You Who Wish To Conquer Pain

I have begun to long for you, I who have no greed
I have begun to ask for you, I who have no need
You say you've gone away from me
But I can feel you when you breathe

—Leonard Cohen, "Avalanche"

i. (investigations)

The official term is emotionally compromised, and it's not a phrase to just throw around. It's the kind of thing that ends a career. Bleeding openly from a near-fatal headwound, refusing to cede the bridge, fine. But god help the captain who finds herself at the mercy of her own unbridled feelings. She's heard stories. It's never worried her.

She doesn't realize that she is emotionally compromised until Tom stands across from her, his hands clasped together lightly while he listens to Tuvok outline their plan: leave the safety of Voyager. Get picked up by the Kazon-Nistrim. Flush out the spy. Find a way back.

As strategies go, it leaves a lot to be desired. And perhaps this is why when Tom turns away from Tuvok to meet her gaze, she thinks, suddenly and unbidden, say no.

"This would be strictly voluntary," she says. "We wouldn't be able to help you, once Seska's got you. There is no way to plan your extraction with the amount of intel we currently have. You'd have to get yourself out."

Say no.

"Why me?" he asks, and he sounds almost… hurt. And although she didn't anticipate this reaction from him she thinks she understands it, thinks he's asking for the same reason her heart in her chest feels like a fist trapped under ice, pounding, pounding.

Tuvok steps in. "It was my suggestion that we capitalize on your former reputation to increase the plausibility of our ruse, and therefore the likelihood of our success."

"And you agree?" Tom asks her, carefully.

She does, but that's not what he really wants to know. She's reluctant to show him her cards, for so many reasons but especially because it will almost certainly influence his decision. But there is only one way she can truthfully answer. "Many people on this ship could be called upon to play the role of malcontent," she says. "But I approved Lieutenant Tuvok's plan… because I trust you."

She does not say, more than anyone else. She doesn't have to.

Unsmiling, he takes a step toward her. "In that case," he says, inevitably, "I'm all yours."

Ignoring the rasping ache behind her ribcage, she extends her hand. He takes it.

"I expect you to come home, Mr. Paris," she says. She is relieved to hear a steadiness in her voice for which she credits entirely her Starfleet training and not, certainly, her own willpower. "That's an order."

"Yes, ma'am," he agrees. His hand slips out of hers.

He sees himself out.

Tuvok turns to her. "Don't start," she pleads, pinching the bridge of her nose.

"There is still time to recruit someone else," he offers.

She winces. She's sure he doesn't mean it to be a test, but it feels like one anyway, or maybe she's set it for herself. Because if she says yes, the implications for her command will be impossible for either of them to ignore. He's offering her an out, but needing one at all is an enormous problem, one that she is not prepared to face.

"No," she says firmly. "He's the best choice."

"Very well," he says, and it's a testament to their long friendship, his faith in her to do the right thing, that he keeps his judgment to himself. His silence rings out like an indictment, even so.

The next day, Tom arrives for his duty shift five minutes late. Chakotay frowns.

She reminds herself to breathe.

When Laxeth hails with the news that Tom has been taken, she takes one measured step forward and then another and grips the railing in front of her. She feels Tuvok, Chakotay, Neelix watching her and she does not care, because in all of their planning she had somehow never stopped to picture the act itself, Tom's kidnapping, the violence of it. On the viewscreen, charred debris floats lazily to the ground. Is he injured? Is he afraid?

She is afraid.

Her knuckles are white against the cool metal. She thinks: come home, come home, come home.

Tom follows orders. He saves himself. But it's a near thing.

She does not immediately go to him, intentionally, hating herself for it a little. For feeling like she has something to prove, even as she knows she would have met anyone else in sickbay. She waits for him to be discharged, and then finds him in his quarters.

"Neelix is hoping for an interview," she says when he lets her in. He moves gingerly, like he's still healing. She suppresses a wild impulse to apologize to him for all of it, for everything, for bringing him on her ship in the first place, for the things she's starting to wish she didn't know about herself.

He smiles ruefully. "I don't feel much like the conquering hero," he confesses, easing himself into a chair.

"You should," she says. "You are. Tom, we couldn't have done it without you."

He looks at her, that same serious expression he'd worn when he agreed to risk his life for them all, just because she asked.

"Any time," he says, simply, and not.

In the end, she passes her own test. She'd sent him into danger. She had not wavered. She would do it all again, if she had to. If she had to.

And she'd thought, when this all began, that these things would prove she is not emotionally compromised after all.

She finds that the opposite is true.

ii. (resolutions)

He's been back on Voyager for a month and a half.

'Forever' isn't a word that has factored much into his life. He has sometimes thought of himself as a rogue planet, no orbit. He never really wanted to be in Starfleet, but he doesn't love conflict and does love to fly, and he figured maybe he could make some kind of life for himself, even if that life was more or less orchestrated by his father.

There was a certain irresistible irony, anyway, in the idea of Admiral Paris training his own son to pilot himself out of the gravity well he called home.

But then Caldik Prime, and then the Maquis, and then Auckland. And then a tiny woman with auburn hair who radiated more power than any admiral, who smiled with her eyes, only her eyes, and nothing about her suggested permanence, either—(when it's over, you're cut loose)—yet he'd known even then, even as he'd given her his standard, flippant responses, that he'd stick with her for as long as she'd let him.

Now he can't stop thinking about that word: forever, forever, Kathryn Janeway is gone forever.

It hadn't occurred to anyone to let him say goodbye. He wonders if she would have come to him, if she'd been conscious when they decided to jettison her.

(I've never liked saying goodbye, so I'll—)

Because they've tiptoed around this unlikely thing between them from the start, since she'd ordered the annihilation of the lives they'd known and he'd stood beside her, watching her watch the explosion, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that he'd rather follow her into hell than be anywhere else in the galaxy. But he hadn't trusted himself to act. Better to keep his feelings to himself than blow it all up by voicing them aloud, and she, too, had held herself at a safe distance, despite what he could read in her face.

