All Night
the stylus
Originally posted 26 January 2000
Summary: What if he kissed her? What if it didn't solve anything? Not a nice J/C.
Disclaimer: Le roi est mort. Vive le roi. Etc.
Set before Season Six but post Hunters and Night. Choose your own time frame.
All night I carpenter
A space for the thing I am given
A love
Of two wet eyes and a screech.
1100 hours
Some days, none of this seems real. Even the concept of home is an alien thing. Voyager. Earth. Just names: compressions of air that emanate from the cavern of a mouth and the dark depths of breath. So, too, I try to shape this nameless thing into a word, a beast. If I can call it, I can hold it at bay. But it refuses to be named or comforted. I am left with the deep ache which is hungry but not hunger and the immovable weight crushing on my chest.
So I turn the lights down low and curl up in the corner of my couch with a mug of coffee and stare at the space passing my window. If I hold my breath I can hear the ship like a living entity around me: hiss of air recyclers breathing us the right amount of oxygen, faint strobing throb of the warp engines like a heartbeat. And deep within the belly of Voyager almost 150 lives which I did not create but for which I am responsible.
I have never given birth to another life. Some days I am reminded of that in passing a planet swirling with rings of rocky fragments, or in the slight shuddering of the deck beneath my feet as a star belches out gases into the void. I have washed myself in responsibility and come up clean, sterile, barren. Crying out, my own voice answers me. There is only (and only on occasion) this stillborn, shapeless offspring without a name or a face; there is this dark, grave specter which rises like bile in my throat.
I do have the faces of my crew like bright beacons through a fog and their voices: respectful, distant. They are not my children. And yet, they are too much mine. I give them what I can; they take as they need. None of us know another way.
Why now? Why today? Yesterday I had lunch with Harry and the quick duck of his head, his shy smile at my praise made me smile, too. It was so easy. Yesterday I beat Tom at pool. I hadn't played in ages and it wasn't until I played again that I realized how much I had missed it: the heft of the cue, its smooth slip between my fingers, the smell of the chalk. I had missed the reality of the game, its lines and angles. I had also missed the easy entrance it gave me to a life taking place outside the confines of the bridge. It had been a long time since I saw Tom and B'Elanna bicker in a way that is so intimate I feel like a voyeur. I didn't even know about Harry and Latarsha Simons. Last night, I didn't even wear my uniform-and I found that I didn't miss it.
I don't know what's different about today.
That's not true. Today was different. Chakotay kissed me.
It's just that I'm not different.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
0030 hours
It is not that I do not find Chakotay attractive. That, at least, has never been in question. He's a handsome man, a wonderful friend, a better First than I could have hoped for or asked for. But as much as I wish it were otherwise, that's not the question. I do not even list the "ifs" anymore. I will only lead myself away from the truth.
I think he kissed me by accident. We were sprawled across the couch in my ready room long after the end of Alpha shift swapping departmental reports and anecdotes when I accidentally picked up his coffee mug instead of my own and drank. I wasn't even looking, too immersed in some of the theoretical physics that I leave to Seven and miss dearly; I just reached out by instinct and grabbed the first mug my hand came to. Except it was the wrong one.
"Kathryn?"
"Hmm?" I didn't even look up until he didn't respond, and even then I hardly noticed him except that something about his eyes was amused and his mouth was quirking hard, trying not to smile. "What?"
"That's," gesturing with the padd in his hand, "my mug. Are you that low on rations already this cycle?"
"Oh." I looked down at the mug in my hand, which looked exactly like the one on the table and laughed. "No. I'm sorry. You can have it back. I mean, if you still want it. I didn't mean to drink out of yours. It's just that I wasn't looking and thought it was mine..." My mind still half buried in the equations I couldn't quite find the words.
"It's okay." He reached out and grasped the mug to take it back, brushing my hand lightly with his-and then stopped, still grasping the half-full mug and my fingers. He kept his eyes steady on my face and I tried to meet his gaze, but my eyes couldn't help straying back to the padd in my right hand. I was so close to the answer; it was niggling at the back of my brain.
And then he kissed me, chastely and rather awkwardly, his right hand on mine, his left clutching a padd resting on the back of the couch, his head at an awkward angle. When he pulled back, there was a question in his eyes that I didn't know how to answer, so I stayed silent. He took back the mug, still asking. I went back to the padd and Seven's equations. Minutes later I felt his gaze drop. He started to say he was sorry but I didn't let him finish.
"Chakotay, don't apologize. Never for the truth."
