Chapter 4: Observation
As Mike Ayala sits tucked away in a quiet corner of Sandrine's, he contemplates his fellow patrons.
Kim and Torres are engaged in conversation at the bar, the two friends having entered only a few minutes earlier, stopping briefly to chat with Janeway and Paris before retrieving drinks. Torres lingered with the command team only a moment (the XO and Captain seeming deep in their usual banter), but the smile the engineer shot the former pilot seemed genuine, however fleeting.
Further evidence, Mike decides, that things between Tom and B'Elanna are less strained now, following their near-death experience several weeks earlier. And while he'll never remark on it publicly, he's relieved.
B'Elanna is one of hid oldest friends, now that Chakotay's gone. And Tom. . . Well, Tom Paris isn't the dishonorable coward he mistook him for years ago. He's a good man. A fine officer. More and more, a friend as well; always quick with a smile or a sympathetic ear.
It's good to see the engineer and the former pilot getting along again, even if Mike can't help but notice the pained expression that appears on B'Elanna's face as she stands chatting with Harry. He even begins to wonder, until a snatched fragment of conversation finds his remote seat.
". . . alright?" Kim asks.
"Fine," the Klingon dismisses gruffly. "Just a stubborn headache."
Shifting his gaze from the bar, he sees Paris and Janeway still engaged in conversation. The normally reserved Captain smiling hugely as her First Officer finishes some kind of story, his gestures even more animated than usual.
It's the first time any of them have seen Janeway this relaxed in a while, and as he mentally catalogues the last few months' events, the Security Chief can understand why. The uncomfortable alliance with the Borg and all that it entailed. Losing Kes. Gaining that drone the Captain is hell-bent on rehabbing.
This last thought gives him pause. He and most of the crew still aren't comfortable with having a (supposed) former member of the Borg on board permanently, let alone considering her part of the crew. But the Captain is determined, and Paris seems to genuinely support the decision, even in private.
"You've forgiven me my mistakes," Tom pointed out to him, a month earlier, while they worked out together on the holodeck.
"You didn't kill thousands - millions of people," he'd shaken his head disdainfully.
"No," Tom had almost whispered, his blue eyes reflecting a profound sadness almost never openly shared. "Only three. But unlike Seven of Nine. . . I was actually capable of my own free choices when I made my mistakes."
Hearing the Captain laugh loudly at something Tom says, Ayala is drawn away from the memory.
Of all Paris' abilities as XO, Mike is the first to admit that chief among them has to be the man's ability to get his CO to open up personally. It helps, too, in erasing some of the discomfort the crew feel around her in social situations; Paris' ease bridging the gap between Janeway's on-duty persona and her off-duty presence.
To be sure, people still sit up a little straighter when she enters, watching she and Paris with faint interest. But it's hard to be too uptight around her in Sandrine's. Not when the ship's XO is making her laugh so hard tears are streaming down her face.
Throwing back her head and laughing again, Janeway stands from her seat, motioning to the pool table.
"But you're going to win," the Lieutenant Commander whines. Failing to keep the sloppy smile from his face despite his feigned pout.
"You never know," the Captain sing-songs, regarding him with a smirk. "Tonight might just be the night you get lucky."
Curious, Mike thinks, watching the exchange with interest now.
"Is that so?" the blonde officer shoots back, his voice suddenly dropping with mischief.
"The night is young, Mister Paris."
Even more curious.
Ayala's eyes narrow, following Janeway's cool sashay to the pool table, Paris trailing behind her.
. . . . .
It's a slow shift on the bridge today. And though Harry Kim has tasks to complete and variables to monitor, most of his time is spent engaging in his favorite hobby.
Spying on the Captain and Tom.
"Do you feel alright?" Tom asks, leaning over to Janeway's seat on the bridge.
"Fine. . . Why?" she responds distractedly.
She seems to struggle to focus on the monitor to beside her, and Kim feels a sudden prickle of concern.
The Captain hasn't been her usual hyper-focused self the last week and a half, though at first it was just a cheerful restlessness- almost a giddiness- that translated into colorful banter with her XO and more merriment than usual during the Alpha shift.
He had just chalked it up being back in a territory devoid of immediate, pressing danger. Until this afternoon, the Captain now looking like she feels physically uncomfortable, maybe even dizzy.
"You're sweating," Tom replies in a low voice, gaze locked on the small sheen of perspiration on her forehead.
Studying Tom, the young officer notes the same sheen on the XO's own brown. Kim feels even more concerned, both by its presence and Tom's apparent failure to notice it himself.
When the Captain looks up, she appears somehow startled by how close Paris is to her, his face only centimeters from hers.
