SOLITUDE DELIVERED
By KJaneway115
"Friendship needs no words—it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness."
-Dag Hammarskjold
PROLOGUE
"Then I guess I am alone, after all." She had said it aloud only once, years before, on a day when it had seemed that everything was falling apart. But the thought had been the underlying theme of her entire life. I am alone.
On the day she had walked home in the rain from a tennis tournament, twelve years old, burning with anger and shame at her loss, she had felt alone. At eighteen, she'd gotten into a philosophical argument with one of her professors at the Academy and had found not only the professor but the entire class against her, and she had felt alone. On her first Starfleet assignment, captured in a Cardassian prison, listening to the screams of then Captain Owen Paris as he was tortured, she had never felt as alone. In the ice of Tau Ceti Prime, desperately trying to save her father and her first fiancé, she had been certain she had never been more alone. On her first quiet night in the Delta Quadrant, when she'd finally had a moment to herself, she had sat on the sofa in her quarters, gazing out at the unfamiliar stars, seventy-thousand light-years from her second fiancé, from Starfleet, from her family, and she had known she was alone. And on the day she had made the statement to her former first officer, she had realized that in spite of her hopes to the contrary, she was as alone as she had always been.
But now, as Kathryn Janeway stood on the dock overlooking Lake George, and breathed in the cool night air, she knew that all of those times before, she hadn't truly been alone. As a child, she'd been surrounded by a supportive family. Justin had rescued her from that Cardassian prison. After his death and the death of her father, she'd had her mother, her sister, and Mark. On Voyager, she'd had Tuvok, Tom, B'Elanna, Harry, Neelix, and the Doctor. She'd had Chakotay. The Lake George night was quiet. The water washed gently against the shore. She looked up at the stars she loved twinkling against the black sky, and questioned whether she would ever again travel among them. She wondered what course her life would take now. The solitude that had been the theme of her life washed over her. The long, lonely cry of a loon echoed across the still water, but no mate replied. In that moment, Kathryn Janeway knew that all the times before had prepared her to face this moment when she was truly, utterly and completely alone.
