Fic archive: Star Trek Voyager - "Is a Boy Forever" 1/1
Rating: R
Paris/female
Summary: Tom Paris remembers a night he spent as a teenager and fragments of an afternoon spent in New Zealand. Leaning slightly towards costume slut fantasy.

Disclaimer: Paramount owns Tom Paris and all things Voyager. They would never generate something like this, so obviously what remains is mine. Not a bad deal, when you think about it.

Warning: This is not a happy story. It contains implied (consensual and non-) sexual situations, and some violence, as well as gratuitous profanity and escapism. Also Paris angst, because it's just so easy.

Translation from the Russian courtesy of the Canonical List of International Swearing. The title and complete quotation are drawn from my beloved copy of "The Little Lavender Book on the Love That Once Dared Not Speak Its Name" (shoulda seen my mother's face when I brought that one home...) The Gibson quote is from my favourite of his short stories.



... Is a Boy Forever
by Jane St Clair


"It's just a blink...one of a thousand things you remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of feelings. Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, razor's edge, forever.

What I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from Sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and obscurity.

It probably took all of four seconds."
- William Gibson
"The Winter Market"



On Voyager, Tom dreams of the rave he went to in Kiev.

It's fantastic, he can feel his seventeen-year-old body erotic around him in black leather and silver cloth. There's silver glitter on his cheeks and in his hair, around his eyes. This is as beautiful as he's ever going to be. He loves it.

The music is undefinable. It has the ragged edge of four-century old Soviet industrial art, mixed with a compelling beat and radiating waves of bass through his body. It's good enough to eat, almost, that sound. He could live on it. He dances on the edge of dehydration and exhaustion in a city that was destroyed by Mongol hordes and Christian knights and Black Death and Nazi bombs and nuclear fire and was raised again. Kiev feels, at this moment, like him, the was he feels. You can't take it or him apart.

He dances alone because he's still seventeen and he knows he's beautiful and he doesn't give a shit about anything else. He wants everyone to look at him. Very likely they are. See a blond boy perched on an industrial catwalk in an east Kiev ramshackle factory block, dressed in black and silver, moving like water and fascinated by the lights while the hands of the crowd ghost his body from a distance.

Tom turns, extends his arms above his head and runs one hand down the opposite forearm in a slow, sensual stretch. Standing suddenly opposite him is a Bajoran in brown rebel leathers. The Bajoran boy isn't dancing. There's New Zealand light glancing off his earring. He's irritated, he gestures at Tom, mouths, Traitor. But Tom only thinks to himself that the Bajoran is angry because they were arrested, and he'll understand later that it wasn't Tom's fault. As if he could have read the minds of Starfleet. Getting arrested was a goddamned accident, nothing more. The other part of Tom's brain says that the Maquis boy does not belong at the Kiev rave, but that information gets lost in the music and the dream and does not repeat itself.

His hands are painted silver and the music comes in black waves. He should be getting ready now to drop onto the towering antique speakers and dance with that girl from Nairobi with the tribal scars on her cheekbones, the one he slept with later and she showed him the sun rising over the Kenyan highlands when he woke.

But he isn't there, that's another Tom Paris who'll do that. This Tom Paris is watching a two-hundred eighty pound Russain convict slam the Bajoran boy into a concrete New Zealand wall and initiate proceedings from which Tom's thirty-two-year-old brain shies away. And when he
screams at the bastard to stop, he only gets a snarl of Russian that could almost have come from any part of his Kiev memory. "Tebya ne ebut, ti ne podmakhivai." Mind your own business, boy.

/You're not being fucked so don't wiggle your ass./

And Tom runs back down the catwalk and dives for the speakers, thinking that he can still make it. He doesn't see the Kenyan girl but she must be waiting, and she doesn't speak Russian and neither does he, so neither of them can possibly know what it was the Russian said to him.

Dance with me, beautiful girl. I remember the indentations on your collar bone where the brass rings sat before you had them removed so you could travel off-world. I remember the long, thin braids of your hair and the bells woven into those braids. I remember the sound of your motion.

/You're not being - /

Kiss me, yes, like that, and tell me you love me, all silver and gold. Let me feel the ridges of your painless, lasered scars. Run your long nails up my back, take off my shirt and drop it into the crowd like you did before. Let me hear them scream and watch us like we're animals or gods.

Dance with me like this, so close our bodies touch from knee to shoulder. I love you. I lick your shoulder, taste brown chocolate body paint and the dark, sour edge of your skin. You gnaw me at the base of my throat and come away with silver on your lips. Nobody hurt me, please.

/ - fucked so don't - /

You never hurt me, I remember that. Jesus, I wasn't very old, was I? You must have had five years on me, at least. You'd come back from twenty months on a freighter doing border runs to Romulan territory. You tasted like space. You tasted like Africa. You told me I was beautiful.

I remember before you called me your beautiful northern boy, blond as Kiev, but I didn't look Slavic to you. You asked me if I was Irish. I said I was American. You said, of course, you should have known. You kissed me on the mouth. Dance with me again.

We danced on the speakers in front of everybody and you traced all over my body with those fingernails of yours. You could have been tattooing me, marking your ownership on me. I wouldn't have objected. It would have been good to be yours.

/ - wiggle your ass. /

What was it you said, laughing? A thing of beauty is a boy forever.

Come on, beautiful. Let's get out of here.


On Voyager, before morning, Tom cries very quietly.