How We Are Hungry
Somewhere, after twenty minutes more of continuous pounding, with the horse at full gallop, I learned. I had been letting the horse strike me, was trying to sit above the saddle, hoping my distance from it would diminish the impact each time, but there were ways to eliminate the pain altogether.
I learned.
—Dave Eggers, "Another," How We Are Hungry
i.
She goes because she thinks she should, because Chakotay stands there and asks after her morning plans and she knows that all that will hold them together, in the end, is discipline. Already there is a power shortage. Worse will come. It feels important to let people see operations proceeding normally, to consecrate routine as something sacred and sure, and if Starfleet says this includes being seen striding confidently into a designated closet of a room, where, alone, she will choke down ration pack number five and pretend that it is strawberries and cream, then that is her duty, and she will perform it.
So the unauthorized repurposing of the captain's private dining room as a galley is a relief, though she is careful not to let Neelix know it. Yet in the absence of an alternative she is disquieted to find she does not know how to be among this crew that is becoming a family without her. She has never been that kind of captain. She's never wanted to be, before.
Weeks pass. She walks into the mess hall and Tom Paris and Harry Kim sit at the table nearest the door, their backs to her, and she hesitates. What is her duty now? All her instincts tell her to hold herself at a remove, to become larger than life, and there is comfort in this thought, and familiarity. It would be easy to find a clarity of purpose in self-imposed loneliness. Easier than knowing what to say to Tom, who twists in his chair as he feels her at his back and for the span of a heartbeat pins her with sea blue eyes, then looks away and does not tell Kim so that she can still walk out, can flee, if she chooses.
She should have. She says every wrong thing. True things, about gratitude, and respect, but nothing they don't already know, nothing they need to hear from her. We shouldn't judge Neelix too harshly, she says, awkward, even as she knows they need space to make light of their circumstance—to lift, however briefly, the curtain of darkness that she has brought down on them all.
She does not join them, of course. They don't ask her to. Tom is as Starfleet as she is, in his way; he'll never ask, knows better than that. Cannot even be expected to think she might want him to.
And she does want him to. Has since she'd grasped his hand and offered him a field promotion and for a long moment he had not let go, their handshake softening into something else, something that his two new pips had made, in that same moment, impossible.
Behind her, she hears, "Ensigns don't invite—"
She skips breakfast.
She makes a habit of skipping breakfast.
.
ii.
"You should program some pretzels," Harry is saying, a little too loudly. "Or bar nuts. I knew a place once that had pickled eggs! It was somewhere in upstate New York."
Over Harry's shoulder, Tom catches her eye, and she has to cough to cover a laugh. "Do you want pickled eggs, Harry?" he asks, not unkindly.
Harry does not want pickled eggs. He wanders away and Kathryn sets down her drink and murmurs down the bar, "How did you get the replicator to produce real liquor?"
Tom leans in, all twinkling eyes and that venturous grin. "How do you know I didn't smuggle it aboard?"
"Did you?"
"Not the swill Harry's drinking," he says. "Come with me."
Tom seems to have taken her coming here at all as license to order her around without so much as a please or a ma'am, at least while she's on his turf, and it's her gratitude for this, profound and unexpected, that brings her to her feet. He holds out his hand and after an uncertain pause she takes it, allows herself to be led around the bar and through a door she hadn't noticed before. The room is dusty and dimly lit, and she commends the attention to detail required to program a storage room into a holographic bar that needs no such thing. He squeezes between two crates, bends low, and emerges, triumphant, with a bottle of whiskey in hand.
Her mouth falls open. "It's not replicated?"
"Nope, this is the genuine article. It was a near thing, too. There wasn't a lot of time between the jailbreak and the ride out to Deep Space Nine."
"I'd hardly call it a jailbreak," she says dryly.
"I brought it for you," he says, holding it out to her. "To thank you. But then there never seemed to be a good moment to give it to you, all things considered."
She doesn't know what to say. She never does, it seems. She wraps her hand around the neck of the bottle, her fingers grazing his as he releases it into her custody. "How did you know?" she asks, because she can't imagine he'd spoken to his father.
