The BLTS Archive - Threesomes
#3: Alpha Centauri
by Nyani-Iisha F. Martin (nfmartin@fas.harvard.edu)

---

Disclaimers:

#1. All of these characters (except Ensign Tolbert), the venue
Voyager)and the universe (Star Trek) belong to Paramount; I'm just
borrowing them for awhile and letting them run around with no clothes
on. The story itself belongs to me, COPYRIGHT 1996 Nyani-Iisha F.
Martin. I have no intention whatsoever of making any money from this
story, and I ask that nobody else do so either; please ask me before
reprinting this story, etc., and please keep this notice on it
whatever you do.

#2. This is an NC-17 story. If you're under 18 and/or offended,
disturbed, troubled, etc., by fairly open-minded sex between two men
and a woman in various arrangements, please press the 'n' key now.

That all being said, here's the story, which begins directly after the
events of "In Triplicate".

---
Personal Log, Ensign Harry Kim, Stardate *****.


Due to the latest Kazon-Nistrim attack Voyager has needed nearly an
entire week of repairs, and probably will need even more. Because of
my injuries

----here Harry flexed his arm once again, as if to convince himself
that the bones were no longer shattered----

it seems to me as if only four days have passed; the Captain has put
me on indefinite medical leave so that the Doctor would not have to.

----Harry frowned impatiently. He felt fine. True, he'd been in a coma
for two whole days after his skull was all but knocked in by a piece
of flying debris; however, now he felt like his twenty-three- year-old
self again, and in need of something to do, someone to talk to.

Unfortunately, all of his close friends were still working feverishly
to repair their ship, B'Elanna especially. Feeling the impatience
surge through his blood, Harry decided to go call up a holodeck
exercise program. _I probably could use the exercise_, he thought as
he finished off his log and all but ran out of his quarters.

An hour later, Harry called up a hot tub and wearily dropped himself
into it, his arm throbbing. _Maybe I'm not as recovered as I thought_,
he ruefully mused, soaking away his aches in the warm water, his eyes
closed against the grassy field he'd been running through, one
reminiscent of the North American Plains. The hot tub was a small one
so deep that Harry could stand up to his neck in water in the center,
with a raised ledge all around to sit on; in this program it was at
the junction of that field and a Southern European hardwood forest.
This holoprogram had been his birthday gift from Tom, from Harry's
descriptions of what he *would* create if he were good enough at
holoprograms. However, having been written by Paris, it *had* had to
have the woodland nymphs deleted.

_Tom_, thought Harry, with a sudden stab of loneliness. He missed his
friends, and especially his two lovers. B'Elanna would be hopelessly
busy right now, but Harry did have to resist the temptation to go find
Tom.

"I wish I could," he said aloud.

"You wish you could what?" asked a voice from the fields, a voice that
made Harry's heart rise with joy as he spun to greet the speaker with
an enthusiastic "Tom!". Harry started to climb out of the tub, but Tom
forestalled him, running the rest of the way to fling himself in,
uniform and all, with a tremendous splash that made Harry laugh; he
was still laughing when Tom pulled him underwater to kiss him. A few
moments later, both men bobbed to the surface and let go of each
other, and Tom stretched and shook the water from his hair like a dog
that has been swimming.

"What are you *doing* here?" Harry demanded as he wiped his eyes, a
bit worried that Tom was playing hooky. This *was* Paris, after all.

"I was excused. There's nothing else I can possibly do right now
except fly Voyager when B'Elanna gets through fixing her." Tom pulled
his uniform shirt up over his head as he spoke, wadded it up, and
hurled it across the tub to the far bank with the exuberance of
freedom. "So I came looking for you. I haven't seen you in *days*".

Harry marveled at Tom's energy. "Shouldn't you be---" Harry forgot the
question when Tom lunged forward, pulling him into a tight embrace and
kissing him so hard he stumbled backwards into the corner of the tub.
After a moment's shock Harry squeezed him back, feeling the two of
them pressed together, heating the water, and feeling Tom, already
hard, poking him through the uniform pants.

Harry pushed Tom away with an effort; when Tom looked at him with
puzzlement he hoarsely replied "you're still dressed," running his
hands down Tom's warm, taut skin to the fastening of the pants. Tom
helped him, working feverishly, their faces inches apart, until all
his clothes lay sodden on the bank; as soon as the last boot left his
hand Harry grabbed him around the waist and started kissing him again,
and began kissing his jaw and down his neck as his hands slid down
over the small of Tom's back.

"Let's get to the bank", Tom murmured into Harry's hair, between
gentle bites to his ear. "Otherwise I think one of us is going to
drown the other."

---

"I didn't think that would work", gasped Harry only a little later.
Tom smiled, lying beside him on the grassy bank of the tub, his head
in Harry's lap.  He was still so _innocent_ in so many ways...."It
tends to,"

Tom said aloud. "That's why it even has a name: a 69. Some of the
things in those vids actually work."

"Well, yeah, but I hadn't thought this would." Harry sat up, looking
slightly dizzy, to smile down at Tom. "What other depravities do you
intend to entangle me in?"

"I haven't even thought them all up yet," replied Tom, sitting up to
kiss Harry once more, then spinning around so they were sitting side
by side. "Computer, cue sunset. I missed you," he added, more quietly.
"You gave us a scare." _The worst one I've had since that day our ship
was nearly destroyed, when B'Elanna reported you dead._

"I know. I'm sorry." Harry leaned against Tom, and drew his knees up
to encircle them with his hands, and the two friends sat together as
the hologrammatic sun began sinking over the plain and the air grew
moist and cool. "Tom, you're a helluva programmer," said Harry, taking
a deep breath that slid his skin across Tom's so that Tom trembled a
bit, beginning to be aroused again. "That air is wonderful.  It smells
like the hills above San Francisco...." he trailed off, his voice
tinged with sadness.

"Yeah," said Tom in reply, putting his arm around Harry. Sex could
wait, he thought, waiting for Harry to start speaking, knowing what
troubled him.  Harry had a life on Earth to get back to, had a family
who loved him and a fiancee....Tom felt a jolt of panic when he
thought about *her*. Could he and B'Elanna lose Harry after all?

Harry turned his head to look at Tom. "You shivered. Are you cold?"

"Not with you here," Tom flirted, smiling.

Harry smiled back, then settled his chin on his hands. "Last night,
because of...this week, I was thinking about my family," he said
softly, "about my parents, and about Libby. I wish I knew if they know
I'm alive....I almost....I realized I hope they don't."

"What?" asked Tom, shocked despite himself, but Harry took little
notice of his comment.

"I hope....if they think I'm dead....my parents will never get over
losing me to the Delta Quadrant either way, I know, but at least that
part of their lives would be *over*, closed. And Libby would be free."
Tom stopped himself from opening his mouth again as Harry went on.

"She's such a warm, loving woman; if she thinks I'm gone she'll have
found someone to love again by now."

"I don't think she's forgotten you," said Tom soothingly. _How
*anyone* could forget Harry Kim is beyond me._

"Forgotten? No, she wouldn't forget me. At least, I hope she hasn't,"
said Harry more archly, turning his face to look at Tom sidelong. Tom
smiled back to cheer him. "But, she's young, she has to go on...and so
do I."

Tom swallowed a cheer; he'd been waiting two years for Harry to say
these words, and patience was never his strong point. Quickly, Tom
tried to think of something to say aside of "Took you long enough!",
but he lost that train of thought entirely when Harry lifted his head
from his hands, and then put a hand on Tom's cheek, looking at him
with that wordless, breathtaking stare that seemed to go through to
the soul. Tom looked back into fathomless dark eyes, unable to breathe
until Harry, liking what he saw, smiled.

"I'm glad I have you to go on with," he said, and Tom thought his
heart would burst with joy as Harry kissed him deeply.

Then Harry lowered his head to Tom's knee, and Tom held him, stifling
a groan of disappointment. _There is a time to talk_, he thought,_and
then there *isn't*_....

"I'm not boring you, am I?" said Harry, dispelling Tom's thoughts into
a slight smoke of self-pity that wafted away. "After all, of all of us
you're the freest. You have the least to go home for."

"No, you aren't boring me," said Tom absent-mindedly, reminded of what
he *did* have in the Alpha Quadrant. One brother and two sisters,
their spouses and their families: three cards every Christmas, three
on his birthday, and nieces and nephews he'd never see lest he be a
"bad influence on them". His mother's grave, with the rosebush he'd
planted. And, his father, who was all but reason enough to defect to
the Romulans. He looked at down at Harry in his arms; his skin tinged
rosy by the sunset, his large, heavy-lashed eyes closed, he looked so
young and innocent, yet he was such a wise man, such a good friend,
and now such a lover....  As Tom tightened his embrace, he thought
that he had, perhaps at least gotten the most out of the Delta
Quadrant.

"Sometimes...." continued Harry, as he snuggled into Tom. "I...I'm
sorry I nearly died, you know."

"I thought Starfleet officers were supposed to be suicidal."

"No, no, I mean...I am sorry I hurt you and B'Elanna by nearly dying."

"I don't know about B'Elanna, but *I* was sure you got your head
knocked in for the sole purpose of annoying me."

Harry laughed. "Really, though, I am. You two care about me so much.
If my parents knew what good hands I'm in they'd almost stop worrying
about me." He smiled up at Tom, who smiled back, restraining his snort
of disagreement.  _They'd probably be horrified_, he thought darkly,
as Harry went on. "I feel bad that I can hurt you, and I worry about
being able to do my job if something happens to either of you.
Sometimes I wonder if it would just be easier to not care."

"It *wouldn't*." Tom surprised himself with his vehemence, and Harry
looked up at him, rather startled, but he realized he ought to say
something, that he had to try tell Harry what a privilege it was to be
*able* to care about people as wonderful as he and B'Elanna. "I
*tried* not caring, remember? You, and B'ELANNA and Captain Janeway,
actually rescued me from that trap. I was barely living that way. I
was breathing, and all, but not really *alive*, until I met you three,
until you gave me back myself..." Tom paused for a breath and only
then noticed the glowingly happy look on Harry's face; distracted, he
tapered off with "I...I'm glad I was forced to care again," growing
self- conscious with his philosophy.

Harry seemed to like it, though; instead of replying, he smiled more
sensually, turned over, and put his arms around Tom's neck. "I *know*
it's time to go back to sex when *you* start philosophizing," said
Harry archly, and Tom, smiling as he leaned forward to kiss him, was,
indeed, very happy to find other uses for his mouth.

---

Two days later, Voyager was finally fixed enough---and the repair
crews rested enough---to have a party in Sandrine's. Chakotay was
sitting with the captain, relieved to be able again to talk to Janeway
about something other than repairs, when Harry came in, pausing only
to kiss Ensign Wildman's baby as she left before joining Tom and
B'Elanna at the pool table. "The Centaurids," said Janeway softly,
with a smile; because of their inseparable nature, the trio had
garnered a few nicknames, this one likening them to the triple star
Alpha Centauri, the nearest set of stars to Earth.

Chakotay smiled only politely, hoping Janeway didn't notice. Ever
since they had apparently "made up" a week ago, just before the last,
disastrous Kazon attack, Paris had flirted with B'Elanna every chance
he had, although, Chakotay grudgingly reminded himself, only when
their respective duties allowed. It wasn't as if Paris was posing a
danger to the ship. However, Chakotay was worried that he might be
posing a danger to B'Elanna and Harry's relationship. What puzzled him
the most was that neither of them seemed to mind; in fact, Paris's
flirting amused B'Elanna.

_If Paris were doing that to my Captain *I* sure as hell would mind,
and so would she_, Chakotay thought, and then smiled a real smile as
he realized that he still thought of Kathryn Janeway as "his Captain",
even though she'd given him her name to call her by and even after the
reason she had.

As Chakotay mused, Harry walked over to the pair and greeted them,
squeezing Tom's hand and putting his arm around B'Elanna's waist. With
most men, that would have been a possessive gesture B'Elanna never
would have allowed, but with Harry it was just his warmth, which shone
through more and more as their relationship deepened. Tom stood on
Harry's other side, only a hairsbreadth away from him as they watched
B'Elanna take her next shot and he winced as Harry cheered; a careful
observer could notice that Tom was including himself in his friends's
affair. Chakotay noticed, misinterpreted, and had to suppress an
uncharacteristic, but none the weaker for it, urge to go over and
smack some sense into the irritating young man. Leaning forward, he
asked Janeway, "Did you notice---"

Tom chose that moment to moan aloud as B'Elanna finished demolishing
him, and Chakotay bit his lip in annoyance as all eyes, including
Janeway's, turned to the pool table. "B'Elanna, that's my morning
coffee!" Tom complained, loudly and melodramatically. "Can't you just
take it out in trade?"

Chakotay would have rolled his eyes at that had he not been surprised
that B'Elanna didn't knock Paris into the next star system; instead,
she actually laughed with him.

"I tell you what, Paris", she said, placing her pool cue in his
dramatically outstretched hand, "I'll take some pity on you, and
retire early tonight. Harry, finish stripping him for me?"

"She'll have to feed and clothe you next week, Harry" bragged Tom,
handing him B'Elanna's pool cue. Chakotay didn't hear Harry's reply
because Janeway rose gracefully from her seat, catching his eye; as
she rose, she smiled and explained, "I think Harry might need my help
impoverishing Tom," and strolled over to get her own cue.

_Oh, that *walk*_, Chakotay thought, and smiled to himself.

B'Elanna, meanwhile, was looking for a seat where she could watch the
pool table; seeing Chakotay, whom she wanted to ask for advice about
(and, truth be told, a blessing on) her new relationship, she slid
into the newly vacant seat across from him. "Not playing tonight?"

"No, I don't think so," said Chakotay. "You and Harry make a splendid
couple," he added, and smiled at her. "You've been very good for him
already, and it's only a month."

"He's been good for me, too." B'Elanna wondered if Janeway had told
him about their threesome, what with the attack and all. Apparently,
the captain hadn't, she found, as Chakotay went on. "Paris looks a bit
too fascinated with you, though. Is there anything I can do about
him?"

B'Elanna stared at Chakotay, shocked, and a bit disappointed. _Why
would I want you to do anything about him?_ she thought, rather
outraged. _If he were a problem, which he is *not*, you of all people
should know I can take care of myself._ She was about to say this, and
more, when she saw Chakotay's expression begin to change, confusion
welling in those dark eyes, as if he were beginning to realize that he
was wrong....

...and she smiled sleekly, as a thought came to her. "Oh, no, don't
worry about *him*," she said.  "It's OK." After a few more moments of
small talk, she said, "Oh, Tom's shot looks too good," and got out of
her seat, watching Tom as he leaned over the pool table, eyeing the
line between the balls. Tom was so absorbed in aiming that he barely
noticed B'Elanna as she sauntered up beside him; just as he pulled the
cue back she pinched him solidly on his behind.

Tom reared up and yelped, as his stick connected with nothing but air
and Harry all but giggled.  Summoning up his deepest air of mock-
outrage he slowly turned to B'Elanna, who shrugged and innocently
said, "Well, you *were* sticking it out, and it *is* such a nice
behind..."

Tom looked mollified. "Well, if *you* say it is..."

Harry, Janeway, and the other onlookers all burst into laughter.
Laughing with them, B'Elanna tossed back her hair to cast a glance
over her shoulder at Chakotay; he was laughing also, but at himself,
his eyes wide with surprise.

---

In Lieutenant J.G. Paris's quarters, a little while after the party
ended, B'Elanna rolled off of a happily exhausted Tom to snuggle
backwards into Harry, draping an arm across Tom's chest. "Mmmm. I
missed you two."

Tom smiled at her, still too breathless to respond. "I thought you'd
dumped us for Carey," said Harry, wrapping his arm around B'Elanna's
waist.

"Nah. It was those seductive warp coils," replied Tom, interlacing his
fingers with hers. B'Elanna smiled at that, put her head down, and lay
silently. Tom lay peacefully beside her with his eyes closed, feeling
B'Elanna next to him and Harry beyond her, glad beyond words to lie
still and quiet and safe next to people who wanted him there. He
hadn't been able to do that for far too long, since---

Tom pushed those thoughts away, not wanting to bother going back
through a long list of bad memories, and concentrated on the woman
lying warmly beside him.

_Finally still_, he thought drolly, opening an eye for a moment to
look at her face in repose. _She isn't even still when she sleeps_, he
went on, remembering the week they had, a week where they hadn't slept
until they knew Harry was going to live and then they'd been so busy
they'd fallen asleep in their uniforms as often as not.

Overworked beyond human endurance and yet so unwilling to rest that
Tom had had to make a practice of dragging her from Engineering after
his own bonecrushingly hard days, B'Elanna had thought aloud about
engineering problems in her sleep, as well as wriggled, kicked, and
once had a loud argument with [presumably] her mother that she didn't
remember when Tom woke her up. But, now, after Voyager was nearly as
good as new---

Tom marveled at the shape the ship was in, considering their two- year
solo jaunt, which had hardly been a pleasure cruise--- she was giving
herself a rest Tom thought she had more than earned. Well, that and a
rematch at pool, after that pinch tonight...

Jumping up, Tom flipped over to face B'Elanna, making her raise her
head with mild surprise. "Why'd you pinch me?"

B'Elanna laughed, propping her head up on her free arm. "I had been
talking to Chakotay, and apparently the Captain hasn't updated him on
the ship's gossip, so he thought you were bothering me. He even asked
if there was, um, 'anything he could do about' you. I had to show him
I didn't need his help dealing with you."

Tom and Harry started laughing at that. "I'd say you two do a fine job
of dealing with me," said Tom, and happily watched two pairs of dark
eyes twinkle back at him. "Besides, he should know you could knock
anyone who was 'bothering' you halfway back to the Alpha Quadrant."

"Maybe further," added Harry. "Remember what we both looked like last
week."

"Last week?" asked Tom, pointing to his ear, which was purple with a
ring of toothmarks. "Look at me now!"

"Oh, come on," B'Elanna protested cheerfully. "I'm only half Klingon.
It's you two who bruise too easily."

