The Price of Victory

CW: Psychotic break

AUTHOR NOTE: I have posted two chapters today rather than the usual one, so make sure you read chapter 28 before you read this one! The final two chapters will be up soon.

They say that I never lost consciousness — that I simply stood there, braced in Mike's arms, staring wide-eyed at my husband. Harry called my name, but I didn't even blink. When Mike tried to guide me towards the turbolift, I would not move.

I was aware of nothing until I woke up to a fit of worried voices in Equinox's sickbay.

At first, I had no memory of the mission at all. It wasn't until later, as I slept in the guest quarters on Equinox, that the horror and tragedy returned to me in my dreams.

I woke up, weeping, after only a short three hours of restless sleep. Had Ransom yet contacted Voyager and told them the news? Had Chakotay told our captain what I had done, and broken her weary heart?

I should have protected Annika. I was her team leader, and I failed her. The crew's criticism was right all along — I was not ready to be on a mission. My selfishness had cost Annika's life.

I could barely breathe through the weight of my sobs. Harry tried to console me, but I pulled away. His touch burned my skin like sandpaper.

Frailty defined me. I was exhausted from the constant barrage of nanoprobes trying to assimilate me. Thousands of drones had been on that sphere, and the Collective wanted payback.

They wanted me.

I knew it was irrational, but Marnah insisted that if Harry touched me, the nanoprobes might slip into his body, too. I had to keep to myself, she said; no skin-to-skin contact. I was dangerous. I could destroy everyone, just like I had destroyed Annika.

I curled into a tight ball at the edge of the bed.

"Talia," Harry pleaded.

"Please just leave me alone," I whispered.

"I'm sorry," he said as he started to cry. "I'm sorry."

His words burned right through me, and I held onto the pain. I did not deserve anyone's sympathy. I deserved punishment.

"The responsibility is on you now," Marnah said. "You are small, weak, and insignificant. You have foolishly traded away the queens, and now the path of the Prophets has become narrow. The odds are impossible."

Impossible is a word for the faithless, I insisted.

"Indeed. That is exactly what you have become, cheli — faithless. That is why you failed."

Somehow, in the haze of my mind, I found myself wandering through the desert where the worst of my failures were born. I heard Tom's voice calling out to me, and soon he was at my side, guiding me back to Noss' ship. His love for me had been so pure, so unfailing. He gave himself away to pull me out of a dark pit. He cleaned me up, and tried to scrub every last sin from my skin.

The feel and smell of dirt clung to my fingertips, even after Tom had washed it away.

My hands reached for him, landing first on his chest before sliding up to his shoulders to pull him towards me, and then moving to grip both sides of his face. The dirt from my fingers smeared across his cheeks. "Tommy —"

"I won't lose you, too," Tom insisted as he grabbed my shoulders firmly with both hands. "I need you."

Then, we were kissing with desperate, hungry need. I could taste dirt in my mouth, now also in his. It covered us both.

From behind, I felt the loving caress of Harry's lips slide along the curve of my neck. I turned my face from Tom, towards my husband. When Harry's lips met mine, I realized that he, too, tasted of dirt.

Quite suddenly, I was kneeling over Annika's grave, alone. I sunk my fingers as far down into the dirt as possible, pressed my forehead to the ground, and wailed.

Wrong. It was wrong. It was all wrong. Nothing — not even a miraculous return to the Alpha Quadrant — could ever make it right again.

When I awoke halfway through the night, I thought that perhaps I had buried myself on that planet after all.

It was very early in the morning when Harry found me curled into a corner near the replicator, buried in a pile of blankets.

"Computer, lights to thirty percent," he ordered groggily. Kneeling down beside me, he dug me out of the blankets before placing a hand to my forehead. "Shit. Talia, you're drenched. Why did you replicate all these blankets? Are you sick?"

I blinked.

Harry grasped both of my shoulders firmly. "Talia? Are you with me?"

I nodded.

My mind reeled with questions. How long had I been frozen in the ice? How had I even gotten here? Why wasn't I in my quarters?