"I'm fine," she says again, shifting back in her chair. "Maybe I had . . . too much coffee this morning. Not enough for lunch. "
"Shocking," Tom drawls, smirking at her slightly.
But something about the smirk makes Harry uncomfortable. It's a look he's seen before on Tom, though not for three years.
When Janeway mirrors Tom's smirk, Kim shifts awkwardly on his feet behind the Ops console.
Weird, the Ensign thinks, shaking his head in one quick motion. As if to rid himself of the thought by jarring it loose.
. . . . .
Tom isn't sure why standing in the turbolift beside Kathryn is uncomfortable, but he decides it's because more people than normal are crammed into it with them.
Can everyone just stop breathing for a goddamned minute? he thinks angrily, tugging his collar as he feels Ayala's hot breath next to him.
"Deck eleven, "Janeway calls and he looks at her curiously.
"I want to see how the modifications to the navigational deflector are coming." As she explains, she turns her face to him.
He doesn't notice her renewed surprise and alarm at his proximity, his blue eyes suddenly locked onto her grey ones.
"I'll come with you," he says absently. "See B'Elanna's work for myself."
She nods, turning her away from him. His gaze lingers on the slope of her flushed neck, paying no mind to her suddenly accelerated breathing.
When the last person gets off on deck nine, Tom feels more anxious than when the lift brimmed with people. He's also keenly aware of Kathryn's presence, but he doesn't know why. He feels uncomfortable, restless; even a little dizzy and short of breath. But he doesn't want to get away from her. Quite the opposite.
When the doors slide open, she almost bolts out of the lift, and he finds himself hesitating strangely at the threshold. Failing to hear his foot steps behind her, she stops, turning around slowly.
"Are you coming, Tom?" she asks him, her voice low, more gravelly than normal. He feels his breath momentarily escape him.
He nods quickly, falling in step beside her as they navigate the hallway to Deflector Control.
When they enter the tiered space, both the upper and lower levels are empty. The engineering kits are all neatly packed up, placed against a far wall in anticipation of the next day's work.
"Looks like engineering knocked off early today," he quips, his voice sounding strange to his own ears.
"B'Elanna's team has been working double shifts the last three days. I told them to take it easy today," she remarks, peering at an open console.
Damn, she already told me that, hadn't she? Over coffee in the ready room at breakfast. She'd looked up mid-sentence, caught me not paying attention. I think I was staring at her .
When he snaps back from the memory of her eyes dancing in amusement that morning, her pink lips twisting in a smile, she's barreling through some concern about the modifications.
"- better if we didn't bypass the relay here, but it would take another two days and I'm just not sure we have it to spare."
He moves close to her on the catwalk, peering at the relay she's talking about. Or at least, staring blankly at her small hands braced against it.
It takes him a moment to realize that those hands are shaking slightly.
"Kathryn?" he asks, touching her shoulder.
She spins around quickly when his hand makes contact with her, like the touch carried some kind of charged pulse that startled her. But he doesn't remove his hand from her arm, drawing even closer instead. Unconsciously trapping her between the console and his body.
He doesn't move after that- except for his gaze, which travels down from her searching eyes, lingering on her heaving chest, before trailing back up the same path.
There are flecks of blue around the grey in her eyes. How did I not notice that before?
"Tom," she breathes, her torso pressed against the wall behind her.
His mouth opens, but no sound comes out. He simply stands staring at her, frozen for what feels like an eternity by her intoxicating proximity.
It's only when he sees her eyes lower to his mouth that he moves forward, crushing his lips to hers.
. . . . .
As B'Elanna stands in the turbolift, she braces herself for a long hour. It's time for her monthly meeting with the Captain, and she would give a year's worth of rations to get out of it.
Normally the meetings are a piece of cake, the time flying by as she and Janeway chatter about repairs, modifications. Random bits of theory. But this one won't. Not as it's the first time she and the Captain will be alone in two weeks, following B'Elanna walking into Deflector Control to find Janeway and the ship's XO half naked, mauling each other against a panel.
Kahless, why didn't I take Joe up on his offer to run the diagnostic that day?
B'Elanna shakes her head angrily, positive she will never pry the image of the two of them from her mind. Janeway's hair loose from her clip, flying around her. Her back arching in pleasure as Tom kissed her throat and trailed frantic hands over her body.
Tom.
B'Elanna had felt like they were so closing to moving forward after almost dying together, drifting in space. She'd even confessed that she missed his friendship, his easy comfort, over the last nine months. She can still see his intense expression, standing in the corridor, when she tried to brush it aside after they got back, and he'd swung her around by her arm.
"I missed you, too, B'Elanna."
