V
Janeway
They don't expect her to decline the promotion, and she doesn't, but she does ask for a leave of absence while she considers her next steps. The admiralty grants her request with an air of polite incredulity. Owen in particular looks alarmed.
In truth, it takes a Herculean effort not to sign on to the first deep space mission in need of a captain, though she has an inkling that, all things considered, they wouldn't send her far no matter what she wants. But to accept the promotion means to stay on Earth, and she's not sure that she can, or not gracefully, anyway. Her crew is splintering, returning to their families, promising to stay in touch, but. Turns out Earth isn't home for a lot of them. She loses track of her people quickly and it breaks something in her that she didn't even know was there. This is ridiculous, she thinks impatiently. This was the whole point of getting home. But for seven years she's shared meals with them, celebrated and mourned with them, hell, even died with them a few times, and now that they are no longer a crew, she finds herself at odds.
She deliberately does not enquire about Chakotay's whereabouts, or Seven's. Whether they're still quartered nearby or have found, together, somewhere permanent to –
Among other reasons not to stay, if she stays... Well, she imagines she'll know a lot more than she wants to know. If she goes, she'll never have to.
It's unforgivable, really. She has a duty to both of them. They may not be under her command anymore, but they've been a family for all this time, and Seven in particular will be overwhelmed by this transition. She tries to reassure herself that Starfleet is, by all accounts, taking exemplary care of everyone, and that she can hardly be needed –
(and by Seven least of all, now that she –)
– all things considered, and that it's reasonable for her to be tied up in debriefings, that nobody expects her to be always in all places, nor all things to all people… despite that this is exactly what's been demanded of her for the past seven years and the crew knows that she has only rarely begrudged them it.
She begins and then deletes several messages to Chakotay, to Seven, and once, in a fit of mad magnanimity, to both of them together… and finally decides to check in on Tom and B'Elanna instead. Of all the burdens she's had to bear –
More than once, she considers leaving altogether. Resigning. Retiring. Maybe she's done enough. After all, this is not the same Federation she left, and she is not the same woman. She missed an entire war; maybe she should count herself lucky and pack up her career before there's another.
Eventually, Tuvok seeks her out. He asks nothing of her except that she join him on Vulcan for a time. His request is one she can't possibly refuse, because he asks her to stand as a member of his family as he undergoes the fal-tor-voh. She's pretty sure he knows exactly what he's doing, putting it like that. She knows for a fact he does not need her to be there. But she goes. For Tuvok, her oldest and most uncomplicated friend, anything.
T'Pel supplies her with airy robes of beige and white better suited to the Vulcan desert than a Starfleet uniform, and the act of replacing one set of garments with the other feels purifying. Under the auspices of helping Tuvok heal, she begins to learn a new language, a desert alphabet, and tries to write a version of her story in which she is whole without a poet-warrior standing at her left. Without a man upon whom her story's happy ending has recklessly depended for such a long time.