by Anonymous
---

Archive: PKSP, PKElite, ASC. . . Actually, I'd be in an absolute tizzy if anyone actually liked this enough to archive it somewhere. So, most anywhere is fine.

Spoilers: "Thirty Days", "Disease", "Bride of Chaotica".

Being a cheesy queer girl as I am, I've taken the title of this from a song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The King and I", called, "We Kiss In The Shadows."

Warning: I do awful, evil things to Janeway's character in this. This takes place right before "Equinox I," and is sort of anticipating the nervous breakdown Janeway has in "Equinox II." She's not in the slightest pleasant. In fact. . . she's positively hateful. So if you looooooove Janeway, I suggest you skip this.

Token Bitch: All this trouble for a little P/K? Jeez.

---

We kiss in the shadows.
We hide from the moon.
Our meetings are few
and over too soon. . .

---

"Mmmmph," Harry Kim asserted. He had meant to say, "I love you," but Tom Paris' mouth had prevented any actual words from forming in his. Instead, he found himself being playfully shoved into his quarters, before any passer-by could see the make out session that had been blindly begun in the corridor.

"Mmmm phmmf," Tom replied agreeably as he nimbly remove the other man's jacket and rubbed Harry's chest luxuriously with both hands. Soon they were both shirtless, and Tom had started on Harry's fly, but Harry wrapped his hands around Tom's waist and pulled the taller man closer to him without daring to break the kiss. Harry felt Tom's strong arms drape around his neck, and the younger man sighed happily. As his tongue lapped deeper and deeper into Tom's mouth, Harry's fingers subconsciously dug into Tom's sides.

"Bed," Harry declared gruffly, and Tom only nodded, entirely lost in the raging desire he saw in those coal-black eyes of Harry's. He didn't have to look anyway; in the last few weeks, Tom had made his way from this particular door to Harry's bed so many times that he was sure he could do it blindfolded. Harry took Tom's hand and took a step backwards towards the bed, thinking how he wanted to--

"Janeway to Ensign Paris." The familiar bark sliced through the heady atmosphere. Tom's face fell, his muttered curses ceasing only a split second before he had dug out his communicator from the nearby pile of clothes and answered, "Paris here."

"Is Ensign Kim there with you?" Odd, Tom thought, she sounded even colder than she usually did these days, at least towards him. He threw Harry a questioning glance and fought to keep the sarcasm out of his voice as he said, "Well, these are his quarters."

"I asked you a question, Ensign."

This couldn't be good, Tom thought, his expression matching Harry's visibly growing dread. When Janeway pulled an "Ensign this, Ensign that," it was time to run for cover. Usually she was content to rely on more familiar terms, although, Tom thought bitterly, her familiarity with him had significantly been reduced to almost nothing lately.

"Yes, sir," Tom replied, using the title he knew irked her. "Ensign Kim is present with me, sir."

"Thank you, Ensign," Captain Janeway drawled sarcastically. "The two of you are to come see me this instant in my ready room."

"But it's our time off--"

"That's an order, Ensign," she practically spat out, and cut the line.

"Shit," Harry breathed, quickly reaching for his shirt. "What could that be about?"

"I don't know," Tom said, dressing as fast as time would allow.

"Do you think she knows--"

"No!" Tom gasped. "No, if she knew, B'Elanna would know, and if she knew, well. . . we probably would not be alive to have this conversation."

Harry nodded grimly. "I'm sure it's nothing. The captain's still pissed at you, that's all."

"It's been months, Harry," Tom shook his head, and pulled on his second boot. "I've saved her freaking life a dozen times since then. You'd think she'd let up."

"This is Captain Janeway we're talking about," Harry reminded him, lovingly straightening Tom's collar. "She doesn't let up on anything, ever."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

---

We speak in a whisper,
Afraid to be heard. . .

---

I won't crack, whatever it is, Tom told himself over and over again, even as he searched his memory desperately for something he might have done to make the Captain pace tensely in front of them as she was just then. I didn't crack before, and I sure as hell won't now.

The silence was asphyxiating, and when Janeway finally turned to face them, the daggers in her eyes made Harry subconsciously flinch slightly.

When she spoke, her voice was low and disgusted, and her words mincing. "I've placed a formal reprimand on both your records."

Big fucking deal, Tom thought, but he spared a tiny, expressionless glance at Harry, to whom he knew these things meant so incredibly much, still. Shock and incredulity passed over Harry's face-- but only for an instant. Still, Tom thought he could hear a small crack in Harry's voice when he asked, "May I ask why, Captain?"

