Untouchable Face

A/N: Unremitting post-Endgame angst inspired by a favourite song, providing a juxtaposition to my story 'Reaching Out'. If you don't like unhappy endings and bitterness, don't read it. First posted 2015. Tidied a little for this repost. It's only a 'T' because of expletives in the song lyrics.

Think I'm going for a walk now
Feel a little unsteady
Don't want nobody to follow me
Except maybe you
I could make you happy, you know
If you weren't already
I could do a lot of things
And I do

There are nights, even now, when she wakes in a cold sweat. Thirty years have passed since she last opened her eyes and stared up at Voyager's bulkheads, but still she cannot shake those insidious terrors. And yet the worst of them come, she knows, not from what happened at the beginning, but what happened at the end. And even, perhaps, after.

Kathryn Janeway gets out of bed and pads, barefoot, into the neat kitchenette of her apartment. Out of the window that stretches floor-to-ceiling on the opposite side of the open-plan living space she can see the first colours of dawn spitting into the indigo sky. Starfleet Headquarters stands square in her vision, a glass and titanium monolith that, for one mirthless second, seems to her to have been erected merely as a metaphor for her life.

The coffee percolates as she watches the sun rise on a day she has been dreading for weeks, for months. She has contemplated simply not attending, but knows that such a dereliction would not go unnoticed. So she must bear it, as she has borne everything. Quietly, and in the knowledge that she has only herself to blame, for ultimately Kathryn Janeway knows she is the instrument of her own emotional destruction.

Thirty years. Where have they gone? Thirty years of praise and criticism; of academic discussions conducted with the benefit of hindsight. Of other people's children and then grandchildren, the faces of whom she will see today, living embodiments, though they don't know it, of her own perceived failures.

So many of the post-Voyager children born to the crew of that journey have been given some semblance of her name, as if their parents have no inkling of the insensitivity of the gesture. As if, somehow, they too believe the unwilling apotheosis she underwent during those years, when she became a matriarch to a family not her own. As if that and the subsequent permutations of her name matched with that of their offspring could possibly be enough of a substitute for losing the chance to name her own children.

The coffee is ready. She pours a mug, drinks it too hot; immediately pours another; does the same. Its bitterness is familiar. It is her own.

Tell you the truth
I prefer the worst of you
Too bad you had to have a better half
She's not really my type
But I think you two are forever
I hate to say it
But you're perfect together

Later, out of the shower, she stands naked in the resolute quiet of her rooms, heavy-breasted, loose-hipped. Staring into her wardrobe, she makes a choice; takes a stand. She still has the right to wear a Starfleet dress uniform, but she never liked the cut and she'll be damned to suffer it on top of everything else she must endure today. The black pants and roll neck she pulls out remind her of another outfit, worn god knows how many thousands of light years away. A size or two larger, perhaps, but then that was a lifetime ago. Dressed, she contemplates herself in the mirror. Her hair is silver now. She does not go in for dying it, the way some women of her years are prone to do. If she were being truthful with herself, she has an irrational fear of not recognising who she is. Today, of all days, she needs every element of self-certainty she can muster.

Making more coffee – she rarely eats breakfast, despite her physician's best attempts to persuade her of the meal's importance – Kathryn Janeway watches her name and face scroll endlessly across the news cycles. They replay the old footage of Voyager arriving home. These are images she has seen countless times, but no matter how often she sees them, her mind focuses not on the ship's exterior, but rather its interior. She remembers where they all were – where she was, and the rest of her bridge crew. It's as if the knowledge has been stamped on her retina, so permanently that all she needs to do is shut her eyes and the scene will replay.

Home. They were home.

It has always spooked her, how precise that memory is. Out of everything that happened immediately before and immediately after, why does her brain choose to relive that memory so very accurately? So vividly, in fact, that if she shuts her eyes, she can feel each breath she took, each minute flex of her anxious features, recall each miniscule puff of Voyager's recycled air as if she were still there. As if it were happening now, not then. Why?

Here, now, thirty years later, she opens her eyes and takes a mouthful of her coffee. And just like that, as if the knowledge has always been there, whole but always avoided, it hits her.

Because she was never home again.

Now, today, they want her to go back. Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of Voyager's return to the Alpha Quadrant, and the brass have seen fit to drag the old relic out of retirement.

Voyager, too.

