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She strode straight-backed into her quarters. Only when she heard the hiss of the doors cut off behind her did she let herself sag, bending at the waist and planting her hands on her knees. Here, in absolute privacy, she could finally drop the Captain’s mask she had worn all day.
Oh, she’d let it crack a little, from time to time, allowing herself the odd smile, a scatter of tears, a choked voice. Those moments had helped bleed off some of the pressure inside her. But now the roiling mess of emotions she’d suppressed all day surged up with a vengeance, clawing guilt and grief and anger and confusion twisting and writhing around the joy and triumph and relief.
They’d done it. Against all odds, they were home. They’d struck a staggering blow against the Collective in the process. Tom and B’Elanna’s daughter was safely born. Naomi could finally meet her father. Tuvok would be spared a descent into madness. Chakotay and Seven...
...no, she would not think of that. Not yet. Instead, she pressed gently on the midline of uniform jacket to release the magnetic seal.
And all it had cost was a monumental violation of the Temporal Prime Directive and the life of a tea-drinking, white-haired, iron-souled, and inexpressibly bitter version of herself determined to wipe out the last twenty-three years of her life. She didn’t know how to even begin to process everything she’d seen reflected in her counterpart’s eyes. How could she possibly assimilate everything the Admiral had told her, the fragile good and the nightmarishly bad, about the future that now would never come to pass?
Assimilate. Now that was an unfortunate choice of words. In a surge of frustrated rage she dragged the now open jacket from her shoulders and flung it across the room. It landed in crumpled heap against the far wall.
For the first time in seven years she was in truly friendly space. She could, if she chose, be off-duty in a way she hadn’t been since the displacement wave deposited her ship in the Delta Quadrant. Did she even remember how?
She’d come close, from time to time. The occasional game of pool in Sandrine’s, that first Talent Night, dinners with Chakotay in her quarters. A handful of days at the end of a three-month quarantine on an alien planet they’d called New Earth.
Back there again, Kathryn?
She quashed the juvenile spike of anger, the stupid sense of betrayal. Chakotay was her friend and her first officer. He had not stopped being those things, nor wavered in his professional support of her. However much both of them had once cherished the hope of something more between them—and she did believe that once that hope had been mutual, just as their initial reluctance to pursue it on Voyager had been mutual—she had known that that seed of possibility could not survive indefinitely in a desert. He could not be faulted for moving on.
The timing, however, was bitterly ironic.
She’d only just found a balance again, after Quarra had spun her so violently off-axis. When her memories returned and the delusion of consent dissolved, old trauma responses had surged to the fore: nightmares, flashbacks, and involuntary flinches. For months, rage quietly simmered beneath the surface of her days, only to chill without warning into bleak depression. She’d managed to function through an unholy amalgam of discipline, long-ago coping techniques taught her by her counselors, and meditation techniques learned from Tuvok and Chakotay.
Chakotay. The cruelest part had been the way Quarra had affected her response to him.
Over the years, Kathryn had begun to think of the romantic undercurrent of her relationship with Chakotay as a banked fire, smoldering gently beneath a layer of protective soil. To her dismay, the illusion of intimacy she experienced on Quarra had knocked that layer aside, allowing buried emotions to flare up as fiercely as they ever had. The result was a push-pull of attraction and unwarranted revulsion, leaving proximity, let alone touch, a minefield more hazardous, more unpredictable, than the ones the Quarrans had used to trap them. Unable to trust herself, at a loss to how to explain the situation to him without crossing the lines that they had so carefully drawn, she’d withdrawn to protect them both.
It had nearly killed her to do it. Chakotay’s friendship was one of her anchors, his companionship a bulwark against loneliness and isolation. Losing it, even temporarily, had been a blow that only her friendship with Tuvok and her nascent friendship with B’Elanna had softened.
She’d fought her way out of it, somehow. Had begun to reach out again, to relax around him, to ask him to lunch and to dinner. But in the interim, the ground between them had shifted. She couldn’t fault him for moving on, but the timing hurt. And the fact that he had chosen a much younger woman who also happened to be Kathryn’s romantically inexperienced protegé was uncomfortable as all hell.
“Torres to the Captain.”
She looked around, then realized the sound was coming from her jacket where it lay crumpled against the wall. Moving as slowly as an old woman, she went to retrieve it.
“Janeway here.”
“Captain, if you have a moment free, Tom and I would love to introduce you to our daughter.”
“I’d be delighted, B’Elanna.” Kathryn forced the words through a dry throat. Hours of speaking with crew and a revolving parade of Admirals and ship captains had left her voice gravelled and harsh. She hoped the young couple would miss the note that spoke of poorly-suppressed tears. “I have a few things to do here, but I could come by in thirty minutes, if that suits?”
“That would be perfect.” Joy leavened the weariness in the new mother’s voice.