"We're only human," said Harry, with a suddenly sad tone to his voice;
he restlessly got up and went to Tom's bookcase, surprising his
friends. So puzzled he was at a loss for words, Tom merely watched
Harry walk across his room, until he realized that, paradoxically, the
three-way pillow talk was somehow more awkward for Harry than the
three-way sex was. _Harry got B'Elanna into pillow talk but is
starting to get out of it himself_, he thought, with a slight twinge
of guilt as he continued with, _not that how B'Elanna and I are
positioned makes things easier for him_.

B'Elanna, evidently thinking similar thoughts, asked, "You OK, Harry?"
in a concerned voice.

"Oh, yeah," Harry absently replied, looking through the books. "Tom,
can I borrow one of your books? I need it to work on a project."

"Sure, but come back to bed," called Tom. "You can read all you want
when I'm out cold tomorrow morning, unless anyone has any reasons for
me to be up then...."

Harry smiled at Tom's cheerful suggestiveness; seeing that smile, Tom
silently breathed a sigh of relief. "Actually," he replied, as he
pulled his chosen book from the shelf, "I have to go back on duty
tomorrow. The Doctor said that my arm is basically healed and my
neurological recovery is proceeding faster than normal. He sounded
annoyed at that," he finished, and laughed.

"I guess that means you're stuck with just me," Tom said to B'Elanna,
who promptly hit him with a pillow. Then she got out of bed herself,
leaving Tom too busy watching her behind move as she walked to
protest, and went to Harry, who turned from the books in surprise.

"Let me see that arm, Harry?" she asked, the reedy burr in her rich
voice sending a thrill down Tom's spine and making Harry's eyes widen.

Harry gave her his formerly broken arm, and she supported it in one
hand and ran the fingers of the other over it gently, stroking every
inch, as if she were making sure the Doctor put all of it back
together. Then she lifted his hand to her mouth and firmly sucked on
his index finger.

Harry nearly stopped breathing, letting out a strangled little moan
and staring at his finger encircled by her lips. Tom, watching this
from the bed, settled back to enjoy the scene and tried to keep his
grin within the bounds of decency. B'Elanna was so tightly controlled
that watching her let a bit loose was fun, he thought, even if he
wasn't on the receiving end.

After a sensually long moment, B'Elanna let Harry's finger be and laid
her hands on his upper arms."If you're on duty in the morning, we have
to pay you extra attention tonight," she purred in answer to his
unasked question.

"But, you're the exhausted Chief Engineer."

"Overworked, yes. Exhausted, no." B'Elanna looked into Harry's eyes
for a long moment, and both men froze; then she let out a little growl
as she kissed Harry so hard he dropped the padd in his hand, shoving
him back against the bookcase.

Tom gasped, watching B'Elanna kiss Harry with a fervor that made his
own groin ache. _Ten minutes ago, she was fucking *my* brains out,_ he
thought with wonder, as he watched Harry tremble in her grasp.

Still, after a little while, Tom started feeling left out, watching
Harry start to kiss B'Elanna back nearly as hard as she was kissing
him. He cleared his throat twice before B'Elanna pulled back her head
to look at him questioningly, while Harry leaned his head against the
books, closing eyes too glazed to focus.

"Save some for me?" Tom asked as innocently as he could manage.

Harry's head popped up as he and B'Elanna looked at each other---and
laughed uproariously. "What, didn't you just get enough?" asked
B'Elanna, grinning and letting go of Harry, just before they both
threw themselves on Tom.

A long and breathless moment later Tom surfaced from the jumble of
bodies to find himself half atop Harry, chest to chest, and B'Elanna
draped warmly over his back, looking down over his shoulder. For a
moment, he thought how, a long time ago, he would have minded the fact
that B'Elanna was smiling at Harry and not him, but now he was more
than eager to help her surpass every expectation in the large dark
eyes that looked back up at the two of them, full of desire, wonder,
and....

Then B'Elanna pulled herself across Tom's back so that he gasped,
feeling her smooth skin and her soft breasts sliding across his
hypersensitive skin, and kissed Tom's cheek, her lips warm on his
cheekbone. Tom turned his head to hers and she kissed him warmly for a
long moment, and then gave *him* a smile as she finished sliding off
him to lie down beside Harry, slipping one arm under his neck and one
around Tom's.

Harry held the two of them to him, one arm around each waist, and
smiled. "So, what are you two going to do to me now?"

Tom thought for a moment. "A lot," he finally said, and kissed Harry
firmly as B'Elanna bit his neck with measured ungentleness. As she
pushed the two men before her onto their sides, she slowly increased
the pressure of her teeth till Harry suddenly arched his neck and
moaned into Tom's kiss; Tom, thinking _I like that sound_, kept
kissing Harry as he slid one hand across his washboard stomach and
past the already tautly hard penis to cup Harry's balls, gently
pressing his fingers in. Harry arched his back so that Tom nearly lost
his hold on his mouth and moaned again, digging his fingers into Tom's
shoulder to hold him.

B'Elanna had let go of that patch of Harry's neck to bite his
shoulders as she reached around him to pinch his nipples; now she
leaned forward to bite his cheekbone and then kiss it, and Harry
pulled his mouth away from Tom's to kiss her back. Tom, putting his
head down on Harry's shoulder, could almost feel Harry's hand brushing
over the ridges on her forehead when he caressed her face and smiled
at her.

Then Harry turned his head to smile at Tom, who smiled back to see his
friend so disheveled, flushed, and deliriously happy; it seemed to him
he could spend years looking at that face. "Hey, B'Elanna, I have an
idea," he said, still looking at Harry. "Let's switch places."

"I just had the same idea. How'd you know?" she asked teasingly.

"Oh, I'm a Vulcan touch telepath." Tom raised his head to smirk back
at her; he was about to make a smart mock-Tuvokian remark when Harry
made a noise between a moan and a chuckle---after all, Tom hadn't
relinquished his hold. "With you two having the same idea I'm
frightened," he said, in a voice that was hoarse around the edges.

"If you can think enough to be frightened," said Tom, "we aren't doing
this right." He finished the statement off with another kiss as he
climbed over Harry; then, as he settled behind him, B'Elanna kissed
him as she settled onto him and wrapped her legs around his waist,
using them to rhythmically pull him into her.

Harry let out another moan, audible through the kiss, and Tom laughed
gently in his ear as he slipped his hands between his friends' chests,
feeling B'Elanna's breasts against the backs of his hands and Harry's
nipples under his palms. "Like this, huh?" he asked, as he slipped
them back out to rake his fingernails down Harry's stomach and sides.

For answer, Harry arched his back, trembling. He tried to grasp
B'Elanna's shoulders for leverage to match her thrusts, but she
grabbed his wrists and pulled them behind her head. Tom frowned with
sudden worry, but Harry relaxed when B'Elanna soothingly whispered
"No, *we're* doing this, for you". Then, firmly wrapping Harry's arms
around her neck as if to say, "and keep them there", she set her chin
on his shoulder, and smiled reassuringly at Tom, but the light in her
eyes was distinctly wild.

And catching. Tom winked back and rolled over to rummage in a drawer,
rolled back with a small tube of lubricant in one hand, and raised
himself on one elbow to look into Harry's face as he concentrated on
what B'Elanna was doing to him, eyes closed and lips parted. "OK?" Tom
inquired.

Apparently unable to trust his voice, Harry grinned.

"OK," Tom whispered, as he opened the tube one-handed. "Trust me."

Harry opened his eyes at that, and Tom nearly laughed as he kissed him
again, and felt B'Elanna wrap one hand around the arm he was leaning
on. Tom pressed so closely against Harry's back that B'Elanna's knees
pressed into his stomach, and, very slowly, in pace with B'Elanna,
pressed one finger into Harry as he stroked his neck with his other
hand, kissing him all the while, feeling him trembling tensely and
forcing himself to relax, listening to him breathe and moan and
looking down into the wide dark eyes.

Harry trembled harder and harder as Tom gently began thrusting with
his finger, and B'Elanna was squeezing his arm in time, so he decided
to be daring, and, on the next thrust, added another finger.

It worked even better than he expected. Reflexively closing his eyes,
Harry gasped, madly rolling his head from side to side, and managed to
cry out, "Tom, I---" before his voice rose to an unintelligible shout
and he came, pressed between his two lovers, clenching so hard around
Tom's fingers Tom thought he might break them.

Then he slumped bonelessly between them, beaming glassy-eyedly at
B'Elanna as his eyelids fell shut.

---

"Well, *that* worked", whispered B'Elanna proudly. Harry had smiled at
her---a real smile, that lit up his whole face---just before he all
but fainted. Tom held her hand across Harry's chest, and smiled at her
when she raised her eyes to his.

"Yeah,"  he agreed. "I think Harry liked that...if he didn't blow a
blood vessel."

"If he did the Doc will kill us," she replied softly, and suppressed a
sudden giggle. Tom didn't, laughing quietly, blue eyes twinkling. Then
he started to get up.

"Where are you going?" asked B'Elanna, with a stab of real fright.
_Not *him*, now. We just got Harry cheered up..._

"Oh, I was just coming around to your side."

_Good._ "Why don't you stay there? When Harry wakes up I think it
would be good if we were both next to him." Tom understood, as if he
knew what she was thinking, and nodded, lying back down and taking her
hand again.

"He's so...angelic when he sleeps, so beautiful," said Tom, looking
tenderly down at Harry and gently brushing stray hairs from his
forehead.

B'Elanna nodded, but it was Tom she smiled at. Harry was indeed
beautiful  in his sleep, the young, eager face calm, but so was Tom
when he didn't know one was looking, when one caught him in a moment
of happiness and peace and the hard edges, the protective mask, were
gone.

Tom looked up at B'Elanna, and saw her looking at him, saw the light
in her eyes. She felt a flash of fear that he would close up, but he
turned that tender look on her and said, "so are you", very softly,
but so that her heart caught in her throat.

Then, jauntily, he added, "even when you kick me and yell in Klingon",
and she grinned back. The tenderness was hidden again, but it wasn't
gone; B'Elanna knew what she'd seen and was grateful to have seen it.
_No wonder Harry chose him as a friend_, she thought. _I'm glad I did,
too._

Aloud, she said, "I kick?"

"And yell in Klingon, at your mother. You called her "mother", too,
not whatever the Klingon word is."

"Then I was definitely arguing with her. She *hated* it when I called
her 'Mother' in Standard." B'Elanna sobered a bit. "I was pretty young
when I stopped calling her anything, when I finally left."

Tom squeezed her hand, calling her back to the present. "What would
she think of you in bed with two bruised human men?" he asked
mischievously.

"Paris...." B'Elanna laughed softly despite herself, and sighed,
unable to even pretend she was annoyed by the question. "She'd think I
take after my father, I guess."

"Including these bruises? I think you take after her!"

B'Elanna laughed louder this time, and Harry stirred. Dropping her
voice to a low whisper, she demanded, "and what would your father the
Admiral think of your threesome here?"

"He'd be shocked that Starfleet types consented to *spit* on me, much
less come---"

On an impulse, B'Elanna quickly headed off Tom's lewd comment by
pressing her hand to his mouth, then grabbing his shoulders, pulling
him upright, and kissing him soundly. Tom kissed her back, burying one
hand in her hair, until she was nearly dizzy with the rush of blood to
her head and the roll of fire in her belly. When the kiss broke,
B'Elanna leaned forward for another one, but Tom forestalled her with
a finger across her lips.

"Thank you, B'Elanna," he said with passion underscored by his soft
voice,his blue eyes like stars as he looked into hers. "Thank you for
giving me this...all of this."

Thoughts swirled in B'Elanna's head. She wanted to thank Tom for
letting her and Harry reach him, for reaching out himself, for
preserving a man who was more than decent and eminently lovable under
all his flaws and across all those hard years. But to say all of that
would take too much time, and too many words, and too much thought.

So she smiled back, and kissed him again.

---

Harry woke up to see Tom and B'Elanna sitting over him, kissing each
other, and any residual blues he might have had were vaporized in the
heat the two were radiating. He rubbed his eyes with one hand and
propped his head up on the other, rubbing the bites on his neck, as he
watched them, and didn't bother to restrain his grin.

Tom came up for air to see Harry yawn out of the corner of his eyes.
"When did *you* wake up?" he demanded in surprise. B'Elanna, looking
downright *serene* (a word Harry would have never thought to apply to
her) simply smiled at him as if she didn't need to say a thing.

Harry, grinning with amusement at their disparate reactions, sat up to
kiss B'Elanna and then Tom. "Oh, just now." More seriously, he added,
"I'd better be going, though. If I'm going to wake up on time I'd
better sleep in my own bed.  Besides, Tom, your bed isn't as big as
mine."

"At least I have a bathtub instead of a shower".  Harry smiled at that
as he climbed out of bed to look for his uniform.

Too soon, he was dressed, his hair brushed back; Tom realized that
he'd come to like looking at Harry naked, not just lustfully but with
simple fondness. B'Elanna sighed beside him; as Tom glanced at her,
his gaze sidetracked to those rounded amber breasts, he thought for a
moment that, besides everything else, his lovers were pretty damn
cute.

Harry sat back down on the bed to kiss them both once again. "I'll see
you both tomorrow at dinner, right?"

"And afterwards you'll play your clarinet for us?"

"You bet." And Harry was gone, leaving Tom and B'Elanna sitting beside
each other missing him....

...for at least a little while. Then, B'Elanna turned back to Tom, and
did something very uncharacteristic.

She leaned against him, putting her arms around him and her head on
his shoulder, and simply held onto him.

Surprised, Tom wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed the side
of her head, wondering if she would say or do something. Instead,
B'Elanna wrapped her arms more tightly around him and nuzzled her face
into his neck, so that he could feel her breath on his throat, her
heart beating against his, her skin pressed against his. Cautiously,
not sure what she wanted, Tom brushed his hand up over the ridges of
her spine, feeling the hard bony bumps and the velvety skin over them,
and eventually pressed his hand to her shoulderblade. _Just when I
think I have her figured out..._

Just then, B'Elanna slid one hand up his arm and throat to entwine it
in his hair, and when Tom turned his head to look at her, tilted her
head back to give him a smile that warmed him from top to bottom. Tom
smiled back, and kissed her again, sliding his other hand up her side
to cup her breast and tweak her nipple between his fingers.

She growled at that, still kissing him, and the fingers in his hair
reflexively tightened their hold. _Aha_, Tom thought, and would have
grinned if he could. Instead he kept pinching her nipple as she kissed
him harder and harder.

Then, suddenly, she let go with one hand and pushed with the other.
Tom found himself landing hard on his back, a rather aroused B'Elanna
atop him."You're insatiable!" he exclaimed in mock horror.

"Nah, you're just cute," she replied, grinning down at him before she
kissed him again, running one hand down and over his chest as she
straddled him. Tom idly wondered for a moment how her mother hadn't
eaten her father alive, before B'Elanna sat up statuesquely, smirked,
and, clenching around him, drove everything but herself from his
thoughts.

---

B'Elanna woke up slowly from a hazy dream of which all she could
remember was being happy, being so filled with happiness that she
nearly expected to see sunlight streaming through the windows.
However, when she opened her eyes, she saw the ever-present stars
outside the viewport...and Tom Paris curled on his side beside her,
one arm still across her waist, looking nearly as young as Harry as he
slept. She reached across and  stroked his hair gently; looking at the
blonde hair underneath her hand, she thought, _yellow hair, blue eyes.
He's sunshine enough._ It was an unusually poetic thought for her, but
she was so downright happy, whether because of the dream or Tom or
both, that she decided to go with the poetic mood. As she slipped out
of bed and went to draw herself a bath, she decided that she felt like
singing.

Soon, she was up to her shoulders in an entirely full bathtub, eyes
closed, softly singing just the tune of something sweet and rich. She
hadn't sung in a very long time; though she'd studied music as a
child---it seemed to be the only thing she did willingly that her
mother approved of---it seemed like she hadn't been happy enough to
sing in years, since before her year at the Academy, and only
infrequently then.

Odd. She'd had to go all the way to the other side of the Galaxy to
find her life, but here she was, finally a Chief Engineer, on the
sleekest, most advanced, most fascinating ship in Starfleet and under
a Captain who gave her a free hand and a great deal of respect; and in
love, with two young men who were at once wildly different and so
complementary she couldn't imagine one without the other.

B'Elanna Torres smiled, something else she'd been doing a great deal
of lately that it felt like she hadn't done in years, and settled down
into the water, still singing.

The bathroom door clicked. B'Elanna opened her eyes and stopped
singing when Tom appeared in the doorway, naked and tousled, and
smiled so happily at her she nearly blushed. "When did you get up?"
she asked.

"Oh, just now. What were you singing?"

"An old song. A very old song." B'Elanna started to get out of the
tub, but Tom stopped her.

"Don't you need your back scrubbed?" he asked, eyes twinkling.

She sighed and smiled, uselessly protesting "you and Harry are going
to spoil me." Indeed, something in her chided her for soaking
luxuriantly in hot water, for taking a day off when there was work to
be done. But something else, bolder now than when she had first
started seeing Harry, told that first part to shut up as Tom clambered
in behind her, and it did as she scooted back, nearly lying against
his chest. Water sloshed everywhere, but they both ignored it; the
carpet would dry itself in fifteen minutes anyway.

Tom started scrubbing her back with short, soft, circular strokes,
almost hypnotic in pattern. "You sing well."

"I do not."

"Yes, you do. What were you singing, anyway?"

_What a cliche this will sound like. The Shakespeare-loving Klingon._
"An old song from a Shakespeare play." Knowing Tom was going to ask,
she started to sing, adding the words, though her choice made her
groan inwardly.

"Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more! Men were deceivers ever. One foot
in sky and one on shore To one thing constant never. Then sigh not so,
but let them go And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your
sounds of woe Into hey, nonny nonny."

Tom brought his hands out of the water to applaud, then put them on
her shoulders. "You do sing well. Good song, too."

His cheerfulness embarrassed B'Elanna. "It's not very appropriate; I
just sang it because it has a nice tune. I mean, neither you nor Harry
are a deceiver."

