Second Chances: Chapter 57
A/N: Sorry for not posting on Wednesday; I was traveling for work and too busy to write. But here we are again. Enjoy.
Stardate 54476
November 2377
U.S.S. Voyager
Alpha Quadrant
The Hirogen's dark eyes shone with a gleeful malice Paris didn't have words for as he raised his rifle. His finger began to tighten on the trigger—
Tom Paris awoke with a start, the nightmare still burning in his mind. Nightmares were nothing new to him; he had always had them, long before there had been anything in his life that was truly nightmare-inducing. Nicki had explained that to him once; he had been seventeen or eighteen and woke from a nightmare in the middle of the night. He had gone down to the kitchen to get a glass of water—or tea, or whiskey, or something else—and got his second fright of the night at the unexpected sight of his sister, sitting in the living room with an infant Ainsley and a PADD, studying a neurology text for medical school. She and Jason had had a fight and she had retreated to the Paris house to get away from it. That happened a lot in the early days of their marriage, long, bitter fights that came from getting married at 20 to a 23—24? He never could remember how old Jason was—year-old medical student, then becoming a medical student herself, having a baby, and having a husband starting his surgical training. Alicia had always been as quietly tolerant of her children's missteps as flights of fancy, and had no problem with Nicki coming over—with or without Ainsley—whenever she needed a break from her marriage.
Nicki had always been stubborn, and had found her match in Jason. Which was good—it seemed like it was only that mutual stubbornness that kept each of them from walking away from that marriage in those first six or so years. He was pretty sure it took Nicki graduating from medical school and beginning pediatrics training for them to settle in together and figure out how to be happy in their marriage.
That night, Nicki had been reading about the neurology of sleep disorders. Knowing sleep would be hard to come by again, Tom had replicated both of them some tea and joined her in the living room. She had explained that people tended to always have the same kind of dream, whether those were happy or psychedelic or sexual or nightmares. He had asked if there was anything in that text about how to change his default dream setting.
He certainly remembered the Hirogen network going down. It had actually happened nine days before Pathfinder realized, as they were downloading the latest letters from Pathfinder. The Hirogen hadn't been too happy with their unauthorized use of their network and collapsed the containment field around the singularity, shutting down the entire network halfway through their download. Paris had gotten B'Elanna's letter musing about whether or not to allow Ainsley to add Izzy to the U6 girls' spring soccer team she coached in Denver, but Harry had been devastated that he hadn't gotten the latest from his parents.
And then there was the hunt.
One minute, the Hirogen were boarding the ship, and Captain Janeway ordered everyone to remove the rank from their uniforms. She kept hers on; she was the captain, but she refused to allow any other member of her crew be hunted just because of his or her rank. She had stood up to those Hirogen twice her size, her chin held stubbornly high as she refused to back down. Not for the first time since they had been stranded in the Delta quadrant, he understood how and why officers could have undying loyalty to their captains.
He would have followed Captain Janeway into hell. And when the Hirogen took over the ship, they all did.
The next thing he knew, he was on the holodeck, in the uniform of an American GI during the Second World War. Harry had told him once the Hirogen problem was taken care of that almost three and a half months had gone by. He had no memories of those months and hadn't believed him until he had checked three different chronometers, all of which confirmed what Harry had said. He had gone from March to June without realizing it.
And then the nightmares started, and he realized that he had some sort of memories of those months, buried somewhere deep down in his head. And none of those memories were good, nor were the dreams he saw them in. He rarely slept more than ninety minutes at a time for weeks, and it was pretty obvious to everyone around him. He tried asking the Doctor if he could prescribe something that would prevent him from dreaming, but the EMH said it didn't work that way. He did, however, give him a modified cortical stimulator that preventing his consciousness from being aware of the dreams. He apparently wasn't the only one on the ship who needed one. Tom slept with that on for the next year.
