For Rossy

Part Five

As the door to his quarters whooshed silently closed behind him, Tom snarled a sound that was half laugh and half sob of frustration and decided that most of the Universe's current problems could be laid at the feet of whichever selfish, insane fuck had invented self-closing doors. He had watched his beloved 20th-century vids often enough to understand the therapeutic properties of a door that could be slammed shut. 

Fucker probably owned shares in a counseling service, he decided. He launched a violent kick at the low coffee table in the center of his living room. It toppled over with a satisfying crash and his lips drew back into a feral snarl of satisfaction. Somehow even the sharp, throbbing pain in his right toes was satisfying.

So he stood there, throbbing foot, bare-teethed smile, arms wrapped tightly around his stomach as though his self-hug could dull the twisting, churning in his guts, and he stubbornly refused to allow even a gasp to escape his mouth because he had a terrible, sickening fear that if he were to give voice to his pain it might transform into an endless wail of anguish. 

Too Fucking Late. That's what he'd said to Chakotay, because it was true. It *was* too fucking late. Chakotay had not only seen the light, but had apparently been blasted off his sanctimonious feet by its brightness. Chakotay had witnessed one thirty-second altercation and it had flicked some switch in his head, enabling him to throw away years of judgments and prejudices and instantaneously embrace a completely new possibility of the traitor's identity.

He couldn't begin to see how Chakotay had made that mental leap. In his opinion, Seska's attack on him, which after all had only been a re-enactment of her similar attack before the away trip to Caton, wasn't evidence of anything except the fact she was an insanely jealous bitch. 

Hell, she hadn't even hurt him this time. Well, not enough to justify Chakotay's comment that she had 'ripped half his face off'. Sure it had *felt* that way before he'd been regenerated and he guessed the amount of blood on his face must have made the injury look worse than it was, but the truth was that he'd gone to the head on deck six, to wipe the blood off his face before re-entering the holodec, and had realized that he didn't even have the faintest pink blush of regenerated skin on his cheek. The last time Seska had scratched him, he'd carried the muted evidence of regeneration for almost a week.

So Chakotay's epiphany made no sense to him whatsoever.

Then again, neither did the reaction of the crew when he walked back into Sandrine's. They had all crowded around him, proclaiming him a hero. In a progressively bizarre emotional scene that soon had him convinced that he'd fallen through a space rift into an alternate universe, countless hands had slapped his back as he had been congratulated for his bravery in attempting to save B'Elanna from Seska's attack.

With a growing sense of bewildered disbelief, he'd experienced first-hand the total unreliability of eyewitnesses. Despite the fact that they'd all had a ring-side view of the action while he himself had know nothing of Seska's attack until after the event, the most prevalent version of the truth was that Seska had charged at B'Elanna, that Chakotay had tried to catch her and then Tom, seeing the danger, had thrust B'Elanna into the safety of Chakotay's arms and had attempted to confront Seska himself. The more he had denied that crazy version of events, the more his assembled admirers had cooed about his 'humility'. When he had pointed out that it had, in fact, been B'Elanna who'd saved *him*, it had been B'Elanna herself who had announced to the crowd that she'd just taken advantage of the opportunity Tom had created with his own bravery. Then she had drawn him aside, pronounced she owed him a 'debt of honor' and had blatantly suggested he should exact payment of the debt in her personal quarters.

He'd fled from Sandrine's, terrified beyond reason by the shining admiration in Harry's eyes and the unmistakable burning musk-smell of Klingon in heat, and his fear had sobered him, transforming his original desire to return to alcoholic stupor into a confused raging resentment. Over the last few weeks fear had become a constant companion to him, something he had learned to hide if not control, but the resentment was something new and equally unwelcome. It also had a name, and that name was causality loop.

He suspected that Chakotay would have some mystical, mumbo-jumbo name for it, fate or karma or something, but Tom knew all life was a simple case of cause and effect. Or maybe not simple, since sometimes the effect came before the cause, but that was just the old chicken and egg argument and didn't change the essential truth that he'd learned from bitter experience. He'd figured out a long time ago that his life was just some cosmic low-budget soap opera. Time after time he'd re-enact the same tired script with the same bored actors. The scenery would change, the players would swap costumes from Cadet Uniforms, to Civvies, to Maquis Leathers, to Auckland Grays, to Starfleet Uniforms, but still the same essential story would be told over and over in an endless loop.

