Not in Front of the Children, a Voyager story by Sue Castle. Not rated; no infringement intended.
He should have realized something was up when the Captain started the
briefing wearing an ermine robe.
Things had been going along okay ... well, as relatively okay as they
could, seventy years from home, with a curious and unpredictable omnipotent
being who had a romantic interest in Captain Janeway
tagging along and popping in at odd moments. Three days ago had been the latest
little visitation, and Q had appeared distracted, annoyed, almost ... afraid.
He'd snapped into being out of nothingness, as was his habit, in the middle of
the bridge, teased Janeway about some sort of parade,
mock-shuddered at Torres, studiously ignored Tuvok,
floated over Chakotay and Harry Kim as if they were
beneath his notice, and stared for an uncomfortable amount of time at him, Tom
Paris, pilot of the gallant Voyager. Or at least, that's what Q had called it.
He had stared at Q for a long moment, seriously tempted to tell him what
a complete twit he was and only stopping his tongue by remembering what had
happened the first time a Q had visited the ship. He had no wish to end up in
limbo or tethered to a huge bush again. So he'd bit his tongue, but inside he
was muttering every vile imprecation he had learned in fifteen years of
sneaking into bars. Some of the terms on the list were pretty colorful. For an
instant he thought he heard a high pitched giggle, but when he shook his head
and listened again, it was gone. So was Q.
Q hadn't returned, and after the first jumpy nerves began to die down it
was business as usual. Until the morning briefing.
Janeway had been standing
at the head of the table, going into one of her soliloquies about the sanctity
of the Prime Directive, and
Chakotay ducked, sending him
sideways into B'Elanna, who dived to avoid the
incoming commander, knocking Tuvok out of his chair
and sending Harry flying into the far wall. He watched interestedly as half the
bridge crew went down like toppling dominoes.
It had to be Q.
Janeway let out a noise
that in anyone less dignified would have been called a squawk, and dropped the
scepter, which got tangled up in the flowing hem of the robe. As she bent to
disentangle herself, the crown slipped forward over her eyes, and she continued
forward. Only Tom's quick reflexes kept the Captain from landing face first on
the floor. Of course, this meant he ended up with an armful of Janeway, but he wasn't complaining. It had all the earmarks
of an historic briefing. He'd enjoyed it more than any he'd ever attended.
Once the excitement had worn off and the briefing was finished, they made
their wary way out to their work stations, once again on high alert for the
presence of Q. The crew manfully ignored the Captain's muttered comments on the
ancestry, mating habits and lack of intestinal fortitude of certain beings who were too malicious and frightened to show their faces.
Tom bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood to keep from laughing out
loud. It was the most fun he'd had in weeks.
Reports and technical manuals. He wasn't an engineer. True, he knew about everything there was to know
about navigational systems, and rebuilding machinery was a hobby of his, not to
mention something he'd gotten really good at in prison, but the things B'Elanna Torres was having to do
to keep Voyager's engines running had more to do with arcane magic and super
glue than mechanics. He didn't know how else he could help, but if Janeway wanted him down here in Engineering, down in
Engineering was where he would be. He gave a single, somewhat paranoid thought
to wondering if this was her way of training Ensign Seril
to take his place, then shook it off at the sound of
Torres' growl.
"I said the tetraspanner, Paris, not the
parallel fuser!" Her patience was running thin. Sure, he was decorative,
and could be useful on some tests, but his attention span was much too short
for this sort of work. He started guiltily and began to rummage through the
toolbox. She winced at the sound of delicate tools tumbling against one
another.
"
<Saved by the bell> shot through both the
pilot's and the engineer's mind.
Ensign Seril was being helped to sickbay by two
brawny security guards as
"Weird," he muttered to himself. "What happened to Seril?" He tossed the question at Harry as he swung
around the side rail and settled into the conn.
"Dunno," Harry half-whispered back.
"Something about never wanting to pilot this cursed ship again." The
young Ops officer looked a bit spooked himself.
You just never knew,
Neelix looked around the
unusually quiet mess hall and decided that morale definitely needed
improvement. His crew was just too uptight after their recent adventures. Time for a little entertainment and happiness.
Unfortunately, the Talaxian version of entertainment
was roughly equivalent to the Human definition of extreme annoyance.
In the middle of the seventeenth verse of the Great Canto of Lost
Treasures (dubbed by Tom as the Poem that Never Died) Neelix
suddenly developed complete and total laryngitis. Vocal cords froze up like cat
gut in liquid nitrogen. Kes hurried him down to sick
bay and all forty eight of the crew members currently trying to eat lunch
kindly waited until the doors were firmly closed behind the couple before
bursting into spontaneous cheers.
Kes reported back in
ten minutes that Neelix would be all right (a
collective holding of breath in the hall) within a few days (rush of air as
everyone breathed a sigh of relief). Saved from the Poem.
