Second Chances: Chapter 25

A/N: I feel the need to explain the note on the previous chapter. Yes, all shows tend to "Mary Sue" (in a gender-neutral way, of course) their characters, but it seems so much more over the top in DS9 compared to, say, Voyager. Paris is portrayed as a flying prodigy, but they're consistent with that, and he has the background and training to match. The Doctor is a walking medical encyclopedia, but he was programmed to be a walking medical encyclopedia. The one that makes the least sense is Torres being the best choice for chief engineer, given that she doesn't have a college education, but they even gave that one an attempt at an explanation: she was a promising student before she dropped out of the Academy, and realistically, her role in the Maquis was more "mechanic" than "engineer," and her time in the Maquis with limited resources taught her how to be creative. And Janeway said they needed creative.

Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now and get back to the story.

(Sorry about formatting, I'm on my iPad).

Stardate 50485
June 2373
Mars Station, Mars

The months flew by so quickly that Lt. Torres barely registered relinquishing command of the Repair Company. Everything about her life was centered around that Jem'Hadar ship. The structural repairs were simple—hulls were hulls, regardless of who built them—but the systems themselves were a lot more complicated. Interesting, but complicated. And having Lt. Glass and Starfleet Intelligence hovering around made it all that more complicated.

She turned in her first repair estimates to Glass a few days before his deadline, projecting completion in eleven months, which seemed like a long time but really meant she had to buckle down and learn the technology. "Do we know what they're going to be using the ship for yet?" she asked Glass one evening as they walked toward the transporter room after a daily sync meeting.

"The specifics, or the generalities?"

She gave him a look. "I figure the generalities are, fly it," she said dryly. He smiled sheepishly at the obviousness of the response.

"Well, yes," he admitted. "As far as the specifics, we still have a long time to figure that out, and there are still a lot of people far above our rank trying to figure out what her first mission will be."

She rolled her eyes as the feminine pronoun of the ship. Most engineers and pilots tended to do that; she liked to tease Tom that he spent more time with his girlfriends than his wife. "I'm assuming that it would be good to figure out a way to communicate to Starfleet and Klingon ships that it's a friendly, without the Jem'Hadar hearing," she commented. He blinked in surprise.

"Uh, yeah," he said slowly. "That would be a good feature to have."

She rolled her eyes again. "I can see why you switched to Intelligence," she muttered. "Good night, Glass," she said as she turned in the direction of Izzy's daycare. "I'll see you in the morning."

As soon as she was officially a project officer, she enrolled in two courses toward her master's degree: Comparative Systems Engineering, and Advanced Communications Engineering. The former was a huge course—twelve credit hours—and unfortunately, was focused on comparing ships' systems of known cultures, but she hoped some of the principles would come in handy. The latter was in hopes of figuring out the answer to the question of how to communicate with friendlies without tipping off the foes. When she completed those, she enrolled in an upper-level physics course about polarons, and then another on antiprotons, and like all physics courses, they gave her a bit of a headache and made her glad to get back to the real engineering courses once she felt she had a better handle on the physics behind the weapons and sensors that had baffled and crippled Starfleet ships since the first contact with the Dominion.

The whole thing was a headache and a nightmare, and she'd by lying if she tried to deny that she was loving it. The hours were long, though, and her raktajino intake was creeping back up to where it had been when they trying to finalize Voyager for launch. She had never been a morning person, and had rarely been one who preferred to run before the sun was up, but on this project, her days typically started around 0600, when she would turn on the holo nanny to keep an eye on a sleeping Izzy as she went for a run, feeling the guilt of doing that with every step. Kwasi Amartey kept assuring her that the program was safe and included many more emergency, medical, entertainment, and educational functions than any person could have—in fact, a lot of the more remote bases and stations used them in their daycares—but she couldn't get over the feeling that it was cheating somehow, or that an actual person would be more reliable in case anything happened to her daughter.

She returned from her run to wake up Izzy, get them both cleaned up, dressed, and fed, and then walked her daughter to daycare before returning to the Jem'Hadar ship for another full day of trying to figure out how it was supposed to work and how to get it back to working. The first hour was usually spent with Glass, getting the updates from Intelligence and trying to fill in what he needed for his reports, until she got so frustrated with his questions that she sent him to the dry dock's office and she checked in with her officers and chiefs. The bulk of the work day was spent trying to apply what she was learning in her graduate courses to the ship, and then there was a daily sync at 1700, which gave everyone enough time to discuss their updates and challenges before Torres ended the meeting at 1745 in order to pick up Izzy from daycare.

