Second Chances: Chapter 20

A/N: 20 chapters already. How far we've come... and how far we have yet to go. Let me know if the story's dragging too much and I'll try to pick up the pace.

Stardate 50193
February 2373
San Francisco, Earth

Lt. B'Elanna Torres sighed and began gathering Izzy's things at the notification that the shuttle was approaching the docking port. "C'mon, Izzy," she said with another sigh. She was far too busy at work to be dealing with this: the shuttle, the days of leave, the long weekend away, the memorial service she didn't even want to attend for a husband who also wouldn't have wanted to attend.

She wondered what he would suggest doing instead, and she immediately knew the answer: whatever his hobby of the moment was. Rock-climbing, sailing, a new holodeck program that he wrote, "restoring" a replication of an ancient automobile, tinkering with a shuttle. The possibilities were endless, and even though it had been two years since he had subjected her to one of his new whims, she still rolled her eyes and smiled at the memory.

She wondered when she had gotten so sentimental. Back when he was alive, she did little more than tolerate his hobbies—with the exception of the climbing; that one was fun—but now that he was gone, she missed them, missed his excitement as he started a new hobby and the way he would beg her to join him.

She missed him. Even though she still didn't fully understand why she fell in love with him in the first place.

Izzy was cranky, probably because her bedtime had passed sometime while they were on the shuttle, although it was hard to tell on the Mars-Earth shuttle. A Martian day was 39 minutes longer than an Earth day; those who lived on Mars easily adjusted to the slightly longer day, but it made communication and travel between the travel a little… interesting. It took a little over a month for the days to align, and despite the frequent travel back to Earth and frequent communications with Starfleet Engineering, B'Elanna never bothered to learn the patterns. She just checked the chronometer whenever she needed to, but she was an adult who understood why things were a little bit off. She couldn't exactly blame Izzy for being a little bit cranky for being thrown off. "Let's get to Grandma and Grandpa's, and then you can throw whatever temper tantrum you need," Torres said to the toddler.

"No!" Izzy protested, immediately dissolving into tears.

"Or just start your tantrum now, that works, too," Torres muttered. She lifted the still-protesting toddler to her hip. She figured those giving her sympathetic looks in the transporter line were parents themselves.

Izzy's tantrum had devolved into full sobbing by the time they crossed the threshold of the Paris household. "Someone's unhappy," Alicia observed from the living room, where she and Nicki were sitting, a bottle of wine between them and a sleeping newborn against Nicki's chest.

"We have wine," Nicki offered.

"I'll be back for some after I put this one to bed."

"No bed!" Izzy screamed before returning to her sobbing.

"Isela Miral Paris. That is enough," B'Elanna said sternly. Izzy didn't seem to care, prompting a sigh from her mother. "Say good-night to your grandmother and Aunt Nicki."

"No!"

"Suit yourself." B'Elanna gave her in-laws an apologetic smile before heading for the stairs.

It took forty-five minutes to get the toddler calmed down enough to brush her teeth and lay down in bed to listen to a story. Halfway into the tale, she fell asleep so abruptly that B'Elanna checked her breathing. Confident that her child was still alive, she spent a few minutes just watching her, her small chest rising and falling rhythmically, her features in a calm expression of peace she rarely had while awake. She was too big for the crib that was still in Tom's old room and too restless to share a bed with B'Elanna for either of them to get any decent sleep; she'd soon have to move down to the "grandkid" room, Nicki's old room converted with several bunkbeds for Kajsa and Stephanie—and Ainsley, when she wanted to have a sleepover with her cousins instead of beaming back to Denver—and the thought made B'Elanna strangely sad. She didn't mind Izzy growing up, and rather looked forward to her becoming a little bit more independent and rational; her sadness came from marking time by her daughter's life. When Tom had died, there were still no outward signs of Izzy's existence. Now she was a toddler, with a big personality, and almost old enough for the grandkid room. Soon, she'd be in school, and before any of them knew it, she'd be moving out of the house and starting her own life.

B'Elanna swallowed the melancholy and gave her daughter a kiss on the forehead. "If only you were always this agreeable," she murmured before crawling out of the bed to get that promised glass of wine from Alicia and Nicki.

