Author's note:While FFN was my reintroduction to fanfic after years away, I've decided to no longer post here. It's just not very user-friendly, and I've got 39 chapters and over 100K words to share! The idea of updating my Tumblr and two different sites 2-3 times a week was daunting, to say the least, especially since I can't get FFN to keep my *%$! formatting. This story will be posted in its entirety over the next few months over on Archive of Our Own (AO3), where my user name is the same (CaptAcorn). I will be leaving my account here open if you want to message me or read my older stuff here.

"Only that the world out there is complicated,

and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,

and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,

is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,

and not to be alone."

- Neil Gaiman

Prologue

It's a rare, brilliant afternoon. The air is crisp and clean, and the sharp scent of conifers fills my nose as I take a deep inhale. Even the ever present cloud cover has taken a day off – last time I saw a sky this blue, it was holographic.

It feels like a tease. One last taste of what we'll all be desperately missing a month from now, or maybe sooner. Per Seven, we can expect a nighttime frost by next week.

But, for this particular moment, it's glorious. I have to get outside for a minute, feel the wind ruffle through my dull, greasy hair and let the sun's radiation warm my sallow skin. It reminds me, a little, of a long ago day – when hope was real and tangible, and not a long forgotten notion.

It was at the beginning of my failed tenure at the Academy. I was visiting MIT. They were developing a new circuitry model — one that, ironically, would be the forerunner of the bio-neural gel packs used on Voyager — and I'd been assigned a paper on 'innovations in computer processors.' Not the most gripping of topics, but back then, even the driest material seemed exciting.

My research could have easily been done in San Francisco. There was no reason I had to see the circuits in person. But it was my first time on Earth (as it turns out, my only time on Earth) and I was hungry and optimistic. I was going to be the first Klingon Chief Engineer, or maybe head up R and D at Utopia Planitia.

Everything I saw was a revelation. The lab's facilities were cutting edge. Professor Eze was brilliant and kind, and encouraged me to apply for a summer fellowship. A glance around Cambridge revealed a haven for non-humans. But, oddly, what always stuck with me from that day was the weather.

My roommate had warned me the New England climate was terrible. She was a California native, from New Los Angeles, but had an uncle in Connecticut. "The winters are nasty, the summers are humid and miserable. Why anyone would choose to live there is beyond me." She'd always been kind of a whiner.

Which is maybe why her uncle had never invited her in the fall. My trip was in October, on a quintessential autumn day. The sun shone from a ciel-blue sky dotted with just the occasional cloud. The trees were awash in orange and red and gold. Eze and I walked along the Charles after he'd shown me around, and we followed our noses to a little farm stand selling bags of apples and freshly baked cider doughnuts. It was nothing like the continual mist that hung over San Francisco or the dry, relentless heat of Kessik, and I loved it. As I transported back to California, I was already plotting out a way I could do a joint degree with MIT and the Academy.

But though the sky above me now is a similarly pristine blue, and the sun is shining more strongly than I've seen since we crashed some eight months ago, I don't feel much like the B'Elanna of that perfect October day – the one who thought her life was finally getting started. I'm feeling a lot more like the B'Elanna from the following January, when Cambridge was buried under a half-meter of snow and ice. The one that was suspended for breaking a TA's jaw and missed her fellowship interview. The one that felt like every door had been slammed shut and had discovered yet another place she couldn't make work.

Because I've been staring at this damn computer modeling for five hours straight and nothing has changed. I've tried tweaking every parameter, cajoling every algorithm, outright begging for a different answer. It always comes up the same.

It's not fair. We've survived so much. The initial crash, the terrible winter. Losing our captain, our security chief, most of our friends. Malnutrition, illness, death. We've been fighting hard — for each other, sometimes with each other — but nearly all of us have kept going.

It's all been for nothing. Because in nine months – a year if we're very, very lucky – the lights are going out for good.

Thanks to everyone here that's read my stuff, and especially to those that have taken the time to comment! I do hope you'll come check out the rest of the story as it gets post on Archive of Our Own!