"Tell me about your captain," Annorax asks Chakotay during one of their fine meals, dining on dishes from civilisations erased by a flick of his fingers. He is the captain of the Krenim timeship, the master of time itself.
"I can't. She is…" Chakotay is at a loss as what to say. Should he make her bigger than life, he knows Annorax will chase her to the end of time. Render her vulnerable, and the Krenim captain will think of nothing but expunging her from this timeline and all those which would have arisen from it.
Annorax offers him the chance to divert her from the path she has chosen. He could, if he wanted to, regress time before her lone ship arrived at the Krenim borders which keep swelling and retreating at each temporal incursion, as if time itself is breathing.
Chakotay does not know how far back he would need to go to stop her solitary crusade and still keep hold of her. He doesn't want to lose her, but their shared history does not allow for much leeway, bound as it is by their lives on Voyager. He knows a mere few years of her, not decades. She is but one individual, not an entire species. A wrong calculation, a rounded decimal, and she'll not only vanish forever from his future, but she will have never existed in his past. And that, he cannot bear.
He tries, though. Annorax says he's got the gift of sensing the swirls and sparks of time which remain hidden to most. He understands when to gently blow a breath on its embers to rekindle its power, and where it needs to be doused down lest its fury devours them all.
But Chakotay is too late. Janeway comes from the bitter depths of space, bent over the helm, hard in pursuit of a cause bigger than her. She is looking for the man Annorax has become. She comes at him, all righteous within the walls of her white ship. Voyager is an anomaly, a piece of hard metal caught in the cogs of Annorax' time machine, barring his path to salvation, and Annorax swears he will crush it.
Chakotay mourns that he is not at her side any longer.
Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc
as she came riding through the dark;
no moon to keep her armour bright,
no man to get her through this dark and smoky night.
###
Annorax aches for another life. He's confessed to Chakotay one evening that he seeks his own beloved to live again. She was among his victims, the unfortunate result of his second attempt at using his infernal time machine. And he's been chasing after that mistake ever since, under the guise of recreating the vast Krenim empire. True resurrection is at his fingertips from the ashes of time, but not for Kathryn.
She's never told him in so many words, but Chakotay knows Kathryn too longs for a different life, not this drawn-out journey to a place which will have forgotten all who fly alongside her by the time they arrive home. A life which once promised a husband to hold her in his arms, a dog to welcome her, a hearth where she can warm herself. Maybe even children with freckles and laughing eyes.
Like Annorax, she also suffers from the guilt that past choices bring. But she is dedicated and determined to right the wrongs she believes she is responsible for. In contrast, Annorax seeks to erase his own culpability and strives to re-write his own history.
Chakotay knows Kathryn will never succumb to that temptation.
She said, "I'm tired of the war,
I want the kind of work I had before,
a wedding dress or something white
to wear upon my swollen appetite."
###
She had not foreseen that Chakotay would be taken away, and she wonders if she'll win this battle by herself. They have been through so many together. Now, it's only her, and she doesn't know if her strength will be enough.
In the darkness of her ship, she takes Chakotay in her arms and dances. On the bridge, in the corridor, in his quarters, his thoughtful birthday gift bouncing at her waist. No resources to exhaust but hers. No other hunger to satiate than her own. No time to waste.
Lalala, lalala
Lalala, lalala
She dances alone well into the night.
###
And then it happens. The lastest temporal incursion goes horribly wrong, regressing Annorax's people to a pitiful remnant of their past glory, his wife never born. Voyager endures still, immune to his efforts to annihilate it and now hidden from his sight and reach. Kathryn continues to defy him.
"A worthy adversary, then," Annorax says of her, as Chakotay rattles on about the Kazon, the Viidians, the Srivani.
Annorax makes him repeat what happened when those experimenters from hell invaded Voyager. They were so dedicated to their goal, so fanatical in their methods. And the way Kathryn—may I call her Kathryn? he asks—kicked the Srivani off her ship makes him see in her a kindred mind, a similar deep-seated recklessness when cornered. If he needed proof she won't back off from her current plight, this is it.
He will feed on her.
Well, I'm glad to hear you talk this way,
you know I've watched you riding every day
and something in me yearns to win
such a cold, such a lonesome heroine.
###
Kathryn walks through the quarters which have melted into the floors, brushes her arm against the screaming bulkheads, stoops under the weeping between the broken boughs of her ship, she wonders too about the one who holds the match to the thread of her life.
She has no interest in mastering that skill. She is quite prepared to be left behind so they can all live. Time burns through everything, leaving nothing but cinders from which nothing can be salvaged. She will never fall into its alluring arms.
Never.