Only, sometimes, sometimes she'd let her gaze linger over the pool table in Sandrine's, or she'd lean her hip against his console while he cracked some joke—sometimes she'd clutch his shoulder as he danced them out of danger and he'd look up at her, and she'd blow out a relieved breath, and she'd grin back at him, and—

And now he'll never know, and neither will she.

So Tom is second in command. A hateful absurdity. What good is this rank to him if he can't use it to turn right around and go get her back? He doesn't want it, does not at all want the responsibility of leaving her behind, and it is by definition his burden now: Tuvok issues the order, and he carries it out. It weighs heavier with every passing lightyear.

It could've just as easily been him. He'd beamed down with her, stayed just as long. And it feels maudlin, it feels small and stupid, but he wishes—

Well.

He hadn't been bitten, but he'd lost everything, just the same.

If he had been, he could've stayed.

He tries once. Only once. "But you're captain now,"he can rescind Janeway's orders, if he wants to.

But Tuvok answers, "To what end?"And because Tom can't reasonably say, to drop me off, to orbit forever, to do whatever it takes, he says nothing.

He doesn't ask again.

It takes Harry just over a month to crack. He almost takes Tom down with him.

He picks up a Vidiian convoy on long-range sensors and seems surprised to discover that Tuvok's allegiance to Janeway requires him to uphold her wishes to the letter. Tom doesn't know Tuvok very well but he recognizes loyalty when he sees it, understands better than they do that Tuvok and Harry are saying the same thing, just in fundamentally incompatible ways.

And then Harry locks eyes with Tom and hurls, "What's wrong with the rest of you? You know I'm right!" and Tom realizes he hasn't been giving him enough credit, if he knows enough to try to use him like this.

"Harry," Tom says, a warning, an appeal. Not here. This will all be so much worse for him if everyone knows that he feels this way and did nothing.

It's relief to watch security escort him off the bridge.

When the shift ends he goes straight to Harry's quarters and pounds on the door until Harry greets him with wide, worried eyes. Tom pushes past him to stand in the middle of the room, hands balled into fists, fighting to tamp down his anger.

"Don't do that again," he says.

In an instant, Harry's expression morphs from apologetic to defensive. "Listen, I'm sorry, but I just—"

"Stop," Tom interrupts. "As you are apparently already aware, you don't have a monopoly on loss. You don't have the right."

"I thought we were friends," Harry accuses.

"That's not the point," Tom snaps.

"I think it is the point. Because if we were working togetheron this, maybe we could find a way to convince Tuvok to contact the Vidiians. Instead you've been holed up with your, with your secrets—"

Tom barks out a bitter laugh that makes Harry take a step back. Secrets is an awfully grandiose word for all the worthless, impotent thoughts ricocheting through his skull these past six weeks. If Harry thinks that an emotional appeal from Tom will change Tuvok's mind, he's got another thing coming.

"You're being naïve," he says coldly.

"You loved her, didn't you?" Harry counterpunches.

Tom allows himself ten seconds to breathe through the urge to break his best friend's nose.

"No force in the known universe could compel Kathryn Janeway to let her crew trade their safety for hers," he says. "You're not doing this for her. You're doing it for you. You think she could live with it if we all get harvested in the pursuit of a cure? And she would know, because the Vidiians would take this ship and follow our trail right back to that planet."

"How can you just—"

"What exactly is it that you think you know, Harry? You think you've uncovered some passionate love affair? There was nothing between us, all right? Not ever. Just—drop it. There's nothing I can do."

It costs him something to admit it. But it has the intended effect.

"Fine. Whatever." Harry grabs his uniform jacket off of his couch and yanks it on, looking anywhere but at Tom. "Let yourself out," he says, and storms out of his own quarters.

Tom stands there for another minute, struggling to collect himself. Against his will, Harry's accusation plays on a loop in his head.

You loved her, didn't you?

"I don't know," he tells the empty room.

Two weeks later, Tuvok orders Tom to set a course for the Vidiians, and Tom's lungs forget to how to take in air.

The Doctor decides that Janeway and Chakotay should be treated on the planet, which means it's Tom who has to beam down. And for all that he has imagined himself here every day for the past three months, it is difficult to see the evidence of the life they'd started to build, together. Harder still to learn from Chakotay that Janeway had abandoned her research, but somehow it doesn't sound like the whole story, doesn't sound like her, so when he leaves the commander to treat her inside the tiny cabin, he pretends he doesn't know.

"Did you ever find that damn bug?" he asks her lightly.

She shakes her head, folds her arms across her chest, shoulders tense. Protective. "It was all destroyed. My equipment—there was a storm. Nothing was salvageable."

He stares at her. He tries to imagine it, knowing how stubborn she is, how determined. What would that have left her with? Anything?

It would've been an unspeakable blow, he thinks. A personal cataclysm.

"I'm sorry," he says. "Were you—are you okay?"

"No," she says. She's wearing flats, so she has to crane her neck to meet his eyes, and something about this makes his chest tighten. "It was—no. I don't think I am."

He hesitates, then decides: what the hell. Before he can think better of it, he sets his tricorder down and steps in close.

"Tell me if you want me to stop," he says softly.

And then he draws her into a light embrace, loose enough that she can easily step out if she wants to, but what he has realized just in the last few minutes is that as tactile as she is, no one else touches her—no one dares—but he does. He's just always taken it for granted. And maybe she and Chakotay… that is, maybe she hasn't gone three months without, without comfort, but something about her seems brittle to him, frayed, forced, and this is all he can think to offer.

She sucks in a breath, and for a moment it feels like she'll pull away, every muscle in her body taut like she's ready to bolt. But then all at once she collapses against him, choking out quiet, wracking sobs into his chest. He tightens his arms around her, brings one hand up to cradle the back of her head, stroking her hair with his thumb.

He has never hugged her before.