"I have my ways," he says, nose in the air, and when she narrows her eyes, he adds, "It's just something I can sense about people. I mean, you just have to be paying attention. Most people don't."
And because he's been supplying real alcohol all evening—and because she's been letting him, letting herself forget who she's supposed to be to him—she hears herself say, "Have you been paying attention to me, Mister Paris?"
A beat passes.
"I'm sorry," she says quietly. "That was inappropriate. So is this, actually. You should keep it."
"Wait—" he tries, but she doesn't. She can't.
.
iii.
Kes leaves, and Kathryn stops sleeping. She paces her quarters until it occurs to her that Chakotay can probably hear her through their shared bulkhead, an idea so repugnant that she storms out without her uniform jacket. Neelix will have left a pot of coffee out for her, pretending forgetfulness. She takes a winding route, past cargo bay two, nails biting into the flesh of her palms. The mess hall doors slide open and Tom is there, and as he turns from his spot on the sofa she is struck by the parallel to those first weeks in the Delta quadrant. She is lightyears away, literally, from the person she was then.
In some ways, she hasn't changed at all.
"Midnight snack," Tom explains before she can ask, though at a glance it doesn't seem like he's eaten any of it. "Floating in space all day really builds an appetite."
She's heard enough of the rumors to know she doesn't want him to tell her about this. She goes to the galley and pours herself a cup of lukewarm coffee, then moves to the window, leaning sideways against the frame.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
Mirthlessly, she laughs. "I should be asking you that."
She gazes, unseeing, at unfamiliar stars. Doubts she will ever be able to forget the sight of Tom and B'Elanna wrapped around each other, gasping their final breaths, horribly insignificant against the backdrop of the universe. If she'd gotten to them just a few minutes later…
Voyager to Tom Paris. Tom, do you read me?
Not B'Elanna, the senior officer on the away team. She'd called out to Tom.
She's slipping.
She hears him push himself up from the couch. A moment later, he joins her at the window.
"She told me she loves me," he says abruptly. "B'Elanna. Out there."
Kathryn closes her eyes, and only opens them again when she feels herself capable of asking, "Did you tell her that you love her?"
"No."
"Why not?"
The lines of his neck and shoulders are taut. He looks at her, then doesn't. "Because I don't."
"But you want to?"
"Maybe," he admits. "Maybe I just like the idea of it, of someone being in love with me. That someone could."
.
iv.
She cuts her hair off. Does it herself in the bathroom mirror the night before she puts herself on an away team that absolutely does not need her. She should know better, after the Borg cube. She does know better. And so she has no one to blame but herself when one of the mercenaries who stole Voyager's main computer processor takes a potshot at them and she goes down. They can't beam out, so they take shelter in an empty house, Tom dragging her backwards across the threshold. He details the contents of their med kit to the Doctor over an encrypted comm channel while she coughs blood onto someone's pressed dirt floor. Tuvok and B'Elanna keep watch at the door.
"She needs emergency surgery," the Doctor decides. He sounds a lot calmer than Tom looks. "I'll walk you through it."
"No. No way in hell," Tom hisses.
"Tom," Kathryn tries to say. It comes out like a wet gasp; across the room, B'Elanna flinches at the sound.
"No. Absolutely not. Doc, you've got to find a way to get down here, or maybe there are doctors here, I could—"
"Mister Paris, listen to me. You trained for this." A pause, then, quieter, "I am not going to let you hurt her."
Tom looks at her, wild and helpless.
"I trust you," she says.
He exhales, hard. "Okay," he says, dragging his hands through his hair. "Okay."
They don't have anything to sedate her with, but it doesn't matter. Tuvok and B'Elanna hold her down. A minute later, she blacks out.
When she comes to, she can tell from the stillness of the room, the hum of the warp core below, that she is back on Voyager. Muffled voices reach her but movement of any kind, up to including and lifting her eyelids, feels insurmountably difficult, and so she doesn't.
