Second Chances: Chapter 52

Stardate 54475
October 2377
U.S.S. Voyager
Alpha Quadrant

Tom remembered that New Year's Day. He had spent weeks creating a holodeck program to celebrate New Year's Eve in mid-20th century New York City, and while some of the crew had gone a little overboard with the celebration—they had had a pretty rough couple of months, and definitely needed the celebration—he had called it a night shortly after 0100. After all, he had a staff meeting at 0800.

The first duty day of 2375 had gone like so many others, until Seven had announced from the newly-redesigned astrometrics lab that she was picking up on a comm signal almost five light years away.

A Starfleet comm signal.

It was a couple of hours of trying to clean it up before they realized it was a repeating, encrypted signal that contained instructions on how they could remodulate their signal to respond.

And then he heard her voice, snapping at his father. And right when he thought he couldn't love her any more.

She was as beautiful as he remembered. More polished, more confident, hair shorter and straighter, and apparently Starfleet had redesigned their uniforms again, no surprise there. She had smiled at him before getting down to business, speaking to Captain Janeway in those clipped, no-nonsense tones she used at work.

He still thought often about that first glance he had at Izzy, because for those four years leading up to it, he spent a lot of time thinking about that baby he didn't get to meet. He had wondered if it was a boy or a girl, wondered what B'Elanna would have named them. He had made up scenarios when he couldn't sleep at night, calculating how old his child would be, imagining what they would look like, what they would be doing at that moment.

And then she was there, on the viewscreen, in B'Elanna's arms, and she was more beautiful than he had imagined, with her mother's ridges and dark unruly curls. He even recognized that attitude that made her think she could hijack an official communication and announce that it was her half-birthday, because she got that from him.

And she had recognized him.

After they lost the channel with Headquarters, the bridge crew had sat in disbelieving silence, and Tom had all but collapsed his head down onto his console from the sheer emotions of the moment. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to disable his console first, and that action caused the ship to jump forward a few kilometers before he corrected, much to the amusement of the rest of the bridge crew.

There was champagne in the Mess Hall that evening—replicated, unfortunately; none of the vintage champagne that his parents collected—and plenty of toasts. He had toasted to B'Elanna and his father for not giving up on them. Joe had toasted to Tom's taste in women. Captain Janeway had wished Izzy a happy half-birthday, and he finally had a birthday for his child.

July 1, 2371. He had been off by a month. He blamed Dr. Gault for the inexact due date they were given.

Tom's group of parent friends on the ship celebrated each other's children's birthdays, usually with a mix of syntheholic beverages and cake while the parent of the birthday kid told stories about said kid and showed his or her friends what birthday gift had been procured for the year. It was only about that kid; no one else told stories of their own kids or tried to one-up the stories. January 28 was Patrick Carey. February 19 was Diego Ayala. April 7 was Aubrey McMinn. May 3 was Sean Carey. May 24 was Ryan-Marie Cabot. June 9 was Alexis Seuphon. August 25 was Natalia and Breanna Yosa.

November 4 was Pedro Ayala. They'll be back to Earth in time to celebrate, but Ayala had no idea where Pedro and Diego were. The Federation had been looking for his ex-wife since they found out Ayala was alive and on Voyager, but in more than three and a half years, all they've found were dead ends. The colony they had been living on when Ayala joined the Maquis had been turned over to the Cardassians; the trail went cold after 2371.

Sam Wildman usually came to the 'birthday parties,' but they didn't do the same for Naomi, because she saw Naomi every day. Paris always wondered if she hugged her daughter tighter on those nights that they gathered in Sandrine's. He also didn't participate by having his own night in the first years, because he didn't have a birthday, name, or any stories of his child.

Six months after they made contact with Starfleet Headquarters, he sat at the head of the table in Sandrine's with a glass of whiskey on the rocks while he read stories of Izzy that B'Elanna had written in her letters. He had gotten her a simple reaction time game for a birthday present, and now that he was thinking about it, realized he had six years' worth of birthday presents for his daughter in bottom of his closet that he should probably give to her.

