Work Text:
Lieutenant Tom Paris submitted his official report on the warp ten incident the same morning the Doctor cleared him for duty.
He titled it:
POST-INCIDENT ANALYSIS OF UNINTENTIONAL PHYSIOLOGICAL AND TRANSPERSONAL COMPLICATIONS ARISING FROM EXPERIMENTAL WARP FLIGHT
After sweating through numerous rewrites of the report, he considered the final version to be factual, if somewhat less than candid. He could only hope his commanding officer deemed it acceptable.
Tom pressed SEND, smoothed his uniform jacket, checked the mirror for the dozenth time (he still wasn’t sure his hairline had returned to normal with the rest of him) and headed for the bridge.
He noted with relief that Janeway was nowhere to be seen.
That relief was short-lived when he locked eyes with Chakotay, in the centre chair.
“Welcome back, Lieutenant.” Chakotay’s dark, direct stare made Tom feel like he was being assessed for structural integrity.
“Thank you, Commander,” Tom replied, keeping his tone neutral. He took his station and focused very intently on the console in front of him.
“Cleared for duty?” Chakotay asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Fully recovered?”
“Completely,” Tom answered, trying to temper the sharpness in his tone. “Fully humanoid. Mostly bipedal. No lingering yearning for humid pools of sludge here.”
“Pleased to hear it.”
The silence stretched like the stars at transwarp.
Chakotay shifted in his chair. “The captain was waiting on your report.”
Tom ground his teeth. “Bet she was pretty interested to read yours, too.”
“Excuse me, Lieutenant?”
“Nothing. Sir.”
“Paris, if you have something to say –”
Tom’s console beeped just in time. A message lit up on the screen.
REPORT TO MY READY ROOM.
“Sorry, Chakotay.” He unfolded from behind the helm and waited for Baytart to slide into his place before adding “I’ve been summoned,” and striding over to the ready room door.
“Enter,” he heard the captain call at his chime.
“Here goes nothing,” Tom muttered under his breath, and stepped across the threshold.
Janeway turned from the replicator to face him, a freshly steaming mug of coffee in one hand. A pile of padds lay dark on the desk before her.
She did not invite him to sit, so Tom stood at attention and fixed his gaze on a point somewhere to the left of her face.
“I’ve read the Doctor’s medical analysis of the incident,” Janeway informed him, “as well as Tuvok’s security assessment, the away team’s observations, and,” she paused momentarily, “Commander Chakotay’s log.”
Tom kept his expression neutral despite the tightening in his chest. He wondered, again, if Chakotay had put in writing what Tom hadn’t been able to. The part that had nothing to do with breaking the transwarp barrier and everything to do with what was left behind.
“I’ve read your report, too, Lieutenant.” With her unencumbered hand, Janeway indicated the padd at the top of the pile. “I have some questions.”
He cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You’ve detailed certain events quite comprehensively, but others …” She paused, finally seeming to notice his rigid posture. “At ease, Tom. You’re not on trial.”
He moved his feet shoulder-width apart and clasped his hands behind his back.
Janeway picked up the padd and activated it. Tom couldn’t see the screen, of course. But the words he’d composed – evaluated one by one, each discarded or selected based on how bland and emotionally detached he judged them – seemed to hover between them.
“You describe your memory of the incident as fragmentary and largely non-retentive,” she said. “Is that accurate?”
Tom tried not to shift on his feet. “Mostly,” he allowed.
Janeway raised her eyebrows.
He sighed. “I don’t remember the pain, or the physical changes.”
“The tongue,” she supplied.
“Right.” He’d watched the sickbay logs. Agony, disfigurement, terror, bursts of rage, death and resurrection. No wonder the Doctor’s report had been eleven thousand words long. “I remember other things,” he blurted.
Janeway waited.
Despite himself, Tom’s hands untwined and his gaze met the captain’s. “I remember knowing you were there. Like… like that was the only thing that made sense.”
Her grip tightened on the padd. “You didn’t include that in your report.”
“I thought that if I didn’t write it down,” he said carefully, “maybe I could keep pretending it doesn’t matter.”
Janeway put down the padd and came around her desk, her eyes never leaving his. “You’re referring to Commander Chakotay’s decision.”
There was enough of a questioning inflection in it that Tom nodded, even though that wasn’t the whole truth.
“You understand why he did it,” Janeway said quietly.
“I know it was the logical decision.” The words came out sharper than Tom intended, but he didn’t take them back. “The Doctor said maybe their DNA couldn’t be altered the way ours was. We don’t have the resources to bring them on board anyway. And then there’s the Prime Directive.”
“All valid reasons.”
“But they were alive, and they were our responsibility,” he said starkly. “And they weren’t just an anomaly to me.”
Her gaze softened and she rested a hand on his arm. For a moment he thought she was about to say something – maybe that she felt the same way – but she didn’t.
It made him want to push further.
“That’s not the only thing I left out of my report.”
“Oh?”
There was an edge in her tone, and it made him rephrase the words he’d been mentally preparing. “I remember more than just sensing you were there. I remember … other feelings. I remember why I chose you to leave the ship with me.”
Her fingers curled on his arm. He stopped talking, thinking she was about to reprimand him, but instead she said, “I know.”
Tom took a careful breath. “Then you –”
“But,” she interrupted him, “I think that’s something better kept out of any kind of log. Don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said softly.
Janeway released his arm and moved past him, catching up the padd with his tortured treatise still glowing on its screen, then pressed DELETE.
“Tom, do you know why I asked you here?”
She waited for him to shake his head in reply.
“Because you survived something unprecedented,” she said. “So did I. Whatever happened – whatever we experienced when we existed in that state – it doesn’t disappear just because the consequences may be inconvenient.”
Tom felt the tightness in his chest unwind a little.
“If you remember more,” Janeway said, “you don’t need to file a report. You can bring it to me.”
“To talk to you?” he asked, feeling his way through everything she wasn’t saying.
Her eyes caught his and held, just long enough to make his heart thud twice, hard. When she answered there was a rasp in her voice that reached to the base of his spine. “If that’s what you need.”
“Okay,” he said under his breath, his gaze steady on hers now. “Okay.”
She straightened up. “Dismissed, Lieutenant.”
He nodded, but before he reached the door to the bridge, her voice stopped him.
“Go easy on Chakotay.”
“Captain?” Some of the outrage returned.
“He made the best decision he could,” she reminded him. “And he was in command. You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re in the captain’s chair yourself.”
“I would have chosen differently,” Tom said starkly.
“I might not have.”
Tom shut his mouth. It had never crossed his mind to question whether Janeway would have made a different call.
“He’s been carrying it,” Janeway continued. “Every version of that choice, every possible outcome. Every judgement you or Starfleet or history could place on him.”
Tom thought about Chakotay’s sharpness on the bridge, the way the first officer’s eyes had tracked him, as if bracing for an impact that never quite came.
“I guess I can try not to bite,” he said grudgingly. “No promises, though.”
Janeway’s mouth twitched. “That’s all I ask. Dismissed.”
Tom stepped onto the bridge.
Chakotay’s eyes snapped to him immediately. “Everything okay?” the first officer asked.
“Fine, Commander. Permission to take my station?”
Chakotay nodded. Tom slid into place behind the helm.
“Not too fast, Lieutenant,” Chakotay added, and Tom laughed.