Free (Chakotay)
I am a free man. Perhaps for the first time in my life. Acquitted by Starfleet, a sort of Maquis hero just for making it out alive. The only allegiances I have now are personal.

It feels good, as though I'm really breathing deeply for the first time. It started in the Delta Quadrant, sometime after those tenuous first months when we no longer looked over our shoulders for mutiny at every turn. Coming back interrupted that sense of peace, but I have found-- I am finding-- it again. Here. In the Alpha Quadrant.

I saw Kathryn today, went and sought her out in the temporary office space Starfleet has assigned her before they figure out whether to make her take leave or throw her back out into space. I figured I owed it to her to tell her of my resignation in person. Not that she would have cared either way. She just took in the news with that blank command face she has perfected and told me she hopes I'll be happy. Fuck it. What does she care about my happiness? Five years ago, I thought she could be my happiness, but I misjudged her ability to get emotionally invested in... anything. I tried to make her into something she wasn't: someone who could laugh, could love me, could begin to make a life with me. I let myself picture our children. Such a silly thing, really, fantasies of the sort I had about girls on Dorvan, or at the Academy. But it still had the power to hurt; and I still mourned them when I finally let them go.

After all, I wasn't about to spend my whole life pining for something I couldn't have. I'm not a monk; and, unlike some people, I don't want to be one. Ok, so Riley wasn't really my idea. But Kellin and I... if the journals I left were any indication, we really had something. And now I have Jenna. We've been together almost a year now, since that incident with the Af'tri, and it's good. Really good. We want the same things: a home, a family, some place to just sit back and be for awhile. I think we're going to take some of my old friends up on their proposal to help start up an ag colony light years away from Earth and all things 'Fleet. It'll be nice not to have to wear a uniform every damn day.

Kathryn, I'm sure, will stay in. She's too 'Fleet to leave now, too entrenched in this pattern of her life. There was a time when I would have tried to make her see the possibilities beyond it, a time when I would have told her that I could help her find herself-- who she really is. But now, well, even I don't have that sort of patience. So I'm getting the hell out of here, away from the people I served with and against and then for. This time, I'm making the leap for good.

I think I'll leave all my holos behind when we take off. I used to have one of us from a party early on in the journey-- before New Earth-- that had us both smiling. It stayed in the top drawer of my bureau because there wasn't a better place for it. Eventually, Jenna found it and made me pack it away somewhere in my closet. She said she could never get free of the expression on our faces. What bullshit. As if Kathryn Janeway could have a hold on me anymore. She's not even willing to let herself be human.

But me, well, I'm free. I don't have anything left that I have to stand for. And she's still stuck trying to make her ideals into something tangible, or trying to be so damn hard without shattering... with only herself for company.


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