They stay like that for a long time.

He leaves first, to give her time to compose herself, and finds Chakotay leaning against the outside wall of the shelter.

"I took care of her," he says. "I tried to make her happy."

"Okay," Tom says, wary.

"But she wasn't happy."

Tom can't tell if this is a question or a confession, so instead of responding he busies himself with the medical equipment. Chakotay snorts, pushes himself off the wall. He looks miserable. He does not look like a man who's just had his life handed back to him.

Tom wishes he could pretend he doesn't understand.

But by the same token, he very much does not want to have this conversation.

"It wasn't her choice," he decides to say.

"It could've been," Chakotay replies, his gaze on a freshly tilled patch of dirt.

No, Tom thinks. Not really. It pretends to be paradise, but this planet is a gilded prison in a hostile region of space with nothing for her to do. Maybe she could have accepted it, trained herself to be happy here. But she would've lost something vital of herself in the process.

Chakotay only made his home among the stars because he was a soldier who needed a war, and that's where the war was. He doesn't belong there, exactly. Not like she does.

"I'm gonna head back," he says. "Comm when you're ready to beam up."

You loved her, didn't you?

It's a bad time for life-altering revelations. He can't do it to her, not while she and Chakotay are so stiff on the bridge, her orders clipped, her smile calibrated to reassure the crew but not once reaching her eyes.

She's not herself. But she's trying to be. The last thing she needs is the burden of his feelings for her, another decision to make about a man she's stuck with.

You loved her, didn't you?

He nurses a bourbon in a smoky corner of Sandrine's and tries to let the noise from the crowd drown out his thoughts. Doing nothing is hard, now that she's back, so he tells himself he's not doing nothing: he's protecting them both. He couldn't cure her, couldn't stay with her, couldn't go back for her. But he can do this for her. He can keep all the things he wants from her to himself.

You loved her, didn't you?

But his gut told him to leave the program unlocked and so he did, careful not to let himself hope. He's almost got himself convinced that this is a stupid idea, that it couldn't possibly help in any meaningful way. She probably wants to be alone anyway, after being forced to share such a cramped space with her first officer for months on end. She'll probably go straight to her quarters from the bridge and never know he was here, trying to do some small thing for her without looking like he's doing it.

So when she walks through the door after he's been there an hour, he leaps out of his chair.

"I can go if you'd rather be alone," she says, startled. "I saw the program running…"

"No," he says quickly. "No, stay."

She comes further into the bar, and Tom waves a server over to take her order. She scans the room and they're quiet for a minute, a little awkward, but then—

"If I remember correctly, we left the score at five games to three," she says, watching him carefully.

"Are you offering me a rematch?" he asks.

"Well," she drawls, "If you feel like losing again, who am I to stand in your way?"

He laughs, surprised, hardly believing his good luck. He doesn't need to be told twice. He sets his drink down and makes for the pool cues, and on impulse he leans down as he passes her, his mouth inches from her ear.

"Magnanimous of you," he murmurs.

He hears her breath catch before he moves off.

You loved her, didn't you?

He never stood a chance.

iii. (basics)

She'd been back on Voyager for a week. Just one week.

Voyager to Paris. Please respond.

She keeps herself going on pure fury. There's no evidence that Tom is dead but she is a pragmatist above all else, so she knows the odds. But when Neelix asks if she really believes someone is coming for them, she experiences a stab of hatred so profound she cannot look at him. And when Harry suggests that Tom's shuttle might have gotten through the crossfire, she can't look at him, either.

She considers how she'd felt being marooned on New Earth, helpless, lost, and she loathes herself for it. They'd had shelter, replicators, and, most importantly, they'd been the only ones down there. Her crew would still find their way home; they were safe.

Now they have nothing.

A voice in the back of her mind whispers: Would this have happened if they hadn't doubled back for you?

She shuts down.

And then Hogan dies.

She should find a way to rally them, to comfort them, but instead she hears herself yelling, yelling, yelling. She orders them to craft weapons. She orders them to eat worms, scooping some up and brandishing them like a threat. She sounds angry, scolding, it's the wrong tone and she can't make herself stop. She orders them to survive.

She orders them to survive until help arrives.

Tom, can you hear me?

"Can I talk to you?" Chakotay says, after the group has dispersed.

He leads her by the elbow to an outcropping of rocks where they won't be overheard. She yanks her arm back. He frowns at her in surprise.

"I understand giving them hope," he says slowly, gesturing to the makeshift camp. "What I don't know is what you think is happening here."

"I don't know what you mean," she lies.

"No one is coming for us."

"You don't know that."

"Kathryn, Tom is dead."

"You don't know that," she repeats through clenched jaw, emphasizing each word.

"We need to be planning for the long term. We should scout the region. We need permanent shelters—"

"Have you noticed how much time you spend trying to convincing me to settle?"

The blow hits its mark. Chakotay's face darkens.

"I'm thinking of the good of the crew."

"That's absurd," she snaps. "Long-term plans? We can't survive here for that long. You want to, what? Split up? Head north? This planet is a wasteland. That's why Seska chose it."

Chakotay's whole body tenses.

She sighs, dragging a hand across her face. "This isn't your fault," she relents. "If anything, it's mine."

He looks away. She allows silence to overtake them, unwilling to say anything else on the subject. She simply does not have it in her to comfort him about the trap they marched into together.

"You really think he's coming?" he asks eventually.

I've lost contact with the shuttle.

"If anyone could have made it, it's Tom." Which is not an answer. But she cannot think that he's dead, any more than she can allow herself to hope that he is not.

They're in limbo.

Maybe they're the ones who died.

Three days pass, then four, then five. Her ears strain for the sound of a ship entering the atmosphere. She becomes hyper-sensitive to all other noise, Neelix shouting instructions to prepare their meager rations, the plaintive wailing of Samantha's baby, one hundred and forty three—forty two people crammed into a cave like some kind of menagerie, loudly patting themselves on the back because they finally start a fire, the most basic of all things.

