Disclaimer: All things Star Trek belong to CBS/Paramount. I only own my imagination.

Spoilers: The Chute. If you haven't seen it, this won't make much sense.

Author's Note: I have the ambition to keep these coming, but I also have a real life which can mess with me. I'm lifting focus completely from the two musketeers in peril to dive deep in to B'Elanna's mind. Her mind is complicated to get a grip of when you start breaking things down. She's young, but too young to understand that it plays a part in everything, and her biological situation is unclear, which makes all of what I have written basically educated guesswork. Before starting to write this season I was debating with myself what rating I should give these instalments, but I have decided to try and work within the T-rating (though I don't fully grasp the system, something I blame my cultural background for which is very non-Anglo-Saxon). It's the effects her struggles have which are important, not graphical and explicit details. I leave those to the reader.


For the third time during this shift she managed to injure herself. It was nothing which in her mind required any medical attention, but it didn't do anything for her already foul mood. She lifted her hand to look at it.

"Great," she said under her breath and wiped the wound. Klingon DNA or not, if she didn't clean it up and put on a plaster it would become infected. Despite popular opinion she wasn't immune to such things. She decided to finish her job first though and reached for the ODN recoupler.

Her mind wasn't on her work, she knew that. These were repairs she didn't have to conduct, but walking engineering like a caged tiger making her people nervous was her only other option. It was better to keep herself busy, she figured. They had been waiting and waiting for word about what had happened to Tom and Harry - in vain by the look of things – and patient waiting wasn't her strength. She was happy she wasn't in the big chair because she knew she would have erupted by now. They were being strung along, she was sure of it, and in the meantime Tom and Harry were somewhere hoping Voyager would find them. If they weren't dead. She banished that thought immediately. No, they weren't dead. They couldn't die on her. She'd had definitely had enough of people dying around her. Tom was resourceful, always using that quick mind of his, and he'd look after Harry. He always did.

Sitting back examining her repairs she tried to focus on the usual human-Klingon chaos inside, separating the emotions, the thoughts and the reactions spurred by it all. Lately she had tried to do that to try and find a way to analyse herself and why she acted the way she did, to get a better grip on herself. Some things were relatively easy. Anything she interpreted as hostility would inevitably bring out her aggressiveness and she knew it was because of her Klingon heritage. However, she wasn't completely without ability to deal with that reaction. It was possible to work on her perception of hostility and which kind of hostility she would allow herself to react to. She tried to remember that when someone quarrelled with her it didn't automatically mean they were hostile.

Other things were more difficult, like fear. She did feel fear, but not as a human would. She feared loss, rejection and embarrassment and it was here where her two sides were feeding each other the most. Humans would fear rejection, just as any Klingon would, but the reaction she had to fear was aggressiveness, at the same time as she tried to force what ever caused the fear out of her life, pushing the emotionally disturbing person as far away as she possibly could. Her cowardice, as she perceived her reaction of pushing people away to be, angered her even more and she ended up in a downward spiral of anger and further hostility. She hadn't yet found a way to break that trend, especially if embarrassment was involved.

Sometimes a very human hopelessness would strike her, adding to her misery. Hopelessness felt to her like a wet blanket slowly suffocating her, and as much as her Klingon side rebelled against it, it was her most powerful human trait and it had turned out to be incredibly difficult to deal with. If this was what humans had to deal with, it boggled her mind that they weren't all depressed zombies. They weren't, so they had obviously figured something out and she needed to do the same. Soul searching and analysis was her answer, but it wasn't exactly easy. She was not used to sit back and think about her emotions, what they woke up inside and in what way she reacted to them. At times she had to admit that she hadn't a full grip on her actual biology, what she could expect from her own body. Discreetly she brushed up on human and Klingon physiology in an effort to try and understand why she reacted the way she did and how her sides could clash or feed each other. The EMH's defence words 'I'm a doctor, not an engineer' became in her mind 'I'm an engineer, not a doctor'. It was complicated, that much she realised. Sometimes it helped her understanding, but most of the times it didn't.

At times she wondered if she should try and talk about it with someone, but she was unsure who that someone could be. The EMH certainly knew all about her biology and though she appreciated his directness, she also felt vulnerable, and she knew the Doctor wouldn't consider that side of things. It could end up being incredibly embarrassing and then she'd be back on square one again. Kes would listen, but B'Elanna wasn't so sure she'd actually understand. Briefly she had even considered the captain, but she was a very busy person, now more than ever and B'Elanna didn't want to disturb her with her petty problems. Chakotay had long been a confidant on many things, but this time around she tried to avoid him. He knew her so well and could start asking uncomfortably personal questions she'd rather not answer. In fact, she didn't want to admit that there could be anything personal going on worth talking about. Her life evolved around work and that was all there was to it.

From nowhere Harry's words on Hanon IV crossed her mind and she all but smashed the ODN recoupler in the bulkhead next to her, but stopped mid-motion and carefully put it in the toolbox on the floor by her side. That was an unwanted reaction and she should not feed any rumours by her behaviour. Despite her effort she couldn't quell her reaction completely and she stared at her shaking hand while emotions welled up inside of her. She steadied the hand by putting it on the bulkhead and tried to breathe calming breaths. Still staring at her hand she listened to the sound of her blood rushing through her veins, her heart beating more strongly than usual and felt the physical effects, the warmth and the strength spreading throughout her body. She buckled slightly and started drawing deep breaths through her nostrils and her senses sharpened. It was pleasurable – far too pleasurable, and unbidden mental images formed in her mind, images she had fought hard to suppress, just as the reaction she was experiencing. The desire to let this have free reign was strong, incredibly strong, as all Klingon reactions were, but this particular reaction sparked deep fear in her. She wasn't a full Klingon and she wasn't on a Klingon world. Had she been, this wouldn't have been the source of fear and anxiety it now was to her, or at least it was what she kept telling herself. Among humans this had to be held down. It was too strong, too violent, too much of everything. Humans had great difficulties dealing with Klingon desire and it wasn't just because of the physical strain it put on the unfortunate man or woman on the receiving end. The genie had to be put back in the bottle. She closed her eyes and focused her mind on other things, knowing this would subside if she could divert her mind. Desire was the one thing she could force down – for now at least. It was just a matter of keeping it down and hoping her emotions would die with time. It had worked before, it should do it again.

As she slowly regained her grip she felt shame. In the face of what was going on, this reaction was definitely improper. She was thankful no one knew about it and with determination she packed up the tool kit and got on her feet. Like nothing had happened, with her usual mask of control in place, she walked through engineering to stow the tool kit away. She had an injury to treat.