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“Thanks,” Tom mutters to her as he goes to leave the briefing room.
Kathryn reaches out blindly, not meeting his eyes until she has a firm grip on his arm. She pitches her voice low, to be absolutely sure that it carries to Tom and Tom only.
“Do you want to tell him?” she asks softly.
He flinches, even after all these years, and she feels him bristle under her hand.
“No.”
She was excited to meet Tom Paris.
He was a handsome young officer only a couple of years her junior, and Admiral Paris talked about him all the time. When he introduced himself in the briefing room of the Icarus as the new junior helmsman, he met her expectations in every way.
When he expertly piloted the shuttle they both sat in towards the moon they were studying, he met her expectations in every way.
When the Cardassians turned up, he surprised her.
“Alright listen,” he said, not taking his eyes off the controls, dodging and weaving even as he spoke, “I don’t think I can get us out of this. So I’m just going to tell you what my dad told me.” For an instant, he made eye contact. “Don’t be unnecessarily heroic.” He looked back at his console. “Having said that, I’d prefer the Cardassians didn’t get their hands on this shuttle.” A glance up at the viewscreen, and Kathryn followed his gaze – the moon, she saw, was getting uncomfortably close, uncomfortably quickly. So was a sudden suspicion in her mind, which she had to voice.
“You’re covert ops?”
“Since the day I left the Academy.” Still no eye contact, and she couldn’t read his expression. “I’m beaming you to the surface,” he declared shortly. “I’ll follow just before impact.”
“Impact?” Understanding dawned. “You’re deliberately crashing the shuttle.”
“Necessarily heroic, I think.” He shrugged – then, before she could argue, hit the transporter controls. “See you down there.”
Her mouth opened to protest, but no sound came out until she rematerialized, and she cut herself off and clamped her hands over her mouth.
It was dark, but not pitch black; the stars overhead provided just enough light to show her the silhouettes of the surrounding trees. Not their intended landing site, then; they were supposed to be planting sensors across a large stretch of desert, ostensibly to study the effects of a sister moon’s gravity on the unique sand structures but, Kathryn had suspected for some time, possibly for other purposes as well.
She turned, taking in her surroundings, wondering what she should do next – wait for Tom, she supposed, and hope he had some idea where they could find food and shelter. But she hadn’t turned a full circle before another transporter beam took her.
Now it was pitch black.
Reaching out hesitantly, Kathryn quickly found a wall, and then three more. A ceiling, just above her head. A floor of cold packed earth.
A cell, she realized, heart hammering in her chest. Definitely a cell.
Deliberately dark. Deliberately quiet. Deliberately isolating.
The Cardassians.
She spent what she was certain were hours sitting on the cold ground, then pacing two short steps from one wall to the other and then back again, then sitting again. No communication came from her captors. The only way to mark the passage of time was with the cues from her own body: thirst, hunger, the cold seeping ever further into her bones.
She tried to keep herself from thinking about Tom; from wondering if he’d made it. But in the end fatigue wore away at her self-control, and scenarios forced themselves on her unbidden: Tom dead in the shuttle crash because something went wrong with the transport. Tom surviving the crash but horribly injured, unable to call for help, lying there alone much as she was now. Tom lying exactly like she was now, in a dark little box, maybe right next to her and insulated to such a degree that he couldn’t hear her when she called out.
Like a curse, the moment the idea of the box being soundproofed popped into her head it was disproven, because that was when the screams started.
It took her a long, horrified moment to recognize Tom’s voice, and then all her other scenarios were disproven as well.
It took not long at all for her to wish that one of them, any of them were true instead of this. Surely Tom would rather be dead than endure whatever was pulling that noise out of him, over and over, endless and excruciating.
Still, somehow it was worse when it stopped.
Scenarios spun into her head again – Tom dead, finally, of whatever torture they were imposing on him. Tom silenced somehow, but still suffering. Again, Tom lying in a cell next to hers, not unable to hear her but unable to muster the strength for a response.
And of course, the most obvious scenario: that Kathryn was next.
