A/N: A little (and probably now belated) 'get well soon' card for Argyle Trekkie.
One
Hello, it's me
I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet
To go over everything
They say that time's supposed to heal you
But I ain't done much healing
Admiral Kathryn Janeway woke and lifted her head from her desk with a wince. The moon was a pearl outside her window, submerged in the cloud-scudded dark of true night. She must have been asleep for some time, she realised, rubbing one hand across her eyes. It had already been late when she'd sent her aide home for the day. She'd only intended to get through one more report, but that one had inevitably turned into more, as they so often did when there was no one to tell her to stop. And there was no one to tell her to stop. Not anymore.
She sat back in her chair, probing her fingers into the ache in her shoulder in an attempt to free up the cramped muscle. She'd done this on Voyager, fairly regularly, or at least she had until Chakotay had got wind of it. He'd walked into the ready room one morning and found her still spark out with her face on a PADD. After that, he'd begun a new routine with the express purpose of making sure she never did it again. Every night before he went to bed, he asked the computer if she was in the ready room. She'd discovered this one night when it turned out that she had been and moreover that she'd once again fallen asleep at her desk. He could have asked one of the bridge crew to wake her. He could have comm'd her and jolted her back into the world of consciousness at one remove. But he hadn't. Chakotay had come to the ready room himself, replicated her a mug of camomile tea and then woken her by gently squeezing her shoulder until she'd opened her eyes.
Every night he'd checked on her. Every night, even in those last bitter years after the Equinox, although by then if he discovered she was in the ready room, he wasn't above sending someone else to wake her.
She wondered if he knew how much that had affected her – both the initial gesture and then its' evolution, which was so much an indication of everything that had gone wrong between them. They had lost so much, by the end, so much of what they had managed to create out of a command team formed of necessity rather than design.
I should call him, she thought. We should talk. It's been long enough. Hasn't it?
It was not a new notion and she felt the faint but familiar anxiety that accompanied it, the one that had always held her back and still did now. She looked at the comm. screen on her desk.
What would I say? she wondered. Would he even answer? It's not as if he'd have to. Not any more.
She stretched out her fingers to activate the screen.
She hesitated.
She withdrew them.
[TBC]