Chakotay
The Delta Flyer
Four Weeks Ago
"I don't give a damn about protocol," Chakotay snaps. "Get out of the way."
"Commander—"
"Need I remind you, Commander, that in Captain Janeway's absence, you are acting captain. Your responsibility to the crew supersedes any personal— "
"No, Tuvok, you need not remind me."
"Commander," Neelix cuts in. "Why don't you both go, together? I can stay and hold down the fort."
Chakotay takes a breath, deliberately releases his balled fists. Standing between himself and the rack of EV suits, Tuvok appears totally unmoved by the complete absence life signs emanating from Voyager. And even knowing Vulcans—even knowing Tuvok—as he does, Chakotay wants to shake him.
"That would be an acceptable compromise," says Tuvok, whose first foolish idea had been to reconnoiter Voyager alone.
"Fine. Let's go."
The homing signal which lead them to this hideaway nebula strikes him as more ominous than not. A beacon in the night, weak and encrypted, that's lead them from nothing, to nothing. Five days trading with the Nar Shaddan, four since they returned to the rendezvous coordinates to find only open space, and they can't be sure when it originated, but here's the thing about homing signals: someone has to set them. Someone who wants to be found.
But it's entirely possible life support has been down for a week or more.
It takes ten painstaking minutes to suit up. Mutely, Tuvok and Chakotay check the seals on each other's boots, gloves, helmets. A muscle jumps in Tuvok's jaw as the ambient lights blink on, nearly imperceptible but for Chakotay's unwanted proximity.
Damn.
He tries not to think about Tuvok's friendship with Janeway, the betrayal it represents. Upon this cognitive dissonance, in fact, is his entire relationship with her built. And with Tuvok, as well, for whatever it's worth.
"We'll find her," he murmurs when the internal comm is active, by way of apology. Then, "Beam us directly to the Bridge," he instructs Neelix. He secures a tricorder to his hip; Tuvok hands him a phaser, which he arms. He misses Neelix' reply, drowned out by the roar of oxygen circulating in his suit, the harsh tempo of his own breathing.
He feels himself dematerialize. And braces to be beamed into a graveyard.
The reality is stark in its disparity. The bridge is empty, utterly: no klaxons sounding, no flashing red, not even emergency lighting, just the flickering of computer terminals failing to tap into backup processors.
Neither are there bodies draped across consoles, frozen by the vacuum of space in their final acts of survival.
Chakotay exhales, slower than he might otherwise so that it won't come through the open comm channel.
One down.
Tuvok climbs the steps to Ops, spends a few minutes attempting to access the main computer. Feeling useless, Chakotay paces, noting which consoles are offline altogether, wondering what they can possibly do about all this with just the three of them. He forces the hopelessness out of his mind, tries to come up with options, any options at all. And when Tuvok announces, "Sensor resolution is too low for internal scans. If any of the crew are aboard, we will have to locate them another way," it does not surprise him in the least.
They don't have time—he doesn't have the patience—for a deck-by-deck search. That means prioritizing Engineering, Sickbay, or Mess Hall. They should also check the escape pods.
"I don't suppose you'd be willing to split up."
Even through Tuvok's visor, Chakotay spots the single raised eyebrow.
If anyone is holed up in Engineering, they're either fine for now, or else well past any help Chakotay can offer. Whereas a populated Sickbay might fill in some blanks. For better or worse.
"Are the turbolifts down, too?"
Tuvok walks over to one and waits. When the doors don't open automatically, he retrieves the emergency hand actuators and pries them apart. Where the lift should be, an empty shaft looms; which means a long, slow crawl through the belly of the ship.
Right. That's not happening.
He taps his combadge. "Chakotay to Neelix. The Bridge is a bust. Can you lock on to us and put us in Sickbay?"
"Can do," Neelix responds.
He just has time to note the look of silent approval from Tuvok, which he supposes means he's forgiven for earlier, before their molecules scatter, and reform in Sickbay.
And here, too, there are no bodies—two down—but a picture begins to come into focus, one Chakotay does not love.
Medical instruments are strewn across every surface, alongside shreds of uniforms torn away in haste. Slowly he circles the room, discomfited to find that the absence of bloodstains on biobeds does not reassure him much. If the crew left willingly, they don't appear to have taken anything with them.
