Notes: Sorry for the late update, y'all - I've been on vacation, and haven't had as much time (or energy) to write. I still intend to get a chapter up this weekend, though it may be Sunday before it's up. Many thanks to tumblr users ailtara and absynthe-minded for all of their help, and to all of you for your patience with me. Lastly, I hope you enjoy this newest update, and I'd love to hear from you.

Chapter warnings: Major character death, as well as graphic depiction of injury/death. (To anyone worried, here is a reminder that this fic is canon-compliant)

Part VIII: Tua Culpa

"Kathryn."

The voice was a clap of lightning through Kathryn's mind. She bolted upright, eyes flying open, and with a long gasp dragged in a lung-full of air. Her skin tingled, her muscles ached, and for a flash of a second, she thought that she could smell ash and smoke.

"Where am I?"

Her question was met with a low, ringing chuckle. Then the voice, echoing and reechoing, said, "You are a stubborn one. I'll give you that."

Kathryn stood. Her feet were planted on empty darkness, and nothing but black as dark as pitch stared back at her, no matter which way she turned. She was, it seemed, back in the Void.

Pursing her lips and planting her hands on her hips, Kathryn stared defiantly up at what she could only image was the ceiling. "I demand to know where I am, and who you are. And what the hell I'm doing here."

The voice sighed. It rippled around her, tugging at her hair and at her uniform jacket, a breathless wind. "I told you." It sounded weary. "I am Virgil. And as for the rest—that will all be explained in time."

Kathryn shook her head. "That's not good enough. First of all, how do you even know the name Virgil?"

"You told me," the voice said, simply. "And now, I have a question for you."

"You still haven't answered mine," Kathryn snapped.

The voice ignored her. "Why did you save the child?"

Kathryn, mouth open to snap a fresh retort, stopped very suddenly. She frowned. "Why did I—What?"

Another sigh. "The child," it said, as if trying to explain a concept to a particularly stubborn child. "Why did you try to save the child from the burning building."

It returned to Kathryn as suddenly as she had been woken. She staggered, the weight of the memories that crashed through her mind striking her with physical force. She saw again the burning rafters, the paint dripping from the walls, the stairs crumbling beneath her. The child, crying on the floor in the middle of the inferno.

"Why did I…" Kathryn looked around, but this time her movement was slower, more out of confusion than demand. She felt something warm and wet trickle down her left cheek, and before she could lift a hand to wipe it away, she tasted the salt of tears on her tongue.

And then her heart hardened. "Who wouldn't save a child?" she demanded.

"You shielded the child with your own body, despite the fact that to do so would likely cost you your life. Why?"

Kathryn whirled. Her hands were clenched in fists at her sides. "Of course I saved the child," she said. "It—He—" Her words stumbled over themselves, her affront and her ire tangling her voice and her thoughts. "He was a child," she said at last. "How could you even question the choice to try to save him?"

"I see." The voice sounded noncommittal, as neutral as neutron.

Kathryn tasted fury. "Would you?" she asked, taking a senseless step forward.

"Would I what?"

"Would you have tried to save him?"

"My actions are not the ones under trial."

Kathryn frowned. Her nails bit into the palms of her hands. "And what does that mean?" she demanded.

"Enough," the voice said. "I have heard enough. It is time to move on."

"Wait," Kathryn said—only for her voice to vanish as the world emptied out from under her feet. She fell. Air rushed past her, a dizzying hurricane, an unending wave of shadow falling with her.

And then, with a sound like shattering glass, she stopped.

When she opened her eyes—eyes she had not realized were closed—she found herself standing on a rocky plateau. Mountain peaks towered above her, craggy and capped with snow, and down the slope, she could just see the dark shadow of a coniferous forest murmuring in the breeze. The wind was sharp and cold, cutting through the jacket of Kathryn's uniform, and she hunched her shoulders forward and tucked her arms around her chest.

She turned away from the slope, toward the peak of the mountain upon which she stood—and she stopped dead, feet freezing to the broken ground. There, lying before her in smoking ruin, lay a battlefield.

Corpses in black and red and yellow and blue lay scattered amid the rocks, splashes of color against a desolate wasteland. Their bodies were burned and broken, twisted and mangled into crooked shapes. Blood and ash stained the fingers of stone that jutted up towards the heavens. The scent of singed flesh and fresh blood struck Kathryn's nose—and she wondered how it was she had not smelled it before.

There was no sign of the foe that had been fought: no corpses, no dropped weapons, no unusually colored blood. Only black and red and yellow and blue, and the red and green and blue of the peoples under Kathryn's command.

Kathryn took an unnoticed step forward, then another. She felt numb, empty. The smoke drifting over the battlefield touched her, parted around her—and still Kathryn moved forward as if in a daze. She had to see, even if she did not want to see.

Ballard. Chess. Jacobson. Ashmore. Jonas. McKenzie. Sarion. Cabot. Arkinson. Ayala.