"Oh, I know people who would disagree with you about me." Tom said
that lightly, rather too lightly, so B'Elanna reached up and pulled
one of his arms around her shoulders.

"I know, but I also know that you are not."

Tom sat silently behind her for a moment, pressing his cheek against
her wet hair. Then he said, softly, in a voice tinged with wonder,
"You mean that." B'Elanna thought, _Of course I do_, but before she
could say that he continued, "this is really working. It...we really
seem to be fitting together, the three of us."

B'Elanna smiled. "Yes, it is. Not bad, considering my track record."

"Or considering mine. You know....I was afraid that I might have...a
flashback or something. I read that they're pretty common for people
who...had experiences like mine." Suddenly, Tom's embrace was very
tight; B'Elanna had to fight her instinct to break away, knowing he
needed to hold her. "But I haven't. I don't think I will."

B'Elanna turned her head to look at Tom, who smiled rather shakily
back, and gratefully kissed her.

Then he leaned back and started sliding his hands warmly down her
front. "Hey!" said B'Elanna, startled, as she grabbed at them. "I
thought we were taking a bath." She grinned when Tom replied, donning
the wounded look she just *knew* he would and asking, "don't you need
your front scrubbed, too?" in such mock-innocent tones that all she
could do was laugh, as much happy as amused.

---

_Of course, she can't take more than a day off,_ thought Tom, rather
resentfully, as he walked towards Engineering. _Chief Engineers don't
take vacations._ Captain Janeway had offered them both two days off,
and Tom, never one to work too hard, had gladly taken them. B'Elanna
took one, spent the better part of it sleeping, and then claimed that
it was a "school  night", so to speak, leaving Tom alone in bed,
because, of course, Harry needed his eight hours, as well.

Ah, yes, Harry. In some ways he was *worse* than B'Elanna. Besides
having too much to do while on duty, so that he talked about some
sensor problems all through lunch, he had some project that he
insisted on working on tonight, so he couldn't come to dinner. Tom had
more than half a mind to look him up after dinner and see what was so
important.

Tom shook his head and sighed. Two of the hardest workers on the
ship....and him.

Reaching Engineering, he folded his arms, leaned against the wall by
the door, and waited. Having time to dress, he decided to make himself
look irresistible enough to make them both sorry they'd had to work.
To that end, he'd replicated himself a blousy white shirt of a silky
polymer, and left off the top two buttons. This went with his snug
forest-green pants that tucked into velvet boots of such a deep green
they were nearly black. Looking down at his sleeve, he had a sudden
thought that maybe he should have worn dark blue instead, to
underscore his blue eyes.

Someone whistled at him, breaking his train of thought. Tom looked up
to see Jenny Delaney standing with her hands on her hips. "Time off is
good for you," she observed.

Tom smiled as her gaze raked over him. His conscience chirped at him,
but he replied to it _Nobody can expect me to mind *this*. All she's
doing is looking._ "Yeah. I get to do important things like update my
wardrobe."

"Indeed." Jenny walked around him as if she were surveying a
mannequin, or livestock. "Waiting for the Chief Engineer?"

There was something in her voice that Tom didn't like, so he merely
nodded. Jenny smirked. "You're trying to be serious about this, aren't
you?"

Now he knew what it was, and he really didn't like it. "I *am* serious
about this, Jenny," he replied, standing straight up. "We all are."

Jenny sauntered up to him, standing so close her nipples brushed his
chest. "Really," she breathed up at him, laying her hands on his arms
and looking up from beneath her lashes like a woman who expects to be
kissed.

Tom was surprised at how angry he suddenly was. Looking down into
Jenny's leering face, he found himself completely unattracted to her,
not even aesthetically. He didn't want to touch her, even to push her
away."Ensign Delaney", he said coldly, "weren't you on your way
somewhere?"

Jenny blinked, her mouth falling open, and drew back from Tom as if he
were a snake striking from a bouquet. Her expression hardened, and Tom
nearly smirked.  "Good day, *Lieutenant*," she hissed, and marched off
down the corridor.

Tom sighed deeply and shook his head, exasperated; then he opened his
eyes to find B'Elanna standing in the doorway and smiling warmly at
him. "Hi."

"Hi." Tom could all but physically feel his exasperation melt away in
the warmth of that smile. He went towards her, but she shook her head.
"There's a million things left to be done," she said apologetically,
"and I need to get at least some of them tied up today."

"I understand." Tom did understand, even though it consigned him to
dinner alone. That didn't stop him from being annoyed, though; still,
he reminded himself, he knew B'Elanna better than to bother
complaining.

"I might catch up with you tonight, though," B'Elanna added.

"Tonight?" _No more school nights?_

"*Might*", she emphasized. Tom nodded, rather disheartened, and was
turning to go when she said, "By the way", tapping him on the arm. Tom
turned back to her---

---and B'Elanna grabbed him by his shirt collar and kissed him, hard.
A small part of Tom's mind could hear the Engineering staff gasping
with surprise behind her, but most of him really didn't care as he
caught hold of her arms and kissed her back.

After a long, sound, thoroughly warming kiss, B'Elanna finally let go
of him. "Nice outfit,"  she said, with a big smirk. Still breathless,
Tom tried his best to smirk back, though what he wanted to do was
throw himself at her feet and pledge his undying love....or rip her
uniform off. Or maybe both. Instead he watched her walk back into
Engineering, then wove down the corridor towards the turbolift and
dinner, a smile on kiss-bruised lips.

---

Blissfully steaming herself in a hot shower, B'Elanna was in such a
good mood she nearly felt like humming. She'd thought it would take
three hours to unravel the crossed pathways (the results of too many
reroutings) in the main communications grid and to find new routes;
instead, it had taken only one. The main grid was up, and the backup
grid had held under the strain. She was done for the day, and, truth
be told, rather felt like playing....

After stepping out and drying off, B'Elanna tapped her communicator.
"Torres to Kim. Harry, have you had dinner?"

"Didn't Tom tell you?" the echoes sounded as if Harry were bent over
something in a small room. "I'm busy with a project. Sorry."

"Ok. See you tomorrow. Torres out." _And Tom's probably amusing
someone in the mess hall_, she thought. _Ah, well. I'm in too good of
a mood to spoil it with Neelix's cooking, anyway._

Still....B'Elanna wanted to talk to Harry. She hadn't wanted to remind
him of Libby, of whom he had left behind, so she hadn't pressed him on
the subject, but now, faced with his sudden depression, she was
beginning to worry that perhaps she should have. A new love affair, by
its very nature, had to remind him of what he had put away to "go on
with his life", to make him think of the doors he was closing by
opening theirs; of the three of them he had the most left behind. On
the other hand, it wasn't like Harry was a baby, and nearly being
killed could rattle anyone. Maybe he just needed a little time alone.

B'Elanna shrugged, tiring of the eternal debate with herself, and
replicated a simple, nice dinner. She'd run into Harry tomorrow and
see if he needed to talk. Voyager simply wasn't that large.

Meanwhile...."Computer, locate Commander Chakotay."

"Commander Chakotay is in the Captain's Quarters."

_Everyone's busy tonight_, she thought, and smiled, leaning back in
her chair. _Let's see if Tom's up for a rematch yet._ "Computer,
locate Lieutenant Paris."

"A Lieutenant Paris is not listed in the ship's manifest."

B'Elanna swore. Another thing to overhaul tomorrow; the computer's
syntax programs. "Computer, locate Lieutenant J.G. Paris."

"Lieutenant J.G. Paris is in Ensign Wildman's quarters."

_Well_, she thought coolly, and then had to laugh at herself. B'Elanna
knew that feeling jealous was stupid and illogical; she had been
pleasantly surprised that Tom considered himself committed deeply
enough to spurn Jenny Delaney, especially in light of her little
speech that first night. _But, then, Vulcan's one race I don't have in
me_ she thought, pulling on her boots. _Besides, I'll just go see what
he's up to._

What Tom was "up to", she found when she rang the door chime, was
sitting on Samantha Wildman's old-fashioned sofa holding Amy "Spike"
Wildman in his arms and letting her drool all over that nice shirt.
Spike was growing fast, faster than the equivalent human baby; she was
already trying to grab hold of the shirt, presumably to put a fistful
in her mouth, and Tom looked oddly pleased at this damp behavior.
B'Elanna did have to admit, he looked quite cute with the baby.

"Trading me in already?" she teased, and he looked up, surprised. "I
don't think Chakotay will let you switch Harry for his son."

"I'm just preparing the second wave," Tom replied, and grinned. "When
you two settle down to raise a herd of children I'll still be chasing
the stars with Spike here." B'Elanna came in and sat down beside him
as he continued, "I thought you had to work tonight."

"It actually took less time than I'd thought." B'Elanna waved
tentatively at the baby and was surprised to be charmed when Spike
made a visible effort to focus on her and then cooed. She'd never
played with younger children very much, always preferring to try to
prove herself to everyone by competing with the older ones. Moreover,
her mother wouldn't hear of her babysitting "human whelps", even for
spending money. "What makes you think we'll let you go?" B'Elanna
continued.

"Huh?"

"What makes you think we'll let you go sailing all over the galaxy
when the three of us have children to raise?" When Tom didn't reply,
B'Elanna looked up to see him turning slightly pink and found herself
getting angry. "Did you think you were the only one who's serious
about this?" she snapped, then relented at the look on his face. "For-
--Gods, Tom, I can't even curse, there's a kid present."

Tom smiled at that, and B'Elanna smiled back. "Whatever she learns
might come in handy..." he said, and then sobered. "I don't know. I do
know you two and this ship are the best things that ever happened to
me, but everything has an end. Everyone calls us Alpha Centauri, but
sometimes I wonder if I'm the Proxima."

B'Elanna shook her head. _And I thought *my* life had been hard before
I got here._"Harry would say something endearing about how Proxima
means Closest, but I'm better with hands than words." Putting a hand
on Tom's shoulder, she continued, "You know Harry, and you know me.
Neither of us is going anywhere without you."

Just as Tom's face began to relax with relief, B'Elanna added, "now
stop worrying before you piss me off," which made him laugh so hard
Spike looked up at him in amazement.

Then he leaned forward to kiss B'Elanna, but she ducked. "Isn't she a
bit young for a chaperone?" she pointed out, making Tom roll his eyes.
"What are you doing here without Samantha, anyway?"

"She went down to talk to Ensign Murphy about something, and she
didn't want to bring the kid, so I agreed to sit with her for awhile,
didn't I, Spike?" The last bit was addressed to the baby, who cooed
again and continued to drool on him. "I might be here for awhile...are
you sure you don't want to go down to Sandrine's?"

"Nah. I don't feel like doing anything else than sitting and talking
to you." For once, she didn't feel that there was anything else she
had to do, any work she had to find. Nor did she feel restless, like
finding something new to occupy herself; Tom, to her pleasant
surprise, wasn't wearing on her nerves, but, in fact, was doing the
opposite. B'Elanna could just sit with Tom and Spike, and be a bit
quiet for awhile.

Not that Tom was very quiet, she thought as he grinned. "I must be
doing something right. You used to not be able to stand me."

"You stopped being a pig," B'Elanna replied simply, as she went back
to wiggling her fingers at the baby. "How sharp are those horns?"

"Not very. Samantha says that she's going to have killer incisors in
two months, though." Tom gave a fake shudder. "Why would anyone marry
someone so---spiky? I like my pain in bed to be inflicted by blunt
objects. Preferably thrown," he added, with a leer at B'Elanna, who
laughed.

"I stand corrected." she said merrily. "You're still a pig."

A long while and much conversation later, B'Elanna was holding a
sleeping Amy, and Tom was proudly evaluating her. "You hold her well,"
he said.

"How did you think I'd hold her?"

"Like a dilithium crystal. Or your favorite phaser."

"You should be glad I don't have any hands free." B'Elanna sat, the
child soft and warm and small in her arms, and surveyed Tom, who had
opened his shirt to the waist so it would dry. His hair was getting a
bit longer, and one stray curl made a circle above those eyes of a
blue she'd never be able to take for granted. _Maybe I *do* want to do
something other than sit and talk, after all_ she thought, as her
smile sleeked.

Tom's eyes widened as he noticed how she was looking at him, and he
was just starting to grin really widely in return when Samantha
Wildman opened the door. "Tom, I'm sorry---Oh, hi, B'Elanna!"

"Hi, Samantha. I just dropped by to chaperone Tom's date with your
daughter." B'Elanna unfolded herself from the couch and handed Ensign
Wildman her baby. "Amy's sound asleep."

"Good. I'm about to fall asleep on my feet myself," Samantha replied,
but she held her daughter for a long moment before putting her in her
crib. "So I don't think I can be terribly good company." She
punctuated her statement with a yawn.

"That's OK", said Tom, who had finished rebuttoning the shirt and held
out his hand to her. She squeezed it and bade them both goodbye, since
B'Elanna was already halfway out the door.

Once out in the corridor, B'Elanna watched Tom shake hands with the
grateful Samantha twice. When her door finally shut and he turned to
her, she said, "looking at you can be annoying."

Tom looked distinctly puzzled. "Why?"

"Because I usually end up wanting to do this." Grabbing his collar,
B'Elanna yanked him across the corridor to push him into the wall on
the far side and press herself against him, but she didn't kiss him.
She simply smiled into his eyes, feeling him warm against her and his
arms slowly coming up around her, watching as his face went from
surprise to smiling desire.  "You aren't busy, are you?" she asked
mildly.

Tom swallowed, and B'Elanna watched his Adam's apple bob, wanting to
bite it and see her toothmarks decorating it. "No, I don't think so,"
he said, straining to speak nonchalantly.

"Good." B'Elanna let go of Tom's collar, grabbed his hand, and dragged
him after her towards the turbolift.

---

_It would be hard to say no to B'Elanna_, Tom thought, as he half-ran
after her, her hand tight around his wrist. She called out some
command to her door and it opened for her; never coming to a
standstill, she pushed Tom into the room before her, nearly throwing
him in, as the lights came on. _But, then, who'd want to?_

Now she *did* kiss him, pinning him to the wall with her body as her
hands made short work of his outfit. B'Elanna kissed Tom hard and
ravishingly, until he thought he'd have no breath left and his feet
would give in if she didn't hold him up by pressing him against the
wall. He moaned as she kissed a trail across his cheek and raked a
trail down his chest, and nearly screamed when she bit him on the
shoulder just as she scraped one fingernail over his glans. _Goddess_
"B'Elanna..."

Then she let go, and Tom nearly did slide down the wall as she stepped
away from him and smiled. "I thought you wanted to talk," he gasped.

"I changed my mind," she replied, shedding her uniform as quickly as
anything. Then she was on him again, devouring his mouth, but now they
were both naked, and he could feel her, soft skin over muscle, as she
pressed against him...Tom started to wrap his arms around B'Elanna,
but she caught his hands in hers and pinned them over his head to the
wall-- --

----and suddenly his stomach heaved, then plummeted.

Tom concentrated on kissing B'Elanna as he told himself not to be a
baby. If she wanted to hold him down, she wanted to, and it had been
more than two years since. He could deal, he reminded himself.

She lifted her head to grin at him. "I always see you from the front,"
she said in a deep and breathy voice. "What's your back look like?"
With that she spun him around and, with playful ungentleness, pushed
him face first into the wall----

---and Tom wasn't on Voyager anymore. He was in New Zealand. And the
hulking prisoner pressing his face into an old-fashioned concrete wall
had a home-made knife to his throat.

---

B'Elanna whirled Tom around, intending to cover his back with bites
and kisses. She'd always wondered what he'd do if she bit him on the--

Tom suddenly went rigid, staring at nothing. When B'Elanna pulled
back, puzzled, he suddenly cried out, "No!" and started thrashing,
seriously trying to hit her.

"Tom! What the hell!" B'Elanna pushed him back against the wall; he
looked like he'd gone crazy. Fighting with a desperate strength, he
got himself turned around enough to punch her in the face, and she let
go of him enough for him to squirm around to face her before she got
him pinned again. "Ow! Paris! What---"

And then she saw his eyes, those sparkly blue eyes, now gone a
frightening, opaque cobalt. Tom was still staring at nothing, but
B'Elanna realized what he *was* seeing was inside his head.
Deliberately, pressing him down with all her strength to keep him from
hurting either of them, she yelled into his face, "Thomas Eugene
Paris!"

Tom blinked, and then went bonelessly limp, dropping his head to her
shoulder with an audible thud, breathing heavily. Holding him up in
her arms, B'Elanna searched for her communicator with one foot,
cursing under her breath that she hadn't taken it off before she'd
undressed and struggling to hold herself and Tom up on the other foot.
Finally, she found it and clamped her toes around it to pull it free.
As Tom began to shiver as if they stood in a freezer, she turned it
with excruciatingly slow care and tapped it.
---_______

Down in the holodeck, Harry ran Program Kim Alpha Three once more, and
sighed, "Still too big", at the result. Still, it did look nice.

His fingers hurt from typing, so he sat down on a treestump and flexed
them, thinking. Thinking about B'Elanna and Tom....and Libby. Libby,
70,000 light years away on Earth, whom he might not see again till
they were both grandparents, or till the day after tomorrow. Libby,
whose proposal he'd accepted, whom he'd promised to wait for, who was
going to marry him as soon as he returned, to the day. Libby, with her
black hair and her bright eyes, her books and her poems and that
little dark mole he'd found where her waist curved out to her hips....

Harry sighed and put his head in his hands. He'd told Tom that he
wanted her to think he was dead; he'd told B'Elanna that he thought
she did. He'd told himself that he loved her, but that he'd gotten
past her, and he was in love again now. But did she really think he
was dead? Had she gotten past him? Or was she hoping, looking in the
skies, waiting as faithfully for him to come home as he'd seen her
wait for her father, lost on a mission, who wasn't found for a month
but who came home alive? Even years afterwards Libby had always talked
about how, whenever she lost hope, she remembered how she'd thought
her father was dead and he came home. Was she waiting now for him, to
do the same?