To no one's surprise, she completely ignored him. "Commander Chakotay overheard Lieutenant Chapman talking to another crewmember in Engineering." Janeway allowed the pregnant pause to hang between them, waiting to see if realization would hit either of them. When it didn't, she added coldly, "I don't normally concern myself with how my crew spends their evenings off, gentlemen. But you are both well aware that the rule against fraternizing with crewmembers of the same gender is very specific."

"What?!" Tom and Harry cried out together, and threw each other identical horrified glances.

Janeway turned to Tom, and he thought that if looks could kill, he'd be a pile of ashes right about now. "Commander Chakotay ordered Chapman to tell him what he'd been talking about, and Chapman informed him that during some juvenile game a few weeks ago, you and Harry were all over each other in Lieutenant Delaney's quarters."

Two very different male voices chimed in simultaneously--

"It wasn't like that, Captain--"

"I can explain--"

-- to which one gravelly female voice promptly put an end. "I don't want to hear any excuses or justifications. I am ordering you to tell me what the meaning of this is."

Of course that sniveling little kiss-ass Chakotay had to come running straight to the Captain and tell her everything, Tom huffed silently to himself. The instant we get back to the Alpha Quadrant and StarFleet has kicked us both out again, I'm going to kick his ass back to here.

"It was. . . " Tom flushed slightly, but remained remarkably expressionless. "Truth or dare. Megan-- er. . . Lieutenant Delaney dared me to kiss whoever her spinning hair pin pointed to when it stopped, and it stopped on Harry. It was just in fun."

"What happened then?" she demanded, her posture one ready for combat.

"Nothing," Harry said, and hoped he wasn't lying too obviously. "We just kissed. You can ask Chapman."

"Chapman says the two of you left together immediately afterwards," Janeway told him, and the slithery insinuation in her voice made Tom want to puke.

"That's untrue, sir," Tom told her, his eyes meeting hers unsteadily. "Harry left because he was tired, and quite some time a fterwards, I thought I might have offended him and went to ask him if he was upset with me. He wasn't, and it was resolved. I eventually came back to the party."

Janeway gave a small, tight nod, and asked, "Has this ever happened between the two of you, before or since?"

Harry, for his part, was appalled. How dare she ask that? Who did she think she was? What made that any of her fucking business? All that was about to pour from his mouth, but Tom, seeing it, said hurriedly, "With all due respect, Captain, what concern is that of yours?"

"Ensign Paris, since this is the second time you're doing this in fifteen minutes, perhaps you need to be reminded that when a superior officer asks you a direct question, it is your duty to respond promptly and to the best of your knowledge. I don't expect to have to remind you again. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," Tom said tonelessly. . . then hesitated.

"Tom and I have never kissed or had any sexual contact outside that one occurrence that you were told about in Lieutenant Delaney's quarters, Captain," Harry told her gently, and knew he sounded convincing.

Satisfied, Janeway gave a small, tight nod. "I understand that you gentlemen are very close friends and share a special camaraderie. I also understand that when in close confines such as those of Voyager, these special friendships can confuse the friends and make them think they are romantically attracted to each other. But you know and I know that sexual contact between two men is disgusting and amoral."

But the only sound was that of their shocked silence.

"Chapman said that the kiss was quite a bit more than just a kiss," Janeway elaborated. "He said the two of you, to use his colloquialism, 'made out' in front of everyone."

"It was just a game, sir," Tom said softly. His stomach was churning with rage.

"It better have been," Janeway hissed, imposing herself a mere inches away from first Tom's face, then Harry's. "If I hear of ANY sort of impropriety between the two of you ever again, you're spending the rest of the journey home in solitary confinement in the brig. Apart. Until then, I'm assigning you staggered duty shifts and ordering you to see as little as possible of each other permanently. I've already had Tuvok erase the Chaotica program." And then-- a bare murmur from Paris. She whirled to face him. "Do you have something to say, Mr. Paris?"

"I said that this is all so unnecessary," Tom told her, abashed. Her eyes narrowed into enraged, strangely calm slits, and she strolled back over to him. Their eyes locked for the longest time, and it was all she could do to stop herself from slapping the challenge she saw in his eyes.

When she spoke, her voice was slow and punctuated. "You better not fuck with me again, Paris" Janeway told him, so low he had to resist the urge to lean towards her to hear better. "Between that ridiculous stunt with the Moneans, over which you still remain without a trace of chagrin, and the way you humiliated me when your asinine Chaotica program went crazy, you can bet that I'm just looking for an excuse to bust your balls, mister. It'll be no smear on my conscious to have you out of my hair for the next thirty five years. Fuck with me too much, and I'll have you in restraints for that entire time. How would you like that?"

