Author's Note:
Started forever ago, finished while sheltering in place and sent out with love and the hope that it might find someone in need of a moment or two of distraction.

All my thanks to Photogirl1890 for so many things, including her help with this piece, but mostly for her patient friendship over this last year.

This takes place in the original Endgame timeline, in a particular corner of a universe that it shares with A Space Between and Stealing Home.

bright and tiny spark

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…day one…

"Go. You should keep things as normal as possible."

The Captain's tone is insistent and just short of an order, but Tom's eyes slide to her left where Tuvok stands. Tuvok, who has parented three grown children. The Vulcan's nod of agreement is slight but perceptible.

Tom looks down and chews on his inner lip for a beat before breathing out a, "Right," and turning his eyes upward as he taps his comm badge.

"Thanks, Chell. I'll be down in a few minutes. Paris out."

He gives a last nod to the Captain and Tuvok and tries to not see the sympathy in Kathryn's eyes. For once he's more than grateful for Vulcan stoicism.

Keep things normal.

Tom slides open the ready room doors and crosses the bridge to take the turbolift down to the mess hall. At least the turbolifts are still operational - though they won't be for long if B'Elanna has her way.

If she's around to have her way.

Fuck.

One level down he exits the 'lift into the corridors which have been too cold and too dark for months now.

Normal.

How long does it take 'temporary' and 'emergency measures' to simply become the new normal?

He rounds the last corner to see light spilling out from the open mess hall doors. No doubt the next staff meeting will feature either Tuvok or Harry taking umbrage with the crew's continued tendency to leave the doors to social spaces open: there are reasons that starship doors are designed to close automatically after all. But overlapping conversations and even staccato bursts of laughter along with the aromas of Chell's cooking accompany the spill of light from the mess hall out into the dim corridor and Tom finds that he can't bring himself to care about optimizing air circulation and security containment measures.

Here maybe there is still a bit of normalcy left after all.

Tom moves through the door and finds himself in the height of the alpha shift dinner hour, every table of the mess hall occupied.

Across the room, Tom spots the object of his search, sitting up on her knees and reaching across the table to point out a particularly colorful vegetable portion on her tablemate's tray. She's in the middle of a lengthy explanation, no doubt a play-by-play of her role in the dish's creation. Ensign Nozawa is nodding along gamely, throwing in a leading question here or there before catching Tom's eye. Kashimuro grins and taps his companion lightly on her still-reaching arm, stopping her mid-sentence and pointing her in Tom's direction.

Miral squeals and launches herself off her chair and across the room towards Tom. "Daddy!"

Tom catches her up into his arms; Miral settles her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. Tom resists the impulse to clutch her tightly against his chest — normal, remember? — and, instead, waves to Chell who has poked his head out of the galley.

"Sorry I'm late."

"Not a problem, not a problem," Chell assures. There is a question in the Bolian's eyes, but Tom shakes his head slightly and the other man nods his understanding. "Miral was an excellent assistant, as always."

"We made mashed bantans," Miral puts in. "That's because it's Monday and Mama always eats with us on Monday and mashed bantans is her favorite." Following her own logic to its conclusion, she peers over Tom's shoulder expectantly.

So much for normal.

Tom shifts her weight to one side so that she looks back at him. With effort, he keeps his voice light: "Well, Mama can't come tonight –" Miral's expression immediately falls and so Tom adds — "even though it's Mashed Bantan Monday," with enough exaggerated exasperation and waggling of his eyebrows to elicit a giggle.

Chell is looking guilty as hell, but there is no way he could have known the particular patterns and parental routines that would be set in stone in Miral's four-year-old mind. Meanwhile, at least half of the diners in the room are watching the scene with concern and trying to catch Tom's eye with 'is-there-anything-we-can-do?' clear in their expressions.

Right now, it's all more than Tom can handle.

With inspiration born of desperation, Tom turns his full attention back to Miral. "Hey, little one? Think you could convince Chell to make a picnic for us? Then we could take it back home and," he gives her a conspiratorial wink, "eat in front of the television?"

