Work Text:
"Braced myself for the goodbye
'Cause that's all I've ever known
Then you took me by surprise
You said, "I'll never leave you alone"
You said, "I remember how we felt, sitting by the water
And every time I look at you, it's like the first time
I fell in love with a careless man's careful daughter
She is the best thing that's ever been mine""
- Taylor Swift, "Mine"
/
The waiter from the tavern was the father of B’Elanna’s baby.
Part of her still had trouble believing it. She had been, if not happy, at least resigned to raising the child alone, because being alone was all she could remember. Her own mother had managed somehow after her father had left. After all that, it was actually quite unnerving to discover that someone else did, in fact, have a say in her life. Even if that someone else was a cute, funny guy who, instead of fleeing at warp from the sight of a baby bump, had wanted to introduce her to his friends. In a way, he’d done just that.
Now, after the holographic doctor’s treatment, her memories were coming in thick and fast. The waiter - Lieutenant Paris - Tom was giving her a tour of their quarters, and everywhere she looked, something told her a story. That box-shaped device in front of the sofa was a twentieth-century television set, which she had built for him as an anniversary gift (and sometimes regretted after too many noisy cartoons). Those bat’leths mounted on the wall were his way of helping her make peace with her fraught cultural heritage (and she had to admit he looked pretty good in Klingon armor).
But it was the crib that made her breath catch in her chest.
It was a sturdy contraption, built to hold together even through turbulence. Toby the Targ sat watch by the pillow, his fraying seams restitched. A mobile hung overhead, decorated with familiar symbols: a Starfleet delta, a tiny model shuttle, a ringed planet … She pressed a button and a lullaby began to play.
“So where did this come from?” she asked, watching the toys sway lightly as the mobile twirled.
“The Doc,” said Tom, smiling and flicking the strings with one finger.
“Wait, really?”
“I mean, he is the kid’s godfather.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope.”
“Seriously?” B’Elanna liked a well-designed hologram as well as the next engineer, but not when it lectured you in five-syllable clinical terms, or told you to calm down after you’d just been kidnapped off the street. “Don’t mess with me, Paris. When my brain’s done cooking, I’ll know if you’re telling the truth.”
“I am. I swear.” Tom stepped back from the crib and lifted both hands.
“That guy? But he’s so … ”
“I know.” Tom rolled his eyes. “Believe me, I’m his medic. But we trust him with our lives, and he trusts us with his program, ever since this ship came out here. And for what it’s worth, I think you meant it as sort of an apology. For, you know, the whole … the whole reprogramming thing.”
“What reprogramming thing?”
Tom’s cheerful face fell. He looked away, muttering a curse.
“Tom. What?”
“If you don’t remember yet, uh … I don’t think I should tell you,” he said awkwardly. “It was kind of between you guys … you’d better ask him.”
“Now you’re starting to worry me,” B’Elanna retorted.
Even as she spoke, though, something about the glint of metal from the mobile made her think of the metal fixtures in Sickbay, of staring blankly at the powered-down sterilizer while she talked with her back to Tom about some of the worst memories of her life.
A worm on a sandwich. Shrill laughter. Her father lamenting the fate of living with two Klingons. The Doctor’s projection of her daughter’s face, those ridges on her tiny forehead exactly like B’Elanna’s own.
She sat down hard on the nearest end of the sofa.
“Bee?” Tom sat down next to her, moved as if to put his arm around her, then prudently backed down - after all, they were only halfway past strangers. “You okay?”
“Kahless,” she gasped. “That’s right. I did reprogram him. You stopped me just in time.”
“You remember?”
She remembered, all right: the string of rationalizations that had made her try to rewrite her own daughter’s DNA like something straight out of the Eugenics Wars. The look of betrayal in the Doctor’s eyes. The way that hologram - that person - had actually forgiven her, for a violation that, if she had been in his place, she would have called unforgivable. (She still hadn’t forgiven the Vidiians.)
There was one part of that memory, though, she wouldn’t give up for the world - no matter how much the rest of it might hurt.
“I remember what you said to me that night,” she said, past the lump forming in her throat. “You said: “I’m not your father, and you are not your mother. And our daughter - ””
“Is gonna be perfect,” Tom said softly along with her. “Just the way she is.”
Just like her memory, he gently touched her cheek so that she turned towards him, and could see how warm those cool blue eyes of his could grow. Only when he wiped away a tear did she realize she was crying.
“Hey,” she smiled shakily against his hands, “You know something?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad I sat down in your section at Umali’s,” she said. “Even if … even if you weren’t the baby’s father, I’d still want you to be her dad.”
“Same,” said Tom. “Even then, I wanted to get to know you. Imagine how lucky I felt that I already did.”
He put his arm around her and held her close, like he’d done so many times - in the ice caves at the alien zoo, in the movie theatre on the holodeck, in EV suits with only one working oxygen tank between them, on the sofa watching TV, in bed after making love - and she remembered it all.
Woe betide anyone, or anything, that would dare to stand between them now.