Second Chances: Chapter 82

A/N: Two more chapters, and then we're done! I've been posting this for well over a year now, so I can't believe we're almost there. And I'm so excited to get started on my next project. Stay tuned...

Stardate 54456
October 2377
San Francisco, Earth

"And just a reminder," Lt. Commander B'Elanna Torres concluded as she finished her lesson on Klingon cloaking devices. "After six and a half years, it's time to bring Voyager back home." The words were met with cheering from the cadets; even though Torres didn't discuss Voyager in class, they all knew about Pathfinder and the seemingly-endless quest to find a way to bring the lost ship back. Many of them had been plebes when Pathfinder first made contact and had piled into the lecture hall for Advanced Communications Networking in hopes of hearing Torres tell how they had managed to find the ship.

She held up her hands to quiet them. "I'm leaving tonight toward the intercept point. If all goes well, I'll be back in about two weeks. If not, maybe sooner, maybe not at all. In the meantime, Dr. Hospod will be filling in for me. He's the head of Comparative Systems Engineering at Starfleet Engineering and was my technical advisor for my master's, so you're in good hands. Be thinking about your final projects. Proposals will be due shortly after I return, but I'll continue to accept them and review them as I'm able until then. If you need a refresher on the project requirements, it's pretty well outlined in the syllabus. Class dismissed." As the cadets filed out of the lecture hall, she noticed a number of them gathered around Shava, likely hoping to get more information about the singularity drive or details about the flight. She wouldn't say that her junior cadet had become a social butterfly by any means, but she did seem less hostile and more comfortable in her place in the Corps of Cadets than she had been at the start of Engineering 2 the previous semester.

There wasn't much to do at Pathfinder; everything that needed to be done had been done already. The experiments had been run, the data analyzed, new experiments designed, run, and analyzed, and over and over more times than she could count. But still Torres stood there in her now-empty lab, wondering if this was finally going to be it, if this was going to be one that got Voyager home. "I don't think I've ever seen this place empty." She turned to see Lt. Serin, her deputy, glancing around the space. "I guess this means it's time for you to go home."

She smiled slightly, familiar with the encouragement from her deputy to leave work every once in a while. "I'm going, I'm going," she insisted. He rolled his eyes but pretended to accept that.

"You ready?"

"A little nervous," she admitted. She knew their part was done; it was up to Joe Carey to make the final modifications to the engines and deflector array and up to Tom to fly them home, but that knowledge didn't help the nerves.

"Don't worry," Serin said in soothing tones. "I won't let the cadets throw any parties in the lab while the parents are out."

She finally smiled at that as she turned to leave the lab. "I expect this place to be spotless when I return," she teased.

"In order to return, you need to actually leave," he shot back. "I'll see you in a few weeks, Torres."

"And you'll hear from me sooner," she said warningly as she allowed him to herd her toward the door. "I don't know what's going to come up between now and Thursday, and I need you here ready to handle anything."

"You can count on me."

She knew she could; he had been her deputy since Pathfinder had expanded from a couple of people in a random astrometrics lab to the three teams of engineers, another of comms, and the busiest collection of astrophysicists and cartographers in Starfleet that it was today. "Thanks, Serin," she said. "Have a good night."

"You too, Torres."

She went straight from Pathfinder to the Paris house, where everyone else—Owen and Alicia, Izzy, Nicki and the rest of the Sanders family, and the two Wyland girls currently on Earth—were already gathered. "Let me guess," Nicki said as she handed B'Elanna a glass of wine, not even giving the engineer an opportunity to drop her duffel by the door. "You stopped by the lab first."

"I just had a few last things to check," B'Elanna said defensively. Nicki rolled her eyes.

"And you'll check them three more times from the Mackay before Voyager even begins the trip," she said. "Gods. After all this time, I can't believe it's finally here. The next time I see you after tonight, you'll have Tom with you."

"Here's hoping," B'Elanna replied as she took a sip of her wine.

"Mom!" Izzy shouted at her as she descended the stairs. "I'm going with you and Grandpa!"

"Well, that's certainly news to me," B'Elanna replied. "And what makes you think that?"

"I'm going to see Dad!" Izzy replied excitedly.

"Yes," B'Elanna said slowly. "You'll see him when we get back, but until then, you're staying here with Grandma and Kajsa and Stephanie."