"Tell me about the wine," she said as she grabbed an empty glass and the bottle.

"It has alcohol," Nicki replied.

"My favorite kind," B'Elanna said as she poured herself a generous glass. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"I beam over sometimes," Nicki said with a shrug. "I have no schedule while on parental leave. And it gives everyone else a break from being around a newborn." It didn't seem like anyone would need a break from that newborn; although it was only the second time B'Elanna had seen him in his three weeks of life, she had yet to see little Tommy awake. A startling contrast to her own newborn, who had probably slept less than Tommy had been awake. "Izzy been cranky lately?"

B'Elanna rolled her eyes. "She's a quarter Klingon and all Paris. She enjoys being cranky."

"She's probably just growing," Nicki said, waving her hand dismissively.

"Of course she's growing," B'Elanna said with another roll of her eyes. "You and Jaxon both say that that's all she does and these first few years are just going to be one long growth spurt."

"You should know better than to listen to either of us. We make up half of the stuff we say."

"I figured that out already, thanks."

Nicki chuckled and checked on her sleeping baby while taking another sip of wine. "I like the hair, by the way." B'Elanna self-consciously touched her hair, the curls that recently brushed past her shoulders now straightened and in a bob.

"Now that Izzy isn't grabbing hair anymore, I thought it would make things easier," she said.

"And is it?" Nicki asked, amused.

"You guys should have told me how easy straight hair is a long time ago."

Both Nicki and Alicia laughed. "Everyone with straight hair wants curls," Alicia said. "And everyone with curly hair wants it straight."

B'Elanna shrugged. "It's easy enough to change."

Nicki laughed again. "I went through a phase when I was a teenager," she confided. "Never again."

"Those were some awkward years," Alicia agreed. "I thought I wanted kids with curly hair, but sometimes, nature should not be messed with."

"Thanks, Mom," Nicki said dryly.

Alicia smiled over at her daughter before turning back to B'Elanna. "I have three children, and who gets the curly hair? My son. Oh, and it was always such a mess whenever it got any length to it. I made Owen buzz Tom's hair off at the beginning of every summer, because if he didn't, that boy looked like a Victorian street urchin after three days of summer vacation."

B'Elanna almost choked on her wine. "That was you?" she asked once she recovered. "Tom hated those summer haircuts and would get so mad at Owen every time he thought about them. He never thought you were behind them."

Alicia gave a sly smile as she took a glass of wine. "I will never share my secrets," she teased. Nicki snorted.

"That's Dad's leadership style," she explained. "He doesn't pass the buck. Ever. Said he had a department chief who did that when he was an ensign—poisoned the section against the captain by blaming everything on the senior staff. It really killed the morale of the section, and, in a way, the whole ship." She shrugged. "One of Owen Paris' great life lessons: he who gives the orders, bears the responsibility of them. Anyway," she said, taking another sip of wine. "Pretty wild stuff about the Changeling on the Klingon High Council," she said. B'Elanna gave her an exasperated look as she took another drink of wine.

"I don't follow Federation politics," she said for what felt like the thousandth time. "What makes you think I follow Klingons any closer?"

"It was on all the comms channels!" Nicki exclaimed. Now that she said it, B'Elanna thought she remembered something from a few months before.

"Well, it didn't result in anyone from Starfleet Command asking me for assistance, so I don't know anything about it," she finally said, getting an exasperated look from Nicki and a chuckle from Alicia. "I work almost twelve hours a day and have an always growing toddler. That doesn't leave a lot of time for catching up on the news," B'Elanna reminded her.

"You really should pay better attention to your surroundings," Nicki said. "I just hope for your sake this whole bit with the Klingons boils over before you relinquish command. I don't care what Dad says. I know enough about Starfleet to know that if they see a round peg and a round-ish hole, they'll find a way to force it to fit. There are only one and a half Klingons in Starfleet uniforms, so I'm sure there's at least one admiral who thinks that we're wasting a third of our resources by not putting you in the fight."

"Don't I know it," B'Elanna muttered, then took another drink of wine. It seemed like no number of times explaining to Starfleet Command how little Klingons thought of mongrels—especially mongrels who were Federation citizens and Starfleet officers—would make any difference, because there was always someone else who thought they should send her somewhere closer to the Empire for one reason or another.