And what would she say if she was, what would she think of him, if he
came back with Tom and B'Elanna on his arms, if he came back and he'd
forgotten her and his promise?

Harry's self-torture was interrupted when his communicator screeched,
"Torres to Kim!" making him jump. "Harry?"

"I'm here!" he replied, settling himself. "What is it?"

B'Elanna sounded breathless. "Tom had a....an attack."

Harry jumped up, his heart pounding. "I'll meet you in Sickbay."

"No! No, Harry, we can't take him to Sickbay. Meet me in my quarters.
Please. And---" Tom moaned weakly in the background--- "hurry!"

"I'm on my way." Harry shut down the holodeck and ran for the arch.

---

_I can't fucking believe this._

Aloud, all Tom managed to do was moan and burst into tears. B'Elanna
pushed him upright and helped him get his feet underneath him, half-
carrying him to the couch where he crumpled, turning away from her and
burying his face in his hands as she leaned over him soothingly, not
saying anything.

_I can't believe this! I had a God-damned fucking flashback!_ Tom
shook with the sobs, and the memory, and the emotions. He had barely
remembered what had happened to him; he knew it had happened, and that
was more than enough. Now, every detail was fresh in his mind, every
word, every touch, every breath, and every damn iota of the pain and
the revulsion and the fear. And though B'Elanna was watching him he
couldn't stop crying.

Her door opened; Harry flew into the room, froze in the doorway, and
gasped. _You've never seen a man cry like this, huh, Golden Boy?_ Tom
thought with the part of his mind that wasn't draining in saltwater
out of his eyes.  _You've never seen the leftovers of a rape before.
Now you have. Now you'll leave,_ he thought savagely, angry at Harry
for being so innocent and untouched, and himself for being so stupid
and used and dirty.

Harry stood in the doorway staring at Tom for a moment; then he slowly
walked in, his hands out as if that would help, and, putting his hands
on Tom's shoulders, gently pushed him upright. As if his hands burned,
Tom twitched away, not wanting to be touched by a man; then he looked
up, and realized the man was Harry, who had not left, who was looking
down at him with eyes full of worry and pity and care, and all the
rigid bitterness went out of him. Tom slumped into Harry's embrace,
unable to hold on to the last shell of bitterness, crying all the
harder.

Harry wedged himself into the little couch, so that Tom was sandwiched
between him and B'Elanna, and the two of them held Tom, his face
against Harry's chest, Harry stroking his hair and B'Elanna his back,
until the wracking sobs lessened and eventually died away. And then
they kept holding him, exactly the same way, still patting him, until
he finally sat up and coughed and looked absolutely miserable.

"I'm sorry."

"What?"

He realized he'd mumbled when Harry and B'Elanna said it in unison.
Taking a deep breath and using strength he didn't feel he had, Tom
repeated himself. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean---"

B'Elanna put a finger on his mouth. "It's not your fault."

"I wrecked the evening."

"Shhh." Surprised, Tom looked up at B'Elanna, who smoothed his hair
once more, then gently held his head still so she could look into his
eyes.

"Shhh. It's *not* *your* *fault*", she repeated firmly, enunciating
every word. "I'm getting you some water." With that, she got up.

Tom looked back down at his legs. _Dammit_, he thought, and smiled
weakly at the fact that he was too drained to even curse creatively.
Harry touched his arm, and he looked up.

"Tom, what do you want me to do?" Harry asked, his face all worry and
eagerness. "Say it and I'll do it."

_You want me to decide? I can barely keep breathing._ "I don't know,"
Tom replied wearily, looking back down at his legs. "Just...stay?"

Harry put his arm back around Tom for a reply, and Tom wearily
considered slumping into that embrace. Finally, he had someone, two
someones, to take care of him....but his dignity was shredded enough,
and it was hard to lean against someone when being touched always
seemed to burn. So Tom sat, Harry's arm around his shoulders,
balancing finely on the last edge between dignity and pain.

B'Elanna returned with the water and sat beside Tom, watching him
carefully as he sat back up and drank it all. When he had, Harry
patted his arm and said, "Do you want to talk about it?"

_Not really_, Tom thought, but B'Elanna looked as if she were
wondering also. "I had a flashback." B'Elanna nodded and Harry
listened. "To when I was..."

They got the point; Harry gasped and B'Elanna swore. "Gods. Tom..."
said Harry softly, his voice full of compassion, his eyes full of pain
for his friend. "I..."

"Aw, hell, I just cried a little is all," Tom joked wearily, feeling
guilty for the stricken look in Harry's eyes.

"*I* should apologize, not you," said B'Elanna from Tom's other side,
sounding, and looking, equally stricken despite her greater
experience. "If I'd known holding you down would...."

"You don't seem very Betazoid," Tom joked, more strongly. "*I* didn't
even know. How could you? I'm OK. Really..."

B'Elanna did *not* look as if she believed him, and her stern
expression made him nearly blush. Then she shook her head, but smiled
softly, and enfolded Tom in her arms, leaning forward to touch him. "I
love you," she whispered softly in his ear, and his heart leaped up.

"So do I", added Harry, as he carefully wrapped his arms around Tom
from behind and kissed the back of his head. "It's us here, now, not
them. It's us with you."

Tom tried to reply and let out a sob instead. He hadn't known that he
needed to hear that, but he did. He clung to his friends for a long,
long moment, surrounded by their love and their arms, as the memories
and the hurt he carried inside him slowly receded.

Then he tried to sit up, and they let go. "Are you up to going
somewhere?" Harry asked. "There's something I want to show you."

Tom grimaced. "I look terrible---"

"Tom, you're as vain as a fashion model," B'Elanna teased. "If anyone
shows up who you don't want seeing your red eyes, just kiss one of
us." She got up out of the sofa and scooped a red-and-black leotard up
off the floor, tugging it on. Adding shoes, she went into her bedroom
for a hairbrush.

Harry got up and brought Tom's clothes to him, and visibly stopped
himself from helping Tom dress. Seeing that, Tom smiled.

B'Elanna returned wearing red trousers and brushed hair. She handed
off the brush to Tom as she asked Harry, "so what is this anyway?"

"It's a surprise", Harry said, with his best mischievous smile. "It's
not quite finished"---Tom rolled his eyes at Harry's perfectionism ---
"but I think you'll like it."

---

It apparently was a quiet night on Voyager, as everyone with time off
had duty the next day; the threesome ran into very few people on their
way to the Holodeck. Tom thought _did you reinstate the nymphs?_ when
they realized where they were headed, but just didn't have the heart
to crack the joke. He felt like he'd been put through an old-fashioned
meat grinder, or gone to warp with the inertial dampeners offline.

Harry got his program, the one that was Tom's gift to him, running,
including two treestumps for his friends to sit on, and then turned to
them. "I was thinking," he started, and blushed as he ran out of
words.

"That explains the smoke coming out of your ears," said Tom weakly,
and Harry smiled and went on. "I was thinking about how in
holoprograms it's always sunny, and how I miss the weather on real
planets. We haven't gone on shore leave in awhile. In the real world,
it isn't always sunny, so I decided to go to work on this. It's not
quite perfect yet, but---"

"Harry, that was a lovely speech," interrupted B'Elanna. "Now show us,
already?"

Harry turned golden-pink and said, "Computer, run program Kim Alpha
Three."

It started to rain.

Big soft fat raindrops, falling from a bright-but-cloudy sky, spun by
a warm soft wind. The raindrops were actually bigger and rounder than
real raindrops, and not as heavy as real ones, but the water that
splashed on their upturned hands and faces was real.

And it was beautiful.

B'Elanna jumped to her feet and held her hands up, smiling and
remembering someplace happy and beautiful, reflecting it in her face.
Harry stood with his eyes closed, letting the water plaster his hair
down and drip off his nose. And Tom...Tom remembered a long time ago,
before his older brother had run away and his mother had died, before
his father, bitter and angry at something he dared not name and no
longer held in check by the wife It had taken from him, had decided
that he would "raise Tom right" and begun the beatings, before all
that...when he was very young, and very happy, running around on grass
in the rain, and his parents were watching him, and smiling. And the
water was warm, and so was his father's smile.

The rain cleared away, and Tom opened his eyes, and realized that some
of the water on his cheeks was salty. _Harry doesn't know what he is
sometimes_, he thought, as he smiled at his friend, who smiled back.
_How right he is._

Tom leaped to his feet and hugged Harry with bonecrushing vigor. When
he stepped back, Harry, regarding him with amazement, said softly, "I
guess you liked it...?"

Tom kissed him for reply.

"Hey," said B'Elanna, and Tom turned to see her standing with hands on
hips. He let go of Harry, who looked pleased and dizzy, to grab her
around the waist and kiss her soundly as well. "Thank you," he said
when he stepped back. "Thank you, B'Elanna. And you, Harry."

"You're welcome, Tom," she said, and smiled. "But all I meant was to
ask Harry where the hot tub was."

Tom Paris felt the darkness finally ebb fully as he laughed. It wasn't
gone; it could never be, he would always have scars on his heart.
However,he thought as he draped one arm around Harry's shoulders and
one around B'Elanna's waist, he wasn't broken, he wasn't dead, and he
certainly wasn't alone.

---

"No." Tom folded his arms as he quietly objected, knowing that with
his young-looking handsomeness, B'Elanna would unconsciously not take
him seriously if he yelled;  he'd look petulant. "This doesn't concern
my performance as Ship's Pilot."

"But you need counseling," B'Elanna replied, her voice pressing itself
against the bars of her control. She looked equally stubborn as she
mirrored Tom's gesture, also trying to argue rationally, for similar
reasons. "I didn't take you to Sickbay; that electronic doctor may be
developing a personality, but he'd still be better at sedating you
than listening to you. But you *do* need help, as badly as you'd need
regeneration for a wound, and the Captain should know. She can arrange
it."

"It's more like a scar," Tom replied dully, turning away to sit down
on the edge of her bed. "It's healed over already, as much as it can
be."

"Tom have you ever had one of these flashbacks before?" Harry had been
sitting on B'Elanna's chest of clothes drawers, mostly listening as if
to decide which side of the argument he was on.

Tom rolled his eyes, not feeling like dealing with either of them on
this subject. "Yes, but they...went away, till now."

"Have you had them only about...this, or about the accident as well?"

Tom looked up sharply, narrowing his eyes at Harry. _So you've picked
a side._ "Only this. I have *nightmares* about the accident," he said,
with enough force to make Harry flinch. "But I don't *sleep* on the
Bridge."

Then Tom looked back down at his hands. "I'm OK." He could *feel*
B'Elanna's skeptical glare, though he didn't look up. "I can pilot
Voyager better than anyone else on this ship, and to Captain Janeway,
that's what ultimately matters. She might like me, might care about
how I do---she cares about all of us---but what she needs to know is
if I can't pilot. And I can."  With that he looked up to see
B'Elanna's expression softening, and Harry's sympathetic. Despite
that, she said, "but---"

Tom cut her off with a lopsided grin and "Besides, the best qualified
people to be Ship's Counsel are Tuvok and Chakotay. Tuvok's run around
in my head once already---do you want him turning womanizing the way
he turned homicidal?" Harry grinned at that. "And Chakotay would feed
me to his spirit guide and have done with it."

Outrage warred with amusement on B'Elanna's face. "He would do his
best- --"

"I know. But he doesn't exactly like me, and he has a hard enough row
to hoe without playing Freud to me."

"As if you're concerned about *him*." B'Elanna conceded defeat
nevertheless, sitting down beside Tom. "OK. I won't tell her....unless
you start having flashbacks regularly again."

"Do you think they're fun?" Tom asked, touching the bruise on her
cheek both to remind her and to take the sting from his tone. "If I
start having them regularly I'll tell her myself." Tom flopped
backwards on the bed and smiled up at her. "I wouldn't be able to have
sex, after all. That would be a *major* problem."

B'Elanna laughed as well. "Arguments before bed are always
invigorating." she said. "Harry, are you staying?"

"Um, I don't know."

"Between what happened tonight and the fact that I'm due at the helm
in seven hours, I think all we're going to do is sleep, so you don't
have to worry about it being a school night." Tom sat up to pull off
the pants as he talked. "Besides..." he looked up at Harry, more
seriously. "Tonight, I'd kind of like...."

He didn't have to finish the statement. Harry sighed with mock
resignation and smiled with real relief as he started unfastening his
uniform.

Much later that night Tom turned over and woke up when his arms hit
the mattress. He opened his eyes to dim starlight and groggily sat up;
B'Elanna was warm to one side, fast asleep with her mouth open; but
Harry was gone from the other. Tom rubbed his eyes and looked around
to see Harry sitting on the chest of drawers, watching them. "Come
back to bed," he mumbled sleepily. "You need the sleep."

"Soon," Harry replied. "I just need to sit for awhile."

Tom nodded, too sleepy to really protest, and lay down with his arm
around B'Elanna again, but he thought groggily, before the sound of
her breathing lulled him back to sleep, that Harry didn't sound so
happy.

And he never did come back to bed that night.

---

"So not only is the Holodeck not free, but B'Elanna's working late on
the couplings with Carey, and *he's* tanked up on caffeine, as usual.
I love the woman, but I don't mind not having to be in Engineering
tonight."

When he didn't get any more reply than a "mmph", Tom looked at Harry
over his dinner. The younger man was pale under his golden skin, his
eyes bruised-looking from lack of sleep, and toying with his dinner---
which, tonight, was actually pretty good, since Harry had replicated
it for both of them. "If you're not going to eat your bul-koki, can I
have it?" Tom asked jokingly. Harry started to hand him the plate, and
Tom had to catch his hand and stop him. "Hey, I was kidding. You
should eat something."

"I'm not very hungry," Harry said listlessly, and began to head for
the reclamator. Tom stopped him again, with, "In that case, I'm not
kidding," which made him smile.

Still, Harry got up and wandered across his front room to the couch by
the viewport, and looked out at the stars. Tom looked at his obviously
unhappy friend, and back at his dinner, and inhaled as many bites as
his conscience would allow him before he trashed the plate and went
over to sit beside Harry. "You're not eating, and you haven't slept
the last two nights. After my nightmare, I'd've thought that should be
my job."

Harry sighed. "I don't know. I just....don't feel OK. I had a dream
about Libby last night. She told me she misses me. I miss her."

Tom opened his mouth and wedged his foot deeply in it. "Really? I'd
thought you were doing pretty well at leaving her on Earth."

"No, I'm not," Harry snapped, springing up, and Tom winced at his own
stupidity. "The fact that I left her on Earth is the *problem*." He
turned to look at Tom, looking truly haunted. "You, of all people,
know that. You know how much time I've spent insisting to myself that
I would stay true to her. That's why I never did anything about Susan,
or Citherys, or B'Elanna, or you. I spent a year looking at you and
B'Elanna, and now I have you two and I wouldn't trade you for
anything, but I have to let go of Libby to have you, and it isn't
easy." Harry finished with a sigh and leaned against the wall. "I'm
not....it really isn't easy."

Tom got up and went to Harry, hands held out in apology. "I do know.
I'm sorry. I'm just stupid sometimes."

Harry looked up and smiled, a real smile this time. "I know. I mean, I
know that you know...." Tom grinned. "I shouldn't lay this on you
anyway. Especially not now---"

"Hey, I'm your friend. You're here for me, and I'm here for you."
Harry's smile grew wider at that, but his eyes filled up; he threw his
arms around Tom and just held onto him. Tom held him, stroking his
hair with one hand, hoping that what he was doing was helping. He
figured it must be when Harry kissed his ear.  "Harry?"

"Do you---do you mind?"

"Oh, I so mind being kissed by the handsomest guy on the ship." Tom
kissed Harry firmly to underscore his sarcasm, then led Harry into his
bedroom and sat him down on the bed. This kind of comfort he knew he
was good at.

Harry leaned against him as if he were too tired to sit up. "I--- Tom,
she was so *real*." Tom, already hard, swallowed a groan. _Boy, can
Harry torture himself_. "She wore that red dress she was wearing that
morning, when I'd gone to the different timeline. And then she asked
me if I'd forgotten her, and I reached out to take her hands and tell
her I hadn't, and I couldn't reach her....I feel like she hasn't given
up hope that I'm alive, like she's still waiting for me to come home.
I can almost picture her putting her arms around me."

A man has only so much endurance. Tom, seeing an opening, asked, "like
this?" and wrapped his arms around Harry from behind, caressing his
nipples through his shirt and nibbling on his ear.  Harry laughed
breathily and leaned back into his embrace. "Is this all you think
about?"

"Flying, too...*sometimes*." Tom punctuated "sometimes" with a kiss;
when he sat back Harry was looking at him. "Are you OK with this?"
Harry asked.

"Just don't hold me down." They both grinned. "Really, I am. I can't
let what was done to me years ago and lightyears away keep me from the
people I want to be with now. I have to put my past in my past."

A pall fell over Harry's face, and Tom could have kicked himself.
"Harry, I don't mean---"

Harry turned around, grabbed Tom's face in his hands, and kissed him
roughly. "I don't want to think anymore," he said in a rough, soft
voice,leaning his forehead against Tom's. "Please don't let me think."

"Sure." Tom tilted his face up to kiss Harry again, pressing him
gently backwards as he did so.

Some kisses and undressing later, Harry said, "Tom, I wanted to ask
you something."

Tom looked up from undoing Harry's belt. "I wanted to ask you
something, too."

"What?" Harry asked, looking surprised, elated, and nervous all at
once.

_I wonder what he thinks I'm going to say, to look like that_, Tom
thought, as he said, "Why do you wear such damned old-fashioned
clothing. A *belt*?"

Harry relaxed and laughed. "The outfit needs it."

Tom gave up on the belt for the moment to lie down beside Harry. "It's
worse than one of those old-fashioned pieces of lingerie, like a hook-
bra. They're at least *supposed* to take awhile to remove." He put one
arm across Harry's chest as he asked, "so what do *you* want to ask?"

Harry turned red, as red as Tom's uniform, and Tom suddenly knew just
*what* Harry wanted to ask him. But his streak of mischief decided to
make Harry say the words.

