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“We’ve had a good life,” he said, and in the darkness he reached across and searched for her hand, took it within his own.
Like a reflex, his fingers enclosed around her wedding ring, turned it on her finger once, as if it were some sort of charm. He did this often; nights when they read in bed, when they visited the theatre, when they settled down to watch trashy holovids on Sunday evenings. He would pretend he wasn’t watching along, but he was, and it was one of her favourite things about him.
The surface of the ring was scratched, having tapped against so many desks and so many consoles, having clashed with very many cups of coffee and flutes of champagne, having travelled recklessly through billions of stars and hundreds of conflicts. Inside the ring, he had had the jeweller inscribe ‘Here begins a new life’ at the last minute. She had thought it both sentimental and inaccurate in turns; she loved their life just as it was, the life they had battled the Delta Quadrant just to have, forged in fire. But she loved the sentiment of it too, and everything that it meant.
Her dress had been ivory, and their wedding a quiet one, and their life spectacular between the mundane disagreements, the slightly different political viewpoints, and the inevitability of aging, not always so gracefully. Sometimes, on Kathryn’s part, terribly lacking in grace.
They had a good life, a wonderful one.
One she was not, yet, ready to see drawing to a close.
She squeezed his fingers, “I’m not prepared to say goodbye to you just yet.”
She could hear his smile, rather than see it.
“What do you suggest, Captain?”
“Admiral,” she corrected, nudging him.
“You’ll always be my captain,” he lifted her hand, kissed the back of it. “But I think, this time, we might have overreached ourselves.”
She was silent for a moment, and Ro Laren’s furious, incredulous face flashed before her eyes - even in the bleak darkness - and she swallowed the rising horror of guilt.
“When Commander Ro Laren visited me, tried to warn me, I dismissed her…” she said. “And I should have listened. I should have-”
“You were already suspicious, Kathryn. She was only confirming what you knew and what you were trying to stop.”
“I had no understanding of the scale,” she shook her head, letting it fall against the wall of the cell.
Tuvok was who she was most worried about. She had known, almost the moment he’d brushed into her office, that he’d been compromised. He was there, of course, but it was not him. And from then on, she had been terrified about who she could trust. She’d tried to raise Picard, but he had vanished. And Shaw’s ship was out of range, so Seven was not an option. She wasn’t convinced there were many others she could trust, certainly not in the Admiralty or the Federation Government.
She and Chakotay were being held, now, in the darkened and terrifying brig, on the U.S.S. Kennedy, a ship which was - until the mutiny - under her fleet command. A ship she had, on a day’s notice, boarded at McKinley in the hope of working out how to fix this while trying to pretend she was - in any way - concerned with the obscene pageantry of Federation day. Chakotay had come with her, he said, because he wasn’t convinced that he could sit on his hands and do nothing. While partly true, it was really because they’d been running together for a long time, escaping by the skin of their teeth, and now was not the time to change that. Habits of a lifetime were, now, too difficult to break.
The slit that had been gouged in her forehead when the changeling who had taken her form had narrowly missed murdering her with the phaser had been attended to, but it throbbed when she spoke, and her head pounded with thirst and with fear.
“They are keeping us alive for something,” she said. “It would be more convenient if we were out of the way. So they need us for something.”
“If you were out the way,” he said, and though he was trying hard to hide it, she could hear the worry in his voice. “I’m your hapless husband, a retired captain and writer, who just happened to get caught in the crossfire while I was visiting you on this ship.”
“You sound resentful,” she said wryly. “And that is not true. You told me you couldn't let me go without you.”
“Not at all,” he sidled closer to her, wrapped her in his arms. “I love an adventure with you Admiral Janeway.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder, and was transported back in time to the barren, terrifying planet on which they had been unceremoniously dumped by Seska and the Kazon during their mutiny. He had held her like this then, in the oppressive darkness of Hanon, and reassured her they would get her ship back. A First Officer breaching all sorts of boundaries, and a Captain letting him. She hadn’t wanted to cry, but she did. It was the first time, in a long time, that she had. And with him it had been so much easier, even then, to be honest, about all of the fears and all of the terrors. To let the need for control go, and be held by someone who just wanted to make sure she was alright.
He’d never been wrong, but the odds were not in their favour this time.
Fate would, at some point, catch up with them. Not only had their life been wonderful, it had been unusually lucky too.
“If we die here, purely hypothetical, is there anything you regret?”
There are things, she knows, he won’t say in answer. That’s okay, they’ve said them before. They are not for the consumption of this brig, not for this moment. Those things are wrapped in tissue paper, buried softly and without any need to resurrect them.
“Not telling you, sooner, how much I loved you,” he whispered. “But you know now, and that’s probably all that’s ever mattered.”
She reached up, pressed her lips to his jaw.
“You?” He asked.
“No.”
And, for the most part, it is true.
“I’ve had a wonderful life with you,” he said. “Really. Even if you’re the most difficult woman I’ve ever known.”
“Difficult, but not impossible,” she laughed gently, quoting the words he had said to her, many times.
There had been many moments which were difficult, but not impossible. Every time she would pull her underwear down and see a streak of blood, hopes dashed, it was difficult, but not impossible. She would tell him, and he’d take her in her arms and tell her there was always the following month. But they’d waited too long.
And it was a silent, slow and pale understanding that grew between them that that particular opportunity had slipped, unnoticed, through their fingers.
Like every difficult moment that had gone before for them, they moved on.
“We’ve had a lovely life,” she agreed, nodding.
The brig was lit up, suddenly, by weapons fire from outside the one window. It electrified the darkness, and she knew that - whatever was happening - it had begun.
Then a voice filled the whole ship, as if by dreadful magic. And she knew, instantly, by the very monotone and the very soullessness of it, who was behind this. Not the changelings, not entirely.
She felt him stir beside her, suddenly awake to what it was.
Green light, grinding horrors.
They were quiet for a moment, before he spoke over the voice ringing through the conduits and corridors, “What’s one last go at taking back our ship?”
In the darkness he reached into his pocket, producing a small kit he always carried. Section 31 had, for the most part, served this retired captain, spy, and writer, well.
She smirked, getting to her feet and reaching down to haul him up.“Might as well go down in a blaze of glory.”
“I’d expect nothing else of you, Kathryn,” he said softly, handing her the disruptor. She stood just in front of him, so close they were chest to chest. So many times, and so many embraces, had begun like this. She put her hand on his chest, over his heart.
“This is how we started,” she looked at him, and in another burst of wild green light which shook the ship as it passed, traced the graying ink on his temple with her hand.
“Let’s finish it this way then.”
He touched his lips to hers, and the universe - this thing so out of her control, so vast and so wild and so untameable - seemed to begin and end where their lips met, where their souls had found each other and refused, against all the odds, to be parted.
Difficult…but not impossible.