His foot kicks something across the floor. Slow and stiff in his environmental suit, Tuvok bends to retrieve it, holds it aloft. It's the Doctor's mobile emitter.
The Doctor isn't with them.
The Doctor isn't with them.
Adrenaline blasts through him as strides to a console and attempts to access the EMH program files. If he got knocked offline before he could transfer his program to the main computer—what the hell happened?—but no, he's here. He's intact. Chakotay reinitializes him manually.
The Doctor shimmers into view, and although Chakotay is prepared to cut off his automated greeting, he cries, "Commander, Lieutenant! It's good to see friendly faces. For that matter, it's good to see any faces at all."
Which is how Chakotay notices, his chest tightening, that the Doctor is wearing command red, not blue.
"Report, Doctor," Tuvok says.
The Doctor's face twists. "We ran into a little trouble."
"I can see that," Chakotay bites out. "Care to elaborate?"
"Of course," the Doctor says, apologetically. "About twelve hours after you left, we hit some sort of subspace mine. It wasn't long before I was inundated with casualties, all suffering from tetryon radiation poisoning."
"Tetryon radiation?"
The Doctor nods. "Exactly. It couldn't be contained, people were going to start dying…. The crew abandoned ship. I had just enough time to vent the bulk of the radiation when I was attacked again, this time by a ship. They were trying to take Voyager, said it 'belonged' to them now. I managed to disable them, but I took heavy damage, set the ship on auto pilot into this nebula… are we in a nebula?"
"We are," Tuvok confirms. "It was admirably difficult to locate you."
"Well, I was out of options! My program was destabilizing; I tried to transfer myself back to the main computer, but with all the damage, and no one aboard to reactivate me… let's just say, I'm glad you found me."
The implications hang between them. Not only what if they hadn't, but why hadn't the crew found him first?
"All right. Here's the plan," Chakotay says. "Doctor, start making repairs as fast as you can. We need life support before we can do anything else. We've only got twenty-four hours of oxygen in each of these tanks, so we'll be living out of the Flyer for a while longer. Tuvok, get Neelix scanning for habitable planets, anywhere they might've taken shelter. Our people have been missing for nine days, and they need medical attention. We don't have any time to lose."
He does not bother to add that they've got a week's worth of repairs ahead of them, at least, just to make this ship habitable. Longer to be able to fly it out of here, if they're being hunted. Shields, weapons, god, warp drive, and not one of them a proper engineer…
Nine days, he thinks again. More than enough time to vent radiation, as far as Janeway would've known. She should've been in touch by now, or should have tried, and when she couldn't get through… But they aren't broadcasting a signal, wherever they are. The Flyer would have picked it up while looking for Voyager. And there was nothing, just the faint pinging of their emptied home, for their eyes only.
The bodies are not on the ship.
But he may yet be searching for a graveyard.
Tom
Starfleet Academy
Just before midterm, Tom is summoned to his father's office. Briefly, he considers ignoring the missive altogether—but this would only delay the inevitable, and he's never been one to put off 'til tomorrow what trouble he could get himself into today. Also: if he doesn't go, he suspects his father will next send an aide to fetch him. An indignity he would rather avoid.
"Let's get this over with," he mutters to himself, tossing his PADD back into his bag, shouldering it, and trudging off across the lawn. Never mind that his schedule is full enough without impromptu meeting 'requests' way the hell out at Starfleet Command. Never mind that he has availed himself of on-campus housing, despite his parents living just down in Portola Valley, for the express purpose of avoiding such interactions.
He decides to eschew the transport system and walk the distance, a miniscule rebellion his father will never notice, but it makes him feel better to do it. Better, too, that by the time he finds himself standing outside the office doors, the instantaneous spike of his blood pressure has had time to settle, making him less likely now to start an incident, though the option, of course, remains.
"He in there?" he asks his father's aide.
"Admiral Paris is in a meeting," the ensign responds, without looking up from his terminal. Tom slouches into a chair to wait, irritated again, perhaps more than is strictly reasonable. Five minutes pass, then ten, and Tom is just beginning to weigh the consequences of walking out—he's done his part just by showing up, if you ask him—when the doors hiss open.