Either he understood what I was trying to say or he had taken enough risks for one evening. We went back to working in silence. Some minutes later-twenty? seventy?-he left with a kind word and a fond smile over his shoulder. Five minutes after the door closed behind him, I solved the physics problem and logged the solution so it would appear on Seven's terminal when she started her shift in the morning. I left my ready room, nodding to the lieutenant running the bridge and returned to my quarters.
Chakotay kissed me.
Chakotay kissed me today. And it didn't change a thing. Because, after his touch, I was still myself.
And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?
Such pure leaps and spirals-
Surely they travel
The world forever...
0200 hours
We are all stardust. I used to have a comparative biochemistry professor who liked to remind us of that fact when we groaned about how many different enzymatic pathways from each species we had to memorize for her examinations. When you come right down to it, we're all made from the same stuff. Physics is like that too. I choose to believe that we are all governed by the same laws of physics-even the Q, though they stretch our understanding of those laws. There are days I find that thought comforting. My grandmother used to say, "Ashes to ashes." I don't know where she got the phrase, but it about sums up my belief about the afterlife and this life. Some days it comforts me to think that I'm a part of something so large, of Life in the grand sense which stretches even as far as these godforsaken reaches of the Delta Quadrant. Other days, it feels very lonely; and even the elegant lines of physics cannot soothe away the hollowness.
This is the part that I don't think I could explain to Chakotay, this essential loneliness that haunts me and at the oddest times steals over me like a swift-moving fog. He is too social, too much a man of people. And he believes in things I do not believe in. Cannot believe in. His stories are beautiful and I am beginning to realize that they complete him; they make him whole.
People used to look at me strangely when I would tell them that I was engaged to a member of the Questor Group. I could almost see them trying to puzzle out what Starfleet Captain Doctor Kathryn Janeway, the dedicated empiricist, could have in common with a philosopher. But really, we weren't so different. Not in the long, rambling discussions we'd have as we lazed on the grass at the little park where we were never interrupted. Not at night, with the lights out, only our voices braiding through the darkness. We were both interested in the *why* of things.
Mark used to tease me that for my birthday he was going to frame my favorite proof. He never did. I suppose I never told him what my favorite was, either, assuming I could choose. It would probably have surprised him that I have always liked the proof of the irrationality of pi. I'm sure he would have made some remark about my need to control even the uncontrollable, so far as it was possible. He never let me get by with much. But that isn't it, not exactly. It is about having something to hang onto when the darkness seems omnipresent: the logical, rational demonstration of the existence of the irrational. The transcendental infinite constant.
And oh, today, when Chakotay touched me, I wanted to let him soothe this beast away. I wanted to lean into his kiss, to lean into him like a bulwark. For a moment only I wanted to be free of this as I have not been free of it since before the Caretaker. But I knew before I did it that it would not have worked. Maybe I have never been free of this. And it would not have been fair to him. I'm not sure that anyone could quell this terrible, empty restlessness that rises up in me. Mark and I, together, could keep it at bay, sometimes. But I was a different person then. There were whole hours I forgot *what* I was. And now? Now I am always reminded. Some days, I fear I am losing the *who* of me inside the hull of this ship, inside the shapeless uniform, in the mirrored surfaces of the pips on my collar.
My coffee is cold. My back is beginning to burn from the angle at which I have braced it against the meeting of the arm and back of the couch. The stars are like great slashes in the black fabric of space which let some light through from an unseen source.
I haven't even the pretense of work with which to distract myself in this dull region of space which is-thankfully-not the Void but is as peaceful. Even the waste management reports have been approved. No one is going to ring the chime on my door to save me from myself.
Suddenly this ship seems impossibly small. And my skin ill-fitting, a poorly made garment.
That, it seems, is the impossibility.
That being free. What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?
What would the light
Do without eyes to knife?
0300 hours
I move, if only to have a different background upon which to superimpose my solitary figure.
In Holodeck One an open program is running. Beta shift has a few crewmembers who like to ski in the hours after their shift. I stay, watching the small figures-who are in reality very close-descend in the distance until the cold air wends through the openings of my uniform jacket and skitters up my arms. Hugging myself tightly, shivering, I call softly for an exit. They keep going up and down, oblivious to my presence.
