Chapter Text
Kathryn stands outside Tom's quarters, her head pounding in time with her heart. She raises her hand to his door chime. For a moment, too long, she stands like this, two fingers resting against the panel, not quite enough pressure behind them to register her presence. Then she draws them slowly down its smooth surface, and allows her hand to fall to her side.
She turns away.
She can no more bear the solitude of her own quarters than the thought of company now, so she walks the decks of her ship without purpose, allowing her choices to narrow corridor by corridor, turn by turn. Eventually, she finds herself outside the Airponics bay. And here, again, she hesitates.
The doors slide open despite her indecision, warm, damp air drifting out to meet her. The lights have been lowered to simulate evening, rows of plants receding into amber shadow, the dimness an immediate balm to the throbbing pain at the crown of her head. Missing Kes, she decides, is easier than missing Tom, and so she steps inside, dark heat enveloping her as she moves beyond the corridor's harsh overhead light.
There are plants here Kathryn recognizes from Earth, Vulcan. Broad, glossy leaves overlap in the gloom, casting long shadows. Others are decidedly more exotic, acquisitions Kes had brought to the Doctor for approval and then coaxed to grow, suspended without soil, through some combination of science and, Kathryn supposes, hope. Beneath the leaves, pale roots vanish into a layer of mist, beyond which water gathers and falls at slow, uneven intervals. She walks the rows with her hands clasped behind her back, resisting at every moment the urge to press her fingers to her temples.
The implants are gone. The Doctor has shown her the scans, enlarged on his monitor and confirmed by Seven of Nine. There is nothing left of the Srivani inside her, no alien technology, no trace of the damage done. Nothing that should cause her any pain at all. And she has, too, the evidence of her own body, her moods stabilized if not her sleep, her headache now a familiar one, not the torment it had become under the Srivani's savagery.
But there had been things inside her she could not feel with her own hands, could not see, could not have known were there at all except for the pressure behind her eyes, the crawling agony across her every nerve ending, the eleventh-hour discovery of a point one five phase variance. Now the Doctor tells her the devices are gone, and she has no more way to prove their absence than she ever had to grasp their presence. He had told her she was fine before, as well. Tired, stressed. The usual story.
She wishes sometimes that Seven had never described to her the sight of Srivani "scientists" crowded around her, their faces inches from her own, instruments moving over her skin, into her skull, while she had sat unresisting, blind to every hand that touched her.
And now—
Now, she owes Tom an apology.
She stops at the end of a row and lets out a long breath. Nearby, a droplet strikes metal with a soft, hollow tap. She thinks of Mark, a promise at an impossible distance. She'd told Chakotay, years ago, that the crew would begin to pair off, build what lives they could together. He'd asked her then, Including you? and she'd flinched. Hedged. Meanwhile, life had gone on; and she'd had Tuvok's friendship, and, yes, she'd begun to take meals with her first officer, and all the while there was Tom, absorbing her sharpness as she did his, answering it with that breezy irreverence—turning in his chair with a grin, teasing her on her own bridge. There has always been unaccountable ease between them, an unspoken understanding. Or, there had been.
Now she cannot even bring herself to chime at his door.
The truth is, she is mortified. The Srivani had taken something private from her, something diffuse and badly understood, and turned it against her. That Tuvok had interpreted her anger quickly enough to answer, Shall I flog them, as well? makes her ill. And what she wants to say to Tom should not be so difficult: She had been in pain, her behavioral restraints under unprecedented strain. Neither of these facts excuses the way she'd spoken to him, to B'Elanna. She is sorry for it.
And she is sorry for it. She can't imagine what Tom thinks of her outburst. She presses her lips together, willing away the memory of his face as she'd dressed him down in her ready room, B'Elanna at his side.
Casting her gaze around for some distraction, she notices a flowering plant set apart from the others on its shelf. There is only one of its kind, blooming from a stem so fine it seems unequal to the task. Its petals are narrow and translucent, trailing into long, curling streamers. At the center the color deepens, violet giving way to smoke gray, a darkness disproportionate to so fragile a thing.
Kathryn finds no identifying marker beyond a small notation in Kes' hand, words she doesn't understand. Carefully, she cups the blossom. Two of the trailing petals brush the inside of her wrist, cool and nearly weightless. She lifts it to her nose, and its scent is faint, all but lost beneath the damp smell of the bay—sweet at first, followed by something oddly like mildew.
She swallows. She releases the flower, and watches it settle on its stem.
*
In the end, she does not return to Tom's quarters.
Days go by, and if Tom is a little more formal around her now, if he goes whole shifts without cracking a single joke, well, isn't this for the best? All things considered? The apology she had meant to offer begins to feel terribly intimate. She imagines herself going to him, asking to come inside his quarters, the door shutting behind her. She imagines the two of them alone together while she tries after all this time to explain herself, when there are so many things she would rather not explain. Not when she's seen Tom and B'Elanna together more and more, laughing over Neelix' latest mystery meal in the mess hall, sitting beside each other at senior staff meetings. And though Kathryn has heard no more rumors—whatever's happening between them, they have learned to keep it to themselves—she knows enough that seeking Tom out would feel like crossing a line she has never before had to consider.
So she leaves it alone.
