Seeing Justin's image on the small screen was a little like watching a dead man come back to life. Her heart twinged looking at his face again, at those piercing blue eyes—
And at that goddamned third pip that had caused all of this trouble.
"You asked me not to contact you until you were ready to talk. But if you're watching this, then I'll assume you are," he began, staring stoically at the screen. "This isn't the way I want things to go between us. I fucked up. And I didn't just screw myself over. I screwed you over. I spent half a year working to make sure you didn't get hurt. In the end I was the one who hurt you. I have to accept the consequences of that."
Taking responsibility was a waypoint on the road to an apology, right? But in Justin Tighe's world it was often a dead-end. She pinched the bridge of her nose as he continued.
"I know I left unexpectedly. This mission is…" He pursed his lips in a way that made her think he wasn't just contemplating his next statement but also deciding how much to hold back. "I've got some unfinished business to take care of. When I'm done, you'll have my full attention. Lord knows you haven't had it before. I'll be back in a few weeks. Comm me then if you want to talk. I love you."
The recording ended abruptly and returned to the main screen.
Kathryn let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding. Lacing her fingers together, she stared down at her hands in her lap and mulled over his message. Did the man always have to be on the fringes of a combat situation to make relationship decisions? They'd just come down off of the Urtea II incident when he'd admitted his interest in her. Only when he was getting spun up for another covert mission had he recorded this message to get back into her good graces.
The idea that he'd taken this mission left her uneasy. Kathryn regretted kicking him out of her dance studio program when they'd argued. Now it seemed his desire to discus his mission choices with her had been about more than simple pros and cons.
Justin's vague mention of 'unfinished business' lingered in her mind. While he'd been her example of how to put a painful past in the rear-view mirror, after talking to Darren, she began to wonder if Justin had never really done that. She had to talk to him. And she had to find out what happened on that mission two years earlier.
"Computer, alert me when Lieutenant Commander Justin Tighe returns to Earth orbit." The computer confirmed her request. First action item complete, she pulled the comconsole back towards her and moved on to the second.
With only the name of a ship and an approximate stardate to get her started, she began to piece together the events of a mission two years' prior gone horribly wrong. Her fingers tapped at the console as she sifted through official records and scant news stories. It didn't take long before she was poring over casualty lists. As Darren warned, there had been many. She read them all.
Official records and an inquiry found that faulty intelligence and hubris on the part of the ship's captain were to blame for the mission's disastrous end. A special operations group had been massively overwhelmed. The groups sent to the planet after them had met a similar fate. The captain hadn't known when to quit.
Nowhere was Justin's name mentioned. The closest she came was finding a list of Starfleet Rangers, identified not by names but by ages. A silent professional, he'd been reduced in his capture to "Starfleet Ranger, Lieutenant JG, injured." But there were three of those. She could only assume one had been him.
And so she read the obituaries.
Each person's epitaph seemed written on the lines of their visage. She saw so much eager hope and determination in those Starfleet service photos, the same as she saw in her own. These men and women could just as easily have been her or Justin. She reminded herself that she was going to have to learn to detach a little if she decided to follow the command track.
That realization didn't make the pair of dark blue eyes that stared back at her from a security officer's obituary photograph any less startling. The face seemed oddly familiar. As she read the text under the woman's name, the invisible dots from details of the woman's life seemed to connect in an indelible line right to Kathryn.
"My God," she breathed. "Bloody hell, Justin. Why didn't you tell me?"
#
Dinnertime was approaching by the time Kathryn returned home. The front screen door slammed closed behind Kathryn in the summer breeze. Her father emerged from his study on hearing this, surprising her in the foyer as she hung up her sun hat and satchel.
"Can I ask how it went?" he asked.
"He's gone, just as we thought." She slipped her fingers into the pocket of the satchel and pulled out the precious isolinear chip. "But he left a message. Thanks for helping me, Dad."
He gave her a curt nod. "I'm sorry you didn't find him."
"Me too. But I think I found what I needed." The late afternoon light glinted off the chip. Kathryn's stomach twisted at the waiting, the nagging worry that he wouldn't make it home before she could look at him with truly open eyes. Her gaze fell to her shoes and in that moment she could see his ankle, twisted and broken in the dark alien night.