As hard as the next few months were on everyone—they had to practically rebuild the inside of their ship, for as much damage as the Hirogen had done to it while trying to turn it into one giant holodeck—nobody was more affected than Harry Kim. The crew had to deal with the fact that they had three and a half months of missing memories, but Harry had seen all of it, had seen his crewmates, friends, lover been turned into play things for the Hirogen, had seen the Doctor patch them up only to send them back into the fight, had worked with the Hirogen to help them expand the holodeck and create new hunts. And his role in it had been his fault. He had been in Engineering when the Hirogen came aboard, and like the rest of the crew, had taken off his pip and tossed it away before they could identify who was important and high-ranking. The Hirogen had come into Engineering and demanded an engineer; Sue Nicoletti, being the senior engineer on duty, had stepped forward to protect her team, the same way Captain Janeway had for her crew, but Harry had interjected, stating that if they wanted someone who knew the ship, he was not only trained in engineering, but was the operations officer and nobody knew the ship the way he did.
He thought he was saving his girlfriend from some unknown horror, and instead, condemned her to the same neural inhibitor and holographic hunts as the rest of the crew, and he had to watch it happen.
He had started drinking—synthehol when he was on board, the real thing whenever he could find it on shore leave and trade outposts—and distanced himself from his colleagues, friends, and even Sue. She had been at her wit's end watching him spiral, and confided in Joe, who in turn confided in Paris. Tom himself was very experienced in both drinking and dealing with friends who were drinking—outside of competition months, Nova Squadron was renowned at the Academy for being a drinking team with a flying problem—and between the three of them, finally managed an intervention without getting the command team or the Doctor involved.
On paper, Tom and Harry had a lot in common. They both went to the right prep schools, both had a lot of pressure from an overbearing parent—Tom's dad, Harry's mom, although Harry dealt with the pressure a lot better than Tom had—both met women they wanted to marry while at the Academy, and if Tom had been a bit younger or hadn't married B'Elanna and started a family, he probably would have been closer to Harry than Joe. Watching Harry decompensate like that was like watching a younger brother—or a better version of himself—and he wondered then, as he did now, how he would have fared if he had been the one to watch his friends suffer and die.
"Tom?" He turned to see B'Elanna looking at him with one eye open in a squint. "What time is it?"
"No idea," he said. "Go back to sleep."
She yawned and blinked. "Nightmare?" she murmured.
"The Hirogens didn't play nice," he replied. "It was hard losing the network and our letters back and forth, but if we could have avoided dealing with them by destroying that network the first time we saw it, I would have done that. Sorry."
"No need to apologize," she murmured. He had told her when they re-established contact about the Hirogen and how they had been hunted. There was no need re-hashing that now, not when she was telling her story and definitely not at whatever time it was in the middle of the night when they both should have been sleeping. "Are you going to be able to get back to sleep, or am I going to have to wake up?"
"I should be fine," he assured her. A few seconds later, he asked, "Do Nicki and Jason still fight?"
She opened an eye questioningly and then sighed. "They argue, usually for fun. They don't fight much, but when they do, they really fight." She sighed again. "Why?"
"They used to fight all the time, for the first five or six years they were married."
"They married young," she murmured.
"So did we," he reminded her with a chuckle.
"Yes, and we fought all the time."
"Not like they did."
"I threw an alarm clock at your head."
He chuckled. "You threw it at the wall."
"I was aiming for your head. You ducked."
"Quick reflexes," he bragged. A minute later, he said, "I thought they were going to get a divorce. Nicki and Jason. Even after Ainsley was born. Every time I saw them together, I thought they hated each other. Dad told to her she should leave him. Mom was… Mom was her usual always-supportive self. She said Nicki was an adult and could make her own decisions and could live with those decisions. Whatever they were."
B'Elanna sighed in defeat. "Why are we discussing your sister at," she rolled over and looked at the chronometer, "zero-four in the morning?"
"I don't know," he said honestly, and she sighed again.
"The biggest fight between them was leading up to her Starfleet obligation ending," B'Elanna said. "Which just happened to coincide with her deployment. Which just happened to coincide with my next deployment."