Looking carefully at the ceiling, Harry began trying to explain. "You
remember the night after the party, when you and B'Elanna teamed up on
me?"

"Like you minded."

Harry laughed. "No, I didn't mind. Do you remember what you did?"

"Let's see." Tom raised himself on his elbows to start counting on his
fingers. "I think I kissed you, and she bit you, and then I pinched
you, and she kissed you, and then---"

Harry laughed so hard he nearly fell off the bed. "No, that's not what
I meant." Then he quieted down, turning his back to Tom and gently
pulling Tom's arms around him. "I don't know if I can say this."

"Hey, I've heard nearly everything...and thought of the rest." Tom saw
Harry's cheek move as he smiled at that. "Ask away."

"Do you remember what you, singular---dammit, the language is 1500
years old and we still don't have a plural 'you'---do you remember
what you did with your fingers? I...liked that. Can we do it again,
but...but not with your fingers?"

"I *am* a bad influence on you," Tom said admiringly, prompting Harry
to turn back over to face him; he forestalled Harry's protest by
adding, "you said all that and you didn't even turn pink."

Harry turned red again. "You know what I'm trying to ask."

"Yeah, but it would be nice to hear you say it."

Harry turned his back to Tom again. "I'm not in the mood for mind
games."

"I'm sorry." Tom kissed Harry's ear, and felt the tension drain out of
his back. "But I think....you should be sure you want this."

"I do," said Harry, rather quickly. "Tom, I want you to....to fuck
me."

Tom grinned into Harry's hair. "I guess you do," he replied. "I
haven't heard you use such language since---"

"Dammit, Tom." Harry turned back over with enough force to roll
himself onto Tom, stopping his mouth with another hard kiss as he
straddled him. "Please?" he asked between kisses. "Don't tease me
about this."

Tom took Harry by the shoulders and gently pushed him away. Harry
looked so young and so disappointed---_like a kid whose puppy was
taken away_, Tom thought---that Tom forgot his quip and said,
seriously, "I won't tease you tonight. Come here." Then he couldn't
have kept Harry off even if he'd wanted to; Harry wrapped Tom in his
arms and kissed him devoutly.

Harry got the belt undone himself, and Tom's shorts off also, kissing
him all the while, and wrapped one hand around Tom as he kept kissing
him, stroking until Tom began to feel a haze rising in his head.
"Harry," he croaked.

"Yeah?"

"Stop that before I come right now." Harry nearly laughed at that, and
let Tom sit up; Tom shook his head, so aroused he was dizzy. "Gods.
Um, let's get the pillows together," he said, pointing to the edge of
the bed, "so you have something to lean on."

"Why not right here? I'm ready, and you look like you are." Harry
smirked, and Tom smirked back but shook his head.

"I don't want to squash you. Trust me, you don't want to feel like
you're pinned."

Harry sat up and patted Tom on the cheek, a look of concern on his
face, and Tom smiled at him. "I told you I'm OK. Now, are we going to
do this, or do I sit here till my balls turn purple?"

Harry smiled again. "Thanks, Tom," he said, and kissed him. Tom kissed
him back, then said, "Thank me after you know you like this," and
scooted off the bed.

After the pillows, and the sheets and the blanket for good measure,
were heaped up at the foot of the bed, Tom asked Harry, "So what do
you use to jerk off?"

Harry raised one eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

"You must have some kind of lubricant around. You're entirely too
sensitive to do it dry. I *do* notice these things."

"Oh." Harry rummaged in his desk, and found a small tube. "Here," he
said, tossing it to Tom, who looked impressed at what he read. "You
could grease machinery with this stuff."

"Is it too thick?"

"No, it's perfect. I was afraid you'd have some of that water- soluble
crap." Tom held out his free hand to Harry invitingly; when he came to
him Tom kissed him again before he gently turned him around.

Harry promptly grabbed onto the sheets with a death grip, and Tom
laughed.

"For goodness sake, I'm not going to be that rough. Relax," he said,
leaning over Harry and kissing him on the neck as he gently pried his
hands loose. "We have plenty of time, and I'm going to use it." Harry
turned his head to kiss Tom, and then buried his face in his arms,
bracing himself anyway. "So tell me right away if anything hurts," Tom
commanded. "At all. The very last thing I want to do is to hurt you."
Harry nodded at that, but didn't say anything, but when Tom ran his
hand over the curves of his behind he trembled.

"Remember this?" Tom asked archly, as he slipped one well-greased
finger in. Harry tensed, and then relaxed slowly, nodding. Tom thrust
for a few strokes and then added another finger; this time, when Harry
relaxed, he smiled encouragingly over his shoulder, and Tom's heart
leaped. At the third finger Harry gasped, and started to push himself
back against Tom's hand. When Tom drew out his fingers Harry made a
small disappointed sound, and Tom chuckled breathily. "I'm not going
anywhere," he said reassuringly, as he lubricated himself. "Here. This
is me, now. This is my cock, in you."  Harry nodded, gasping and
leaning up on his elbows, pushing himself back against Tom. Tom
wrapped his arms around Harry's waist as he felt himself slide deeply
in and watched Harry throw his head back and moan, eyes closed, as he
felt it too.

"Tom," he said raptly.

"Yeah?"

"Oh, nothing...just you. You're in me." Harry turned his head again to
beam at Tom, his face full of amazement, and Tom nodded back, too far
gone himself to even think of being arch. He leaned forwards to kiss
Harry, pulling him tightly against his hips as he did so; Harry gasped
into the kiss, tensing again as he felt Tom plunge as deeply as he
could go, then relaxing.

"I'm going to start...."Tom whispered; Harry nodded and put his face
back down in his arms.

To say Harry was tight was an understatement, especially since he
hadn't done this before and he was tremendously responsive now; every
time Tom thrust Harry gasped, and every time he gasped he tensed. Tom
tried very hard to keep himself in check so he wouldn't hurt his
friend, though what he wanted to do, so badly his head swam, was to
grab Harry's shoulders and thrust as hard as he possibly could until
they both came so hard they fainted. Instead, he ran through all the
settings of impulse power and the newest set of shield modulation
patterns he was working on, one at a time, between thrusts. And still
his brain was fogging over.

Harry's voice, though muffled by his arms, cut through the fog. "Tom?"

"Yeah?" Tom panted.

Harry lifted his head. "Harder."

"Harder?!" _I didn't hear him right._

"Harder." Harry rolled his hips as if to emphasize his request, and
Tom, clutching his hips, let himself a little more loose. _Fuck the
shield modulations_, he thought, as he thrust quite a bit harder.

Harry dropped his head into his arms and moaned, and Tom stopped,
afraid. "Harry?"

"God. Almighty." Harry was breathing nearly as hard as Tom. "No, don't
stop. Tom, that was perfect. Please..."

Tom had already started again before the "please" had passed his lips,
and it shaded up into a moan that set Tom's blood afire. Tom started
thrusting in earnest, feeling Harry pressed between him and the bed,
feeling Harry shove himself back against him on each thrust, up on his
elbows now, moaning loudly. Harry rolled his hips back again and again
until the haze filling Tom's brain crested into a tidal wave and broke
over him as he slammed into Harry once more and came, his own shout
blending with Harry's and echoing in his ears.

Then he collapsed onto Harry's back and held onto him, waiting for the
room to stop spinning.

By the time it did Tom's knees had turned to jelly; he slid to the
floor with an ungraceful thud. Harry slid down beside him, and the
pillows followed. "Tom...." he whispered.

Tom opened his eyes to see Harry's face above his, tears on his
cheeks. He wrapped his arms around his neck and kissed them away, then
kissed Harry warmly. "Oh, God, Harry. Thank you. I didn't hurt you?"

Harry smiled unsteadily. "No, no, you didn't." And he wrapped his arms
around Tom and kissed him back, just as passionately, if not more.

Tom felt something poke him in the stomach and looked down to find
that Harry hadn't come yet. "Why didn't you tell me?" he demanded, but
forestalled any reply with another kiss, pushing Harry onto his back
as he wrapped his still-slick hand around him. One arm under Harry's
neck and the other hand masturbating him, Tom kissed Harry nearly
continuously, watching that face with those large, deep eyes, until he
came as well, arching his back and crying out.

"Where's your refresher again?" he asked Harry when he had caught his
breath.

"Between the replicator and the wall. Why?"

"Because we demolished this pillowcase." Tom regarded it for a moment,
wiped off his thumb again, then threw it into a corner with their
clothes. "It can wait." He laid his head down beside Harry's, draping
his arm across his chest.

"Thanks, Tom," said Harry, putting his hand on Tom's cheek; Tom smiled
at that. "Anytime," he replied.

"Well, you did tell me to thank you when I knew I liked this." Harry
smiled back and kissed Tom, then put his head down with an exhausted
thud. "I feel nearly as battered as the first time B'Elanna and I had
sex," he said. "I'm sore, but boy was it worth it."

"You aren't supposed to be sore," said Tom, a bit worried. "Do you
want to---"

"Go to Sickbay?" Both men burst into laughter. "I can see the Doctor
now, scolding you as he runs the regenerator over me."

"Yeah," Tom replied. "Mr. Paris, I expect you to use care and caution
when you fuck a member of this crew." he said, imitating the Doctor's
stern tones. Harry laughed and kissed him again.

Tom blinked in surprise as a thought came to him. "I think I've kissed
you more than I kissed anyone since my first girlfriend. I was never
that much of a kisser before, but you've certainly got me into it. Do
you always do this?"

"Do what?"

"Give your lovers good habits. B'Elanna was telling me how you got her
to be cuddly. Not bad, making *her* cuddly. That's like making a tiger
lick your hand."

Harry laughed, and then yawned. "I guess so....I think I'm falling
asleep." He turned on his side, to put both arms around Tom. "This was
wonderful. Thank you."

"You're welcome."_So are you._"Harry?"

"Mmmm-hmm?"

"I....think....Shit, I'm mangling this. You know what I'm trying to
say."

Harry grinned, a mischievous glint in his eyes. "It would be nice to
hear you say it."

Tom sighed and grinned, hearing his words thrown back at him. "I love
you, you know that?"

"Yes. I know." Harry leaned over Tom to kiss him once more. "I love
you, too," he said, looking down into his eyes. Then he laid his head
on Tom's shoulder and closed his. Tom stroked Harry's hair as he said,
"computer, turn off the lights," his heart full nearly to overflowing.

---

A long time later, B'Elanna let herself into Harry's quarters. She'd
finally got those couplings fixed, and sent Carey, now crashing, back
to his quarters to sleep, but she was still wired on her own
adrenaline and far from drowsy; since the computer had told her that
Harry was in his quarters and wasn't in bed, she'd decided to go talk
to him about his increasingly melancholy behavior.

The lights were off. B'Elanna knew Harry's quarters well enough to not
need them, but it was still odd; she was about to call for them when
she rounded the corner into his bedroom and heard gentle snoring.

Tom and Harry were sound asleep on the floor, wrapped in each other's
arms, the pillows beside Harry. _Damn literalist computer_, B'Elanna
thought as she smiled to see them there. Pulling the bedsheet free of
the tangle, she draped it over them; Tom didn't stir, but Harry opened
his eyes.

"B'Elanna?" he asked softly, his voice thick with sleep.

"Shhh", she said, and leaned down to kiss him on his forehead. "Go
back to sleep." He smiled, and closed his eyes; she could hear him
start snoring again as she let herself out. _He'll finally sleep_, she
thought. _He'll be OK. I don't need to talk to him._

Unfortunately, she was wrong.

---

"So, who'd you see?"

"I'm *not* telling you." B'Elanna folded her arms and leaned backwards
in the chair as Tom leaned forwards across the table, smiling
mischievously, the remains of their dinner and a plant he was slowly
killing (a gift from Kes, or it would have died long ago) between
them.

"Awww, come on," he said. "I've told you who I saw, and that was
pretty darn embarrassing. I think I'm the only person who didn't see
someone they're in love with."

"I didn't tell you then and I'm not telling you now." B'Elanna was
fighting a losing battle with an amused smile, and Tom pressed his
advantage.

"I didn't know you had ridges going down your back then, either."

She lost, and smiled, rolling her eyes. "Your luck is holding today,
Tom Paris; most days I'd be pretty pissed at you." Carefully looking
away, she continued in low tones, "That Bothan made me see Chakotay."

"Chakotay?" Tom whistled, and wisely kept his comment to himself.

"He used to be the only person who accepted me as myself," she
explained.  "Everyone else saw me as a weak excuse for a Klingon----"
Tom was getting full, what with all those swallowed comments----"or an
excessively strong human woman, as a failed cadet or as a terrorist.
Only Chakotay never put me into any boxes, slapped any labels on me.
He judged me only as who I am, and not according to any ideas he had
as to who I should be, yet he showed me how I could be a great deal
more than I was when we first met."

Tom got up and threw the plates in the reclamator, a little sorry he'd
asked. "But does he do this?" he asked when he returned, wrapping his
arms around B'Elanna's waist from behind and leaning over her to bite
her neck gently as he slid his hands up to her bosom.

Tom was gratified to see that this little move (apparently) worked
equally well on B'Elanna, who arched her back, pushing her breasts
into his hands, and laughed. "Is this all you think about?" she asked,
smiling up at him.

"What do you think?" Tom leaned in to kiss her, but she ducked as she
plucked his hands off her chest.

"You can't distract me this easily," B'Elanna said cheerfully, pulling
a crestfallen Tom around to face her. "If I remember correctly, I was
lecturing you on Chakotay's virtues." Tom tried not to look too
disappointed, but B'Elanna caught his look anyway and smirked. "And
how he was the only person who saw me as I am....

"Until I came on this ship."

At that, B'Elanna smiled up at Tom, a smile that took his breath away
and made him ashamed of his crude attempt at quieting her; he knelt by
her chair, his hands still in her firm grip. "Until I met Harry, who
chooses his own friends, and Captain Janeway, who gives out second
chances, and you, who understands what it is to need a second chance,
and to take it." With that, B'Elanna leaned over to kiss Tom, a deep,
long kiss that he felt down to his toes.

When she sat back, looking at him intently, he felt obliged to make
some kind of a speech in return. "Well, the Captain could hardly pass
up the best engineer in the Quadrant, and Harry has enough sense to
not fit people into boxes. And you've given me as much of a second
chance as Captain Janeway has." Tom was surprised to realize how much
of that he meant. In fact, he meant all of it.

B'Elanna looked surprised at his sincerity, too; she smiled again, and
fondly ran one hand through his hair before she kissed him again.

Then she sat up. "I'm worried about Harry," she said flatly. "What you
said just now about him reminded me."

Tom nodded, reminded himself; suddenly, kissing could wait. "Now that
you mention it...I haven't seen him, except on the Bridge, in four
days, and the last time I talked to him he was torturing himself about
Libby. When was the last time you saw Harry? Did he say anything to
you?"

"Three days ago, and all he said was "hi" and "bye". I don't think
he's been eating very much; I never see him at meals."

"He doesn't look like he's getting any sleep, either; he has circles
under his eyes and the Captain had to repeat most of her orders to him
today."  Tom stood up, reading B'Elanna's worry in her eyes and
knowing his expression mirrored hers. "Computer, locate Ensign Kim."

"Ensign Kim is in the Holodeck."

"I guess we'd better go talk to him, then," said Tom, unnecessarily;
B'Elanna was already halfway out the door.

---

The Holodeck wasn't running anything when they got there; Harry was
sitting on the floor with the heels of his hands pressed into his
eyes. He jumped to his feet when he heard them coming.

"Harry!" B'Elanna gasped, and went to him. To say that he looked
terrible would be rather an understatement; the circles under his eyes
were purple and bruised-looking with lack of sleep, and his face was
beginning to look gaunt. "Something is definitely wrong," she said,
trying to put her arms around him. He ducked out of her embrace, and
her heart sank.

"Yeah", Harry agreed in an exhausted voice. "This is."

"What is?" Tom asked, looking as bewildered as B'Elanna felt as he
walked up behind her. Harry looked up at him with sad and weary eyes.

"This....relationship. I can't do this.  I can't do it anymore."

B'Elanna couldn't have felt more stunned if the entire warp core
detached itself and fell on her. She knew she was staring at Harry
with her mouth open, but she felt rooted to the floor, too shocked to
move.

Harry looked down at his feet and went on. "I love you both," he said
softly. "It's not you, either of you. It's just that I loved Libby
first, and I promised her I'd wait for her.  What am I if I don't keep
my promises?"

"But she's on the other side of the Galaxy!" pleaded Tom. "She
probably thinks you're dead, Harry. What are the odds----"

"I don't care about the odds! I can't gamble with my heart, Tom."
Harry turned away from them to lean against the wall. "Before I met
you I promised her, and I can't forget that now. I'm sorry, but I
can't do this anymore." And with that Harry turned and started walking
away from them.

"Harry!" B'Elanna yelled after him. She started after him, but
something on her left arm weighed her down; thinking only to get to
Harry she yanked again and felt the weight change its orientation, but
not diminish---and heard Tom grunt.

Then her brain started working again, and she turned around. Tom was
kneeling awkwardly on the floor, hanging on to her left wrist as if
for dear life.

"Oh, Tom." B'Elanna shook her head and helped him to his feet, sorry
for pulling him down...but beginning to be angry. "Why, in the name of
Kahless, did you stop me?"

"I used to be a stupid young man, too." Tom rubbed his knee. "He has
more sense than I ever did; he'll come around," he said, as much to
himself as to her.

"I hope so," B'Elanna said, and then felt herself sway as what had
happened hit her. They'd lost Harry. They'd lost him, to a girl 70,000
light years away and his own damned sense of honor. She felt her eyes
prickle, and cursed the tears.

"B'Elanna?"

"I'm not crying," she said thickly, pressing her fists into her eyes.

"Good," said Tom, his voice rough; B'Elanna looked at him and saw his
eyes brimming over. "I am." And he sat down with a defeated thump.
B'Elanna's legs folded under her and she settled down beside him,
grabbing his hand tightly to steady him.

