Second Chances: Chapter 22

A/N: This chapter is inspired by Dr. Bashir in season 1 of DS9 and his incessant flirting despite Dax telling him multiple times that she wasn't interested. It makes me sad to think that women will still be dealing with such things in the 24th century...

Stardate 50203
March 2373
Mars Station, Mars

Lt. B'Elanna Torres knew the biology; she knew that, even if she wanted the companionship that Sarah Carey had described, she would never have the attraction and love that make a relationship worth it again. Not with anyone other than Tom.

But in retrospect, she wondered if she was so adamant about it not happening because she was so damn clueless when men expressed interest.

She learned at an early age that the attention she got was not good attention. She grew up on a very human colony with a very Klingon mother and an absent human father, and either of those bits on Kessik IV gathered unwanted attention from gossipy men and women with not enough going on in their lives. Even though everyone on that planet knew of their existence, neither Miral nor B'Elanna could go anywhere without people stopping what they were doing to look at them, as if they were an oddity that must be closely examined, not neighbors who had been there for years. She had wished she could just disappear and that nobody could see her or stare at her.

When her male classmates hit their teenage years and began the long-standing tradition of teenage boys on seemingly every world and seemingly every time of researching everything they could find about girls, the attention B'Elanna got in school took a sudden and still unwelcomed change. She had known what the databases said about the sexual practices of Klingon women, and as an angry teenager with nothing and everything to prove, she indulged the curiosities of just enough of them to allow the rumors to flood her secondary school. It was enough to get the scorn of the last few girls who hadn't scorned her since elementary school and get the rest of the boys to stop trying.

Served them right, anyway. Teenaged B'Elanna had gotten immense satisfaction out of violently breaking bones of boys who pretended to develop a sudden caring for her after years of intermittent mocking and ignoring.

By the time she had arrived at the Academy, she was so accustomed to assuming that any attention was negative attention that she tried to avoid it altogether. She was fantastically bad at that, but it didn't stop her from trying. It had taken months of Tom going out of his way to help her fit into the Academy, to try to stop her from fighting, to try to help her pass the classes she couldn't care less about, to realize that he was in neither group of people she had encountered her whole life: he didn't view her as an oddity, and didn't view her as a sex object. He viewed her as a cadet who required more assistance than most, but most importantly, he viewed her as a person.

It wasn't until after he had blurted out that he had fallen in love with her did she even consider the possibility that he was speaking the truth, and that maybe she felt the same about him. He had been a constant presence in her life for months by then, helping her with her rehab, letting her vent about her frustrations, taking her sister on flying lessons and out for ice cream. But it took those words for her to examine his actions in retrospect and realize that he had been sending out pretty large and loud signals that she had completely overlooked, her entire being fine-tuned to filter out any signals from anyone else in attempts to shield herself from unwanted attention.

Lt. Commander Kwasi Amartey had been a project officer at the construction battalion for well over a year already when Torres arrived. He was quickly on his way to becoming Starfleet's leader in holoengineering; the holographic communicators that had recently hit all the ships and stations had been the thesis for his master's degree. He was objectively very handsome: tall, with symmetrical, well-sculpted features and smooth dark skin that made his eyes and teeth shine with his quick smiles. Torres didn't know where on Earth he grew up, but he had an accent with a rhythmic cadence that was almost soothing to listen to. He taught three classes at the Technical Services Academy, the school for enlisted mechanics-in-training: Holodeck Maintenance and Repair, EMH Maintenance, and, strangely enough, Shield Systems Maintenance and Repairs. Shield Repair was a required class for all to-be-mechanics, but his Holodeck and EMH courses always filled up as soon as they opened, and it didn't escape anyone's notice that those classes were disproportionally filled with women. It didn't matter what the man taught; women would line up to listen to him recite Starfleet engineering regulations line by line.

Torres' alarm went off at 1750, the same it did every day at 1750, ten minutes before the station day care closed for the evening. They would obviously stay to watch over any kids who still hadn't been picked up, but each delinquency earned the parents a demerit. Five demerits in a calendar year—an Earth calendar year, thankfully—and the parents would have to find alternative child care. It was a three-minute walk from the battalion offices to the day care. Less if she ran.

Her eyes moved from the chronometer to her monitor, where a repair report was almost completed. It should only take her another five minutes, which would still give her two minutes to spare.

She heard a door down the corridor slide open and closed and sighed, rising from her chair. The report would have to wait until the morning.

She stepped out into the corridor as Amartey approached. It was a familiar routine for the two of them: both had alarms set for 1750, both had a daily debate about finishing one last report or heading straight for the day care.

Both had one demerit already for the calendar year. In February.

"How was Earth?" Amartey asked as they exited the battalion headquarters and briskly walked toward the day care.

"Still standing," Torres replied.

"Good trip?"

She gave him a look. "It was for Voyager's memorial." She didn't talk about her personal life at work, yet it seemed everyone, including the mechanics under her command, knew about Voyager and that her husband had been sitting in at the helm when it disappeared.

"Right. I'm sorry." He reached the door before her and held it open.

They both pressed their thumbs to the scanners to summon their daughters, and a few minutes later, both appeared in hand with one of the caretakers. "Cutting it close," she said warningly.

"But not late," Amartey said innocently, his smile charming.

Oye was about six months older than Izzy, and developmentally, they were currently at about the same stage. They got along as well as any toddlers did, in that they liked the same games but hadn't yet learned how to play them together. "Interested in dinner tonight?" Amartey asked as they exited the facility.

