Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
—Mary Oliver
What Kathryn knows is this:
She's cold.
She's cold in a way she has never been cold before. Cold like the vacuum of space. Cold like she couldn't swear to being alive if someone put a phaser to her head.
Hypothermia, her brain suggests.
She's cold, and it is so bright she might be drowning in light now rather than mud on some stolen moon, and it occurs to her that she must not be dead after all, because she's certain if she opens her eyes under this deluge that it will split her head in two.
And then, as though in crashing waves, sound begins to reach her again, too loud, too close. She tries to fold in on herself, half-convinced she hears the unceasing screams of Admiral Paris, but someone stops her, someone holds her still, someone says, Hey. Hey, you're safe. A steady hand on her shoulder. Fingers brushing blood-matted hair from her frozen face.
She keeps her eyes shut.
Darkness, mercifully, finds her again, and she follows it down, down, down.
·
The next time she wakes, the lights overhead have been dimmed, and she realizes she's in a medical facility. Hushed voices drift from the other side of a white curtain. A voice she doesn't recognize speaks of torture, then of an experimental, emergency treatment. Speaks of Owen Paris otherwise, perhaps, never regaining consciousness.
"I can't be here," she hears someone say, and she does know this voice. This is the voice that reassured her in the midst of chaos. A woman calls after him as he turns on his heel and strides out of the shared room.
"Mrs. Paris," the first voice urges. "You need to make a decision right now."
She assesses the situation. A dull ache where the Cardassian guard had driven his fist into her skull. A cortical monitor bites into her temple and she is buried under four layers of blankets, but when she sits up, she's only a little dizzy. It's manageable. Cautiously, she puts one socked foot on the floor, and then another. No alarm goes off, no nurse rushes in to shoo her back to bed. So she wraps herself in one of the blankets, and slips out of the room.
He's easy enough to find, pacing at the end of the short corridor, hands balled into fists.
"Tom—" she tries to call, but it comes out as a rasp and she coughs. He spins around and his eyes, a little wild, search her face.
"Katie," he says with real relief, meeting her halfway. "Should you be up?"
She ignores this. "What's happening? Are you okay?"
"Am I okay? I'm not the one who's just been—"
"Don't," she cuts him off. "We don't have to talk about it, but don't do that."
He looks away. Clears his throat awkwardly. "I don't know how to feel. Seeing him just lying there like that… what happened to him…"
She understands.
She understands that, turbulent as Tom's relationship is with his father, he would struggle to process feelings he'd rather not have at all. It's complicated, she imagines, for him to see the man who has loomed so large all his life be reduced to such a state of vulnerability.
She understands, because his father's helpless shrieks ring in her ears still. She blinks and the darkness is a cage, and she is not sure she will ever unlearn the cold that seeped into her bones while they held her there, while they brutalized him. While she could do nothing.
This may get unpleasant for us, Ensign.
She says none of this, because they should not both have to bear her memories. But something of her thoughts must show on her face; suddenly Tom looks worried, makes as though to reach for her but stops short, unsure.
He has probably been warned that survivors of torture are not always amenable to touch, after.
Since there is nothing she can say to make this easier for either of them, she lays a hand on his forearm.
"I'm sorry," she says quietly. "I'm glad to see you."
And even as she knows that Tom only came all this way because of his father—or, perhaps more accurately, because of his mother—she can't help the flood of comfort she feels at his being here. Of course he would have checked up on her, eventually, once she was back home. They are friends, after all. But for just a moment she considers that he might… that he could be here for her, too—recalls his soothing hands, and that he'd attended to her even though his father must have been nearby—and something dangerous flutters inside her ribcage, something familiar and terrifying.
She shivers.
Tom frowns and takes a step forward and for some reason, for some reason she will not articulate even to herself, her breath catches, and he notices. He stills. And his pupils seem to dilate, almost imperceptibly except that she cannot tear her gaze from his, and she thinks it might be such a relief if he would just fold her into his arms, tuck her head beneath his chin and warm her, warm her, warm her—
"Tom? Oh," Julia Paris says, stepping into the corridor. "Ensign Janeway," she acknowledges shortly.
"Ma'am," Kathryn returns, straightening her posture somewhat ludicrously, given her medical gown and the threadbare blanket across her shoulders.
Mrs. Paris beckons Tom, and with obvious regret he turns back to Kathryn. "I'll find you later," he promises. Places his hand over hers and draws his thumb across her knuckles, once, before stepping back.
But she knows that if she is well enough to stand here with him then she is well enough to be called back to duty, and someone will have noticed. By morning she is whisked away to a secure location for classified debriefings, neither a prisoner nor exactly free to leave for some time, and Admiral Paris is transferred back to Earth to complete his recovery. His wife and son, of course, go with him.
Later, she will not analyze her feelings of that day, her wanting to be held by Tom. She will not imagine what he might have done had they not been interrupted. She will not dwell on that look in his eyes, the one she fears may have been mirrored in her own.
She won't risk it.
She has known Tom for much of her life. Their fathers are close. Their mothers host gatherings together. And if part of it is that she is afraid—well. If she's learned anything from the past few weeks, it's that fear keeps her sharp. That her fear is rarely wrong.
Also: Tom is going to be a pilot.
One day, she is going to need a helmsman.
And so she tucks these thoughts away and resolves not to consider them again.
They are friends, she tells herself.
She tells herself this for years.