Caretaker - L. A. Graf [6]
The fact that he was still here said something about either his commitment to his own rehab, or his intelligence. She didn't know him well enough yet to determine which it was.
Taking a breath to clear her thoughts and school the dislike from her features, she clasped her hands loosely behind her back.
"Tom Paris?" She summoned him as though only just coming up on the scene, seeing no need to surrender any advantage she didn't have to.
Not to this kid. Not knowing the kind of stock he came from.
The flailing light under the machinery's belly died abruptly, leaving a smear of darkness across her vision as an echo of its brightness.
Paris pushed himself out from under with a smoothness that betrayed the gliding board he must have had in place under his back, and flicked up the visor that hid his eyes as though lifting an extremely chic and expensive pair of sunglasses. Sweat sheened down the middle of his chest and across the flat plane of his stomach, and Janeway noted that his pale skin glowed just a bit too pinkly below his collar line and above his cuffs. Not used to New Zealand's bright winter sun, then, and too proud to move himself inside when the daylight threatened to burn. That indicated a special type of stupidity, reserved for young men who felt they had something to prove but hadn't a clue what it was.
Very like the description she'd been given before flying down to New Zealand, and not at all like his father.
"Kathryn Janeway," she identified herself. She didn't offer her hand, and he gave no sign that he expected it. "I served with your father on the Al-Batani. I wonder if we could go somewhere and talk."
An odd little smile that seemed to go deeper than it should ghosted onto his face at the mention of his father. Janeway wondered what sort of thoughts moved behind an expression like that "About what?" Paris asked her, still stretched full-length on the gliding board.
"About a job we'd like you to do for us."
He laughed--a laugh as odd and light as his smile--and tossed a hand toward the machine above him. "I'm already doing a `job,'" he explained with mock sincerity. "For the Federation."
Attitude looking for a place to happen. Janeway had been warned, but it didn't make her like it any more. Still, a dozen years of service had taught her well how to temper her tone and expression. "I've been told the Rehab Committee is very pleased with your work. They've given me their approval to discuss this matter with you."
Paris studied her with eyes that held a hint of an intellect far keener than his history implied. Then he shrugged, as though dismissing everything he'd just allowed himself to think, and bounced to his feet with an easy grace that spoke volumes about the training and life he'd known before this. He faced her with arms spread, that infuriating grin laid out between them like a shield. "Then I guess I'm yours."
Only if I decide I want you, Janeway thought back at him, her face as cool and stem as possible. And then only if I decide I need you. She didn't have time to waste on him otherwise.
* A park. The damn penal facility had a park. Janeway walked with Paris between the full, green trees, seething at the lovely solitude of the place amid these people who seemed, by temperament, ill-suited to appreciate it. Still, it was Paris who slowed to pluck an errant scrap of plastic off the walkway--Paris who detoured them around a bob of oblivious pigeons so that their conversation wouldn't disrupt the birds.
And, all the while, he undercut the notion of his own decency every time Janeway began to think there might be something more to this rebellious boy than anyone realized. If nothing else, he was certainly a complicated young man. She wasn't sure she wanted complicated