notes: violence and canonical character death warnings for this chapter.

Part XIII: Insomnium

Kathryn stood on a plain of ice, blue and white and as sharp as the brilliant sky overhead. The bitter taste of smoke crawled into her nose and mouth to sit on her tongue and to make her cough, and her eyes watered—though whether that was from the smoke or from the bite of the wind, Kathryn could not say.

She knew this place.

"Is this what you fear, Kathryn?"

The words were carried by the wind—were the wind, all cruel vowels and biting consonants. They struck Kathryn in the face, in the back, in the chest, like hail flung by a raging storm, until she clapped her hands to her ears in a vain attempt to shut them out. Blood dripped from her nose, and trailed in thin lines down her cheeks from beneath her hands.

"Is this what you fear?"

"Stop," Kathryn gasped, falling to her knees. She shut her eyes, blocking out the blue sky and white ice. "Please. Stop."

The wind calmed. "Tell me," it whispered, coiling around her, caressing her blood-stained face, sneaking through the gaps in her uniform to settle stinging against her flesh. "Is this what you fear?"

Kathryn's right leg snapped. She screamed, falling backwards to land hard on the ice. Bone ripped through skin, and the warm gush of fresh blood stood out against the cold like a punch. She gasped, fighting nausea and pain and the taste of darkness closing in, and clutched the ice that cracked, slow and long, beneath her.

"Please," she begged.

The wind howled. It struck her, pummeled her chest, tore at her hair and at her uniform with clawed fingers. "Tell me," it demanded. "Is this what you fear?"

Smoke washed over her, black and hissing and noxious. Kathryn choked—and as she choked, the smoke crawling into her lungs, she felt the right side of her chest shudder, crack, collapse beneath an invisible weight. She tried to scream, but the sound came out mangled and weak, and was accompanied by the wheeze and bubble of a collapsed lung.

"Please. What do you want?"

"Tell me," the voice moaned. "Tell me what you fear."

The light changed around her, fading from bright sunlight to the filtered light of a smoke-filled room. The air was acrid around her, and from somewhere in the haze Kathryn could hear the hiss and spit of sparks falling from a broken control panel. The ground was hard beneath her, but it was no longer the sharp cold of ice.

"No." The word was strained and accidental, pulled from Kathryn's lips by pain and white-lipped fear. "Please, no."

The smoke swirled around her, and its voice was low and hoarse. "Tell me, Kathryn," it said. "Tell me…"

Kathryn clenched her eyes tightly shut and focused on breathing. No, she told herself with her first labored breath. This isn't real, she said with her second. This is in the past.

"Tell me, Kathryn," the voice murmured.

She kept her eyes shut and gripped the hem of her uniform jacket with shaking fingers. Please, she tried to say.

And then another voice, weak and half a whimper. "Katie-bird?"

It had been more than a decade since Kathryn had heard her father's voice. She had, she realized, almost forgotten what he sounded like.

A hitching sob, mangled and broken, limped through the smoke. "Katie-bird," Edward Janeway said again. "Are y—" A wet, sucking cough interrupted him, and for a minute that was the only sound in the crumpled shuttle. When at last it settled, there was a long second of silence before Kathryn heard the first rattle of her father's dying breath.

She lay there, with eyes closed and fingers tangled in rumpled cloth, and fought the urge to roll over and crawl to him. She could still remember the pain, vague and half-assumed, when she had tried to do so all those many years ago. Worse, she could still remember the way the smoke had parted when she was only a few feet away, seeing for the first time Justin's broken body at the foot of his chair. She could remember the pain, paralysis, the indecision, the fear that had gripped her when she had seen him—and she could remember hearing her father's breath fall away into silence while she lay on the slowly freezing shuttle floor, unable to decide who to go to. Worst, she could still remember the unnatural stillness that had stolen into the shuttle alongside the silence. It had almost taken her heart with it.

Not again, she told herself. I won't let it happen again. And I won't give him the satisfaction of seeing me crawl.

"Kathryn…" the voice said. It curled around her, kissed her closed eyes and draped itself over her chest. "Kathryn, what is it you fear?"

"Go away," Kathryn said, as forcefully as she could. The words fell from her tongue ragged and limp, breathless.

"I can't."

