Sixteen

I am out here studying stones
trying to learn to be less alive
using all of my will
to keep very still
still even on the inside
I've cut all of the pertinent wires
so my eyes can't make that connection
I am holding my breath
I am feigning my death
when I'm looking in your direction

Studying Stones – Ani de Franco

The following two weeks passed far faster than B'Elanna would have liked.

Kathryn introduced her to Professor Tuvok, an astrophysicist who seemed to have lived and worked all over the place but was now based in California, working as an advisor on some sci-fi show made by Paramount.

"It's an odd choice for him," Janeway had confided as she drove them to the office he worked out of the first time they'd met. "Tuvok is… well, I guess he's a little different. You'll see."

B'Elanna had seen, almost immediately. Tuvok didn't smile during their entire meeting. He and Kathryn didn't hug when they arrived, despite the fact that Janeway had told her she'd known him for most of her adult life. Small talk was not his forte. But he was a brilliant researcher with a diverse background, and moreover, he knew how to make complicated scientific theory quickly accessible to the masses. That alone made him perfect for what they had to try to do now, and it wasn't as if B'Elanna was interested in small talk anyway, was it? Tuvok gave her reading lists and then, when he discovered she couldn't access the texts he'd recommended, he provided them out of his own personal library. There was plenty that she didn't understand, but she was a quick learner and absorbed everything he explained like a sponge.

She began to see that her idea really could work.

The main problem was time. B'Elanna studied every spare minute she had, but between school, her boxing training, working with Kathryn to build the proposal and… well, everything else she had to do, she barely had a moment to breathe. She didn't care if most of her schoolwork slipped, but she couldn't cut classes without Chakotay finding out. If he did, their deal would be broken and she wouldn't get to fight a real bout. She thought about dropping out of the boxing club completely, but how would she explain that to him? Sure, he thought that she was spending all that extra time just on the water reclamation project, but that lie would only get her so far. She was still petrified that he'd find out about her connection with the Crims, and the more she stretched the truth the more likely it was he'd see through it. Besides, she didn't want to let him down, or at least not any more than she already had.

Then there was Tom. He was always there, on the periphery. She knew that sooner or later he was going to ask her out on an actual date and B'Elanna didn't know what she was going to say when he did. He wasn't the sort of boy she usually had anything to do with. And he really was an idiot, a lot of the time. But there was something about him that she couldn't just ignore, something that made her smile in class when one of his quips popped into her head. Something that made her heart jump whenever they bumped into each other in the gym. And he did have faith in her, just as Kathryn had said - a bewildering, overwhelming amount.

Not that B'Elanna had time for a boyfriend. How would that work, alongside everything else? And how exactly would she explain the fact that she was absent pretty much every night? Although recently she'd been cutting into the time she'd spent dealing. Not enough for the cash to drop, because that would be tantamount to signing a death warrant – either hers, or Chakotay's. But she arrived at her patch late and left early as often as she could get away with, which so far had been at least every other night. B'Elanna knew she had to be careful. The Crims had eyes everywhere. They owned everywhere. But she wanted to make her invention work. She could make it work, she was sure of it, if only she knew a little more, learned a little more, had just a little more time…

When she slept, she dreamed of a future formed from metal she had forged with her own hands. She wandered the corridors of her own mind, tracing her fingers along walls inscribed with scientific formulae; actions and reactions; angles and weights; outlines of starships like the ones in Tuvok's television show.

Once she even found Tom's face amid the medley. Her mind had made him indelible in flat planes of silver, his expression caught in the moment he'd looked back at her that day across that wind-swept, barren earth.

I bet you can do it. I bet you can make it work, B'Elanna Torres.

"Kathryn?"

She looked up as Tom's voice echoed to her from the gym's corridor. Janeway was sitting at her desk, trying to get through the site's monthly accounts – not her favourite exercise but one that needed attention or it would get dangerously out of hand. In front of her was a seemingly endless pile of invoices, receipts and orders. There seemed to be more every day, if not every hour.

"Yes?" she called back.

"Can you come out here for a minute?"

"Give me a second…" Kathryn made a mark against the figure she'd just been examining and got up, feeling the familiar ache in her left shoulder and wishing there was some permanent way of healing it.

Tom was standing at the door of the gym, holding it open so that a shaft of bright sunlight fell past him and into the dim corridor. He'd been working on the site, helping Neelix and his friends fit some edging along the border of the new turf. A week in and it was holding its own, thank goodness, although that was only thanks to the tending rota Neelix had developed.

Tom pushed the door open wider as Kathryn approached. Beyond it, idling at the kerb, was a battered and dusty blue Chevy pickup that looked as if it hadn't been new since the mid-60s. A young woman stood next to the driver's door, dressed in cowboy boots, pale blue jeans and a salmon pink sweater. Her hair was close-cropped and very fair. She offered Kathryn a smile that seemed as placid as her general demeanour.

"What is it?" Kathryn asked Tom, as she smiled back.

"Kes – this is Kathryn," Tom told the woman. "Kathryn, this is Kes. She's got something you're going to want to see…"

The two women shook hands. "I've just moved here," Kes said. "From Kentucky. My family has a farm there. I love it, but… well, I guess I just wanted a change. An adventure."

"I can understand that," Kathryn told her with a smile, wondering what this had to do with her. She glanced at Tom, who only shrugged.

Kes headed for the truck's tailgate as she spoke. "Back home all the produce we eat is home-grown. I tried to tell my folks that I probably wouldn't even have a garden of my own, but Mom still insisted I bring stuff with me…" she dropped the gate, gesturing to the truck's bed.

Kathryn looked. Inside were rows and rows of plants.

