Second Chances: Chapter 46
A/N: Super long chapter. I couldn't find a good place to split it into two, and although most of the stuff doesn't really add to the story, I just didn't want to cut it. So, super long chapter.
Stardate 51495
August 2374
San Francisco, Earth
B'Elanna Torres was standing at the Paris' replicator when the front door opened suddenly, Nicki Sanders standing there, holding a very large mug of coffee. "I thought we were meeting you at Starfleet Medical," B'Elanna said as a greeting.
"I'm your designated escort," Nicki said. "To make sure you actually make it to Starfleet Medical."
"I know the way there, thanks."
"You have a bit of reputation for not showing up to appointments," Nicki replied. "A reputation you've earned, I might add."
B'Elanna shrugged a shoulder; there was no point in arguing that. She took her raktajino from the replicator. "Izzy!" she called out. "Aunt Nicki is here!"
The girl made a lot more noise descending stairs than anyone her size should have. "Aunt Nicki!" she exclaimed. "Piggy-back ride!"
Nicki chuckled and took a sip of her coffee. "Oh, no," she said. "You may be my favorite Paris-ite, but I need to be able to drink my coffee as we walk. It's going to be a long day, and your cousin Tommy is a tiny little asshole who didn't let me get any sleep last night."
B'Elanna smirked. "I told you that was a distinct possibility when you wanted to name him that."
"You'd think I would have known better," Nicki sighed. "To be fair, his sister and brothers aren't any better. Okay. Let's go. It is going to be a long day."
The long day started in Dr. Bayrote's office, where he completed the scans he mentioned during their conversation. "My turn!" Izzy declared. B'Elanna sighed at the fact that Izzy had already figured out the pattern of 'scan Mom, scan Izzy.' She didn't say anything, though, because her being excited and eager to submit to the endless scans would make the day a lot easier. Dr. Bayrote chuckled and turned his attention to Izzy.
"I suppose I can save Dr. Waslet the trouble," he said.
"Who?" Torres asked.
"Stiana Waslet," Dr. Bayrote said. "She's the new pediatric hybrid psychiatrist. I thought you knew that; Navi started seeing her about eight months ago."
"How many psychiatrists does this department need?" Torres asked. "There's one cardiologist, one endocrinologist, one neurologist, one pediatrician, two gynecologists, and, what, ten psychiatrists?"
"Two psychiatrists, three psychologists, and three counselors," Bayrote corrected.
"Why?"
"Because you hybrids have complicated mental health issues," he said with a smile. "All done, Miss Paris," he said to Izzy. Turning back to Torres, he said, "I'll analyze these before you come back this afternoon. And I'll send Izzy's scans over to Dr. Waslet. She has her evaluation scheduled for 1400."
"Baby's first head shrinking," Torres muttered. Dr. Bayrote smiled.
B'Elanna only had a few doctors to see, but since Izzy was still developing—Nicki's term; B'Elanna preferred 'growing'—she had a more complicated schedule, about half of which they finished by lunch. They resumed their appointments at 1300 with orthopedics, and even though they still had hours to go, Torres was already on edge. "Who are you?" Torres asked sharply as they entered the exam room, expecting to see Dr. Storga, the hybrid orthopedist she had been seeing since she was a cadet, and instead seeing a tall Vulcan in a teal uniform.
"I am Dr. Skath," he announced, raising an eyebrow. "I am an orthopedics resident and will be examining you today."
"Where's Dr. Storga?" Torres asked. Dr. Skath raised that eyebrow again.
"I am fully aware of your orthopedic history," he said. As if on cue, the door slid open, revealing the lanky commander.
"Sorry I'm late," he said, but didn't address the reason for his tardiness. "Always good to see you, B'Elanna."
"You sent in a resident?" she asked sharply.
"You're always a good learning case," Dr. Storga said. "It isn't often we get to see Klingon/human athletes in clinic."
"I'm not an athlete anymore," she replied.
"I think your marathon finishes would beg to differ. Dr. Skath, feel free to examine your patient."
Torres glared at Storga before turning her attention to the Vulcan physician. "Are you experiencing any musculoskeletal pain?" Dr. Skath asked.
"No," Torres replied.
"I'm pretty sure that's not true," Dr. Storga interjected. "This will go faster if you just cooperate."
