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"Are you and your dad fighting again?"
B'Elanna shifted Miral to her other hip, a moment too late to stop their daughter from making a sticky grab for the frame in his hands.
Tom wiped off a smear of banana and read the words beneath the glass again: A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.
How he'd come to hate those words. And the man who had tainted them for him.
He'd found it in an antique shop in Sausalito, a hand-lettered old print in a wooden frame. At fifteen, the words had resonated with him: one perfect sentence, summing up his passion and his dream, to join the Federation Naval Patrol and show everyone (fine, and show his dad) what he was made of.
It hung above his desk throughout most of high school. He could wax eloquent about what it meant, much to the amusement and secret envy of his friends. It scored him a couple girls too, of course, much to the not-at-all-secret envy of his friends.
It felt like William G.T. Shedd had written it just for him, for his life. And so when Admiral Paris had laid down the law, insisting his son join Starfleet instead of the Patrol, he did the only thing that made sense to him anymore. He'd taken that once-treasured print out back and burned it the day he took his Academy entrance exam.
His mother had tried to reconcile them, but there had been too many battles and too many wounds still to come. There was the Academy. The accident. The Maquis and prison. It wasn't until Kathryn Janeway had given him another shot that he thought maybe, finally, he'd found his place out beyond the harbor.
They'd talked about it once, after Voyager's return, but they were men and so they mostly didn't talk about it. Still, Tom somehow knew that his dad was sorry for having tried to dictate the course of his son's life. And there had been a look in his father's eye earlier that day, when he'd placed that new extra pip on Tom's collar. Pride might have made sense, but to Tom, it had seemed like … a dare?
At the party, his dad had found a quiet moment, presented his gift and slipped away. Tom couldn't have spoken anyway, not after he'd ripped off the paper and seen the reproduction of Shedd's quote, beautiful and unexpected.
Tom handed the frame to B'Elanna with one hand and tugged Miral against his chest with the other. "Let's do it."
"Do what?"
"Resign. Start the engineering firm. Build ships together."
Her eyes narrowed. "You're sure you're not fighting with your dad again?"
"I'm sure." He laughed. "I'll tell you about it."