A/N:
Some references to the events of Mosaic appear below, but I dropped Justin out of the picture entirely because he doesn't suit my timeline, and also I don't like him.
Day 78
It's not that they'd thought they had all the time in the world, not with her worsening headaches. But the ship itself has seemed so static through all of this, themselves the only real casualties. They'd noticed early on that any damage done by gravitational shears reset along with everything else. Learned to ignore the turbulence, the creaking of the hull. Tom has likened the experience more than once to being on a ship at sea, battered by fathomless waves to which they've necessarily surrendered so much control.
But then they decide to divide and conquer, Janeway to Sickbay, Tom to Engineering. Tom allows Harry to invite him along once he is summoned by B'Elanna, feeling so like he is triggering the next chapter in an overplayed holonovel that for one unnerving moment of paranoia, he considers scanning Harry to be sure he is not a simulation.
And then he enters Engineering. And he should have come much sooner.
It is uncomfortably warm here, even humid. Much of the Engineering crew have their sleeves pushed up to their elbows and B'Elanna is flushed, the top edge of her tunic a little damp. Immediately, Tom feels sweat beading at his hairline.
He's got a bad feeling about this. More to the point, he's got a bad feeling about the fact that they've never heard that Engineering is boiling away before.
"What are you doing here?" B'Elanna asks when she sees Tom.
"Just tagging along. You did interrupt our holodeck time," Tom answers, banking on his presence not mattering to the timeline, such as it is.
"Uh, alright," she says distractedly. "Harry, take a look at this…." She leads them over to a terminal where she seems to be monitoring the thermal containment systems.
"The core temperature has increased? Why?"
"That's the big mystery. I've checked, double-checked, and triple-checked the plasma intercooler, and the tanks. I can't find any reason for it to be this hot."
"Hot enough to overload the reaction chamber?" Tom asks.
"Not yet," B'Elanna says. "But if we don't get it under control…"
Harry grimaces. "How long has it been like this?"
"I don't know exactly. Early this morning. When I left last night, everything was fine."
She sounds more exasperated than worried. And indeed, despite the unnatural heat, the immutable fact that the warp core does in fact have a maximum temperature that it can reach before it kills them all, Tom scans the room and does not detect panic in the movements of any of the crew.
Somehow, he does not find this reassuring.
But it's not until he shares his findings with Janeway that he truly understands the pall of anxiety that follows this discovery.
"Entropy," she whispers, one hand over her mouth.
Her tone makes his pulse quicken.
"It's a closed system," she says, horrified. "The loops. Oh my god, Tom. It requires a massiveamount of energy to maintain something like this and there's nowhere for it to go. We're building energy with every loop. That energy manifests as heat."
"But… entropy builds as time passes. Time isn'tpassing!"
"Look at us," she argues. "Time hasn't stopped, it's repeating. I don't know how to define what we're experiencing, but we already know how much energy is needed to travel to the past. Now compress it into the boundaries of our loops..."
"Why is it only hot in Engineering, then?" Tom asks, wanting, more than anything, for her to be wrong.
"Computer, what is the temperature on the Bridge?"
"The temperature on the Bridge is 23.4 degrees Celsius."
"It isn't just Engineering. But the warp core would be disproportionately impacted… It might even be absorbing the heat, increasing it. I don't know." She laughs darkly. "I don't know. I've never been stuck in a time loop before."
"But why haven't we noticed?"
"Tom, we have no idea how long we've been here. If the temperature has increased so gradually that we just keep acclimating…"
It's always been a possibility, that they've been looping for far longer than they recall. But Tom does not usually allow himself to dwell on it, feeling, whenever he does, a sort of existential dread he is not prepared to confront. Now, he can't stop himself.
"Can we cool down the warp core?" he asks, already knowing the answer.
"If I had to guess, I'd say even the plasma coolant is warmer than it should be."
Tom casts around for anything to say, anything to dispute this awful prediction, and comes up short.
