DISCLAIMER: The Voyager Universe: Paramount's. This story idea and its J/C departure from canon: mine. Profit: I wish.

RATING: PG

SUMMARY: Admiral Janeway gets the last word.

Still You/Marked Urgent

by 50of47

After the initial excitement of Voyager's spectacular entry into the Alpha Quadrant had died down, Kathryn Janeway found herself in her ready room, buried in work. She was trying her best to clear away what she could before they reached Earth. These precious few minutes alone were the last she would have before the media frenzy began in earnest. That would be followed by debriefings, and the intense public scrutiny she knew would be waiting for her in particular.

At least, that's what she told herself she was doing. Her mind was in an uproar, and not entirely because of the conflicting demands of updating her logs, reading the steady stream of congratulatory messages flowing to her terminal, and trying to organize a preliminary report for Admiral Paris containing the most salient details of their precipitous return home. Admiral Janeway had caused her counterpart's unrest with the horrendous violation of the timeline that Captain Janeway doubted even the timeship Relativity could fix, and with what she had revealed to her younger self.

Janeway stopped reading and closed her eyes. She took several deep breaths, trying to focus herself long enough to get a sense of where to begin sorting it all out. She knew that she would get nothing substantive accomplished until she had released some of the pent-up emotion from the past several days. The Captain leaned back and made herself comfortable, determined to think through what was distracting her, although she knew it would probably give her a headache.

Where to start? First, by leaving the ethics of their return home to Starfleet Temporal Investigations. She expected there would be repercussions because she had finally caved in and gone along with the Admiral's suggestions, but at least she could work toward keeping the focus on the human issues as much as possible during the debriefings. Surely the Admiralty would understand the pointlessness of needless loss of crew lives, whether to untreated illness or the vagaries of another sixteen years in the Delta Quadrant -- especially when highly qualified people were so badly needed after the Dominion War.

Admiral Janeway. What a rude awakening that had been -- to see what Captain Janeway would have become in another twenty-six years if she had kept to her original decision to bypass the transwarp hub. She could be completely honest with herself here in the privacy of her ready room, and admit that she really didn't like her future self at all. She didn't want to end up becoming anything even remotely like her. If that factor had influenced her in any way to follow the Admiral's suggestions, she didn't want to dwell on it. Better to focus on those twenty-two lives that no longer would be lost on her watch, than on something a vanished timeline might have done to her. Captain Janeway would rather believe that she could have found a better solution on her own, that she could have gotten them home in less than those additional sixteen years, and that the Admiral's timeline was not inevitable.

And yes, there was the matter of Chakotay and Seven...

Janeway heard her terminal beep. She opened her eyes to see a confidential message marked urgent blinking on her screen. It had a Starfleet identification tag, so she entered her clearance code to open it. She was stunned to see Admiral Janeway's face.

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"Surprised to see me again, Captain? I know I'd give almost anything to see your face right now. It must be nearly as priceless as that slightly flummoxed expression you let slip when I first appeared on your viewscreen to tell you I'd come to bring Voyager home.

After all the trouble I went though to accomplish that, you don't really think I'd let a little thing like death stop me from having the last word, now do you? I recorded this just before leaving for the unicomplex and flagged it to be delivered to your terminal an hour after Voyager's central computer core auto-accessed Earth's Federation Time Beacon. I knew you'd be dutifully holed up in your ready room by then, instead of celebrating with your crew. I was right about that, wasn't I?

Remember the early days, when you used to worry so much about keeping enough distance from them, the way they taught you in command school, while still letting them know their captain cared about them?

When did "proper command distance" turn into the isolation and detachment that eventually produced me? Oh yes, I remember... The Void. Gave one too much time to think, didn't it? That was the start. You hid yourself away in your quarters, once you realized the full weight of exactly what you'd committed everyone to. You couldn't swallow your own idealistic fiction anymore, the one about being Starfleet's farthest-flung deep-space mission. You even pulled away from Chakotay. That had to have been one of the earliest of many turning points on the road to becoming me.

Yes, I know. This self-indulgent little analysis is giving you a temporal headache that has you grinding your teeth, wishing I'd get to the point so you can shut me off. You've probably figured it out – this lecture is about a missed opportunity, but it's not the one you think. And about a mistake, but not any of those that kept you up at night, lying in bed and staring out at the stars because you couldn't sleep. Oh Kathryn, you can't even begin to imagine. I've had twenty-six years more than you to think about it all – to crystallize my regrets into something I could finally almost live with.

Starfleet ordered me into counseling, you know, about a year and a half after the debriefings were over. They told me it was standard procedure to do a psych workup when promoting someone to admiral, but I think the real reason was that I'd probably made one too many casual sarcastic quip, and grown a little too sour for their taste. I wasn't the serious, respectful, obedient Captain Janeway they expected me to be, the one who was supposed to be enormously grateful for the promotion they were giving me, despite my age and having been away so long.