Light, blinding and painful, suddenly replaced one of the walls. Instinctively Kathryn put her hands in front of her face; someone was shoved towards her and she almost caught him, but they both stumbled into the back wall and fell to the ground; by the time they hit it the light was gone again.
The other person, lying there tangled up with her, groaned weakly. Kathryn’s heart leaped in her chest with equal parts hope and fear; licking her lips, she ventured, “Tom?”
An intake of breath. Then, voice raw from screaming, he whispered, “Janeway. I thought you got away.” The despair in that last word was painful.
“Only for about thirty seconds.” Trying to extricate herself carefully, she pushed herself into an upright position. “Are you okay?”
“I think my nose is broken. The rest of me...” The shaky noise that came from his throat might have been an attempt at a laugh. “They used some kind of device. I guess it stimulated the nerves or something. Nothing else hurts anymore, it’s just... tingling.”
Kathryn felt for his hand, trying to offer whatever comfort she could. It trembled in hers.
“Do you think the Icarus will come for us?” she asked, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.
The sigh that prefaced his response was answer enough. “Honestly? I don’t know that my father would take that risk.”
“You’re his son, Tom.”
“He was the one who suggested me for covert ops. And he made it clear from the start that he’d treat me like any other officer. I don’t have any reason to think that’s not exactly what will happen.” Another sigh, and he continued more quietly, “I told them everything. If the Icarus comes, the Cardassians could have the advantage. So I guess we should hope that they don’t.”
The chill that stole through her wasn’t from the cold ground they were sitting on. “That doesn’t sound much like hope.”
He was silent for a long moment. “I just hope they leave you alone.”
But they didn’t leave her alone. Of course they didn’t.
Electrified with pain, she hoped that she might die soon. But she didn’t.
But three days later, despite Tom’s professed hope, the Icarus did come.
* * *
The CMO treated Tom’s broken nose, fixed Kathryn’s split lip, and removed the torture devices from under their skin. Physically, they were declared healed within the hour.
Psychologically, Kathryn didn’t think healed was something she could ever hope to achieve.
She wasn’t sure how long she sat there once she was released to her quarters. But when she decided to go find Tom in his, she found him already standing outside her door.
She couldn’t read the look on his face – she wasn’t used to being able to see it. But she understood a whole lot more of what was in his voice than just his mumbled “Hey.”
“Come in,” she told him, standing aside.
He did. They stood there awkwardly, and Kathryn swallowed. “Would you like some coffee?” she essayed.
Tom nodded, and she pretended not to notice his hesitation. “Sure.”
Grateful for the small task, Kathryn replicated two cups of coffee and carried them to the couch. Gingerly, Tom sat beside her.
“I’m not exactly sure why I’m here,” he admitted, cradling the cup she handed him.
“That’s alright,” she said. “I was about to go looking for you.” She paused, then confessed, “I feel better now that you’re here.” She didn’t go further – pondering why that could be, and what possible connection there might be to the fact that for the past three days, the only time they were both safe was when they were together. She was sure Tom could draw the same conclusions she could.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
They drank their coffee in silence, for the most part, beyond comparing notes on their respective discharges from sickbay. They were both on medical leave for at least a week. They had both been told to see a counselor, the caveat being that the post of ship’s counselor was currently vacant.
They both found themselves quietly relieved to be reminded of this.
Tom drained his cup and put it down on her small coffee table, then clearly didn’t know what to do with his hands; finally he settled them on his knees, but his fingers fidgeted helplessly.
Kathryn put her free hand over his, and he turned it over under her palm, holding her tight, a familiar tremble in his grip. She put her cup down next to his and added the strength of her second hand to the first, pulling his hand to her chest as she had so many times over the last days, hoping it would give him some kind of comfort.
For the first time, their eyes met as she did this.
She wondered if his eyes were always this blue.
Tom swallowed, but he didn’t look away as he asked, “What do we do now?”
A part of her recoiled at this question, immediately picturing the long, arduous and probably impossible path that lay ahead of them in the name of finding something like normality again one day.