"—could kill him," Tom is saying. "It's his job to—"
"To what, Tom? To babysit her? He's Maquis, she's a grownup, she can make her own—"
"Starfleet first officers protect their captains, B'Elanna. It should've been him down there."
"Well, who needs his protection, when she's got yours?"
Silence follows. It feels heavy, and private; regret washes over her.
"I should go," B'Elanna says eventually. "I'll see you later."
Tom doesn't answer. The sickbay doors open, then close. She tracks the sound of his footfalls as they near, coming to a stop at her side. Gently, he lifts her hand and places it into his own.
"Do you still have that whiskey?" she rasps. She decides to risk looking up at him and promptly regrets it, squinting against an almighty headache.
He breathes out a relieved half-laugh, leans down conspiratorially. "Think we can convince the Doctor to classify it as medicinal?"
"I wouldn't count on it," the Doctor calls out, emerging from his office.
She squeezes Tom's hand. "Thank you."
His face twists. "You shouldn't," he says. "You shouldn't thank me. I should've—"
The Doctor eclipses him in her field of view. Tom swallows, shakes his head. His hand slips out of hers.
.
v.
Something shifts between them, after that. Guilt radiates off of him, and although she doesn't precisely know its source she can take a guess that it has to do with whatever B'Elanna thinks she saw down on that planet. It was inevitable, she thinks, that it would come to this: she can insist they are friends and not be lying, but neither is it the whole truth; and that there's nothing to say about a relationship they don't have is a technicality she knows would not satisfy B'Elanna.
And then Fate seems to cradle her face in its hands, pries her eyes open and forces her to glimpse the future. She bears witness as 'Bobby' cares instinctively for a heavily pregnant 'Brigitte', and it's all too easy to imagine the holographic swell beneath B'Elanna's dress is Tom's child. She doesn't want to see it. She doesn't want to know what her inaction will cost her, doesn't want this image, this warning, blazing behind her eyelids every time she tries to sleep.
She kills the Hirogen who shoots her in the leg. Hides her wound until she can get the Doctor alone.
She lets Tom go. She throws herself into the project of rehabilitating Seven. Sometimes she has dinner with Chakotay. She tells herself she hasn't lost anything because he was never hers to lose. She tells herself that it's enough.
.
vi.
She only opens the door because she thinks it's Chakotay, back for another round of hollow platitudes. She opens the door to tell him she'll call Tuvok if he doesn't get out of her sight. But it turns out to be Tom pounding on her door like he's trying to break it down. And Kathryn, who has just been wishing for a couple of Borg cubes, lets him in.
"I've been fighting with B'Elanna. Again," he announces.
"Okay," she says, wary.
"She said, 'You don't want to start a fight with me', and she meant it as a threat, but you know what? She's right. I don't want to start a fight with her."
"But you do want to start a fight with me."
"I want to know," Tom says, "when you're going to tell me that you're in love with me."
Automatically, she steps backwards. She takes too long to decide whether to lie, can see in his face that he knows he's right.
"I'm not," she says.
"You're not in love with me, or you're not going to tell me?"
She can't think. She'd thought he'd never ask. She'd thought he'd understood. "I didn't intend to tell you," she confesses, and watches as his expression hardens into something she doesn't recognize.
"Why the hell not?"
"Because it doesn't matter, Tom."
"It matters to me!"
Frustrated, she runs a hand across her face. He takes a step closer, and then another, until there would be no hope of explaining themselves if someone were to walk in on them like this.
"B'Elanna—"
"She just put us out of our misery. It's over."
Which changes nothing at all. She could have said something years ago, before B'Elanna, before this got so far out of hand. Now she has to be responsible for his loneliness as well as her own.
"Have dinner with me," he says.
"Tom," she sighs. She is too raw, defenseless against this conversation. "I don't know what to do about this."
"Is that why you're hiding in here?"
"Don't," she warns.
"You're punishing yourself."