It was the story of a misfit, a cuckoo masquerading as an eagle, who was innocent of any wrongdoing except that that he was *different*, he didn't belong. Always there would be a cardboard cutout villain, who would spread misery and harm amongst the cast before escaping capture by wily legerdemain. Sometimes the villain would be cornered, the hounds baying at his feet, the actors gathering at the scent of blood, only for the villain to divert justice from himself by unmasking the innocent hero as an impostor. Other times the hero would defeat the villain, but in the act of doing so would give away the fact that he was *different*. So whatever the outcome, the episode would end with the misjudged hero being banished in disgrace, walking alone into the sunset in search of a new town, a fresh start, a new role to absorb in his search for acceptance, though all the time he knew that the next episode would end exactly the same as every other.

So it didn't matter whether Seska *was* the real traitor. Even when the villain was exposed, the episodes still ended the same way. He still ended up outcast and alone.

Cause and effect. 

He'd fallen in love with Chakotay and, if Seska *was* the traitor, it was damned obvious why the effect of that love had been an Auckland prison cell. Fuck. It probably hadn't even been personal. He'd spent two years believing it had been the name Paris that had painted a target on his back for whomever had set him up. Now it seemed more likely that it had been the cow-eyes he'd been making at the Maquis Captain that had caused Seska to discredit him.

Which had been the beginning of this particular causality loop.

Cause: Chakotay had let him be captured. Effect: He'd hated Chakotay's guts with almost as much passion as he'd loved him. 

Cause: He'd taken Janeway's offer, even though they'd both known there was no way in hell he could lead her to Chakotay's cell. Effect: He'd inadvertently reinforced Chakotay's belief that he was a traitor.

Cause: Seska turns out to be the traitor. Effect: Chakotay feels guilty enough that he wants to be friends.

Cause: Tom and Chakotay become friends. Effect: Tom manages to finally trip the big guy into bed.

Nice idea, except it was too fucking late now, wasn't it?

He could already envisage the way it would play out. Cause: Tom lets down his defenses. Effect: Chakotay finds out that Tom is insane. 

And that was 'best case scenario' because he was beginning to suspect that 'insanity' was the least of his problems. There was an insidious voice inside his head that was insisting that the only crazy thing about him right now was his refusal to accept reality. 

He knew the effect. He had superhuman senses. Not imaginary senses but quantifiable ones. How could he be imagining the abilities if they truly existed? He had…okay, let's face it, he had superhuman healing abilities. He could deny the seriousness of Seska's attack as much as he liked but it hadn't just been Chakotay who had thought the injuries to his face were severe. The Doctor had been equally shocked. And he could remember feeling the flaps of skin hanging down his face. So he *should* have the shiny pink evidence of regenerated skin. Just as he should have woken the morning after the pirate attack with at least a bruise where his forehead had impacted against his console because he *hadn't* regenerated himself, despite his lies to the contrary. 

Which begged the question of what would have happened if Chakotay hadn't called for an immediate site-to-site to Sickbay. Would his clawed face simply have restored itself? Would the skin have simply sealed itself back together in front of the stunned eyes of the other crew? Since the regenerated skin had transformed from raw pink to golden tan in the five minutes it had taken him to travel from Sickbay to the head, didn't that suggest it would have been perfectly capable of complete self-repair? The only way to answer that question was to deliberately cut himself and see what happened, but the thought was too sickening to contemplate and he suspected he was more nauseated by the idea of proving himself right than the thought of cutting himself in the first place.

That fear had a name too: Gary Mitchell.

Before his ignominious cashiering out of Starfleet Academy, back when he'd actually imagined he might fulfill the destiny his father had carved out for him, he'd eagerly devoured the history of the only man who had managed to make the staid role of Starship Captain seem an exciting career choice for a boy whose heart still resided in dreams of sailing ships and carefree adventure.