Miral claps in delight - Mondays and all schedule anomalies temporarily forgotten - and squirms down to skip over to Chell.

The Bolian squats down to eye-level to listen to his sometime-assistant's excited request and then smiles, straightening up and offering his hand. Tom watches as the two disappear back into the galley, Miral still skipping to match Chell's longer stride.

Which leaves Tom standing alone and with no visible occupation in front of most of the alpha shift who are all still doing their best to telegraph concern and sympathy.

Fucking hell.

It's Nozawa who rescues him, pushing away from the table he'd been sharing with Miral and crossing the room to stand beside Tom, effectively blocking the other occupants of the mess hall from Tom's view — and Tom from theirs. He and Kashimuro have never been exactly chummy and the Ensign maintains a casual sort of attention as he stands by Tom's side, but he presents a single point of focus and for that Tom is grateful.

"Any word yet, sir?"

The question is pitched to be overheard by any who might be interested, allowing Tom to address all of those suffocating, silent questions with a single conversation. He meets Nozawa's eye and hopes his look conveys his appreciation.

"Nothing yet." His volume matches Nozawa's.

The Ensign nods. "If there is anything that any of us can do," and he tilts his head toward the galley and the chef's assistant within, "you only need to ask."

Tom's throat tightens and he gives a quick nod but is saved from any further response by Miral's reappearance, closely followed by Chell. His daughter is lugging, of all things, an actual picnic basket, which is easily half her size.

"I've got our picnic!" she announces to Tom and the room at large, giving a small grunt as she hefts the basket forward.

Tom's eyes flick from his daughter up to Chell who seems to be actively restraining himself from helping Miral with her burden — a gesture that would go over about as well with Miral as it would with her mother. Instead, Chell gives Tom a shrug. "The basket was stashed down behind the leola root — must have been there since Neelix."

"Thanks, Chell." Tom manages a small and probably pained smile. He holds out a hand to Miral who staggers over with her prize. After a moment's hesitation, she allows Tom to assist with one of the basket's handles and they head out of the mess hall together, Miral waving her good-byes to Chell and Nozawa.

Dinner entertainment ends up being a Merrie Melodies marathon and Miral is distracted enough by the rarity of being allowed to eat in front of the television not to notice the continued absence of her second parent. Show over, she tumbles off the sofa and disappears into her room only to reappear minutes later with a small stack of picture books. Drawing her small, warm body up into his lap, Tom makes his way through the stack, even deigning to give encore readings of ABC's with Flotter and Toby and the Terrible Tribbles.

Miral's weight has been growing heavier against Tom's chest ever since Toby discovered his secret valley full of tribbles for the second time, and he finally rouses her enough for a quick trip to the bathroom before gathering her back into his arms and carrying her to her room and bed. Her eyes are already more than half-closed as he tucks her ragged stuffed targ into her arms and pulls the covers over her.

"Tell Mama to give me a kiss when she gets home." And then her eyes close and her breathing deepens to a gentle snore.

Tom sits beside her for a few minutes, taking what comfort he can from her small presence before rising and leaving the room, keying off the lights on his way out.
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…day two…

It's been eighteen months since Seven's death.

Miral had been just a week shy of her third birthday. B'Elanna and Tom - himself still reeling from the clusterfuck of a mission - had consulted with Sam, with Tuvok, and even, in desperation, with the Doctor. They had talked themselves in circles and finally blown up at each other as they tried to decide what and how to tell Miral.

In the end, she'd needed little explanation; instead, she'd insisted that she wanted to see Seven's body. They'd tried to dissuade her, but Miral had come by her stubbornness very honestly from both sides of her hybrid heritage. And so Tom had found himself at the entrance to Sickbay, one of Miral's hands clutched tightly in his, while her other arm had been wrapped around her second favorite stuffed friend, a raggedy-furred sehlat with one missing tusk.

Miral's hesitation had lasted only until she spied Seven's body, laid out on a biobed across the room. A sheet had been pulled up over her chest but her face was uncovered: the Doctor had known they were coming.

Dropping Tom's hand, Miral had moved confidently across the room to the edge of the biobed, with Tom trailing behind her. Once beside the bed, she reached a hand up to stroke Seven's upper arm and then turned to Tom for help.