Meanwhile, Harry left to fetch a tricorder. By the time he returned and began checking my vitals, I had shoved away the rest of the covers, exposing my slick skin to the ambient air.

I was no longer so cold, but I still did not know what temperature I felt like.

"No fever," Harry murmured. "Everything looks fine."

He snapped the tricorder shut and let out a sigh. Then, stretching a hand out to my face, he lightly stroked the skin from my temple down to my chin. "What happened, ja'lat?"

I shrugged my shoulders.

"Can you tell me anything? Why were you wrapped in all those blankets?"

"Cold," I whispered.

"Did you have a nightmare?"

I closed my eyes and tried to think back. Failing to remember, I opened them again and shrugged. "I don't know."

"Do you want to go back to bed?"

"No."

"Do you want to stay here?"

I paused, letting myself consider the thought. Then, I shook my head. "No."

"Tell me what you need from me, Talia. What do you want to do?"

"I don't know."

He sighed. "Okay. How about a nice sonic shower? Would that help you feel better?"

Again, I paused. Then, I nodded.

Harry led me to the bathroom and helped me undress, raising goosebumps as his fingers gently brushed along my sweaty skin. Divesting himself of his own clothes, he activated the sonic shower and led me to stand in front of it, its pulsing vibrations gently lifting and dissolving every particle of grime from my body.

When I leaned back against Harry's chest, he slipped his arms around my waist and pressed a tender kiss to the juncture of my neck and shoulder.

I sighed. It felt so good. He felt so good.

One kiss was followed by another... and another.

For the first time since I had left on that fateful scouting mission so long ago, I relaxed into his touch. My head lolled to one side. He carefully undid the band that held my hair, loosening the long, copper waves before he swept them over one shoulder so that they cascaded down over my breast.

I inhaled deeply as he continued to cover my neck in gentle kisses. Rolling my head back to rest against his chest, I laced my fingers with his and pulled him closer.

But then I became aware of his unintentional arousal, and an awful flare of panic shattered the sweet moment with searing heat. Seemingly out of nowhere — insofar as Harry would be able to tell, at least — I started to cry.

It began with a jarring sob that escaped my lips, making Harry stop in his tracks to ask if he'd hurt me somehow. I shook my head, and then my whole body was trembling with the violent onset of terror. My shoulders began to curl over my chest and my knees gave out beneath me.

I could smell dirt. I could taste it. I breathed it and I bled it. It corrupted everything, and so did I.

Harry caught me and slowly guided me to the floor, still bracing my body against his. Then, once we were sitting, he turned me towards himself and began to rock me gently back and forth, murmuring soft words of comfort into my ear.

"I'm sorry," I finally choked out. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry —"

"Shh," he soothed. "Talia, hey. It's okay. You're alright. I'm here. I love you."

"I can't." I pulled my knees into my chest and hugged them tightly. "I can't," I repeated, even as he continued to try to calm me. "I can't. I'm sorry. I can't."

Harry squeezed me tightly. "It's okay —"

"No!" I shouted at him, breaking my grip on my legs, wrenching free of his grasp, and scrambling along the floor to get away from him. "It's not okay! It's not! Nothing is okay! I ruined —" I gasped for air as a sob choked me, "— everything. Why? What's wrong with me? I didn't mean to. I didn't know. I'm sorry."

"I know, Talia," he insisted calmly. "You did nothing wrong. You have nothing to be sorry for. None of this was your fault."

My mind refused to register his comforting words. It had been caught in the rapids of panic and dragged under the surface. On some level, I knew I was being irrational. But when I looked to Harry and saw him covered in dirt, the last echo of sanity within me was pulled under the water and began to drown.

Frantically, my eyes darted around the room as I realized that everything — everything — was soiled. Dirt had smeared across the floor where I dragged myself away from Harry. It was on my clothes, piled in the corner. It covered the sonic shower panel.

Everywhere. It was everywhere.

I tried to scrub it from my skin, but it just kept getting thicker. I begged Harry to help me, but it filled my mouth until I choked on it.

It was burying me alive.

