Epilogue
Together
Kathryn finally accepts the proffered promotion, and then a position at Starfleet Science in Quantum Mechanics, and the collective sigh of relief from the Admiralty can be heard lightyears away. Chakotay is offered a professorship at the Academy in Xenoarchaeology, a career he'd long thought a pipe dream… but Starfleet seems highly motivated to keep Voyager's former crew close, and happy. Still recovering from a Federation-wide blow to morale, Voyager's return is the best PR campaign anyone at Communications could have hoped for. Kathryn and Chakotay are just glad to be, at long last, peers, but quite frankly they'll take whatever Starfleet wants to give them. It's more than they'd expected by several orders of magnitude, considering the Maquis progress reports requested before they'd even left the Delta Quadrant.
By the power and glory of transporter technology, they eschew settling in San Francisco and find a well-equipped cabin in the Mojave, just the other side of Death Valley. Kathryn loves the vast openness of this desert, its quietude, its vivid hues and then perfect dark; and though her work takes her off-world often enough, when she misses the stars she need only look up, the center of their galaxy more vivid here than perhaps anywhere else on Earth.
The cabin, though thoroughly modernized, does not come with a bathtub. And so one day Kathryn finds Chakotay out back when she returns home, odd bits and pieces strewn about, his actual supplies hidden out of sight so that she won't catch on too quickly. And she asks, "What are you working on?"
And, grinning, he tells her, "I'm building something."
And she looks askance at the haphazard piles all around him and asks, skeptically, "What could you be building?"
He laughs, then, and finally she gets it. As gestures go it's a little on the nose, but it elites from her a wide grin nonetheless, and her smile is the scaffolding of his every hope and wild dream, so he takes it as win.
Their mutual decision to begin again was both simple and not. They have loved each other for what feels like an age already, and if the straight roadhad been lost for a while – if they've each taken it in turns for seven years to feel hurt, neglected, betrayed, forgiven by the other – well, what's the rest of their lives for if not the making up of lost time? And yet, Chakotay carries a burden of guilt that he has not yet learned how to resolve. He disappointed a lot of people – Kathryn and Seven, but also everyone who cares about them – and he struggles to reconcile his actions with the man he'd thought he was. And so he tends to be solicitous of Kathryn in a way that she does not entirely welcome, feeling no particular need, after everything, to make him grovel.
For her part, Kathryn had already done the heavy lifting of her healing on Vulcan, but because she ishuman, she still has moments of doubt and insecurity – not only about him, or them, but decisions made on Voyager that Starfleet might have been all too happy to conciliate, but she's not. They sometimes talk about Lessing and Ransom, and it's the only time he sees fear in her eyes, unsure that he has truly forgiven her or that she is allowed to forgive herself. A voice in the back of her mind that sounds suspiciously like Tuvok's reminds her to stay present in this moment, and not dwell on the past, or, for that matter, the future. She makes the effort.
She misses Tuvok more than she might have expected, and based on the frequency with which he manages to find a plausible reason to contact her, she guesses Tuvok misses her, too, in his way. Of course, she reflects warmly, he has always written to her whenever they've been apart. Her profound gratitude transcends every language she knows, so it's lucky that Tuvok understands her so well. Their time together – his home a refuge, his resolute friendship a balm for her soul – has served as the bracing foundation upon which she could begin to rebuild her life, here, with Chakotay.
"I can't say I ever expected to be in Tuvok's debt," Chakotay chuckles wryly on the night that Kathryn shares the story of her time on Vulcan with him. But here they are – and he's not complaining.
And like a dam bursting, Kathryn finally reaches out to the others: she never lost touch with Tom and B'Elanna, but now she also makes time to catch up with the Doctor, and Lieutenant Harry Kim, and her shared ordeal with Seven has brought them paradoxically closer, though Seven still only comms Kathryn when she knows Chakotay will be elsewhere. And HQ regularly connects them to Neelix, who's been so sweetly ecstatic to learn of the new dynamic between the Command Team, and the three of them chat about Dexa and the boy and everything and nothing at all.
Kathryn has been so tightly wound for such a long time that this openness with her former crew is like a gift to them all, and to herself. There is a new lightness about her, and often Chakotay finds himself transfixed, awed that she is real and this is real and they are real at long last. He watches as she wraps herself in a woolen throw and pads softly through their home, coffee mug ever in hand, her auburn hair catching the light from the setting sun. She has taken on the aspect of the desert, he thinks, not for the first time. She is imbued with the steady heat of it, the lightness of its breezes, its kaleidoscope of sand and rust and turquoise, the pink-purple-orange brilliance of dusk and dawn. Its solidity and ardent extremes. They contain multitudes, Kathryn and her desert.
And it suits her, this new life. And he, too, is at peace.