NC-13   It's NOT a death story btw... 

For many years, I believed that Thomas Eugene Paris was the living embodiment of all those faults.

I judged him before I even met him and when our paths finally crossed I found nothing to disabuse me of my preconceived notions. The only son of one of the most powerful men in the Federation, Tom Paris was infamous as the embodiment of a spoilt golden-boy who had thrown away a destiny of greatness because he was too weak to carry the burden of his family name.

Yet, I was wrong.

Despite all of the facades that Tom used to hide himself behind, he was never guilty of borrowing pride. The only thing that Tom ever borrowed was guilt. His pride is his own and he wears it deservedly and well.

It took me many years before I could see clearly through the intricate self-protective layers he had wrapped around himself and, although I was not alone in perceiving him as the man he pretended to be, I blame myself for all the years we wasted as we danced around each other like fighters in a boxing ring. Our pugilistic relationship, woven from a thousand sessions of verbal sparring into a tapestry of mutual loathing, was always as much my fault as his.  I found him inexplicable. He was more alien to my perceptions of morality than any non-human entity that I had ever encountered.

In many ways, my re-evaluation of Tom's character was a slow, laborious process that took place largely in my subconscious over a period of several years. Looking back, I wonder at my own behavior. Surely from the moment that he risked his life to save mine on the Ocampan staircase I should have realized that my preconceptions of him were wrong. Instead, I judged his behavior on that occasion badly. I passed judgment on his attitude rather than his actions. I allowed my vision of him to be clouded by my dislike of his irreverent attitude to authority in general and myself in particular.

No matter how deeply ingrained my prejudices, I *had* begun to respect his abilities and admire his courage long before that fateful day that our Voyage ended. I cared for him as much as I did any other member of the crew. I valued his undisputed skill at the helm.  I took pleasure from his talents at holo-programming.  I even trusted him to at least always *try* to do the right thing, albeit with the over-eager thoughtlessness of an over-grown collie pup.

What I had never achieved, though, was the ability to *like* him.

Any good leader knows that it takes a mixture of talents and temperaments to make a good team. Kathryn understood that right from the onset. I often accused her of  treating Tom like a reclamation project. I wavered between believing her interest in Tom was maternal to suspecting it was romantic.  He was, undeniably, the best looking man I'd ever set eyes upon.  He had a fine-boned beauty that captivated males and females alike and yet, despite his deceptively lean frame and pretty features, there was nothing soft nor feminine about him. He prowled through the corridors of Voyager like a young lion, but like that lion he never stalked his prey. Sun-kissed gold, he lazed indolently on his off-duty hours and waited for his victims to throw themselves at his feet.

At least that was *my* perception of him but I have already admitted that I was wrong.

Kathryn always saw him more clearly than I did. She often took the opportunity of our weekly informal dinners to bring him into our conversation. She would point out that what I saw as his weaknesses were in many ways his strengths. She would shrug off my complaints of his irreverence on the Bridge and comment that his presence was missed whenever he was off-duty. Whenever I pointed out that he consistently acted without thinking ahead, she would remind me that his actions were always motivated from a good heart. Yet, despite her staunch defense of him in private she never allowed his misdemeanors to go publicly unpunished. To an extent, she was harsher with him than she was with any other member of the crew.  So I concluded, in the end, that her feelings towards him *were* maternal rather than romantic.

The realization came as a relief to me although, yet again, I misconceived my own reasons for feeling that way.

I wish she'd witnessed my awakening.  Looking back, I think she knew what was in my heart years before I identified the emotion myself. It's just little things, the turn of her head, the rising of her eyebrow, the deflection of one of my diatribes with a joke, the way she turned every private talk we had around so that Tom had at least a walk-on part in every conversation. She was a stubborn woman, a proud woman. Too proud sometimes. Yet, underneath the veneer of Captain that she maintained so rigidly, even when we were alone, she was a warm and romantic person.  The clues were there in her choice of holoprograms. In her private fantasies she indulged her longing for romance, but in real life she tried to foster it in others.

Perhaps, in a strange way, she had some maternal feelings for me too.

I misinterpreted *her* affection too.  For a long time I seriously considered Kathryn as my potential mate.  She tolerated my fantasy with grace, never actually rejecting my advances but simply pretending not to see them for what they were.

Then, she'd mention Tom.

