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Paris was thoroughly distracted by the thought of augmenting the warp engine’s spin reversal system with very short bursts of kinoplasmic radiation. That’s the story he’s sticking with, anyway.
He hasn’t been sleeping well since Janeway tasked him with finding a way to make Voyager use antimatter more efficiently, but tonight he’d actually managed to have a breakthrough while teetering on the edge of wakefulness. B’Elanna had been none too happy with being poked awake at 0300, but even she’d begrudgingly admitted that it was worth the rude awakening.
For two hours, Tom had bounced ideas off B’Elanna, making sure that the resulting increase in antiprotons would still feed smoothly into the dilithium regulation chamber. By that point, it had been close enough to alpha shift anyway that he wouldn’t feel too guilty waking the captain. True, it was all still theoretical, but it sounded promising enough that B’Elanna had stopped rolling her eyes after the first five minutes. The only problem was that testing it would require dropping out of warp for a significant amount of time to access the antiproton injection subsystem.
So, Tom’s still staring at his PADD when he buzzes at the door of the captain’s quarters, and thus he doesn’t quite register Janeway’s use of the word “yes” rather than “come in.” She’s not in the living room area, so he walks farther into her quarters, triple checking his data on the strength of the subsystem’s injector seals. Before he realizes it, he’s at the open door to her bedroom. He glances up, about to apologize for the intrusion, when—
“Chakotay, yes.”
The only light in the room is coming from a small lamp on the captain’s bedside table, but it’s enough for Tom to clearly make out what’s happening on the bed. Commander Chakotay is, indeed, an active participant, but it’s quite clearly Captain Janeway who’s calling the shots. She’s riding her first officer shamelessly, her hands braced behind her on his thighs. His hands, meanwhile, are doing split duty between one of her breasts and… somewhere distinctly south of that. She obviously approves of the commander’s work, because her head is tipped back and the sounds she’s making are increasing in both pitch and volume.
Without saying a word, Tom turns around and walks out, the front door sliding shut behind him.
He stands in the corridor, his heart beating in his throat, and looks to his left.
His right.
No one.
Well then.
He’ll clearly have to take up the warp propulsion system with the captain another time.
Clearing his throat for the benefit of… no one in particular, Tom starts down the hallway as casually as possible. If his left eye has suddenly developed a twitch, at least there’s no one to notice it.
The captain and Chakotay. Chakotay and the captain. It’s not like this is unexpected, of course; the rumors started after Voyager returned to New Earth to rescue the two of them. Privately, though, Tom had had a hard time believing it would ever happen; Janeway had always seemed too devoted to her role as Unflappable Starfleet Captain to do something as human as… well, her first officer.
Clearly things have changed, and the evidence is now permanently seared onto Tom’s retinas. Alone in the turbolift, he actually shakes his head from side to side to see if that clears anything up. He’s been watching a lot of mid-20th century cartoons lately, all right? He’s mildly surprised that his eyeballs didn’t just pop right out of his head. He feels a lot like that coyote who keeps getting anvils dropped on him.
This is a burden no man was meant to carry. Tom must be the only one who knows, or it would be all over the ship by now. He doesn’t pass anyone during the relatively short walk back to his quarters, but he still flinches every time he turns a corner. Somehow, he knows that he’s going to blurt everything out at the first person who speaks to him, so he takes the last stretch of hallway at a bit of a run.
Inside, B’Elanna is standing by the replicator with a fresh cup of coffee. “What did the captain say?”
Tom chooses not to relate exactly what the captain said. In stuttering half-sentences, he tells B’Elanna what he saw, sparing no detail. He’s not going to be the only one to live the rest of his life with that mental image, by god.
B’Elanna just takes a sip of her coffee and mutters, “Finally.”
This stops Tom short, and he takes a moment to gape. “That’s your only response to this? Finally?”
She shrugs. “Do you seriously not see how they look at each other? There was a time when I’d have killed to get Chakotay to look at me like that.” He grunts in protest. “Before I met you, baby,” she coos.
Tom only gets called “baby” when he’s being particularly dense. Or has his face buried between B’Elanna’s thighs. It’s kind of a weird dichotomy. “There are some things a person is just not meant to see. Or hear. Or know the details of. I mean… does this not completely upend the command structure?”
The mug thumps down on the table so hard that liquid sloshes over the rim. “Oh, the captain finally gets some, so now no one’s going to take her seriously?”
“Not what I meant!” Tom says quickly, hands up in case the mug should become airborne. “Just… there’s a reason she’s keeping it quiet, right? You know how she loves her regulations. I haven’t looked it up specifically, but I’m pretty sure the captain and the first officer aren’t supposed to be sleeping together.”
“I don’t know, there were always those rumors about Captain Kirk…”
“Seriously, B’Elanna.”