"Can't or won't?" Kathryn asked. Bile rose with the words, buoyed by pain and encroaching tears. Through the smoke, Kathryn heard her father cough again, wet and weak and getting weaker.

The voice did not answer.

The minute it took for Edward Janeway to die felt like an eternity to Kathryn. She lay on the shuttle floor, blood seeping from her ruined leg and onto the floor, and from her ruined lung into her mouth. The salty taste of it clung to her lips, dripped down her cheek, and filled her nose with the iron. The bile sat at the back of her throat and waited.

And then there was only silence. Kathryn choked on a sob made of iron and emptiness, and the bile surged. She gagged on the taste of loss, and only barely managed to roll onto her side before she heaved. Acid and bile splashed across the bloodied shuttle floor, and the aching emptiness was filled with the sound of Kathryn retching.

When her stomach was empty, Kathryn collapsed onto her back, gasping small sobs. Uncertainty welled within her as she stared blankly at the smoke-addled ceiling above her. Should she have gone to her father? Could she have changed the outcome if she had tried?

She closed her eyes, swallowing the taste of bile and tears, and tried to shut out the wondering. To second-guess herself now would be to bring herself to ruin.

The air went cold and stale. Kathryn shivered and opened her eyes, only realizing when she tried to sit up that nothing but a lingering ache remained of the intense pain—until she slammed her head against hard metal, sending flashes of light arcing across her vision and a dull throb echoing down into her neck.

"Shit," she hissed, pressing a hand to the top of her head as she settled back down against the cold floor.

There was no light. But for all the darkness, Kathryn could not help but feel as if she should recognize where she was. There was something intensely—and terrifyingly—familiar about the cold press of metal against her skin, and about the sour, stale taste of the air in her nose and in her mouth.

Where was she? Why did she feel an overwhelming sense of terror? What was about to happen?

Footsteps. And in the echo of the footsteps, reverberating through the floor and into her bones, the words, What do you fear?

Then the snick of a bolt being shot back, and a flood of light washed into Kathryn's cage. She shrunk back, lifting a hand to cover her eyes, cowering towards the back of the metal box in which she lay. Laughter, and coarse words in a foreign tongue.

And with a sick swoop of her stomach, Kathryn knew exactly where she was.

Hands reached in and fastened around her arms. Kathryn kicked, dug her toes into the mesh walls of the cage, thrashed against the fingers that fastened into her hair. She screamed, and clawed at scaled skin, and even as they resolutely dragged her forth, she fought.

"The bitch knows thinks she can fight," one of the Cardassians said above her.

"I think we should teach her a lesson," another said.

There was laughter, and the hands holding her let go, sending her tumbling to the floor. Before Kathryn could regain her bearing a boot smashed into her stomach. She coughed, scrambled for air and some semblance of footing—only to be shoved face-first into a wall by a fist to the small of her back. She felt her nose break, felt the warm gush of blood over her lips, felt herself fall dazed to the floor.

"Doctor, get in here."

"Is this what you fear, Kathryn?" The voice was too high to be a Cardassian voice—too high, too light, too lilting. It echoed in the ringing of Kathryn's ears, in the throb of her nose.

Another hand wrapped into Kathryn's hair. The ground slid beneath her, hard and rough against her bare feet, and then flew up to meet her. She caught herself on her hands and knees. Another boot crashed into her stomach, sending her flopping limply onto her side, every inch of air driven from her lungs.

"Is this what you fear?" the voice asked as Kathryn hit the floor.

The Cardassians loomed over her, grinning and laughing. They reached for her—and as their hands touched her, a thousand memories flashed through Kathryn's body. Bones snapped, flesh tore, blood ran, skin burned. Kathryn screamed against the hands, against the pain, against the voices running together in her ears and body and mind.

"Is this what you fear?" the voice asked.

"We're losing her!"

"I would have expected more of a Janeway."

"Tell me, Kathryn! Is this what you fear?"

"I need an emergency medical site-to-site transport. Now!"

"What would your daddy think if he could see you now, crawling on the floor at our feet?"

"Kathryn—"

"Twelve CCs of—"

"Poor little Ensign—"

"Kath—"

"Kes, I need—"

Please, Kathryn thought, to the Cardassians, to the voice still echoing beside the thunderous pain, to the two worried faces appearing and disappearing above her.

Please…