He said nothing, his eyes fixed on a point behind her on the wall. . . but a nervous bob of his Adam's apple told her that he was already imagining terrorized claustrophobic flashbacks, restrained to a bed or the wall, alone in the brig. She gave him the tiniest, satisfied smile. "That's what I thought." She cleared her voice, and said louder, "You're both senior officers. You represent me to the rest of the crew at all times. What the two of you have done is a disgrace. I'll not have my authority flouted behind my back. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," Harry answered through clenched teeth.

"Perfectly clear, sir," Tom drawled, and his voice was biting.

"Thank you. You're both dismissed."

---

Alone in our secret,
Together we sigh
For one smiling day, to be free. . .

---

"Motherfucking bitch!" Harry cried, throwing another pillow across the room. Tom watched him impassively from his own couch. Harry had been at it for a good fifteen minutes; Tom figured he was ready to start winding down. "Gods! Did you see her, Tom? She can't do that, can she?!"

"Yes, she can," Tom said barely audibly.

"I HATE her," Harry exclaimed. He realized what he had just said, and he looked at Tom to make sure Tom wasn't as horrified with him as he was with himself.

Instead, Tom only said, "I hate her, too." He wouldn't look at Harry, and that sent Harry into a panic. "But what can we do, Harry? She's serious."

"I don't know-- lodge a formal complaint--"

"She is in her jurisdiction, Harry," Tom told him, and sounded incredibly defeated. "It's in the books. We have nothing to lodge a complaint against. And besides, who are we going to complain to? Chakotay?"

"What are you saying, Tom?" Harry sat next to Tom and grabbed the other man's hand, which remained limp in his grasp.

"I'm saying we obviously can't see each other anymore," and his voice cracked on the last word. Tom looked away grimly, and Harry's insides shook with terror.

"That's crazy!" But his shoulders slumped, and a rebellious tear slipped down his cheek. He wiped it away angrily and went on, "I've waited five very long fucking years for this, Tom. I'm not going to give you up just because Janeway is a bigot."

Tom's gaze swept up to meet Harry's and he lovingly stroked Harry's cheek with his hand. "We have to, Harry. We have to."

"We'll fight this--"

"We can't. You know that." His hand dropped, and he squeezed Harry's knee. "We can't do this anymore."

"This isn't the Tom Paris I know talking," Harry said, sounding much braver than he felt. "The Tom Paris I know would have blown the Captain off and dared her to say something about what he felt was right. Unless. . . you don't--"

"I love you, Harry," Tom told him, his voice thick with emotion. "Don't you know that? Do you know how long it's been since I've said that to another human being? I think the last person I told was my mother, Harry, and I was a child. Do you realize how much you mean to me? This makes me sick; how can you even imply that I'm having an easy time with Janeway's fucking proclamation?"

Harry's spine stiffened, and he lowered his head in shame. "I'm sorry." His eyes locked onto Tom's once again, and he said, "The thought of never having you again, when we could be so happy, is--"

"I know," Tom nodded slowly. "Me, too." He gave a shaky sigh. "You said that the Tom Paris you knew would fight this. But, Harry. . . the Tom Paris you know recently spent the longest month of his miserable life alone in the brig. I can't go through that again, not for the rest of my life. This last stretch broke me. No-- it did, Harry. It really did. I'm thoroughly cowed now, just how she wanted. She knows I'm claustrophic and fucked up. She tailored those consequences just for me. Within a week I'd be begging them to shoot me. You saw what a wreck I got to be this last time. I'm still having nightmares. And-- in restraints; Jesus Christ, Harry. I'd lose my mind."

"She wouldn't--"

"Like hell, she wouldn't!" Tom cut him off caustically. "I would have agreed with you before we got to the Moneans. But now I know that Captain Janeway, once pissed off, is capable of just about anything out of sheer spite. She has to know that we're in agreement with her heart and soul; if we dare even hint at contradicting her, even if we go along with her, she will squash us like bugs. Don't you know that by now? Didn't you learn anything with what happened with Tal? She put a black mark on your perfect record because you screwed somebody she didn't like. And you still trust her?"

Harry swallowed, but said nothing.