One after another, she came across the members of her crew. Their faces were tight with death, their eyes open and staring into a black eternity. Their uniforms were burned, torn, bloodied, dead a hundred different ways.

Flies had begun to gather. Their buzz was a low counterpoint to the keening of the breeze as it blew eddies in the smoke. They crawled across the corpses, their wings iridescent against browning blood, their bodies black against the paleness of skin in death, against the glassiness of dead eyes.

"What happened here?" Kathryn's voice was the tolling of a funeral bell over the silence of the land. Somewhere overhead, a carrion bird screamed in reply.

There was, however, no answer to her query.

Kathryn crested a ridge, and found herself looking down into a small ravine. It looked to have been hollowed out of a once-great rock, now split and weathered long away by wind and rain and ice. Now it held a fine, gritty dirt that grew a smattering of purple and yellow wildflowers.

The wildflowers were not, however, what had captured Kathryn's attention. Rather, it was the three corpses lying, broken and sprawling amidst the purple and yellow, their uniforms covered with the fine dirt, turning black to grey and muting the red and yellow.

"No." The word was a gasp from Kathryn's lips, and as she started down the steep side of the ravine, her legs went weak. She half-slid, half-stumbled down to the ravine floor, a cloud of dust rising in her wake, the grit loose and treacherous under the soles of her boots.

And then she was down, and the bodies of Harry, Tom, and B'Elanna lay stretched out before her.

"No." The word came again, unbidden and unknown, and Kathryn sank to the ground, staring at the dead young men and woman. Her eyes were dry—painfully so—and her throat was dryer. Breathing was suddenly difficult; her lungs ached, her mouth was bone, her throat constricted with each attempt at shallow breath. She could feel her heart shuddering against her ribs, could hear her blood roaring in her ears. Everything else was still, silent.

In that moment, there was nothing else in the world but her and Harry and Tom and B'Elanna.

She loved all of her crew. 70,000 lightyears from home, the people under her command had become her reason for waking up in the morning, for putting on her uniform, for stepping onto the bridge and sitting down in her chair. They were more than the people she was responsible for; they were her family. They had become her heart as well as her life.

But the truth of the matter was that there were three members of her crew in particular that Kathryn loved most—that she loved like she imagined a mother would love a child.

And all three of them lay before her now, cold and lifeless.

There came the sound of grit tumbling down the side of the ravine, then behind that the crunch of footsteps. Understanding came only slowly to Kathryn's grief-numbed mind—but then the sounds clicked, and she was on her feet with a spring and a savage snarl. She whirled, feet kicking up a cloud of dust, and sank into a fighter's crouch. Whoever it was, if they were the ones responsible for the deaths of her crew—of Harry, and Tom, and B'Elanna—then she would kill them without hesitation.

It was not, however, some unknown alien standing before her at the foot of the steep incline. It was a man, tall and tan, with dark hair and dark eyes. Blood from a gaping wound in his neck, which by all rights should have killed him, darkened his skin, stiffened the uniform he wore, painted his face and hands a garish red.

It was a man she knew better than she sometimes thought she knew herself.

"What have you done?" Chakotay's voice was stilted, clipped and curiously formal. The wound in his neck gaped, and fresh rivulets of blood ran bright and red to join the blood already drying in his jacket.

Kathryn stared, confusion and horror warring in her mind and rooting her to the ground. Her mouth opened, and when she spoke, her voice sounded distant to her ears, faint and far away. "Chaktoay?" she heard herself ask. "Chakotay, what happened?" And then, again, fainter and more desperate, "What happened here?"

Chakotay laughed. The sound was rude, and as garish as the blood that bubbled from his mouth, that ran down his chin and from his neck in a growing river. "Don't you know?" he asked. The question was a sneer.

Kathryn shook her head. "No," she said softly. "No, I wasn't here. I found them here like this. Chakotay, please—tell me what's going on."

And again Chakotay laughed, high and loud and sounding not at all like the Chakotay she knew so well. "You know what happened," Chakotay said. His eyes never left hers. "You know what happened, because you're the one that killed them."

Kathryn stumbled as if Chakotay had physically struck her. The ground seemed to open up beneath her, the world tilting on its axis to send her falling, falling, falling into empty blue and emptier black. She couldn't stand, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. All she could do was gasp, and stumble, and shake her head dumbly.

"No," she said. "No, I didn't—I wouldn't."

Chakotay shook his head in return, and when he stepped toward her, neck gaping and mouth pulled wide into a crimson smile, Kathryn stumbled back a step. "Yes," he said. Then again, "Yes. This is your fault, Kathryn."

"No," she gasped again, and stumbled another step back.

"You killed them."

"No."

"This is your fault, Kathryn. Yours."

The heel of Kathryn's right boot caught on something soft and she fell backwards. She landed hard, and when she scrambled to regain her footing, she found that she had tripped over a leg—Harry's leg. She froze, still on the ground, every muscle locking into place and holding her prisoner beside the corpse of the man she would have called son.

