Chapter 3. Revenge

It's an hour later before the commander arrives in sickbay. I am sitting on a biobed, explaining for the fourth time to the Doctor that I feel fine, that as he has finished all the tests he'd wanted to run and given me a mild sedative to counteract my symptoms of stress, I really need to be going now or I'll miss dinner with my daughter.

Chakotay asks the Doctor to give us a minute. He stands looking at me, face grave.

"I'm sorry," he says.

That surprises me. "For what? I'm the one who lost my composure down there."

"And I'm the one who let it get to that point."

I shrug. "You couldn't have known." I'm not entirely sure what I mean, exactly - couldn't have known about my past, or about my time on Quarra? Or that Naomi's fake parents would turn out to be complete assholes?

"I could have. I should have. I … didn't protect you."

"Well, Commander, if it's any consolation … you're not the first. Don't worry about it. May I go take Naomi to dinner now?" I know I'm needling him, digging myself in deeper, but I can't help it. My need to be with Naomi, to keep my promise to her, is reaching fever pitch.

Fortunately, that is what he seems to intuit from my uncharacteristically bitter urgency. "I'm scheduling you for counseling with me, twice a week, starting tomorrow. Until then - dismissed. And give Naomi my regards."

I'm so relieved to be freed from sickbay that it doesn't occur to me until later that night to wonder what exactly he'd been doing in the hour before he came to sickbay.

**ooo**

When I see her, Naomi is waiting in the mess hall, hunched in a chair, watching the doors. Tal hovers behind her, looking helpless. I feel a twinge of guilt for saddling her with Naomi's care in my absence, but that twinge is extinguished by her warm smile, which I see when I look up from Naomi's full-body, shamelessly needy hug. Tal squeezes my shoulder as she silently slips past us into the corridor. I'll talk to her later.

Naomi and I stand just inside the doorway, swaying back and forth for long minutes, feeling one another's breath and heartbeat. Her muffled sobs pass quickly, and then we are just peacefully, finally together, in a state approaching symbiosis. Crew members walk carefully past us, voices hushed, giving us space. They seem to understand that in this way we are healing.

Naomi doesn't ask me how I spent the afternoon, downworld, and I don't bring it up. We seem to have a tacit agreement not to discuss it. It doesn't matter anyway. There is nothing about it that she needs to know, and very little that I would share with her willingly.

Eventually I pause in stroking her hair to ask, "Are you hungry? Should we eat dinner here or in our quarters?"

"Let's eat here, mommy. I helped Neelix make the food. I want to see everyone eat it." I can't argue with that logic, though it makes me smile.

To give her a good view of her fellow diners, she sits with her back to the viewport. That puts my back to the room, but as I only have eyes for my daughter, it's all the same to me.

That's how Joe Carey is able to approach our table without my noticing. I just see Naomi's eyes light up as her face lifts to greet a visitor.

"Uncle Joe!" She is happy to see him, more than the other shipmates who have stopped to say hello. I realize she has missed him.

He walks into my field of vision, and as I see him, really see his face for the first time since … everything … I realize I have missed him, too. I give him a shy, apologetic smile, which he answers with a relieved one of his own. I offer him my hand, and he pulls me up from my chair and into his warm encompassing embrace.

I have a moment of flashback, remembering how he restrained me in sickbay after my first failed treatment, when I didn't know him. My body stiffens involuntarily, and he instantly releases me, steps back a bit. But I search out his eyes, asking silently for forgiveness, for time, for another chance. The concern melts from his eyes leaving only warmth behind.

At our invitation, Joe pulls up a chair and joins us at our table. As Naomi gives him a detailed account of the ingredients and preparation steps for each food on his plate, dropping sometimes into a hilarious, spot-on imitation of Neelix as she does so, he laughs at all the right times, musses her hair playfully, asks questions that show her he is hanging on her every word. She laps up his attention, while I just sit back and drink in the sight of them both.

My bright, vibrant, beautiful daughter. How many times is this, now, that I have almost lost her forever? And wouldn't this loss, on Quarra, have been the worst of all, taking as it did my very knowledge of her, of myself as her mother? Even if we had been left there, living separate lives, never knowing what we had lost? It doesn't bear contemplation.

Kubeki's final words still ring in my ears. "Didn't it strike anyone as an awful risk, to trust someone with your sort of damage with the care and nurture of an infant?" She had no idea how much careful thought I'd given to just that question, before conceiving Naomi, before even marrying Gres in the first place.

"Success is the best revenge." The old saying runs through my head, and apparently out of my mouth as well, for Naomi and Joe both stop and look at me. I shrug, smiling. Naomi resumes her chatter without missing a beat, but Joe continues to consider me thoughtfully. When Naomi next pauses for a mouthful of food, I casually ask him, "Joe, would you like to come over for dessert when we're done here?"

Naomi's shriek of "Hot fudge sundaes!" drowns out his reply, but his real answer is in his smiling eyes.