About time. He looks up, and where he expects his father to be frowning down his nose at him, he finds—
"Kathryn?" Tom says blankly. "What are you doing here?"
"Tom! Oh, Admiral Paris is my thesis advisor—"
"And Cadet Janeway here is working on one of the most brilliant projects I have ever had the pleasure of overseeing. It'll knock the folks over in Physical Cosmology right on their… axes," his father interjects, looking proudly at Kathryn, who seems torn between embarrassment and gratification. Tom prods his feelings, searching for that familiar stab of bitter resentment—here is yet another person whom his father would seem to prefer over his own son. But it doesn't come. All he finds is a kind of second-hand pleasure for her, and something strangely like pride, though he has no right to it.
"This is Tom," Owen continues, and Tom notices with no small amount of surprise that he doesn't say my son, Tom—just Tom.
"Tom Paris? You never said!" Noticing Owen's look of confusion, Kathryn adds, "We have biochemistry together."
At this, Owen's mouth flattens into a straight line of disapproval. Kathryn looks as though she'd very much like to agree.
And then something else occurs to Tom, something that causes a flopping sensation in his stomach. "Wait, are you graduating? Why are you in biochem?"
Kathryn grimaces. "I put it off. I was focused on my junior honors thesis, and… well."
Finally, several pieces fall into place. Why she'd seemed so familiar that first day of class, even though he's positive he'd have remembered meeting her. He's seen her here, coming out of his father's office, nose buried in a PADD. Kathryn is the protégée his mother is very, very tired of hearing about. The Admiral's daughter with the future so bright it blotted out Owen's own family for half a year.
Well, that's complicated.
"At any rate," his father is saying, "I'm sure you have a class to get to, Cadet. Tom, shall we?"
With a nod and a smile, Kathryn slips past Tom, who suppresses a mad urge to grasp her hand as she goes. Owen beckons Tom into the office, and they settle themselves on opposite sides of his imposing walnut desk, an antique so unlike his colleagues' glass-and-metal monstrosities.
"So," Tom says, cutting to the chase. "What's this about?"
"I can't just want to see how you're getting along this semester?"
"I have an advisor."
"Yes, and you have a father who never sees you at home anymore. Tom, I'm just asking how you're doing. How are your classes? How are you?"
Instead of answering, Tom picks up a framed photo on his father's desk and turns it around. It's himself, ten or eleven years old, posing with an ice cream cone at the Wharf. No surprise Kathryn didn't put two and two together. He wonders if his father never updated the photo because everything was so much easier then. Easier for him, anyway. Never for Tom.
It must have been like loving a puppy. And in that puppy's place now is a fully grown son, who's not half so malleable as his father would prefer.
"Do you talk about me? With—people?" he asks, before he can think better of it.
"Of course I do, Tom," Owen sighs. "You're my son."
Tom doesn't know what to say to that. If he'd considered it for longer than the second it took him to ask, he would've guessed no. He doesn't know what to make of an Owen Paris possessed of... what? Fatherly pride? He sets the photo back down.
"She's something, isn't she?"
Panic spikes hard from Tom's gut up into his throat. "Who?"
Owen gives him a look that's entirely too shrewd for his liking. "Careful," he advises.
But this is a subject Tom is in no way willing to broach. "I was thinking of doing my physical training in France next year," he volleys. "Marseille."
He waits for the explosion, the disappointment, the why can't you ever just.
It doesn't come.
Owen looks away.
It isn't at all what Tom thought finally winning a round would feel like.
Kathryn
Quarra
Present
She's on a ship.
She doesn't recognize it. But she knows, somehow, that this windowless space is not underground, that the thrumming beneath her feet is not from the central core. It's larger than her transport into Quarra, larger than any ship she's been on before, but she is certain, even so, that she is right.
She's afraid.
A barren corridor stretches before her. Lights along the bulkheads pulse red before plunging her into darkness, one beat on, one off, neither allowing her eyes to adjust nor providing enough illumination to identify what lies ahead. The strobing makes her nauseous so she shuts her eyes against it for a moment, seeking equilibrium.