"Tomatoes, beans, squash, corn, eggplant and sweet peppers," Kes reeled off. "I'm having trouble finding somewhere to live, and if I don't get these in the ground soon, they'll bolt or just die off. I took them to a thrift store a few blocks over this morning and someone told me about this place and that you might want them. Can you take them? I'd hate them to go to waste."

Kathryn looked up at Tom, amazed. He grinned back. "Told you," he said. "You were talking about maybe putting in a vegetable patch, right? Here's one ready to go!"

"Kes," Kathryn began, slightly overwhelmed. "I'm not sure what to say…"

The young woman gave another placid smile. "I know what my grandmomma would say. She'd say some things are meant to be and those things will always find their way to each other. She'd say we shouldn't question it too much when they do. I didn't want to bring them, but I did, and look what I've found because of it. So maybe she's right."

Kathryn laughed slightly. "Well, I'm happy to go along with that – in this instance, at least. Thank you, Kes. You've made a decision I was struggling over much easier."

"You're welcome. And if you don't mind… I'd like to come back to visit? See how the plants are doing?"

Kathryn smiled. "Kes – we'd love you to join us just whenever you can spare the time," she said. "I guess you could say this is our own adventure, of sorts. Frankly, we can use all the help we can get. And you're sure to meet some new people into the bargain."

Kes smiled, looking past the pickup to the garden beyond. "That sounds like a good trade-off to me," she said. "Do you want to unload them now?"

When Chakotay arrived that evening, there was only one figure still working in the early evening sunshine. He smiled as he watched Kathryn kneeling amid a row of plants that hadn't been there the last time he'd visited. Crossing to the gate he saw her look up as the old hinges grated against each other. She smiled but didn't stop what she was doing.

Chakotay looked around as he crossed the site towards her. It was remarkable what a difference just a week or so had made. Sure, most of the place was still bare earth, but it had shape now. There was form amid the young branches of the fruit trees and the fragile blades of grass. The area where Kathryn knelt had been raked into long furrows, along which were standing many plants in pots, ready to be placed into the waiting ground. It looked like something, where before there had been nothing.

"Hi," he said, as he reached Kathryn's side and crouched down beside her. "Looks as if you've been abandoned."

She smiled. "Hi. No, everyone had had a long day. I was planning to leave the rest until tomorrow… but I thought I'd just get to the end of this row. Some of these tomatoes are almost ready to flower."

"Where did all these come from?" Chakotay asked, looking around at the rows of maturing plants. "Don't tell me you've been raising these in your spare time? Don't you ever sleep?"

"They were a gift. From someone who wanted them to have a good home and had heard about this place."

He shook his head. "'If you build it, they will come'" he quoted. "Never thought that one would prove to be true, especially here."

Kathryn laughed, the sound mingling perfectly with the fading sunlight as she patted in another tomato. "I never would have thought of you as an aficionado of 80s feel-good movies!"

"No?" he said, softly, smiling. "Then how do you think of me?"

She turned her head to look at him, a flash of surprise crossing her face. A spark seemed to pass between them, unexpected and electric. For a moment it seemed to Chakotay that Kathryn was on the verge of saying something – something unguarded, something that at that moment he would have given his annual salary to hear.

Say it, he thought. Whatever it is, just say it. Give me a sign…

But instead she bit back whatever had been on the tip of her tongue and flashed him a bright smile. "Do you know anything about tomatoes?"

He shook his head. "Not really."

"They were the first thing I learned to grow when I was a child. My father was away a lot when I was growing up, but that was one thing that he and I did together. We grew them from seed and I found it so tedious, especially at first, just waiting for something to happen. And then, once they had grown, hoping that they wouldn't get eaten by some bug or other, hoping that the fruit would set and ripen. But somewhere along the way it became so satisfying to watch them sprout and grow. I'm glad we have some here. Perhaps some of the local children will have the same experience as I did all those years ago."

Chakotay smiled. "I hope your father will come and visit you here and see this place. I'm sure it would be wonderful for him to see what those tomatoes he planted with you when you were a child eventually became."

Kathryn was looking away from him, but he saw her face freeze into a look of such painful sadness that he felt his stomach lurch.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Kathryn – did I say something-?"

She glanced at him, though she didn't meet his eye, pulling one side of her mouth into an unhappy smile. "My father died, I'm afraid," she said. "He won't be coming to visit me, or this place."

"I'm sorry."

Kathryn smiled again, that same, tight unhappy expression that was all the more tortuous for its contrast to how radiant her face always seemed to him when she smiled. "Not your fault."

Her hand was resting on the tilled soil and before he'd even decided what he was going to do Chakotay had reached out and covered it with his own. "Still," he said, quietly. "I am sorry."

She looked at their hands, entwined amidst the dirt.

"It's so long ago," she said. "He's been gone more than half my life now. And yet still I sometimes wake up and I've forgotten. How is that even possible? Especially given the way that-" she stopped, staring out across the garden, shaking her head.

Chakotay didn't push her. He wondered for a moment if she was still thinking about her father, or about the fiancé she had seen die. He hoped her father, at least, had passed on peacefully. Something in him gave a sharp, painful pulse at the thought of this woman enduring something so terrible once, let alone twice.

A moment later Kathryn cleared her throat and pulled her hand away from his. "Anyway. These tomatoes won't plant themselves. I'm determined to get this row in before I leave."

Chakotay nodded. "Then show me what to do and I'll help."

"Oh, you don't have to do that. Don't you want to go and punch a bag before your students turn up?"

He got up and moved around her to the next plant in line. "I can give that a miss for a day. Besides," he added, "maybe it's the company, but right now I'm feeling pretty peaceful."

She cast him an assessing look for a moment. "Could be the tomatoes."

Chakotay laughed slightly. "Could be."

[TBC]