With a tight smile, Tom had lifted her up so that she was on level with the bed. The Doc, he noticed, had healed the worst of Seven's visible abrasions and cuts, something that Tom would be sure to thank him for later.

Miral had solemnly taken in the still form of her friend, before reaching out of Tom's arms to tuck the sehlat under the sheet at Seven's chest. Then, leaning almost entirely out of Tom's hold, she wrapped her arms around the former drone's neck and rested her small head against her body. After a second, she had pulled herself back up to Tom.

"It's okay. She can sleep now."

Tom had frowned, pulling back to give her a long look. "Miral? You know Seven isn't going to wake up this time, right?"

Miral had nodded. "I know." And she had looked down at Seven a final time. "It's okay," she repeated, resting her head back against Tom's chest. "She's ready now."

Three months later, Voyager had encountered the Fen Domar for the first time.

This time there had been no bodies to visit, no final embraces or gifted sehlats.

In a single day, a tenth of the population of Miral's small world had, from her perspective, simply vanished. And Voyager's corridors had gone dim and cold.

Which is why, when a blurry-eyed Miral stumbles out of her room in the early hours of ship's morning and her eyes dart around the quarters looking for B'Elanna, Tom decides on a switch of tactics: whatever else Miral has to deal with, her mother will not be yet another person who just disappears.

"'Morning. How'd you sleep?"

"Good." With an oomph, Miral pulls herself up onto the sofa beside him. "Where's Mama?"

Tom keys off the PADD he'd been reviewing and sets it on the top of the stack on the end table, pulling Miral into his lap.

"Well, Mama had to go on a trip –"

"Daddy –" Miral stops him with a pre-teen-Naomi-inspired eye-roll – "it's not a 'trip'. It's called an 'away mission'."

"Right. An away mission," Tom agrees, nodding. "And it's taking longer than we thought it would."

Miral considers this. "When is she coming home?"

Tom's throat constricts and he fights to keep the pitch of his voice even.

"I'm not sure, little one."

Miral's features tighten, and Tom braces himself. But she only frowns, tilting her head to one side as if searching her memory. "She forgot to say goodbye."

Fucking, fucking hell…

And all Tom wants is to wrap his daughter tight in his arms and somehow keep any harm or sadness or disappointment or…anything bad from ever touching her again.

"Well," and somehow — somehow — he manages the tone: light, reassuring, teasing, "you'll need to remind her when she gets back."

He drops Miral off for a morning of puzzles and kadis-kot with Naomi before heading to the exercise in frustration and sheer uselessness which is the senior staff briefing.

They know nothing.

It was supposed to have been simple: in and out, there and back, a quick meet and greet that, with any luck, would yield a sample of dilithium to be brought back to Voyager for analysis before setting up a buy.

B'Elanna had had every expectation of returning in plenty of time to enjoy her mashed bantans with Miral.

And then their contact had ghosted on them.

The meet had been at an outdoor café in the middle of a crowded commercial square in the system's primary trading district. Soon after the initial introduction, the contact had risen from their table claiming the need to answer an urgent communique and disappeared into the dense, shifting crowd.

According to Ayala's report, B'Elanna had 'expressed some frustration' at the 'waste of our time' and, ordering Vorik and himself to remain where they were, had gone after the contact. A minute later, both men had lost sight of her in the crowd when there was a flash of a transporter beam from the direction she had taken. Ayala had tried to make contact by comm without success. He had gone to search for her by foot; Vorik had returned to the Flyer and scanned both the planet and the ships in orbit for her biosignature. Both had come up empty.

"So, are we assuming the Fen Domar have her?" In his place on Tom's left, Harry is bristling with nervous energy. Tom had intentionally seated himself at the table's end beside the Captain – not to better participate in the meeting but to bypass the uncomfortable moment when everyone else tried to decide whether or not to fill B'Elanna's customary seat to his right.

"The evidence to support that assumption is at best circumstantial, Lieutenant," Tuvok counters from across the table. "However," the Vulcan continues as Harry opens his mouth to jump back in, "it is also our 'best guess' for now."