Move, she thinks. You're supposed to move.
She opens her eyes, and moves.
She seems to know where to go. The corridor is a river without junctions, apparently endless, and without knowing why she is afraid she thinks she's right to be, but she does not falter. She goes on. She goes on.
She's alone.
The thrumming beneath her feet is not from the central core, and after a while she realizes she feels but cannot hear her own footsteps. Just a dull press of silence, like plunging underwater only more, only worse. She thinks: dampened. She thinks: absorbed. But before she can solve this riddle—and she must, she must solve it—the terminus appears, as though out of a red fog. She approaches. There is, after all, nowhere else to go.
Not until she's right upon it does she recognize it as an airlock.
With all the surety of having done this a thousand times, she steps inside, pulls the hatch shut behind her. While it is she who initiates depressurization now, she understands, too, that she could not stop herself if she tried.
She does not try.
A countdown begins, a woman's voice in her head, ten, nine, eight
"Kathryn."
No. Panic soars through her because this is wrong, this is wrong, she was supposed to be the last one out, the last—
seven, seven, six, five
She whirls around and sees herself standing there, nearly unrecognizable; her face marred with lesions, hair matted, pupils blown wide despite the darkness, alone, alone, alone—
"Wake up," her double says.
one.
The airlock cycles.
She opens her mouth to speak—
and is blown into space.
Wake up.
She does.
Before she can make a conscious decision to do so, she's throwing her legs over the side of the bed, panting, a swell of vertigo crashing into her. Reality coalesces in slow motion, her senses returning one at a time; she registers first a soft breathing behind her. Tom, fast asleep. Her bedroom. Her home.
She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, until colors bloom behind her eyelids.
Just a dream.
She knows from experience that she'll find no more sleep tonight. She spares a thought for the arboretum, open at all hours now that winter has set in. But she wants to see the sky, to ground herself, ironically enough, beneath the stars she knows and not the ones that subsume her.
As quietly as she can, she slides out of bed and into the kitchen for a pain tablet and a glass of water, then folds herself into her window seat. She leans her head against the cool glass and looks up until she no longer feels like she might be sick.
Eventually, Tom comes to find her. He drapes a blanket around her before settling in opposite, allowing their feet to intertwine.
"Want to talk about it?"
"It's nothing," she says. "Dreams."
"Dreams, plural?"
She hums noncommittally.
"They say winters here can do strange things to people."
They've all heard the stories. Cautionary tales. And maybe it is the unbroken night that causes her to dream of space. She'd thought so too, at first.
But she feels fine. It doesn't bother her at all while she's awake. Actually she finds it comforting, and there is a slowness to life here, a necessary calm, that she cherishes. Already, she can't imagine living anywhere else.
And although she seeks the light of the stars in the aftermath of these dreams, it's not darkness itself that unsettles her. It's the emptiness. She is alone in that strange and hollow sky, and there is such an inevitability to it. The corridor. The airlock. It isn't every night. But on these nights, the dream is always the same.
"I'm fine," she says again, when Tom starts to look worried. "Just dreams."
By now the automatic lights in the living room have begun to illuminate, signaling the start of the day in the absence of a sunrise. She pushes herself upright and stretches. "You should go back to sleep," she adds.
"Nah, I have some errands to run anyway. I'll walk you in."
"Tom," she says, placing her hands on her hips. "I'm fine."
"Who said you weren't?" He rises too, drops a kiss on the top of her head.
A hot shower goes a long way toward restoring her sense of normalcy; by the time they've bundled into their outerwear, the last remnants of her dream have left her. Tom hands her a headlamp, then pulls on his gloves. "You lock up," he says, wiggling his fingers.
"I don't know why you don't do that at the front door," she says, rolling her eyes. They might as well be living together, the way she knows his habits by heart.
Outside, snow crunches under their boots. Here and there people stop to greet them, puffs of hot breath rising between them like little clouds dancing in the lamplight. She will never get over how friendly people are here, how well everybody gets along despite hailing, more often than not, from wildly disparate home worlds. Tom and herself notwithstanding. She reaches for his hand and squeezes, having to work at it a little through their thick gloves.
He looks over. "What?"