Life was good.
As she turned to walk back into the cramped hydroponics bay behind the
kitchen, she paused in the doorway and let out a choked squeak. Tom noticed her
frozen figure in the doorway to the bay, and got up hurriedly to make sure she
was okay. Coming to a stop behind her, easily able to see over her head because
she was so short, his eyes widened at the sight of the shelves.
Roses. Hundreds
of them, yellow, white, palest pink and vivid red, streaked and swirled with
color, light purple and powder blue. He grinned and lightly clasped her
shoulders. "Neelix must've been working on this
one for awhile. What's the occasion?"
The large blue eyes looking up at him over her shoulder were a mixture of
pleasure and bewilderment. "There isn't one, that
I'm aware of, anyway."
He grinned at her. "Ah, he just wanted to say he loved you. Smart
man," he grinned softly down at her. "Lucky one,
too." With another friendly squeeze he let her go, leaving her to
stare in wonder at the riot of blooms filling her hydroponics trays.
The afternoon shift was uneventful, a small blessing for which everyone
except
"Hey, Harry!" He grinned down at his buddy.
"Hey, Tom," Harry responded playfully.
"Where you off to with the horn?" Tom gestured at the case and tilted a brow in query.
"I need to practice, but I didn't really feel like going back to my
quarters yet. I thought maybe the aft observation bay-"
"Why not Sandrine's?" Tom interrupted enthusiastically. "It's
midweek, probably won't be too crowded, and the acoustics are great. You could
have people around you but they wouldn't interfere or bug you ... well, no more
than I usually do, anyway." Harry met the hopeful look in those big
sapphire eyes and found himself caving in, as always. Tom read surrender in his
friend's face and whooped in victory, urging him on toward the holobar.
Swinging through the doors, the only crewmembers they saw were B'Elanna and Tuvok, playing a
quiet game of pool in the corner, and, surprisingly, the Doctor, a beret
covering his balding pate, discussing vodka martinis with Sandrine. They
exchanged waves and Harry went to a semi-dark corner and opened his case.
"Doc sure seems more at home here since his romance with that V'Dian scientist, doesn't he?" Tom was watching Harry
put the pieces of his clarinet together. In the background, B'Elanna's
triumphant crow signaled another Vulcan loss. Tom could picture Tuvok's calmly disgruntled-but-not-admitting-it expression.
At least it was easier for him to lose to a Klingon/Human
than to a Talaxian. Tom grinned. Now, *that* had been
funny. The rattle of the cue stick in the rack diverted his attention from
Harry, and he turned to see Tuvok gazing at the
clarinet with something like desire in his dark eyes.
"Care to join us?" Tom asked lazily. Tuvok
considered it for all of a split second before settling into the vacant chair.
"You ever play?"
"On Vulcan, musical instruments are considered a tool to aid in
centering the mind, focusing the thoughts. The mathematical precision of music
is highly admired." Tom sighed, and Tuvok nodded
slightly. "I played both the lute and the lyre."
"My mother played the viola," Torres put in softly from behind
Tom's left shoulder. "She taught me from when I was a small child. It was
... one thing we had in common." Tom reached up and caught her hand in his
and she smiled briefly down at him.
"Too bad you don't have instruments. We could have quite a jam
session. You play anything, Tom?"
"If you're going to have some sort of concert in here then you
really should take care of your own instruments." He carefully, but
forcibly, set a Vulcan lute and a viola case on the table next to Harry's
clarinet case. "I was involved in a very interesting conversation
regarding the relative curative properties of wood grain alcohol on-" Long
red fingernails curved around his jaw and a delicate white hand covered his
mouth as Sandrine's wide, painted eyes peered over his shoulder.
"We were just leaving, cherie,"
she laughed to Tom.
He nodded, not bothering to hide his own grin as she dragged the not
particularly protesting doctor away. Tuvok was
fingering the lute very thoughtfully, examining it thoroughly before playing a
few exploratory notes. B'Elanna was exclaiming with
enjoyment as she put a beautiful, darkly shining viola to her shoulder, drawing
the bow gently across the strings to pause and listen to the deep tones
spilling from the strings. She saw the tiny, sparkling gold ribbon tied around
the end of the bow and grinned with delight at Tom.
"Thank you! This is wonderful! How did you know to program this?
This is great!"
Tom tried to tell her that he hadn't been responsible, but before he
could get the words out, Harry began to play. Tuvok
picked up the counter harmony, and B'Elanna joined in
happily. Tom stared at the gold ribbon on the end of the bow and thought about
the spanner he'd seen earlier on his way out of engineering. Something began to
whisper in the back of his mind. Something very odd was going on here.