She got two to three hours with Izzy before putting her to bed and putting in several more hours of coursework and reviewing diagnostic reports and calculations before finally making herself go to bed around 0300. At first, it had been difficult to switch from project lead-mode to parent-mode for those few hours that she dedicated to Izzy, somehow much more difficult than it had been to switch from company commander to parent at the end of her workdays before the Jem'Hadar ship arrived in her life. She had to stop herself from treating her toddler as one of her engineers, but once she got the hang of it, those were her favorite and most relaxing hours of the day, even more so than her early morning runs. She wondered what it would have been like if Izzy had been a few years older, if she and Tom had had to care for a child while finishing the Voyager project. Somehow, she doubted it would have been as beneficial, enjoyable, or relaxing. They would have fought over whose turn it was to watch over Izzy and who could stay late at work. They had both been busy in those last few months, but she much more so than him; she was sure she would have been the one staying at work at least 90% of the time, getting progressively more and more cranky about missing out on time with her family, which would undoubtedly result in her twisting it into Tom's fault in her head and lashing out at him.

It had been almost two years since she had become a single parent, and for the first time, she found a positive aspect of it: not having someone to parent with meant that she got all of the good parts of parenting, in addition to all the bad ones.

She fell in love with Tom because she liked who she was more when he was around than when he wasn't; she fell in love with Izzy for the same reason. Being Izzy's mother had made her a better person. She was infinitely more patient now than she had been before she had learned how to deal with a toddler and somewhat better at making herself relax. And Izzy, like her father, spent most of her time being up-beat and happy. It was hard to be upset when around a smiling toddler.

Being Izzy's mother had also made her a better officer, or, at least, a more understanding one when one of her engineers requested time off or needed a break from the grueling schedule. They worked long hours from Monday through Friday—with the exception of Thursday afternoons, which were still reserved for allowing the chiefs and NCOs train the junior mechanics—and would come in on Saturday mornings, but the times she asked anyone to come in on a Sunday were rare. She herself also tried to keep Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings for time with just her and Izzy. Sometimes they spent that time on that S-class shuttle she felt a little bit guilty about abandoning, but most of the time, they were outside. Izzy loved "hiking," even though her idea of hiking was skipping around on one of the short nature trails around the Station while wearing her tiny and adorable hiking boots instead of her usual shoes. Tiny and adorable hiking boots that were a pain in the ass to put on her small feet, of course, but Izzy would get so exciting about "hiking" that B'Elanna continued to do it.

She had a moment of reflection on the Mars-Earth shuttle in June as she simultaneously tried to entertain Izzy and review the results of the last warp core diagnostic about how different she had become since Voyager had been lost. There was the obvious—she now had a soon-to-be-two-year-old, after all—but the more subtle things as well. She had been so opposed to missing any opportunity to work before Izzy was born that she didn't even want to take the shuttle back to Earth to see Dr. Gault after they discovered her pregnancy. Now, she was taking a few days of leave just to run a marathon in Madagascar with her sister-in-law.

She was beginning to understand what the words "work-life balance" meant, even if her current version of "balance" looked like a teeter-totter with a Naussican on one end and a toddler on the other.

Her hours spent on the ship and her coursework were hours that she hadn't spent training for the marathon, and it showed in her performance. Sydney, who preferred to run in the cold, was similarly ill-prepared for the African heat, and neither managed to cross the finish line before the three-hour mark. "Thank the gods I'm going to have more time to train for next year," Sydney remarked after several minutes of trying to catch her breath, turning her head to look over at her sister-in-law from where they were both lying in the grass after their painful finish. "I'm moving back to San Francisco with the kids before the new school year starts," she explained. B'Elanna blinked in surprise; was Sydney leaving Jens? The man was boring, but he was a good husband and father. "I'm getting promoted," she continued, not giving her sister-in-law an opportunity to ask any questions. "And Jens is moving over to the Taurus. It's definitely not large enough to have a commander as the chief of security. Dad suggested the command track, but it's not as if Jens and I can both be first officers on the same ship. And, don't tell Dad, but I'm really not interested in commanding a ship someday." She rolled back over onto her back and sighed. "I'm going to be Admiral Huang's adjuvant at Starfleet Operations."

"Congratulations," B'Elanna said.

"Thanks. So, we're doing Norway next year," B'Elanna groaned in response.

"I would say I'm done with this nonsense, but I know you won't accept that," she said. "Norway's far too cold."

"Turnabout is fair play," Sydney pointed out. "You know I hate running in the heat. Besides, Jens' parents are always bugging us to visit Tromsø more. It is a nice city. And you'll be done with the 'new drive' by then." They had taken to calling the Jem'Hadar ship the 'new drive' to avoid unintentional mention of the classified project. She groaned as she pulled herself to a seated position. "C'mon," she said. "Let's go meet up with the others and see some lemurs. Some good needs to come out of this stupid trip to Madagascar."