She smiles, talks to just about everyone, dances with too many if her sore feet are proof, nods at Seven from afar, poses with the Doctor for a couple of holoimages, and avoids Chakotay.
Kathryn is pleased for him. After all, the event is to celebrate the well-deserved promotions of Captain Chakotay and most of the former Maquis crew members who have elected to stay in Starfleet.
She is pleased for all of them. Until the last minute, she had feared Starfleet might break its promise to absolve the renegades, but Admiral Paris has proven once again to be a friend she can count on. Some people do not change.
Finding a moment to herself, she sips a drink and smiles at a joke drifting from a nearby table. She's probably heard it before, but seven years is a long time. Seven years that are already disappearing in the midst of unreliable memories.
It's not like she is allowed to forget much, the endless debriefings a constant reminder of exactly what happened, on which precise stardate and at no less accurate spatial coordinates. The panel of admirals views Voyager's logs in the darkness of the interview room.
She answers their queries – the why's, the how's – to the best of her recollection. Frankly, if it wasn't for the logs, she would hardly remember what she was thinking or hoping to achieve every single second of seven long years. Planets, species and missions blend into white noise, space battles fuse into one giant fracas.
Cheers resonate from nearby. Chell has brought a cake to celebrate the birthday of a crewmate's daughter, and family and friends gather around the table, congratulating the young child.
Kathryn finds herself clapping too. Voices she hasn't heard for decades wrap around her. Seven candles stand at attention on the hand-made cake. She blows them all out in one mighty puff. Her mother takes a holoimage of the occasion, and her father helps open the birthday present, an old-style Newtonian telescope, all replicated brass and real glass lenses. That evening they go outside in the cold of a moonless Indiana night, well past her usual bed time. That's how Galileo saw Jupiter, says her mum, and they spend the next hour looking at the planets of the solar system – Mars, Venus, Saturn.
She never tells her parents how disappointed she'd been, peering at tiny faints dots lost in a sea of black. But she keeps the telescope, dutifully recording her sightings over several months, longing to go in space instead and explore the vast expanse beyond. Two years later, she goes to Mars and she's hooked. Space is where she'll belong from then on.
She wonders where the telescope is now.
Admiral Paris is talking to her. He is pushing Starfleet to give medals to her crew to recognise their valour and fortitude he says, and she'll be the one presenting them of course. Soon, in a month or so, once her debriefings are finished and her Rear Admiral position secured. He is pleased, pats her on the shoulder then leads another toast in her honour and everyone stands up and turns to face her. She gracefully accepts the well-meaning compliments, responds with kind words, thanks her crew once more.
The room gets noisier as the night draws on and her headache flares. She excuses herself, taking refuge on the large balcony overlooking the city, its bright lights dotting a horizon which is both beautiful and familiar. Leaning her forearms against the rail, she can't understand the stomach churning feeling that she's not home, not really. She's flailing about on Earth, looking for an anchor to a world that's out of phase with her.
The night sky ignites with fireworks and a laser show over the harbour for a celebration she knows nothing about. The thumps of the explosions lunge towards her, the slight delay between blinding light and ear-shattering blast pulling at her memory.
Phaser beams streak past and the bulkheads groan in a concerted echo under hits from another enemy, another species who took umbrage at Voyager crossing their borders. Smoke rises. People drop around her, moaning in pain. When the lights come back in the interview room, she is shaking like a cadet at her first live firing exercise. The panel asks if she wants a recess. She says she's fine and the debriefing continues even as her mind weeps for those who died that day.
She's barely fourteen when she sees her father cry for the first time. She's seen him sad, angry, but never those silent glistening tears as he recites the names of those who did not come back from the valiant mission he's led. He has recovered by the time a Starfleet admiral pins yet another medal on his chest. When he sits down in the front row, his wife holds his hand and doesn't let go. Kathryn does the same on his left.
Like her father's, her memory is also punctuated by deaths, small crosses standing forlorn by the side of the road. A face she has not seen for a long time appears on the wall screen of the debriefing room, a name is called, and she gets side-tracked, pulled back to when their lives shortened to nothing. She loses herself in those moments, reliving the decisions that cost them their futures. The admirals repeat their questions until she comes back to Earth with a thud. They ignore her lapses and move on to the next log.
She does not talk of her jumbled mind to the lengthy line of counsellors jostling to see to the famous Captain Janeway. The ones she trusts, those who've tasted deep space themselves she sends to her crew, saying they'll do more good there. The others are pompous clods or too awestruck to force her to open up. She gets rid of them fast.
The fireworks have ended and the night closes in, clouds hiding the stars. She shivers in the cold evening but stays outside, away from the gathering. A waiter walks by, a laden tray on offer. Tearing herself from the vista, she exchanges her empty glass for a full one.
Ensign Kim—Lieutenant Kim—approaches, his arm wrapped around his fiancée's shoulders. They are both so young, she feels an ache just looking at them. He tells his former captain all about how he met Libby at his birthday party when he was a fourth-year cadet at the Academy.