(Ho, ho, ho.)

She doesn't want to go. Kathryn Janeway doesn't want to go back there, to that little ship and those seven dark years that turned out to be the only home she ended up ever having. She doesn't want to walk those corridors, where every turn and every junction holds a memory, where every room holds a reminiscence as if it were a time capsule dedicated to her life. She doesn't want to see the crew, old and fruitful and settled elsewhere, popping into the old place for a nose around as if it were nothing more than a curio, important then but not now, never now. She doesn't want to see them.

The thought that she has been keeping at bay presents itself, and she isn't quick enough to shut it out.

She doesn't want to see him.

So fuck you
And your untouchable face
Fuck you
For existing in the first place
And who am I
That I should be vying for your touch?
Who am I?
Bet you can't even tell me that much

She does go, of course. Never let it be said that Kathryn Janeway shirks the call of duty, even in a well-earned retirement. She boards the shuttle she has been assigned, along with the rest of the invited brass. Voyager's transporters are so out of date now that their pads are useful for nothing more than photo ops. She poses for the single one she can't get out of – the old crew, back together. She forces a laugh, a smile as wide as if she meant it. She avoids looking to her left. He's there, but she keeps his face out of focus.

His hair is grey, she notes, despite herself. It's darker than her own. He's in a dress uniform.

So is his wife.

So is his eldest son.

Kathryn Janeway circulates. She presses the flesh, as is expected, although her pronouncements mean less these days, she is beginning to realise. She is part of the old, and the old have always had only limited usefulness. She is a reminder of how things used to be, not how they could be in the future.

She suspects that somewhere, even now, a textbook is being prepared that casts her achievements as failures, not successes.

Somewhere around the mid-afternoon mark, when she has grown tired of circulating among people she only vaguely knows, she liberates a bottle of wine and retreats. She wonders how many people will notice that she has gone.

She heads for her old quarters, reasoning that if anyone comes looking for her they are more likely to try the ready room. She juggles the bottle and the matching glass, relieved and obscurely amused to note that the key code is still the same.

Inside, the space is empty. Not of furniture, but of her. The seven years of her life she spent in these rooms have been erased so effectively that she may as well be walking into a blank holodeck programme. She puts the glass down and opens the bottle, pours a generous measure and then paces out the room, drinking as she walks. Despite the lack of her, it is easy to let the memories come. The books she read and recycled. The PADDs she studied, long after her shifts had ended. The sleepless nights, the worry, the determination, the anger, the confusion, the panic, the self-doubt, the loneliness.

She stops, centre stage, and wonders why she ever thought this would be a good place to come.

Two-thirty in the morning
and my gas tank will be empty soon
Neon sign on the horizon
Rubbing elbows with the moon
A safe haven of sleepless
Where the deep fryer's always on
Radio is counting down
The top 20 country songs
and out on the porch the fly strip is
Waving like a flag in the wind
Y'know, I don't look forward
to seeing you again
You'll look like a photograph of yourself
Taken from far, far away
And I won't know what to do
And I won't know what to say

The door opens behind her, which is strange because she locked it, just in case. Kathryn Janeway turns around and then wishes that she hadn't.

She should have known it would be him.

Chakotay walks in and the door shuts behind him. Alone, at least, she notes, and then almost wishes he wasn't. He'd hold his tongue if Seven were there. He'd button his lip if their children were present. Without them, she wonders what he'll say. For surely, there must be something he wants to get off that broad chest of his, for why else would he follow her, after all this time, to here of all places?

They regard each other with frank gazes. His tattoo has softened along with the lines of his face. Kathryn Janeway raises one eyebrow and lifts her glass to her lips. She remembers waking up from dreams of tracing that tattoo with her fingers. She never did, not once. Not once.

"I'm glad you came, Admiral," is the lie he chooses as his opening gambit.

"Did you imagine that I wouldn't?"

He widens his stance a little, puts his hands behind his back. It's a curious gesture, the sort of thing she'd expect from a raw recruit, not a seasoned captain. "No one was sure. No one from the crew has spoken to you for so long that it seemed possible you'd choose not to attend."

She turns away, looks out of the window. It's wrong to see Voyager in drydock, pinioned like a fish ready for gutting. It's wrong.

"She's still my ship," she observes. "She never had another Captain after me."