James Tiberius Kirk was his hero. A maverick who had broken every Starfleet rule and some they hadn't even thought to invent until *after* he'd broken them. A gung-ho, seat-of-his-pants adventurer who would have been as at home leading a rag-tag crew on a 17th century clipper to the new world as he was on a starship. He'd been fiercely loyal to his crew. He'd risked his life and career, time and again, to prove his ceaseless belief that 'the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many'.

Except in the case of Gary Mitchell.

Mitchell had become Kirk's best friend when they attended the academy together and the friendship had been strong enough that even Kirk's rapid promotion to Captain while Mitchell remained a lowly Lieutenant hadn't come between them. They had served together and played together and even, it was rumored, had slept together. Given Kirk's propensity to bed anything sentient and reasonably attractive, the latter was most probably true.

And Kirk had killed him.

Because something happened to Mitchell. He became *different*. He somehow became infected with some alien virus that gave him superhuman powers. Through no fault of his own, Mitchell became something more than human and as he began to manifest those powers his own crew became so threatened by him that they threw him in the brig and made plans to abandon him. Admittedly Mitchell had then gone crazy, using his powers against Kirk, but under the circumstances Tom didn't think that Mitchell was the villain history had made him out to be. Kirk had 'thrown the first punch'. All Mitchell had done was resist the idea of being thrown away like used garbage just because Kirk was afraid of him.

Tom's admiration for Kirk wasn't blind. No matter how great a legend he'd become, Kirk was a man and, like all men, had made mistakes. Overall, though, Kirk remained a shining example of what a 'good man' represented to him. Kirk was the yardstick that he used to measure people against and, in many ways, was the reason he'd fallen so hard for Chakotay when they'd first met. Chakotay was a Kirk. What he'd done, in giving up his Starfleet Career and joining the Maquis to protect his people, was the kind of maverick hero act that Tom believed Kirk would have done in the same circumstances. True heroes didn't follow *rules*, they followed their heart.

Like Kirk, Chakotay was a natural-born leader. People couldn't help but respond to his natural leadership ability and the calm self-assurance of his own worth. There were differences between them, naturally. Where Kirk charged into situations depending on his quick wit to save him, Chakotay was more measured in his approach. Given the leisure to contemplate the consequences of his actions, Chakotay preferred to think first and act later. But when he was cornered, Chakotay leapt out snarling with the same wolf-like instincts as Kirk always had, thinking on his feet with instinct and deadly assurance.

It wasn't a co-incidence that out of all the Maquis cells his had been Voyager's target. Starfleet had sent their finest new prototype vessel out to capture its most dangerous enemy and the fact that they had judged Chakotay to be that enemy was vindication of Tom's belief that Chakotay was a 'Kirk'.

But history had proved that even a Kirk wouldn't accept a monster like that which now resided in Tom's skin.

It's too fucking late, he'd told Chakotay, and he'd meant the words as a wail of protest against the ironic twist of fate that Chakotay had only opened his eyes to his innocence after he'd just become a Gary Mitchell, rather than a bitter rejection of Chakotay's apology. 

Which wasn't to say he hadn't deliberately allowed Chakotay to misunderstand him.

He could already see that lonely sunset beckoning and his only way of delaying that inevitable fate was to keep his newfound abilities secret for as long as possible and the best way to do that was to make damned sure that Chakotay never got close enough to peel away his defenses.

Even so, when the chime went on his door he barely hesitated to answer it.  He figured it was Harry, or even B'Elanna attempting a fresh foray against his disinterest, but there was a part of him that *hoped* it was Chakotay, if only so he could steal another memory of the big man looking at him without the usual scorn in his eyes. Memories were precious things that could be stored up to warm the inevitable winter that was fast approaching. Since all he'd ever dare accept from Chakotay was the gift of a few apologetic glances he'd need as many as possible to stave off the cold wind that was coming.

But it wasn't Chakotay, or Harry or even B'Elanna, and his surprise at his visitor's identity transformed into blunt rudeness.