They sent me to a half-Betazoid. She told me she sensed I still had unresolved feelings from my time in the Delta Quadrant. I told her she was mistaken. She started to talk to me about closure, and I yelled back at her. "Closure? My First Officer – my best friend – died just as we finally came home. I lost the other half of my soul, and you want me to find closure?"

We hadn't even been home six weeks when it happened.

His death certificate said 'catastrophic neurological failure due to untreated severe head trauma,' but it was a stupid accident, Kathryn. Chakotay was unsettled after Voyager's return, and went off into the wilderness on one of his vision quests. He walked too close to the edge of a cliff, and the ground crumbled away under his feet. It was several days before anyone thought to come looking for him, and by then, the damage had gone far too long without treatment. All the Doctor could do was to keep him comfortable until the inevitable.

He died with your name on his lips. I know. I was there. I held his hand as he took his last breath.

When they brought him back to Starfleet Medical, someone checked for the name he'd left as a contact in case of emergency. I came immediately when B'Elanna was finally able to reach me to tell me Chakotay was asking for me. He wasn't any more lucid than Tuvok was by that time, but it was never Seven he called for in his dementia. He had never stopped loving Kathryn. The look in his eyes at the end told me that.

What I would have given to have known that when Seven died. I might have reached out to him back then. The day he came to me in my ready room and asked me to marry the two of them was the day I wrapped the first of many cold layers of cynicism around my heart. Initially, I chalked the relationship up to a midlife crisis, but when I realized he was serious, I convinced myself that his angry warrior story had been nothing more than a pretty little speech. I buried my forlorn hope that we would have been together when Voyager finally returned home.

I piled on more defenses as the years went by, even when he got over Seven's death without any more than the expected grief. She did die in his arms, Kathryn, just as I told you, but he didn't cry over her the way he did over you on that nameless planet. Remember that?

B'Elanna told me quite some time later that he'd admitted to her that Seven had been a lonely mistake -- a poor substitute for something he'd never have with Kathryn, but that he just couldn't be alone any more. I guess she thought my knowing that would change things and finally bring us together, but it didn't work. I was too far gone into my own self-recrimination and bitterness by then to even consider the possibility. Eventually, I began to indulge myself in the occasional fling with whatever willing and eager attractive body presented itself when Voyager stopped somewhere for any length of time, and so did he.

Thankfully, those remaining years in the Delta Quadrant never damaged our friendship. We were still best friends for the rest of the journey, and once Tuvok's illness had progressed, Chakotay was my only friend. There were those unexpected moments of closeness that were almost like the way it had been in the early years before the Borg alliance, and they seemed to be enough for both of us. It was only when he told me with his dying breath that he'd never stopped loving me that I finally realized there could have been so much more, and that the fault was mine alone.

And that's the real reason I came back, Kathryn, underneath all the others -- Tuvok's illness, the people I lost before we made it back, the broken threads of lives that couldn't be put back together again after 23 years, the possibility that Kathryn and Chakotay might actually be together at last. I returned to redeem the other half of my soul's future, that lost opportunity for a gentle spirit to rebuild a life for himself and his people, to finally have the family of his own he always wanted so badly.

You never saw the shell he became by the time we reached home, Kathryn. The crew was the center of Chakotay's life, his family, so to speak, after you began to draw further and further away from them as the losses mounted over the years. You and I, we've never relied on people when there was a scientific puzzle or work to be done that we could bury ourselves in to get though the tough times, but Chakotay always needed that connection to others that we so easily shrugged off. So many years gone by before we were back, and then with the crew starting to disperse, there really wasn't enough of anything familiar left to anchor him. No wonder he was too distracted to watch where he was walking.

So finally, Kathryn, once and for all, why am I telling you this? Let's just say it's the tiny part of me that's still you asking the part of you that loves that angry warrior in spite of yourself not to make my mistake. It's the only one left in your timeline that the you I once was can still make. I saw the hurt in your eyes after you finally tossed aside the Temporal Prime Directive and let me tell you in whose arms Seven died. You were always the balm on his troubled soul, and we both know the place he holds in your heart. I used to be you... remember?

I still outrank you. I would order you to redefine your parameters if I could, but quite obviously, I no longer exist. They've only been on a few innocent dates, Kathryn, and let me remind you -- now that Voyager's home, all bets on any part of my timeline running its appointed course are off.

I hear the shuttlebay doors opening. There's just enough time to flag this message for delivery before you come aboard to inject me with the neurolytic pathogen. Mustn't keep Her Majesty waiting.

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