"No," Izzy said stubbornly. She had literally put her foot down, planted it hard onto the floor, her arms crossed over her chest and her chin lifted defiantly. "Dad said I'm going to see him soon, and that means I'm going with you!"

"Soon is a relative term, Izzy," B'Elanna replied. "You'll see him in a couple of weeks."

"No!"

"Yes."

"No!" she repeated, then changed tactics and asked, "Why not?"

"Why can't you go?" B'Elanna asked. "Because it's a Starfleet ship, and you're not in Starfleet."

"Mom."

"It was kinda a week argument," Nicki chimed in. "I lived on a Starfleet ship long before I was in Starfleet."

B'Elanna gave her sister-in-law a warning glance, which Nicki intentionally missed, before she turned back to Izzy and sighed. "You have school," she said. "And it's a few days in the runabout to get to the rendezvous point. Runabouts aren't very big and we're going to be tripping over each other. And they're really boring to be in. And it's too dangerous."

"It's not too dangerous," Izzy scoffed. "I know how to fly."

B'Elanna didn't see what the two statements had to do with each other, but if there was one thing she had learned from being the mother of a six-year-old, it was that that happened quite frequently. "You fly simulators," she pointed out, then sighed. That was hardly the point. "Grandpa and I have a lot of work to do while we're on the Mackay and then when we're on Voyager. We can't be entertaining you."

"I can entertain myself."

For twenty minutes, sure, but B'Elanna doubted that would be true of the two-day trip to the waiting point, nor the wait for Voyager to travel through the singularity, the twelve hour flight to the rendezvous point, or the several days B'Elanna would be running diagnostics on Voyager's engines before they could begin the return trip to Earth. "Izzy, you're staying here, and that's final."

"I don't see why she can't go." B'Elanna whipped around in surprise at the sound of Owen's voice, then glared at her father-in-law.

"You're not helping," she snapped.

"It's not going to be the most exciting trip in the world, but if she really has her heart set on it, I don't see why not," Owen continued with a shrug.

"She has school," B'Elanna pointed out.

"And she could do her school work on the Mackay," Owen argued.

"We don't know what will happen if something goes wrong," she said. "I don't want her to be anywhere near the exit point of the singularity if this fails."

"We'll be over a light year away," Owen reminded her, and she herself had confirmed Swanwick's and Yuiv's calculations that determined that would be a safe distance away.

"We're going to be busy," she pointed out. "There are a lot of last-minute things that need to be ironed out before the flight, and then I'm going to be in engineering and you're going to be working with Captain Janeway."

"And while we're stopped, there's not going to be much for the chief helmsman to do," Owen said. She flushed at the fact that she had completely forgotten that at the end of this, Izzy would have two parents capable of keeping an eye on her. "It'll be good for Tom and Izzy to have some time alone together." He turned to his youngest granddaughter. "Go get your duffel, Izzy. We're leaving right after dinner. Admiral's orders."

"Yay!" she exclaimed, rushing forward to wrap her arms around her grandfather before she turned and ran back up the stairs. "Thank you, Grandpa!" she called out over her shoulder as she ran.

"Seriously?" B'Elanna demanded. "She's my daughter! Don't you think this should be my decision?"

"It's my mission," he replied. "That means I get to choose my team."

"Sure, out of eligible Starfleet officers," she said. "You don't get to draft six-year-olds into the Fleet just to suit your purposes! I'm not comfortable with this, Owen."

"Well, you've got about an hour to get more comfortable with it," he replied. "Because it's happening."

She knew better than to waste her time or her breath arguing with him; if there was one thing she had learned from over a decade of dealing with various members of the Paris family, it was that their stubbornness knew no bounds. Not that Izzy hadn't inherited a healthy dose of that from her side of the family as well, of course. Instead, she released a long string of Klingon curses in his general direction, and was pleased to find that doing so was as satisfying as she remembered.

When Izzy's excitement at being included kept her awake until well after midnight on the first night, B'Elanna wasn't sure if she was going to kill her daughter or her father-in-law first, but she had calmed down significantly by a few hours after breakfast on their first full day in space, when it set in that time in a runabout really was significantly more boring than the time she had spent on various starships on their trips to Qo'noS, or even on the Bird of Prey that had taken them from DS9 to Qo'noS a year and a half before. But she had sat in the back and done her homework with minimal complaints, taking a few breaks to work on foot drills with the practice soccer ball that Ainsley had insisted Izzy bring with her, the one that gave immediate feedback on how well she was executing the prescribed drills.

