You wait in your cabin, knowing – and fearing – the conversation that you are about to have. The last three years, your memory of their bleakness like a thick grey fog, something that you can step through and through to find only the same greyness, damp and heavy, sapping your energy and drive, haunt you still, in spite of the adrenalin charged days that you have just lived through, and in spite of having stood once again in the place you belong.
Because you too should have known.
You believed it was the Enterprise that gave your life its drive. Your position at the head of the five year mission, representing the Federation's dream of exploration and enlightenment, the role that fulfilled your life's ambition. Everyone, Bones, Uhura, Scott, Sulu – especially Bones who had resigned in exasperation at your stubbornness and that of Starfleet Command - told you that you belonged on a starship. The hum of the engines was something that you lived with every fibre of your body. Because you knew you couldn't hear them, there is no sound in space, so it was illogical to say you could hear them them, you felt them and breathed with them.
And so you took her back. Pushed Decker to one side and took her back. For the best possible reasons, and knowing that you were damned lucky that the right thing to do was also the only thing you could possibly do and the thing you thought you wanted more than anything. You stood again on her bridge. You commanded her crew. You called on her engines. You saved your earth. But your soul wasn't nursed back to life by your silver lady. In the end there was only one man whose presence on the ship made the difference that mattered. Whose calm presence and loyal support informed your choices and inspired your understanding.
The man who has spent the last three years trying to forget you.
In five minutes he will stand outside your door and request entry. You will answer him calmly, with just one word 'Come' and he will step inside without hesitating and stop a respectful distance from you. Because that is always what he has done. That is how it has always been between you – a complete and entire understanding and acceptance of each other that has underpinned the most important relationship of your life. And that of course is what you should have known. It was not the trappings of command, or the power of the ship, or the thrill of ambition that made the 5 year mission so important. But the loyalty and friendship of this one man.