"Something's happened to Janeway out here, Harry," Tom went on. "She's under too much pressure. She's going to crack soon. I'm not in the least bit sorry-- she's made plenty of people's lives hell over one or the other of her whims. But you're suggesting we butt heads with a highly unstable and slightly paranoid-- yeah, paranoid, Harry, don't look at me like that-- with a highly unstable and slightly paranoid dictator. You're asking for our ruin, and in the end, we'll still be apart. At least this way we can still see each other."

"But if she doesn't find out--"

"Fuck that, Harry, she'll be watching us for a long time," Tom shook his head, and ran his fingers through his short hair nervously. "You shouldn't even be here. You should leave."

Harry thought the pain in his chest would crush him. "You wanted this. You're tired of this, of me-- you want to go back to B'Elanna," Harry accused him, and the desperation was audible even to himself.

Tom squinted at him a little, his face etched with sadness, and gave a melancholy sigh. "I love you more than I ever thought it was possible for me to love anyone. But if believing what you're saying makes this hurt less, then I won't stop you."

They held gazes for an instant... but with an anguished cry, Harry tore out of Tom's quarters without looking back.

---

"You said what?" Chakotay nearly dropped his fork as he listened to Kathryn Janeway recount the day's conversation with Ensigns Kim and Paris.

"I had to; I couldn't let anything like that happen again." Janeway swallowed another mouthful of her dinner and sipped her coffee, only catching at the last minute the stunned expression on her first officer's face.

"Kathryn. . . I don't. . ." He shook his head and started over. "That isn't our business, who they kiss and who they don't."

"You should have seen their expressions, Chakotay," she leaned in conspiratorially, her face the picture of outrage. "They're hiding something. They were furious with what I was saying. If there wasn't more going on between them, they wouldn't have minded quite so much."

"They're best friends, Kathryn," Chakotay told her as gently as possible. "They've spent every spare minute together for the past five years, and you're telling them to break that lifeline off without warning. They're going to take it hard."

"Chakotay-- two men, kissing! Doesn't that make you sick to your stomach?"

He chose his next words carefully, weighing what she would and would not understand. "My people. . . don't look upon same sex relations the same way that most of the Federation does. We believe gender, like 'race' was until the later half of the 21st century on Earth, is ultimately a construct that people emphasize for political or idealogical purposes. . . but in the end, we're all more or less equal. Just look at the Andorians; they have a union of three, not two people. Two of those people are bound to be the same gender."

"Of course I believe that we're all equal," she retorted. "That doesn't mean we should all be sleeping together. Especially not my senior crew."

"StarFleet is pretty narrow in this case," Chakotay agreed, reluctance oozing into his voice. He recalled the angry, brief, passionate embrace in which he had once been with Tom Paris, and flushed slightly. "But. . . with all due respect, Kathryn, you seem to be taking this very personally."

"Maybe I am," Kathryn nodded, her jaw in set defiance. "But I was raised to believe that a man and a woman belonged together, and that anything else was unnatural."

Chakotay shifted in his chair uncomfortably, a fact that wasn't lost on Janeway. She knew that her deeply fundamentalist beliefs were borderline offensive to Chakotay-- he had many times pointed out how her religious ancestors had conquered, massacred, raped, stolen from and pillaged his own ancestors centuries earlier, and continued to oppress them brutally until Earth joined the Federation. And. . . when they had been stuck on New Earth, and they kissed so passionately, held each other so tenderly. . . her lectures on the evils of premarital sex had left him rather cold, to say the least.

"I know it makes you uncomfortable, Chakotay," she said, her face softened. "But I won't back down from my beliefs, especially when they're StarFleet orders. Tom and Harry need to learn a lesson, and if threatening them with thirty five years' solitary confinement is what they need to learn it, then that's what they'll get."

Chakotay considered what to say next, and finally decided on, "Would you carry that threat through?"

"Without hesitation."

"Tom Paris," Chakotay said carefully, "is severely claustrophobic."

"I'm aware of that."

"He has had to be medicated multiple times just to be able to sleep since the last time he spent in the brig in solitary. I'm told he suffered panic attacks throughout the entire time he was there."

"He brought it upon himself." She shrugged simply. "Don't tell me you're feeling sorry for him."

"No," he quickly said. "I'm just pointing out medical facts to you. I'm not sure he'd survive being restrained and in solitary. I don't think the Doctor would approve, either."

"Duly noted," Janeway nodded. "Then let's hope we don't get a chance to find out."

Chakotay swallowed down the rest of his words, and resumed eating his dinner. What a coincidence, he thought to himself with a heavy dose of irony; the food's turned cold.

---

End