Chakotay is silent, possibly acknowledging the point, though Janeway isn't looking at him and so cannot tell. Without more to say, she drinks instead, watching the stationary stars and trying to feel him. She always used to be able to feel him.

"You should come back, Admiral," Chakotay says, quietly. "You are missed."

She laughs shortly. "Oh, I doubt that. Unless you mean the media want photographs of me milling about with a grin on my face, and let me tell you, that is never going to happen."

There is a pause, and then he says, "No, Kathryn. We miss you. The crew misses you."

His use of her name decks her, as does the tone he uses to speak it. She's never liked being blindsided, and for him to do it now, again – here! – is particularly unacceptable.

"That's Admiral to you – Captain," she spits, and then turns around to face him. He has the audacity to let the expression on his face fade through surprise into hurt before fastening on blank. At least, she thinks it's blank, because she can't read him, and even when she couldn't feel him, she could always at least read him.

They stare at each other for a few seconds. He shakes his head slightly, glancing out of the window.

"What did it?" he asks. "After everything we went through. After everything we survived. What made you hate me so much?"

I see you and I'm so perplexed
What was I thinking?
What will I think of next?
Where can I hide?
In the back room there's a lamp
that hangs over the pool table
and when the fan is on it swings
gently side to side
There's a changing constellation
of balls as we are playing
I see Orion and say nothing
The only thing I can think of saying is

Her heart stutters even as her jaw clenches. She takes another drink and then realises her glass is empty, so she turns away and pours another.

"What makes you think it's about you?" she asks, roughly. Angrily. Cornered and hating it, because he never used to do that. He always gave her an out.

He laughs, shortly. "I'm the one you won't look at in public. I'm the one you have to force yourself to stand next to for one single photograph. I haven't seen you for ten years, and you can't even bring yourself to say hello to me. You might resent having to speak to the others too, but you do it. You even managed a hug for Seven. But me? I have to track you down to a locked room before you'll give me the courtesy of looking me in the eye."

"Well," she says, the viper in her biting well. "I'm sure I'm sorry if I've hurt your feelings, Captain. Objection duly noted."

There's a silence. She risks a glance at him and wishes she hadn't, because although he's not looking at her, the expression she can see on his face has been put there by her words. They stand still, a tableau of painful disappointment, and inside she's going back again. She's going back to that last moment that this ship was her home and this man was her family, and something happens that has never happened in all the times she's been back in that moment. For the first time ever, she feels like crying. Because she knows what happened next, and she knows what should have happened next, and these two things are incompatible, and these two things have poisoned the intervening decades with the taint of her regret.

Chakotay turns to go, as quietly as he arrived.

He's at the door when she says it.

"You didn't wait for me."

He stops with his back to her. For a moment she thinks he'll leave without acknowledging her words, as well he might. But after a second or two he turns to face her, a shadowed look in his eyes.

"You never asked me to."

She looks at the glass in her hand. "No. No, I didn't, did I?"

He stares at her, and she wonders for a moment whether the thing that she always assumed was so glaringly obvious for all those years was perhaps, actually, anything but. Which would, she sees, be a tragedy all of its very own.

"Would it have made a difference?" she asks. "If I had?"

He's still looking at her, but he's seeing his wife. He's seeing his children, no less loved for being adopted. She knows this. Perversely, she loves him for it.

"I don't think there's any way I can answer that and it be what you want to hear," he says.

After he leaves, she stands at the window and pours another drink. She drinks it as she counts the stars and wonders whether there is a way to turn back time. Maybe she could do it better this time. Maybe she could say the right things, do the right things, when they should be said and done, all the time knowing in her heart that it would make no difference. To change it all she would have to go back to before they ever saw each other, because this was the deal she made with herself the minute they were lost, which was the same as the minute that they met. That the ship would always be more important than herself. That getting the crew home was paramount, no matter what. She just didn't realise, then, not fully, the magnitude of the price that she would have to pay, or that she would be paying it for the rest of her life even if she succeeded. Or that, in the end, the only thing that could make her complete was something she would never let herself reach out and touch. Not even once.

She finishes her drink.

She puts the glass on the table.

She leaves it there.

Fuck you
And your untouchable face
And fuck you
for existing in the first place
And who am I
That I should be vying for your touch?
And who am I?
I bet you can't even tell me that much

[END]

A/N: The song is 'Untouchable Face' by Ani DiFranco