"Go. You have to get to the transporter site!" he'd demanded.
Standing in the foyer, her heart began to race. "Kathryn?" Her father's voice seemed just as distant as that Cardassian planet. Her head snapped up but she felt paralyzed, unsure what to do. The one person she had felt comfortable talking about Urtea II to was gone.
"Those are Toskanar dogs. They'll tear you to pieces…"
Justin's voice, hoarse with pain and desperation, still echoed in her mind as clearly as it had on that dark night when he'd tried to convince her to save herself while she could.
Kathryn blinked, shook the tremor out of her hands and took a calming breath. "I thought about what you said this morning. And I think I could use a listening ear right about now."
The air between them was heavy and silent for a moment, and then Admiral Janeway slowly pushed open the door to his study. Dry-eyed, with some invisible vice-grip on her throat, she sat and told him everything their security clearances allowed her to tell, and him to hear. All of it just made her father nod.
"Seriously, Dad, you're just going to sit there and not say anything?" she finally asked.
He folded his hands and rested his arms against his thighs. "Kathryn, you have been through an ordeal that would break most people. And then you fell in love while trying to make sense of what you just endured. That's a lot of good and bad experiences to process all at once. I want to take the woman who I still remember as my little girl and hold her and make it all better, but I won't. You've always valued your independence. So tell me how I can help."
She sighed, resting her elbows on her knees as she stared out the very window that had been the impetus of their conversation earlier that morning. "Unless you can help me make up my mind, I don't know what you can do. With my career, with Admiral Paris, even with Justin — Every option seems somehow like I'm betraying myself. No choice is good."
Her father looked at her pensively, then rose from his seat on the couch and walked over to his bookshelf. "Let me show you something." He gently picked up a palm-sized gold clock, a gift Kathryn recalled he received from colleagues when he'd made Vice Admiral, then walked back and handed it to her.
"Look at the seal," he commanded. "What does it say?"
On the face of the clock was engraved a version of the Starfleet seal she didn't recognize. Behind its ticking hands she could see words and read them out loud. "Ad Astra Per Aspera." This wasn't the motto of Starfleet, or the Academy, which she knew: Ex Astris Scientia—from the stars, knowledge. Latin fortunately hadn't been one of the esoteric subjects her parents had forced her to study. She looked to her father for a translation. "I don't know what it means, Dad."
He smiled. "To the stars, through hardships." Her father took a seat on the couch next to her. "That was the seal in the pre-Federation era. The admiralty has long gifted items with that logo as a reminder that the hard work we do to secure and maintain peace is what allows humanity to be explorers. Then, and only then, do we earn our place amongst the stars."
She glared at him. "In other words, toughen up, buttercup."
His smile became more broad. "You're tough enough already. Too tough makes one inflexible, and inflexible things break. No, what I'm saying is that you need to remember who you are.
"When you were young, there was nothing you wanted more than to join Starfleet. That motivation, in part, led you to seek out Admiral Paris as a mentor. And I may be so bold as to say that I think it led you to save Lieutenant Commander Tighe's life as well. Talk to that young woman, Kathryn, and I think you'll have your answer."
Edward Janeway gave her a gentle smile, then stood and walked out of the room, leaving Kathryn alone in the study with nothing but the sound of a ticking timepiece and her own thoughts.
#
"You want to see options for accelerating your treatment progress?"
A week after her conversation with her father, Kathryn once again found herself on the proverbial therapist's couch, the twice-weekly event by which she marked the time since she'd returned to Earth.
"Yes, ma'am," she told her counselor. "I feel like I've hit a plateau in my recovery. Or perhaps, a platform to launch myself from. I'd like to make some kind of change so I can pursue the next step in my career."
Counselor Deanna Troi reminded her of Justin in her pale face, sharp features and dark hair. It didn't help that she was Betazoid, as he'd predicted her counselor might be.
The woman folded her hands and rested them on her crossed knees. "Trying to take the next step in your career? Or to force yourself to make a decision about it?" Kathryn inclined her head. "You've been home for two months and I previously felt that you had no sense of urgency to make a decision. Now, I sense urgency, but I can tell you're still just as confused about the decision as you were a week ago."
