Notes: Wow, look at this: an update after only a week! I'm quite proud of myself, not going to lie. In any case, I'd love to hear from you guys! What are you liking? What are you not? Do you have any idea what's wrong with our dear and beloved Captain? Let me know!

Chapter VII: Vita Principi

Everything hurt.

Kathryn drifted in and out of consciousness, borne on nebulous waves of heat and pain and cold. There were voices to either side of her, soft and emotional—though she could not seem to understand either their words or what emotion it was that colored their tones. Her left hand ached with the deep, purple pain of layered bruises, and she wondered through thick webs of exhaustion what had happened to bruise her so badly. She had only vague, hazy recollections of sudden cold, and hands, and more voices speaking over her agony.

It reminded her of something. Something she didn't like to remember. So she didn't remember it.

Instead she opened her eyes, and tried to understand where she was.

She wasn't where she expected to be—though as that thought filtered through her aching mind, she found she was not sure where she expected to be. All she knew was that she expected to see white ceiling and soothing, yellow light; that she expected to hear a lilting voice humming a long-ago composed melody that she half-knew, and to smell the crisp, clean scent of antiseptic and medicine kept in sterile bottles.

But there was only dark ceiling, and muted shadows steeped with dimmed light that she associated with late nights and an ever-pervasive headache. The air smelled like fresh coffee, and like stale coffee, and somewhere between that like old books and soap.

She was home. Or, at least, in her own quarters. She wasn't sure she could remember what "home" was right now.

A wide room bathed with the flicker of a raging fire—

A two-story, shingled house sitting at the end of a long, wending drive lined with ash trees, with a roofed porch and a barn with peeling red paint and creaking doors half a mile farther—

Stars sliding past the viewport, bathing the moss-green couch with undulating silver shadows—

Blackness, above and below, before behind—

"Easy now, Captain."

Kathryn blinked, and found herself staring up at two worried faces. One was male, with stern lines etched permanently into his forehead; the other was female, young and fair, with lips that seemed ready to smile at any second. It was the man who had spoken.

"Easy there." It was the man again. He smiled, seeing her eyes focus on his face. "Welcome back to the land of the conscious, Captain."

Kathryn frowned. Captain. The word felt like a hollow that had been carved in her throat, and then had been crammed full of something heavy and tangled and hard and rotting. She didn't like the feeling of it, even as it was as much a part of her as her heart, which fluttered against her ribs. It was inseparable from her; it was her, whether she wanted it to be or not.

And, lying there, staring up at the worried man and the girl who looked at her with enough concern to fill a galaxy, she wasn't sure she wanted it gone.

"How are you feeling?" the man asked.

Kathryn frowned. Only then, as she frowned again, did she realize that her earlier frown had bled away.

How did she feel, though? She felt…tired, and as if she had been wound with gauze. She felt hot, and cold, and yet numb. She felt everything and nothing, and beneath all of that, fear.

But fear of what? What was it that she was afraid of?

A wide room bathed with the flicker of a raging fire—

Hands, and more hands, and voices that spoke words that she could not understand—

A man she knew—a man she knew better than she knew herself—looking at her over the console that separated them, eyes dark and warm and infinite—

"Tired," Kathryn said. Her voice came out as a croak.

The man smiled. "I'm not surprised. You had a fever of 41 degrees."

"I… What?"

The man's expression darkened. He looked up and over at the girl standing beside him. "Kes," he said, addressing her, "I need you to run to Sickbay and—"

The rest of what he said faded out of Kathryn's hearing as his voice was replaced with a low, white hum. She shivered, and then reached up with her hands to cover her ears. It did nothing to ease the humming, however.

Fingers wrapped around her right wrist, and pulled her hand away from her ear. The man was watching her, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. His lips were moving, but Kathryn couldn't seem to hear what he was saying.

The humming swelled.

Kathryn.