His face had been so earnest then, his eyes flashing with pain.
She tries to hold onto that memory. But now it's quickly replaced by his flushed face, eyes closed, as he feverishly kissed Janeway. His words of honesty and friendship drowned out by the sound of him groaning the Captain's first name.
"Lieutenant," Janeway greets, rising from her desk.
She gives a curt nod, trying not to be obvious in her refusal to meet the older woman's eyes.
It isn't until they're almost done with the meeting that B'Elanna notices the Captain hasn't tried to make eye contact either. Isn't until the formal stuff ends, the time coming to make their usual small talk, that she realizes the woman across from her is as deeply uncomfortable as she is.
When Janeway stares into coffee cup, going on about the engineer's latest proposal, B'Elanna finally spares her an appraisal.
There are dark circles under Janeway's eyes and the rest of her skin looks slightly sallow. She looks. . . tired. Stressed.
The engineer zones out of the conversation completely, reflecting instead on the last few times she'd seen Janeway with Paris. It had only been on duty, and she'd retreated from their presence as fast as she could, but she realizes now there was a certain distance there. An uncharacteristic lack of comfort between two.
And once, when Janeway had walked away from where Tom in engineering, his eyes had followed her slight frame. Trailing her with a pained expression.
They're so uncomfortable they're barely speaking to each other, she thinks, flushing with guilt that she'd assumed they'd already fallen into a romantic relationship.
When the Captain clears her throat, looking acutely uncomfortable, B'Elanna snaps back to attention.
"Lieutenant, I haven't gotten the chance to apologize. . ."
Janeway pauses, collecting her words, and for the first time, B'Elanna feels genuinely bad for her. She can only imagine how the woman across from her feels. Caught in an embarrassing position by a subordinate. Her relationship with her First Officer, her friend, now strained. Possibly irreparably.
"I'd like to say I'm sorry," Janeway begins anew, "for what you walked in on. . . The awkwardness it may have caused you."
Well at least she said 'awkwardness' and not 'pain', B'Elanna thinks, half bitter and half relieved. Janeway- ever the diplomat.
"You and Tom weren't yourselves, Captain."
She's pleased by how easily the words come. How natural they sound, despite the pit in her stomach.
"Still," the Captain says, shaking her head, "if I caught two of my others in that position-"
"You'd find a way to understand. Given the circumstances."
Janeway nods, meeting her gaze for the first time. The relief is apparent on her drawn face.
B'Elanna tries to cling to this thought, blocking out the image of Tom's blue ones trailing Janeway in engineering, and with a longing he never seemed to spare for her after the Sakari caves. The longing she must have looked at him with, even if buried under hurt and anger.
"Thank you, Lieutenant."
Janeway's crisp nod, coupled with her rising from the desk, indicates a dismissal. But for some reason, B'Elanna's feet remain planted where they are rather than fleeing at warp speed.
"Captain. . . have you talked to Tom about this?"
She can't believe they're her own words, convinced that it's someone else doing the talk. That perhaps when the Doctor cleared her for duty, he skipped some kind of crucial brain scan.
"Lieutenant, I don't really think we should be talking about. . . "
Janeway's voice trails off as she rearranges PADDs on desk, but despite the Captain's mask she wears the engineer can see it; the fear and pain. The longing for a friend who now seems out of reach. Perhaps, too, the longing for something else.
All things B'Elanna is acutely familiar with.
"I know it's not my place," she says, suddenly undeterred. "But it isn't as though you can talk to your First Officer about this."
The woman across from her scratches her eyebrow, shaking her head slightly. Still, no verbal protest comes, and the engineer takes it as a sign.
"You weren't yourselves," B'Elanna repeats, "it has no bearing on your friendship, your working relationship."
As the words tumble from her lips, she isn't sure what's worse. That she's reassuring the woman who's managed to touch the man she herself pines for, or the fact that the reassurance she's offering is one she knows to be false.
Altered hormones levels or not, it isn't as though Janeway or Paris had batted an eyelash at anyone else during the alien experiments. Only at each other. It's a reality B'Elanna is painfully aware of, as Tom failed to search her out in his impaired state. Despite that he was all she wanted in her own, almost a year earlier.
Janeway searches her face. Scanning for insincerity, the younger woman recognizes.
Whether she's so upset as to miss it, or so desperate as to deliberately ignore it, B'Elanna will never know.
"Thank you, B'Elanna," her CO says softly, sitting back down.
When B'Elanna leaves the ready room, walking across the bridge on legs that feel borrowed, the lift doors open and Ayala gets on with her.
"Can I ask you something, Mike?" she says, leaning against the wall of the lift.
The characteristically cool security officer only nods.