"Our only guess, you mean," clarifies the Captain, echoing the thought in Tom's own head. Janeway turns to him expectantly, but Tom has nothing to add – at least nothing productive. She doesn't even bother to glance down to the other end of the table where the other member of the command team sits in a silence that has been customary for months now – eighteen months to be exact.

The other chairs at the once full table sit empty.

"Right, then. Tuvok," the Captain turns to her security officer, "take Ayala back to the planet and see what you can find out. Someone must know something. Harry?" Harry straightens, clearly relieved to be given some task. "Go through every quad of the Flyer's sensor data: see if it picked up anything we can use to determine where that transport beam came from."

Harry nods. "Yes, ma'am."

The Captain motions her dismissal and Harry moves first, gripping Tom's shoulder briefly on his way out. As she stands, Janeway turns to Tom and starts to say something but then seems to think the better of it. Tom finds himself grateful for that small mercy.

It's a light work day and Tom wishes it wasn't: the last thing he needs is time to think. He meets Icheb on the holodeck for some advanced shuttlecraft evasive maneuver training and then goes over Voyager's duty roster for the upcoming week with Lieutenant Rollins over lunch, having first checked that Miral has been successfully transferred over to the Doctor's care for the afternoon. He has half a bridge shift to cover after lunch, but Voyager is sitting in orbit around a class nine gas giant in the same system where the meet and greet had gone FUBAR, counting on the magnetic field generated by the planet to mask them from any passing Fen Domar patrols.

Until they have some clue of where to go, there is little to do at the helm.

He and Miral brave the mess hall for dinner. He can't avoid it forever and, besides, the scuttlebutt has done its job. Everyone else now knows exactly as much as Tom does, which is a whole lot of nothing.

Miral is tetchy, complaining about foods that she usually eats without issue and whining about everything from Tom's choice of table to the fact that one of her Zabee nuts accidentally drops into her stew as she is eating. Tom mentally starts a countdown and is unsurprised when halfway back to their quarters - after he makes the critical error of forgetting to let her give the turbolift command - Miral melts down completely.

He squats, crouched down to her level in the halted 'lift weathering the screaming, kicking and hitting phase of the tantrum before she at last accepts his offer of a hug. Once cradled against his chest, her now half-hearted screams subside into sobs and finally to hiccups. When she is calm, Tom tells the 'lift to resume and stands with his daughter in his arms, one hand stroking her curls as her hot, wet face presses into his neck. He carries her the rest of the way back home.

In the early hours of the morning, Miral crawls into Tom's bed. He lets her, slipping his arm around her, and the image of B'Elanna's no doubt less-than-happy reaction to this new sleeping arrangement flashes through his mind.

Gods, would he give anything for that image to become reality.
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…day three…

Tuvok's investigation has proven fruitful. A Mihkal traveler passing through the trading district had spoken of a Fen Domar holding facility in the neighboring system. If the Fen Domar indeed have B'Elanna, that's the most likely place that they would have taken her for questioning.

Tom has spent too much time in prisons and in engaging the Fen Domar to have any illusions about what that means. Sitting at the briefing table, he swallows back a violent wave of nausea as the rest of the senior staff begins to assess options.

Based on the information the traveler had offered, infiltration of the facility is risky but possible and, with Voyager's chief engineer at stake, the risks are deemed acceptable. Tom doesn't even try to volunteer for the team Tuvok is putting together: even without Miral already being a parent down, the Captain would never let him anywhere near this one.

As the meeting breaks up, Tom is the first out of his seat and has already pulled the doors open when he hears Chakotay asking for an extra moment with Tuvok and the Captain. The small part of Tom's brain that is still able to care wonders what that might be about.

At eleven hundred hours, Tom heads down to the shuttle bay to see the team off. Theoretically he's doing a final check on the Flyer but he doubts anyone is buying that. He enters to see Tuvok's SAR team assembled, dressed in black and looking decidedly non-Starfleet.

It's been years since his brain has made the separation but now it does: Ayala and Dalby, both ex-Maquis and, in this moment, with very little apparent emphasis on the "ex-".