It's untenable.

At night she sits just outside the mouth of the cave and searches the stars. The quiet howls in her ears. Her head pounds.

Tom should have reached the Talaxians by now.

But he doesn't come.

And then, suddenly, he does. It's over so abruptly that for a second she doubts her own eyes, Voyager hovering low in the sky, triumphant, surreal.

His voice is the first thing she hears when she steps out onto her bridge, and even though she's expecting it, it knocks the wind out of her.

"Welcome back, Captain," he says. He meets her halfway and she takes his hand in both of hers, scanning his face for signs of injury. He's as filthy as the rest of them, but he doesn't seem hurt. Not like the last time he went away. And he must know what she's doing, because he gives her the barest of smiles, private and reassuring. She squeezes his arm—she can't seem to stop touching him—and lets him go, but she watches him all the way to the conn.

She doesn't know how she feels. It's not joy, exactly. Shock, maybe. They should probably all be seen by the Doctor. Her skin tingles where she touched him and she has to force herself not to stare at the back of his head because he is so utterly alive, and he saved them all, again.

This time she didn't even have to ask.

She can't help it. She walks down to his station and lays a hand on his shoulder. "I think you've earned a rest, Mr. Paris. You're excused, if you'd like."

"If you're staying, I'm staying," he declares.

At last, she smiles. "The conquering hero," she says under her breath, so only he can hear.

He doesn't wait for her to come to him, this time. He shows up at her door late that night, nervous but determined. He's out of uniform.

She lets him in.

Hesitantly, he walks toward her, his hands clasped in front of him. She flashes to the day she'd asked him to leave her, to hunt down Michael Jonas. It's the same posture, and his eyes hold that same intensity, somehow both sure and unsure. He swallows. She watches the up and down bob of his Adam's apple.

"Is it just me?" he asks.

For half a beat, she considers playing dumb. It's an old instinct, but also—and she's surprised to discover it—she is petrified. On the heels of everything they've just survived, the past four months, the past two years, this is the thing that threatens to bring her to her knees.

Ridiculous.

"No," she says. "It's not just you." Again, her fingers tingle.

"Thank god," he says, and before she can do anything else, his hands find her waist and he pulls her in and kisses her. And she can tell that he's trying to be gentle, because he is kind, he's thoughtful, and he has some idea of what she's been through, but then she groans into his mouth and her tongue dances against his and it's as though an electric shock passes between them, all her nerve endings alight, and he makes a sound so low she hardly recognizes it as his voice. He walks them backwards against a bulkhead, tangles one hand in her hair, drags her hip to his with the other.

"Tom," she gasps. He scrapes his teeth along her neck and she presses the whole length of her body into him, closer, closer, clutching at the back of his shirt. "Off," she orders, and he chuckles indulgently, tugging it over his head. She runs her hands across his chest, and then she looks up at him, breathing hard.

"You should know something first," she pants. Because she knows herself, and she knows that she won't be able to do this just the once, and he deserves to know—

"I love you, too," he says. And then, the audacity of him, he grins.

She huffs something between a laugh and a relieved and needy sob. "Thank god," she says, and drags him down by the neck to kiss him again, again, again.

iv. (the chute)

They'd stolen just over a month together.

Tom doesn't remember how long it's been since then, how long he and Harry have been here. But he remembers they'd had thirty-nine days together, because he combs through every memory of her, examines each singular detail, while he lays on the cold ground and waits to lose his mind.

And he is losing his mind. That much he knows.

But maybe if he thinks of nothing else he will be allowed to keep her.

"You were right, you know," he says one night. Or whatever time it is.

"I'm right about a lot of things," Harry jokes. His voice is thin, sort of stretched, but he's trying. When they first got here Tom thought he'd be taking care of Harry, who is younger and innocent and so gullible, and has never, it goes without saying, been incarcerated.

It has very much been the other way around.

Tom thinks it might have to do with Harry being a better person than him, on the whole. Less inclined, naturally, to the worst impulses that the clamp is amplifying in them both. The shame of this drips off him like sweat, a sheen of self-contempt. Makes it hard to look at Harry, sometimes.

Harry looks up to him.

"You asked me if I loved her," he clarifies, staring hard at the roof of their shelter. He needs to say it aloud, to make it real, because with every day that passes he feels increasingly like he made it all up. He knows that's not true. He knows that this thing in his brain is trying to suck all the good out of him, twist it into something that will subdue him so they don't have to bother. No guards down here, just your own naked fear. Just the unrelenting absence of hope.

He knows all this. He's not sure how much longer he'll know it.

Harry rolls over to study his face. "Does she know?"

"She knows," Tom says. "We—she knows."

Harry is quiet, mulling this over.

"Weird," he decides.

Tom laughs, for the last time down here.

His usefulness comes down to this: he kills a man.

Not even the man he was trying to kill. The Akritirian who wants Harry for himself comes back around and Tom, well, Tom blows it. Maybe it's that he doesn't want Harry to see what he's capable of. Maybe he's not as capable as he's always thought. He lands a solid left hook and the guy crumples and Tom doesn't seize his chance, doesn't take him out while he's sprawled at his feet. He adjusts his grip on his knife and waits, waits to see how far he'll have go, and then another prisoner just walks up and guts him.

Stabbing him back is a reflex. He doesn't want to lose his only weapon so he doesn't let go, and the knife, buried to the hilt in his attacker's belly, follows Tom down. Slices him open.

He hears someone else say if he doesn't bleed to death, he'll die of infection and doesn't realize, at first, that they're talking about him.

But they must be, because the other man is already dead.

So he keeps them from taking Harry. But Harry's burden is doubled, anyway.

"They'll come for us," someone rasps against the back of his neck. "They're coming, Tom. Just hold on."

Sometimes he knows Harry. Sometimes he doesn't.