A few days later, Seven calls her to Astrometrics, and within minutes her whole miserable preoccupation seems suddenly, embarrassingly small.
“The children have grown so much you wouldn’t believe—” Kathryn reads, and then stops, the next words caught behind something hard in her throat. “These are letters,” she tells Seven. “Letters from home.”
Saying it aloud does little to make it seem real. More fragments emerge from the datastream over the next several hours, names painstakingly matched against the crew manifest. Inevitably, some of the names belong to people they've lost since that first communication with Starfleet. She thinks of their families learning that Voyager survived after all, of the impossible relief of knowing that someone they had mourned might still come home. Now their letters have crossed half the galaxy only to stop short at her desk, and she will have to tell them otherwise.
But most of the names belong to the living, and for them, the first day passes in a kind of astonishment. Kathryn can hardly walk down a corridor without passing someone bent over a letter, stopped wherever it happened to find them and oblivious to all else. She finds Ensign Wildman crying openly outside the mess hall, smiling through tears as she reads; later, she nearly trips over two crewmen sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor outside Astrometrics, comparing photographs embedded in their messages. Carefully, she steps around them and through the doors.
“Captain!” Neelix greets her. “You’re just in time!”
Kathryn looks immediately to Seven. “Starfleet Command?”
She hardly dares to hope for it: instructions, perhaps, or some new technology, some plan formed in the Alpha Quadrant by teams of experts with resources Voyager can only dream of. A way home.
But Seven holds out the PADD in her hand and says, “A personal communication addressed to you. From a Mark Johnson.”
“Oh.” Kathryn looks at the PADD for a beat before taking it, her chest tight. “Thank you, Seven.”
She leaves Astrometrics without opening the message.
Tom has the bridge when she arrives, seated in her chair and leaning toward Harry’s station as they speak. At the sight of her—or perhaps of the PADD in her hand—he comes quickly to his feet.
“Is that a letter for you, Captain?” Harry asks.
“Yes. Seven's just downloaded it.” Kathryn cradles the PADD between both hands. When she looks up, Tom is watching her. She tries to smile. “I’ll be in my ready room.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tom says. She feels his eyes on her back as she goes.
She lowers herself onto her couch without looking at the PADD, her grip tightening at its edges. She draws in a short, bracing breath, and finally looks down. For a moment she can only stare at their names together, an arrangement once so familiar:
KATHRYN JANEWAY
FROM MARK JOHNSON
On the page, they look more entwined than they ever were in life. As though they had already built the future they were only just beginning to imagine. She recalls having to ask Mark to take care of Molly just before she'd left, pregnant and nearly due; he had, of course—had already anticipated her request. And yet... and yet they hadn't even decided where they would live. They hadn't set a wedding date. There had been so much still to figure out.
Mark begins the letter with such ordinary things: Molly and her puppies; news of friends Kathryn has not thought of in years. Small details of home that bring a sad smile to her mouth as she reads. Her mother misses her terribly, had thought that Mark should be the first to write. This gives Kathryn pause, and she notices a deliberateness to his writing, a careful circling of something he doesn't quite know how to say. Her smile fades. She settles back against the couch, breathes out slowly through her nose. She has known Mark too long not to recognize when he is trying to spare her.
As it turns out, that something is his wife.
Kathryn has had three years to understand, intellectually, what seventy-five thousand lightyears means. She may have continued using Mark as the answer to questions she didn't want asked—I intend to be home before Mark gives me up for dead—but she has never actually allowed herself to follow the thought through to its obvious corollary: But what if he has?
The moment Seven had spoken his name—and what a jarring thing, this collision of worlds Kathryn had never meant to keep so separate—she had felt sure that something long deferred had finally come due. And here it is: Mark had mourned her. Mark had married another woman. Mark is happy.
Life had gone on.
She expects to feel grief. She expects—not betrayal, it's not as though she doesn't understand, but loneliness, certainly. Humiliation, to have been faithful all this time, while his vision had haunted her dreams and accused, Someone else is in your thoughts now. Isn't that true? Isn't there someone you're thinking of?
What she does not expect is the relief.
A wave of nausea rises so abruptly that she sets the PADD down. She stands, needing to move, but the room seems to shift beneath her; she reaches the viewport lightheaded and cold all over, braces herself with one hand against the frame.
Without warning, she remembers Tom at the helm, just a few weeks ago, Kathryn bent over his shoulder as they'd studied something together, one hand resting absently on his shoulder. She cannot remember what they were looking at, but she remembers the heat of his arm against her thigh, the closeness of his face as he'd looked up at her and smiled, sincere and so, so warm. The catch beneath her ribs, quickly ignored.
I haven't been unfaithful, she'd told the Mark in her head. Which was not, of course, the question he had asked.
Her fingers begin to tremble. She draws her hand away from the glass and covers her mouth. Her heart is beating too fast, she can feel it in her throat, it roars in her ears. Mark has for so long meant there was nothing to consider, no choice like Tom and B'Elanna's to make. Whatever she may have wanted had been so beside the point she hadn't ever let herself look at it closely enough to name it, to feel it. Now, released from that promise, she understands with a kind of horror that there have been choices available to her all along.
She is in love with Tom.
But whatever she might once have done with this knowledge, she can do nothing about it now.