Her mind floats away once more, Harry's voice flowing around her. She can't remember the day she turned twenty-one. The days and months had rushed past, packed with arduous study and intensive training. She's got no time for parties or boyfriends. The year passes quickly, that's all she can recall.
She congratulates the couple, embraces Harry who returns her hug with great gentleness. When they leave, she goes back to the reception. The crowd is thinning, people mulling near the exits. From across the room, she spots Seven and the Doctor talking to Chakotay, his dress uniform hanging so elegantly on him. Even at that distance, she senses the laughter in the corner of his eyes, in his relaxed stance. He puts his hand on Seven's shoulder, nods his agreement at whatever the EMH is saying. He looks good, rested.
Voyager is home, her crew is home, finally free to decide their own future, make their own paths. Her fingers squeeze around the stem of the glass, dread filling her mind.
It's a feeling she's quite used to. Soon after her graduation, she learns fear comes in different flavours. The Academy has failed to prepare her for the consequences of what happens when one obeys orders and strays into enemy territory. The deaths of her father and fiancé shatter the rest of her.
She puts the pieces of her life back together. The command track seems logical and she throws herself into more training and study. By the time she's twenty-eight, she's on the bridge of the Billings, where she finds that there are so many more ways she can be hurt. But she will no more break than if she were made of neutronium.
B'Elanna and Tom come to say their late goodbyes for the evening. Miral snuggles against her chest, eyes heavy, stubby fist tightly holding on one of her fingers. Kathryn reluctantly gives her back to her exhausted parents.
Naomi is next, her father tongue-tied to talk to the captain who's seen more of his daughter than he's done so far. Sam's got a dreamy smile and whispers she's expecting another baby. Naomi glances back in mocked panic as the Wildman family leaves, the three of them holding hands.
She goes for a long walk with Mark, their fingers intertwined, her dog bounding ahead. It's her thirty-fifth birthday and she's back in Indiana on leave. They talk about getting married by the end of the year, having kids before too long. He is a good man, dependable and loyal to a fault. All is good, predictable. Safe.
Maybe there is a universe where that future exists right now, but she obviously opened the wrong door late that year, and has found herself astray in a dark wood ever since.
A few couples dance slowly under the glare of the lights, head against shoulder, indifferent to what's happening around them. The music has been cranked up to compensate for the smaller crowd. Most of the tables are deserted, dirty dishes strewn against white linen. The room smells of spilled wine and stale perfume.
She escapes into the corridor before finding an empty bathroom. Red eyes and pasty cheeks look back at her from above the basin. Her stomach flips.
When the heaving stops, she slides against the cold tiled wall near the door. Holding her knees tight against the chest, she closes her eyes. Once upon a time, she could have out-drunk men twice her size, but it has been nearly a year since she's tasted anything else than synthetol.
Chakotay brings a bottle of Anterian cider to her quarters. She's been wanting answers to questions she should not ask, according to him. He hides behind the Temporal Prime Directive and says very little of his meeting with her younger self when the ship shattered into separate timelines. After that evening, they talk even less and drift apart. She is forty-two a few days later and can't be bothered celebrating a non-event.
Since she stranded Voyager in the Delta quadrant, she's put her existence as anything else than the captain of a doomed ship on hold, frozen. She's not looking forward to the next seven years – an admiral before she hits fifty if Owen's right, stuck behind a desk and going home to an empty place. She's overshot her life, hurtling into nothingness at the speed of light.
She pushes herself upright, opens the tap full bore and splashes water against her face. There's a job waiting for her tomorrow. The debriefings have been moved to late afternoon, enabling her to start on Voyager's decommissioning project. Nobody but her former crew can fly that ship, with its strange fusion of alien and outdated Starfleet technologies. It is a lone ship that doesn't fit the Starfleet mould any longer. She empathises.
The piped music flares, then hushes down again. Somebody has come in the room and hovers close by. She fumbles for a towel, eyes stinging. Her hand is guided to something soft and she mutters a thank you. It's only when she looks up while dabbing her face that she sees him in the mirror, standing by her left shoulder.
As if he's always been there.
####
"Mom, Kol has—" The shout tapered off, drowned by a battalion of small feet running down the staircase.
Kathryn pulled the blanket over her head. "Your turn," she mumbled. "Birthday."
"Excuses, excuses," said Chakotay, making a show of getting up very slowly.
"You said I could sleep in while you make a cake with the kids." She peered from underneath the covers.
"Remind me," he said, throwing a T-shirt over his shoulders. "How many candles should we put on? Fifty?"
A pillow smashed against the wall behind him, half a foot from his head.
"Forty-nine, Mister, forty-nine."
"Not sure if we'll manage to fit seven times seven candles on a cake. Won't be big enough."
He closed the door quickly behind him before his wife could hurl further projectiles. Smiling to himself, he joined his young daughter and son in the kitchen and got started on the cooking.
My greatest thanks to muldy and Voyagerfictionfan for their beta work on this story.