There is no Pain
a story for Janeway and Paris
by vanhunks
RATING: G
DISCLAIMER: Paramount owns Voyager, Janeway, Chakotay and Paris.
NOTE: This story was written in response to the challenge on the ASC - Four simple words: "There is no Pain." After it was written, I realised the potential for a prequel, and soon a new series developed, called: There is no Pain.
As the story was written several years ago, I have now revised it to include moments from the resulting series, teasers and references that appear there and which I felt would be appropriate.
SUMMARY: Tom and Kathryn Paris celebrate their daughter Rebeccah's sixteenth birthday.
THERE IS NO PAIN
Most days when they were in Indiana and the weather was mild or just more forgiving than the light frosty air that hailed the coming of winter, they took to the porch and reclined lazily in the swing seat. Times there were that they sat quietly, their hands seeking touch, fingers lacing. Always, it was enough. No words, just a hushed air in which each remained in deep thought, flung into the past, or perhaps the present. Pleasant thoughts, sometimes a reluctant revisiting of things past.
Like now.
Kathryn stole a glance at Tom. His hair was greying, she realised with some surprise. Her lips curved in a tender smile as she studied him. The sun had just touched the edges of the porch so that he remained more in the shade, giving him a shadowy appearance. Although he was quiet, she could sense the deep peace in him, now. His lips and cheeks were softer, relaxed, stained by a hint of a flush. He was happy, a joy that seemed to radiate from him.
Tom sensed her gaze on him and he looked up, returning her smile. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze, then turned his attention to the PADD again. They were returning tomorrow to San Francisco and were savouring the last day here. Yesterday had been Rebecca's birthday and a day that marked endings and beginnings.
Yesterday….
********
"Mom, have you seen my green t-shirt?" Rebeccah asked as she barged into her parents' bedroom, not bothering to knock.
"The one your father gave you only last week?" Kathryn Paris asked.
"Yes, that one, Mom!" Rebeccah sighed exaggeratedly, throwing her arms up in a theatrical gesture.
Kathryn looked at sixteen year old Rebeccah and her heart wanted to burst. "She looks like you in every way, Kathryn," Tom had said when Rebeccah was born, and which he repeated every time they marked new milestones in their daughter's life. Rebeccah did resemble her, Kathryn thought with pride and she felt a small tug of sadness at the same time.
Kathryn rummaged through her drawers and found the garment, though how it got there she couldn't fathom. Perhaps with the laundry, she thought idly.
"Thanks, Mom," Rebeccah crooned and gave her mother a kiss on the cheek.
It was Becky's birthday and their daughter was brimming with excitement. She had been accepted at the Academy, and would attend when the new semester started. A bit early for her, but then Tom started very young. So did Chakotay...
"Pleasure, sweetheart," she murmured absently as she turned to the mirror again and brushed her hair.
*****
Tom Paris entered the room a few minutes later, enjoying the view of Kathryn sitting in front of her mirror. He gave an inward smile. Earlier Rebeccah had barged past him, pushing him out of the way in her hurry to pester her mother. Then equally quickly she had breezed out again, waving her green t-shirt like a flag, ignoring him completely. Kathryn and Rebeccah. His life. His breathing. Sighing, he crept up behind Kathryn, squeezing her shoulders gently. He stared at her reflection in the mirror, idly wondering how she could remain so beautiful still. Kathryn's mouth curved into a smile as she rose from the stool and turned in his embrace. As always, Kathryn pressed against him, inhaling his aftershave, just…inhaling. Like a kitten she rubbed against him, nuzzling her cheek against the soft morning stubble on his chin.
She raised her face to him and kissed him, her lips lingering on his. His heart hammered against his ribcage. Her softness was enticing as he deepened the kiss, nipping her lower lip then sliding his tongue into her mouth. Kathryn had been far more responsive to him in the last few months and he wondered absently if he should count himself lucky, or whether he dared to hope again. Like a raging torrent hope flared wildly in his chest as her mouth opened under his. Their breathing became laboured; he could feel himself hardening just at the touch of her hips against his as she began to melt into him. He wanted to make love to her, wanted to feel again the wonder of Kathryn crying out his name as she had never done before during their lovemaking; he wanted the total connection, the sense of oneness he had had the privelege of experiencing only recently. Finally.
"Kathryn..."
"Hmmm..."
"Venus observed..."
"I have arms, Tom," she said huskily. Tom wondered again. Kathryn was uncommonly warm and receptive and alluring this morning. Perhaps it was because it was Rebeccah's birthday. Over the years Kathryn had raised his hopes, dashed them again when he thought she might love him as completely as he loved her. As he had loved her from the moment Rebeccah opened her beautiful baby blue eyes and stared at him. Eyes like his, Kathryn always said. Yet, it couldn't be. It could never be.