She glared at him again, feeling like a child being scolded by a parent, but knowing he was right, sighed and turned back to Dr. Skath. "Right ankle, right hip. And left shoulder. That one's new."
Skath scanned the offending joints, his eyebrows rising as he did so, and Torres smirked, now wondering just how much of her orthopedic history he had read. "You have a tear in your rotator cuff in your shoulder," he finally said. "And some apparent calcifications in the ligaments of your right ankle, knee, and hip."
"Running, running, and… bat'leth?" Dr. Storga asked, pointing at her ankle, hip, and shoulder in turn. Torres nodded and Dr. Storga smiled, and then turned to Dr. Skath.
"Human connective tissue weakens with strain," he explained. "Instability begets more instability. Klingons, on the other hand, tighten and become stiff in attempt to stabilize the instability. I'll explain the physiology later. Lt. Torres is a competitive runner and has been since childhood, and I've told her several times that if she doesn't do better on her stretching and her physical therapy exercises, she's not going to be able to ambulate by the time she's thirty, the way she abuses her joints. Let me show you how we've been treating the calcifications, and then I'll let you treat her shoulder." He grabbed the tissue regenerator and began, and then turned back to Torres. "I want you to see Mileham before you head out today," he said to her. "Dr. Skath, anything else you would like to advise your patient?"
"Perhaps it would be prudent to cut down on the running," Skath said. Torres stared at him for a second, and then turned to Dr. Storga.
"He's new," he told her, then turned back to his resident. "That's not going to happen. Lt. Torres is a record-holding decathlete who has switched to distance running for unknown reasons."
"Sister-in-law reasons," Torres interjected. Storga nodded at that.
"She's not going to stop running, no matter what you tell her," he concluded to Dr. Skath.
"Curious," Dr. Skath replied, "that she would rather risk permanent injury than give up on a hobby."
Torres hated it when doctors talked about her as if she wasn't in the room. "That hobby keeps me sane. It keeps me from being an unpleasant person to be around," Torres informed him. "It's your job to make sure I can keep doing it."
"I did not realize orthopedics would require so much…psychology," Dr. Skath said, raising an eyebrow.
"Just wait until you do your sports rotation," Dr. Storga said with a slight roll of his eyes. He turned to Izzy. "Miss Paris. Do you want to play a game?"
"Yes!" Izzy said excitedly.
"Do you know how to play Simon Says?" She did, and he used the game to get her to move her limbs in a variety of ways, watching carefully. "Simon says, touch your toes," Dr. Storga said. She did obediently, and he used the opportunity to examine her spine. "No evidence of scoliosis," he said, now to Torres. "Her spine is developing normally. Your scoliosis was congenital, but in humans, it develops between the ages of ten and twenty. She didn't inherit your spinal disorder, but we'll be keeping an eye on it for a while just to be sure." Torres nodded; she couldn't remember her own spinal surgery, since she was only an infant, but she still felt a sense of relief every time Dr. Storga said that Izzy's spine was fine.
He turned back to Izzy. "Do you like sports, Miss Paris?"
She brightened. "Soccer!" she said excitedly. "And qa'vak!" Storga turned to Torres, eyebrows raised.
"Nicki's kids play soccer," she explained. "Ainsley and Christopher sometimes kick the ball around with Izzy. And qa'vak is a Klingon game. She learned on Qo'noS."
He nodded his understanding. "I bet you're a really fast runner," Dr. Storga said. "Are you faster than your mom?"
She giggled. "No!" she exclaimed.
"Are you sure? Let's go out in the hallway so you can show me how fast you can run."
Izzy loved running but was rarely allowed to do it inside, so she was excited about the prospect of running down the hallway. Dr. Storga watched her carefully as she did so. "Kids are so natural when they run," he murmured, watching carefully. "She's doing something funny with her left leg," he said a minute later. "It might just be something she's doing, but I want Mileham to take a look at it, maybe teach her some exercises to make sure her muscles develop right. Thank you, Miss Paris," he said to Izzy. She came over to them and grinned. "You're very fast," he said. "Later today, your mom is going to take to you meet Commander Mileham. He's going to teach you some games so you can learn how to run as your mom someday."
Izzy looked from him to Torres, her eyes wide. "Not 'til I'm big," she finally decided, and it took Torres a second to realize that she was saying she wouldn't be as fast as her until she was older.
"How big?" Torres asked, and Izzy had to think about that.