We'd share a meal and she'd casually mention that one of the foodstuffs was Tom's favorite. We'd visit the holodec together and at some point she'd either compare the program with one of Tom's or suggest that he also would enjoy the scene we were experiencing. Even on New Earth, when only *she* believed that we would find a way to escape that planet, she still spoke of Tom.  

It was no wonder that I believed for so long that Tom Paris was my rival for Kathryn's attention.

There's an old Earth saying that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.  Kathryn didn't just lead me to the trough, she kept dunking my head under until I choked. She probably despaired of me ever waking up enough to take a long cool draught.

Maybe I never would have under any other circumstances.

So, although I pretend to Tom that I am as determined as he is to escape this place, I am content here.

Kathryn taught me well.  Not only how to finally open my eyes and *see* Tom for who he is, but she taught me, on New Earth, that there is sometimes something inside a person that prevents them *ever* accepting defeat. Just as Kathryn would never have ceased her search for a cure, neither will Tom ever stop his quest to find a way off this planet.

It's not that he's not happy here.

Despite the daily struggle we have to survive on this planet that was never designed for human life, Tom shines like a fallen star.

Everything about him is brightness. Sometimes, when he smiles at me, I imagine that he contains a warp-core worth of light. He is golden, glowing, basking in my attention, delighting in the love that has slowly grown between us. Every morning he says that he'd rather spend the rest of his life alone here with me than lose what we have found together.

Then he spends the rest of the day trying to find a way to mend the shuttle.

For the first three months after we crashed here, swept so far off course by the meteor storm we were fleeing that we knew Voyager would probably never find us, I shared Tom's desire to escape.  Even though I was so badly hurt in the crash that even with Tom's medical skills it was touch and go for several weeks whether I would fully recover. 

I spent the first of those months confined to a makeshift bed in a natural cave near to where we crashed, while Tom split his time between caring for me and attempting to mend the shuttle.  I learned a lot about Tom in that time. I learned a lot about myself too.  Lying awake for hours, unable to do anything except *think*, allowed me to finally face what had been lying dormant in my heart for so long.

How many ways do I love Tom? In more ways than there are stars in the sky. I love his smile, his laugh, his pout, his frown. I love the way that he moves and his stillness in sleep. I love his eternal optimism and his ceaseless doubts. The way that he and I think like one and the way that he challenges my opinions. I love his self-confidence and his self-doubt.

Tom Paris is a living contradiction. Hard and soft. Fire and ice. Laughter and tears. Strength and weakness.  I could live with him for a thousand lifetimes and never truly know him. Yet there is never anything I could learn about him that I wouldn't love.

Over the years, as we have lived here alone, I have patiently flaked away some of his veneer. I have chipped away at his illusion. I painstakingly peeled the armor of Voyager's flyboy to see the real man beneath. I discovered that the tarnished gold-plate didn't hide a base interior, but one so precious that it put Tom's external beauty to shame.

A lot of my love for Tom is that which has been tested and strengthened by time. As each day passes in this place the emotional cord that binds us together is woven thicker and stronger. We are more than lovers; we are friends. I can't pin-point the moment when I started to like Tom, but I know the precise moment that I started to love him.

It was the first time I ever saw him cry.

Tom is a strong man, perhaps the strongest man I've ever known. His strength is deceptive and something that is easy for someone to miss if they aren't *really* paying attention. Tom bends, adapts, changes, compromises. That can seem like a weakness of character to a superficial observer. It's only when you take the time to *really* watch him, really see the pattern of his behavior, that you realize that Tom simply cannot allow himself to fail. He will retreat, faint, fall-back, change the angle of his attack. He will even *seem* to give up.

That's where casual observation fails. When you know him, *really* know him, when you have no other distraction nor entertainment except Tom-watching you learn that he only retreats so that he has a running start to try again. He only seems to fail so that he can approach again with the element of surprise.

Very few things ever *really* defeat him and those are the few things that *really* hurt him.

The first time he ever admitted failure to me, he cried.  It wasn't a self-pitying type of emotion, it wasn't even a call for sympathy. It was angry and furious and full of self-hatred. His tears were so hot they burned my heart.

After four weeks on that planet, he finally had to admit to me that he had run out of options. That he had looked everywhere, had tried everything, had run his tricorder over every piece of vegetation that he could find and that there were no options left. Now that we had run out of supplies from the shuttle to supplement my diet, I would *have* to eat the flesh of the amphibious fish-type creatures that were the only advanced form of life on the planet's surface.

