Disclaimer: This story is a companion piece to BratKatze's wonderful Today, Yesterday, My Thomas and Wishes. It takes place in the same universe, and is based on events she dreamed of and wrote in her stories. It is absolutely necessary to read them first to understand what's going on here. This story is set just after Wishes. In the true spirit of list-hood I got so inspired by her lovely universe that I couldn't keep fingers off keyboard or brain in any gear but C/P so had to write this and get it out of my system. BratKatze has generously allowed me to play in her sandbox. Thanks, BK. I owe you one. The title is from a fragment sent to me by arachne (it seemed to fit so well with BK's early titles): Ah fill the Cup: - what boots it to repeat How Time is slipping underneath our Feet: Unborn TO-MORROW and dead YESTERDAY, Why fret about them if TODAY be sweet! - Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: (punctuation is his) Paramount: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Owns all, does nothing with it. Me make money out of this? No way. ================== Today be Sweet Part 1/3 by whitecrow June 1998 ================== "Sacre-coeur, chalice de tabernacle...." Tom Paris swore all the forbidden quebecquoise curses of his youth as his ship came apart under his hands. Where the *fuck* was he? How the *fuck* could he get out of it? His eyes darted over the consoles, trying to assimilate over a hundred readouts at once. Jeeze.. what I wouldn't give for a Starfleet shuttle, he thought, and groaned softly as the litany of starfleet shuttles he'd knownand loved scrolled through his overloaded brain -- Arruz, Bakersfield,Cochrane, Daystrom, Edgarson, Fukiyama - shuttles he'd crashed, burned, bent, cannibalized, taken for granted, and oh yeah lets not forget,*fucked* in, way back when. Hey, *that* was an idea, maybe he could go whoring around Starbase 847, supposing he survived all this, and demand a shuttlecraft as the price of his not inconsiderable talents. Woo-wee, Tommy-boy, thinking with your cock again, yeah, way to go! "C'mon, you can do it," he muttered under his breath, "got yourself into *and* out of worse situations than this, Tommy-boy. Forget the leg, it'll look after itself..." His hand moved fluidly over the sensor pads, eyes scanning data, brain processing information at heightened levels. *Shit*, adrenaline gave you a lift, he thought again, then hurriedly scanned the atmospheric readout. CO rising, that must be the cause of his lightheadedness. Thank god he'd had the foresight to fix the first aid kit to the co- pilot's seat before he began his run, but that still left the problem of trying to reach it. He tried once more to grab it with his left hand, gritting his teeth as his ribs grated noisily against each other, and fell back once more with his goal unreached. "One more try..." He reached across his body once more, pushing his mind and body past the pain "jeeze... just one second, one more only onejeezuschristsangdesaviour ....aaahhhh" He screamed once, but he had it! Panting heavily, he suddenly felt a huge constriction in his right side, and he could not hold the cough that tore through him, moaning in pain even as he coughed, and the blood sprayed bright red over the console. He fell back, whimpering as the movement jarred his leg, and blood welled fresh around the bone that protruded from his thigh. "ohgodohgodohgod the painkillers 're wearing off..." each breath was a whimper through gritted teeth until the pain subsided to barely tolerable levels. He fumbled in the medkit for the hypospray, and dialled it up for tri-ox and any painkiller he could think of. Gratefully, hungrily, pressing it to his neck, he waited the requisite 10 seconds until the delicious numbness began to spread throughout his chest and leg. He sighed aloud on an exhaled breath as he felt his brain kick up another notch. Hastily he leaned forward. Can't afford to rest, Tommy-boy, gotta get outta here... He had turned off the emergency warnings an hour or so ago, as the red flashing light began to get on his nerves, and was now forced to rely on the data readouts for information. He could hear the ominous creaking and rattling as his little Hornet shook itself to pieces around him. "Great little ships in their day," he mused, "only that was about 50 years ago. Oh *God* what I wouldn't give for a proper shuttlecraft..." Abruptly he cut power to the forward sensor array, trusting to blind instinct not to ram a planet, and routed it back to life support, laughing in adrenaline overload as he did