The doors behind Tom are pulled open and not Tuvok but Chakotay walks through, also in black and also with a particular bearing that Tom hasn't seen since Teero triggered the Maquis's (thankfully temporary) religious awakening.

"Commander-" Tom starts, using the other man's rank to fish for a reaction and getting a half-expected wince in response- "I didn't realize you were –"

"It's B'Elanna," Chakotay cuts him off, not sparing Tom a glance as he brushes past. "Let's move out," he directs his team.

It's Dalby and Ayala who look back, Dalby merely nodding but Ayala offering a reassuring, "We'll bring her back, Paris."

And then they are gone and Tom is left alone staring out into the vacuum beyond the shuttle bay's force field.

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…day four…

Tom awakens the next morning with Miral beside him. He hadn't even bothered to pretend the evening before, laying down beside her in his bed until she had fallen asleep, Toby the Targ nestled under her chin.

Over breakfast, he tells her that they are going to spend the day together – Captain's orders.

Miral approves but, "After lunch I still need to go help Tal run her checks of the science lab circuit panels." She chews and swallows another spoonful of cereal, then continues, "Tal says I'm 'absolutely essential' to her doing it right."

Tom smiles. "Well then, can I come watch?"

Toying with her spoon, Miral considers this, her lips pursed. "I think that would be okay." Then, she fixes Tom with a painfully familiar look of fond tolerance. "But don't touch anything, okay, Daddy?"

Later, Tom sits on the floor of the science lab, leaning against the bulkhead and watching as Miral and Tal move from one circuit panel to the next. Tal seems to have forgotten his presence entirely. She laughs and jokes with Miral as they systemically move through the steps of the diagnostic at each panel, Tal squatting down to Miral's level and working slowly and methodically enough that the four year old can follow and help out.

Like Naomi before her, Miral has been accepted from birth as a child of Voyager, the adopted niece of dozens of crewmembers from every department and at all levels of the command chain. On any given day, she happily bounces from running diagnostics with Tal to sterilizing hyposprays in Sickbay to mashing bantans with Chell, never doubting that her presence is welcome. Whatever the dangers the ship has faced over the last five years and despite all the losses Voyager has suffered, Tom knows a bubble of love and protection has surrounded its youngest occupant.

On the third panel, Miral points to the tricorder Celes is holding. "You forgot to reset the readings again!"

And Tal, whom Tom has seen crumple under criticisms of her work time and again, laughs and resets the device before reaching over to ruffle Miral's curls. "Ha! And that's why you, Miral Paris, are –"

"— absolutely essential," they finish together, giggling, and then turn back to their work.

And this, Tom reflects, is what Miral has given the crew in return: laughter, hope and an ever-determined optimism. Miral is and always has been an insistently happy child, embracing every strangeness of her life as part of a great adventure. With every small interaction, she shares that unvarnished perspective with even the most jaded or anxious of her shipmates.

She, quite simply, amazes Tom.

But what happens if one of the pillars of that willfully happy world crashes down around her?

Tom shakes off the thought as Miral calls to him to come help with "something weird that's happening with the reading": apparently, he will be allowed to touch something after all.

At 1600 hours, Tom gets a comm that the Delta Flyer is returning. That this is the extent of the message tells him everything he probably needs to know, but, nonetheless, he drops Miral off with Chell to help with dinner prep and heads to the shuttle bay.

Opening the shuttle bay doors, he runs squarely into Chakotay. The first officer growls and he shoves Tom to one side. "Get out of my way, Paris."

Tom's tripwire-taut temper flares as he grabs the older man's arm. "Not until you tell me what happened." And damn but if that rush of adrenaline doesn't feel good.

Chakotay pulls roughly away. "Read the report if you want to know." And he continues into the corridor without a backward glance.

Venting a Klingon curse, Tom moves to follow but Ayala steps forward to put a hand on his shoulder.

"I'd let him go."

Tom swings around to confront Ayala, but there is nothing but sympathy in the security officer's bearing. Tom forces himself to relax his clenched fists and takes a steadying breath.