But to the other part of her, the part of her that was holding his hand over her heart, the answer seemed clear.
She pulled that hand up to her lips and pressed a kiss to his fingers, closing her eyes, not daring to look back into his in case she was mistaken. She heard the sharp intake of his breath, and her own stalled in her chest until she felt his free hand come to rest gently on her cheek.
Her body lit up with what she expected for a terrified second to be pain, but turned out to be something quite different. Shakily she breathed out, and she opened her eyes to meet his gaze again.
She was electrified even before he kissed her.
He was gentle, careful, slow, but Kathryn surged forward to meet him with a kind of desperation she did her best not to examine – a task that became increasingly difficult the further they went, and when she was half out of her uniform the more sensible part of her broke through and asked him, even as her hands were burrowing under his own clothes, “Is this a good idea?”
He put his hands over hers, stilling them; the tremble was gone, she noticed, and he took a deliberate breath before he answered: “Do you think we could make it worse?”
He was right, she realized. Worse did not seem possible. Better... Maybe.
Maybe seemed good enough.
Kathryn shook her head, and she kissed him again.
She’s almost expecting him to show up at her door, after the conversation – confrontation – she had with B’Elanna. So she stays up waiting, and she is not disappointed.
“B’Elanna broke up with me,” is the first thing out of his mouth.
This, too, does not surprise her. “I’m sorry,” she says anyway.
Tom sighs, shaking his head, and he drops himself on her couch; a rare display of familiarity, these days, and inappropriate behavior from a subordinate. “I kind of expected it, I guess. Of course Chakotay made sure to tell her how I begged you to ignore her wishes.”
Quashing the reprimand that would be appropriate, almost required of her as his captain, Kathryn sits down beside him. “Did you tell her? About—”
“No,” he cuts her off. “It’s classified.”
“It won’t be by the time we get home,” she points out gently. “You have my full permission as your superior officer, if you think it would help.”
Tom just shakes his head again. “You’re the only person I can talk about it with. You always have been.”
Kathryn studies him, but his posture just confirms that this isn’t something she should push him on. It never has been. “Alright,” she says.
Tom is studying her right back, but it takes a moment before he says, quietly and almost plaintively, “How come you dealt with it so much better than me?”
This question does surprise her, but it’s not an unfamiliar one; Kathryn has spent plenty of time turning it over in her own mind, these past twenty years. “I don’t know that I did,” she says honestly. “Just differently.” She looks at him. “Do you know why I switched from science to command?”
“You told me my dad recommended it.”
“He did. But I think I took him up on it because I wanted to prove something to myself. That I could face that kind of danger again. That I could somehow become unaffected by it. That wasn’t how it worked, of course. But I deliberately put myself in situations where I could say, look, I faced that, I’m fine. Unnecessarily heroic, is the phrase that springs to mind.” A pause, and she adds, “I don’t think I was remotely fine, looking back.”
“And now?”
“No,” she admits after a moment. “No, I’m still not fine.”
Tom holds her gaze for a moment – long enough for her to wonder what he’s seeing in there, but then he looks at his feet. “Yeah,” he says. “Me neither.”
“I’m sorry I left you,” she confesses, spurred by who knows what. That admission on his part, probably, and the fact that they don’t normally talk like this anymore. “After Caldik. That was selfish of me.”
“No,” he says immediately. “You had to. You were protecting yourself. I always understood that.”
“I was,” she acknowledges. “But then there was no one left to protect you.” And Kathryn has longed, always, to protect him. From his past. From his father. Often from himself.
She has long resolved never to tell him this, but she has wondered for longer still whether the incident at Caldik Prime might have been a moment, however brief, where Tom needed protecting from himself. Because she can’t explain how else a pilot as skilled as him could have made such a colossal error. A moment of weakness, too late to properly correct, costing other lives instead of his own... Well. Somehow that has always seemed a far more plausible explanation.
Tom is looking at her again, and for once she can’t read the look in his eyes. “Have you ever wondered...” he says eventually. “If things had been different. If we could have made it work?”