"Which you seem to use very ingeniously," he mumbled against her lips as her hands started roaming over his body. Why analyse her actions when they spoke so clearly to him?
"Have you got Becky's present?" she asked, her voice husky, enticing.
"Uh-hum," he murmured his affirmation as he kissed her again. Then Kathryn released him suddenly.
"And Tom, the house is going to be buzzing with her friends soon."
How could he resist her when her arms wound so tightly round his waist?
"Yes, sweetheart," he replied, distracted by her nearness.
For the next few minutes they were so engrossed in kissing that they were rudely awakened by:
"Not again! Aren't you guys getting a little old for this kind of thing?" Rebeccah asked sweetly, hands on her hips in an unconscious gesture so like her mother's that Tom's heart flipped over.
"We'll be with you in a second, Becky," Tom grumbled, yet his voice sounded indulgent.
Very early the morning they had gone into Rebeccah's bedroom and both wished her happy birthday. The presents always came later when they were together in the living room, making it something really special for their daughter. It had become tradition and even now at sixteen, Rebeccah still relished being spoiled by her parents in this way.
*
Rebeccah watched her parents draw apart reluctantly and wondered whether she would one day be privileged to have such a bonding. She loved them both so much! Sighing with great contentment she made her way to the living room where they were going to make a big production of giving her gifts. It was tradition and she loved tradition. Now if only she could vaporise Adam, her constant irritation of a younger brother and Egor, her constant irritation of an honorary older brother, her life would be complete. Shaking her head, Rebeccah decided that without them she'd miss them anyway.
Sweet sixteen! Going to the Academy! She gave a low chuckle as she remembered her parents' good-natured arguments over what her chosen career would be. But her heart had always been set on flying. Her mother had given a sigh of capitulation when she saw she was outnumbered by daughter and husband and honorary older brother Egor Torres. Rebeccah just knew she was going to have the best looking Dad at the Academy even though he had a bald pate and one who was going to be her tutor once she became a senior cadet.
The window of the living room overlooked the sloping grounds. There in the distance was the oak tree with its swing and tree house. In the back garden there were little bushes of tomato plants. She could never understand how her mother could plant tomatoes so prodigiously and nothing else! Perhaps, she thought, it was from their days when they were still traveling in the Delta Quadrant...
She was sitting in a deep arm chair when Tom and Kathryn entered. She turned to look expectantly at them. Her Dad, she knew, was always the one to surprise her, always with something completely unique. She had after all, outgrown the teddy bear stage, had her own vid-com when she was about seven, piloted a shuttle when she was almost six years old. That time Egor was thirteen and she had promised Egor that her Daddy would kill him. Egor had been her enemy then, brought up to hate her mother.
"Daddy?"
*
Rebeccah sat where she had always seated herself waiting with anticipation for them to enter the lounge. The same breathless expression on her face, the same shine in her eyes. The same smile which reminded him so much of Kathryn. Rebeccah who hated being called Becky.
He bent down and kissed Rebeccah on the cheek, his heart burning with love for her. Then he handed her a PADD.
"Happy birthday, sweetheart," he said tenderly, his hand caressing her long hair. Rebeccah looked at him, then her mother. Her eyes shone as she saw the love in their eyes. Then she flicked on the PADD, stared at it for long moments before she looked at Tom again, a query in her eyes.
"It's the specs for a runabout. A little vessel I designed, Becky. It's yours and waiting for you at Utopia Planitia."
Before he had even finished, a cry of joy sounded about the room as Rebeccah jumped up and hugged her father tightly for long seconds, the PADD slipping from her fingers as her arms went round his neck.
For the next few minutes Kathryn watched as Tom and Rebeccah discussed the specs of her new runabout, a compact little vessel with warp five capability. Poor Adam! Their ten year old son was chomping at the bit to fly Tom's own ship. Tom had twice rescued their son when Adam had sneaked on the Prometheus D, stolen its fastest shuttle and made off into space, the second time crashing the shuttle on Mars. They had spent a few harrowing days next to their son's bedside while he recovered from his injuries. Adam was spending the day with Tom's parents, no doubt trying to woo the old man into a visit to Utopia Planitia. Adam had a deep fascination for engines.
And Egor… Kathryn gave a little sigh. Egor was away on Kronos with his adoptive parents Miral and Diego Torres. He had promised to join them later the evening. Rebeccah and Egor were still sparring, with Becky still promising that her daddy would kill him. Kathryn had been pregnant with Adam then. She still had nightmares about that time when she and Rebeccah had been abducted by Maj Cullah and he had trained the young Egor to kill Rebeccah as his rite of passage.