"What happened?"

Ayala shrugs. "She wasn't there. Never had been." He considers his next words before adding, "If I were a betting man, I'd say the Domar don't have her at all."

Tom frowns, not doubting the sincerity of the other man's words but, "How can you be so sure? You couldn't have been there more than a couple of hours. How could you search -"

Ayala shakes his head. "We weren't searching, Tom." He flexes his fingers perhaps unconsciously and then lets his statement hang in the air, looking squarely at Tom. Dalby moves up to stand behind Ayala's shoulder, a muscle twitching in his cheek, but otherwise very still.

Tom resists the impulse to look down to see if the two men's hands are literally stained with blood.

He wonders why he didn't see it before: the all-Maquis team and each member with a particular skill set — a skill set that had, in fact, given Tom reason to cut these men a wide berth during the first year of their enforced coexistence aboard Voyager. Tuvok must have known — Janeway too to authorize the team.

Tom can even sort out the Vulcan's logic — and the Captain's rationale: Voyager can't afford to lose their chief engineer. Not with Seven and Carey both already gone.

Maybe he should be appalled.

Or maybe he would have been a good fit for this mission after all.

"She wasn't there?" Tom asks once more, looking to both men before him for confirmation.

Ayala and Dalby both shake their heads, no.

Tom nods. "Right." And then he turns and walks back out of the still-open shuttle bay doors, heading back to find Miral.
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…day five…

They have no leads, no new ideas, no thoughts on where to look next. Voyager is sitting in enemy space and is ever short on resources and sooner, much sooner, than later they are going to have no choice but to move on.

Their two person evening routine has already become, well, routine. Miral pauses a couple of times as they move through dinner and book reading, her body stilling completely, but both times the pause is brief before she picks back up the thread of her endless chatter, seemingly oblivious to the interruption.

It's not until they are lying in bed together that she turns into Tom's chest and gives a sigh that he can feel through her whole, small body.

"What is it, little one?"

Another sigh. "I miss Mama."

And that's all. Words said, she turns back over, holding Toby tightly, and falls into sleep. Tom stays by her side for a long while, stroking the tangled curls of her hair.

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…day six…

B'Elanna returns unannounced, hailing Voyager from the bridge of an alien spacecraft as it appears on the sensors out of nowhere, and bringing with her a new ally against the Fen Domar.

"The Xaandu are interested in the ablative armor that we've installed on the Flyer – that's why they wanted to…talk to me," B'Elanna is explaining to Janeway as the Doctor hovers around the biobed on which she is sitting. "In return, they are willing to share their transphasic technology which has been successful getting weapons through the Domari shields."

She has a bruise on her cheek and the skin around her wrists and ankles is rubbed raw — "a little misunderstanding between friends," B'Elanna explains with a shrug and a sidelong look at the Xaandu.

Tom's jaw tightens as the alien chuckles - or at least the noise it emits bears a passable resembles to a chuckle - in response. But since it appears that his or her nose-or-beak-or-whatever-is-protruding-mid-visage has recently been bent seriously out of alignment, Tom figures that B'Elanna gave at least as good as she got. He forces himself to focus on his returned wife and not her erstwhile captor.

Initial introductions made, B'Elanna seems more than happy to pass off her guest to the Captain. "Remember, next time, maybe just try asking first?" she offers as a farewell before Janeway and the Xaandu head out of Sickbay together.

Once the Doctor has declared B'Elanna healthy and has healed all visible evidence of her injuries (for once without his patient's protest), Ayala appears, Miral's small hand clasped in his as she skips alongside, chattering about their upcoming Mok'bara lesson. When she sees her mother, she stops short. Then, dropping Ayala's hand, she rushes headlong at B'Elanna who slips down from the biobed and drops to her knees just in time to catch her daughter up in her arms. Miral's arms wrap around B'Elanna's neck.

Mission accomplished, Ayala nods to Tom – Tom wisely does not notice the slight water-like glistening in the other man's eyes – and moves silently back out of Sickbay.

Hesitantly, Miral pulls away from her mother. "You forgot to say good-bye." Her tone is serious, without any hint of childish whine.