Hydroponics is quiet. I think it will always remind me of Kes. I touch softly the petals of the flowers which are the color of a new dawn. They grow between two tubers from different worlds which Neelix has found uses for. One tastes a bit like potatoes, one like cranberries. I cannot remember which is which. At the Senior Staff meeting where Kes proposed cultivating the flowers, I remember B'Elanna argued vehemently that the space could be better used for foodstuffs, that we didn't have the resources to expend on growing things for simple aesthetics. Kes responded patiently, pointing out how many medical substances came from flowering plants. And then she added, "If we don't have time or energy for beauty, what are we doing, anyway?" B'Elanna growled but agreed to find the energy for resources. I was so glad, for once, not to have to be the one to argue for necessity.
In Cargo Bay Two I relieve a startled ensign from Engineering and repair a power conduit, soothed momentarily by the mechanics of connections and ion levels. My hands are blue and unreal in the light from the gel packs. Recalibrating the junction I do all the math in my head, twice, and for a moment am easy. On the way out, I pause briefly to watch Seven regenerate. Fleetingly, I wonder if she dreams. I leave before any of the thoughts have a chance to form.
I do not go to the Bridge.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road--
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.
0410 hours
Back in my quarters and a message blinking on my console: Tuvok, requesting time to run security drills. I smile a little, remembering that first Review Board and my indignation at his criticisms. I cursed him for his memory, his exactitude. I have learned instead to depend upon it. We still have dinner together occasionally. Some days, listening to his dry, warm voice I want to ask him what he thinks of me. He has more to lose out here than most of my crew. I catch myself wishing that he would, just once, rail against the entire quadrant, my destruction of the Array, his own losses.
Or perhaps I just want him to say that the woman he knew in the Alpha Quadrant was different and did not have it in her to do the things I have done. To have once been certain would be a precious thing.
I switch to tea, restless enough without the stimulation of coffee, even after my wanderings. It's an Assam blend which I haven't told Neelix about because I don't want to imagine what sort of "substitutes" he might concoct. I bury my tongue in the rich rusty taste and hold the mug hard, trying to pretend that I am not still shivering.
I am glad that I am alone. I learned with Mark about the horrible tug-of-war between needing another warmth in the room and the solitary nature of sleepless nights. I cannot push this far enough away tonight to be touched.
...at one with the drive,
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
0500 hours
In under an hour the computer will announce the time to wake me. Instead of sleep, the calmness of insomnia is settling over me. The world moves just a bit farther away under the gauzy shroud of more than a day awake. My movement, which has been restive and quick all night, smoothes and slows. If I were on Earth, in what was our apartment near San Francisco, I would open the door to the balcony and curl in a chair with the tattered green afghan to wait for the sunrise. They never tell you at the Academy that, even if you belong in the stars, you might miss sunrises: the breaking of light from one star over a single curve of horizon.
I remember my first visit to Mars and how different the sunrise seemed. Since then I've seen so many suns come up in so many different places that it's almost hard to remember that I was amazed that "my" sun could rise on Mars. The other thing I remember from Mars, from my time cave-diving is that when you were deep enough into the caves that the water no longer held any light from the sky, it was almost impossible to visually distinguish up from down. In utter darkness there was no light to swim towards and the directions lost definition. The body always thinks it knows; but sometimes it is mistaken. This quadrant disorients me in much the same way. "That way madness lies..." But some days it looks so very much like sanity, or, at the very least, survival.
Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.
I shall be good as new.
0545 hours
The alarm. In fifteen minutes I am meeting Tuvok for breakfast in the mess. In an hour and fifteen minutes my senior staff will convene in the conference room to tell me that there is nothing new to report, nothing unusual or interesting about this region of space except that it holds us between its rocky systems of planets. I will wear a new uniform and brush my hair back from my face. I will smile for Neelix and hope that B'Elanna and Seven can work together long enough to aruge well out of my earshot. I will offer Chakotay coffee and ask him to lead our upcoming informal gathering to bolster crew morale; I will tease him about still not having performed at Talent Night.
They are a wonderful crew. Better than I could have hoped for: diligent, loyal, compassionate. My task is first to live up to their expectations and then to get them home. To let them become themselves in the middle of skirmishes and shortages and years without an ally we trust.
Something hard forms in my side. I tamp it down, push it away. The ache remains but the pain is duller. I can bear this. I have made it through the night. Morning is all I can ask, some days.
Fin
Author's Note: All poetry is from Sylvia Plath and is used without permission but with great reverence. Titles of poems are, in order of appearance: "Thalidomide," "Elm," "The Night Dances," "The Jailer," "Words," "Ariel," "Poem for a Birthday." All poems may be found in _The Collected Poems_.