Kathryn frowned. Command or intelligence? Using science to hunt Cardassians, or fighting bureaucratic betrayals in the trenches by becoming a commander? Counter to what her father had said, her young adult self had never dreamed of either one of those career options.
"You're not wrong," she admitted reluctantly, then jutted her chin up. "So are you going to help me move my treatments along or not?"
Counselor Troi, who seemed hardly any older than she, smiled gently. "I think you're moving yourself along just fine. But if you want, we can add some bilateral memory engram desensitization. It's not without risk, but it should make the memories less disturbing."
"What risk?" Kathryn asked.
"A very small risk that you'll lose emotions associated with other powerful memories that you formed around the same time. Falling in love with Lieutenant Commander Tighe, for example."
Kathryn's eyes narrowed. How sadistic life was that she was being given to choose between keeping memories of Justin and memories of her torture.
The moment elongating before she responded quietly. "I'll have to think about it."
"It's not the only way to move forward, Kathryn. You've mentioned conversations with Justin, with your father, your mother…have you spoken to Admiral Paris? My understanding is he's resumed light duties. He may be available if you'd want to talk with him."
Kathryn startled, her eyebrows snapping together in frustration. "He knowingly sent me into this mess-Because of my lineage. Not because of my skills. I could accept it if I'd earned the post. We've been over this."
"True," Troi responded, her voice measured and calm. "But from the sounds of it, he regretted the decision immensely. Kathryn, if you choose command, then you, like the admiral, will make command mistakes. You will have to learn to forgive to forgive your leadership, to forgive your crew, and most importantly to forgive yourself. It's a skill that will help you do your work better no matter what career path you choose. Some people are more afraid to forgive someone who's maligned them than they are staring a phaser rifle in the face. But maybe the chance to practice that compassion will help you decide what you want to do and advance your recovery."
Kathryn digested her comment like a potent but bitter pill for a long-festering illness. "They may have told me that you were a recent graduate, but, you're damn good at your job, Deanna."
Troi smiled gently. "I would say the same of you, Lieutenant."
Kathryn left the office and snaked her way through the rabbit warren of halls and offices that was Starfleet Medical's main building, all the while chewing on the counselor's comments. She wasn't sure what a conversation with Admiral Paris would look like. It seemed unfair to dive in after months apart and immediately ask him for another apology for his actions.
But perhaps they could talk about mundane things. He'd been her trusted mentor for years. Trust was like a cut ring: you could always tell that a connection between the pieces had been there, even when it was broken. Her feet carried her towards Admiral Paris's office. His attaché would be there. Kathryn knew she could request a spot on his calendar or at least superficially find out how the Admiral was faring. She arrived and reached up to tap the entry pad.
The chirp of her commbadge interrupted her. "Personal notification for Lieutenant Kathryn Janeway: Lieutenant Commander Justin Tighe has returned to Earth."
"Where is he?" she inquired, her body suddenly tense with anxiety and excitement.
The answer the computer gave came as little surprise. She turned on her heel and headed out of the building. Admiral Paris could wait.
#
The mid-morning sun had already burned the fog off San Francisco Bay. The view of the water was unusually clear as she crested the hills of Starfleet's Memorial Gardens. She was rushing; the detour she'd made to quickly replicate a dress uniform and change into it had taken precious time.
But the gesture mattered, and she expected Justin wasn't going to be going anywhere for a while. Better that he had some time to himself before she descended on him like the stalker she felt she was. Kathryn crested the hill where the computer had told her he'd be. She tugged at her tunic as the lone figure came into view.
He stood in the midst of seemingly endless rows of polished black stone markers that rested in the grass, a small box clasped in his hands. He too was in full dress uniform. Under other circumstances she would've teased him that he 'cleaned up well,' but for the moment she'd have to tuck her admiration of his physical attributes away.
The dress boots she wore clicked on the pavement, and on hearing this Justin's head snapped up. He looked at her with surprise, then confusion, as if trying to decide if she were a mirage. She slowed her pace and in a few short moments closed the distance between them. By then the emotionless mask of the soldier had been replaced on his face again. But she couldn't mistake the remnants of grief that dampened the corners of his eyes.
He didn't move. He didn't speak. Her instincts told her to hold him, to comfort him, even though she wasn't sure how he'd respond. So she wrapped him instead in the soft embrace of her voice.
"Tell me about her."