Tom is his name, maybe. That would make sense. Makes sense that the person gripping his hand so tight it hurts would know his name. If he had the words he would thank him for the pain that blossoms through his knuckles and up his arm because for an instant it clears his mind. For an instant, he thinks, Oh. Harry.

Then his blood is roaring again and his skull is white hot and it's all slipping away from him, a tide going out. A woman smiles over her shoulder. A woman throws her head back with laughter, with pleasure. He knows her, he knows her.

His eyes roll back in his head into thrumming darkness.

He's dying. Time passes, and it doesn't.

"You're weak," she hisses.

He moans.

"Pathetic." Kathryn narrows her eyes, hands on her hips. "I should have left you in prison."

"I am in prison," he tries to joke. His eyes clench shut against the spiking pain that accompanies speech and coherent thought, and when he looks up again, she's gone.

"Wait!" he pleads. "I'm sorry! Don't leave me here!"

"I'm right here, buddy. I'm not going anywhere," Harry promises, his hand over Tom's.

And then Harry nearly kills him. And his only thought, a rare stab of lucidity, is: please don't let me hurt Harry, too.

He wakes up in sickbay. Which comes as something of a surprise, since he hadn't expected to wake up at all. The overhead lights are an agony and he groans, turns his head away, and notices, because he can turn his head, that there's nothing protruding from the back of his skull.

It's gone.

He sits up too fast. Blood rushes to his head and the too-bright room swims in his vision and oh, god, he's gonna puke—he leans over the side of the biobed and dry-heaves, but luckily, ha ha, he hasn't eaten in days, so at least he doesn't make a mess on the carpet.

A sound that's trying to be laugh but comes out a shade too hysterical escapes from his throat and then Kathryn is there, her hand tight on his shoulder, the other rubbing circles on his back.

"You're okay," she says. "You're okay, Tom. You're home."

"Harry…"

"Harry, too. He's right over there," she points. Harry is already standing, talking with Tuvok in the far corner. He looks… like himself. He looks like none of it happened.

"How did you get us out of there?" he asks, his voice raw, because he's still having trouble with the not-being-dead of it all.

Later, Harry will describe how Kathryn had come blazing out of the chute, rifle in hand and a phaser on her hip. That she'd come down first, in defiance of all protocol. She'd cut down three men in her first three seconds and then Tuvok had arrived with backup but by then Harry had already pushed through the crowd and the first words out of her mouth were, "Where's Tom?"

But for now, all Kathryn says is, "We didn't take no for an answer." She gives a great deal of the credit to Neelix, actually, who arrives soon after and agrees heartily with this assessment, and everyone crowds around him, too close, too loud, jubilant where he and Harry and Kathryn are something else altogether, and it's difficult to sit there, with Kathryn so near he could reach out and touch her except for the people flanking them, people he is happy to see but would really, really like to leave.

When he's finally released, Kathryn doesn't follow him out, of course. He announces his steak dinner plans in such a way that she'll know when to come. He owes this to Harry. Owes it to their friendship. But his mind is elsewhere, and so is Harry's, and they both know it.

Three hours later, Kathryn lets herself into his quarters, where he is flat on his back in his bed because his standard-issue Starfleet mattress feels like the height of luxury, and he is trying to memorize this feeling, to never let himself take it for granted again. She kicks off her boots and joins him, a little tentatively, like she's afraid she might hurt him, so he turns over and pulls her flush against his body.

Just as he'd imagined doing hundreds, thousands of times these past few weeks.

"I didn't think I would see you again," he says against the shell of her ear.

"I wasn't going to let them have you."

"What if you hadn't found us?"

"That wasn't an option."

She says it so matter-of-factly, like she has that kind of control over objective reality. Hell, maybe she does. By rights they shouldn't even be here right now, like this, together. They've been separated so many times he has actually lost count of them all. Somehow, impossibly, they keep finding their way back.

He pulls her closer, breathes in the scent of her warm, clean skin. He never thought he'd be clean again.

"I killed someone," he says. He doesn't know he's going to say it until it's out of his mouth and since he can't take it back he holds his breath, frozen, awaiting her judgment. There are so many things she doesn't know. Things that could change everything.

She doesn't move. "Was he trying to kill you?" she asks.

"Yes."

"Then I'm glad you killed him first."

He buries his face against her neck and tries not to completely lose it. Cautiously, she rolls over, runs her thumb along his jaw, brushes his hair back from his forehead. Soft, gentle touches for his flayed-raw soul. She looks him in the eye.

"I'm glad you killed him," she says again, and he believes her.

A month goes by, and then another, and nothing comes to tear them apart. She assigns them to away missions together when she probably shouldn't. Tuvok tries to keep her from beaming down to twentieth century San Francisco and Tom says that in that case he'll be happy to advise the away team from Voyager, which causes a minor incident, but everyone's got a limit and Tom has long since reached his.

And when he relents, she nearly dies on Chakotay's watch. Tom drives his fist into Chakotay's cheekbone which feels, somehow, like it settles something between them.

They are never not in danger, it seems. But they are together.

He starts to think that maybe, maybe, everything will be okay.

And then he fucks it all up.

v. (thirty days)

They've been together for two years when the thing she most dreads comes to pass.

The second Tom is escorted out of her ready room she collapses backwards against her desk, feeling like she might be sick. Her hands shake.

"Aren't you being a little hard on him?" Chakotay ventures, later that day. "We've broken the Prime Directive before." He says we but he means that she has broken it, and for less worthy causes than, for example, a personal request to save a civilization from itself.

She can't say: This isn't about the Prime Directive.

She can't say: You have no idea what's at stake.

Although since it's Chakotay defending Tom, given all of their history, he could probably take a wild guess and not be wrong. He can probably guess, for instance, that she does not disagree with what Tom did.

A captain interferes in the affairs of two disparate species, acts in the interests of one over the other, starts a war and alters the course of countless thousands of lives, not least those of the people aboard her ship. Four years later that captain's pilot interferes in the internal affairs of a species that does and does not want their help, acts in the interests of one side over the other, nearly starts a war, nearly alters the course of countless thousands of lives, not least her own.

