A/N: For Ky. The sixth yahrzeit.
Day 29
Tom tosses his PADD off the side of his bed and stretches languidly. One day he may again grow accustomed to the gratuitous freedom that is lazing around in bed on a Sunday morning, but this is not that day. In the penal colony they were forced up and at 'em at 0500 every morning, the days bleeding together interminably in the absence of anything to differentiate one from the next, and even three months on, when he think back on it, he imagines himself trudging through a thick miasma of guilt, anger, and oppressive tedium.
But today he has managed to lay around until just past 0800, an unspeakable luxury as far as he's concerned. He presses himself up into a sitting position and yawns widely, spends another moment reveling in the nothing he has to do right now, then throws his legs over the side of the bed and heads for the sonic shower. A lesser luxury—he misses running water—but he won't let it spoil his mood.
Refreshed, opting with some regret for Neelix's cooking over burning through his replicator rations, he throws on a uniform, the path of least resistance. He finds he stands out less in uniform. Better optics. The one time he strolled into the Mess Hall in his civilian clothing, some crewman—what was her name, Anderson?—made loud and pointed comments to her companions about Tom's lack of loyalty to anyone or anything.
Little did she know. But still, he's not gonna make that mistake again. He'll have to change into parrises gear on the holodeck anyway, since he hasn't saved enough rations up to replicate his own.
Replicator rations. He sighs. It's the number one drag on his morale these days. Never enough to go around, and the less he can replicate, the more he has to venture into the common spaces.
He heads out and down the corridor, slowing as he approaches the turbolift and the two sets of adjacent quarters. Behind one door: not an enemy, anymore, but certainly an unfriendly face. Behind the other… would the Captain take her breakfast in the Mess Hall, on a weekend? She can't have many more rations than he does, what with all the coffee…
He doesn't get the chance to find out. The turbolift arrives and the doors open in a way that, if he were feeling whimsical, he might even call pointed, considering his train of thought. He spares one last glance for the door of his particular interest and then shakes his head, and allows himself to be shuttled up to deck two.
As he enters the Mess Hall, he scans the room automatically for a quiet corner to tuck himself into. Kurt Doyle looks up from where he's sitting with a couple of his fellow Maquis—former Maquis?—and oh, Tom recognizes the look in the other man's eyes. He seriously considers grabbing something to go, but it's going to be a long journey if he doesn't deal with this, and, well, he never was one to run from a fight.
"Full uniform, huh?" Doyle sneers from his table. "Isn't it your day off? You and the rest of the senior staff?"
Tom rolls his eyes. Damned if you do… "Never know when we 'senior staff' might have to leap into action," he answers dryly.
Doyle shoots out of his chair so fast it tips over behind him. "Is that a joke?" he hisses. "You think it's funny to sell us out and get rewarded for it with those shiny pips and a—"
Tom doesn't bother to wait to find out what else he can count among his vast rewards for treason. "You know what I think is funny, Doyle? Is how your captain didn't seem to have a problem falling in line one second after stepping foot on Voyager. I was there. Did Chakotay even put up a fight? Offer a single alternative? So who's betrayed you, Doyle? Was it me? Because I'm not the one who brought you to heel."
Doyle tries to rush him, but Tom sees the hook coming a mile off and easily sidesteps it. He is so, so tired of this. A few Maquis sprint over and Tom tenses, but to his surprise they only surround Doyle, hold him back.
"You arrogant piece of shit," Doyle hurls. "They should have hanged you. If I get half a chance—"
Someone in the crowd gasps. Tom ignores them. "Do you think you're unique out here? Because you're not. We're all going through it, Doyle, and personally I find your litany of grievances boring. Yeah, I'm wearing the uniform. We should be all thanking Starfleet for saving our asses. Chakotay did you a favor. If he can deal with it, a bottom-of-the-rung crewman like you should be able to."
Doyle redoubles his efforts to break free just as Neelix comes out from behind the galley wielding a cast-iron pan. "Just what is going on here?" he demands, looking first to Tom, then Doyle, purple-faced and seething.
"We're all fine here, Neelix," Tom drawls, turning his back on Doyle and clapping Neelix on the shoulder. "Crewman Doyle here was just about to go finish his breakfast. What're you serving today, anyway?"
