Izzy was asleep on the couch and using Tom's lap as a pillow and he wasn't far off when the doors to his quarters slid open a few minutes after midnight. "Hey," B'Elanna said quietly, a smile on her face.

"Hey," Tom replied. He nodded down to their daughter. "She fell asleep about an hour ago. I don't want to wake her up."

B'Elanna's smile widened. "She's a heavy sleeper," she said, lifting Izzy's head to free him. "She doesn't sleep as much as they say six-year-olds are supposed to, but when she's out, she's out." She replaced Izzy's head on a pillow and got some incoherent murmuring from the child. "Do you have a blanket? She'll end up kicking it off in an hour, but I still like to pretend."

The only one he had needed for the last six and a half years was the one on his bed, so he replicated a new one. B'Elanna smoothed it over Izzy and gave her a kiss on the top of her head before they moved to the sleeping compartment of the quarters. "How's engineering?" Tom asked.

"Things look good," B'Elanna said. "I think we'll be good to start moving tomorrow, maybe in the afternoon. I have another diagnostic running now."

"How's Joe?" Tom asked. "Neither of us had been sleeping much the last few weeks."

"I sent him back to his quarters around 1700," B'Elanna said. "He was getting tired. I think everyone on this ship earned a few months of leave when we get back." He did have to agree with that.

Even though B'Elanna rarely went to bed before 0300, she changed and crawled into bed with him. "Good day?" she asked as she settled her head on his chest, and it struck him that, for the first time, his whole family was in one place. It was his quarters on Voyager, but it was a place to start.

"I think we have a pretty great kid," he replied. She chuckled.

"Of course you'd think so," she said dryly. "That girl has always been her father's daughter. Is your shuttle still in one piece?"

"It's not a shuttle," he reminded her, getting another chuckle. "She has talent," he said. "A lot more than I had when I was a kid."

"She does love to fly," she agreed. "She was a good assistant on rebuilding that S-class, but I know which side of the helm she'd rather be on."

"What happened next?" he asked. She thought about that for a minute.

"Company command was hard," she finally said. "I had some great mechanics, but I had some troublemakers, too. Almost enough to make me feel sorry for my first company commander." He couldn't help but laugh and nod in agreement; she had been a lot of work. But worth it. "We were busy, just like Owen predicted, but we—Izzy and I—fell into the rhythm of things and had our routines. I took up mountain biking, when I had the time, because a lot of other officers in the battalion did it and it was the best way to socialize with them without having to actually socialize. Things were…normal. And then it was actually Sarah—Carey—who reminded me that they weren't."