so, knowing it would be close - death from oxygen starvation, or death from collision with some space debris. Hardly mattered, really, and it would be *so* nice to be able to stop fighting the universe. He was getting awfully tired of his one-man, uneven battle with fate. In bright red letters, heavy with danger, the heads-up display flashed "Warp core breach within 50 seconds" and this time he really did laugh out loud. His hand slowed momentarily, as his brain calculated the odds. Jettison the warp core and he was powerless. Impulse engines shared power bled from the warp core while warp engines were idle, so he would end up drifting in space. *Great* way to die - not! If he jettisoned the core he would be unable to outrun the resulting explosion. On the other hand, he could go down with his ship, in the tradition of all great captains, "and who out here would know to mourn my fate?" he thought wryly to himself. God, it was getting hard to think! He hit his head with his left hand, trying to speed up his brain, but it suddenly seemed all too hard. No way out, Paris, just accept it. "You always were a coward." - his father's voice, "Running away is what you do best." - the judge at the trial, "Coward, traitor, what are your thirty pieces of silver this time?"- Chakotay on Voyager's bridge in another lifetime. He tried to catch the thought back - remember why you're out here! You can do it! Abruptly he aborted the core. Standard Starfleet training came back at the weirdest times. He watched the rear sensor display as the core fell away behind him, scanning the heads-up for the time to explosion - still 30 seconds to go. A whole lifetime. When was the picture show going to start? He hoped any scenes from his life were interesting ones, he didn't want to have to go through the bad bits again, he'd hated them the first time. He leaned his head back, letting the medkit slip from his fingers. "Any regrets? Just one...." he thought, and even as the blackness began to fray the edges of his consciousness his brain supplied the image he sought, deep velvet brown eyes looking down at him... He sagged unconscious in his seat, and never knew the nimaginable power that seized his little Hornet and dragged it out of danger. --------------------------///------------------------- "Captain, I think you'd better get down here to sickbay." Harry Kim held his arm protectively over his commbadge as the patient tried to pull it down and away to end his conversation. "Can't it wait, Harry? I'm rather busy up here at the moment," came the answer from the air. "Certainly, Captain, it can wait." Harry looked down at the patient. "Guess you got your wish." he said. "Harry," gasped Tom, ribs only beginning to heal, "I just want to vanish as quickly as I came. Jesus, if I'd known Wolf Raider was around I'd have blown up the core myself. I don't want to see him..." he lay down, weakness and pain flooding through him suddenly. "You can't avoid it, Tom. He'd come looking for you anyway, always does. It's that stray kitten mentality of his, always gotta be looking after birds with broken wings, pilots with broken ships, you know how he is." Tom turned his face away, so that Harry couldn't see the expression in his eyes. Oh god, he'd rather be dead than here on the same ship as Chakotay. Universe's sense of humour again - when was he gonna learn that it just *loved* to kick him in the face? Harry leaned over him. "You OK Tom? I'll get the doctor... Hey Doc.." he called, rising, and a real-life honest-to-god human doctor strolled over to them. "Commander, I said you could have 1 minute with the patient since he's an old friend of yours; I didn't expect that *this* would be the result. His endorphin levels are spiking, his blood pressure increasing, alpha waves disturbed... oh, dear me..." he elbowed Harry out of the way and leant over his patient. Tom felt the stinging coolness of the hypo at his neck, then blessed nothingness. ---------------------------------///------------------------------ On the bridge Captain Chakotay exhaled a breath that he didn't even know he'd been holding. It seemed he'd been holding it for hours. Just another normal day for Wolf Raider. They'd fought 2 lone Dominion ships on the edge of Rift 751, and completely destroyed both. Although he hated taking life in this impersonal fashion, he'd become cynical about the Federation's chances of ever getting the Dominion to see peace and reason and just leave them the hell alone. Out here on the edge prisoners were a luxury he couldn't afford, and every member of the Dominion left