Now Kathryn looked at husband and daughter and felt the pride well up in her. She had not told Tom what she would give Becky, although she had known about the runabout for weeks. She experienced a momentary surge of panic as she clutched her gift for their daughter. Her hand shook slightly as she stepped forward, seeing Rebeccah look at her over Tom's shoulder. She must have seen her mother's slight unease and frowned. Kathryn sighed, her heart hammering. The time has come at last, she thought.
"Mom?" Rebeccah murmured as she let go of Tom and stepped forward to take her mother's hand and move with her to the couch to sit down there.
Did they both sense her unease? Kathryn wondered as Rebeccah hugged her in a brief but fierce caress.
Tom didn't know what she got for Rebeccah, and that had been tradition too. She would never tell him until he'd see it on the day of Rebeccah's birthday. Like now.
"Happy birthday, sweetheart," Kathryn said, her voice trembling a little as she handed Rebeccah her gift. With childish excitement Rebeccah tore the wrapping off to reveal an oblong box which she opened slowly, retrieving the gift with reverence. She gasped and then stared for several long moments at the object in her hand.
It was a silver watch, an analogue chronometer attached to a silver chain.
"Mom…this is absolutely beautiful…"
*****
Tom stared, transfixed at the watch that lay on Rebeccah's palm. How often in the last almost seventeen years had he seen that watch in Kathryn's drawer? Lying neatly in a corner just under her fine underwear? How often had he himself looked guiltily at it and wondered and agonised?
He clutched his chest as a sharp stab of pain ripped through him, his breathing suddenly laboured and wheezing a little. Tom kept staring in punishing heartache at the watch. In the first years he had often caught Kathryn sitting on the floor caressing it; he often heard her quiet sobs. He often… He was a fool. A prize fool for thinking that Kathryn had forgotten or moved on. The watch had lain in her drawer and even when he couldn't see it, it had seemed to taunt him, to remind him that Kathryn was and never could be his, never belong to him in heart and mind. For too long she hadn't been his in body and just when he had begun to hope in recent months that she was more loving, more enjoying of their intimacies, now…this…
There was a distant buzz in his ears, a sting behind his eyelids. From far off he heard their voices, breaking intrusively into his distraught thoughts.
"It was a gift your father gave me, Becky."
"You mean my real father, Mom."
"Yes, Rebeccah..."
"On your birthday too?"
"Yes, sweetheart. The day he gave it to me he had to remind me it was my birthday!"
"I'll shall never forget my own birthday," Rebeccah's voice sounded through the fog of his pain.
"I thought it was time I gave it to you now."
"It's beautiful, Mom. Very beautiful," Rebeccah said as she fingered the watched lovingly, letting the chain lace through her fingers.
"Yes, it is, isn't it?"
"I saw him, you know, in a vision… I was very little…"
"Yes. It was the day we told you Chakotay was your father…"
When he couldn't bear it any longer, Tom gave a small inward cry, letting his feet carry him away from the pain…
****
"Mom..." Rebeccah said suddenly very softly as she saw Tom move quietly out of the room, seeing him standing on the porch seconds later.
Kathryn followed her daughter's gaze and a look of pain came over her elegant features.
"He will always be my father," Rebeccah said, her hand touching her mother's cheek. "I have never known any other father and - and I love him very, very much, Mommy," she continued, using her old little girl endearment as she spoke to Kathryn.
Kathryn blinked to try and stem the tears as she looked at Rebeccah.
"You love him, I know," Rebeccah said softly as she looked at the door again through which her father moved. Then she hugged her mother fiercely. She had known since she was very small. They had been open with her. But she always felt so completely the daughter of Kathryn and Tom Paris that it never really bothered her. Her father loved her to distraction and that was more than she could say for many of her friends who either hated their stepfathers or just never cared. She felt so cosseted by both her parents; they had given her all they could give her: their love. She was happy, well adjusted and could not have wished for a more caring father than the man whose shattered expression she witnessed when he looked at the watch just now.
She held her mother away from her. "Go to him, Mom. He needs for you to tell him that," she said with so much wisdom. "And this," she said as she looked at the watch again in her hand, "I shall treasure it always as a link to the man who fathered me..."
Kathryn looked at Rebeccah, and realised how much of Tom really was in her. She gave her daughter a grateful smile, got up and walked to the door through which Tom had gone minutes before.
*****
Tom stood at the edge of the porch and sighed again heavily. She could never let him go, he thought. Chakotay was always there, a silent witness to their struggle to come to grips with their loss, their grief, their pain. The first months they were both too shattered when both Chakotay and B'Elanna and a few other members of the crew died as they came through the wormhole that brought them home.