"Because it's my fault," she snaps, for the second time in an hour. She is so tired. Tired of having this conversation, tired of being coddled, tired of pretending their mission has been a success as though their reason for being out there in the Badlands was anything other than the reality. There was nothing scientific about it.
"So now you're just going to abandon us."
She gasps. "You have no right—"
"You're being selfish," he interrupts. "You think you stranded us out here. You think it was a mistake. Everyone from Chakotay down to the lowliest crewman is telling you we're fine but you're determined to sit in the dark and deprive yourself of everything you want—"
"What the hell do you know about what I want?"
"Oh, I know enough." His voice is rough and, ruthlessly, she ignores the heat that floods her body at the sound, the pulse of longing to close the distance between them.
"Please leave," she whispers.
"Come with me."
She is ashamed of her own weakness, for how close she comes to giving in.
She doesn't deserve the reprieve he represents.
"Please," she makes herself say.
Carefully, like a man approaching a caged animal, Tom slides his hand into her hair, cups the back of her head. He brings her forehead to his and his breath alights on her parted lips, and she could end this, she could end this right now, or it could be a beginning. All she has to do is tilt her face just so, hardly any trouble at all. She could press her lips to his, could open under him and let him slide his tongue into her mouth, the wet and welcome heat of it, and it would be, she thinks, like the birth of the cosmos. Here begins a new life.
"I love you, you know," he tells her.
It's not a question. She waits until the doors close behind him to say, "I know."
.
vii.
She walks into the mess hall and Tom and Harry sit at the table nearest the door, their backs to her, and although she's come in search of Tuvok—her eyes flit to where he stands like an uncanny beacon with his every unfamiliar mannerism, the imperfect posture, the timid smile on his face—she keeps moving. All four of them turn as she approaches.
"She must have heard me!" Harry says happily, and she realizes what she's walked in on, again: that they are still lamenting Neelix's cooking, the way they praise Tuvok so effusively, like for six years they've been ravenous for real food. Only it isn't real. And she thinks the same thing now as she had then: they're lucky to have Neelix. They would have starved to death in the first three months.
Tuvok places a dish onto a table already groaning under the weight of a dozen desserts. Neelix, looking for all the world like a proud parent, has fitted Tuvok with a matching apron.
She reminds herself to smile. "What's all this?"
"We're having fun," Tuvok explains. A little bounce in his step.
Her smile slips.
Tom, who has been pretending not to watch her all this time, steps in to cover the awkward silence.
"It turns out Tuvok is quite the pastry chef," he says, and Tuvok takes the bait, handing her a terra nut soufflé. And she plays her role. She takes a bite, makes a show of collapsing against Harry—not Tom—in rapturous delight.
Finally, Tom looks away.
He's worried about her, she knows.
This is the second time she's had to confront losing her oldest friend.
And she was wrong, about this scene. This crew that has become a family is rallying for Tuvok, not as he should be, as he was one week ago, but as he is. Where she has been relentless in her pursuit of rightness, they're giving him what he needs right now, a thread of connection; a small, good thing. She suppresses an impulse to rub at the spot in her chest that her crew has carved out of her, which aches, now, as Harry smiles so sweetly at Tuvok, who ducks his head and retreats behind the galley, embarrassed, pleased.
But she has a duty. And she will perform it.
She wishes she didn't have an audience for this.
She follows Tuvok, affecting a calm she hasn't felt in days. She pushes him the way she'd want to be pushed, in his place; the way she knows he'd want her to if he were in his right mind. She thinks of his wife, and his children. Pushes him until Tom and Harry twist in their seats to watch. Until Neelix comes up behind her and tells her to stop.
"Maybe tomorrow," Neelix says, as good as an order straight from Starfleet Command. She bows her head, pushes the dessert away while her heart breaks anew.
"This," Tuvok says suddenly. "This is what I saw." And he slides a modulation pattern across the counter, red icing twisting across a pistachio cake. He'd promised her the first bite.
She beams at him.