And still Chakotay came on, dark and towering, alive with a wound of death still bleeding down his neck. "You killed them," he said. "You killed them. This is your fault, Kathryn."

He was above her. His shoulders blocked out the sun, throwing her into sudden shadow. And then, kneeling, he reached out with one hand to seize her by the neck. His fingers were cold, cold, cold as night and shadow and the vastness of space—as death—and as they tightened around Kathryn's neck, his other hand batting easily away the frail defense she threw against him, she could not help but shiver down to her bones.

Chakotay leaned down, down, down, until the wound in his neck wept scarlet tears onto Kathryn's face. The ground bit into Kathryn's back and into her scalp, and still Chakotay pressed, until her eyes watered and her breath came whistling from her throat. "You killed them," Chakotay whispered, and Kathryn did not fight him. "You killed them."

And then everything went black.

~*x*~

Kes sat beside the captain's bed in a chair dragged in from the living room, feet beneath her and chin resting in the palm of her right hand. The lights were low, the temperature in the room lower, and Kes watched as starlight streamed past the windows in the bulkheads to either side of the captain's head. She could hear the captain's breath, slow and deep and rhythmic, and could sense the brightness of her mind; her captain was alive, and steadily so.

That did not, however, quell—or even ease—the worry that churned in Kes's belly. And she suspected that it was the same for The Doctor, for all that he did not have a stomach that could churn. An hour after the captain had slipped unconscious, he had left for Sickbay, leaving stern instructions for Kes to monitor their captain's life signs. She had promised she would alert him the second anything changed.

Thus far, everything had been quiet. Chakotay had stopped in on his way to the bridge for his duty shift, and Kes had repeated her promise to notify him if anything changed. He had left shortly after, with little more than a curt nod and one last, long look at the captain, still and silent in her bed.

The sound of the captain's door opening dragged Kes out of her ruminations. She straightened in the chair and turned, to see The Doctor striding into the room. His face was dark, his posture stiff, and when he moved to set the medical case down on the captain's beside table he did so with more force than was strictly necessary.

"I take it the tests did not go well, Doctor?" Kes asked. She swung her feet down to the ground, and sat forward in the chair.

The Doctor straightened, and turned to face her. "No," he said bluntly. "I ran every single test and screening I could think of, and one or two that I invented on the spot, and nothing. Absolutely nothing."

"So you still have no idea what is making the captain sick?"

"Didn't I just say that?" The Doctor snapped, waspish. Then he sighed, and turned back to the case, which opened with a click at his touch. "How has she been?" he asked, his back still turned.

"About the same as when you left," Kes said. "I sensed a change in her breathing pattern about an hour later, but it eased again after about fifteen minutes, just when I was about to call you. She's been calm ever since."

"Hm," The Doctor grunted. "I wish you had called me," he said. "If it happens again, please do."

"I will, Doctor," Kes said.

The Doctor nodded, and then set about drawing another vial of blood into a containment vial.

Kes watched him work for a long moment. Then, tentatively, she spoke. "Doctor?"

"Hm?"

"I've been thinking." Kes took a breath, and flattened her palms against her skirt. It was a habit she had picked up since joining the Voyager crew, and had become a reflex whenever she was not entirely certain about how what she was about to say would be received.

"A dangerous pastime for anyone," The Doctor commented, off-handedly and without any real bite.

"Yes, well, I've been thinking: Could this illness have anything to do with the Kaminoans?"

The Doctor paused in his work, and turned to give his full attention to Kes. "Why do you think the Kaminoans might have something to do with this?"

"They had her for nearly twelve hours," Kes said, softly. "We have no idea what they did to her in that time."

The Doctor frowned. "True," he said. "But nothing inimical showed up on our scans. She was in perfect health when we got her back."

"According to all of your tests now she's in perfect health," Kes pointed out.

"Hardly," The Doctor retorted. "I said that the cause of her sickness is yet to be found, not that she was healthy."

"You get my point, though, do you not, Doctor?"

The Doctor sighed. "Yes, Kes," he said. "I get your point. And you do have a point. But I'm not ready just yet to blame the Kaminoans." He fixed Kes with a steady, penetrating look. "You know what the commander will do as soon as we start leveling accusations. And Mr. Tuvok too."

Kes smiled, a half smile. "Yes," she said. "They are both protective of her."

The Doctor snorted. "Protective? Over-protective is what I would call it."

"So we keep this between us," Kes said, bringing the subject back to the topic on hand. "At least for now. But I do think, Doctor, that it is a possibility that we should reject so soon."

The Doctor's eyes darkened. "You're right, Kes," he said. "We don't know what they did—or what they were trying to do. And twelve hours is a long time for any operation. I was surprised that they hadn't accomplished what they set out to do…" He trailed off, as if losing his words to his thoughts.

Kes sat forward. "Yes. So what if they did accomplish what they set out to do?" she asked. "What if we were wrong?"

"I am afraid," The Doctor said after a long moment, in which Kes's words hung heavy between them, hovered over their captain's still body like a thunderous cloud, "that you may be right."