In her mind's eye she imagines this thing that did not happen in stunning slow-motion technicolor detail, frame by nightmare frame, this thing for which she would never forgive herself, and it didn't happen but her pulse races, races, she can't catch her breath—

It's not about the Prime Directive. But she can't tell Chakotay that. She can't tell Tuvok, who agrees with her decision, albeit for very different reasons. She can't tell anyone. It burrows down into her bones, the guilt, the isolation, the overwhelming wish that none of this had happened, and there is no way to excise it without making everything catastrophically worse.

She holds out for five days.

She dismisses the officer standing guard over the brig, disables the forcefield, and drops down next to Tom on the bench, elbows on her knees, head in her hands.

Tom waits.

"I overreacted," she says, her voice muffled.

"I understand why," he says quickly. She glances up at him, and she can tell from his open expression that he badly wants to make up and move on.

He doesn't get it.

"No, I'm not sure you do," she says. She lets out a slow breath. "How could you do this?"

"Riga asked for my help," he answers. "I knew—"

"How could you to this to me," she specifies.

"I knew you couldn't get involved. I thought I was protecting you. You agreed that something should be done! I thought I could take the burden off of you. Kill two birds."

"Protecting me," she scoffs. "And did you stop to consider how I would feel if I'd had to shoot you down?"

She already knows the answer. Of course he hadn't. He would have known that she'd be forced to act against him, but if she had to guess, she'd say he had so trusted in his skill as a pilot that it had not once occurred to him that she might end up responsible for his death.

At the time, the precision with which Tuvok had targeted Tom's missile had been a relief. Now, in retrospect, it terrifies her. The implications terrify her.

To his credit, Tom appears truly stricken. "I'm sorry," he says, horrified, reaching for her hands. "Kathryn, I am so sorry. You're right. That was—I didn't think."

"I would've had to live with it. I would've had to live with your blood on my hands. And now, I have to live with the knowledge of what I would have done. What I would do. And I—" she pauses, shuts her eyes against what she has to say next. "I don't know how I can trust you not to do this again."

"Okay, wait," Tom says, the edge of panic in his voice. "It sounds like—it sounds like you're saying you want to end this."

"I don't. I don't. But I can't—"

"Kathryn," he says, dropping into a squat in front of her. "I made a mistake. I thought, I honestly thought that we were on the same page. I was wrong. I will never, ever put you in that position again."

She shakes her head. It's not even that she doesn't believe him. Maybe she's just too afraid, afraid of herself, to move past this. It's what she's always feared, from the very beginning: that he would die, and it would be her fault.

"I can prove it to you," he says, when she doesn't respond.

She doubts it. But because she would actually love to be talked out of this, she gives him the chance. "How," she asks, her voice flat.

Awkwardly, he repositions himself so that instead of a squat, he's braced on one knee. "Marry me," he says.

The ship hums.

She opens her mouth, then closes it again.

Tom watches her expectantly.

"What?" she asks, finally.

"Marry me," he says again. "We should get married."

She can't tell for sure, but she thinks she might be furious. A dozen thoughts flood her overwrought mind. She doesn't even know where to begin.

She starts with the least consequential.

"You're proposing to me in the brig?"

"It seemed like a now or never situation," he admits. "But there is a ring, in my quarters."

She puts a hand over her mouth. Her heart clamors in her chest. This doesn't even begin to address the issue she'd come here to discuss; if anything this would make it worse.

"Tom—"

"Kathryn," he says seriously. "I don't—I don't feel like you need forgiveness, but I think you feel that way, so: I forgive you. I forgive you, and I am sorry, and I swear to you, I understand. And, look, we don't have to get married if you don't want to, but what I'm, what I'm trying to say is that I do think of us as a unified front. You and me against the galaxy. That's what I'm trying to show you. That's what our marriage would mean to me."

She doesn't know what to say. It's not like she's never thought about it, except that it might be more accurate to say that she has painstakingly not thought about it, this thing that's always felt so extraordinarily out of reach. Something for another life.

Tom seems to take her silence as a positive sign. "My idiot mistakes aside, selfishly… anything could happen, to either one of us. We've been pulled apart so many times and we've just been lucky these last few years. If something were to happen… I want people to know."

"Tom… your parole," she says, a little helplessly. This is the reason their relationship is a secret. It's not his preference, at all, and frankly nor is it hers. But the closer they get the Alpha Quadrant the surer she is that she has to protect him from the appearance of bias, that they can't do anything to undermine the terms of his release.

Or, no more than they already have by disappearing into the Delta Quadrant.

"So we'll keep it to ourselves," Tom says. "Tuvok can do it. Harry can be our witness."

She almost laughs at that. The first time Harry had seen them together he'd backed slowly out of Tom's quarters, tripping over himself to apologize like he'd walked in on something other than dinner. It had taken weeks to get him to relax and it's a miracle he hadn't given them away to the rest of the crew. The idea of him witnessing her… their…

"Do you really have a ring?" she asks.

"A good one, too," Tom grins, sensing victory. "The spoils of many a betting pool."

"Don't tell me that." She shakes her head, glancing around again. "I can't believe you're proposing to me in the brig."

"You're about to let me out," he reasons.

"Maybe I shouldn't," she says, darkly.

"You should say yes," he counters.

She should not. There are a dozen reasons why she should not.

Owen Paris is going to kill them both.

"Yes," she says.

vi. (renaissance man)

They've known each other for seven years. They've been together for almost five, and married for half of that time. So he knows, immediately, that something is wrong.

He knows that something is wrong because when he calls to her across the empty corridor she stops dead in her tracks, anxiety clouding her eyes. Not her eyes; the Doctor's. The Doctor, who doesn't know why the name Kathryn would come out of Tom Paris' mouth.