She shook. Her breath snagged in her throat. Her eyes burned, wide and staring. She wanted to speak, but her tongue was thick, heavy against the roof of her mouth, and the air in her lungs had shriveled.

Kathryn…

Her name was a sigh. A breath of wind in a windless space.

No, Kathryn said—or tried to say. No….

"Captain?" It was the man—The Doctor, she thought suddenly, he's The Doctor, that is his name—speaking. "Captain, what's wrong?"

She reached for him with her left hand. Tried to grab onto the front of his uniform, only for her fingers to slide over it as if it was glass. He looked down at her fingers scrabbling against his chest, and then reached quickly up and seized her hand.

"Captain?" he said, yet again. And then, in a tone she did not recognize, "Kathryn."

Kathryn…

It is time. Come with me, Kathryn...

The world tilted, spun, and slid out of focus. And then, with a silent gasp, Kathryn's eyes rolled into the back of her head, and the last thing she felt was her body going limp against the mattress of her bed.

~*x*~

Tom Paris was, for the first time in eight months and nineteen days, early for his shift. He stood waiting in the hall for the turbolift, bouncing on the balls of his feet and humming an old sailor's ditty—one of the many he had learned from a scarred and foul-mouthed sailor he had met in the penal colony back on Earth. The tune was simple, masking words that would make even lower deckhands' faces blush with a lilting melody.

When the turbolift opened, however, the song died a quick and painful death behind Tom's lips.

Commander Chakotay stood in the turbolift. He was leaning against the wall, arms crossed tightly over his chest and face turned toward the floor, hiding gaunt cheeks and bruised eyes from all but the sharpest sight. In the fraction of an instant it took for Chakotay to register Tom's presence, he thought he could see something dark and terrible resting on Chakotay's chest, weighing him down with a thousand gravities.

But then Chakotay straightened, and though his eyes remained bruised from lack of sleep and his skin remained pale with exhaustion, whatever it was that Tom had glimpsed was gone, masked behind the tight smile that Chakotay gave him.

"Early this morning, Lieutenant Paris?" Chakotay asked.

Tom stepped into the turbolift, and pried a grin onto his face. It felt stiff, and forced. "Don't look for it to happen again anytime soon, Commander," he said. The doors closed, and the floor began to rise. His voice sounded too large and loud for the small confines of the turbolift, as if he had shouted.

Chakotay chuckled. But, unlike Tom's voice, his chuckle seemed small and weak, as if it was drowning in the artificial atmosphere.

Looking at him sideways, Tom watched Chakotay's face for a long moment, trying to catch a glimpse of the thing he had seen earlier. He had learned a long time ago that those who rose high in the ranks were experts at hiding their emotions and feelings. Because of that, Tom had long ago made an art of learning how to see through the cowls and masks that they used to protect themselves.

He blamed his father. A lieutenant commander at the time of his birth, and an admiral by the time Tom was admitted to Starfleet Academy, it seemed to Tom that had been parented by such a mask. Or so it had seemed to him, as soon as he was old enough to begin to understand such things. He had resented it then, and he resented it now, and so he took great pride in being one of the few who seemed able to pry those cowls and masks away.

It landed him in trouble, as often as not. But there were times—like now—that Tom believed wholeheartedly that the good it did far outweighed the harm it would ever deal him. Because, no matter how good they were at hiding it, every Starfleet officer was a living, breathing being. And Tom believed that, too often, that was a fact forgotten by the members of their crew.

The turbolift doors opened, and Tom followed Chakotay out onto the bridge. He watched the commander take his seat beside the captain's empty chair. For a second, as Tom passed him on his way to the conn., he thought that Chakotay was going to stand again—he stiffened, fingers whitening on the arms of the deep-backed chair, eyes slanted sideways at Captain Janeway's seat—but then he seemed to settle. Something went out of him, all in a rush, and in the last glimpse Tom had of him, it seemed that the bruises around his eyes darkened to a hollow, hungry black.

Something was very, very wrong. Tom just didn't know what.

Not yet.