And that was the moment I fell in love with him.

I'm not a fool. I know that sometimes life forces a person to choose between ideals and reality. I had the choice to remain vegetarian and die or eat flesh and live. The choice I made was inevitable and so caused me less moral dilemma than I would have expected. For Tom, though, the fact that he was forced to present me with that ultimatum was shattering. It was seeing *his* pain, his anger and outrage at his failure to find me a better solution, that finally opened my eyes to him.

That night was the first time we made love. What began as a tearful, angry confession moved to a mutually comforting hug that turned inevitably to a slow and languorous exploration of our bodies. For Tom that first time was just a plea for comfort and forgiveness, an offering of himself to soothe the blow of the news he had given me. For me, though, it was a promise made and forever kept.

Sometimes, when I think back to that night, I believe the Spirits guided us together at that specific point in our lives.  If I imagine how I might have reacted to the truth *without* that love already firmly lodged inside my heart, I shiver and go cold.  Just as we are sometimes too blind to see love when it is offered to us, so love allows us to then blind ourselves deliberately to protect the one that we love.

On the sixth week on that planet, I decided I finally was strong enough to walk down to the clearing where we had crash landed to see the progress Tom had made. It was a long way. Such a distance that I was amazed that Tom had managed to drag me as far as the cave at all. I wasn't the *only* one of us hurt in that crash. Imagining him limping all that way, pulling me on a make-shift stretcher with his one unbroken arm, I was stunned and my respect for him grew even as confusion made me weak.

I remember my heart thudding in my chest, my blood rushing through my veins so fast that it almost deafened me as I asked, "How's it going, Tom?"

He poked his head out of the shuttle door, his smile as blinding as the midday sun that beat down on his golden hair and he although he said, "You shouldn't have walked so far, Chak," he swung down to greet me with an obviously welcoming embrace.

"So...you're making good progress?" I asked, when he finally released me.

"Slow," he admitted, still smiling radiantly, "but it'll speed up now you're well enough to help." 

So I did, for a couple of months anyway. It wasn't like there was that much else to do. At first I admit I just wanted to stay near him, keep my eye on him. I admit I was as scared as I was confused and my heart told me the only way to handle the situation was to help him.

Two months is a hell of a long time on a planet like this one. It was long enough for me to change my priorities. We needed more than just shelter. We needed warmth when the chill of the night wrapped itself so tightly around us that even shared body heat wasn't enough. We needed permanent traps to capture the fish-like creatures that so often eluded our lines.  As the weeks passed, as Tom's natural leanness became an almost painful thinness, I began to abandon my own work on the shuttle and concentrate purely on keeping us alive.

At first, Tom assumed my decision to spend my days weaving reeds into nets and blankets was just because I was still physically weak. So he left me to it, occasionally joking that I obviously had a *nesting* instinct. And, as I had with Kathryn before, I would drag him from his obsession as night fell, forcing him to eat, to drink, to sleep. 

Then, on the day I marked my makeshift calendar with the first day of the fourth month, I finally forced him to sit down and talk with me. I pointed out that Voyager was long gone. That no matter how desperately they had wanted to find us, they would have been forced to abandon the search and leave by now. I carefully pointed out that even *when* Tom managed to get the shuttle to fly once more, that there was nowhere for us to go in it.

"I know," he said. Then he leant forward and kissed me and the conversation was over.

The next morning he returned to work on the shuttle.

And that's our life now.

We have a small kiln, powered by the shuttle's warp core. I spend a lot of days making utensils out of the river mud and firing them in that kiln. Tom occasionally looks at the growing pile of crockery and, with a high-wattage grin, asks me if I'm expecting company for dinner.

Two years ago I ran out of ways to make our cave any more comfortable. By that time I'd built us a raised bed, table, chairs, a proper out-house, a functioning water pump.  I'm seriously considering starting a new shelter. A real house this time. A little closer to the river perhaps, now that we know where the flood plain ends.

When I mention the idea to Tom he just smiles, pats me on the shoulder and tells me to 'knock myself out'.

Then he returns to work on the shuttle.