Everything happens very quickly, after that. The Ba'Neth are revealed, threatened, and finally bribed into restoring Tuvok's sense of self. "It would be a shame if you forced me to hail the Kesat homeworld," she drawls, hands on her hips, ready to decimate their entire way of life.
"That got their attention," Tom smirks when the Ba'Neth hold their fire, and there is a definite note of pride in his voice that doesn't belong there, that should not make her flush with pleasure on her own bridge.
And then the procedure, the simplicity of it seeming absurd after everything they've endured. The Doctor briefs her, assures her that Tuvok will recover apace. She spares a moment to thank Neelix, again, for his efforts, then retreats to her quarters and feels, after all these long days of holding it together, all the fear and adrenaline and then the exhilaration of victory, like she can finally catch her breath.
.
It's late, when the door chimes. She calls for her visitor to enter without rising from her armchair. Tom stands in the doorway, backlit; she can't make out his expression.
"Can I come in?" he asks.
"Please," she says, setting her book aside. She gestures to the couch opposite.
Tom has been in here just one other time between the void and now, but so was most of her senior staff. He'd sat some distance away, then, maneuvered Harry to sit between them. He has taken her at her word, since she'd asked him to leave a year ago. Her pulse quickens at his being here now.
"I'm working on something new," Tom says, after he's settled.
"Oh?"
"A holoprogram. Nineteenth century Ireland, a little seaside village. I'm thinking of calling it 'Fair Haven'."
She smiles, despite herself. "That sounds nice."
"I was hoping you'd say that."
He lets her sit with his words, until she understands. "Bit of an escalation from Irish whiskey. Building me a whole town."
"You've been different, lately."
"Have I?" she asks, though she thinks she knows what he means.
"Lighter," he clarifies. "You join in, and not only because you think you should. Even in the mess hall, with everything going on…."
She runs her fingers down the spine of her book, and has no excuse for what she hears herself say next.
"Have you been paying attention to me, Mister Paris?"
He leans in, the same twinkle in his eyes she'd fallen in love with at the start of it all. "Always."
"I still don't know what to do about this," she admits.
"Have dinner with me." When she looks down at her hands, he says, "We've already had dessert. The world didn't end."
"Not for a lack of trying," she says. "Tom, if it had been you—"
"You would've handled it. This was Tuvok."
"Maybe," she says. "I'm not sure you can really understand how much you terrify me."
"And you think I'm not afraid? The risks you take—"
"The risks you take."
"Chakotay should stop you."
"Chakotay wouldn't dare," she snorts.
"I would," he says, seriously. "If I thought I could convince you to stay on the damn bridge. But I know I never will, and I'm still here. I'm still willing to risk the end of the world."
Restless, she stands, walks over to her replicator. She doesn't really want anything; she orders coffee anyway, just for the solid heat of it in her hands. "Maybe you're just stronger than I am," she says, without turning.
"Then how lucky for you that I've smuggled aboard a bottle of liquid courage."
This brings her up short. "You still have it? After all this time?"
"Saving it for a special occasion." He rises as well, comes to stand behind her. Gently, he lifts the mug out of her hands and sets it down, then turns her to face him. "I'm not stronger than you. No one is stronger than you."
"Nothing has changed," she tries, weakly, unsure whether she's hoping to convince him, or herself.
"You have," he disagrees. "I have. Let me prove it to you—over dinner."
"And after?"
He looks down at her in his arms, a mischievous grin overtaking his features. "Whatever you want."
She feels herself relenting before she makes a conscious decision to do so. Her arms come up to wind around his waist, and he doesn't hesitate. He pulls her to him and holds her there, and she breathes him in, the clean, familiar scent of him, of home; and she fits into his embrace like she has always belonged there, and all the tension of the last week, the last six years, falls away from her, and she thinks that he must be right, after all. She has changed. Her heart isn't in her throat; she isn't running for the door. When did it happen, she wonders. When did she begin to prefer living to loneliness? And then she decides not to wonder. Not now, anyway.
Into his chest, she murmurs, "Bring the whiskey."
His chuckle is low and full of promise. "Always," he says again.