"Enough about that," Alicia interrupted, topping off everyone's wine glass to finish the bottle. "What are the plans for tomorrow?"

"Jason's staying home with Drew and Tommy," Nicki said promptly. "Ainsley wants to go to the service, so I'm signing her out of school. Christopher adamantly did not want to go, so he'll stay at school. I think Syd said Kajsa wants to go—they're getting here in the morning, with Dad—and Stephanie usually wants to do what Kajsa does, but she might be a bit young. We'll see. Jens is going to beam over to Denver with Alex and maybe Stephanie. Jason said they're more than willing to watch over Izzy if you'd like," she offered. B'Elanna nodded.

"I'll probably take you up on that." Izzy's attention span wouldn't last the hour and a half the service was scheduled to take. "I already told Sarah Carey that I'll bring her to the reception tomorrow night, so it would be nice if she gets some rest during the day."

Nicki snorted. "That girl doesn't rest, and even if she did, around her cousins is not the place to get it." B'Elanna had to agree with that. Trying to keep up with Stephanie and Drew usually got Izzy wound up, not calmed down.

Once the wine was done, Nicki and Tommy beamed back to their house, Alicia begged off to go to bed, and B'Elanna got back to the endless litany of reports and evaluations that seemed to make up the majority of her job, wondering for what had to be the thousandth time why she allowed them to make her think taking command was a good idea.

The Wylands and Owen arrived the next morning, and Sydney and B'Elanna promptly left to go for a run. "I'm sorry," Sydney said as they finished their third kilometer.

"For what?"

Sydney didn't say anything for several more meters. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you after Tom disappeared," she finally said. "I didn't know how to be, so I just… stayed away. That's why we stayed on the Pathrind for parental leave."

Now it was B'Elanna's turn to be quiet for a few hundred meters. "To be honest, I didn't want people around," she finally said.

"I've always been competitive," Sydney said as if B'Elanna hadn't spoken. "I was eight when Tom was born. Nicki was six, and almost as soon as he was born, it was like he took her away from me. They were close in a way that I wasn't, and I had a hard time with that. And then, he died, and it really bothered me that I would never have a chance to be close to my brother. And I was really jealous of anyone who was closer to him than me. Which was…a lot of people. Especially you."

"I didn't want anyone's sympathy," B'Elanna said. "I still don't. And I'm certainly the wrong person to tell anyone else how they should be grieving. I didn't need you when I was in the hospital, or when I was living in San Francisco again against my will." They ran several more beats without speaking. "Running was my release, from when I learned how to run through the first two years of the Academy," B'Elanna continued. "Going for a run kept me from striking out at people. When I did refrain from striking out at people. Tom picked up on that pretty damn quick, making me go for a run when he thought I'd get in fights during plebe summer." Good thing, too, because it seemed like she always seconds away from smacking that smirk off Virot's face. And anyone who claimed that Vulcans didn't smirk was lying. "After my coma, it was my vengeance—against my body, against that damn snake, I don't know." She fell in love with Tom that summer over their daily runs, but she didn't say that to Sydney. "The thing about being depressed is that you know what you need to do to not be depressed—go to medical, go for a run—but you just don't have the motivation or energy to actually do those things. After Izzy was born, it took everything I had to do the bare minimum needed to survive and keep Izzy alive. Getting out of bed, replicating food, going to all those damn medical appointments—doing each of those things seemed like an impossible task, and I just didn't have anything left for doing what I needed to do. Finally telling T'Pana that I needed help and needed to see Dr. Bayrote was the jump-start I needed, but I also needed someone to kick my ass and get me running again, to relearn how to be a functioning officer and learn how to be a functioning mother." They ran several more blocks before she concluded, "Tom was there when I needed him by being Tom. Nicki was there when I needed her by being Nicki. Don't apologize for being there when I needed you by being you."

Four hours later, inside a Starfleet assembly hall on a cold and raining February San Francisco day, they listened as the Voyager crew was memorialized, recognized for their heroic actions on the ship's inaugural mission, and heard Lieutenant Thomas Eugene Paris declared dead.

Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres was officially a widow. At twenty-four-years-old. With a toddler.