B'Elanna had been pregnant. Kathryn didn't know she herself was pregnant until a few weeks later. She had come to him, knowing how devastated he was over B'Elanna's death. He could see her clearly as he recalled her standing in his apartment, the one he had prepared for B'Elanna and their baby. Kathryn had looked ragged, pretty much as he must have looked after two weeks of sustained drinking. She had looked ragged, sad, unhappy, emaciated and moments before her devastating revelation he had railed at her, telling her how there was no more B'Elanna and no more baby.
He recalled Kathryn's words…
"Would you consider being a father to a little girl?"
"Whose?" he had asked, the answer already forming in his mind before hers came.
"Mine," she had said. "Mine…"
That was when he had suggested they marry. Kathryn had stumbled through the night towards his apartment, her concern serious as a Starfleet captain, unmarried and pregnant by a dead lover. Kathryn had been grateful, and he... He needed comfort as much as she did. It had been a terrible time for them both as in the months they had waited for the birth of their daughter they could only grope at each other and wail their grief to the heavens. Healing such as it was, had been slow and very, very painful.
But the minute Rebeccah was born, he knew he would never love a child more, or care for her mother more than in those precious moments he had held his little girl in his arms. She was his and he loved her unconditionally. And so he and Kathryn gave their daughter what she needed most from her parents: their total and irrevocable love.
It wasn't long before his own feelings for his wife had grown into love, although he knew she could never...could never... He closed his eyes and pursed his lips tightly to stem the pain from overflowing again. Somehow he had deluded himself that Kathryn's feelings had changed in recent months. The intensity and colour of their lovemaking was changing. She was more passionate, more demonstrative than she had been before. His heart had brimmed with new hope. Perhaps now she could... But he had been mistaken. The watch... that watch that was the constant reminder that Kathryn had loved another man, that she was still in love with a man long dead, who didn't know he had a daughter.
He looked up as he heard her footfall on the floorboards of the porch. She stood in front of him. He looked away again in the distance, not wanting to see or hear what he had known all along.
*
"Tom…"
Tom looked beaten, Kathryn thought as she stood close to him. Beaten and unhappy and convinced that he would lose her. He had often had those dreams…
"Tom, look at me. Please," she repeated softly, her hand touching his arm. Even in profile she could see the flash of pain marring his attractive features. Slowly he turned to look at her, a world of sadness in his blue eyes. Strange she thought absently, how Rebeccah's eyes were the same blue. She was Tom's daughter in every way that counted, in every way that mattered.
"I thought it was time to give her the watch, Tom."
"I understand, Kathryn," he said quietly then continued, "she is Chakotay's - "
"No, Tom. Rebeccah is your daughter. Yours. You love her," Kathryn said in a pleading tone. "She has known no other father. She doesn't want any other father. She loves you to pieces…"
"My blessing, Kathryn..."
"Yes..."
"I love you, Kathryn," he whispered desperately. "After B'Elanna I never thought I could love anyone again, but I fell in love with you. Sometimes I think we – we…"
"Were always meant for each other?" she finished, hope flaring in her.
Tom gave a cry of pain. "Chakotay will always be in your heart. I can't fight his ghost anymore…"
Kathryn wrapped her arms around him, yet stood in such a way that she could look in his face, see his eyes light up again. Tenderly she caressed his cheek, rose on tiptoe to kiss him lingeringly. Her heart raced as he responded to her caress.
"Tom, my love," she said at length, feeling his heartbeat, how it quickened. "I gave Rebeccah the watch because I didn't need it anymore. I haven't needed it for a long time, Tom..." She waited to see her words sink in.
"Kathryn?"
"I love you, Tom Paris, with every breath of my being. No more holding back. My peace has been made a long time ago when I told you then, just after I told you we're pregnant with Adam. But you didn't believe me…"
The smile the crept into his face transformed his features.
"If you must know, I was too afraid to believe my luck, always imagining that deep down you still pined. Forgive me, Kathryn. It was just…seeing the watch… It unhinged me a little…"
She kissed him again, then stood back to gaze long into his eyes. Eyes that shone with new-found joy again.
"No more pain, Tom."
"Kathryn?" he said again, an almost foolishly happy smile on his face as he saw in her eyes the answer, all her love there, for him.
"There is no pain, Tom."
*
From where she stood in the lounge looking through the window, Rebeccah saw her parents in an embrace such as she had never seen before. Her father's hands were cupping her mother's head close to his heart, and his head was bent so that his lips touched her golden hair.
She sighed with contentment, then looked at the fob watch and chain lying in her hand. For a brief moment she imagined she saw the man Chakotay again, smiling at her, as if he had spoken to her about Kathryn and Tom Paris.
"There is no pain."," she said softly.
THE END.
To follow: Rebeccah