alive would live to fight another day. Callous in the extreme. He shook his head, then hardened his heart, as he had done every day for the last 16 months, every day since he'd gotten his own command and begun to wage war. And it was a long war, a long and lonely war. As he did everyday, at least once, he wondered whether Tom was still alive. Always the unanswerable question - could he have stopped Tom, had he somehow pushed him away? Again the anger at Tom's betrayal swept over him. Would it ever lessen? Oh Great Spirit, life was simpler in the Delta Quadrant. He remembered that they'd rescued a runner in a Hornet some hours before the battle. The Dominion ships that he'd just destroyed had been chasing it. Wolf Raider had been able to get a tractor beam lock on the little craft and had dragged it to the safety of the hanger bay just as its jettisoned core exploded. The pilot was down in sickbay now. He supposed he'd better take a look at him - really, he didn't want to know. There were thousands of would-be heroes who thought that the way they waged war was better than Starfleet's way, and they were always getting into trouble, having to be rescued, patted on the back and sent on their way, to do it all again. He thought about those runners. Some of them were brave, all of them were foolhardy. They ran medical supplies, food, dilithium crystals, anything that was needed, across the frontier under the noses of the Dominion. They were small enough for smash and grab raids on Dominion installations, small enough and foolhardy enough to sneak prisoners and wounded out of the battlezone. They got away with things a Federation-sanctioned ship would never be able to. He admired them, wondered whether he would be contributing more to the war effort if he handed Wolf Raider back to Starfleet, rounded up his old Maquis crew and became a runner. It was a daydream he had had often in the last 16 months. With a sigh he shelved it once again, and turned to his XO "I'll go visit that pilot now, Commander. You have the conn." "Uhh, captain, I'd like to come with you." Chakotay looked at his exec in surprise. "Do I look like I need a nursemaid, Harry?" he asked softly. "No, " Kim replied, looking his chief in the eye, "But I'd like to come, anyway." Chakotay considered a moment. Perhaps Kim just wanted a private word in the turbolift or something. "Very well. Lieutenant Sarel, you have the conn. The commander and I will be in sickbay if you need us." "Sir." Came the laconic reply, and the Vulcan at Ops moved smoothly into the command chair. Chakotay and Kim left the bridge. Surprisingly, Kim was silent during the ride below decks. As they exited the turbolift, Chakotay glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. Kim was looking straight ahead, the small crease above his eyes the tell-tale indication that he was thinking hard. Again Chakotay wondered why Harry had wanted to accompany him. They reached the sickbay doors, and Kim turned to him as they opened. "Captain, " he said softly, "I can't think of any other way to say this. The pilot we rescued, it's.. it's Tom." Only because he had been with Chakotay for so many years, only because he'd seen him in so many situations, was he aware of the minute change in Chakotay, as if his captain had in one instant moved from one state of being to another. It was only a pause, a slight hiatus in his step, then Chakotay was moving forward as he had been before, no faster, no slower. Together the 2 men approached the still form on the biobed. Harry hung back, letting Chakotay approach his former lover alone, then moved to the foot of the bed. Chakotay stood still beside Tom. He looked down at the face that he had known, or thought he had known, so well, the face of the man he had loved beyond life, beyond reason, the face that he had seen in so many guises, arrogant, sorrowful, twisted in ecstasy, smoothed in sleep. Involuntarily his hand rose to once again smooth that sleeping brow, then paused, as he recollected what Tom was to him now. No longer lover, no longer friend, not enemy. An unknown. His hand came down on Tom's chest, as if he could feed his own strength into the heart that beat so slowly within, his broad fingers splayed over the pale green scrubs as if he could feel through them to the skin beneath. As Harry watched he bowed his head, as if praying, as if hiding his eyes. Abruptly he turned, away from Harry. "Call me when he's ready to be released." He said curtly, and left, striding out, his whole posture screaming privacy. Harry did not follow him. End part 1