Tom is watching for it and so sees the brief struggle for control as it flits across B'Elanna's features before she is able to reassure, "I know, targhHom." She holds Miral's shoulders, their eyes level. "I'm sorry — I promise I'll try never to let that happen again."

Hours later in their quarters, Miral snuggles in B'Elanna's arms on the sofa. They are on their third or fourth go through Toby's chosen literary adventure for the evening and Miral's eyelids are drooping heavily when Tom finishes cleaning up dinner.

Arms crossed and leaning against the wall next to the television, he gives himself a full minute to revel in the scene before suggesting that it might be time for bed.

Miral awakens just enough to murmur that she wants to sleep in Mama and Daddy's bed again.

"Again?" B'Elanna mouths, eyebrow twitching up.

Tom lifts his hands in surrender, but B'Elanna only tightens her hold on Miral. "Maybe I can yell at you about that tomorrow, okay?"

Tom smiles and nods, reaching down to lift Miral out of her mother's arms and carry her to her preferred sleeping spot.

When Tom returns to the living area, B'Elanna hasn't moved from her spot on the sofa and he gratefully sinks down beside her. Without preamble, she moves closer into his side and Tom wraps an arm around her shoulders.

He feels a week's worth of habitual tension begin to ease out of every muscle in his body. B'Elanna shifts yet more closely against him and, emboldened, Tom presses a kiss against her brow.

"You really had no idea where I was?" She tips her head up to read his expression. This isn't the first time one of them has gone missing; he knows she knows what the last few days would have been like for him.

Neither of them need to relive that. "No idea at all." And he pivots away from the real thrust of her question: "Chakotay led a raid on a Fen Domar holding facility to try to find you."

She raises her eyebrows, surprised. "Chakotay led it?"

Tom nods. "With Ayala and Dalby." He watches her parse that. "It shouldn't surprise you that they'd come after you."

B'Elanna considers, then shakes her head. "Not that they – that he – would come after me." She frowns. "Maybe that he bothered to return to Voyager after, though."

Tom doesn't have an answer to that. Had he had the mental wherewithal over the last couple of days, he might have wondered the same thing.

"What would you have done?"

"Hmm?"

"If I hadn't come back – if you hadn't been able to find me," B'Elanna clarifies, now twisting so that she is fully facing him. "Would you and Miral have left Voyager?"

Would they have? Could he have justified keeping them on the ship with all the risks involved when Miral had already lost one parent? Wouldn't it have been more responsible, better parenting to leave – to find a stable planet that would welcome them, where Miral could grow up in a house and have friends her own age? Someplace where she would no longer need that fragile bubble of protection that Voyager's crew works so hard to keep in place around her?

But, then, what if something happened to Tom? Miral would be left alone – safe, but alone.

Which is what it comes down to because, on Voyager, as long as a single other crew member is still left alive, Miral will always have a family.

"Nah - Voyager is Miral's home."

B'Elanna tilts her head. "Hers. Not yours?"

Tom waits a beat before answering softly, "jIHvaD juH Dachegh."

B'Elanna inhales sharply and Tom feels the shiver as it passes through her body. But, when she answers, her tone attempts to be teasing and Tom knows to pretend to ignore the near crack still at the edge of her voice. "Getting sentimental on me in your old age, Paris?"

Tom's undeterred. "Well you didn't yell at me about Miral's new preferred sleeping arrangement: I thought I might be able to get away with some mushy stuff too."

"Mmm," B'Elanna intones. But she doesn't disagree.
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…day seven…

Tom wakes in what must still be early ship's morning. Miral is asleep in the middle of the bed between her two parents; B'Elanna has snagged Toby in one arm while her other arm is wrapped loosely around their daughter.

Shifting closer, Tom reaches his own arm out to drape around both of them. "Welcome home," he murmurs before falling once again into sleep.

…end…

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Endnotes:

1) jIHvaD juH Dachegh -You are home to me

2) Miral's visitation with Seven was heavily inspired by Kate Braestrup's Moth story "The House of Mourning", which is part of Moth's All These Wonders collection.