For Rossy

Part Three

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

The constant monologue ran constantly through his head, like a looped vid-recording, as his fingers flashed over the console faster than he was consciously aware of making the tactical decisions they were enacting. The Captain and Chakotay had both ceased even trying to aid him with suggestions. They were both now just sitting back in their seats and clinging on for dear life as he spun Voyager into increasingly sickening twists and turns.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

He didn't need verbal confirmation that the weapons systems were off-line, or that the warp engine was bleeding plasma like a gut-shot hemophiliac. He could hear that for himself in the distant wounded groans of the engine room. He didn't need his new, strangely acute vision to confirm that they were well and truly fucked. Even a myopic tribble could figure out that one small starship versus a whole fleet of seemingly homicidal alien pirates was not the best of odds. Neither did it take a genius to figure out that just one more direct hit against their shields would be enough to make Voyager imitate a Roman candle.

Something the aliens obviously didn't want to witness, given the way they had ceased firing and instead had circled to form a blockade, confident their own shields would hold against the impact. 

"They want us alive," Harry declared from Ops.

"Or more likely they just want the ship in one piece," Chakotay replied dryly.

"Punch through, Tom," the Captain insisted, as the cordon tightened. "There's still room."

Yeah, unless you were fond of the nacelles, Tom agreed, as his eyes judged the closing, triangular gap between the alien vessels.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh YEAH…eat your heart out Kirk. Bet even *you* never did *that*!

Tom wasted a fraction of a second in self-congratulation that he had just proven every law of physics wrong by back-flipping a starship at warp nine then, as the inertial dampers managed to compensate for his impossible maneuver and those people stupid enough not to have strapped themselves in started to pick themselves up off the new 'floor', he reversed the procedure and righted the ship once more.

Amongst the screams and groans of falling bodies, only Tom clearly heard Tuvok's order to fire aft torpedoes.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh sh….

Because sound can't travel through a vacuum, the explosion behind them was silent. Its immensity wasn't *heard*, but rather felt, as Voyager jerked and shuddered under the compression wave.

At his station, Tuvok raised one eyebrow slightly into the Vulcan equivalent of intense surprise and then, as the beleaguered shields gave way under the onslaught of their own weapon's success, he ducked to avoid the bulkhead that sheared off the left wall and smashed into Tactical.

Oh shit.

Tom wrestled the conn into submission, subduing Voyager's frantic bucks and twists with the calm confidence of an experienced rodeo rider, and then pulled her to a halt when they were far enough from the epicenter of the explosion. Only then did he allow himself to wonder whether Tuvok had known what he was doing when he fired a photon torpedo into a dense cloud of their own vented plasma.

Possibly, given the fact that the entire alien fleet was nothing more than shrapnel now. Possibly not, considering the fact that the entire interior structure of their own ship had collapsed as a consequence and Tuvok himself was buried under half the starboard bridge consoles. As were Chakotay and the Captain.

To his left, Harry was sprawled over Ops, his head gashed open and bleeding with an intensity that proved he was still alive but unlikely to stay that way much longer. He was unconscious, at least, so his was one less voice in the cacophony of moans and screams that were wailing a deafening chorus through Tom's head in a maddening ship wide symphony of pain.

Except on the bridge. Everyone there was unconscious and, judging by the blood trickling out of everyone's ears, it was a fair bet that the compression wave that had knocked them out had also burst their eardrums. So, in a way, it was a comfort to hear the moaning on the other decks. It at least proved that the bridge had suffered the worst of the damage. 

Tom staggered to his feet, off-balanced more by the sounds in his head than by the throbbing ache in his temple where his own forehead had impacted against his console. He knew, without checking, that the comm. system was down and the transporters were off line. They both had their own particular sounds that he could have identified even through the wild percussion that was drumming through his head.

He couldn't afford to worry whether moving Harry would be dangerous, since not moving him would inevitably be fatal, so he grasped the ensign under his arms and threw him over his shoulder in a fireman's lift. When he realized Harry was less heavy than he'd expected, he turned and hauled the unconscious Captain over his other shoulder, then staggered off the bridge towards sickbay.

It took him over an hour and twelve trips to carry the entire bridge crew to sickbay and by the time he'd finished the emotions foremost in his mind were fear, confusion and resentment rather than any feelings of relief or satisfaction. The resentment was because although all of the crew he had passed in the corridors had been walking wounded, in one fashion or another, not one of them had agreed to help him. The fear was because he understood the reason they hadn't helped.

They were blind. 

Every single person he'd met as he'd dragged his fallen comrades towards the Sickbay had been wandering around in sightless confusion. As far as he could tell, the whole fucking crew were blind. Except for the bridge crew who were presumably deaf *and* blind. 

