The Dying of the Light

A/N: This is my round two entry for the 2017-2018 J/C Cutthroat Fanfiction contest.

I'd like to thank the Academy… oh, wait, wrong speech. Ah, here it is. Thanks so much to Cheile for giving this a quick, last-minute read-over. Thanks also to the ever-patient Talsi for managing this contest. I hope this story was worth the wait.

Beyond the prompt of "Voyager/the crew encounters someone or something ancient," my muse has been this: What if TNG's episode "The Inner Light" had been a Voyager installment, instead? This has also been heavily influenced by Dylan Thomas' timeless poem, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

Enjoy. :)

Teaser: Do Not Go Gentle

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas

There is a memory I hold to with such ferocity, Daddy swears I could strangle the gods themselves in my grip. When he tells me this, I remind him that there are no gods, and he mutters prayers under his breath as he walks away. I know he only wants to keep me safe, and I can't blame him for being afraid.

Here, everybody is afraid.

The memory, Daddy insists, is nothing but a fabrication of my mind — a fantasy concocted to combat the barbaric brainwashing techniques used on me. This is what the doctors tell him, and he has never questioned the validity of their diagnosis.

They believe that I am crazy.

For months after I first woke up here, no one would tell me what happened. They said that they were protecting me from being re-traumatized, but now I know better. As always, the truth has been concealed in silence and fear.

Eventually, it was decided that I should know about the tragedy that is my life.

They say that Eline and I lived in the city. One night, peace officers came into our house, dragged us from our bed, beat us nearly to death, and black-bagged us for crimes against the state. Eline was taken to prison for propagating forbidden research. I was taken to a government re-education center, and became a test subject for mental reprogramming techniques.

Having lived my whole life in the same village as Eline, the only way to purge every memory I had of him was to erase my identity completely and give me a new one. Somehow, I resisted the process. Although I have lost, perhaps forever, any memory of the man who was my husband, I did not latch onto whichever identity they attempted to thrust upon me. Instead, I escaped into a fantasy fit for novelization, and became Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation Starship Voyager. Since then, I have spent the past five years with my eye at the lens of a telescope, looking for any indication of where I am or what happened to my ship and her crew.

Regrettably, I have no other answers.

I can still remember Kathryn's life like it was my own, but I must admit that I wonder if she was ever real. After five years of being Kamin — living in the house where I grew up, seeing the clear grey eyes of my father who loves me, and connecting with people who know me better than I know myself — I have finally begun to think that this might be my real life. Perhaps the people here are right; perhaps I did lose my mind when I lost the man I loved.

It's not as if this is the first time I recall meandering through the black night of grief. Despair is a starless sky that Kathryn Janeway fell into many times over the years. After a while, she came to need it like she needed air to breathe.

And, piece by piece, she allowed her soul to fade into that dark night.

A Starfleet brat and the oldest of two girls, she learned early how to bury the gnawing melancholy that comes with being separated from a loved one. Early in her own Starfleet career, she became the only survivor of a tragic shuttle accident in which she lost both her fiancée and her father. Years later, after stranding her crew seventy thousand lightyears from home, night became a blanket that Kathryn pulled tighter around her own shoulders with each passing month. It kept her warm, in a macabre sort of way.

It kept her safely alone.

To be honest, it is something of a relief to accept the narrative I have since been given. Here on Kataan, in a moderately-sized village tucked in the center of the Ressikan mountains, I am far less burdened as Kamin than I ever was as Kathryn. The politics plaguing the Central Cities — the very politics that cost Eline his freedom and overwhelmed my psyche — are hardly felt here. It isn't perfect, but it is certainly more peaceful than the lonely life I had been condemned to — lost in hostile space.

At least, that's what I tell myself. Sometimes, I almost believe it.

Yet that last memory of Kathryn's — or mine — is one that I still cling to like a plank in the sea. It is grey as the bulkheads and the carpet on Voyager's bridge. Grey, like the two command chairs sitting side-by-side and so far apart in the middle of it all — one for my first officer, and one for me.

But there are some colors that simply refuse to fade away. There is red — the red of blood, Ressikan wine, and my favorite shade of lipstick — in the matching stripes of our uniforms, reminding us of the desire we sacrifice daily for the sake of our crew. There is russet brown, deep and dark in his eyes, the last time he settled that disarming gaze upon me.

Then, for just a moment, there are the metallic hues of steel and bronze in the oddly-shaped probe that we had paused to investigate just before my life as Kathryn Janeway came, abruptly, to an end.