"What do you want?"

And nothing prepared him for the equal bluntness of the reply.

"You. I want you to fuck me."

The voice was breathy, as dark and full of promise as midnight. A deep, crushed velvet voice that was at complete odds with his previous perceptions of the speaker.

"Go home, Kid."

"I'm not a kid," Gerron replied, and the blazing heat in his dark eyes was so intense that Tom nodded sharply in acceptance of that truth. Gerron wasn't a kid anymore. Come to think of it, Gerron hadn't been a 'kid' since the day he'd seen his family slaughtered by the Cardassians. There was an age of pain and bitterness banked behind those almost black eyes, the silent but subtle scars of a childhood abruptly corrupted by reality. Facing the fact that life sucked was a curiously maturing experience, as Tom himself knew only too well.

So no, Gerron wasn't a 'kid'. His slight frame was as deceptive as his pretty boyish face. There was a man's strength in that slender body and maturity in the brain housed behind those dark soulful eyes. More to the point, there was a man's longing seeping out of every vibrating pore of Gerron's trembling skin.

"You're leaking," Tom muttered without thinking.

He almost laughed aloud when Gerron flushed almost scarlet with embarrassment; dark eyelashes fluttering frantically as he surreptitiously checked his groin for the stain of his excitement. He wanted to explain what he meant, that it was Gerron's *need* that was leaking into the room, only there was no way to explain his thoughtless comment without admitting the fact that his whole body was thrumming in resonance to the waves of emotion that were pouring invisibly off the youth's body. 

The air was thick with it, lust and need and wants, with a sharp under taste of fear and a vibrating top note of anxiety. As he sniffed the air, his nostrils unraveling the heady scent into distinct identifiable strands, it felt as though he was peeling Gerron down to the bone, stripping him to nakedness as each layer of conflicting emotion was identified and then discarded. He could *see* Gerron and so he knew the truth. Gerron was no innocent kid.

Yet neither was he what he was so bravely trying to appear. Whatever self-confidence had allowed him to come here and ask admittance to Tom's quarters was rapidly disappearing in the face of Tom's apparent indifference.

"What makes you think I want to fuck you?" Tom asked, his face a careful mask of soft mockery to conceal the way his body was reacting to the offer.

Gerron chewed his lower lip uncertainly, a shimmer glinting now in the fathomless eyes, doubt and humiliation swiftly drowning the Dutch courage that had carried his feet to Tom's quarters. When he spoke his voice was still breathless but now its stuttering spoke of rejection rather than hope. "I thought…you…I mean you…well, B'Elanna. So I thought…"

Something a little cruel twisted inside Tom at the stammered words, something alien and hungry, something that pounced with eager delight as soon as Gerron began to squirm.

"I turned B'Elanna down, so you figured I wanted something a little *different* tonight?" he purred, moving forward in a blur of speed so that Gerron was still blinking in disbelief when he reached out and grabbed the younger man's chin between his fingers. "Something like *you*?" 

Gerron's eyes widened and Tom could hear the rapid hastening of his heartbeat, a primitive rapid drumming that beckoned Tom's own heart to join its erratic dance.
He laughed, the sound a little wild and panicked, and he dropped his fingers from Gerron's face both appalled and thrilled to see the white spoor of his cruel fingers still embedded into the flushed skin he had released.

"Run, little boy," he hissed. "Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind."

He saw it then. The real fear. The twisting confusion on Geron's face as he instinctively realized that he had waded out of his depth with his bold seduction. He saw Gerron take a step back, his dark eyes wide with primitive terror as he sensed a truth that his mind would hopefully afterwards reject. 

"You're…" Gerron choked but then he shook his head helplessly, unable to complete the thought let alone the words because it wasn't his brain that had identified the danger that now resided inside Tom but some long dormant instinct carried deep inside his DNA from the time when the people of Bajor had huddled in caves against the unknown terrors of the outside world.

Oh run, Tom prayed. Run, Gerron. Get the fuck out of here before I lose control, before the smell of you and the touch of you and the sound of your so-delicious terror lets out the monster that's clawing its way out of my skin. Go now before I rip the clothes off your body and steal more than you could ever dream of wanting to give, go before you destroy me.