"Nothing," she says. "Just happy."
They stop at a tea shop along the way, as has become their habit since discovering it. The owner is a neighbor of theirs, a Brunali woman named Lyora who is sympathetic to Kathryn's craving of what she refers to as alien delicacies.
"I've got something new for you to try!" she says to Kathryn. "It doesn't match your description precisely, but…."
"Desperate times," Kathryn nods.
Lyora steps into the back room to pour the mystery substance; when she returns, she's already put the lid on the takeaway cup.
"That bodes well," Tom snorts. "She doesn't want you to see it."
"Don't be rude," Kathryn chides.
"Oh, he's not wrong," Lyora says cheerfully. "But give it a try anyway. I think it tastes better than it looks."
Hopefully, Kathryn takes a sip.
"Well?"
With some effort, she swallows the… substance, thick like mud and about as flavorful. "Well, it's hot," she says, which is, after all, a point in its favor. Lyora sighs.
"Two Yavrikan teas, please," Tom laughs.
"Coffee," Kathryn moans.
"I'll keep looking!" Lyora promises. She hands over the teas, and waves them off. A tinkling bell rings out as the door swings shut behind them.
"'It's hot'," Tom snickers, once they're safely away from the shop.
"It's just that she's so nice. I feel terrible about it."
"Lyora, of all people, understands." Which is perfectly true, of course. She'd left behind everything she'd known, sought refuge here, just as they'd done, when her people refused to relocate after repeated Borg attacks. They'd rebuild, and rebuild, and Lyora couldn't convince them to find another way. Kathryn can't imagine the difficulty of her decision. By comparison, leaving Earth seems simple enough.
"Aren't you going into town?" Kathryn says, realizing they're nearly to the plant already. "You're going to have to backtrack."
"Why, did you want something?"
"I knew it! 'Errands', he says." She shakes her head. "How you lie to me."
"You love me," Tom smiles.
She lets out a long-suffering sigh. "I suppose that's true."
An hour into her shift, Jaffen finally shows up. She's about to tease him for this when she takes in his pinched face, shining with exertion. He's stripped his uniform down to the base layers.
"Where in the world are you coming from?" she asks.
"Had to run over to Maintenance," he says, bending over to catch his breath. "They called me in early. Someone on swing didn't show. Again."
"Ouch."
"Tell me about it," he grouses. He heads down the rows of terminals to his own station, crossing paths with a data runner balancing a stack of tablets.
"The specifications you asked for," he says, handing one off the top to Kathryn.
"Oh, good, thank you." She scans the data quickly, confirming her suspicions, then catches Jaffen's eye and signals for him to come back over.
"What's up?"
"How are your coils today?"
"That's a rather personal question," Jaffen deadpans. She scowls, so he adds, "I haven't had a moment's peace since I logged in. Do you want me to check now?"
"I'm having a hell of a time regulating these thermionic emissions. And look at this," she adds, handing over the tablet. "The frequencies are rotating way faster than spec."
Jaffen frowns as he reads. "When I was down at Maintenance—"
"This station doesn't require two operators."
Kathryn jumps. The Efficiency Monitor, a tall, blonde woman who moves with now-legendary stealth, looms behind them.
"And good morning to you, too, Annika," Jaffen greets.
"He was just helping me with a question," Kathryn offers, while her pulse returns to normal. "We're almost done."
Annika looks like she's about to argue—with heroic effort, Kathryn does not sigh pointedly—but then the blood drains from her face. "Do it quickly," she says, and starts to move off.
Jaffen and Kathryn share a look. "Are you all right?" he asks Annika.
"I'm—" she starts, but suddenly buckles, has to catch herself on the edge of a terminal. Kathryn hurries over to her and slides under her arm, easing her to the floor. She's a head taller than Kathryn, so she doesn't notice the other woman's eyes roll back in her head, doesn't recognize the warning signs until the trembling begins.
"Go to Medical," Kathryn instructs Jaffen. "Annika. Can you hear me? We're getting help, hang on." She strips off her jacket, bunches it up and carefully slides it under Annika's head. Workers, noticing the commotion, start to gather around them, speaking in low, alarmed tones. It is, Kathryn thinks, the worst sort of white noise. Familiar and ominous; the soundtrack to every disaster.