Neelix is slow to lower his pan, scanning the room suspiciously. Doyle makes a sound of disgust, shakes off his buddies and storms out. Tom will have to watch out for him, he thinks, as the crowd disperses. The weight of it settles in his chest and for a moment every ounce of him regrets coming here. Maybe he shouldn't have even acknowledged Doyle. He'd been wondering lately whether standing up to one bully would provide him with a cushion against any others—a tried-and-true method, in theory. Now that he's had the opportunity, he's not so sure.
Neelix leads him to where he's keeping something like congealing oatmeal warm on the stove, but Tom finds that he's lost his appetite. He waves Neelix off, feigning some forgotten meeting (I really can't be late, so sorry, Neelix!), and walks out as calmly as he can manage. He makes it as far as the first turn to take him out of view before he collapses against a bulkhead, runs a hand across his face in frustration.
It will take time, he knows, for the people on this ship to forget his past. And time is something they have in abundance; yet it would be all too easy, he knows, to make things worse for himself. To give them some new reason to ostracize him, primed as they all are to loathe him on sight. He has a real chance here, for a life of sorts. He can redeem himself on Voyager in a way that means something, unlike the penal colony. He got there by letting a lot of good people down, and they kept him busy with menial physical labor which did nothing, really, to balance the scales. Here, with the whole crew depending on him, he can try to make things right.
If he doesn't screw it up.
Day 36
Heading up to breakfast, Tom can't shake the feeling that he's forgetting something. Mentally, he makes a list: he showered, shaved, brushed his teeth. Put on a fresh uniform, despite it being his day off. And it is definitely his day off, isn't it? He's not on the wrong deck. He's not supposed to meet Harry on the holodeck until 1000 hours. It's gnawing at his mind, whatever it is.
Entering the Mess Hall, his gaze goes straight to Kurt Doyle, sitting at a table with a couple of his fellow Maquis. Ex-Maquis? People to avoid, anyway. But as he heads for the food trays, it becomes clear that Doyle has other ideas.
"Full uniform, huh?" Doyle calls, drawing the attention of the entire room. "Isn't it your day off? You and the rest of the senior staff?" He says it like an expletive. Tom considers his options, decides ignoring Doyle completely would be the more provocative choice.
"Never know when we 'senior staff' might have to leap into action," Tom answers blithely, hoping to shut this confrontation down before it can heat up.
This backfires spectacularly.
"Is that a joke?" Doyle snaps. "You think it's funny to—"
A wave of déjà vu sweeps over Tom, so profound that he misses the end of Doyle's sentence. He looks over his shoulder at the kitchen, expecting to find support in the form of Neelix rounding the corner. The galley is empty.
"Hey, I'm talking to you," Doyle shouts, and Tom whips around to find the other man suddenly standing way too close. He just has time to dodge the punch Doyle throws, and the entire room seems to rise as one, a handful of them rushing over to hold Doyle back.
"What the—"
"What is going on here, exactly?" Neelix demands, emerging from the storeroom armed with heavy cookware.
Tom looks at Doyle, still restrained by his companions, then back at Neelix. "Nothing, Neelix," he says finally, trying to sound calm. "I think we're fine here, aren't we, Doyle?"
Roughly, Doyle shakes free and strides out of the Mess Hall, throwing Tom a murderous look as he goes. One of the Maquis, to Tom's surprise, offers a half-apologetic glance before following Doyle out.
So much for his good mood. He allows Neelix to show him the breakfast offerings—a variety of unidentifiable fruits, coffee, something that's trying to be oatmeal—but Tom's heart isn't in it.
He makes an excuse and leaves, decides to do a few laps around the deck before he meets Harry. Without exactly knowing why, he doesn't want Harry to be able to sense what's just happened. He'll probably hear about it anyway, but Tom doesn't want it to taint their limited free time. And—he can admit it to himself if no one else—he doesn't want Harry, with his heart of gold and bottomless optimism, to think less of him for getting into it with Doyle. However much it blindsided Tom himself.
What Harry may or may not have intuited, though, he'll never know. B'Elanna calls him away just as Tom arrives at Holodeck 2, leaving him on his own again. Not exactly the Sunday he'd had in mind, on the whole.
He's just thinking he'll head to the Hololab to make some progress on his new program, when a red alert sweeps through the ship. Immediately, his heartrate spikes. As he spins around and dashes back to the turbolift, his heart in his throat, he's hard-pressed to think of any scenario worse than a second round with the Vidiians… and yet, when he arrives on the Bridge to see not a ship but a spatial anomaly through the viewscreen, somehow he is not surprised.