"You're…" Gerron choked, all huge eyes and gasping breath, all sex-scent and prey-scent, all staggering, quivering submission. "You're so fucking *hot*, Tom. Please. I want you. I want…oh, prophets, Tom. I don't know what you're doing to me, but… but, please!"

No. Oh fuck, no. Gerron. Don't …don't let it out. I can't…can't…

But as Gerron sank to the floor, his legs folding under him until he was kneeling at Tom's feet, his pouting, quivering lips pressing against Tom's crotch, his shameless naked need leaking out of his pores, Tom found that he could, after all.

~#~#~#~

"Cardassian?" Chakotay repeated, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Beyond any doubt," the Doctor replied pompously. "I would like, naturally, to point out that if my request to update the Sickbay files with the records of your original crew had been complied with, Lieutenant Seska's subterfuge would have been found out far sooner."

"How the hell can she be Cardassian?" Chakotay repeated helplessly, fighting the urge to scratch frantically at his crawling skin. He felt dirty, no, filthy. Filthy and contaminated. He wanted to cut off the hands that had touched her, the mouth that had kissed her, the cock that had thrust so fucking eagerly between that…that *lizard's* thighs. 

"There's no way you could have known," Kathryn assured him, her own face white with shock. "We didn't even imagine the Cardassians were capable of this kind of genetic modification and you didn't have the facilities in the Maquis to do these kinds of tests. Even if the Doctor *had* discovered this sooner, it wouldn't have made any difference. Her potential to harm your people ceased the day you were stranded in the Delta Quadrant."

"Did it?" Chakotay demanded. "What about her potential to harm *your* people, Kathryn? What about Tom?"

She closed her eyes for a moment to steady her breathing and take charge of her rampant thoughts. When she opened them again, her eyes were sad but steady and her voice, though soft, was uncompromising.

"The harm was already done, Chakotay, wasn't it? It was done the day you allowed Tom to be captured and imprisoned. Now all you can do is apologize to him."

"It's too late. That's what he told me, and he's right."

"It was always going to be too late, wasn't it?" she asked bluntly. "That's the nature of apologies. They always are too damned late."

"I know but if I'd agreed to the medical scans when we came aboard, if I hadn't listened to her excuses…"

"They were *good* excuses, Chakotay. They fooled me too and as Captain of this ship the decision was mine not yours, so the blame is mine too. It seemed entirely reasonable that people who had been subjected to Cardassian torture would be too terrified of medical procedures to trust the Doctor. There was no reason to suspect Seska was anything except what she appeared to be, a Bajoran woman who had survived a terrible internment as a Cardassian prisoner. She didn't just fool you, Chakotay. She fooled us all. She even fooled Tom. Do you honestly think he would have accepted the label of traitor if he had even a slight suspicion of who the true traitor was? He can't blame you for not seeing the truth, with all the evidence stacked up against him, if even knowing his own innocence he couldn't see the truth either."

"But he…"

"Wallowing in guilt isn't going to help you *or* Tom. The important thing now is how to move forward. We've not only got to decide what to do with Seska, we've got to find a way to break the news to the crew that doesn't harm Tom."

"Spirits," Chakotay breathed, rubbing his face wearily as her words sank in. "I hadn't thought it through that far. Your crew are going to be a problem now, aren't they?"

It was clear, from her failure to jump on his description of the original crew as 'hers', that she knew exactly what he was alluding to.

"They could be," she admitted. "Although the ex-Maquis will feel like you do, full of guilt and regret over misjudging him so badly, the fact that he *didn't* attempt to betray you will possibly go down badly with the Starfleet personnel. They already distrusted him because of what happened at Caldik Prime and the fact that he'd joined the Maquis, but after you made it so clear that he'd betrayed you a lot of them saw his infiltration of the Maquis as proof that he'd been trying to buy Starfleet's favor again."

"Which made him 'one of them', after all," Chakotay finished tiredly. 