But Tom doesn't understand any of this yet. He only knows that she shouldn't be looking at him like that, not if everything is fine.

"What's happened?" he asks, striding over to her.

"I'm fine, Lieutenant," she snaps. "I'm extremely busy."

His blood runs cold.

"Tell me the word," he says, working to keep his voice level.

Kathryn stares at him blankly.

"Sickbay," he orders.

They've had their bodies stolen, their memories wiped, their minds controlled by improbably distant enemies. No one knows the risk better than the two of them; and after the last time, when an alien wearing Tom's skin abused her absolute trust in him to try to strangle her to death, they'd come up with a system, a word to signal that all was well, or not.

All is not well.

He takes hold of her wrist and tries to usher her down the hall, but she digs her heels in, wrenching her arm out of his grasp with uncommon strength.

"Don't hurt her," she mutters hurriedly, turning her face away from him. "I'm handling it!"

"Paris to—" he starts—he needs the Doctor, right now, and maybe Tuvok—, but before he can finish Kathryn seizes his hand, crushing it in hers. He feels his bones shift and groan and she bends his wrist backward to bring him to his knees. Desperately, he throws out an arm to try to grab on to her leg, to pull her down with him, and his hand… goes right through her.

A hologram.

"Where's Kathryn?" he gasps, pain dotting his vision.

The imposter leans in close and hisses, "You're going to get her killed." And then Tom feels the sharp cold of a hypospray against his skin, and he struggles, he struggles to stay conscious, but inevitably, blackness overtakes him.

He comes to on a slab in the fucking morgue. Harry hovers over him, calls, "Tom's awake!" to someone he can't see.

He's up and throwing his legs over the side of the table before Harry can stop him, sucking a breath in through his teeth when his wrist fails to support his weight. "Where is she?" he demands.

Quickly, he takes in the scene: Ayala pulling Chakotay out of a drawer, a tricorder in hand; he doesn't seem overly alarmed, so Tom supposes they don't think he's dead, but still it strikes him as odd, as ominous, that the Doctor isn't here. And Chakotay… Chakotay's face is shadowed with what looks like two or three days of beard growth. Tom lifts his hand to his jaw to feel his own stubble there, and tries not to panic.

"She's back," Harry soothes, which right away sets him on edge. "We got her back."

"Back from where? Where is she now, Harry?"

"Okay, don't freak out," Harry says, unhelpfully. He glances over at Ayala and lowers his voice. "She and the Doctor were taken. Kidnapped. They were holding her hostage, making the Doctor take on our appearances to steal the warp core."

You're going to get her killed.

Tom slaps his chest and finds that he doesn't have a combadge.

"Harry, I swear, if you don't tell me where she is right now—"

"She's in sickbay. Tom, you can't go!" Harry adds, because Tom is out the door before he finishes his sentence.

"Like hell," he throws over his shoulder.

Tom barrels into sickbay to find Kathryn unconscious in the surgical bay. Her face is as white as the sheet covering her from the neck down, except for the stark purple-blue around one of her eyes. There's blood crusted in her hair. Blunt-force trauma, his brain supplies automatically.

There is a lot of blood.

"You can't be here," Harry insists.

Brusquely, the Doctor glances up from where he's prepping for surgery. "Actually, it's good that you're here. I need your assistance." He's in full emergency mode, apparently back to normal, which is somehow more unsettling than the alternative. Tom himself is trembling violently, has to actively restrain himself from taking his feelings out on the Doctor before he knows the full story.

"He can't help," Harry repeats.

"Shut up, Harry," Tom warns, low and dangerous.

"His wrist is broken," Harry says loudly over Tom's objections, and Tom recognizes the out for what it is and appreciates it not at all.

"He knows how to use an osteo-regenerator," the Doctor says impatiently. "We need to operate on her, now!"

Tom starts to move; Harry grabs him by the back of his uniform. He gives Tom a look that plainly says I will if you make me and Tom wheels around and shoves him as hard as he can, so Harry turns back to the Doctor and announces, "She's his wife."

For a moment, no one speaks.

The Doctor takes in Tom's haggard appearance properly for the first time, his wild eyes, his shaking hands, and seems to decide not to ask questions.

"Get him out of here," the Doctor tells Harry, tossing him the osteo-regenerator before turning his back on them both.

"Let me help, god damnit!" Tom shouts.

"Let's go," Harry grunts, pushing Tom through the door. The Doctor seals it behind them.

Tom paces.

Fore, aft.

Fore, aft.

Harry leans against the opposite wall, his face a mask of guilt which Tom is refusing to acknowledge.

"You know I had to tell him," Harry tries.

Tom ignores this, too.

Before long, Tuvok arrives. "Finally," Tom explodes. "Maybe he'll let you in."

"Doc knows. About them," Harry explains. Tuvok raises an eyebrow.

"I am here at the Doctor's request," Tuvok replies.

"Is she—"

"It is a security matter," Tuvok interrupts, then adds, "I will give you an update on her condition if I am able."

Tuvok overrides the lockout and goes inside. Tom tries to get a glimpse of Kathryn but he doesn't have the right angle, Tuvok is blocking his field of vision, and he can't hear anything, either… and then the door shuts in his face.

He slides down the wall and drops his head into crossed arms. Warily, Harry sits down beside him.

"I should have figured it out sooner," he says.

"You can't blame yourself for this," Harry says bracingly.

"I should have done more. I should have gotten to her."

"They probably would have killed you both."

"If she dies…"

"She won't," Harry says. "She's going to pull through. She always pulls through. And so do you; the two of you should be studied by Starfleet Science for as much as you've survived."

Tom doesn't laugh.

Harry is joking, but it's too much. They have been put through entirely too much. For seven years they've scraped by on adrenaline and dumb luck and it is too fucking much. He's had enough.

Except that there is nothing, not one thing, that he can do about it.

And there is every chance their luck has finally run out.

