Chapter Text
“How could you do this to me again?” is the first thing Kathryn says to him, when she’s dismissed the security officers who have marched him to her ready room from the disabled Delta Flyer.
Tom, idiot that he is, takes longer than he should to fully grasp what she’s saying. “Oh, shit,” he says belatedly.
“Seriously?” Kathryn demands. “That’s your response?” Agitated, pacing, she cuts him off before he can reply. “Was it not bad enough last time, when I only had to threaten to fire on you? You really had to make me actually launch a torpedo?” She comes to a stop in front of him, a seething pillar of fury. “Tom, I could have killed you.”
“Kathryn.” Tom licks his lips, the enormity of what this has done to her only just sinking in. “I didn’t mean—”
“No,” she cuts him off again. “No, you never do, do you? You just let yourself get dragged along until it’s too late to back out.”
“That’s not what happened,” he insists.
“Isn’t it? Isn’t that what always happens?” She shakes her head, stepping away from him toward the viewport, and he doesn’t dare to follow. “I don’t know what to do with this,” she says. “I don’t know what consequences could possibly convince the crew that I’m not letting you off lightly.”
Tom swallows. “I don’t think I can help you with that,” he says carefully. “That’s not my place, as your subordinate.”
“Oh, thank you.” She spreads her hands and lets them fall aggressively back to her side. “Thank you for putting this whole mess squarely in my lap.” Sighing, she sits on the couch, and her tone changes as she looks up at him. “I didn’t think there was anything that could break us, after everything we’ve been through. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Kathryn...” Horrified, Tom steps toward her, but she holds up a hand in warning and he stops short.
“I don’t think I can talk about this now,” she says. Her tone and expression harden. “I’m demoting you, and I’m sentencing you to thirty days in the brig. We’ll see how we feel after that.”
* * *
Tom doesn’t hear from her for the entire thirty days.
He tries to send messages via Neelix – apologies at first, then declarations of love, and finally even a joke or two – but nothing ever comes back, though Neelix promises he’s relayed every one.
This level of anxiety about his marriage is something Tom hasn’t felt in a long time.
It’s a familiar pattern, though: Tom messes up, Kathryn has to pick up the pieces. Maybe it’s a miracle it’s taken so long for it to happen again on this scale. Maybe it was inevitable that she would get sick of it one day.
Because the truth is that he didn’t even make the connection between the standoff between the Maquis ship and the Odyssey almost a decade ago and what happened at Monea. He’d been too engrossed in the idea of helping save the planet to stop and think about how Kathryn would feel about it. Oh, he’d known she would be mad at him for breaking the rules, and that he’d get some kind of public dressing down, because that was what had to happen when her husband misbehaved.
He never thought it would hurt her so deeply.
He never thought she might not forgive him.
His anxiety permeates his cell, and by the time he’s released, he’s fully marinated in it.
* * *
Kathryn’s not there when Tom arrives back in their quarters.
He’s not sure what to do with this realization; he just stands there in the living area for a long moment, struggling with the fact that he has to make decisions now that go beyond the confines of a cell in the brig.
Shave, Tuvok said.
Tom can do that.
He goes into the bathroom. He shaves. He showers. He cleans his teeth.
He puts a fresh uniform on, and he almost looks presentable.
What to do next is a much more difficult question.
He’s not sure if he’s grateful or not when the burden of that decision is taken from him by Kathryn stepping into their quarters. She stops just inside the doors, echoing his earlier indecisiveness, and they look at each other with trepidation.
“I’m sorry,” they both say simultaneously.
Some of the tension leaves the air, and Kathryn eyes him speculatively. “Do you want some coffee?” she asks eventually.
“Can I have breakfast too?”
The look she gives him is undecipherable, but she walks over to the replicator and orders coffee and orange juice, jam and butter, bread and croissants. Tom helps to carry everything to the table, hoping this is a good sign.
They sit; Kathryn pours the coffee. She doesn’t speak until she’s taken the first gulp.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, looking into the mug rather than at him. “You said something to Neelix about cruel and unusual punishment. You’re probably right.”
“I didn’t expect him to actually say that to you,” Tom says. “Kathryn. I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I never think. I didn’t mean to put you in that position.”
“Tell me you won’t do it again,” she demands.
“I won’t do it again,” Tom promises. “You have my word.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.” Kathryn sighs, and she finally meets his eyes, but it takes a long time for her to speak again. “What now?” she says softly.
Stupidly, Tom says the first thing that comes into his head. “I get a say?”
“Of course you get a say.”
“Right. It’s just...” He swallows, and confesses, “Part of me was expecting you to tell me you want a divorce.”
