Chapter Text
Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.
- A. E. Housman
Prologue
They say, don't they, that one should not spend too much time looking into the abyss, for the abyss may choose to look back. What hope then, for a woman who has spent her life crossing one? Here she stands, on this little naked spit of metal reaching out into the void. Does she think she is immune? Does she really imagine that she can provide some sort of effective barrier between the people ranged behind her on this narrow bridge to nowhere and the gigantic, awful nothing that has already engulfed them all? Does she think she can accomplish what even Canute, somewhere in his stubborn heart of hearts, must have known was futile?
In the end, after all that rage, all that burning, all that endless, god-awful struggle, the snuffing out of her candle doesn't even register amid the general incandescence of the cosmos. Moreover, when oblivion comes, it is perversely silent. When she stands before what she instantly understands to be the conclusion of everything she knows to be true, the noise that accompanies her epiphany is as much of a void as the darkness through which it travelled to claim her.
The order to clear the bridge is seconds old. Everything around her is a blur of motion. Voyager's shields have failed and consoles everywhere are breaching against the overload. The deck bucks and writhes as if the ship herself is trying to shrug off desecration. On the viewscreen the hulking carcasses of other dead vessels cast shadows against Voyager's pale hull, spectres cut by the ragged jealousy of enemy fire.
Tom Paris is the last to leave his post and to make him do so she has to drag him from his beloved pilot's chair. His fingers are still questing for a way to save them when she pushes him ahead of her, up the steps. Tuvok is holding the Turbolift doors open, Harry Kim is just behind him, shouting, shouting, shouting though she cannot hear a word. Both of Harry's arms are outstretched towards them, willing them to hurry, to be faster than the hell coming at them from the abyss.
She can't help looking back. A different ribbon of light is on the viewscreen now: white-gold, impossibly beautiful, burning closer, closer, twisting in the void as if it is alive. It is like nothing she has ever seen before.
She always did have an explorer's heart. Later, this is what they will say between themselves, to try to explain why their Captain stepped towards it, instead of turning away.
It could be true. It really could.
But it isn't.
Not even slightly.
[TBC]