Zeva system
U.S.S. James T. Kirk
Captain Harry Kim didn't know how long he had been tossing and turning in bed, but he was getting tired of it. Feeling frustrated, he threw off the covers and called for the lights.
He pulled a uniform from his closet and fumbled with the fastenings as he ordered coffee from the replicator. Insomnia was nothing new to him; he took his first station command seven years before, and often found sleep to be evasive during tense situations. Navi used to tease him about it, saying that inability to sleep was a sign of an unsettled mind. Of course, she also had an MOT of fifty-three hours; when she was faced with a tense situation, she just locked herself in sickbay and absorbed herself in her work until it was over. At times, he would have done anything for that ability.
Then, as in now, his preferred method of calming himself was a long walk through his station—his ship, now—making sure that everything was functioning as it should be and just basically trying to stay out of the way. As often as not in his days on Deep Space Four, Christopher would join him, father and son walking the decks of the station, talking about school, work, music, or whatever else crossed their minds. Those walks were the only good thing to come from his inability to fall asleep. As Christopher got older, Kim used to complain to Navi that he had no idea what he was going to do when their son left for prep school on Earth. As it turned out, he shouldn't have worried; Christopher died less than six months before he was scheduled to start the ninth grade.
He pushed that negative thought from his mind and focused on his ship as he stepped out into the corridor, his coffee still in hand. He headed for the turbolift, debating where to go first. He quickly decided against the bridge; everyone tended to get a little skittish when the captain was on the bridge when he didn't have to be. He remembered his nights commanding the gamma shift on Voyager and how nervous he always got when Captain Janeway came onto the bridge or into her ready room during her insomniac wanderings. Engineering was another high-power section of the ship to visit, but he just as quickly eliminated visiting that particular region of the ship. Engineers tended to get confused when their captain paid them a visit.
Instead of any potentially busy area of the ship, Kim decided that his first stop should be the Officer's Mess. On every ship or station, it was always somebody's night, and always somebody's day—bars and mess halls had as little respect for the artificial Federation Standard chronometers as enemy attacks. If he wanted to get a feel for the atmosphere of the ship, the best place wasn't where people were working, but where they were relaxing.
He stepped off the turbolift and headed toward the Officer's Mess, but before he arrived, he was intercepted by a woman headed in the opposite direction. Admiral Kathryn Janeway smiled thinly at her former Ops officer as she changed directions to walk with him. "Insomnia," she said knowingly. "It's a captain's curse. There's too much to worry about, so you drink too much coffee to stay awake while working on what you're worried about. Then you can't sleep from the worry and caffeine, which makes you worry more, and drink more caffeine. It never really ends."
He smiled back at her; that pretty much summed it up. "So why are you still awake, Admiral? You're not a captain anymore."
"Just because I don't command a ship anymore doesn't mean I don't still worry," she replied. She took a sip from her own mug of coffee. "After all, we are in the midst of a battle."
"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" he asked incredulously, taking in her relaxed manner.
She smiled and shrugged a shoulder. "I don't get out much anymore. Don't let them put you behind a desk, Harry. You'll always regret it."
He snorted. "And when was the last time you were actually at your desk?" She only smiled and shrugged in reply. "So what is worrying you?"
"My godson stormed away from dinner after a fight last night."
"So?" he asked with a shrug. "That would be normal for a dinner with my godchildren."
"Abbey and Joe were raised by Tom and B'Elanna," Janeway pointed out. "Nenyaht was raised by Chakotay and Seven. There's a difference."
"Is there?" Kim asked. "Abbey spent more time with me and Navi whenever we were on Earth than with her own parents, and took piano lessons from Seven for hours a week for fifteen years. Nenyaht was always around one Paris or another and avoided his own parents whenever possible. Sometimes I don't know who raised who."
Janeway smiled and took another sip of her coffee. "We managed to defeat the Borg and travel thirty thousand light years in a matter of minutes to get home only to spend the rest of our lives around each other." She sounded almost sad about that observation.
Kim cleared his throat slightly. "So what was this fight about?"
"What do you think?" she asked dryly. "It was about Abbey. He's worried about her being down on the planet, thinks it will bring back bad memories about the attack four years ago."
Kim looked down at the table, suddenly uncomfortable. "I wasn't fair to her," he finally said before looking up again. "Not yesterday before she left for the mission and not four years ago. Sometimes I still forget that she's not that little girl who used to come over and play the piano for us and complain that her parents don't understand her. Part of me wants her to still be that girl, because if she is, that means that none of this has happened, that the attacks never happened." He glanced away again. "I didn't visit her while she was in the hospital. I didn't even try. Part of me blamed her for Navi and Christopher's deaths, and I think she knew that—as if it weren't bad enough that she already blamed herself. She's never going to be the same person she was four years ago, and part of that is my fault. I'm going to have to live with that the rest of my life."
"None of us are the same people we were four years ago, Harry," Janeway countered gently. "And I think we're all still trying to figure out who we've become."