"No," Torres said. It was a frequent question and one she rarely agreed to, and only on those evenings when she didn't have more work to do and the weather was nice enough that they could eat outside at that restaurant by the park and the girls could play between the few bites of food either of them ate. She had told him the first time he asked—and several times since—that if he was looking for a relationship, he would have to look elsewhere, because she wasn't interested. And yet, he kept asking.

"You sure?"

"Yes," she said simply.

"Can I walk you two lovely ladies home?"

She frowned at him. "It's in the opposite direction," she pointed out. She didn't mention that she was planning on working on the shuttle for about an hour, or until Izzy got fussy.

"It's no trouble."

She rolled her eyes and turned and walked away. "I'll see you in the morning," she called over her shoulder.

The next day was Thursday, a fact that escaped Torres' notice until she saw two of her ensigns in hiking gear after lunch. "Hey, L-T," Ensign Brownlee greeted, sticking her head in the door. "We're about to head over to meet with the others. You ready? We're hiking today."

She bit back the urge to respond with, does it look like I'm ready? while gesturing to the stacks of PADDs on her desk and the fact that she was still in uniform, and instead went with, "Just give me a few minutes to change."

She kept a few sets of exercise clothes in her office for this very reason. It wasn't the first time she had been caught unaware by a Thursday.

The battalion's officers beamed over to the hiking area in the shadow of Arsia Mons. The volcano itself made for some pretty boring hiking—it was just a long, continuous, low-grade slope to the caldera—but the old lava flows made for some interesting topography.

Commander Winters was big on esprit de corps and the battalion being one big happy family. He strictly prohibited discussion of work during the officer PT session, which didn't leave much for Torres to talk to her fellow officers about. She sometimes talked to Ensign Martin about running, as the young ensign in the maintenance company was also a marathoner, but she didn't have any other non-work-related hobbies. Even her side project of fixing up that S-class shuttle was too closely related to her job to qualify. The only other thing she had going on in her life was Izzy, and she found that non-parents were easily bored with tales of toddler antics.

That left her swapping stories of toddler antics with Amartey as they navigated the old lava field. "That is a great view," Amartey said as he stopped, his eyes out on the horizon and his chest heaving for air. Torres snorted.

"You just needed a break," she scoffed. He wheezed out a laugh.

"I'm not as young as I used to be," he confessed. "It is a nice view, though."

She chuckled and followed his gaze. "It's Mars," she replied. "More red rocks and more lava fields."

"Aww, Torres, where's your sense of romance?"

She scoffed again. "Nobody has ever accused me of having one of those," she pointed out.

Even when she examined the events with the critical eye of someone who had lived through them, she still had a hard time processing what happened next. He had grinned at her and leaned toward her, and she knew from that look that he was trying to kiss her. So, she did the only thing she could think to do.

She pushed him away. Hard.

She heard the crack of his ankle as he stumbled back awkwardly, and a split second later, his bark of pain. "Shit!" she exclaimed, grabbing at him before he tumbled down a rock face. "Torres to Winters," she said, slapping her combadge. "I think Amartey broke his ankle. I'm going to beam with him back to the clinic."

*Now my officers can't even walk without breaking bones?* Winters complained. *Keep me posted, Torres.*

She tapped her combadge again. "Torres to Mars Station. Two to beam directly to the clinic."

The medics had escorted Amartey off to a treatment room, and Torres wandered off to replicate some raktijino. Twenty minutes later, one of them came back and said he had been treated and needed to stay off his leg for another hour, but could have visitors. She followed him back to the room where a sulking Amartey was still lying.

He waited until the medic left them alone. "What did you do that for?" he asked.

"Me?" she asked in response. "What did you do that for?"

"I was trying to kiss you!"

"I know!" she exclaimed. "That's why I pushed you!"

"Why?"

"Because I didn't want you to kiss me!" He still looked at her as if he couldn't comprehend her thought process, and she sighed. "I have told you a thousand times that I'm not interested in a relationship," she said.

"Why not?"

"What difference does that make?" she demanded. "I said no. Why is that so hard for you to understand?"

"I thought…"

"You thought that because my husband died, I should just find the next eligible bachelor and go for it?" she asked. "You thought that if you kept pestering me, eventually I'll just cave and we'll live happily after ever?"

"I thought I was being charming."

"You weren't," she said flatly. "You were being annoying." She thought back to Tom, remembered those months between when she woke up from her coma and they started dating. He was always there, but he wasn't persistent. He put the ball solidly in her court, and waited to see if she was going to pick it up or not. He told her after they were married that those months were torture, to see her every day and spend those runs and meals together as friends and to not pressure her, but he had known that pressing her would have resulted in her running away.

He had respected her ability to make her own decisions from the beginning, and she would always love that about him.

She sighed and rubbed her forehead. "I appreciate that you're one of the few people in the battalion who knows what it's like to have our jobs and deal with being a single parent, but I don't want a relationship. With you or anyone else. If you can't respect me as a friend and stop trying for more, let me know now."

He studied her for a moment. "You'll let me know if you change your mind about a relationship?"

"I won't," she said flatly.

He considered that before nodding. "I'm sorry for how I've acted," he finally said. "I hope we can still be friends. And that you won't break my leg again."

She smiled despite herself and gave a slight nod. "I'll try not to," she promised.