"We should get back to our quarters," she said, trying to hold onto
some self-control."We can't stay here...."

"I know." Tom rubbed the back of his other hand across his eyes. "Your
place or mine?" he added with a lopsided grin. B'Elanna could have
smacked him; _how can he make jokes now?_ Then she saw what he was
trying to do and managed to smile back.

"Yours. It's closer."

---

The walk calmed them both down somewhat; by the time B'Elanna wearily
threw herself onto Tom's bed she felt bleak and angry all at once, but
it *was* somewhat of an improvement on wanting to bawl like a child.
"So what do we do now?" she asked Tom, who lay beside her.

"Now? Is there anything we *can* do?" replied Tom miserably. "Either
Harry comes to his senses and comes back to us....or he doesn't."

"But there *has* to be something we can do!" B'Elanna sat up and
kicked the wall in frustration. "Dammit, Tom! I don't just let people
I love walk away. Do you?"

"Sometimes, if I can't do anything else." Tom sat up and gingerly
reached out to touch her arm. She didn't look at him, but she didn't
throw him through the wall, either, so he put his hand firmly on her
shoulder.  "This isn't my fault, or yours. This is something Harry has
to work out for himself. So there's nothing *we* can do."

Now B'Elanna did feel like looking at him. "When did you get so wise?"
she asked sardonically, trying to smile.

Tom gave her a lopsided smile back. "You've been rubbing off on me."

B'Elanna suddenly felt like a real smile. Here was Tom, as abandoned
as she was, trying to console her. "You're a real piece of work, Tom
Paris."

Tom pulled his hand back, beginning to look hurt, and she shook her
head. "No, I mean....fuck it. Come here." B'Elanna held out her arms
to Tom, who looked relieved as he wordlessly sank into them, and they
sat there just holding each other.

"Dammit," she said, after awhile. "I should have seen this coming..."

"Then so should I," said Tom, sitting up, blue eyes flashing. "He
talked about nothing but Libby the last time I saw him. But I didn't,
and neither did you. B'Elanna, this *isn't* your fucking fault. You
can't--- " Tom stopped himself and swallowed his comment.

"I can't *what*?" asked B'Elanna, a dangerous lilt to her voice, and
was pleased to see that Tom was still a tiny bit afraid of her as he
dropped his and said softly, "You can't fix *everything*."

B'Elanna looked at him and suddenly laughed, a wild, high, hysterical
laugh, her careening emotions sweeping her away. "No, I can't", she
said,and just as suddenly burst into tears. "No, I can't."

"Shhh," Tom tried to say, wrapping his arms around her, but B'Elanna
heard his voice crack as well. She buried her face in his chest,
sobbing, holding him tightly as he pressed his face into her shoulder,
and they cried themselves out in each others' arms....

....while, one deck down, a clarinet sobbed, alone.

---

_Forget cutting it_, thought Captain Janeway, glancing from her helm
officer to the ensign at Ops. _This tension would break a knife._

Not that Ensign Kim and Lieutenant Paris looked *angry* at each other.
On the other hand, Harry Kim spent half the day staring at the back of
Tom Paris's head, only to suddenly look very busy every time Tom had
the slightest occasion to turn around. Tom, meanwhile, could barely
keep his eyes on anyone but Harry every time he faced the rest of the
Bridge; Janeway saw his eyes flicker back and forth as she talked to
him, Chakotay wasn't bothering to say much to Tom, as it would all
have to be said three times, and Tuvok seemed to be taking a perverse
delight---or would have, did Vulcans take delight in things, of
course---in asking Tom things just to see him try and fail to keep his
attention from wavering.

She sat back and crossed her legs. Still, the two men were behaving as
professionally as they could, she told herself. _How would I endure
sitting next to Chakotay under similar circumstances? I hope I *never*
have to find out. I wonder if we set a bad example for the
crew....perhaps they would have been better off if I hadn't made it
seem so acceptable to form liasons._

Chakotay looked over at her; she knew he could see the doubt in her
eyes, and smiled at him to cover it. He smiled reassuringly back. _No,
what they had they had, and it was a good thing for them, even if it
might be over._

Tom sighed at the helm; out of the corner of her eye Janeway saw Harry
look up quickly and then force his head back down. _Though I certainly
hope it isn't, for their sakes...and ours._

---

"Commander? Do you have a moment?" Chakotay, eating lunch alone,
looked up to see B'Elanna holding a tray in one hand and a padd in the
other.

"Of course." He smiled sympathetically at her. "How are you holding
up?"

"OK." B'Elanna shrugged, picking through her lunch for the edible
bits. "I'm trying not to terrorize everyone in Engineering."

"I'd meant to talk to you about that; Dalby and Carey both came to
talk to me about you." Her head snapped up and Chakotay smiled more
broadly. "They're concerned because you're being too nice."

B'Elanna smiled at that. "I'll have to be crankier, then." Then she
sighed.  "I'm worried; I know you know why. Here are the energy use
records for the past two weeks."

"Ensign Ashmore uses too much hot water, Ensign Wildman does too---
but she came to me about that, and I'd meant to ask you if we could
increase her ration."

"Of course." B'Elanna was tapping her fingers on the edge of the
table, waiting for Chakotay to go down the list.

"And Ensign Kim keeps his lights on all the time he's in his
quarters." Chakotay noticed that B'Elanna had stopped tapping.

"That only began five days ago," she added. "Which was when...."
Chakotay nodded. "I came to talk to you about this because...I don't
think I can talk to him about it. I know why he's keeping his lights
on, but...I can't talk to him about it unless I talk to him about the
reason why. I know it's unprofessional. That's why I came to you; for
advice. As a friend."

"Well, you're right; it is unprofessional, but people have done much
worse," he said soothingly. "Hmmm. I'm surprised you haven't gone to
talk to him yet; it's not like you to let people alone to stew in
their own juices."

"It was Tom's idea."

"Well, everyone has some good ones." B'Elanna smiled at that. "As a
friend, I think the three of you should go for a long walk in a nice
place. Which reminds me...have you picked a shift down on Melaris
Three yet? I need to know when you want to be on leave so I can
coordinate the search for rubidium."

"No, I haven't, and neither has Lieutenant Paris....did Ensign Kim?"
she asked, as an idea came to her.

Chakotay picked up the padd beside him and scanned through the data.
"Yes, actually."

"When?"

"800 hours, day after tomorrow. It'll be midday planetside where we're
going."

"All right. If I went down at 750 hours, how long could I stay?"

"Around nine hours if you aren't camping overnight; we're expecting
everyone who isn't back at 1650 hours. If you are, I strongly suggest
that you bring gear; the nighttime temperature drops to about 5
degrees or so."

"No, eight hours should be enough," B'Elanna said, and smiled a
hunter's smile. "Can I sign up for then, to be back at 1550? I can see
you at 1700 to plan the rubidium search. And...can you make sure
Ensign Kim doesn't know about this?" Chakotay raised an eyebrow, and
she continued, "I'm not going to ambush him or anything. It's just
that....well, you said yourself that it's not very like me to leave
people alone; I think I've left him alone quite long enough. I'll even
get Paris to come along and prove I didn't jump on Harry from a tree."

"Between you two I feel sorry for Mr. Kim," said Chakotay, smiling.
"750 hours it is."

---

Harry wondered if something in his subconscious were trying to drive
him insane. He'd thought that the piercing guilt was a sign that he
should have stayed faithful to Libby, and that breaking up with Tom
and B'Elanna would assuage it. But now he found himself feeling just
as guilty for hurting them....and hurt them he knew he had, too well
to lie to himself. He'd run into B'Elanna in the turbolift and watched
her back stiffen as she stood quietly staring at the wall until he
thought it would burst into flame, and when she spoke her voice was so
cold he nearly wished she would scream at him, attack him, do anything
except talk so coldly and detachedly for someone so warm. And, on the
bridge, Tom merely looked at him....

Tom looked at Harry like a man who'd seen many loves and more passions
fail him or be taken from him, and was enduring what had turned out to
be merely the latest loss; seeing Tom like that, and seeing himself
reduced to another in the series of Tom's mishaps in life, made Harry
want to put his fist through the wall in sheer frustration.

Harry shaved, and looked at himself in the mirror as he did so. The
purple circles under his eyes were gone, banished with a mild
sedative, but his cheekbones were sharper than ever. _I've really got
to eat more_, he thought. _After my walk I'll make myself the biggest
dinner._ But the thought of eating alone made food sound like sawdust.

He shook his head and dried his face. _I'll feel better once I get
planetside._

He was right about that. Melaris Three was a tilted, seasonal planet,
much like Earth; the region where they were going on leave was in its
springtime, and springtime apparently was beautiful even on the other
side of the galaxy. Harry pulled off his boots and wandered barefoot
over soft blue grasslike vegetation, looking around him at waist-high
saplings in blue and green pigments and tall trees scattered between;
they were at the edge of an expanding forest, apparently. He smiled,
tilting his face up to the sunshine and drinking in the sweet, warm,
flower-tinged fresh air, and never even suspected he was being hunted.

As it turned out, Captain Janeway needed Tom available to go over
those shield harmonic patterns he'd been working on, so B'Elanna was
"unchaperoned"  down on the planet; the thought of Tom as a chaperone
made her smile as she knelt behind a tree, watching Harry wander up to
one shaggy-barked, blue-leafed tower that was shedding delicate white
petals profusely enough to produce an ankle-deep "snowdrift" all
around it. He kicked gently through the petals, delight on his face,
and then looked up at the star Melaris through the branches of the
tree, letting petals fall all around him.  He looked so serene
B'Elanna felt rather sorry to disturb him, but, she reminded herself,
she wanted to watch him from near, not from far; she wanted to be
close enough to warm herself in his glow.

So she carefully began to move.

Harry put one hand on the bark of the craggy tree that he stood under,
feeling the absurdly delicate white petals it was snowing as they fell
on his face and shoulders; had he been much younger he would have held
up his hands to catch them. _I *have* to ask Tom to make a hologram of
this_, he thought, and the thought threw him back to the sad present.
_I won't be able to ask Tom anything for awhile._

Something touched Harry on his shoulder. He turned around----

----saw a glimpse of a beautiful, angry face----

---and felt himself slammed against the tree hard enough to knock the
wind out of him.

When Harry had gotten his breath back enough, the first thing he
noticed was that he was being held up by a two-fisted grip on his
collar; the second was that he dangled there, his feet off the ground
so far his toes barely grazed the grass. With trepidation, he opened
his eyes...

....and saw B'Elanna below him as she held him against the tree,
breathing deeply but evenly with the exertion. "Hey, Starfleet," she
said, slowly and calmly. "We have to talk."

---

B'Elanna watched Harry with amusement as he rubbed his throat and
settled down facing her...a safe distance away. "Well," he croaked,
and rubbed his throat again. "I guess you're doing OK."

"I've spent quite awhile with my calisthenics," she said, and smiled.

Harry looked laughably nervous. "Apparently..." Then he looked down
into his lap. "How's Tom?"

"Coping. A few nightmares. He misses you."

"And you?" Harry smiled up at her from under his lashes; B'Elanna
growled in irritation, and the smile wavered, but remained. Then he
looked down again. "I'm sorry."

"You should be," B'Elanna snapped, and was sorry the next second..
"Shit. Harry, I don't mean that. I'm sorry---"

"No, you're right." Harry looked up at her. "I've had....a lot of free
time lately, so I've been thinking. I didn't do well by you and Tom,
and I'm sorry for that. I couldn't face either of you all this week. I
was thinking that maybe I shouldn't have taken your invitation in the
first place---" B'Elanna felt her spine go rigid, throwing her head
up, as she opened her mouth to protest; Harry, seeing her startle,
hurriedly added, "but I was wrong to think that, also. I'm glad I
did." And he smiled at her, softly but truly, before he looked down
again, crushing petals between his fingers.

"I'm glad you did, too." B'Elanna took a deep breath and tried to
remember the words she'd planned.  "I know you know why I want to talk
to you." _*That* was inane_, she thought, but Harry nodded. "I...I
understand being honor-bound to a promise, but please do hear me out.
You didn't earlier."  Harry heard the resentful edge in her voice and
smiled ruefully. "You remember what I told you when you asked me why I
wanted you---that we might die anytime and I didn't want to miss my
chance with you. What I haven't told you is how having you makes me
want to live, makes me feel alive."

Harry looked up, surprised, but B'Elanna was looking at her hands now.
"From the first moment I met you in the Ocampan city you were pushing
me towards life, and reaching towards it yourself, always so warm and
eager and yet not at all like a puppy or something. Sometimes I enjoy
things even more because I see how you enjoy them."  She sighed. "This
doesn't sound important, but it is. I'm more careful because of you
and Tom. I've stopped leaning out over the warp core." They both
grinned at that. "I have people in the Alpha Quadrant, everyone does,
but my reasons for being are almost all on Voyager, and *you* are one
of them."

B'Elanna looked up to see Harry pressing the heels of his hands into
his eyes. "Dammit," he said, and went pink under the gold, then looked
at her. "B'Elanna, I...I've fallen in love with you, and with Tom. But
I thought I was in love with Libby. I'm supposed to marry her. When
did I stop loving her?"

_Dammit, Harry!_ Harry unconsciously shuffled backwards at the look on
B'Elanna's face as she bit her lip to control herself. "Why...." she
began, pausing to rein in her voice and her temper, "in the name...of
*anything* would falling in love with us make you stop loving Libby?
Do you fall in love in discrete quantities, like photons or
something?" The absurdity of the metaphor made her smile despite her
anger, and that made Harry smile; looking at him, at those deep eyes,
she went on, more gently, "Your loving Libby is...your loving her.
Because you love us doesn't negate that any more than your loving Tom
prevents you from loving me."

"I hadn't thought I could do that, either." Harry grinned, but the
smile faded quickly. "But....I'm still engaged to Libby."

"Do you still want to marry her?" B'Elanna asked, and promptly wished
she could take the words back; Harry looked like he'd been
struck...with a thought. He leaned forward and put his chin in his
hand for a long moment while she tried to keep herself from praying
for one specific answer.

Finally, he looked up again. "I don't know," Harry said, and B'Elanna
let out the breath she'd been holding, disappointed but relieved. "I'm
not the man I was when I told Libby I'd marry her. I'm sure she's not
the woman she was when she asked me. I had a dream once, the night we
first put together our threesome." Harry blushed. "It's a silly
dream...I went home with you and Tom on each arm and Libby introduced
me to her husband and her baby."

"If I introduced you two to my mother she might ask me for one of
you." Harry looked up at that, and B'Elanna smiled as she watched him
realize she was joking and laugh. "Well?" she asked. "Do Tom and I get
our friend back, or no?"

Harry smiled at her. "Do I get time to think about this?"

"I should say you've had five days." B'Elanna smiled back, getting to
her feet. "But I won't.  I'll just wander around this tree and let you
think..." she paused, and added, "but I do have one other thing to
say."

"Yeah?" Harry looked up at her, and the way he looked made B'Elanna
suddenly go hot and cold all over with wanting to bend down and kiss
him. "You told me that it's not sunny all the time, remember? What
we're doing takes courage; I may reach towards life when I reach for
you, but any or all of us *still* could die any day. But courage is
part of our job in the Delta Quadrant, and the sun *does* shine
sometimes."

Harry smiled.

---

B'Elanna sat leaning against the tree, feeling so acutely aware of
Harry's presence on the other side of it that she thought she could
nearly hear his heart beating as he sat, motionless, thinking. _I'd
nearly forgotten how handsome he is._ She wanted to throw herself on
him, remind him of what he had given up by leaving them, eat him up
because she was so hungry for him. However, what she wanted, more than
anything else, was to have Harry back as her friend, at dinners,
playing clarinet for her, talking to her, and she wouldn't do anything
to endanger *that*. So she sat still and made herself think about
which sites in this continent were mostly likely to yield crystalline
rubidium and how much processing it would need, until the rustle of
the leaves and the warmth of the sunlight lulled her to a light sleep.

A couple hours later B'Elanna woke up when Harry came around the tree
to stand in front of her. "I decided," he said soberly....but his eyes
traitorously twinkled, and she was hard put to suppress her smile as
her heart rose.

"What did you decide?"

Harry reached down, pulled B'Elanna to her feet, and kissed her
*hard*. Stunned by his demonstrativeness, she didn't move in his arms,
and he let go of her, looking dismayed. "I'm sorry," he said, backing
away.

_Fucking why?_ thought B'Elanna incredulously, but her mouth was too
full of his kiss to work yet, so Harry went on with his unnecessary
apology, his chin dropping nearly to his chest.

"I don't have any right to ask you after what I did, leaving like
that. You probably don't trust me yet and I don't blame you."

B'Elanna smiled at Harry's all-too-Human tendency to talk *entirely*
too much. "Harry?" she said evenly.

"Yes?"

"Shut up and fuck me."

Harry looked up at that, and the sheer joy that shone out of his face
absolutely dazzled B'Elanna, for the short moment before he grabbed
her and pulled her to him, kissing her nearly as hard as she'd ever
kissed him, one hand already wrestling with the clasps at her
shoulders.

_Well_, B'Elanna thought with some small corner of her mind that
wasn't being set ablaze, as Harry twisted her hair around the fingers
of one hand to hold her, still kissing her as she undid their uniform
fastenings. _I guess this settles it._ He let go of her to pull off
his turtleneck and she gasped. "Damn, Harry, where have you been
hiding this?"

"This?" He grinned and carelessly threw the turtleneck down. "I missed
you, is all." And he pressed her against the rough-barked tree,
kissing her again, kissing her neck and her face and her ridges,
pulling her turtleneck off to kiss her shoulders, and repeating in a
fervent murmur, "I missed you," as his hand caressed the side of her
throat and the other slid down to help her finish tugging their
uniforms and shorts off.