The surgery lasts three hours, which is to say, an eternity. When Doc lets them back in she is still unconscious, still so pale she's practically translucent, and Tom finds that he is almost afraid to approach her. She's been wrapped in a blue-green medical gown and moved to a recovery bed, but she looks about as far from recovering as one person can be. Tom goes to her on unsteady legs. Feels her skin with the back of his hand.

She's warm.

"Commander Tuvok confirmed your… status," the Doctor says, frowning. "So I suppose I can tell you that she's going to make a full recovery. But it was a close call."

Tom skims his palm down her arm, hating her stillness. "Is this my fault?" he asks.

"No," the Doctor sighs. "That particular distinction goes to me. I was stopped before I could eject the core. They fired on us… and Tuvok didn't know she was on their ship, when he returned fire." He pauses, apparently deeply uncomfortable, then adds, "I am sorry, Mr. Paris."

But Tom waves off his apology. He climbs onto the biobed opposite Kathryn's and curls in on himself, wishing there were room for two on these things.

There have been so many close calls.

The unfairness of it pools in his stomach like acid, like grief, sharp and paralyzing.

Hours turn into days. She doesn't wake up.

"Her brain is healing itself," the Doctor assures them. "It takes time."

Tom reports for his shifts and comes back. He reads the same page of her novel four times in a row before giving up. Harry brings food from the mess hall, against the Doctor's heated objections. He lays on the biobed across from his wife; sometimes, he sleeps.

And then one morning he blinks himself awake and Kathryn is laying on her side, studying him. A smile plays across her lips.

He lets out a breath he feels like he's been holding for centuries.

"Hi," he says. "I'd prefer it if you didn't get kidnapped again."

She coughs a wry chuckle, easing herself upright. Harry and the Doctor hurry over. "I'll see what I can do. Were you hurt?"

"Yes," Harry says, at the same time that Tom answers, "No."

"Mr. Paris is fine," the Doctor interjects, examining his tricorder as he scans Kathryn. "He simply would not leave."

She shoots him a worried look. "How long has it been?"

"Four days," Tom answers hoarsely. "You almost died."

"Related to which, I do have a question," the Doctor says, striving for a neutral tone that he doesn't quite achieve. "Shall I… update your next of kin in your medical files?"

Tom's heart lodges itself in his throat. A lot of people know, now. No one who won't keep it to themselves if he asks them to, but still, in a big way the jig is up. Truthfully, he cannot bring himself to care. It's only because it has mattered so much to her that he's kept their marriage a secret anyway, maintained their separate quarters, left their rings in nondescript boxes on his nightstand, her windowsill. But it could be thirty more years before they get back to Earth, and he's just not going to let the looming specter of a Starfleet parole board keep him from her side at a time like this.

But he takes in her weariness, at odds with the deliberate set of her shoulders except for how well he knows her, and he doesn't have to ask what she thinks is best, even after all that's happened.

"No," he tells the Doctor, exhaling. "No."

It's been two months since the incident with the Overlookers.

Tom watches Kathryn pad barefoot around her quarters, wrapped in a light blanket, a lukewarm mug of coffee, as ever, in hand. His chest aches with the effortlessness of this small moment. He wishes he could bottle it somehow, this feeling. Seal it in amber, freeze the two of them in time, just like this. No Borg, no Hirogen, nobody trying to exact revenge for something none of them had any control over.

How, he wonders, can a thing so indomitable feel at the same time so very fragile?

He's done something—not for the first time—that will change everything.

But for the first time in a long while, he's not sure how she will react.

Eventually, she notices his scrutiny. "What?" she asks, wrinkling her nose at him.

"I love you," he says.

She studies him suspiciously. "And?"

"And I have to tell you something," he admits.

She rolls her eyes, pursing her lips but in a fond sort of way, which only worsens Tom's nerves.

Only one way out now.

"I—had a parole hearing."

He'd used the data stream just after her surgery to warn his dad about what was coming. Then he'd begged and borrowed comm time from what must have been at least two-thirds of the crew, to allow enough time to meet with the parole board. It still surprises him, actually, how many people were willing to help. And help keep it under wraps.

She blinks at him. Deliberately, she sets her coffee aside.

"Shouldn't I have been there?"

This is the part she's not going to like.

"I told them why you couldn't. Tuvok stood in for you."

She is worryingly still while she processes this information.

"Maybe you'd better skip to the end," she says.

He hands her a PADD. She takes it from him mutely, unease in her every movement.

She reads.

"Discharged from parole," she breathes. Her eyes are as wide as he's ever seen them. He's not sure whether this is good or bad, yet.

"Cut loose," he confirms, rising from the chair.

"Oh my god, Tom," she says, and his heart jackhammers unpleasantly. He did this without her to protect her, and, yes, the last time he'd done that it had all gone to hell, but he'd consulted with Tuvok on this one, he was sure this was the right way to handle everything—he thought she probably shouldn't even be seen initiating the proceedings, all things considered—but he has been terrified that she won't forgive him for going rogue on her again no matter his reasoning. And if she is going to leave him for this then it was all for nothing; he could've just kept his AWOL parolee status, because what does he care? If he's just going to lose everything else in the process. He'd rather go back to prison, for that matter.

But then she lets the blanket fall from her shoulders and crashes into him, her hands flat on his chest, and at first he's afraid that she's crying but she pulls back a little and she is beaming at him, and it's like the face of the sun, just that brilliant.

And then she gasps. "Yourfather!" she realizes, covering her mouth in horror.

"My father," Tom says, trying to keep a straight face, "told me, and I quote, to 'Tell Katie Janeway that I expect to be first on her list in the next data stream'."

And now she's crying. But she's also laughing, and he thinks that he's done all right, actually, in the end.

It could be another thirty years before they get back. Or they could get thrown straight to the Federation's doorstep tomorrow. Stranger things have happened. But whatever else comes, they're protected now.

Not safe. But together.

And he doesn't have to pretend that she isn't everything to him, anymore.