It's difficult to judge how long the tremors last, but when they stop it's all at once, an unnatural stillness overtaking her as she finally slumps into unconsciousness. It feels like an age, but must be mere minutes before Jaffen's sprinting back with a medical team. "Make a hole," he shouts, and the gawkers part to allow the group through.
"I think she had a seizure," she tries to tell one of the med techs. But he moves past her without looking at her, briskly lifting Annika onto a stretcher.
"Wait," she says, reaching for the man's shoulder. "Don't you want my statement?"
"Your supervisor will be in touch if we require information," he says shortly. And then they're spiriting Annika away, and the supervisor does indeed appear as though summoned. Addressing the crowd at large, he calls, "You can all return to work. Everything's under control."
Which is, evidently, the beginning and end of his job here.
"What the hell was that?" Kathryn mutters to Jaffen.
Instead of replying, Jaffen takes her by the arm, leading her into a shadowed corner behind their control panels. "Have you noticed anything unusual around here lately? Anything else, I mean."
"Other than the regulators? Just that our power usage is way up. But I understand that's to be expected?" That's what she'd been told, anyway. The city cuts all nonessential lighting to compensate, so they can keep everyone's homes warm and well-lit. Still, yes, it's a strain on the grid. But it's a planned strain.
"Maybe," he says.
"Are you going to tell me what you're thinking, or—"
"This isn't the first time this has happened," he says, lowering his voice. "I heard someone up on nine had to be carried out."
"Some transplants just don't handle the transition well," she says, parroting Tom's words from this morning, but declining, as before, to include herself in this assessment.
"I don't think that's it," he says slowly. "When I was down at Maintenance, I overheard some of the guys talking. They've been doing a lot of work over at the Central Hospital. That's why the grid's running hot. They're operating at full power, 24/7."
"Is that… not normal?" she asks. "For a hospital?"
"Maybe," he says again.
The skin on the back of her neck prickles unpleasantly.
"So what, then?"
"I don't know," he admits. "It's just damned odd, isn't it?"
But she can't even begin to know what to consider odd. She's never overwintered before. And they'd all been warned this could happen, hadn't they? Workers who can't handle it transfer south, no harm, no foul.
And then a terrible thought occurs to her. Her hand flies up to her throat. "You don't think…"
"No," he says, and now, at least, he sounds sure. "We'd know if it was the radiation. We'd all be sick."
Still, she rubs at the site of her injections, and finds that she welcomes the signal to break for medical. And when the med tech presses her daily inoculation into her skin, she feels herself relax minutely.
The remainder of their shift passes without incident, for which she is profoundly grateful. Jaffen begs off joining her at the bar, citing his impromptu double-shift, so she packs up and heads out alone. She's looking forward to Tom's steadying influence—looking forward to sharing what she's learned with him, and having him tell her that everything's all right, that Jaffen needs a vacation, anything to help her shake off this strange day.
But when she arrives, Tom looks… grim.
"I'm taking my lunch," he calls to Umali, who looks like she's been expecting it. She nods her approval. Tom leads Kathryn over to a small table in the back.
"Bad news," he says, then, "wait. Are you okay?"
"Tell me what's wrong first, then I'll explain."
He takes a deep breath. "The Housing Authority's kicking me out."
"What?"
"I should have known this might happen. Apparently there's been this big influx of workers, and they need somewhere to put them all. Employee housing isn't really for the waitstaff, you know. I was assigned my apartment when I worked at the plant. Guess my lease is up."
She goes cold.
They'll hardly see each other.
Oh, there's the train, of course, but her shifts are long and non-employee housing is clear on the other side of the city, and would Tom get a new job? It's a long commute when there are a dozen other bars that would hire him in a second. She imagines herself getting off work late, walking home alone each night to her empty apartment. Maybe they'll spend weekends together, but it won't be the same, and over time… over time…
"I've got a lead on a little studio just outside of town," Tom is saying. "It's not much, but—"
"Move in with me," she blurts.
Tom freezes. He scans her face. "Are you serious?"