Harry's fire caught in B'Elanna; setting her back against the tree she
wrapped her legs around his waist and bit him on the shoulder. He
groaned and pulled her closer as she bit her way up his neck, her arms
around his shoulders and waist, then pressed her against the tree to
hold her up and cupped her breasts in his hands; B'Elanna could feel
him tense, down to his fingers around her nipples, each time she bit
him, and exulted in the feeling, in Harry pressing himself against
her, his heart pounding next to hers, his hands cradling her breasts,
his warm scent and the silky hair tickling her nose as she bit him
hard right under his ear. Harry yelled at that, his entire body
tensing, and in one smooth motion slid his arms under B'Elanna to lift
her and penetrated her.

B'Elanna arched her back and growled with pleasure; in this, as in
everything this day, Harry was being uncharacteristically rough. When
she could open her eyes again she looked into his...and saw concern in
his face.

"Is the tree too rough?" he asked, breathing hard.

B'Elanna laughed. "This is a fuck of a time to think of that," she
replied, breathless herself, and tightened her arms and legs around
him.

"Pun intended?" asked Harry; B'Elanna growled again and bit him on the
other side of his neck, so hard he moaned and she could feel his knees
almost give. He leaned against her and the tree for a long moment, and
she breathed deeply just to better feel herself pressed against him.

Then he leaned back, and B'Elanna realized Harry was holding her up.
She'd forgotten he was that strong. "No, it's too rough," he said. "I
want.... B'Elanna, I want you..."

"You have me." B'Elanna kissed Harry; he kissed her back, looked into
her face again, and blushed.

"I want to press you against a tree and fuck you as hard as I possibly
can, until I've made up for this week, until my head explodes," he
said passionately, and yet as if he couldn't believe he'd say such
words. "I can't against this tree. I'd be worried about your back."

B'Elanna did not mind if her entire back was scratched away, but she
had cooled enough to humor him. "That one over there looks
smoother--!" Instead of putting her down, Harry got his arms more
firmly underneath her, then marched right over. "Put me down! I can
walk."

"Why? That would take longer." When B'Elanna smiled, Harry pushed them
both into the tree hard enough to knock the breath out of her and
kissed her before she had it back, and B'Elanna was instantly back
afire and more. She dug her nails into his back and bit his lip as she
kissed him; he pressed his fingers into her side hard enough to leave
handprints as he held her and thrust into her, moaning into the
kiss...and B'Elanna realized she heard herself moaning as well, and
would have smiled if she could. Instead she wrapped her legs more
firmly around Harry, feeling the papery bark of this tree shredding
against her back, and kissed his neck, rubbing her cheek against his,
sinking her hand in his hair as he started trailing kisses across her
cheek....and was very surprised when he reached where her jaw joined
her neck, and, instead of kissing, bit her.

That bite sent B'Elanna over the edge, and she clung tightly to Harry
as the entire world around them dissolved to him, as she went spinning
out into exploding space.

When she came back to herself Harry was nearly there. "B'Elanna!" he
gasped, and she turned her face up to his; his eyes were closed,
squeezed shut, as he concentrated on feeling her. "I'm going
to...don't let me go...."

"I'm holding you," she replied, tightening her embrace. "I won't ever
let you go."

Harry smiled at that and came, groaning softly, pressing his face into
her hair, nearly crushing her against the tree for a long, beautiful,
glorious moment.

Then he gasped again, for air this time, and sagged. "I think..." he
managed to say as his knees began to give way, and they both fell to
the grass in an ungraceful heap.

---

"Mmmm!" B'Elanna sat up and stretched her arms over her head; Harry
looked up at her in wonder and awe, as she was the only stationary
point in a still-spinning universe. "Harry, that was...impressive."

_Yeah_, Harry thought, having surprised the hell out of himself also.
"I try," he said, taking one more deep breath as the world finally
slowed to a stop. She grinned at that and leaned forward to kiss him,
her fingers warm against the bites on his cheek. "You do pretty
fucking well...pun intended." Harry grinned at that, and kissed her
back, and ran his fingers over her forehead. "I missed you," he said.
"I missed these."

"My ridges?" B'Elanna looked puzzled as Harry sat up and nodded.
"Yeah. They're part of you, after all. They help make you beautiful."

She looked at him as if she were about to protest, then smiled.
_Maybe, if I say it enough, she'll believe me._ "So, it was my
forehead that made you come back to your senses---hey!" B'Elanna was
looking at something beyond his shoulder, already springing up, so he
turned around---

And saw a large woodchucky animal dragging their uniforms away. When
it saw B'Elanna coming it began running surprisingly fast for such a
stocky creature; she dove for it but missed.

"It left the phaser and tricorder," B'Elanna noted, scooping a phaser
up. "And your undershirt," she added, smiling at him briefly before
she ran after the "giant woodchuck", shooting at it. One of her shots
hit a dead tree, and as the woodchuck vanished, jumping down the
hillside between large rocks, she gave up the chase....

....and the tree started to fall, with her standing beside it.

Harry thought his heart would stop as he started running in earnest.
"B'Elanna!" he screamed---and thought he'd die himself as she turned
to look at *him*, her back to the tree. Harry motioned frantically,
yelling, "Look out!" just as B'Elanna finally heard the tree and
turned, trying to jump out of the way. She seemed to evade the trunk,
but couldn't get clear, and the last of B'Elanna Harry saw was her
falling under two large branches as the tree fell at his feet.
"B'Elanna!"

---

_She's not dead_, Harry thought, and felt relief so strong he could
taste it. B'Elanna blinked up at him dazedly, most of her legs under
the treetrunk, large branches pinning her in an awkwardly twisted
position; she was lying with her chest down and her face turned to his
side, one arm caught underneath her body and the hand under her head,
trying to push herself up with her free hand. "B'Elanna?" he asked,
picking his way between the branches to get to her.

That was when the pain did, too; she closed her eyes and screamed, a
sound that pierced Harry to the heart. He fell to his knees beside her
and grabbed her free hand; she clenched her fingers so tightly around
it he could feel the skin being crushed, and didn't care, as she
choked off the scream and gasped, strenuously trying to control
herself, tears streaming from her eyes. Her mouth worked as she kept
trying to speak and had to keep swallowing screams.

"Shh," said Harry, reaching out to stroke her hair gently. "Shhh,
don't speak."

Harry Kim had seen people die before. He'd seen people die on Voyager,
as a cadet he'd helped in an earthquake in Alaska that defeated the
seismic controls, he'd even accidentally seen an operation once when
he was a young child. But he'd always somehow thought, somewhere deep
in his mind, that there was a space, a boundary, between the people he
loved and the dangers of life. That wall came crashing down as
B'Elanna gasped for air, pinned under the tree, her eyes clenched shut
in pain and her fingers entwined desperately with his.

"Harry." B'Elanna managed to open her eyes. "It---shit..." she
squeezed them shut again for a long moment, biting her lip hard. "I'm
in trouble."

"I know. Lie still." He concentrated on stroking her hair to keep his
own panic at bay. "Let me see if I can move the tree---"

"No. Don't." She coughed, and winced again in pain. "Something's stuck
in my side. That might drive it deeper."

Harry nodded. _I probably can't move it anyway_, he thought, looking
up at the trunk, as thick as his calves were long. "Can you hold on?
I'll try to get out uniforms back."

"Don't drop a tree on yourself," she replied, with a ghost of a smile,
as she disentangled her fingers from his.

Harry got up, absently flexing his bruised hand, and found that the
woodchuck had left to them a turtleneck, a boot, and his tricorder;
B'Elanna's phaser was apparently underneath the tree where she'd
dropped it. After using the boot to kick dirt onto the small fires on
the tree's cut end (though, apparently, the tree was rather
waterlogged, which made it heavier but at least prevented a major,
disastrous fire), Harry tried to find the animal that had stolen their
uniforms, but without more detailed information on it than that it was
capable of motion, he found twenty-seven animal lifesigns in the
immediate vicinity.

"Setting the tricorder on mammalian lifeforms yields just us," he told
her as he sat down beside her again.  "So I guess it must be an egg-
laying woodchuck."

"And to think I brought the damn phaser in case we met something like
this." B'Elanna reached out for Harry's hand again and coughed, and
winced. "So put the shirt on already."

"You're hurt, and it's supposed to get cold at night." Harry laid it
down and started to carefully tear the seams open.

"And you have the better chance by---"

"Don't say that." Harry grabbed B'Elanna's hand. "You're going to be
fine. We'll get out of here. In a few hours they'll come looking for
us. We'll *both* be here waiting for them."

"I'm not doing well."

"Shhh." Harry picked the shirt up and began tugging with his teeth,
but B'Elanna squeezed his hand.

"Harry, listen to me!", she said. "I'm *not* OK. I'm trapped under
this thing; I can't keep moving even to distract myself. My chest
hurts. It hurts to breathe. A twig is stuck in my side and I can feel
things busted inside me. My knee is bent backwards, so even if I could
get from under this tree I couldn't *go* anywhere. And I may have
broken my back; it hurts enough. Be realistic; they're not coming for
us for hours more, and I'm not in good shape.  There's a chance---" a
fit of coughing stopped her, and made her nearly bite her lip through
in pain.

"We've beaten worse odds," said Harry, squeezing her hand reassuringly
until she opened her eyes to keep arguing. "It won't help me if you
freeze yourself into unconsciousness, you know.  I need your help."
Harry smiled at that, thinking, _She never admitted that two years
ago..._ before he pushed the thought away.

"Like one little shirt will help me that much. I can't afford having
you go into shock either. I need you to hang on."

B'Elanna looked up at him, and then sighed and gave up as Harry
noticed that she was already looking paler and was beginning to
tremble; the notion of her giving up an argument frightened him nearly
as much as her litany of injuries, and he feverishly went back to work
on the turtleneck.

Noticing, she added, "besides, I have the tree for a blanket", which
made Harry smile. She hadn't given up yet.

---

Kes strode into Tom's quarters to find him hunched over his
communicator, frowning in frustration. "You wanted to see me...?"

"I wanted to borrow your communicator for a moment," he said, smiling
up at her,"and to ask you a favor, if necessary. I've been trying to
contact Lieutenant Torres, and she's not responding. I thought my
communicator might be broken."

"Kes to Lieutenant Torres." Kes tried three times; on the third she
got some kind of growly moan as a reply, and Tom's look of alarm
mirrored hers. "I'm going down to Engineering," he said, getting up.
"Can you go to the Captain...?"

"I'm on my way." Kes smiled reassuringly at him; he reflected that
smile for the briefest moment before continuing in his headlong rush.

---

"You have to apologize to Tom when we get back," said B'Elanna weakly,
but with merriment. Afraid of losing consciousness, she'd insisted on
talking, and on making Harry talk to her. "Same way."

Harry grinned. "What, do you want to watch?"

"Don't you think we'd annoy the Doctor? I'll still be in Sickbay."

"We'll be there with you, anyway." Harry patted her hand, which was
nearly limp in his. "Besides, you'll be out in no time."

B'Elanna nodded absently. She felt so tired....

...she realized that she hadn't taken a breath, that she was blacking
out, and gasped for a painful, blessed mouthful of air. Harry was
instantly leaning over her, concerned, adjusting the impromptu blanket
around her shoulders.

"Are you all right?"

She started to reply when she realized why she'd been falling asleep.
The pain was much diminished, replaced by a creeping cold numbness.
"It doesn't hurt very much anymore."

Harry smiled. "That's great!....isn't it?"

"No," said B'Elanna, frightened by her own apathy, trying to make
herself worry and flare so she wouldn't sink into the peaceful
darkness she could feel pressing on her eyelids. She opened her eyes
wide to keep them open, and focused on Harry, framed by leaves and
trees, looking young and worried. "No, it's not good."

Harry understood, and she saw his expression change as his worry grew
to fear. "Oh, damn." Carefully, he put his arms around her as best he
could, careful not to move her or press on her. "We're going to get
you out of here. Just hang on to me.  Hang on."

---

"Have you located their comm signals?" asked Commander Chakotay, down
in the transporter room. Lieutenant Ayala nodded. "Yes, sir....but I'm
only reading one life sign."

It seemed that the temperature in the room fell fifty degrees.
Chakotay glanced over at Lieutenant Paris, who had gone so pale so
quickly the change had drawn his eye, and didn't even notice his
scrutiny. "Beam them up," Chakotay ordered, not letting himself fear
for what he might see.

When the bewildered animal materialized, growling and whuffing, shreds
of the uniforms still in its mouth, the sudden relief made everyone
break into very unprofessional, and very needed, guffaws. "I guess
they made up," said Tom cheerfully, though he was still very pale.

"Still, it's not like either of them to willfully remain
incommunicado." Chakotay called for the time. "It's been eight hours
and more, already. We'd better start searching."

---

Harry Kim hadn't been this cold since survival training in Siberia,
and there his uniform at least was on him, instead of being stolen by
an oversized woodchuck. The sun was setting, and, even though the tree
was a partial windblock,the scented breezes were rapidly growing very
cold. He shivered.

"Cold?" B'Elanna asked, her hand limp in his, the vibrant alto voice
little more than a whisper between her effortful gasps for breath. Her
ridges had never looked so sharp, the skin over her cheekbones so taut
and pale. Harry was doing most of the talking now.

"I'm OK," he said reassuringly; she looked up at him with obvious
disbelief.

"Take the shirt," she said. "I have boots."

Harry laughed until he thought he might start crying from sheer
hysteria, and stopped himself. His stomach growled. "Hungry, too," he
amended.

"The tricorder?"

Harry shook his head. "I'd have to turn off the positional beacon to
use it to scan for food. I don't want to do that for even a second. I
want them to find us as soon as possible."

"Why---" B'Elanna coughed, and Harry waited. "Why did you choose...."

"Shhh, I understand, save your strength." Harry patted her hair. "To
leave, or to come back?" He rolled his eyes at himself. "I told you
why I left when I left, but...anyway, I missed you two very badly. I
was going to come beg your forgiveness soon anyway, and ask to be
friends again; I'm not sure why I got so upset I thought I had to
leave in the first place.  But when you slammed me against the tree---
" she smiled at that--- "I remembered...well, your arms and your
strength, and your body, and...." Harry could feel himself blush.
"When I sat down to think I went to sleep."

"You did?"

"When I woke up I thought you'd kill me for going to sleep, but you'd
dozed off yourself." He put his chin in his other hand. "Still, it was
a good thing I did, because I had another dream." B'Elanna rolled her
eyes, slowly rolling them back. Every blink had become a battle
against losing consciousness.  "I saw Libby putting away her
telescope, and you unpacking one with glee; I don't think my
subconscious could get much more obvious than that. Libby has always
been an astronomy buff...and always been hopeful. Her father used to
be in Starfleet, and he was lost on a mission once, but he came home.
I had been thinking that it's unlikely that she thinks me dead...but
two years is a long time, and I have to give her credit for being
realistic...and try to be realistic myself. I want her to be happy,
not pining and waiting, and I know she'd want the same for me.
Besides, seventy years is a long time, too, and a beautiful woman is a
joy forever, especially one who wants to...unpack me."

B'Elanna smiled. "You sound like Tom."

"He's been rubbing off on me."

"Nice euphemism." Harry laughed again....

...and when he opened his eyes B'Elanna's had fallen shut. "B'Elanna!"
he called, and she didn't answer. He patted her cheek several times,
calling her name and patting more firmly each time, until he finally
slapped her and she startled and woke.

"Harry?"

"You blacked out."

"Ow." B'Elanna smiled, but the smile was half grimace. "That hurt
pretty well."

"Now *you* sound like Tom," Harry replied lightly, trying to stave off
his growing fear. "Hang in there. It's nightfall; they'll be here
soon."

"What's that? In the sky?" Following B'Elanna's gaze, Harry looked up,
and saw an aurora-like storm on the dark side of the sky. "It's
probably an ion storm..." he said, and his heart sank. They couldn't
be beamed up through an ion storm; it would take that much longer to
find them.

B'Elanna looked up at him; she knew this, too. "If..."

"You will *not* die here," he said as forcefully as he could, though
his voice quavered slightly. B'Elanna shook her head, a minuscule
movement hemmed in by her position and her injury.

"Listen. If I die, you *have* to make sure my letter gets home." She
stopped for a breath, and Harry nodded.

"I will," he promised fervently. "But you won't."

She smiled weakly. "And Tom..."

"Needs you as much as I and Voyager do. I won't go back to him
without. I won't go back to the Captain without you. And I definitely
can't go back to Engineering without you." She smiled again at that.
"But I won't have to. We've been in worse, and come through. We met in
worse, remember?"

"I know, Harry. I'm fighting." B'Elanna sighed, and pushed her eyes
open wearily. "Keep talking. Keep me awake. Help me keep fighting."

"Anytime. Did I tell you what Susan Nicholetti wants to play?" Harry
kept babbling desperately, and B'Elanna kept clinging to his every
word.

---

Tom's heart sank like a lead weight; he knew where he'd felt this
cold, sick fear before. "Captain, an ion storm began about ten minutes
ago over the western end of the landing region," he heard himself
saying. "Scanners are going to be ineffective until it's over."

"That's where Ensign Kim and Lieutenant Torres are," added Chakotay
helpfully, as Tom stood still and pale, remembering waiting in the
hospital to be told what he already knew, that his three passengers,
including his fiance, were dead, and desperately thinking _Not again.
Don't need rescuing, you two. Don't die on me._

"Transporters will be useless, too." Captain Janeway paced back to her
chair, thinking. "Yet an atmospheric entry will be difficult with this
storm."  She turned." Mr.Paris, can you take a shuttle down to their
last known location and look for them from a low altitude?

_Dear God, not again._ Tom felt a wave of fear so powerful it nearly
knocked him off his feet; he wanted to beg the captain not to ask him
to do this, wanted to beg her to send anyone else besides him lest his
life repeat itself and he kill not one lover but two this time. But he
knew that saying these things would require explaining, would require
telling her about the resurgent nightmares and the flashback that had
come from reopening doors in his mind he'd once bolted shut. What's
more, if she took him from flying now she might take him from flying
permanently; in the end he was being irrational. So, he bit his lip
and stood up straighter.

"Yes, Captain," was all he said, his heart pounding so hard he barely
heard her send Ensign Tolbert to accompany him.