"And who are you?" she sternly spoke
to the one beneath the smoke.
"Why, I'm fire," he replied,
"And I love your solitude, I love your pride."
###
She dreams, spins her past and future together, weaves them into a hard shell around her, a shell with no gaps, no cracks to let in anybody else, because she loses them all at the end— Justin, Mark, her dad. That is her destiny, her fate. She is alone. Will always be.
Until brown eyes steady her and a warm hand holds hers tight, not letting her go. She smiles in her sleep.
Lalala, lalala
Lalala, lalala
When she wakes again in solitude, six months of hell are etched deep in her bones, and she wonders what years of the same will do to her soul.
###
The fire calls to her. A chance for redemption. A time for reckoning. For cleansing.
The ship crackles around her, a disjointed tune of strumming metal echoing all around. The anticipation of what is to come trickles down her neck and arms, barely cooling her heated skin. Better the dry, sharp bellowing heat, she tells herself, than the cold and silent death that waits outside a hull pounded by micrometeorites. With the deflector down, the ship will surely collapse.
She looks around for a shield, anything to make the moment stretches before she'll have to yield to the heat. A shield when she should have a sword, but her weapons are few now, barely working in fact. Only pride holds her up. And anger. And desperation.
She grabs the piece of metal, already hot in her hands, breathes a last gulp of air and dives into the flames.
"Well, then fire, make your body cold,
I'm going to give you mine to hold,"
and saying this she climbed inside
to be his one, to be his only bride.
And later, much later, after her altercation with the doctor who threatened to relieve her of command, she looks at herself in the broken mirror. The taut skin over the scars glisten in the dim light, her face a reminder she will no longer be who she was. Time has caught up with her, hurried and merciless.
Maybe she could spare herself all of this, and learn how to turn the wheel of time like Annorax is doing somewhere close by. She could restore Voyager to its shining glory instead of the dark steed it has become. Make herself young and smooth-skinned again. Give herself to the man she lost. A good man. Another one she couldn't keep hold of, after Justin and Mark. First death, then distance, and now time have taken them all from her.
Would she dare change the past just for him? she asks the grimy withered face which stares back at her with exhausted eyes.
###
She has arrived, her ship a pitiful ruin, her allies a motley company. Annorax is glad Chakotay has disappeared, plucked off the Krenim ship. He has had enough of the man's concerns ringing in his ears, his judgemental attitude. Now he can face that flea that is Voyager head-on. He'll be doing Janeway a favour to clean her out and erase her.
He fires all he's got at the Starfleet ship, but once again, she evades his calculations. She sets Voyager on a collision course with the Krenim ship, willing everybody in range out of this timeline.
The explosion is silent, the night made bright with debris set alight, swirls of smouldering gases hiding the stars from view. The two ships burn, dust and smoke and fire rising overhead.
And deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and high above all these wedding guests
he hung the ashes of her lovely wedding dress.
###
And deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and then she clearly understood
if he was fire, oh she must be wood.
She's outguessed time itself, creating a future born from fire and big enough for them all. Throwing herself into a fiery end in eternal surrender, she's become the master of her fate if only for an infinitesimal instant. She has tricked time, that great leveller of men and deeds, by feeding it her soul. And if her body had not already succumbed to the flames, she would have thought it fitting to burn and burn again in hell.
###
I saw her wince, I saw her cry,
I saw the glory in her eye.
Myself I long for love and light,
but must it come so cruel, must it be so bright?
Chakotay can only watch from afar, his heart beating hard—boom, boom, boom, as if taking the measure of time itself. But there's nothing for him in that dazzling light. Nothing of her left.
###
Time stops, turns around, makes all of them forget the fire and the hell and the entire year, and starts them on a new path.
It extinguishes Kathryn Janeway's sacrifice and nascent legend into oblivion. It will never be beaten again by that proud little human, once a pristine canvas and innocent of its wily twists. She will never remember she's bent time itself to her will.
It has won again.
Lalala, lalala
Lalala, lalala
Or so it thinks.
Note: Joan of Arc, written by Leonard Cohen and sung by Jennifer Warnes and Leonard Cohen. From the album Famous Blue Raincoat (1986).
This story is part of the collection Who By Fire, organised by MiaCooper, and running over the whole month of May 2019. It takes its inspiration from Leonard Cohen's songs. If you like angsty Star Trek stories, go and have a look on Archive of Our Own. Go to Browse - Collections - Filter by Title: Who By Fire: The Merry Month of Cohen.
My great thanks to my betas, Black Velvet, who got me to change a few things, and Devovere, who did the same. I really don't see why betas need to be so fussy. The first draft was perfect. And the second. And the…