“Until then, B’Elanna. My deepest congratulations to you and Tom both. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“Thank you, Captain. Torres out.”
Kathryn turned around and leaned against the wall, letting her jacket drop again from nerveless fingers. Tom and B’Elanna’s desire to share their daughter had touched her, but it had also reminded her that getting back to the Alpha Quadrant had never been the final hurdle.
There were Starfleet officers, herself and the Equinox crew chief among them, who would have to answer for their choices. And the battle for the more irregular of Voyager’s crew–the former Maquis, Tom, Seven, Icheb, the Doctor—was yet to be joined. Kathryn might be hopeful, even optimistic, but she wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
Only a little while longer, Captain. But for now, you need to keep fighting. And for starters, you need to go down there and reassure B’Elanna and Tom.
She steeled herself, reached for the reserves of strength that she had drawn on so many times before—and found only flat emptiness. For a moment, she felt only stunned, blank shock.
This is ridiculous, she thought. Come on, Kathryn.
Still she could not make herself move. What scraps of energy and motivation she could find siphoned away as quickly as they drained.
She felt, she thought, like a massive star. She had burned the core of herself to power her journey through the Delta Quadrant, layers of successively heavier elements forming about the remnants of who she’d been. Now, with her core fully converted to iron, the fusion process she had relied on suddenly cost more energy than it could possibly yield.
Panic spiked and dissipated into a black, choking misery. With the fire at the heart of her extinguished, there was nothing to combat the inexorable gravitational force of her despair. She felt as if she were collapsing inward on herself, layer by layer, everything she had been compressing into something small and dense and lost. Here at the end, with her task almost done, she was going to fail them all.
The smothering pressure grew heavier, tightening her chest. A wild thought occurred to her that this was the ironic codicil to all the times that she had believed herself alone, that she would collapse into a human black hole, forever isolated from the world around her. She had spent so much of her journey suppressing her pain for the benefit of her crew, determined to carry the bulk of her own burdens. Now all the offerings of affection and friendship would accrete in orbit around her horizon, but never cross it, and all the warmth and joy and love within her would be trapped and unable to escape.
No.
As if something in her core had hit neutron degeneracy pressure, the crushing free-fall of misery stopped, rebounding into a shock wave of determination. A sudden, defiant smile curved her lips.
Caution tempered her relief. In a nascent supernova, the shock wave could stall, setting a dying star back on the path to forming a black hole. If she tried to handle this alone, the same could easily happen to her.
She couldn’t turn to Chakotay with this. Tuvok was in seclusion, preparing to depart for Vulcan. B’Elanna needed to focus on her newborn. And in truth, what she needed was more than any friend, let alone subordinate, should reasonably give. That left only one option.
“Computer,” she said aloud. “Open a channel to Starfleet Command. Admiral Owen Paris.”
“Forwarding to his home office. Commencing video call.”
She turned to her terminal just as the elder Paris’ weary face appeared on its screen.
“Captain Janeway. Is this an official call?”
“Not precisely, Admiral.”
The tension around the corners of Paris’ faded blue eyes did not relax. “Captain, if this is an attempt to get the quarantine lifted..”
“No, sir. We all understand the reason for that.” From somewhere, she found just enough energy to smile at him. “I know how eager you are to see Tom. If you could have, you would have already.”
His posture softened minutely. “Then what can I do for you?”
“I’m assuming that we’ll all be offered counseling, sir, either after or during the debriefings?”
“You will.” He did relax then, his lined features turning avuncular. His voice gentled. “It does help, you know.”
“I appreciate that, sir. I was actually wondering if—” she faltered, and caught him watching her with sudden concern.
“Is everything all right?”
She took a deep breath and started again. “If it’s possible, I’d like to start my counseling early. I realize that it would need to be remote, over a secure channel...”
Comprehension washed over her mentor’s face, followed by compassion. “That should be possible.”
“Thank you, sir.” Her voice wavered, roughened. She cursed her lack of self-control.
“Katie.”
She steeled herself to meet his eyes, sure the compassion she’d seen there would have turned to pity. To her shock, what she found instead was a profound respect.
“You did a lot of brave things out there,” Owen Paris said softly. “But just now, you were brave in a way I never managed to be.”
The shadows of old, shared pain darkened his gaze. Her own compassion welled up to meet it.
“That means a great deal, sir,” she said, voice shaking.
This time she couldn’t stop the tears. Owen mercifully ignored them.
“Go celebrate with your crew, if you can. I should have counseling options with the appropriate clearance waiting for you by the end of Beta shift, if not sooner.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He smiled. “I’m the one who should be thanking you, Katie. Welcome home.”
The terminal screen blanked as he cut the connection. As she brushed away the dampness from her cheeks, she felt the shockwave inside her stutter, steady and flare into a supernova of hope.