---

Harry Kim woke up. He was freezing, and it was fully dark. He'd been
hunched over B'Elanna's hand in his lap, dozing and mumbling nonsense;
his back was sore and stiff, his mouth dry. "B'Elanna, do you want
some water?"  he asked, feeling around for the boot-cum-canteen and
trying to remember where the brook was.

There was no response.

Harry leaned close to her. Melaris Three had no moon, and the
starlight was dimmed by the trees, but he could see that B'Elanna's
eyes were closed and her lips unnaturally pale, blue-grey in the dim
light. As fear surged through his veins, he found that she still had a
pulse, thready but regular...but her breathing was getting shallower
with each breath.

"B'Elanna!" Harry yelled, and she didn't so much as stir. He shook her
free arm and it flopped lifelessly in his grasp, chill and clammy.
"B'Elanna!  Wake up!" he yelled, and slapped her on the arm as hard as
he dared, then on the face. She didn't react at all.

"Dammit, I didn't come back to you to lose you! Wake up!" Harry felt
panic surging up to claim his mind...and realized what had woken him
up. He heard a shuttle landing. At first he thought he was dreaming,
but the sound grew behind him; he turned his head to see the shuttle
settle, large and noisy, bright and beautiful, into the ravine where
the woodchuck had hidden. _They found us!_ he thought, and turned back
to B'Elanna----to see her last breath wheeze out of her lungs.
---_

Tom heard someone swearing and crying as soon as he opened the shuttle
door; as soon as he recognized the voice it gave his feet wings and he
dashed up the slope, leaving Ensign Tolbert bemused in his wake.

Harry was on his hands and knees, pleading, "dammit, don't die!" and
tugging desperately at---a fallen tree? No, something caught under the
tree, someone---

Tom ran up, ignoring the cold lump of fear in his belly, the horrible
sense that he'd been here before. "What happened?"

"She stopped breathing, just now." Harry stopped tugging fruitlessly
on B'Elanna's shoulders, though he was still looking down. "Can you
beam her out?"

Tom nodded and slapped his communicator, pulling it off as he
spoke."Paris to Tolbert. I found them."  Ensign Tolbert made a
surprised sound. "One to beam out, *now*; start resuscitation as soon
as you have her." And he laid the badge on B'Elanna's hair; her still
form fizzled out a moment later.

Harry grabbed Tom's hand and levered himself unsteadily to his feet.
"Tom---" Tom looked at Harry in shock; with his wild eyes and his
tearstreaked cheeks, he looked very different from the polished ensign
who served aboard Voyager.

"Harry, are you OK?" he asked, reaching for his cheek; Harry brushed
the hand away, and tried to smile, but his teeth chattered. Taking
that as enough of an answer, Tom put his arm around his friend,
rubbing his shoulder. "Come on, let's get you back to the shuttle."

B'Elanna was breathing when they got there, lying on the floor and
covered with a blanket. "She started breathing again on her own,"
reported Ensign Tolbert, kneeling beside her. "Although," she went on,
pulling up the blanket to show them the stick embedded in B'Elanna's
side, a massive bloodclot around it, "she's not out of the woods yet."

"Hooray for Klingon genes! Sit with her, Harry." Tom threw the
tricorder down, pulled a blanket off the shelf and wrapped Harry in
it; clutching the blanket around himself, Harry sat down on the floor.
"None of us are; we still have to get out of here, and the ride will
be worse getting back." Tolbert swore under her breath. "Hang on." Tom
threw himself into his chair and strapped himself in, but paused
momentarily when he glanced at his knuckles and saw how white they
were.

Then he shook his head and pushed the fear down again. He had a job to
do, and this was merely difficult flying, not a full-blown disaster.
He'd been flying Voyager for two years and never yet felt like this,
he reminded himself. It made no sense to feel this now.

But that lump of fear sat in his stomach like ballast as they lifted
off.

---

Ensign Tolbert looked a shade or two paler herself by the time they
docked with Voyager, though Harry, having had time to scrub his face
with the blanket and calm down, looked a great deal better, nearly all
right despite the rough flight.  Only Tom knew that he was doing
nearly as good of a cover-up as Tom was, but at least B'Elanna had
kept breathing.

As for Tom himself, he leaned against the shuttle, safely out of the
way, as a team headed by Kes swept B'Elanna and Harry up and carried
them off to Sickbay, and waited for his hands to stop shaking. He was
so absorbed in trying to look nonchalant that he didn't see Kes return
until she was nearly right in front of him. "Tom, you're awfully
pale."

"I need more sunlight, is all", he joked weakly. _Well that fell
flat_.

Kes looked searchingly up at him, and Tom knew he was out of practice
at his devil-may-care-guy role; then she put her hand around his
wrist. "You're shaking, too. Come on, you're coming to Sickbay."

"When you get B'Elanna stabilized and Harry cleaned up I'll come
visit."

"No," the petite Ocampa said firmly. "You're coming as a patient." And
she dragged a rather impressed Tom off to Sickbay.
---_____

"There are plenty of biobeds," said the Doctor, looking up; Tom
pretended not to hear him. He and Harry were sitting on one facing
B'Elanna's, Harry in a pair of pajamas (that being all Tom could
find), an empty mug in his hand, his still-wet hair making a big damp
circle on Tom's shoulder and Tom's arm around him;  both of them had
long since abandoned propriety for support. The Doctor, his hint
apparently ignored, sighed and went to put yet another charge on the
tissue regenerator.

"How is she, Kes?" Tom asked, looking at the pale face framed by dark
hair, her ridges looking so sharp, the skin so taut and sunken...

Kes smiled reassuringly at him. "Stable.  She's going to be fine,
although it's a good thing we got that stick out of her when we did.
She did bleed internally a lot." Harry started to lift his head, but
Tom patted it back down to his shoulder, stroking his hair with one
hand.

Harry said it anyway. "Tom, I'm sorry."

Tom sighed. His own fear had faded with a mild sedative and finally
died with Kes's announcement, but he didn't quite feel up to soothing
feelings he didn't think Harry needed to pummel himself with."For
what? You two had an accident. It's not like you'd be in any better
shape if the tree had squashed *you*."

"I know. I just feel so *guilty*." Harry did sound close to tears.

The Doctor, returning, heard that, gave Kes the regenerator, selected
a medical tricorder, and came over to them, programming it. "Mr. Kim,
would you please stand up?" Harry obliged, and the Doctor ran the
instrument over his head. "Just as I thought. Why didn't you tell me
about these unnaturally strong emotions?"

"Strong emotions?" asked Harry, puzzled, as realization dawned over
Tom, making him grin. The Doctor stepped back a pace and folded his
arms. "You have acute recovery-phase hyperagrupnetremia. In other
words, during the course of your recovery from your head injury,
certain areas of your brain became hyperactive, causing you to feel
excessive emotion and to have vivid dreams. You *have* been feeling
excessive emotions recently, have you not?"

"All that guilt..." said Harry slowly, and looked up at Tom in shock.
"Was from my head injury?"

"Indeed, Mr. Kim. Your subconscious chose an appropriate reason for
your consciousness to "grab hold of", so to speak."

Harry looked as if he'd been hit in the head; Tom felt rather sorry
for him. "All this time, I felt like this---I *left* you two---because
part of my brain was overactive?  Damn, Tom, I'm so sorry---"

"Hey, it made sense to all of us. Your subconscious is pretty smart."

"You forgive me?"

"What's to forgive?" _I told you I love you_.

Harry smiled so widely Tom could have sworn the room got brighter,
and, ignoring all decorum, grabbed Tom's face in his hands and kissed
him. "Thank you," he said fervently, looking into Tom's eyes with
those unforgettable dark ones, now sparkling with joy. "Tom, thank
you."

Then he took a deep breath, and, self-control back in place, sat down
to face a rather disapproving-looking Doctor. "If you're done," the
Doctor asked in tart tones, "there is the small matter of treating
this condition before you start 'feeling guilty' again."

His speech was interrupted by Kes's yelp; B'Elanna was just barely
beginning to regain consciousness, and, confused and groggy, she'd
swung her arm and thwacked Kes in the face hard enough to knock her
down. The Doctor sedated B'Elanna nearly before Tom could blink; he
was about to treat the bruise rapidly swelling on Kes's cheekbone when
she stopped him,saying, "Lieutenant Torres needs that regenerator more
than I do." He listened to her, but didn't look very happy about it.

Tom looked at Harry. "I guess B'Elanna's going to be OK, huh?"

Harry just smiled back, and Tom's conscience suddenly decided to bug
him again. "That's two of you all right", it twittered. "What about
the third? What about that panic attack?"

Tom rolled his eyes at it, and Harry, seeing that, asked, "What?"
Trapped, Tom sighed, thought _Damn pushy conscience_, and said,
"Harry, can I talk to you about something?"

---

Captain Janeway walked down the hallway with a thoughtful smile on her
face, rather glad she hadn't had time to go down on Melaris Three, and
had so avoided being one of the people robbed by giant woodchucks with
a predilection for stealing clothing. Besides Ensign Kim and
Lieutenant Torres, who had had the most harrowing adventure, at least
four others had fallen afoul of the larcenous wildlife; Ensign Ashmore
and Crewman Henley had been found, huddling together and naked, in a
cave on the very edge of the ion storm, having lost their clothes the
same way Harry and B'Elanna lost theirs. Once the storm passed Janeway
had had clothes beamed down to them and given them a little time
before they were beamed up. Ensign Jenny Delaney and Lieutenant
Hargrove had found them; *they* still had their clothes, and were
never cut off by the ion storm, but they'd planned to spend the night
planetside, and had returned from a walk to find their campsite
demolished and every scrap of bedding and food gone.

"So much for a restful leave", Ensign Delaney had said, stomping off
the transporter pad with Lieutenant Hargrove at her heels. So much,
indeed.

The Sickbay doors opened to reveal Lieutenant Paris and Ensign Kim
sitting on a biobed next to a still-unconscious Lieutenant Torres;
Ensign Kim was holding her hand, but the two men were having an
animated discussion.

"You've got to tell her," insisted Harry. "B'Elanna will say the same
thing when she wakes up."

"I *know*," said Tom. "But I won't risk my position at helm."

"You said yourself this doesn't have anything to do with your ability
to fly, but it will if it gets worse."

Tom rolled his eyes; Janeway could see it from where she stood, and
smiled. "This isn't hard enough, you know. I really need for you to
make it harder."

Deciding that she'd eavesdropped enough, Janeway was about to march
into the room so the two men would notice her, when the Doctor
appeared at her elbow.

"Captain," he said, and they instantly jumped down from the bed and
stood at attention, though Harry kept his hold on B'Elanna's hand.

"At ease, gentlemen. Doctor, how is Lieutenant Torres?"

"Much better, Captain; we've stanched the internal bleeding and
repaired much of the soft-tissue damage, as well as set the broken
ribs and pieced her calf and knee back together, though it will take
several regeneration sessions to repair the bones and cartilage. She
began coming around and accidentally hit Kes, so we sedated her."

"Very good, but please go easy on the sedation. How are you, Mr. Kim?"

"Much better, sir. The Doctor diagnosed me with hyperagrupnetremia-- -
" _I don't think I would have remembered that whole word_, thought
Janeway---"so I....wanted to apologize for any--erratic behavior on my
part for the last couple of weeks."

"Erratic behavior? On the contrary, you've been a model officer."
Harry beamed at her, and Janeway thought how nice it was to compliment
someone who reacted so well. "I'd like you to assist in the rubidium
mining; you can turn in your report when we convene tomorrow at 1200
hours." He smiled again at her concession of the late hour. "Mr.
Paris, you haven't had any   time off yet, so, if you could turn in
your report with Ensign Kim, you can go on leave directly afterwards,
though, if you go down to Melaris Three, you should probably watch
your belongings carefully."

Harry blushed as Tom grinned, saying, "Yes, sir."

With that, she turned to leave; behind her, Harry gave Tom a small
push, and Tom gave him a mock-dirty look and went after her.
"Captain?" Tom asked, catching up to Janeway as she turned back
around.

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

"Can I talk to you for a minute?"

---

B'Elanna entered Harry's bedroom to find Tom lying on the bed and
Harry playing clarinet for him. As quietly as she could, she limped
over to the bed and dropped herself down on it; Tom scooted over to
put his head in her lap, carefully avoiding the cast that held her
knee together. Harry glanced over at them but kept playing, and she
closed her eyes, buried her hand in Tom's hair, and let the music
soothe her itchy, throbbing knee, her anger at her clumsiness, and her
generally annoying day.

When he finished they applauded. "I think you're getting even better,"
said Tom. "Do you have any pieces for clarinet and alto voice?"

B'Elanna yanked gently on his hair, and he yelped melodramatically,
making Harry laugh. "If you think I'm performing you're crazy. I'm
nowhere near as good as Harry."

"Hi to you, too." Tom made a kiss-face at her and she rolled her eyes,
amused despite herself. Harry rolled his eyes as well as he came over
to sit beside her, and Tom threw his legs over *his* lap. "How's the
knee?"

"Itchy. The Doctor says he can't do any more repairs on the cartilage
till this set heals, so I'm in the cast for at least two more days. I
told him that a Chief Engineer can't afford to be unable to run, and
he offered me more medical leave." She snorted, and the men smiled at
each other.

"Well, would you want him telling you how to fix the engines?" offered
Harry soothingly. "Besides, you're healing faster than I would with
the equivalent cartilage damage."

"Hooray for Klingon genes," added Tom. B'Elanna rolled her eyes again,
but smiled.

"It's just that I hate being immobile." Putting her arm around Harry
she added, "If it hadn't been for you I think I would have freaked,
stuck under that tree."

Harry looked down. "If it hadn't been for me you wouldn't have gotten
stuck under it."

Tom sighed aloud.

"Want me to pull your hair, too?" asked B'Elanna, her voice and smile
growing dangerous; Harry looked up at that and smiled apologetically
at her. Then he said, "I haven't had time till now to thank you for
coming after me, and you, Tom, for not being angry at me."

"Actually, I think you did thank me," said Tom."Apparently the Doctor
doesn't like having people kiss in his Sickbay."

B'Elanna laughed. "I'd told you he wouldn't."

"Of course, then you made me go risk my career."

"Oh, that's right,"said Harry, sounding entirely unrepentant. "How did
that go?"

Tom raised his fingers to count on them. "The Captain commended me for
my honesty, told me she didn't think my job was in danger....and then
said she'd talk to the Commander about his counseling me." Tom rolled
his eyes while Harry and B'Elanna laughed.

"Poor Tom," said Harry. "Are you sorry B'Elanna went to get me back?"

"Oh, yeah. Having to be counseled by Chakotay outweighs all your
musical charms." Harry blushed at the innuendo, and Tom smiled and
reached up to take his hand. "Really, though, Harry, we had to come
after you; I'm just sorry I missed the party." Harry and B'Elanna
grinned ruefully at each other. "After all, everyone nicknamed us the
Centaurids for a reason. There are three of us in this."

"Although it isn't quite accurate, as the stars aren't equally close."
Harry smiled anyway.

"Well, can *you* think of any triple stars where they are?" asked
B'Elanna.

"Theta Deneb, Rilamentaua---" Harry stopped, and began to turn golden-
pink, when he noticed how Tom and B'Elanna were looking at him. "Well,
Libby *was* an astronomy buff."

"What, are you going to become an engineer as well?" B'Elanna teased.
"As well as a great pilot."

"Maybe he's part Betazoid," added Tom archly, sitting up. "He's too
lively to be even part Vulcan."

"Let's see what else he can learn through touch telepathy," said
B'Elanna just as mischievously, pulling Harry to her as Tom wiggled
around in back of him.

"Hey!" said Harry, feigning surprise as he caught B'Elanna's shoulders
and turned his head to look back at Tom. "Are you two always going to
team up on me?"

"Why not?" replied Tom, working on the clasps as B'Elanna bit Harry
gently on the cheek, making him close his eyes and blissfully give up.
"It's so much fun."

A long time later, Harry rolled over onto his stomach, put his chin in
his hands, and looked intently at Tom and B'Elanna, who were still
dozing, her head in his lap. "I suppose we'd have to ask the Doctor
for help,"he said, rubbing his bitten cheek absently.

"Help doing *what*?" asked B'Elanna, as Tom opened one eye to look at
him.

"If we wanted to have a kid with your skin and Tom's hair," replied
Harry, still looking at them like an artist picking paints.

"A *KID*!?" B'Elanna and Tom sat up and tried to look at Harry with
horror, but didn't quite succeed; Harry, having anticipated this
reaction, grinned up at them. "I was thinking of three, in fact,
unless we want the Doc to have to get really creative."

"We haven't been together for that many *months*," said B'Elanna.
"Harry, you're insane."

"Well...." said Tom, leaning back against the wall and looking
thoughtful; B'Elanna looked around at him in shock.  "Maybe we should
put the blonde hair on our kid, Harry, since it'd have to be a test-
tube job anyway."

B'Elanna growled at both of them, and they grinned at each other. "I
hope you two realize why *you* can talk about this so casually."

"Well, I don't think Voyager has any artificial wombs, though our
talented Doctor probably could---" B'Elanna reached down to plant her
hand across Harry's mouth.

"I don't believe this conversation."

"I can see why, if you're covering the conversants' mouths," said Tom,
and ducked.

B'Elanna rolled her eyes and released Harry. "Six months, you two. Let
me have six months of freedom from stretch marks before we start
planning this."

"Well, I hadn't meant anytime *soon*," said Harry cheerfully. "Six
months sounds good to me. Tom?"

"What can I say? You lead, I follow."

"Oh, crap." B'Elanna said suddenly. "I couldn't be Chief Engineer
during my pregnancy, because of the radiation levels."

"I thought we were waiting six months to plan this," said Tom,
sounding slightly worried.

Ignoring him, B'Elanna added, "I guess I'd have to have triplets,
then."

Harry gasped, his eyes going completely round at the thought. B'Elanna
looked at him, then at Tom, who also looked shocked out of his
wits.... and laughed with complete happiness.

---

The End