She says she's never been afraid of taking risks, but Mark, for example, was no risk at all. Contentedly landlocked with his books and philosophies, he'd loved her without needing her. Without needing her to keep him safe.
Unable to sleep, unwilling to indulge herself in the holodeck maybe ever again, she slips into the shuttle bay, into the Flyer, leaving it powered down so that the only illumination comes from the overhead lights at half-strength, filtering in through the viewport. She knows by now that if she lets her mind drift she can imagine it truly is night, night in a way that means something. That it's moonlight she traces with the pads of her fingers, following a cobbled path of curves and blunt angles: the analog controls Tom insisted on including, a design so quintessentially him.
She suspects she might know every nook and cranny by heart.
She draws her knees up to her chest and sinks deeper into the chair that she also thinks of as Tom's, letting her head fall back against the headrest, letting her eyes drift shut, willing away her memories of the day.
"Going my way?" a voice calls out from behind her, and she represses the reflex to spring guilty up from the conn, but only just.
How did you find me is the wrong question with an obvious answer, but it would be the easier one to ask. Easier than why did you find me, the harbinger of a conversation she has actively avoided for these past three days.
"That depends," she says instead, deciding to deflect. "Are you here to help shoot me out of an airlock?"
"I'm afraid I can't do that for you," Tom smiles, leaning against the half-wall behind her. "I wanted to make sure you were all right. You never came back."
"Oh, the Doctor filled me in on the finer points of the situation," she says, rolling her eyes at herself and turning, finally, to face him. "You seemed to have everything under control."
"Not quite," he chuckles, perhaps recalling Harry's black and blue face, or his own split lip. She grimaces in acknowledgment.
"I'm… sorry, Tom," she says softly, because her humiliation is outweighed only by the crush of responsibility she feels for a dozen members of her crew getting drawn into a fistfight. Because she'd altered his program without his permission, in ways that had caused an emotional cascade failure beyond her wildest dreams.
"Actually, I think I owe you an apology," he says, and though his tone is mild he does not meet her eyes.
She holds her breath.
"I made it for you, you know. Not Michael, but—" he laughs, self-deprecating, "well, all the rest. I made Fair Haven for you."
Slowly, she exhales.
What she'd told the Doctor wasn't precisely true. She hadn't left Michael that day because she'd realized none of it was real. That part she'd known all along, and all too well. Had wrestled with her misgivings, her shame, and done it anyway.
No, she'd fled… because she'd finally understood what was real. What it all signified, each careful photon and forcefield that cocooned her on that false lakeshore in something like respite.
And how it could all be so finely tuned to her interests, without her participation in its creation.
An aficionado, they'd called her.
"I know," she admits.
Tom startles. "You never said."
"Neither did you."
And either one of them could invoke that magic word, Mark, a panacea against all risk. Either one of them could end this conversation easily enough, now and, probably, forever.
She doesn't say it.
Tom drops into to a squat beside her. "The Burleigh Manor," he says, counting on his fingers. "Da Vinci's Workshop. Fair Haven might be the least subtle, but I've been telling you for years. Not to mention," he adds, glancing around, "that I seem to have unintentionally built you a Captain's yacht."
Her mind reels. When the Gothic holonovel appeared in her database right around the same time Sandrine's made its debut, she'd wondered. She'd never been bold enough to ask, not when doing so might make it awkward for her to drop into the bar late at night and run the table on her helmsman.
But then the da Vinci program had arrived on her birthday that difficult third year, and as far as she'd known only Tuvok and Chakotay knew that particular date, neither one of them likely culprits. Another mystery she'd let lie at the risk of spoiling it, another program she'd kept close to her chest.
Yet for all that, she realizes, there is this one thing Tom does not seem to understand.
"I don't come here because it's my shuttle, Tom," she corrects him. "It's entirely yours."
The wide smile he gives her then makes her ache, and she welcomes it. Tom is always ready with a smirk, ready to hide himself behind an easy grin, but this—this is the bright, true smile he'd given her when she'd granted him his field commission, entrusted him with her ship, their lives, all those years ago.
This smile is a gift she does not ever want to let lie.
"Well, in that case," he says, rising and offering his hand so she can do the same, "you think the Captain would authorize a midnight joyride?"
No holodecks this time. No proxies.
Just them.
"Oh, I think she'll allow it," she murmurs, and she settles in behind him while he takes the conn.
For once, she is not afraid.