Day 39
"…I was up late. Later than usual," Janeway amends, at Tom's knowing grin. "I was supposed to have the day off!"
"I know the feeling," he agrees.
"What were you going to do today?" Janeway asks, and Tom is surprised by the question. For a wild moment he considers telling her about his fight with Doyle, how he felt like he knew it was coming but was helpless to stop it. He imagines unburdening himself to her, sharing how odd he's felt today, imagines her confiding in him in turn. In his mind's eye he sees them in his quarters or hers, a bottle between them, the lights low and the old, familiar stories swirling in the air.
"Parrises squares," he says instead.
"Ah, that fits. I always preferred—"
"Tennis," they say together. Janeway smiles at him, a proper smile, her eyes twinkling.
He holds this moment close as they begin to work together on the problem of the sensor data. Half his attention on the terminal in front of him, half working on committing the look in her eyes to memory, he is just considering making an attempt to elicit a second smile—does he dare be so greedy?—when she gasps, and then crumples.
Sensing that they have no time to lose, he calls for an emergency medical beam out even before he reaches her. They rematerialize in a tangle of limbs, he on the floor, Janeway slumped over him.
The Doctor doesn't miss a beat. "What's her status?" he demands, seizing a tricorder and kneeling to scan her.
"It's her head," Tom answers without thinking. There's no way for him to know this, and yet he's certain he is not wrong. He likes to think of himself as pretty good in a crisis, but he takes in her pallid skin, her pupils blown wide, and it's only with a truly herculean effort, as he feels her lose consciousness against him, that he does not panic.
"She needs surgery immediately," the Doctor concludes, snapping his tricorder shut. "Kes, prepare the microvascular beam. Mr. Paris, assist me."
Carefully, they lift her off of the floor and onto a biobed, where the Captain who looms so large on the Bridge now seems incongruously vulnerable. Again, fear slams into him. Kes hands the Doctor a slim, metal device and Tom is forced to back off, very much against his better judgment. Together Kes and the Doctor crowd his view of Janeway's face and he can feel himself, any second now, on the verge of shouting that someone needs to tell him what the hell is going on… when the sound of alarms fill the room.
Cordrazine. Cortical stimulator. It all happens so fast, a blur, a frenzy of emergency lifesaving measures. Kes flits around the room collecting instruments and hyposprays, and Tom takes one step backward and then another. Abruptly, he knows what's coming. He knows how this ends. He feels, somehow, like he has seen this before.
And then everything stops.
Tom holds his breath.
"Make a note in the log," the Doctor says quietly. "Death occurred at 1302 hours. Cause: a ruptured intracranial aneurysm."
Day 42
Tom tosses his PADD off the side of the bed and drags a hand across his unshaven face. He does not want to get up. He feels… off. It reminds him of the way he could always sense shifts in barometric pressure as a kid, predicting with near-perfect accuracy when a storm would be coming through. He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. Hopes very much that they're not about to run into bad weather.
He sighs, and forces himself into the sonic shower.
His rations aren't going to make it to the end of the month at this rate, but he cannot talk himself into eating in the Mess Hall today. He's in a bad enough mood as it is without inviting any extra trouble. After three months of carefully flying under the radar, much of the crew has come to tolerate him, but a few holdouts… well.
He even understands their point of view. But he is so weary of fighting all the time.
He eats quickly and heads for the turbolift, leaning tiredly against the wall on his way up. He slept well enough, long enough, but still he feels like he's been up for days. Maybe he's coming down with something.
Not exactly an auspicious start to the week.
And then he steps off the turbolift and onto the Bridge, and he sees… not the rest of the senior staff, but Ayala, Baxter, Lang… and Baytart at the conn?
Ayala looks over at him from Tactical. "Something I can help you with, sir?"
"Uh," Tom replies.
The obvious question is on the tip of his tongue, but a wave of vertigo crashes into him, and he hesitates. Surely, he has simply made a wildly idiot mistake. He is, after all, exhausted. And yet he has the feeling that this question on his mind is one that no Starfleet officer has ever asked without some trepidation, and least of all on the Bridge.
He stares at Ayala's combadge until the sensation of spinning in place eases, holding up one finger—wait—so the other man knows Tom hasn't totally lost the plot. Then he takes a deep breath, thinks, in for a penny...
"Uh… what's the stardate?"
Ayala furrows his brow. Baxter and Lang are looking at him curiously too, now. "It's 48543, sir."