Oh, god. Mortification washes over her. "I mean—" she stumbles. Her face feels hot, she must be flushing. "That is, I would understand if you didn't want—"
"No! No, I just don't want you to offer out of, out of pity or something, because—"
"No, you're right, and I shouldn't have sprung this on you." Awkwardly, she tries to smile. "Long day. Weird day."
"I want to. I'd love to." He reaches across the table for her wrist, urging her to look at him. "Let's do it."
"But if—"
"Kathryn," he says, cutting her off. "Can I move in with you?"
She laughs, a little shakily. "Well, when you put it that way. If you're sure."
He pushes his stool out and stands, comes around to her side of the table.
"I'm sure," he avers. And quells her doubts with a kiss.
Kathryn
Starfleet Academy
Reaching the courtyard, Kathryn pauses, then redirects. Instead of heading to the transport station as planned, she doubles back and settles herself into an alcove adjacent the office building. The Command campus is quiet at this time of day, and the sky for once is nearly cloudless. She hardly ever takes the time to appreciate these things, rushing from one lecture to the next, home to Indiana for Friday night supper whenever she can swing it and then back that same night, weather-permitting. The past two years in particular have been a whirlwind, and she's enjoyed it, she thrives when pushed to her limits… but today, she finds that her curiosity is greater than her desire to stay on routine.
She's long been curious about her mentor's son. Admiral Paris speaks of Tom often, pride animating his stoic features as little else does. She'd envied Tom this. Wondered what it would be like to have a father so free with his praise. She tries to imagine her own sharing her every accomplishment with his colleagues, with junior officers, and she just—can't. The vision won't come, not even as a fantasy. It's her sister who's graced by their father's attentions, for all that she seems to want or value them. And Kathryn didn't join Starfleet only to make him proud of her, but what would it be like, she can't help think, to have him take an interest in her work now and again? Brilliant, Admiral Paris had called it, like it was easy for him to do so. Like it cost him nothing to be so generous.
Stop, she orders herself. It doesn't matter. She digs through her bag for a PADD, thinking she may as well pass the time doing something useful, but then she hears footsteps and twists in her seat, spots Tom emerging from the building. He does not look pleased, and, damn, she hopes it's not because of her. She stands, wiping dirt from her uniform, and smiles ruefully when he notices her.
"This must be strange for you," she says.
"'Think not, is my eleventh commandment'," Tom quotes, waving it off.
"You never said," she presses.
"Neither did you, Cadet Janeway."
Well, he's got her there. "It's just… a lot, right from 'hello'. I don't want people to think—"
"Yeah," Tom says. "Yeah, I understand." He hoists himself up into the alcove she's just vacated and she joins him, their legs brushing. She holds herself still, waiting for him to shift away from her.
He doesn't.
"It's a habit," he allows, finally. "My father hates it. 'Be proud of the family name, Tom!' Which is all the more reason not to announce it, frankly. I don't really think about it anymore."
She frowns. Something in his tone reminds her of his words on their first day of class: it really irritates my father, so I can't be too mad about it. Suddenly, she's not so sure she's been right, these past two years, about the Paris family dynamics.
"He speaks highly of you, you know," she tells him.
He studies her, like he's trying to decide whether to believe her. "I didn't, actually."
She doesn't know what to say to that. At his words, she feels a tightness in her chest that she can't express, or else can't face voicing aloud. An understanding she would rather not possess.
They make quite a pair, it turns out.
Impulsively, she reaches out and takes his hand, squeezing lightly. "He's very proud of you. He says so all the time."
Tom looks away from her, snorting, and she doesn't like what this suggests about the man who has given her his full support at every turn, once she'd convinced him of her seriousness. Her worth. She feels… disappointed in him. It's as though a curtain has been lifted, the illusion broken. Perhaps this is why Admiral Paris has never offered to introduce her to Tom, despite his showing off a family photo at their first meeting.
But Tom seems to very much not want to talk about it. And this, too, she understands.
"Escort me to the transport station, Mister Paris?" she asks. He rewards her intuition with that crooked smile she's come to know so well.
"Yes, ma'am," he agrees, hopping to attention. Her hand slips out of his. And that's fine, perfectly fine.
The sky is a hazy purple-pink as he walks her home.