And no amount of waving medical tricorders in their faces could tell him *why* they were blind and without that information he had no way of curing them. Basic field medic training didn't cover what to do when even a tricorder couldn't identify damage. So, with the Doctor off-line and himself seemingly the only person unaffected by the compression wave, he'd decided he had no time to do anything except carry people to Sickbay, patch up any life-threatening injuries and then search for more victims.

So, once the bridge was clear, he had no option except to work his way around the ship, deck by deck and room by room, in search of anyone with more serious injuries. He gave up trying to gather people together and instead carried a med-kit and treated them on the spot, knitting bones and staunching blood where needed, in an increasing haze of his own confusion.

Hours passed, though he was aware of time passing only by his increasing exhaustion and the blessed gradual quietening of the crews' agony. Hours in which he became increasingly certain that he was trapped within some nightmare, wading through its treacle-thick horror by virtue of simply forcing one foot in front of the other as he stumbled from one fallen person to the next while all around him those crew who were less injured stumbled and cursed and tripped over the very people he was trying to save. 

His voice grew hoarse with the repeated need to say "It's me, Tom Paris," to the people who grasped him in desperation and he'd run out of excuses to say when they inevitably asked him why the lights were out. At one point, faced with over a dozen panicked and bleeding crew who had fumbled their way to the mess hall, he'd been cruelly tempted to scream out "The light's aren't out, you're just all fucking BLIND."

But fortunately he'd recognized the urge as nothing more than an outlet for his own growing hysteria and had remained silent, slipping back out of the room unnoticed as soon as he'd ascertained that none of them needed critical medical attention.

So time passed, until he was simply too exhausted to even try and stagger back to sickbay to check whether any of his original patients had woken up. Or perhaps he simply couldn't face the Captain yet and explain that they'd all fallen into some twilight zone where he was the only sighted man left on a ship of the blind.

And so, instead, he half-walked, half-crawled to his own quarters, locked the door, threw himself down onto his bed still clothed and drifted off into a restless sleep wherein the whole crew pursued him through the corridors of voyager until they cornered him in the observation lounge and explained from lips beneath sightless eyes why it was necessary for ship's morale that *his* eyes should be put out too.

~#~#~#~

"Well?" Katherine Janeway demanded, her eyes scanning down the ready room table and pausing meaningfully at the two empty places before fixing her gaze inquiringly at her First Officer.

Chakotay shrugged a shoulder and gave a wry smile. "Life signs in his quarters indicate he's physically fine but still out for the count. Do you want me to wake him up?"

"God, no," she replied fervently. "From the sounds of things he needs all the sleep he can get."

"B'Elanna too," Chakotay pointed out. "It's a miracle that she managed to get ship's systems back on line at all, let alone under those circumstances. It was her ability to patch the emergency systems in absolute darkness, despite her fractured skull, that got the Doctor's program running." 

The EMH greeted that announcement with a derisive snort since he'd spent the last two hours complaining so bitterly that his program should have been equipped with an independent power supply that several of the bridge officers had regretted having their burst eardrums healed.

"I agree she should get a commendation," Katherine said, with a repressive frown at the Doctor. "But Tom was the one who saved our lives. If he hadn't gotten us stabilized, we'd have died before the Doctor was re-activated. He performed triage on over sixty of the crew. Not one death, Commander. It's a miracle. Despite the absence of even emergency lighting he single-handedly made his way throughout the entire ship, found every single person who had a serious injury and treated them."

"Highly improbable, Captain," Tuvok interrupted. "Since most of the injured, ourselves included, were unconscious it's impossible to state unequivocally that Lieutenant Paris treated everyone. It is a far more likely scenario that several different people performed the triage."

"And then forgot they'd done it? Dozens of people have confirmed speaking to Tom during the incident in various parts of the ship and no-one else is claiming to have done anything except blunder around in the dark," Harry replied, his chin jutting pugnaciously in defense of his best friend's unexpected role as ship's hero.

"As far as I can ascertain," the Doctor confirmed, "Mr. Paris was the only member of the crew who wasn't injured in any fashion."

"That's odd in itself," Chakotay pointed out, "But fortunate for the rest of us since he's also the only half-decent medic. I agree with Tuvok that it's improbable that Tom did single handedly save *everyone* and until he and B'Elanna wake up we won't be able to fill in the gaps, but there's no doubt that he did act above and beyond any expectation of bravery and selflessness with what we know he *did* do."

Tuvok steepled his fingers and peered at them thoughtfully.