She closes her eyes. “I don’t want a divorce.”
“Good.” Relief floods Tom’s system; he babbles, “Because I’m not even sure we legally could, out here. The nearest Federation court is pretty far away. And we’d have to fight for custody of Harry.”
“Don’t joke about this,” Kathryn says quietly. She looks at him, eyes serious, searching his. “How do we move on from this? Because we sure as hell can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Can’t we?” Tom says hopefully.
“Tom,” she says, bringing both hands up to rub her forehead. A warning.
“Sorry,” he says again, but he shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. I apologized. You apologized. I promised not to do it again. What else is there?”
She’s silent for a moment, contemplating him, a heavy silence. Then she says, “It’s not just you who can’t do it again. It’s me, too. I can’t use my authority as your senior officer to punish you because you hurt my feelings.”
“I know I did more than hurt your feelings,” Tom says.
“That’s not the point,” she says, as though the point should be obvious. It’s not.
“What is the point?” he has to ask.
Kathryn shakes her head, sighing. “I suppose the point is that the balance of power in our relationship has become fundamentally warped by the fact that I’m the captain of this ship. And I need to be more mindful of that, especially in the situations when I’m least inclined to be mindful of it.”
“You really feel bad about this, don’t you?” he realizes.
“Of course I feel bad. I wouldn’t have treated anybody else so harshly.”
“Yeah, but I’m not anybody else. Kathryn...” He dares, finally, to touch her, to slide his palm onto her knee, and to breathe more easily when she doesn’t flinch. “Look, we both know you can’t be seen to give me special treatment. And sometimes that does mean you have to be harder on me. I get that. It’s fine. I’m fine. Don’t take more than your fair shame of the blame. It’s my mistakes that got us here, not yours.”
“I don’t think you understand how much I let my anger influence my actions,” she tells him. “I lashed out because you hurt me, because you made me so afraid, because I love you so much.” Her voice doesn’t break, but there’s a hint of a wavering in there. “But I can’t abuse my position like that. It’s not fair for me to use my authority against you. It’s just as bad as it would be if I treated you with some kind of favoritism, if not worse.”
“Alright,” Tom says slowly, taking this in. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you didn’t treat me fairly. But the only thing that hurt me is that you wouldn’t speak to me. You basically told me our marriage was in danger and then gave me the silent treatment for a month. That wasn’t fair. The other stuff, okay, maybe you wouldn’t have punished someone else the same way for the same crime, but I bet there are other captains who would have. But I spent a month worrying that I’d be served divorce papers when I got out. And that’s nothing to do with our places in the Starfleet hierarchy.”
He’s conscious of the tension in his fingers, the way he’s gripping her knee more tightly than he’d intended. Kathryn takes a breath, and her face contorts into more guilt, but her hand reaches out to cover his gently. “I thought you said there wasn’t a Federation court close enough to process our divorce.”
“And I thought you said we shouldn’t be joking about this.” He raises an eyebrow.
“I did,” she acknowledges seriously. “I’m sorry, Tom. I didn’t give enough consideration to how that would make you feel.”
“Now you sound like me,” he teases gently.
For some reason, the way she looks at him just makes him feel worse.
“I think...” Tom essays, trying to put words to something that’s usually so glaringly obvious it doesn’t need words at all, “I think the thing is, you’ve had my back for so long, without question. And maybe I take that for granted a little too much. That it’s okay for us to have professional differences because it never touches our personal relationship. But it’s not never, not really. We just pretend that it is.”
Kathryn nods contemplatively. “I think I’ve often taken you for granted. And maybe we need a wake-up call from time to time. But none of this has answered my question.” She squeezes his hand. “What do we do now?”
"I don’t know.” He searches her eyes. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” she echoes, and he almost wishes she would stop looking back at him, because the oceans of hurt in her gaze make him feel sick. “I’ve never felt this way before. Not even about the Maquis thing.”
“You had other things to worry about, then,” he reminds her softly, stupidly, because of course neither of them wants to be reminded right now about what those other things were, and how they ended.
But it’s too late, and the pain between them becomes almost physically palpable, amplified in the way her hand tightens over his.
“My sister told me to leave you, you know,” she says quietly, finally looking away; her eyes fall to her coffee mug, a familiar refuge. “Back then.”
He swallows. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Me too,” Kathryn says. But she’s frowning.
Carefully. Tom turns his hand over under hers and slips his thumb over her fingers, grasping them gently. The frown doesn’t diminish, but she meets his eyes again as he raises her hand to his lips and presses a kiss to her wedding band. “I love you,” he says softly.
Her voice almost breaks. “I love you too.”