"Of course, this could all be moot. We've all come a long way since we arrived in the Delta Quadrant. Both of our crews have learned to like and respect each other. So it might not make any difference if Tom is now revealed as a loyal Maquis rather than a would-be Starfleet spy. Hopefully it will all be water under the bridge now they have learnt to like and respect him for himself."

Chakotay thought about it seriously. "I think it will be, for most of them, but there's always the rotten apple in the barrel, isn't there? Whichever way we play this, *someone* is going to turn it around and use it as a weapon against him."

"Probably," she agreed.

"What the hell is it about him, Kathryn? Why does he always get dealt such a bad hand?"

To his surprise, she smiled. 

"Maybe it's just the universe's way of trying to make a big lug like you jump off the fence and finally wade in to defend him."

~#~#~#~

"You look…" Harry paused, obviously searching for the right word. Then he shrugged helplessly at Tom's raised eyebrow and offered the only thing he could come up with "Different."

Tom's eyes flared with alarm and the fork that had been hovering disinterestedly over his breakfast jerked and speared a piece of fruit with a violence that made Harry's own eyes widen.

"What do you mean 'different'?" Tom snarled, as though the word had a dark, insidious meaning that he alone knew.

"I meant in a good way," Harry assured him hurriedly and was so relieved to see the tension drain back out of his friend that he swiftly dismissed the fleeting suggestion that he'd actually been 'frightened' of Tom for a moment because…well, because that was impossible, wasn't it? "You seem more, well, comfortable this morning. The last few weeks you've been kind of creeping around like you're uncomfortable in your own skin. This morning you seem relaxed again, like whatever demon's been riding your back has climbed off again."

"It has," Tom agreed easily, his face suddenly a serene mask.

"Well that's good then, isn't it?" Harry asked brightly.

"Depends, doesn't it?" 

"On what?"

"On where it went."

"Where what went?"

"The demon."

"Huh?"

"What if it didn't get off but just got in?"

"You've lost me," Harry admitted worriedly.

Tom gave him a blazing smile and shrugged. "Jeez, Harry. If I pull your leg any more you'll have to limp to the bridge."

Harry smiled uncertainly, feeling oddly unnerved despite the relief that flooded through him at Tom's sunny expression. "So what's really up?" he asked. "I expected you to be in a foul mood this morning after what happened last night. I can't believe Seska attacking B'Elanna like that. Why do you think she did it?"

Tom shrugged and chewed a piece of fruit before answering. "I guess we'll find out soon enough," he said mildly.

"Everyone's talking about you again," Harry confided. "They all think you walk on water now."

"Oh?" Tom asked, with apparent disinterest.

"Even the Maquis are calling you a hero and," he dropped his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, "I think you ought to know that B'Elanna's prowling around like a love-sick targ, snarling at anyone who even mentions your name. I think you're in there, Tom and you know what they say about Klingon women"

When Tom frowned slightly, Harry flushed with embarrassment as he thought about what he'd just said. "Sorry. I know B'Elanna deserves more respect than that. I guess I've just reached a point where the only sex-life I have is imagining 'other' people doing it and, to be honest, I guess I'm a bit envious of you. She's one hell of a woman, isn't she?" He took a deep draught of his coffee as though toasting the idea.

"If you like that kind of thing," Tom replied. "She's not my type, Harry. I like my women soft. When I want hard, I prefer the real thing."

Harry blushed furiously, choking as his coffee went down the wrong way.

"You okay?" Tom asked.

"Yeah, " Harry gasped, when he'd stopped coughing. "I didn't know you…well, you know…but it makes sense now."

"What does?"

"The fact that B'Elanna had Gerron pinned against a bulkhead this morning, shaking him like a rat and calling him several variations of slut in more languages than I realized she knew."

"Oh?" Tom asked, with studied indifference.

Harry frowned uncertainly, then a slow grin spread over his face. "You did, didn't you? You sly dog."

"Gerron okay?" Tom asked.

It was clearly the nearest Tom was going to come to an admission, Harry realized with a sigh of disappointment.

"Yeah, he smirked right through the whole incident like he didn't give a damn whether she broke his neck or not. Weird really, since B'Elanna in a fury is pretty damned scary."

