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half she pulled him (half he sank)
The waters murmured, the waters swelled,
moistening his bare foot;
his heart surged with such yearning,
as if his sweetheart had called him…
For seven hours, Kathryn Janeway thinks that Tom Paris is dead.
Tuvok seeks her out after five.
It’s not his way. His guidance is provided on request, and typically confined to common spaces: Commander Chakotay lingering at a distance after a briefing, arms folded across his chest; Lieutenant Paris seating himself opposite Tuvok’s customary table in the mess hall, speaking without invitation over the top of Tuvok’s PADD. Ensign Kim prefers turbolifts, will stand beside Tuvok in complete silence until the moment before the doors part, and only then voice his concerns.
But Kathryn Janeway, for all their decades of friendship, will almost never come to him—even as she expresses her gratitude, again and again, for his counsel. Tuvok does not take her distance personally. He has observed that there is no one aboard in whom the Captain confides, anymore.
She answers after his first chime, still in unrumpled uniform at this late hour. The light from the corridor falls across her pallid face, her mouth twisting before she steps back to allow him entry, and the dimness of her quarters closes around her again.
“I’m fine,” she says, retreating toward the couch. She gestures for him to sit—an invitation which he ignores, one eyebrow lifting.
“I’m fine,” she says again, defiantly meeting his eyes.
He does not contradict her. Long experience has taught him that pressing her before she is ready only ever yields one outcome. Instead, he moves to the replicator.
“Vulcan spice tea, hot.”
Behind him, he hears her sigh, at once frustrated and resigned. He can easily imagine the expression that accompanies it. She does not, however, ask him to leave.
Finally, he does settle himself beside her, passing her the teacup with care. She accepts it, her fingers tightening briefly around the saucer, the muscles along her jaw painfully taut, and when she takes a sip it is an acknowledgement of something unspoken; an act of limited surrender. Still, her brow remains furrowed, her expression pinched. She presses her lips together, and automatically her hand lifts, hovers near her temple, then drops again.
Tuvok looks away. He would want such privacy afforded to him.
And although he registers, a moment later, the faint clink of porcelain against glass, he does not turn back immediately. Not before her hand closes over his.
There is no other warning.
Cold, too cold skin unresponsive beneath her hands. A biobed, a chest cracked open, ribs splayed, the cavity exposed and a heart lifted free, heavy and inert, a meter away from the body to which it no longer belongs. A face shrouded darkly, instruments slick with blood. Lieutenant Paris—Tom, Tom, oh my god—unmade piece by piece, meted into component parts, nothing left to answer to his name.
And threaded through this cataclysm is fault, her fault, all her fault, from the moment she let this begin, your life could be in danger and we need you, we need you, please, please let me make the flight—and then this cold certainty shudders, destabilizes, and something else surges up beneath it. Longing, sudden and fierce, reaching, clawing—
The sensation is unbearable. It tears through her composure, through his, and for a heartbeat Tuvok cannot separate her distress from his own. He recoils, closing his mind by force so that the present slams back into place, and his vision clears, and only then does understanding arrive: the Doctor has not yet performed his autopsy of Mister Paris. Not for several more hours. These are not Captain Janeway’s memories, they are her inventions, images forged from guilt and grief and inflicted upon herself even now, even as they speak. Please, please let me—
“I’ll be all right,” she says, unaware of what transpired between her one breath and the next. “Really.”
They had long ago come to an understanding: that she would signal her intent with her body language, move slowly enough to give him time to raise his defenses. He would accept her touch, then, as it was meant—unbidden and utterly human, but not necessarily unwelcome. But he had looked away. And she—
The echo of her distress lingers, and, alongside it, something else he could not isolate amid the onslaught: a deliberate distance, an apartness she clings to despite herself, or perhaps because of. The recognition draws him backward along a familiar line of thought, to another ship, another conversation, her reasons for eschewing a relationship for so long. “Whatever you were to decide,” he had told her then, “I am certain that your judgment would remain sound.”
He remembers, too, the last time that she and Mister Paris were separated. Her guilt, and his fury at her reckless pursuit of redemption, a fallout which had reverberated for weeks throughout the USS Billings and her crew.
“How can you be sure?”
She had not consulted Tuvok again. Had not asked whether his opinion had changed in the wake of the Caretaker incident, nor had she brought any matter requiring formal review to him before appointing Commander Chakotay as her first officer. Before that decision, such matters would have required Tuvok’s involvement, as her de facto second in command. He had drawn his own conclusions, thereafter.
But humans, who seem to possess an endless capacity for pain, command only so much self-restraint. And so when the Doctor, some time later, comms the Captain’s quarters, the look she gives Tuvok is so stricken, so fearful—a terrible, dreadful hope—that it would seem to contradict the words themselves.
“He’s alive,” the Doctor says, sounding no less stunned than she appears. “Mr. Paris is alive.”
She is not wrong to be afraid. The Doctor meets them in the lab to speak privately of mutation and mania, her hands clasped behind her back, posture rigid with control until at last she asks, “Can I talk to him?” and for her trouble her onetime partner hurls through a forcefield, You're hoping I'll die!—and then, worse, You’re going to fail.
And she is afraid when he escapes his confines, and it falls to Tuvok to hunt him down. When Tuvok draws her aside as the corridors begin to clear, unholstering his own phaser and placing it in the palm of her hand, watching her fingers curl reluctantly around its grip. She is not afraid that Tuvok will hurt him, but that she will; which is, perhaps, why Tuvok discovers the weapon abandoned, useless to her now, in an unsecured section of deck six.
Three days pass before the pair are located on an uninhabited planet along with their… offspring, and another four before the Doctor summons Tuvok and Commander Chakotay to sickbay, declaring his patients “Good as new,” their human DNA restored. The Captain lies motionless, curled in on herself, her features slackened by sedation. Across the room, Mister Paris mirrors her posture, and while the Doctor briefs Chakotay, Tuvok registers the parallel rise and fall of their chests, the near-synchronous cadence of their biomonitors. The physical distance between them is notable. It may be deliberate, an attempt to mitigate physiological stress while their genomes stabilize. It also reflects a total misapprehension of the situation at hand.
Beside Tuvok, Chakotay asks, “There’s one thing I’m still not clear on. Why her? Tom was five decks away.”
And because Chakotay is looking at him now, Tuvok considers his own answer to this question. He has warned the Commander once before: that he is at all times honest, to his own convictions, within defined parameters. He is privy to information that never found its way into the ship’s official records. And he carries images in his mind that were not his to keep, let alone share.
His choice is not a difficult one.
But in this instance, Chakotay is spared Tuvok’s honesty. The Doctor supplies his best hypotheses—chemical signaling, environmental triggers, the tendency of certain species to seek out the most dominant mate. “She is the highest-ranking member of the crew, after all. But only Mister Paris can know for certain,” he concludes lightly. “Hopefully he will deign to enlighten us when he wakes up.”
Tuvok inclines his head, allowing them their suppositions.
What was shared between the Captain and Lieutenant Paris did not originate in mutated genetic code. Nor does it yield to the assumption that choice alone governs outcome. By choice—the Captain’s—the two are not together. They are not, however, separable in fact.
“Please inform me when they have awoken,” he says, aware that recovery will take longer than the Doctor can know.