Dr. Abbey Paris was already unfastening her uniform shirt as she stepped across the threshold into her quarters, her first shift as a physician finally over at 0300. Only thirteen hours of straight work, she thought with an ironic smile as she tossed the teal-colored top on her couch and kicked off her heeled boots. From what Drs. Jackson and Mallard said, she could expect quite a few more of those in the next year as she completed her residency requirements.

"Valerian root tea, sweet, extra hot," she ordered into her replicator as she unceremoniously dumped the top on her couch.

*Problems with insomnia, Abbey?* her replicator mockingly asked her, making her jump back in surprise.

"Joey," she hissed, her eyes narrowing dangerously. He even programmed it with his own voice. "Valerian root tea, sweet, extra hot," she repeated through gritted teeth.

*Most insomnia is from poor sleep habits,* Joe Paris' disembodied voice continued. *Going to bed at a reasonable hour every hour and waking up the same time every morning—*

"Shut up and give me my damned tea!" Abbey exclaimed loudly.

*Tsk, tsk. Quite the temper, Abigail. Must get that from your mother's side of the family.* He continued to prattle on, but Abbey was no longer hearing it. She had always had a hard time controlling her temper when she was tired, and the constant fatigue of medical school did nothing to change that. In her fury, she picked up the first thing her hand contacted—a standard Starfleet-issue vase that she meant to recycle the day before—and hurled it at the replicator. The voice stopped.

"Damn it!" she exclaimed. Without even thinking about it, she spun on her heels and stalked out of her quarters. She hardly paused as she crossed the corridor and entered Nenyaht's codes to his quarters. Just as she suspected, it hadn't taken her any amount of time to figure them out; they were the same codes he had at the Academy.

The sleeping engineer awoke to someone shaking his shoulder. He opened his eyes into narrow slits, seeing the angry face of a quarter-Klingon doctor. "Get up," she demanded. "I need an engineer."

He groaned and tried to roll over to cover his eyes, but she quickly pinned his shoulders down. "What time is it?" he finally moaned.

"A little after 0300," she replied. "Come on." She stood there with her hands on her hips, waiting, until he finally threw off the covers.

"This better be quick," he said with a sigh. "I'm having breakfast with Kathryn in four hours." She didn't say anything as she led the way back across the corridor to her quarters.

Seeing the replicator, he gave a low whistle. "What happened?" he asked.

"Joey," she said darkly.

"Joe smashed your replicator?" he asked, confused.

She shook her head quickly. "No, I did that," she admitted. "He reprogrammed it."

"Well, you're in luck," Nenyaht said thoughtfully, kneeling in front of the offending equipment. He removed the outer panel, revealing intact circuitry inside. "The replicator did more damage to the vase than it did to the replicator. You only dented the panel."

"Great," she said sarcastically. "Now can you fix what my petaQ of a brother did?"

He couldn't help but chuckle; she only spoke in Klingon when she was angry or embarrassed. He was guessing it was the former. "What did he do?"

"I tried ordering some tea when I got in," she said, glaring at the replicator. "He programmed it to give me a lecture about my sleeping habits."

"Probably because you were using it at 0300," he said thoughtfully. "Let me try to change the chronometer on the replicator and see what happens." He made the necessary adjustments before putting in an order. Glancing over at Paris, he said, "Extra hot valerian root tea, sweet." She raised her eyebrows, impressed that he remembered how she drank her tea.

*Hey! Who are you and what are you doing using my sister's replicator? No men in her quarters! Out! Out!* Abbey looked surprised at the words, but Nenyaht just laughed.

"Hold on a minute," he said, rising. He was surprised to see Abbey standing so close to where he had been kneeling, but quickly recovered, placing his hands on her shoulders to move her aside. Less than two minutes later, he returned to her quarters with two steaming mugs of tea. He handed one over to her with an apologetic half-smile. "I can fix it," he said as she sighed in defeat. "But I'm going to have to be well-rested before I can attempt to undo his work. I don't have to tell you this, but your brother is a talented programmer."

