Title: Tarnished Armor (the ancient history redux)

Author: Abbey

Summary: Janeway looks at Harry and Tom’s relationship, and the choices she has made.

Rating: PG

Fandom: Star Trek: Voyager

Codes: J, P/K, P/T, vague J/T

Spoilers: Mosaic, Latent Image

Written for the Remix/Redux IV. Based on Tarnished Armor, by Trekker.

 

You tell yourself there’s nothing you could have done differently, and then you spend a lifetime building lies to support that assertion. I should know. I carried that burden for many years before I was able to lay it down. Even finding words to tell some stories, to let them loose, is difficult. But I can say that we had a full-fledged tragedy recently. We lost B’Elanna.

 

It wasn’t supposed to happen. There was no battlefield, no casualties were expected. For B’Elanna, it was supposed to be a little down-time with her husband and his best friend. As captain, I was ready to wind down, put the ship’s functions on autopilot, and read a good book. Then all hell broke loose and I got a call in the middle of the night saying that there was a crew member dead and others injured on the surface of the resort planet some of my people were spending leave on. Not only this, but the government wouldn’t release details of who was dead, or allow my group to beam off the surface.

 

At this point, I ran on nerves and a half-finished bottle of wine, shuffled in and out of alien corridors, trying to find any way to get our people back. By the time I finally saw B’Elanna’s crushed and blue body in front of me, and heard the aliens confirm that her pregnancy was indeed lost along with her life, it was all I could do to smooth her hair back and wonder if I could have done anything differently.

 

I loved B’Elanna. I loved her fire and her self-doubt, loved her quick mind and sensitive personality, loved who she became in the years I knew her. I thought her beautiful in a way that transcended the mere physical. I don’t know if it was exactly sexual, or just some connection we two stubborn scientists had, but it was more than I should have felt, given my position. I miss her.

 

I counseled Harry and Tom after the funeral, after things had calmed slightly. It’s a little bit of a misnomer. I am not a counselor. But still, I am expected to get a good read on those under me, to judge their situation, to recommend a course of action for them. The physical wounds had healed, but Tom was still in shock. I couldn’t really do anything for him, just tell him to call me if he needed someone to talk to. He didn’t say much, what could he have? Standing on a cliff, the ground had given way beneath his feet, and his wife had tumbled to her death. He had only been saved by his friend’s quick grasp.

 

Harry was more talkative. “I feel partly responsible, Captain,” he said. “The moment came, and I reached out for the person—the person I cared more about.” Harry stopped abruptly, avoided my gaze carefully. There were circles under his eyes and he seemed vaguely drugged, but then the doctor had put him on some pretty heavy medications for the dislocated shoulder he had sustained while holding pulling Tom to safety.

 

“Keep going, Harry. Tell me whatever you want. It’s not going anywhere outside of this room.”

 

“I love Tom,” Harry choked. “I always have. And in that split-second I reached for him, just because of those feelings.”

 

A dilemma I knew all sides of. “You couldn’t have saved them both,” I said gently.

 

Harry inhaled deeply and shuddered. “I know. But that choice. In making it, I effectively killed B’Elanna and her baby. For what—my own selfish feelings?”

 

This wasn’t going to be easy. I moved closer, held Harry firmly in my arms, and prepared to share a few stories I generally don’t like to tell. “About twenty years ago, two men I loved, my husband-to-be, and my father, were drowning in a wrecked shuttle. I had enough transporter power to save one of them. I couldn’t choose. I was paralyzed. I tried to rescue them both, knowing I would fail. And I did. I spent the next several years of my life feeling responsible for the unnecessary death of at least one person I loved.” I paused, drew a deep breath. “Some of the great religions, great thinkers, would say I did the right thing in favoring no one, in trying to preserve all life. But that was no comfort. I didn’t care if I was morally right—there was a life I could have saved, and I hadn’t. I had failed. Don’t let yourself get caught in that vicious game, Harry,” I said, looking past his face to the stars streaking by my viewport. “Please talk to the doctor. He knows what you went through. I chose differently than you. Do you remember when the doctor decided to save you because of his friendship with you, at the cost of another person’s life? You’re experiencing the same grief as his.”

 

Harry seemed to take my suggestions to heart, and life became as normal as it could have been without B’Elanna. I was hard on Tom, maybe a little too hard. I made him serve his shifts, keep out of his quarters. Grief shuts people down, stops them from performing basic functions. Tom may have hated me at the time, but I think he understood that my goal was that he not become paralyzed by that suffocating grief. I knew about Harry and Tom’s feelings toward each other, had always known. Not like it was very obvious, but I’ve seen my fair share of male friendships, and this one was not typical.

 

Lots of men are close, or pretend to be. They believe each other implicitly, without question or hesitation. They share stories of doing God-knows-what together. You can’t penetrate those bonds; you can’t suggest to a man that his best friend is fallible, or less than honest. Still, we’ve constructed that it’s a long jump from best friends and comrades-in-arms to lovers. Men will become embarrassed and indignant at suggestions that their feelings have any remotely sexual component. However, when watching Harry and Tom, I always saw an ease in their actions, no restraint in how they touched each other, how gently and openly they spoke to each other. They loved each other, and what is love other than a bond between best friends and comrades-in-arms?

 

Harry and Tom finally came to know that, and to expand their relationship. Now, because of death, they cling to each other. They are rarely apart. They exist to comfort each other, to do battle with each other’s demons. Watching, I am sometimes jealous that they have each other. That they have anyone.

 

I had dinner with the Doctor recently, and asked him exactly what broke him out of the circle of grief that returned when I gave him access to the memories of the surgery that he had performed on Harry, and not on his companion. It couldn’t have only been the Dante I lent him.

 

“I don’t know why, but death beats you into life,” he said, adding with a tilt of his chin, “even though I’m not alive, strictly speaking. Nothing makes sense, really. Why does death strike when we least expect it? Why do we have to make impossible choices about it? The only plausible thing to do is to keep living, to continue in your own person what was lost because of others’ deaths.”

 

So Harry and Tom do. So we all do. When I told him my own story, the Doctor asked me who I wanted to save, my father or Justin. “My father,” I said. “Though I couldn’t admit that I loved him more, that he was more important to me. It seemed wrong. I still wonder what my family would have been like had he lived.”

 

It’s ancient history, really. I don’t carry the guilt around anymore, but I keep always with me the people I have loved, the people I could not save. They stay with me through the dark hours of the night, when I turn in dreams, alone. Though I am continuously reminded of the limitations of humanity, of the tenuous nature of life, I do not will that the memories of those people ever part from me.

 

END

 

 

(Index)