"Five," she finally declared, and Torres laughed.
"Keep dreaming, kiddo," she said.
An hour later, she had to admit that Dr. Waslet was really good with kids. B'Elanna still wasn't thrilled with the idea that her pre-schooler was seeing a psychiatrist, but when thinking about her own turbulent childhood, she had to admit that maybe it wasn't the worst idea Starfleet Medical had come up with.
After Izzy's session with Dr. Waslet, they swung by the Physical Therapy department, which was busier than Torres had ever seen it, filled with officers and crewmen injured during the war and working on rehabbing their injuries. She felt silly taking Commander Mileham's time when he should have been helping them, but he waived her objections aside. "Even when you're completely healthy and just here because Storga micromanages, you're still my most interesting patient," he confided. He had said that countless times five and a half years before, when she was struggling through her rehab after her coma and learning how to walk, and then run, again. He had been a young lieutenant commander back then, already with a doctorate in physical therapy and working on his Ph.D. in comparative anatomy. "Let's see what has Storga worried."
He had her run in the gait analysis at various paces, and then quickly studied the data, shrugging a shoulder dismissively. "Same thing as always," he said. "Your history of running in the same direction around a track did its job on your gait. Are you still doing mok'bara?" She nodded. "And yoga?"
"Not as often as I should," she admitted.
"Of course not," he muttered. "Three times a week, do half an hour of mok'bara and then ten minutes of yoga. Even you can manage ten minutes three times a week. I'll send you the poses I want you to do. And do those stretches after every time you run. It's only three minutes. I'd rather you cut your run short by three minutes and do the stretches if you're concerned about time. Now, he wanted me to watch Izzy run, too, right?"
They put Izzy in the gait analysis. She wasn't quite sure about running in that space, but seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly. "Ah, I see what he saw," Mileham said. He pointed to her left knee on the display in front of them. "Klingon skeletons are different than human skeletons—more bones, denser bones, stronger joints—and the musculature is different as well. Both you and Izzy have largely Klingon bone structures, including an auxiliary femur. I really need to find out what the Klingon word is for this bone; I just call it the femula." He pointed to the thinner bone that ran alongside the femur. "Because of the extra bones, the Klingon knee works differently than the human knee. What I'm looking at here is some weakness in the in the cross connections in the knee, the left more pronounced than the right." He shrugged. "Easy enough to strengthen. Izzy, let me show you some games that you can play with your mom that will make you run really fast."
He walked them through the various exercises to strengthen the deficits he noted, and B'Elanna smiled slightly at the attention everyone was giving her three-year-old. "I wonder how fast I would have been if I had a dedicated team of orthopedists and physical therapists starting when I was three," she commented.
"Third best decathlete in the Federation is nothing to scoff at," Mileham commented. "I think you did okay without it." She smiled slightly and had to nod in acknowledgement.
After physical therapy, B'Elanna left Izzy with Nicki to go for a walk, and then headed over to Dr. Bayrote's office for her own psychiatric evaluation. "Your neurotransmitters are a little off from your baseline, which is why you've been experiencing anxiety," Dr. Bayrote informed her. "I don't think it's far enough off that I'm going to encourage treatment, but I can give you some medication if you like."
"The gene therapy?" she asked, and he shook his head.
"Unrelated," he said. "Neurotransmitters go up and down. That's why we have moods. Your gene therapy was to address the fact that you didn't have the glutamate receptors in the right places and that was manifesting as depression. Your receptors are fine, but you're producing more norepinephrine than you're used to. Which is probably because you have yourself worked up about finding Voyager. Do you want to talk about it?"
Well, that was his job, so she did. She didn't even realize until she started talking that she was worried that if they didn't find Voyager soon, their window would close, that something would happen to the ship and it would deviate from the likely paths that they thought it could take, based on the data she and the other B'Elanna Torres had collected, and they wouldn't know where to look. That they only had one shot at this, and she wasn't allowed to take it.
She didn't even know if Voyager was still out there, if Tom was still alive, and she had let herself get worked up about not searching for a needle in a galactic haystack fast enough.
She went back to Nicki's office to collect Izzy and head back to the Paris house, but Dr. Gault found her just as Nicki's office door slid open. "Trying to sneak out without seeing me?" he asked.
"That was the goal," Torres replied.
"This is why you have a reputation," Nicki said to her sister-in-law from inside her office. "I'll keep Izzy entertained."