"When you have a bad day, what do you to try to get rid of the stress?"
"Vulcan meditation," he answers, his arms clasped behind his back.
"That works for you?"
He smiles cryptically at her incredulous expression.
"No," he confesses. "But I always try it before heading to the holodeck to punch the lights out of some Nausicaans."
She stares at him, studying his subtle amusement.
"So, why bother with the meditation in the first place?"
His smile widens into an all out grin.
"I guess I got used to the vain attempt."
"Right," she mumbles, closing her eyes
As Mike watches her silently, B'Elanna contemplates her own futile behaviors for the rest of the ten-deck ride.
. . . . .
When she catches sight of Tom in the mess hall, he's sitting alone with Seven at a table by a window. The two are talking in low voices, and Tom is obviously groping for conversation while Seven perches uncomfortably. But still, he's trying, and for this Kathryn's grateful.
When Kathryn hears the name 'B'Elanna,' she halts her approach to Seven and Tom's table.
The ship's Chief Engineer has just been discharged from Sickbay after the Doctor treated her for the partial engramatic purge she suffered, prior to Ayala interrupting the Mari's procedure with evidence of the world's own source of violent thoughts.
And though the silence still stretches between her chair and her XO's, she'd seen Tom's face morph from worry to relief, and then finally into pain. She knew, with a pang of sympathy, it would be Mike and Harry, not him, who waited for the engineer when she was released from the Doctor's care. Never again him.
"It is illogical to gain knowledge of other species given the risks such explorations invite."
She knows immediately from hearing Seven's assertion that the former drone is now continuing with Tom the conversation the two of them had in her ready room earlier in the day. She isn't surprised Seven is still pushing; she could tell by her face before that what she herself had said hadn't swayed the young woman. Still, she's surprised to see Tom engaging so readily with her, gesturing the way he would as if in conversation with Harry or Neelix.
Kathryn can't hear the rest of the conversation, but after a minute, Seven's face loses its hard edge of doubt, becoming contemplative. She approaches the twosome again, her curiosity getting the best of her.
"Captain," Seven greets stiffly, abruptly stopping her discussion with Paris.
Well, so much for that, Janeway muses.
When Seven excuses herself, Kathryn looks down at Tom's untouched plate, feeling a stab of concern.
"Not hungry?" she asks, standing awkwardly by the table instead of sitting down.
"I think I'm just not brave enough to try Neelix's latest dish. . . Our jobs seem harrowing enough without dinner being an adventure."
The quip is of the sort Tom would normally make, but his voice carries a hollowness to it that she knows it didn't have two months earlier.
She silently curses herself, one more time, for having tried to pretend the Srivani's experiments and the surrounding events never happened. It's only made things worse between them.
"Buy you a bowl of tomato soup?" she offers. "I think I even have a bottle of Kradin ale still stashed away somewhere in my closet."
The look he gives her is one of tempered hope. It dawns on her that he can't even manage outright optimism at this point.
"Sounds good," he says, forcing a smile.
"Shame to waste your dinner though," she remarks, and he favors her with a rueful glance as he stands up. She fails to suppress her smirk.
"Chell just came in," he says, nodding to the Bolian. "I'll offer it to him."
He's quiet once he gets to her quarters. They both are.
Of course, when both of them start to talk, they do so at once, awkwardly stopping and staring at each other.
"I'm sorry," he says politely, "you were saying?"
"Tom. . . I want to apologize for making things more awkward between us than need be. We should have just talked about it the first week."
"I was under the impression you didn't want to talk about it right after," he apologizes.
She wants to turn away from him, unable to voice her thoughts with complete honesty.
I don't even want to talk about it now, she thinks. We just have no choice.
"Tom," she says instead, "we weren't ourselves. There's nothing we can do about what happened."
"We weren't," he echoes quickly.
"What happened has no bearing on our friendship. Nothing to do with our working relationship."
It doesn't occur to her to question how quickly B'Elanna's words come to her, and or how unwilling she is to the analyze the assertions she's making.
"I agree completely," he chimes.
"So," she says, again standing awkwardly beside the table he sits at.
"So," he says, a smile appearing on his face as he looks at her. "Friends again?"
"Business as usual," she laughs, sitting down across from him.
Digging into dinner together, she feels grateful for their rediscovered ease. Pleased that she's salvaged her relationship with her First Officer and best friend.
Ignoring the doubt lurking at the back of her thoughts, she keeps her eyes locked on their dinner and her plate. The scientific mind that's led her to poke into ever nebula and under every rock all of her life now having absolutely no desire to search the pair of blue orbs just across from her.
Eyes that remain steadfastly locked on the known safety afforded by his own plate.