Summary: Not only is Ensign Williams stuck on a ship seventy thousand light years away from home but she's also been plunged into total darkness. As the crew struggles to retain morale, Sarah's taking it all rather hard. To top it all off, the Night has brought back a memory of someone Sarah used to know, and it looks as though he's here to stay...
Disclaimer: ST:VGR - not mine; Labyrinth - not mine; Solaris influences - not mine.
Into The Night
For one who has no regard for time or speed or distance, seventy thousand light years is a meaningless concept. For Captain Janeway, seventy thousand light years was something she could not easily dismiss, especially now that she looked out into space and only darkness stared back at her.
Chapter 1: Who is Harry?
The captain of the lonely ship lost in the depths of the galaxy was faced with the fact that they had been sailing through unknown space for some four years, and were only a smidgeon closer to home. Two weeks ago the stars had gone, and she realised just how much she missed them, even if the nebulae and systems were foreign to her. She pondered about the lives of her crew, confined to living in a proverbial tin can just over three hundred metres in length. The wall next to her grumbled and she patted the metal.
"You're not a tin can, Voyager," said the Captain reassuringly, "Didn't think you were quite so touchy."
But then even the glass on the shelves started to shake, and she abandoned her coffee, stumbled out onto the bridge. The vibrations spread through the entire ship. She was about to ask her perplexed officers what was going on, when all became calm, suddenly and unremarkably. The captain held onto the back of her chair.
"Felt just like a tremor, Captain," offered the pilot, "If we had been on Earth."
"Tremors belong to twentieth century horror movies, Mr Paris," Janeway said, and sought another opinion, "Mr Kim?"
"It was probably some kind of rogue shockwave," offered Ensign Kim, who saw no need to be quite so concerned. Commander Tuvok did not agree, and promptly ordered the Ensign to go over the sensor readings, twice.
"Well then," said their captain, who felt that all was now quite under control, "I'll be in my ready room." She remembered her coffee, cooling on the desk all by itself, and left the crew as they were.
Following this minor interruption to an otherwise perfectly normal morning, everyone carried on just as before, and poor Ensign Kim was about to finish his second sweep of the sensor logs, taking care to be extra meticulous for the high Vulcan standards of Commander Tuvok, and First Officer Chakotay was a few minutes away from being relieved of his command shift, when there was an emergency transmission from deck six.
"This is Ensign Williams," it crackled, "Intruder alert in my quarters!"
It was, at first, the nicest late start to a morning that Sarah Williams had ever had, possibly in her entire life, even accounting for the fact that she was stuck in the blackest part of the Delta quadrant thousands of light years from Earth. Her night shift, on the other hand, was horrible and dark, not a soul awake down on deck fifteen, no time to spend on the holodeck, and she'd gone to bed miserably at oh-four-hundred. Quite unexpectedly she had fallen into a warm dream, where at the Academy graduation ball Harry had finally asked her to dance. Harry Kim, who had eyes for every girl on campus who didn't even know he existed, for every girl, except for the one who only had eyes for him. And there they were, dancing to a twenty-third century NuKlingon number which was then enjoying a brief revival, and he held onto her as they danced, away, swaying, so gently. When her alarm insisted that sleep was over, she could still feel his arms resting at her waist.
"What took you so long, Harry?" she whispered, still half asleep, into the faint dream.
Suddenly, the illusion of arms tightened around her and became quite cold.
"And just who is this Harry?" asked a tired voice, somewhat resentfully.
Sarah yelped, broke free of the arms, leapt out of bed, and within less than a second was pointing a phaser at the covers and speaking into her communicator.
The covers moved.
"Security is on its way," Tuvok's voice reassured.
Phaser unwavering, Sarah took small steps to the bed, found the edge of the sheet with her free hand, and pulled it away.
For a moment she couldn't think of what to do. Or where to look. The phaser wobbled. There was little time, and before she knew it she'd tapped the combadge again.
"Commander, call them off," she said hastily in a voice she hardly recognised as hers, "Please. It's a mistake."
"Ensign?" Tuvok asked, concerned.
"It was just a bad dream," she apologised, "There's really no-one here."
As soon as she shut off the transmission, embarrassed, for now the whole of the bridge knew that she'd called security over some indigestion-induced-dream, she decided to look at the bed again. Just to make sure.
"Oh crud," she said, and looked away.
"A mistake? Just a bad dream?" asked her visitor, apparently offended, "No-one here?"
She rubbed her eyes, but he was, quite plainly, still there.
"Don't you wear clothes anymore, Goblin King?"
He wasn't in the least concerned, "Not when I sleep."
Sarah was quite happy that at least her own bedclothes were safely on, and that Tuvok had dismissed the security deployment in time, or this could have been really awkward.
"Who's Harry?" he asked again, betraying a hint of interest. She threw the sheet back at him.
He watched her with amusement and curiosity as she paced around the room and scanned herself, drank some water, pulled at her eyelids to check her eyes in the mirror and recalled what she'd eaten the previous day from the database.
"And you're still here," she said, having completed her self-diagnostic.
"Why so wound up?" he enquired, yawning. "Let's have breakfast."
Why? Well, precisely because…
Because…
Her eyes fell on the clock.
She swore.
"My shift starts in ten minutes."
The Goblin King wasn't leaving her quarters. In fact it looked like he was about to go back to sleep.
Despite the lack of possible options in this situation, Sarah felt as though she were breaking a particularly important protocol by not informing the captain. But what could she say? That there was a Goblin King in her room? Moreover, that he had appeared in the middle of the night, in her bed, with not so much as a hint of decency? Besides, there was no time.
"Look you," she hissed between running out of the sonic shower and throwing instruments into her case, "Don't you dare leave this room. Just stay put! Understood?"
It would be so difficult to have to explain him to a shipful of scientists.
She looked at him, already asleep, one last time before she locked the door with a personal access code and headed for the science lab on the deck above.
It was only sometime later, while Sarah was knocking back the coffee in the mess hall and trying to avoid the captain who had come there for the very same thing, that in Sarah's quarters Jareth the Goblin King stirred, stretched and slowly woke up.
His first thoughts were that he fancied breakfast and that he, for some unknown reason, was looking for someone by the name of Harry. He frowned. The bed didn't seem quite so large, or so comfortable, as he last remembered.
"This is not my castle," he said grimly.