They headed down the corridor to his office, and instead of sitting, Torres stood in the middle of the room and crossed her arms. "How's your sex life?" Dr. Gault asked as soon as the door was closed, and Torres couldn't help the bark of laughter that escaped.
"Do you always ask questions you know the answer to?" she replied. He raised his eyebrows. "Last I checked, my husband still wasn't here," she reminded him. "Maybe you remember that? Caused enough problems that I was hospitalized for a couple of weeks a few years ago?"
He rolled his eyes at her sarcasm. "You never equated sex with marriage until you were married," he pointed out, and she threw her arms up in frustration.
"I seem to remember a very long discussion about this before I got married," she reminded him. "Pheromones, attraction, biochemistry? This should sound familiar, because you were the one who explained it to me."
"I think I can reverse it." His words stopped her cold, and she frowned.
"It's been more than three years," she said, a non-sequitur, but the first thing that popped into her head.
"Do you want to try?"
She finally sat, her mind spinning. Did she? Would she have if he asked her before? She shook her head slowly, but more in thought than denial. "I don't know if he's dead or not," she said slowly. "The ship might have…" She was talking more to herself than to him, so didn't bother to finish that thought. A minute later, she looked back up at him. "If he's not dead, and Voyager magically reappears next week, would we be able to have more kids?"
She hadn't realized that she wanted another baby until she asked the question. She hadn't even been sure she wanted the first one, but now that she had formed the thought and vocalized it, she realized she did. She wanted another baby. With Tom. She wanted them to do the newborn stuff together, the way they should have the first time, the way another Tom and B'Elanna were doing on another Voyager in another universe. She wanted him there for first words, first steps, for temper tantrums and giggles and everything in between.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Maybe not. Probably not."
She shook her head again, this time more definitively. "No," she said. "No, I'm not going to risk it." She would rather live without sex than give up the chance to have another baby with Tom.
He nodded slightly. "I'll keep working on it," he promised. "The offer stands if you ever want to consider it."
"Thank you." For as often as he rubbed her the wrong way, she appreciated that about Dr. Gault, that he always treated her like an adult and respected her decisions, even back when she was a 17-year-old cadet and definitely not acting like an adult.
This new realization about what she wanted was still bouncing around her head hours later, back at the Paris house, and she went into Owen's study with a new determination. "This Pathfinder project," she said without preamble, referring to the name of the group that consisted of one cartographer and two astrophysicists sifting through the Voyager data. "Do you think you have room for a civilian engineer?"
He looked up, amused. "Do you have one in mind?" he asked.
"Me." He looked confused, then concerned, then put down the PADD he had been studying.
"What's this about?" he asked slowly.
"Glass and I had an idea on how to find Voyager," she reminded him. "And I've been working on it, but I can't give it the attention it deserves, not while my duties are elsewhere."
He shook his head. "You need to finish your thesis, B'Elanna."
"I need to find Tom!"
He sighed. "I promised you I won't meddle with your life or your career," he said after a long pause, "and I won't. But I'm also not going to participate in you throwing away your career."
"There are things more important than my career!"
"I know that!" he replied, the unexpected force behind his words making B'Elanna blink in surprise. "I know he's your husband, but he's also my son, and I want him found, too. But you're so close to finishing your master's degree, and you will regret it if you don't turn in that thesis. And the Fleet will regret it, too."
"I don't give a damn about the Fleet right now, Owen!"
"You should!" he said, his voice again rising. "The war is not going well! We need every advantage we can get. If you don't finish that technical manual, it will be months, probably a year until another engineer can get to your level of knowledge in Jem'Hadar systems, and I don't know if we have a year!" He took a deep breath. "Finish your thesis," he said a minute later. "When it's done, I'll see what I can get do to get you assigned somewhere where you can focus on Dominion communication technology. I promise."
It grated on her when he used that word, because it had grated on Tom. He threw promises around like they didn't mean anything, and she didn't necessarily trust that he meant it any more now than when he promised Tom as a kid that he would be at his soccer games or flight competitions. But at the moment, it was the best she had.
Three weeks later, her master's thesis was accepted by the committee at Starfleet Academy College of Engineering and Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Five minutes after that, Technical Guide 47-893: The Jem'Hadar Fighter, was distributed to every engineer and mechanic across the Fleet.