It was an odd ritual, really, but after more than six years on the other side of the galaxy with the same people, they had developed a lot of odd rituals.

"That day that you contacted us… that was the second best day of my life," he said now to B'Elanna, who looked amused.

"The second?" she asked teasingly. "If the first wasn't our wedding, you have some explaining to do."

He shook his head. "The first was a few days ago, when you and Izzy stepped out of the Mackay," he said. "Our wedding was third. It was a good day, don't get me wrong, but it's pretty easy to stand next to someone and say you'll always fight for them. It's another when that person is 60,000 light years away and you still fight for them." He smiled at her, pushed her hair behind her ear. "That moment, seeing you on that viewscreen, seeing that you didn't give up on me, seeing Izzy…" His voice trailed off. "Those first years were hard," he said, his voice lower now. "There were moments, days, weeks, when I thought it was over, that nobody back home still cared, still knew to look for us. Honestly, fighting for our lives was easier, because I could distract myself from that idea. But when I saw you, I knew you hadn't given up on me, and I knew you wouldn't give up on me. And that meant a hell of a lot more to me than standing in front of some admiral at Starfleet Headquarters."

"'Some admiral'?" she teased. "Admiral Pitlatch was your commanding admiral!" But she was smiling, and then kissed him in that way that almost made him forget there was a sleeping six-year-old on the other side of the divider.

Almost.

They were going to have to figure out this 'sex as parents' thing. Of course, it will probably be easier once they had more space to be parents than a single officer's quarters on an Intrepid-class ship.

"I wish we could have had the Hirogen network longer," he said with a rueful smile. "I enjoyed getting your letters."

Turned out, the Hirogen didn't like sharing and would rather destroy their entire network than do that. And then there was the whole 'hunting our prey' thing, which he would rather forget entirely.

"And I liked getting yours," she said. "But honestly, it was a terrible mode of communication. The MIDAS array was much better, and Barclay never would have thought about it if we had gotten complacent with the Hirogen network."

She had a point. After that first message, they were never able to get audio or visual reliably, and the only communication for the next three and a half months were letters that came once every nine and a quarter days, give or take a few hours. Then they lost the Hirogen network and had several months of silence before he was able to actually see her again.

"You know a lot of what happened over the next few months," she said. "I gave you most of the highlights in our letters. I guess, though, I just gave you the events, I didn't really…" Her voice trailed off as she tried to find the right words. "It was a paradigm shift," she finally said. "We had almost four years of thinking that Voyager was destroyed and all of you were dead, and suddenly, it wasn't, and you weren't. It was hard for a lot of people. Four years is a long time, and a lot of people moved on. Mark, Captain Janeway's fiancé, had married another woman. Libby—Ensign Kim's girlfriend when you left—was married and had a kid, and that was awkward, but it was really hard for those who were married and had gotten remarried, to find out that their spouses were actually still alive. Sarah hadn't had a serious relationship in those four years, but she told me she felt guilty about the fact that she had even dated other men."

"And for you?" he asked. She had already told him that she hadn't dated, but that didn't mean that things weren't still awkward when he suddenly came back to life. She looked hesitant about her response, looked like she was thinking about it.

"I told you once, during my recovery second classman year, that I didn't know who I was anymore. That I had spent my first two years at the Academy defining myself and being that person, and that wasn't the person I was after my coma. I wasn't the athlete anymore, wasn't the one who had more stamina than all of her classmates, and I got lost trying to find out who I was. It was like that again. For most of our marriage, I was a widow, a single mother, an engineer, a graduate student, and then all of a sudden, I was a wife again and Izzy had a father. I didn't know how to redefine myself to fit that. I didn't know how to rearrange my life to make sure there was again room for you in it. So I did the same thing I did when I was a cadet—I overcompensated on the parts of my life that hadn't changed. I was still an engineer. I was still a graduate student. And I didn't let myself think about much else. Until I was forced to."