Fan Fiction
TITLE: Chakotay's Holidays: Groundhog Day (an interlude)
AUTHOR: Brenda Shaffer-Shiring
RATING: PG
CODES: P, with C & T friendship (implied). Future chapters will be C/T.
PART: 3/?
DISCLAIMER: Paramount will little note, nor long remember, what I do here. But
they still own the VOY copyrights, so they get a shout-out anyway.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks to Diane Bellomo for betaing.
SUMMARY: When B'Elanna moves out, Tom fantasizes about changing the past.
Once, while he was going through net archives looking for his beloved 20th-century pulp movies, Tom Paris had come across an odd title: "Groundhog Day." Even though the archive listings indicated that the film didn't fit into any of his preferred categories, the unusual title had intrigued him (why in the galaxy would anyone make a movie about an arcane holiday based around a never-more-than-half-believed weather prediction phenomenon?), and he'd called it up. It had proved to be a moderately entertaining comedy about a weather forecaster who repeatedly re-lived the arcane holiday until he "got it right," and won the woman of his dreams.
Quaffing his mug of beer, Paris thrust it forward on the bar to signal that he wanted another. Unusually quiet, the tall, slender bartender scooped it up from the smooth wooden surface, and complied with that unspoken request. But of course, neither the aging Frenchwoman nor anyone could grant Tom Paris what he wanted most: he wanted to be that forecaster. Or at the least, he wanted that forecaster's opportunities.
If he could live one day over, his life would be very different. But which day would he choose? Taking a swallow from his re-filled mug, Tom silently contemplated the question.
Maybe he ought to relive the day his father had offered Tom the chance to work with him in special vessel development projects. This time, Tom vowed, he would firmly refuse. He had accepted the offer in the same optimistic spirit in which it had been made: the feeling that, since his relationship with the admiral had so greatly improved, they ought to be able to work together on friendly terms. Regrettably, it seemed that, between Owen and Thomas Paris, familiarity was more likely to breed contempt. Or rather, anger, first in the form of bickering, and later of open arguing.
He had not mentioned the problems to B'Elanna, who was having a hard time coming to terms with John Torres, and seemed happy that Tom was doing so much better with his own father. Owen Paris, of the old school that believed his differences with Tom were between Tom and himself, never breathed a word to B'Elanna either.
Or maybe, Tom thought, he ought to relive the day, last November, when he and his father had had that spectacular blow-up in front of the rest of the development team. Since B'Elanna hadn't known of the deteriorating situation, it would have been hard to tell her just why his father had taken him off the projects and had him reassigned to other work.
As for the new job, it was still flight testing, still work for a skilled pilot, but when one is removed from an admiral's team there are always questions. Perhaps Tom ought to try redoing the day when he had grown tired of the questions, and decided to visit Sandrine's after work to take the edge off his frustrations.
Or perhaps he ought to try reliving the night when, drunk and half-crazy with the things he couldn't (wouldn't, he admitted silently) say to B'Elanna, he had spilled his guts to pretty, sympathetic Maliya, there in the back corner of Sandrine's. Pretty, sympathetic, affectionate Maliya.
Or at last chance, he ought to relive New Year's Eve, when he had sought sympathy from Maliya after his quarrel with B'Elanna.
And B'Elanna had found them together. As if (as if?) to make it worse, she'd been accompanied by her own personal paragon of uprightness, honesty, and integrity: Chakotay. Well, at least Chakotay had kept her from putting him in the hospital.
And today B'Elanna and her Native American knight in shining armor had come to Tom's (formerly Tom's, B'Elanna's and Miral's) apartment to collect the last of her and Miral's things. And Tom had not been able to think of a thing to say to stop her. Should he try to relive today? No, screw that; he didn't know how he'd lived through it the first time.
He looked up at the clock behind Sandrine's bar. It was too late to relive today, in any event. Tomorrow had already begun.
He pushed away from the bar. The occasional time-travel anomaly aside, in real life it was always too late to relive today.
But perhaps it wasn't too late to improve tomorrow.