These days, the 'work' consists mainly of keeping her clear of the creeping weeds that pass for grass on this planet. Their roots have taken a firm hold beneath the shuttle, wrapping her in their greedy caress. The only time I managed to distract him from his obsession for a few days, he returned to find her smothered in foliage.

It was the second and last time I saw him cry. He was almost hysterical as he ripped and tore at the weeds that had wrapped themselves around and through the broken metal carcass.

I found him collapsed on the ground, his shoulders heaving, his face streaked with tears.

"It's fucked, Chak," he sobbed. "It's completely fucked, isn't it?"

I wrapped my arms around him, pulling his back against the warmth of my chest, letting his head nest against my neck, stroking his fine, soft hair as he cried against me.

"She'll be fine, Tom," I lied, as I looked over his head at the wreckage, as my eyes traced the jagged ripped panels, the rusting frame and the electronic panels that strewed the ground around her like the entrails of a disemboweled corpse. "If anyone can fix her, Tom, you can."

He twisted in my arms, searching my face for sincerity, for faith, and as though a light switch had been turned on, his radiant smile returned.

Sometimes we need fantasies.

For a long time I thought the fantasy that Tom needed was that we'd escape this planet. It hurt me a little, to be honest. As much as I had also originally wanted to escape, we've made a life here with each other and now there's nowhere else in the universe that I want to be. Only, well it's not the planet I've grown to love but anywhere that Tom is.  I've found a peace here that I only ever dreamed was possible. Loving Tom, being a faithful satellite of his brightness, I've found *my* home.

Home is where Tom is.

I can't bear to see that brightness dimmed, to see him hurt by reality. So I live with his fantasy, his unceasing need to believe the shuttle will one day rise again.  I spend my days protecting his fantasy, keeping him fed and warm and safe and loved, taking care of our survival so that he can spend his days simply pursuing his hopeless dream.

His fantasy doesn't hurt me anymore because I finally understand it, understand *him*.

Just as I have my religion, my faith, so does Tom have a religion of his own.

It's nothing like anyone else's, but then Tom is unique and so his faith is something new and bright and incomprehensible to anyone except himself.

Tom's god is flight, the alter he worships at is a broken shuttle and the faith he has defies anything as mediocre as reality.

The day that I first saw the shuttle, six weeks after we crashed on this planet, I remember the sight of her made my blood run cold. Not because she was destroyed beyond repair.  By that time Voyager's failure to respond to our distress beacon meant that the chances of our ever being rescued were already slim to none. What terrified me was that Tom actually seemed to believe that she could be repaired. 

I looked at the shuttle, at Tom's smiling face and realized that, by any normal definition of the word, he was insane.

It was my love for him that kept me silent. It was my time with Kathryn on New Earth that gave me enough understanding to support his 'madness'. It was my inability to see him in pain that made me pretend to believe.

Yet, as the years pass, I find myself becoming an acolyte to Tom's religion. 

Sometimes there is a divinity to madness.

The shuttle isn't a broken space ship. It's Tom's mystery walk. 

When we were back on Voyager, I believed that Tom Paris was a man sorely in need of moral and spiritual guidance. I thought he was shallow and self-centered. I thought his external beauty concealed a dark soul, that his pride was false and that his brightness was the false sparkle of fool's gold.

I was wrong.

I thought his insistence that the shuttle could be repaired was a sign of insanity.

I was wrong about that too.

Because there is more than one kind of damage and there is more than one type of flight. Perhaps the shuttle will never leave the ground again but *that's* not what Tom has been mending over the years we have been here.

His obstinate refusal to accept defeat, his inability to give up fighting against impossible odds, his impossible cheerfulness every morning as he leaves to work on the shuttle and his ceaseless optimism each evening despite another day of failures. The way his eyes laugh when I accidentally make some untactful comment, as though he secretly finds humor in his own obsession. These are his medicines. These are the tools he uses to repair something that I never had even realized was broken.

Me.

Loving Tom has taught me the most important lesson of all. That you *can't* fly if you refuse to let your feet leave the ground. That there's a vast chasm between surviving and living. That reaching for a hopeless dream is better than settling for pragmatic reality. 

That life isn't about attempting to do the possible.

It's about aiming for the improbable.

And who knows?

Maybe that damned shuttle *will* fly again, after all.

Because, as I told him before but now repeat in sincerity, "If anyone can fix her, Tom. *You* can."

The End.