"It's all a matter of perspective," Tom replied, his eyes suddenly distant and haunted. "The kid's taken more frightening things in his stride."

"The Cardassians," Harry agreed sadly, not seeing the guilty slide of Tom's eyes from his own.

"As long as he's okay," Tom muttered.

"Okay? He looked positively damned smug to me," Harry retorted, a little enviously. When Tom didn't respond, he decided to pry a little. "So are you and he...um…"

"No," Tom snapped, and Harry shivered as a cold trickle of what couldn't possibly be fear ran down his spine at the blazing heat in Tom's eyes. "It was a mistake. I was drunk, he threw himself at me, and I fucked him. That's all it was. I don't even remember the details."

Harry blinked uncertainly at the coldness of Tom's words. Although they were essentially no different from the words Tom had often used to describe his regular emotionless sexual encounters with the Delaney sisters, there was something guarded in his tone this time, a shadow of hurt and fear that resonated through the chilly comment.

Harry leapt to the obvious conclusion and felt a dart of sympathetic pain in his own heart as he decided that Gerron Tem had obviously breached some part of Tom's defenses that weren't yet ready to be invaded.

He smiled internally as he absorbed this new knowledge. It explained how Tom could simultaneously seem to be more comfortable with himself and yet still be thrumming with a weird, undefined tension. Tom had obviously fallen in love with Gerron Tem and was just caught in the early throes of self-denial.

That decided, Harry smiled at his old friend and considerately changed the subject.

~#~#~#~

"Did I, or did I not make myself clear to you this morning?"

Gerron trembled at the rumble of menace in Tom's voice and his guts twisted and spasmed but he tried to take courage from the fact that Tom *had* allowed him to enter his quarters. He dropped his eyes to the carpet where he noticed with surprise that his right foot was apparently attempting to dig a tunnel to safety through the thin pile of the beige carpet. He forced his leg to still its nervous twitching only to find that his hands were now twisting together in front of his groin. Horribly aware that his dancing fingers were just emphasizing the twitching bulge there, he thrust his hands behind his back. Which made his hips jerk forward so that the material of his pants was now taut against his straining cock.

Almost whimpering at his inability to control his body's response to the older man, he raised humiliated eyes to Tom's face and was relieved to see a mouth twitching with repressed humor rather than derision and now Tom's voice was infinitely gentler as it continued.

"Last night shouldn't have happened, Tem."

He felt tears prickling at his eyes and although he struggled to contain them, they spilled down his cheeks in mute reproach.

Tom flinched slightly, as though wounded. "I'm not saying it wasn't good, Tem. You're a great kid. You're gorgeous and sexy and you're going to be someone's heartbreak and trouble. But not mine. I don't have what you want, Tem, and even if I did I wouldn't give it to you."

Spoken so bluntly, the words should have hurt and perhaps they even did for a fleeting moment before the resilience of youth slapped away their momentary sting leaving nothing in their wake but a sense of freedom. They confirmed what he already suspected, maybe even what he had *hoped*, he had nothing to lose here. Tom wasn't offering love or a relationship or anything else that it might be expected that Gerron wanted. All he had to offer was *exactly* what Geron wanted. Sex. Hot, meaningless, rutting sex. 

It wasn't something he was proud of, that dark need to lose himself completely, to float away from his body as it was used mercilessly, to find that special secret place inside of himself where fear and pain couldn't follow. He'd made the mistake once of confiding that yearning to Chakotay, hoping perhaps that the big Maquis Captain would become the key that turned the lock into his private place of refuge. It had been an error of judgment. He'd mistaken Chakotay's aura of strength for a shadow of darkness. He'd misread the contained physical strength for a cloak concealing violence. He'd sensed animal heat but in trying to provoke it he'd unleashed only a smothering, humiliating protectiveness.

Instead of throwing him over his desk and ravishing him, Chakotay had, albeit kindly, suggested that he needed some form of counseling to deal with what was 'obviously the manifestation of psychological scars left by his experiences as a Cardassian POW.'