Three hours later when the musicians had called an end to the jam session
and the program had ended ... and the instruments remained ... he *knew*
something weird was happening.
That night, instead of dreaming about Caldik
Prime and lock-picking in prison, he dreamed of roses and ribbons and lutes and
ermine.
He wasn't sure. And he didn't want to sound delusional. And while Tuvok and Torres had been understandably confused about the
instruments, he'd managed to come up with a line about replicator
rations and gifts and Harry that hadn't made much sense but they'd bought it. For now. He *had* to find out what was going on.
So he ran a little experiment.
Chakotay had really been
getting on his nerves lately. Authority, power, all that sort of thing,
combined with still being irked at not getting in on the plot to trap the
traitor (not to mention getting knocked on his can by Paris during the course
of the ruse) had given Chakotay an attitude with
regards to the pilot. So he was, in his own stoic way, picking on him.
Finding the most boring checklists for Tom to go
over again and again and again (all in the name of readiness, of course). Finding excuses to run him all over the ship on mundane errands that
could have been handled by courier, just to make his feet hurt. Questioning and
double checking everything that
Harry giggled.
Chakotay spluttered. And Janeway squirmed, fighting an attack of the chuckles.
Tom swallowed, slowly turning, not really sure he wanted to see what he
had a nasty feeling he was going to see. He was right.
Chakotay sat, glued to his
seat, wearing nothing but a loincloth, a wreath of jungle vines in his hair,
strange symbols painted all over his chest, tied into his chair by any number
of strange flowering plants. He looked like a holiday arrangement, except for
the rapidly reddening face and the gaping jaw. An extremely confused wolf sat
at his feet, looking for all the world like it had been wolf-napped from the
forest and plonked unceremoniously onto a starship, and it wasn't too happy with the whole situation.
Of course, from the increasingly apoplectic look on Chakotay's
face ... neither was he.
"Captain," Paris managed to choke out, "I think ... we
have a problem."
Janeway stared in
fascination at her first officer. "Um-hm. I'd say we do, Tom."
"Ma'am," he tried a little harder, "I *really* think we
have a problem." She managed to tear her eyes from the paint running down Chakotay's chest and looked bemusedly at Paris. "I
think ... it's Q."
The bemusement left her eyes as if she'd been dunked head first into a
bucket of ice water. Her face paled and she looked around somewhat wildly. Chakotay saw her right hand flail again and tried to duck,
expecting another scepter to appear, and only succeeded in choking himself on an hibiscus vine. As he was trying to catch his breath, the
object of their conversation appeared.
"You!" Q thundered, pointing accusingly at ... Tom Paris. The pilot looked
around even more wildly than Janeway had.
"What? What?!" he half-screamed.
"I didn't do it! It wasn't me! I didn't put the roses in the bay and take
away Neelix's voice and make the instruments and
dress her in ermine and I *certainly* didn't make Chakotay
into a big flower pot!"
The entire bridge crew stared in disbelief at Paris.
"Did I?" he asked in a small voice.
"Well, no, not really," came an equally small voice, off to his
left. All eyes swiveled to see a young being, a boy no more than seven or
eight, looking contritely at Tom. "I suppose I did."
"This is all your fault," Q grumbled,
marching past Paris to sweep the youngster up into his arms, settling him onto
the side of his hip as if he was a bag of potatoes. "You
and your colorful vocabulary." Tom stared at him in complete lack
of comprehension. "Don't think just because you didn't actually *call* me
all those names you were thinking about that I didn't hear them!! And so did he! Don't you know better than to say things like that around
children?!"
Paris was at a loss. What had he said? "I didn't say anything!"
"No, but you were thinking it!" Q accused. "That's just as
bad! Little Q's have big ears, you know!"
Tom stared from the irate adult Q to the abashed small Q in his arms and
felt an insane desire to laugh. "Are you trying to say that he heard me
calling you a ... uhm, twit ... in my head and
decided to stick around and see what else there was going on in my brain?"
"Yes!" Q was beginning to calm down. "I'd been looking for
him for eons, and he decides to play hide and seek *here*, of all places, with
*you* as a guideline, of all Humans. It's a wonder you're still alive to talk
about it!"
Tom had a brief mental image of the entire bridge crew in their
underwear, and fiercely squashed the thought.
"Exactly!" Q crowed.
The little Q looked very interested.
Adult Q looked at him quickly, then sketched a
hasty bow in Janeway's direction. "I will leave
you to it, then, Madam Captain."
With no fanfare, he disappeared, leaving the bridge crew sighing with
relief. Finally, Tuvok stared at the captain and
nodded toward Chakotay.
"About the commander, Captain?"
She looked at the utterly embarrassed man, then the now-napping wolf.
"Somebody, get me some hedgeclippers."
If nothing else, the adventure had taught him one thing. You could never
be too careful, with kids around.
end