She doesn’t know why the question stabs at her heart like it does – it's been years. So many years. Too many, for her to react like this. Still, she can’t lie. “Of course,” she says softly. “But they weren’t.”
“Right.” He sighs one more time, and he heaves himself to his feet. “Thanks,” he says, and his tone is no less heavy than when he said that same word to her in the briefing room earlier. “Goodnight.”
Kathryn didn’t tell Mark she was going to see Tom.
She wasn’t allowed to tell him, of course – Tom amounted to a secret weapon on Voyager’s already classified mission to the Badlands, and sharing that information with a civilian would warrant serious disciplinary measures.
Still, that felt more like an excuse than a reason.
She was shocked, frankly, that Admiral Patterson had agreed to her plan after the skepticism he’d shown. She didn’t know if he really believed that Tom could be an asset, or if this was some kind of favor to her, or to Admiral Paris, or to Tom himself.
None of which mattered, she told herself, if it got Tom out of prison.
She didn’t say much beyond what she was objectively there for, when she found him at the penal colony. Too much potential for others to be listening in, and their relationship had always been a deeply private thing. But she waited while he was processed out of the facility and handed over formally into her custody, and then she took him out to dinner.
He wasn’t looking as well as she’d hoped.
“You really think I can help you?” he asked, fiddling with a piece of garlic bread. He was far too thin, compared to his usual self. Kathryn hoped the pizza they’d ordered would tempt him more than the bread.
“All you have to do is sit next to me and give me an idea of where to look,” she assured him. She bit into her own garlic bread, hoping to inspire him.
The opposite happened – he put the bread back onto the plate, pulled into half a dozen pieces. “I can try.” He frowned. “But I really didn’t see that much of the Badlands.”
“You’ve seen more than anyone else on Voyager.” She took another bite, and added carefully, “And if anything goes wrong, I might still need you at the helm.”
Finally a real interest sparked in his eyes instead of the wary assent he’d been looking at her with for the last couple of hours. “That’s not what you said before.”
“We were in a Starfleet facility, and that is not Starfleet’s preference.” She looked at him, hoping she could coax that spark into something more over the course of this mission. “But it is mine.”
And over the course of their much prolonged mission, she was gratified again and again by how little coaxing she really had to do.
This time, she isn’t expecting him.
“Hey,” he says, standing in her doorway, his gaze drawn immediately over her shoulder to the blue disc of the Earth hanging outside her window. His tears his eyes away to focus on her face. “I thought I’d come by and ask how you’re doing.”
She shrugs, gesturing for him to come in. “We’re home. I just can’t quite believe it. I’m not sure what to do with myself.”
“What, Starfleet hasn’t started the paperwork already?” He follows her to the couch, where she collapses with a sigh and he sits more carefully.
“I’ve been assured it’ll be incoming by morning,” she tells him. “But given that we burst into the sector unannounced at twenty-three hundred hours, they told me to sit tight and get some sleep.” She snorts. “As if I could possibly sleep.”
As if she’s ever been able to sleep properly since those three days on the Cardassian moon.
“I’ve been reading up on the Dominion War,” she tells him. “The Cardassian Empire took quite a beating. They lost huge swathes of territory. Cardassia Prime is in shambles.”
Anyone else would have taken this as a non sequitur. Tom follows her chain of thought immediately. “I guess a lot of folks are sleeping easier, then,” he says.
“I hope so.”
“They’re right, though,” he tells her. “You should try to get some rest, if the hordes are descending in the morning.”
She looks at him, wondering if she should protest at him telling her what to do. She’s insisted on a certain professional distance between them on Voyager, for both their sakes. But they’re not going to be on Voyager together for much longer.
“So should you,” she settles on.
As if Tom sleeps, either.
He looks back at her, because he knows she knows this.
And he reads between lines Kathryn herself hasn’t dared to look between these past seven years, and he asks, “Do you want me to stay?”
“Yes,” she admits, because finally she’s allowed to.
She still feels better when he’s there.