By Thursday morning, B'Elanna had to admit—to herself only; she didn't want to deal with that 'I told you so' look on Owen's face—that having Izzy along was far from the chore she thought it would be. It had been too long since she had spent much time with Izzy when both were awake and neither was distracted, between her work at Pathfinder and teaching at the Academy and Izzy's schedule of school, soccer, and flight practices and how busy that kept her, and it was nice to have that reminder that she had, against all odds, been raising a well-adjusted, happy, and interesting child.

They had settled into the location where they would wait for Voyager to do the jump, and then B'Elanna changed into her gym clothes for an hour of mok'bara before connecting with Pathfinder for the most recent projections of the next morning's flights while Owen and Izzy occupied themselves with dinner in the back. *I can get you connected to Voyager to go over the data with Lt. Carey, if that would be helpful,* Lt. Serin said. *Sali said she can get a window between you and Voyager in fifteen minutes, but she's not sure until the comm connects how long it'll be open.*

"Anything is better than nothing," B'Elanna replied. "Let's do it."

Fifteen minutes later, they got their window, and after the crewman who had been manning astrometrics realized what was going on and had summoned Joe Carey, B'Elanna was discussing the projections for the next morning's flight and what that would mean for the deflector settings with the chief engineer. "How's Tom?" she asked as they finished up.

*Killing himself running these simulations,* Joe replied. *I don't know when he last left the holodeck.*

"Well, that's nothing new," she joked. He smiled slightly in reply, but he looked pretty close to the tipping point of exhaustion himself.

*We still have a few minutes left of comm time,* he said. *Do you want me to go get him?*

Part of her didn't want to disturb him from the simulator, but the rest of her knew that if this didn't go well and Voyager was destroyed, she would never forgive herself for giving up one last opportunity to tell him that she loved him. "Thanks, Joe," she said. He nodded and turned toward the door, then hesitated and turned back.

*On the very slight off-chance I don't get to say this to you tomorrow, thank you, B'Elanna, for everything you've done for us. And for being a friend to Sarah and the boys. Getting to see them every other week… Well, that's a lot more than I thought I could ever ask for just a few years ago.*

She nodded slightly. "Thanks for taking care of Tom," she replied. He gave a nod, then ducked out of the astrometrics lab.

She returned her attention to her console, not looking up again until she heard the door to Voyager's astrometrics lab sliding open again. "Joe said you've been running simulations non-stop," she greeted her husband. "You look like it."

His smile was tired, but was still all Tom. *I've used up almost all my replicator rations on raktajino,* he said, and she doubted he was joking.

"How have the simulations been going?" she asked.

*I'm at about 90%,* he said. Her eyes widened, impressed. *If you can get Joe a good, wide singularity, I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing.*

"Ninety is a lot higher than any of the test pilots at R&D could get," she pointed out. "We're going to monitor your progress from about a light year away. I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" she said. She knew her voice was more forceful than the sentence required, but couldn't help it. This had to work.

*That's my goal,* he replied.

"That's good," she said. She took a deep breath, remembering those words she had told him before big flights, back when they were newlyweds in a small apartment on Mars and had no idea what the universe was going to throw at them. "Don't you dare die on me. I'm only getting married once, Flyboy."

She saw him swallow a few times, and when he spoke again, she heard regret in his voice. *Don't worry. I'm not planning on it.*

"That's good," she said, and she heard in her own voice the same heaviness she heard in his. "Because if you did, I'd have to go down to the gates of Gre'thor myself to kill you again."

*It's going to work, B'Elanna. It has to.*

"I love you, Tom," she said, and thinking of the six-year-old in the back, probably eating dinner while her grandfather quizzed her on her multiplication tables, added, "and it's about time for you to start pulling your weight on this whole parenting thing."

The smile that crossed his face was almost enough to erase the signs of fatigue that had been etched there, and she felt a thrill of excitement at the fact that she would soon see him interact with his daughter in person for the first time. *I love you, B'Elanna,* he said. *I'll see you soon.*

Less than 24 hours later, she kissed her husband for the first time in six and a half years, and then watched him give their daughter a hug for the first time ever.