I clawed at myself desperately as the dirt continued to build and harden all over my body. My mouth was open, alternately screaming for help and gasping for air, but I felt like I was accomplishing neither. Somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard Harry com for an emergency medical beam-out. I could practically feel myself being crushed to death under the weight of my own failures.

But then, there was light.

It was warm and radiant, bursting forth from within and burning away all of the corruption that had tried to bury me. Reaching into the depths of my mind, it dragged my sanity back up to the surface so that I could breathe again. It wrapped itself around my bare skin to give me clean clothes, and then it laid me gently in a bed of the most perfect softness and warmth.

Sleep, said a gentle voice that I recognized right away. It was Kes, saving me yet again from my own self-destruction. You're safe now, Talia. Sleep.

And so I did.

My memories of the following days were fragmentary at best.

The first time I woke up on Voyager, I tackled Captain Janeway to the floor because Marnah threatened to have her assimilated.

On a different day, every console in sickbay was screaming horrible things at me — each one speaking in a different language — until I couldn't even hear Harry talking anymore.

Still another occasion ended with me being restrained and sedated because I scratched my arms until they bled. It was my desperate attempt to scrape away the dirt that lingered within my skin from Rojel's grave.

The next time I awoke, it was Chakotay who kept watch over me. He was sitting quietly at my bedside, reading a somewhat-weathered copy of Dante's Inferno.

"Midway upon the journey of our life," I quoted aloud, "I found myself within a forest dark; for the straightforward pathway had been lost."

Chakotay looked up, a bit startled at first, and met my gaze before allowing a relieved smile to blossom across his face.

"Ah, me," I continued. "How hard a thing it is to say; what was this forest savage, rough, and stern, which in the very thought renews the fear."

"I didn't know you were a fan of Dante," Chakotay said, closing the book and leaning towards me.

I shrugged weakly. "My grandmother loves that book."

He nodded. "I should have guessed. This one is Kathryn's."

I hummed. "Not what I would expect."

"How are you feeling?"

"Drugged, anxious, exhausted... I've been better."

"What's the last thing you remember?"

I closed my eyes to think back, but everything was blurred together. "I don't know," I whispered. "I think I remember being restrained, but it's hard to hold onto the images."

Chakotay slipped his hand into mine. "Don't stress over it. Maybe it's better that you can't remember."

I opened my eyes and searched the depths of his familiar dark-brown ones. "What's wrong with me, Tay?"

A heavy sigh escaped from his lips, and he gave my hand a squeeze. "You're very sick, Talia. We put you back on duty too soon. You were sent on a mission, but something went wrong. It stressed you out. When we got back, you suffered a psychotic break."

"Did I hurt anybody?"

Chakotay shook his head. "No. But you tried to hurt yourself. That's when you were restrained."

I turned my head to look up at the ceiling, closing my eyes to force the tears out. "I remember the planet — the one in the gravity sinkhole. I died there, and now I'm just a ghost. You know that's why I'm so fucked up, right? And why the nanoprobes can't assimilate me. They want to, but they can't, because I'm not really here. I'm frozen in the ice at the bottom of the well."

My friend looked at me as if he wanted to cry. "We're getting you out of the ice, Talia."

I shook my head. "This is my punishment."

"For what?"

"I rejected Marnah's purpose for me. Turned away from the Prophets. I became selfish."

"What are you talking about? What purpose?"

"Ah'no Eelo Talia Kendra'yan, tahl'ral melar's Bajor-B'hava'el."

"I don't understand," Chakotay said.

"She made me for a purpose. She played with the charter; thirty-one rigged the game. I didn't want to play, but the gods forced me in. I was the carrier, the Prophet-bearer. Annika needed me, but I fell out of time. I didn't have what she needed, because I'm a ghost now. She sacrificed herself instead. But we've exchanged the queens too soon."

I shook my head as I began to cry. How could I explain the weight of all my failures when logic kept slipping through my fingers? "I don't know what I'm saying, Tay. I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't know —"

With his free hand, Chakotay began to wipe at my tears with a soft piece of cloth. "Shh, Talia. It's okay. You've been through a lot. You don't need to know anything right now."

"It's too soon for the endgame," I whimpered. "Too soon... too soon. It's too soon."