"You're right," Paris replied, taking a sip of tea. "You didn't have to tell me."

He grinned. "Long day in sickbay," he observed. "You just got off duty, right?"

"How'd you know?"

He pointed to her uniform trousers, her skin-tight black undershirt, the uniform top draped over her couch, the heeled boots kicked off near the door. She was almost obsessively tidy; there was no way she could stand to leave her things out. "You haven't picked up yet, and you always get out of uniform as soon as possible. Since you're half out of uniform and have stuff lying around, you must have just gotten off."

"Excellent powers of observation, detective," she said with a half-smile. She sighed and shook her head. "I'm going to kill him."

"Joe?"

She nodded. "This is so like him. Or, at least, the old him." She sighed again. "I don't know how much time you've spent with him lately, but he's changed. He's more serious now, almost paranoid. It's so strange."

He didn't want to tell her that he saw her brother on a fairly regular basis, once or twice every few months, more frequently than she saw him, if Joe was to be believed, and much more frequently than Abbey and Nenyaht had seen each other. He knew he shouldn't feel guilty about that—he had been as much Joe's friend as Abbey's growing up—but it just seemed so strange to have remained close to one twin while becoming so distant from the other. "He's an intelligence operative," he pointed out. "Paranoid is how he stays alive."

"I know, but I still…Sometimes I miss him. Joey. I miss having him around, I miss how he used to be when we were kids. I miss how things seemed…normal."

"The attacks hit him hard," Nenyaht said softly. "He lost a lot."

Her head snapped to face him, her eyes narrowed into a cold glare. "Don't you dare talk about who lost what that day. I lost a lot more than Joey."

"I'm sorry. I know—"

"I lost my aunt, my cousin, three-quarters of my team, my career, my fiancée, my life, Nate. Compared to that, what the hell did Joey lose?"

"He lost his aunt and cousin, too," Nenyaht pointed out. "And he almost lost you," he added emphatically. This, at least, was familiar: Abbey getting fired up, him remaining the calm voice of reason. Six years of silence hadn't changed that. "You didn't see him when you were in a coma. I didn't think anything could rattle the great Joseph Kohlar Paris, but that really shook him up. His world didn't quite make sense to him."

She eyed him for a moment, trying to figure out if he was telling the truth before she snorted dismissively. "Joey doesn't need me," she snapped. "Joey doesn't need anybody. Just ask him, he'll tell you." He only smiled knowing and took another sip of tea in response.

"You're taller," he said, dropping the subject after an extended period of silence. He didn't want his first conversation with her after six years to be an argument about what her brother feels.

"Hmm?"

"You used to come up to here," he said, gesturing vaguely around his lower torso. "Now you're closer to my shoulder."

"People grow, Nate," she said teasingly.

"Not after they're nineteen."

She shrugged a shoulder. "I grew fourteen centimeters in the six months after I stopped training."

He knew what that meant: after the attack forced her to give up her sport. "Isn't that a lot for a twenty-one-year-old?"

"Not really," she said. "It's not unusual for gymnasts to have a growth spurt after they stop training. Nobody knows the exact reason why, but some think it's the body getting caught up to the size it would be if it weren't for the constant stresses of the sport."

"You're still pretty short."

"Thank you, Captain Obvious," she said sarcastically, but with a smile. The smile faltered slightly. "Listen, Nate, about what I said…"

"Abbey, we don't have to talk about—" His words were interrupted by the klaxons of a red alert, followed immediately by the chirping of Nenyaht's combadge.

"Did you sleep with that on?" Paris asked in wonder.

He shushed her as he tapped it. "Nenyaht here," he said.

*Report to deflector controls, Lieutenant,* the voice replied in clipped tones before signing off.

He sighed and set aside his mug. "I guess two hours is enough sleep," he said dryly. "We'll finish this later, okay?" She nodded quickly, avoiding his eyes. He directed her chin so her eyes met his, and she nodded again. He dropped a quick kiss on the top of her head before racing back on duty.