“Seriously, Tom, good for her,” she says, leaning forward over the table. “We’re out here in the ass-end of nowhere, possibly for the rest of our lives, and she’s always acted like if she just obeys protocol hard enough, if she denies herself long enough, it’ll get us home. Now she finally has something good for herself. I’m happy for her. And for him. I’m just not entirely sure why you’re so freaked out about this.”
“I don’t know if I’d go with ‘freaked out.’” Tom would absolutely go with freaked out, if he weren’t trying to stay cool around his girlfriend. It’s hard to explain, but there are some paradigms shifting here.
Pausing, B’Elanna narrows her eyes and starts to smirk in a way Tom should really recognize by now. “Is it jealousy? I mean, I get that she was the mother of your mutant fish babies--”
“Hey!” Tom yelps, “We all promised never to speak of that again!” He clears his throat and settles back into his chair, affecting an air of cool confidence before replying, “And they were super-evolved salamander babies. I think.”
“Glad we cleared that up. I’m just saying, you’ve seen worse. You’ve done worse. With her.”
“Not the same,” Paris groans, putting his head in his hands. “I don’t really even know how to explain it. It’s not like walking in on my parents -- which I never did, by the way, or the psychological scars would be a lot worse. It’s more like… watching my big sister get drunk. Sure, she’s an adult and she’s got her own life, but it’s not something I really want to picture.”
She snorts into her coffee cup. “A big sister you used to flirt with?”
“It’s not a perfect comparison, all right? And it’s not just about the captain; it’s about Chakotay, too. I have to be on the bridge with them just about every day. They can do whatever they want when they’re off duty, I just don’t want to see it.”
“So don’t go wandering into their quarters, genius.”
Tom opens his mouth to reply, but she has got a point there. But she’s clearly not grasping what he’s trying to tell her, so he shifts gears into damage control. “Just… how do I act like nothing happened?”
She thinks for a moment. “You’re sure they didn’t see you?”
“Trust me, I could have been on fire and they wouldn’t have noticed.”
B’Elanna smirks. “Get it, Captain. I mean, it’ll be awkward for you for a few days, but you know how it is around here – Seven will try to kill us again or aliens will turn Neelix into a frog and then we’ll all have something more important to worry about.”
“I guess,” Tom sighs. There goes his left eye again.
“You just can’t tell anybody about it.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m serious, Tom. Not even Harry.”
“Not even Harry!”
&&&
That promise lasts until just after lunch, when Tom is sent to engineering to talk to Harry about refitting the warp engine on one of the shuttles to test his modifications. He’d taken the coward’s way out and gone to Tuvok for preliminary approval, which should gain him at least twelve hours without having to consult the captain.
It’s not that Tom really wants to talk about it, or even think about it – he knows it’s none of his business, after all. But he just can’t wrap his head around it, so clearly he’s not looking at things the right way. Or something. The eye twitching is becoming a thing now, and he’s started to bite at one of his thumbnails again. He needs to process this verbally to figure it out, and Harry’s always good for that.
Currently, Harry’s got his head buried in shuttle guts, so Tom takes a thorough look around the hangar bay to make sure they’re alone, then crouches down and blurts out, “This morning I walked in on the captain and Chakotay…” How to put it so as not to scar dear, sweet Harry? “In flagrante.”
“Not funny,” Harry says, his eyes glued to his hyperspanner.
Tom frowns. “It wasn’t a joke.”
“Right. Just like ‘Tuvok has a virus that can only be cured by hugs’ wasn’t a joke? Like ‘Jenny Delaney loves men with mustaches’ wasn’t a joke? Like—”
“Point taken,” Tom sighs. “I don’t have the best track record of coming to you with crazy-sounding yet viable information. But I swear, I’m not joking this time.”
“Try something more believable – like maybe Seven has suddenly decided that we could all improve our efficiency by 34% if we wore hovershoes. Pink ones.”
“Harry.”
“What?”
“Harry.”
He finally puts the hyperspanner down. “Tuvok’s already got me down here working on your project. Why is it so important to you that I believe this joke?”
Tom glances around again to make sure no one’s come in the hangar unannounced. He still leans in to whisper, “Because I now know that the captain has a strawberry birthmark on her hip and I have no idea what to do with that information.”
Harry blinks at him several times in succession. Swallows. Blinks once more. “This isn’t a joke.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” Tom yelps, hands flailing.
“But why are you saying it? I don’t want to know this!”
“I don’t either. Look, I know you’ve got a kind of hero-worship thing going on with the captain, but my sanity takes precedence.”
“So go tell B’Elanna.”
“I did!”
“And now you’re telling me?”
In fairness to B’Elanna, Tom was never not going to tell Harry, and if she doesn’t know that by now, she never will. “I need somebody to process this with. I just have so many questions. When did this start? Why did this start? Who made the first move? Why are you not shocked by this?”