The conversation had been mortifying, leaving him feeling so ashamed of his own desires that although he'd attempted several relationships since that day he'd always aborted them abruptly whenever his partner had breached the question of what he really wanted. Partly his caution had been fear that Chakotay was still watching over him like a self-appointed big brother, ready to charge in and save him from his own dark impulses, but the real reason was that he couldn't face anyone ever looking at him again with that combination of pity, sadness and disgust.

Then they'd ended up in the Delta Quadrant and he'd found himself trapped on a ship so small that he didn't even dare attempt to put a foot out of place. Voyager was too small for him to believe any rumors of his behavior wouldn't filter back to Chakotay. So he'd played it safe, avoiding relationships, depending on his innocent looks to conceal the dark yearning in his heart, so that no-one would ever whisper in corners that Geron only liked it 'rough'. He'd managed to bury that part of him so deeply that even he had almost forgotten it existed. 

Until he'd seen the way Tom Paris had danced in Sandrine's.

Hot, fluid, limbs moving like molten metal, a fury of strength and sex that pulsed with such heat beneath the deceptively lean body that it had threatened to explode into the room with the force of an erupting volcano. Gerron knew he wasn't the only person who'd seen it, the elemental fury that pulsed under the physical body. B'Elanna had seen it too, reacting as instinctively as Gerron had. Perhaps even Seska had been caught up in that spell, clawed by the invisible tendrils of heat and passion that had been emanating from Tom's swaying frame.

"You're wrong, Tom. You're offering me exactly what I want," he growled throatily. 

To his surprise, Tom flinched visibly and took several steps backwards, his eyes bright with both pain and fear. For a moment Gerron swayed there uncertainly, his perceptions of Tom as formed the night before now floundering in the face of his clear reluctance to continue the dark dance they had started. Then the truth came to him, in a sudden wave of understanding, and for the first time in his life he felt empowered by his desires rather than ashamed of them.

It was *Tom* who was afraid here, not him. Somehow he'd tapped into a darkness in the older man. He'd caught Tom in a state of semi-drunken, shocked vulnerability and had released something dark and dangerous that Tom was now desperately trying to re-cage. Tom was afraid of his own desires, perhaps even appalled by his memories of the night before, of the way he had ripped Gerron's clothes of with his teeth. 

His fucking *teeth*! Just the memory of that, of the dangerous animal he had unleashed in Tom, made Gerron's cock dribble with excitement.

You've got what I want, Tom. What I need. You've filled a hunger in me that I can't control and it's just left me hungrier. So you don't get to walk away now. You can't turn that need on in me and then just turn your back. You can't. I won't let you.

"Please Tem. I want you to leave now," Tom said, as Gerron began to advance on him with fever-bright eyes and ragged breath.

"What about what I want?" Tem asked in a silky whisper that made the other man's eyes darken in definite, if reluctant, response. "I want you to fuck me, Tom Paris. I want you to rip my clothes off and throw me to the floor. I want you to hurt me, Tom. I want you to punch that fantastic cock of yours into my ass so hard that they hear me scream in the Alpha Quadrant."

"Don't do this," Tom begged but despite his words his voice was ragged and rough, as though he could barely breathe, and like the night before his eyes were changing, becoming something *other*, as though something dark and ravenous was rising behind his eyes to fog his brain until he was aware of nothing but need and want and hunger.

"Fuck me," Gerron whispered. "Use me. I'm yours, Tom. All yours and you can do anything to me. Anything you want."

Although Tom's sudden scream of crazed hunger whipped through him in a flash of terror, sending him collapsing to his knees in a combination of submission and instinctive dread of this now alien creature prowling over to claim him, Gerron retained enough self-awareness to feel a sense of triumph that he had again unleashed the beast that resided inside Tom Paris.

And if, perhaps, he felt some sense of shame too at his deliberate provoking of something that Tom was obviously desperate to suppress, it was quickly drowned in his own relief as he was sent spiraling towards his inner sanctuary by the savage teeth that bored into his shoulder as the creature that was no longer Tom pounced.

Go to Part Six