He had been so very wrong.
How had he been so very wrong?
Again.
He wanted to hate her, but he couldn’t hold on to that feeling for long. Every time he tried, he found the image of their child, floating in her little world, completely unaware that the two people responsible for creating her had come undone.
If he was being completely honest, part of him had felt it happening the last time he had stood among the holographic stars playing “Clair de Lune.” He had begun to grieve the loss he hadn’t yet been able to name. He would continue to grieve for a very long time.
But more important, he needed to think. He needed to make a decision. Voyager was about to embark on a new and incredibly dangerous mission. He, alone, was now responsible for the life of his daughter and he didn’t know if it was right to expose her to that. Tom clearly wouldn’t think so. But Tom had B’Elanna, Michael, and Miral. Kim had no one. He could not imagine spending the next several weeks, months, or years doing anything but the only job he had ever done, offering the admiral and the captain the best he had left to give, and learning to live again in the absence of Nancy Conlon. He had lost everything else. He couldn’t lose Voyager or his daughter.
Nancy had been restored to her body. She was healed. And she had decided to remain aboard Galen for the duration of the fleet’s mission. Their child now resided in Voyager’s sickbay, pending Kim’s final notification to Captain Chakotay of his intentions.
He faced a future he didn’t want, that he could hardly conceive. He had never in his life felt so desperate.
Or so alone.
21
VOYAGER
Commander Tom Paris was running late. It wasn’t his fault. Michael hadn’t slept well the previous night and truly didn’t care that his parents were expected in the mess hall at eleven hundred hours in full dress uniforms. Miral had been up since zero six hundred, demanding to put on the white dress with the poofy skirt that had been replicated for her so that she could spin and twirl and leap, testing the skirt’s buoyancy.
And B’Elanna still hadn’t forgiven him.
It didn’t help that watching her fasten the last of the buttons that secured her dress tunic only made him think of how nice it would be to help her undo them.
When she turned to face him, she had no trouble at all translating the look in his eyes.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
“I love you.”
“We’re late.” Poking her head out of their bedroom she called, “Miral, if you rip that skirt one more time, you’re not going to the wedding.”
“I has to go, Mommy,” she shouted back. “I am flower girl.”
“You know, if there isn’t already a superhero holoprogram with that name, I’m going to write one,” Paris said.
“Yeah, well, you’ll have plenty of free time to do that in a few days,” Torres tossed back.
“Do we have to talk about this again?” he asked.
“What’s to talk about? You’ve made your decision,” Torres replied, stepping into the ’fresher to check her hair one last time.
“I thought we agreed.”
“You said you would resign your commission and take the children back to Earth if I refused. That’s blackmail. Not agreement.”
“I needed you to know how seriously I feel about this,” Paris insisted. “I wouldn’t have actually done it.”
“I know. I would have killed you first.”
“B’Elanna, I get it. I really do. Together we can do anything and who’s to say that the fleet won’t encounter any number of dangerous things in the next year and a half that will make staying on Voyager for this trip seem like the better choice. But sometimes, you have to consider the odds.”
“Janeway and Chakotay got this ship seventy thousand light-years in seven years,” Torres reminded him. “We survived the Borg, Species 8472, the stupid Malon, and a bunch of other hostile species I can’t even remember now. I think they can handle the interstellar void and a quick tour of Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical.”
“I agree. I think they’ll do great out there. But that’s a very different mission profile than the one you and I agreed to undertake when we decided to stay with the fleet.”
“They need us,” Torres insisted.
“I need us more,” Paris replied. “I’m willing to risk a lot when it comes to Starfleet, but turns out, I’ve found my limit and this is it.”
B’Elanna glided past him, heading into the living room. He caught her hand and lifted it gently to his lips.
“You were supposed to be in Chakotay’s ready room ten minutes ago,” she reminded him.
“He’ll wait. He’s not going anywhere without his best man.”
“And doesn’t that tell you anything?”
“He and I have already discussed this. He understands our choice.”
“Your choice.”
“B’Elanna, stop. Look at me.”
She did so, lifting stormy eyes to meet his.
“Now look at them,” he said.
Torres turned to see Miral springing off the sofa and landing on the deck with her skirt flying over her face. Michael lay in his bassinet, sleeping soundly.
“It’s time,” he said simply. “Miral needs a ship with children her age. One of the Galaxy classes maybe, with a proper school. And Michael needs us both. He’s going to be walking before we know it.”
“We can make do.”
“I know we can, because we have for years now. But this isn’t the time to take them deeper into the unknown. This is the time to give them the foundation they will build upon, and that foundation needs to be rock solid.”
“You’re talking about Earth?”
“I can think of worse places.”
“And what are we supposed to do there?”
“Whatever you want.”
“And our friends?”
“Will be back in a couple of years with some amazing stories to tell,” he assured her.
“I don’t know, Tom,” she said. “It’s such a big change. I like our lives the