Sighing, Harry scrubs a hand across his forehead. “I don’t know the details, and I don’t want to know the details, but I’m pretty sure they don’t want everybody else to know.”
“I’m not telling everybody; I’m telling you.” Tom pauses, shrugs. “And B’Elanna.”
Harry stares at him blankly for a moment. “Well, you told me. Anything else?”
“Umm… no.”
“Okay, then I’m going to go ahead and pretend you didn’t tell me this thing that has no impact on my life whatsoever.”
“But—”
“No. Impact. Whatsoever.” Harry punctuates each word with a jab of the hyperspanner, then goes back to reinforcing the injector seals.
Well, that wasn’t at all what Tom was expecting. It’s not like he thought Harry would immediately curl up in the fetal position, but... would that really be so much to ask from a friend? It would be familiar territory – Tom comforting Harry, talking him down from the metaphorical ledge. Okay, in this particular situation, Tom would be the one dragging Harry out on the ledge in the first place...
So Tom figures he kind of brought this one on himself. Maybe he ought to make it up to Harry, let him pick the next holonovel and offer to be his sidekick, Tom thinks, gnawing on his cuticle as the door slides shut behind him.
&&&
From there, it’s over to Astrometrics to find an area on their projected course where Voyager can sit in relative safety with her warp engines offline and to see if Seven has any holes to poke in his methodology.
She’s in the lab by herself and waits until she’s good and finished with whatever she was working on to acknowledge that Tom’s in the room. As he’s waiting, he notices that his thumb has started to bleed. He tucks it into a fist and hides it behind his back, forcing his brain into engineering mode. Warp propulsion. Antimatter injection. Protons and antiprotons, which aren’t supposed to interact unless they’ve been secretly dating off-duty since that first thing with the Malon, maybe?
“Lieutenant Paris. What can I do for you.”
Tom snaps his focus back to Seven and briefly wonders whether she’s ever heard of a question mark. “I could use some help with my idea for the spin reversal system.”
As always, she proves extremely helpful, and this time she manages it with only three mostly-unintentional digs at Tom’s intellectual capacity. As soon as she finishes, she turns back to her work station and Tom’s left staring at the back of her head.
Should he?
He really shouldn’t.
He’s gotten a woman’s opinion on this already.
But still.
Seven does spend more time around the captain than B’Elanna does. Tom doesn’t know if they confide in one another, but Seven has access to more raw data, even if she hasn’t spent enough time as an individual to know how to process it.
He’s gonna do it. What the hell. The odds that she’ll even know what he’s talking about are minimal, right?
“Hey, Seven, you spend plenty of time with the captain,” Tom starts, leaning casually against a console. “Has she been acting… unusual lately?”
Seven doesn’t look up from what she’s doing. “Unusual? Specify.”
“I don’t know. Happier? More relaxed?”
“Is this related to the efficiency of the antimatter chamber?”
“Not… I mean, not directly.”
She finally turns to face him. “Then perhaps you should redirect your inquiry to Captain Janeway.”
“Ah, see, it’s actually your opinion that I’m looking for.”
“My opinion is irrelevant.”
That’s the first “irrelevant” to come up in this particular conversation and they’ve been talking for nearly ten minutes, so Tom takes it as a good sign. He tries a different approach. “Your observations, then.”
She cocks her head slightly to one side, and Tom can almost see the gears turning. “Since our emergence from the void, Captain Janeway has indeed exhibited more frequent behavior that could be interpreted as ‘happy.’ Smiling, increased leisure time spent with the crew, reduced physical tension.”
Now they’re getting somewhere. “How about, uh, Commander Chakotay?”
“The increased frequency of those behaviors is less obvious, but concurrent with the captain’s. Is it your hypothesis that these two phenomena are directly related?”
Tom snorts and mutters, “Yeah, I’d say direct relations are happening all over the place.”
Seven blinks at him, much in the same way Harry did. Somehow, this is far more intimidating. “You believe the captain and the commander are engaged in a sexual relationship.”
“What? No! I didn’t say that,” Tom protests. He’s more surprised than he probably should be that Seven was able to do the math. “It’s important to me that you didn’t hear me say that.”
“But your implication was clear in your use of the word ‘relations.’”
Okay, he definitely needs to watch his sarcastic asides. Backpedaling as hard as he can, Tom says, “Clear to you, maybe.”
“Indeed,” Seven agrees, turning back to her work.
Tom should absolutely walk away. In just a minute. Somehow Seven has just blown completely past the big revelation, while even hearing captain and commander and sexual in the same sentence is making Tom’s eye start to twitch again. “This doesn’t seem… surprising to you?”
