Notes: This was a speed challenge on PacKage...
> Factors are -
> *at some stage in the story, Tom speaks with his eyes closed
> *third person POV
> *an ambivalent or ambiguous ending

He was not conscious in the conventional sense. Oddly enough the world seems to have shrunk to him, turned mutile and uneasy, as though a slight tremor, a pressure in the wrong place, the wrong words, might break through some unrealised barrier and let in unending vacuum and night.

Again.

He walked, through air turned watery, through walls turned gaseous. He did not look back to the pale figure on the floor behind him.

Tom Paris was not quite dead. So he took the blued, unsteady time, and walked through the corridors of his life. The corridors of his ship.

He had conquered worlds. Fought tyrants and villains, had ridden white stallions across open plains, swum untouched waters. Had lived - too long, had loved too little. And here he was. *Then* he was. Once more beside the first day of the end, when it broke and failed, watching again the agony of frustration as all happened according to the fore-ordained script.

"No!" An echo of some ancient shout, not letting the eyes dwell on what they had already, irretrievably, seen, tight closed now, against sights inside the mind, begging in whispers that it not be, that he not be dead, not be gone, not be dead, not leave him alone, not alone, not alone

Each light particle, each crest and trough of photons split and prismed around the old moment when he could have changed... The fragility of it astounded him, here, now, looking back at his friends, when they *were*.

When the pressure had changed; when the photons had burst with uncaring devastation, the chamber seized, the mechanism locked, and only he safe, only he, and the ship, left to stare at the silence, dizzy with loneliness.

To have a wish; to lean into the fragility of the moment and not set the timer irreversibly for detonation; to not leave on the shuttle to carry the combat in closer; to say I loved you, sweet brown eyes, before the jagged blast vomited out air and life and bodies, leaving only him behind...

The moment wavered, hazed...and the light changed...

Magnificent Seven stories, Sentinel stories, Star Trek Voyager stories, The Ragbag

Page last updated 21:42 28/03/2006.