48543. Aloud, Tom thanks Ayala and makes a quick escape.
Back in the safety of the turbolift, squinting against his own bewilderment, he thinks, but shouldn't it be Monday?
Day 51
When the call comes for senior staff to report to the Bridge, Tom freezes in place, feels all the blood drain out of his face. He hears the red alert as though from under leagues of glacial water. How—
Forcing himself to move, he sprints down the corridor and throws himself into the turbolift, pacing its perimeter on the ride up. It isn't possible, he didn't hear correctly; it's his mind playing tricks, the shock of the past twenty-four hours. The lift doors open onto the Bridge and he hurtles through them. He can just make out auburn hair behind the weapons console and he is almost flattened by a sudden surge of vertigo, but he can vomit later, he drags himself down the handful of steps, he has to see…
"Is everything alright, Mr. Paris?" Janeway asks, concern evident in her bemused expression.
Everything is very much not alright, he wants to say. He stares at her face, a little flushed, and it's all he can do not to reach out and touch her. Desperately, he scans her features, her clear blue eyes, her slight frown. His wild eyes meet hers and she starts to rise from her chair, seeming to sense a question from him that she can't begin to interpret.
No, everything is not alright. She died, Janeway died in his arms yesterday, and he's been in a stupor ever since, his only reprieve a brief and fitful sleep plagued by the memory of her ashen faced twisted in agony, while he looked on, helpless to save her.
It couldn't have all been an hallucination… could it?
He tears his gaze away from hers to look at the viewscreen, where the stars outside churn grotesquely, and he is not at all sure that he is not losing his mind.
Day 60
Janeway is quiet on the ride down to deck eight. She seems like she wants to ask him something, catching his eye once before staring hard at the floor, chewing on her bottom lip. A heaviness seems to fill the turbolift. Tom feels it too, though he can't begin to explain it. He fights to control a nameless dread that keeps bubbling up in his chest. He's trying to chalk it up to the disquieting pocket of space they're in, the lack of any fixed point deeply unsettling the navigator in him. He could hardly stand to look out of the viewscreen, earlier, every fiber of his being screaming at him to turn away.
That's not really what this feels like, though.
This feels like something else.
Tom looks over at Janeway and notices his pulse quicken, anxiety unaccountably clogging his throat. Ignoring this with some effort, he is right on the cusp of inviting her to share whatever's on her mind when the doors open, and she steps out without waiting for him.
He pauses, surprised.
It's not just that this is unlike her. It's that this isn't what he expected her to do, somehow.
Jogging a little to catch up, he struggles to hold his tongue. The tips of his fingers tingle with the impulse to place a hand on her shoulder to stop her, to ask her what's wrong. To ask if she knows what's wrong with him.
Entering the Science Lab, he moves to a station off to the side without waiting to be told, as she boots up the primary console. He is already combing through the disarray of data, when Janeway instructs him to apply a variety of algorithms to the energy signatures emitted by Chaotic space. Tom hesitates, his hand hovering over the controls. This is precisely what he'd been preparing to do, only now realizing they had never discussed a plan. A… lucky guess? It's not the only thing they could be doing in here, but it's the thing that makes the most sense…
He decides, shaking his head a little, not to mention it to Janeway. A tinge of dizziness hits him as he does so and he stills, breathing through it. Not at all in the mood for a trip to Sickbay today.
He makes an heroic attempt to refocus on his work, but hardly any time passes before he feels Janeway's eyes on him. He looks up and finds her gaze troubled, confused.
"What?" he finally asks.
"I don't know," she huffs, frustrated. "It's like—"
But what it's like, Tom never finds out. She sucks in a breath and her hands fly to her temples. At once, the hair on the back of Tom's neck stands up. She tries to move to him but he can tell she isn't going to make it, meets her in the middle in three quick steps and eases them both down to the floor.
"Tom, something is happening," she gasps, gripping both of his forearms. She looks petrified. "I remember—I remember this happening."
Tom frowns. "You remember getting a headache?"
"Not a headache," she grimaces. "Tom, you have to remember. I'm—"
She jerks her body away from him, twisting to vomit onto the floor and not in his lap, and oh, fuck, he does.
He does remember.
"Paris to Transporter Room 2, emergency medical beam out!" he shouts.
"We won't make it," Janeway forces out, her words sluggish.
"No, wait, listen to me!" Tom begins, but as usual, she is right. By the time they rematerialize in Sickbay, she's gone.