“Hardly. Captain Janeway and Commander Chakotay are both attractive, healthy individuals existing in a closed community. As captain and first officer, they have similar hierarchical status both professionally and socially. And, as has been clear, they share a personal bond of trust. It is entirely unsurprising that their relationship should encompass their sexual needs as well.”
“But… wh…” Tom starts, not even sure what question he’s trying to ask. It’s a shame Seven’s back is turned; he’s making some fairly impressive hand gestures in an attempt to convey his sense of cognitive dissonance without using words, which have now begun to fail him entirely.
It’s just as well. Even he knows better than to argue with Seven.
&&&
With everything he has to do, Tom figures he might miss dinner, so he decides to swing by the galley to grab something to tide him over. And maybe get his mind off things for a few minutes. He’s managed to calm himself down with some good, old-fashioned manual labor, though his brain still pokes at it like a tongue at a sore tooth. Or Harry with a hyperspanner.
Before he can grab a rada plum, Neelix pops up from behind the counter. “Tom! What can I do for you, my friend? Not missing dinner again, are we?”
“Oh, hi, Neelix. Listen, uh…” Hey, Neelix likes to talk. He will definitely talk to Tom about this. He might even listen when Tom talks, too.
Neelix’s whiskers seem to quiver. “Yes?”
It takes maybe a second too long, but Tom thinks better of it. “Never mind. Guess I left my brain in engineering.”
“Then you better go fetch it!”
Tom is so proud of himself for exercising discretion that he walks out without his plum.
&&&
By the time Tom goes back to find Tuvok and get him to sign off on the final checklist, it feels like the day has lasted a standard year. Preliminary tests with the shuttle have gone well, but he’s still no closer to having a handle on… the other thing. Fortunately, he’s somehow managed to avoid Janeway and Chakotay all day, and maybe with some sleep he’ll be able to process it. Or at least not act like a stammering idiot when he eventually runs into them.
Tuvok is in the cargo bay, running some final scans on a large quantity of liquid deuterium that they plan to trade for dilithium at the next solar system. It takes him only a few moments to read and comment on Tom’s changes, but Tom’s mind is elsewhere, anyway.
Which is why he nearly misses it when Tuvok says as he hands back the PADD, “It has come to my attention that you have been contributing to a certain rumor, Lieutenant.”
Tom gapes. “W-what? Who told you that?”
“It hardly matters who informed me. Suffice it to say that this particular item of gossip will go no further.”
That hits him like a fist to the chest. “I swear, Tuvok, I never meant for it to become gossip.”
“Regardless of your intentions, Mr. Paris, the walls of Voyager, as they say, have ears.”
“Oh my god,” Tom says, clapping a hand to his forehead. “I am so sorry. What are we going to do?”
The Vulcan’s expression seems to ease a little… though that might be Tom’s imagination. “We will do nothing. Such rumors are not a novelty, and without any new contributions, they will subside in time.”
“Yeah, but this time—” Tom manages to cut himself off, then glances around. He doesn’t think Tuvok would’ve initiated the conversation if there were anyone else in the cargo bay, but given what he’s just learned—
“There is no one else here, Lieutenant,” Tuvok says with an almost-but-not-quite sigh. “The fact remains that it is never wise to discuss such things in public areas, regardless of their truth value.”
“Regardless of their…” It suddenly strikes him. “Tuvok, you know, don’t you?”
“I know a great number of things, Mr. Paris.”
Tom knows he’s cruising for a Vulcan nerve pinch, but he can’t let it go. “No, I mean you know.”
Tuvok narrows his eyes, and though he doesn’t move a step, Tom suddenly feels the need to back up. “I know,” he says, “that Starfleet regulations were formulated without regard to the situation in which we currently find ourselves. I know that Captain Janeway and Commander Chakotay would never act in any manner that would endanger or even inconvenience their crew. Most importantly, I know the Vulcan mind meld technique of Ru’Shak, which can be used to remove individual memories from sentient beings. However, as I am out of practice in this technique, I cannot guarantee that my use of it would not damage the mind on which I performed it. Permanently.”
Vulcans are pacifists, Tom knows, and anyway he’s pretty damn sure that Tuvok is making that Ru’shak thing up. But still, there’s absolutely no need to find out. “Message received and understood, sir. No, uh... no need to be melding any minds.”
“Excellent,” Tuvok says, picking up his tricorder and resuming the scans. “It would be a shame for the ship’s most accomplished pilot to lose control of his mental faculties.”
&&&
While beating a hasty retreat from the cargo bay, Tom whips around a corner and runs right into the Doctor, whose portable holoemitter makes him more solid than seems possible of photons.
“Ah, Mr. Paris. Have you seen the captain lately? Or the commander? It would seem they’ve gone off together.”
Tom opens his mouth, but a muted gurgling sound is all that comes out. Without another word, he dashes down the corridor.
The Doctor turns to watch him go. “How insufferably rude.”