"I did not intend to sound unappreciative of Mr. Paris's endeavors," he said quietly. "I am merely perturbed by the scenario that I am required to accept in view of them. 142 members of this crew were injured, the ship was so badly damaged that even the emergency systems were off line, yet one solitary member of the crew was not only unscathed but appears to have physically carried over two dozen members to safety, successfully treated several dozen more in various decks and all of this in total darkness. The scenario is improbable unless Mr. Paris has perfect night vision and has the strength of several men. Both of which are evidently not true."

"It's a mystery," Katherine agreed, "but human history is full of
true stories where disaster has enabled a person to perform tasks that would be physically impossible under any other circumstances."

"There are many documented cases where disaster has inspired an abnormal surge of adrenaline empowering a temporary state of phenomenal strength and endurance," the Doctor confirmed helpfully.

"As the Commander said, I'm sure Tom will be able to fill in the gaps when he wakes up," she added, "but I'm certainly not going to drag him out of bed just to answer questions about it any more than I'm going to wake B'Elanna up to speed up the engine repairs. They've both earned a little consideration this morning. The important thing is that we've all survived. I think we can allow our two saviors a lie-in."

She waited until the other officers had filed out of her ready room and then called Chakotay back for a private discussion.

"I'll bet you're thanking your spirits now, Chakotay," she said, with a sly smile.

He frowned at her in polite puzzlement.

"For letting you start treating Tom more fairly *before* he turned himself into the ship's hero," she clarified. "An awful lot of people are going to be re-evaluating their opinions of him in the light of what happened yesterday."

"Deservedly so," Chakotay agreed easily. "You don't need to rub my face in it, Katherine. I don't have to like the man to acknowledge what he did. While I agree with Tuvok that a single man couldn't possibly have done everything that's being credited to him, it's equally obvious that he did save all of our lives. He deserves whatever respect or affection he receives as a consequence and I agree that both he and B'Elanna should have their actions officially commended."

"Does it hurt?" Katherine asked sweetly.

"Does what hurt?"

"Carrying such a heavy chip on your shoulder?"

"I don't und…"

"BS, Chakotay. Why the hell can't you just say it? You were wrong about him. You know you were. This *proves* you were and you still can't just let the past go, can you?"

To her surprise, the brown eyes that rose to meet hers were soft and sad rather than offended.

"I wish I could," he admitted quietly. "You can't begin to imagine how much I wish I could just 'forget' what he did before."

Her own eyes widened with surprise and not a little compassion.

"You *do* like him, don't you? For all you fight against it, you're not as indifferent to him as you pretend."

"I'm not indifferent to him at all," Chakotay agreed. "From the day our crews merged, Tom Paris has never once failed to perform his duties to the best of his abilities. He's an excellent pilot, a good officer and this isn't the first time he's saved our lives. I'm not a hypocrite, Kathryn. At my request, and against your own better judgment, you gave B'Elanna the fresh start I asked you to. You gave Tom Paris the same clean slate and he hasn't let you down. Now I've let go of the anger, I can see that clearly."

"But you don't want to, do you?" she asked.

"There's an old saying, Katherine. 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on myself.' I'm prepared to respect him, perhaps even to like him, but I'm never going to make the mistake of trusting him. He's betrayed his colleagues once and that proves that given the right, or wrong, circumstances he's capable of betraying again. No one changes *that* much."

"You're a stubborn man," Katherine announced.

"I have to be," Chakotay replied, his expression sad. "Because this isn't about *me*. It's about the people I've sworn to protect. I can't allow my own feelings to compromise the possible safety of the crew." 

"Oh, Chakotay," she murmured sympathetically, as she finally understood. "You *more* than like him, don't you?"

Although his eyes flared warily, he respected her too much to lie. A wry, self-depreciating smile flickered over his features and he shrugged as he said, "So call me a middle-aged fool."

"I think the only foolish thing about it is your own self-denial, Chakotay. If yesterday proved nothing else, it proved that our lives out here are too precarious for us to waste any potential chance of happiness on what-ifs and maybes. The Tom Paris who saved us all yesterday isn't a man capable of betrayal. Perhaps leopards never chance their spots and someday, somehow, Tom could again become the man he once apparently was, but I doubt it and even if it *should* happen then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. 

"Deal with the Tom who lives on this ship, not the Tom who lives in your memory. You'll both be happier for it."

"I wish it were that easy," Chakotay sighed.

"Nothing worth having is ever easy," she said, with a smile. "Give it a try, Chakotay. All you've got to lose is that chip on your shoulder."

"I'll give it some thought." 

"That's all I ask," she agreed. "Now I think we'd both better get out there and help with the repairs so that when our Pilot wakes up he has a ship to fly."

Go to Part Four

~#~#~#~