It's not that they'd thought they had all the time in the world. But they'd been naïve to imagine they understood the stakes when they've never known all the parameters of this crucible. Janeway had said it herself: Why does anything not work? They should have seen it then, should have guessed they were even less in control than it seemed. Tom has been almost wholly focused on Janeway's deaths, but it's never just been about the two of them. The damage to the hull resets, Janeway rises from the dead each morning, but if the thermal energy they are building on a molecular level continues to increase unchecked…
Somehow, impossibly, the perimeter of the temporal disruption seems to be limited to the ship itself. They can't find the damn border but that's Janeway's theory, that otherwise they would have been able to launch a probe. And if the warp core breaches inside a closed system as small as theirs, it wouldn't just destroy the ship. It would tear into subspace… and whatever is generating the loops along with it.
It would be catastrophic.
"We're running out of time," Tom says, at last.
Day 81
Although Janeway is more convinced than ever that they have to break out of the loops before they will be able to fix anything else, they don't have a single lead to aid in that goal. And so, helplessly, they turn their attention to their other unsolved mystery: Chakotay.
Janeway's excursion had yielded considerably fewer answers than Tom's had in Engineering. When she'd arrived in Sickbay, complaining of a headache that she, unlike Tom, did not have to feign, Chakotay had shut down, waiting in stony silence for her to leave.
"Don't you have the authority to force the issue?" Tom had asked, genuinely confused.
"Only if the CMO removes the officer in question from active duty," she'd explained. "And even then, they don't have to disclose the details. It's just that senior officers usually do."
And after all, Chakotay and Janeway hardly know each other, really. The past three months have been remarkably devoid of mutiny, but even Tom can see that whatever is going on with Chakotay is also making him edgy, mistrustful. Unlikely, in other words, to volunteer his private medical information.
And so Tom hatches a plan that he is afraid, at first, will cause Janeway to lose some respect for him. They know roughly when Chakotay goes to Sickbay. If they beat him there by way of the Jefferies tubes, they might be able to eavesdrop on his conversation with the Doctor.
It is monumentally, outrageously unethical. It might actually be illegal.
Janeway agrees to it.
But between the headaches and the nightmares, she is having trouble waking herself up early enough lately. Which is how Tom finds himself at her door, punching in her access code and watching nervously over his shoulder for passing crewmembers on their way to breakfast, or Chakotay himself, for that matter.
Slipping inside, he maneuvers easily through her dark quarters, familiar to him now after spending so many nights on her couch. He steps quietly into her bedroom and squats down at the side of her bed, laying a hand on her back until she stirs.
"It's time to go," he murmurs apologetically.
She groans. "Give me a minute to get dressed."
He retreats to her living room and calls for lights. Replicates two mugs of coffee, sets one down on a side table for her. As he does he spots the fateful book she'd been reading when this all began, the one that had kept her up until 0400, leaving her exhausted loop after loop. It's never occurred to him, somehow, to ask her about it.
He turns the book over now and reads the unfamiliar title. Dubliners. Irish; that figures. He smiles fondly and then flips to the page she has marked, finding several lines highlighted.
'She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory'.
And if he has allowed himself to imagine, these past weeks, that she is not engaged to be married, now that fundamental knowledge comes rushing back to him. Against his will, his chest tightens. And it's at this moment that Janeway emerges, her eyes tracking upwards from the book in his hands to his shattered expression.
"I'll explain," she says, after a long moment. "After."
He nods, swallowing hard.
They decide that since no one will remember anything they do even if they are spotted, they might as well take the turbolift down to deck five, limit the amount of time they have to crawl through Jefferies tubes. They enter down the corridor and to the left of Sickbay, Janeway leading the charge. She seems to want to take responsibility for this unsavory decision, despite that it was his idea. He follows her in and shuts the hatch behind them, wondering, not for the first time, who the hell decided on grated metal floors, so tough on human hands and knees.
"You practically need body armor to crawl through these things," he says, trying to lighten the mood.
She hums her agreement.
They're pretty sure the Doctor will be offline until Chakotay arrives, but to be safe they ask the Computer to confirm once they reach Sickbay. Tom pops the hatch and activates his combadge, dropping it on the floor below. Janeway confirms that their link is active, and then they seal themselves in again.
They wait.
They can't speak now that the comm link is open, and Tom finds this horrifically uncomfortable, considering. There is nothing else to look at in here but he focuses on not looking at her, on not making things any more awkward. She shifts a little and her leg brushes against his, and he valiantly does not react, but then it happens again. He glances over and realizes, from her small smile, that she is doing it on purpose.
He relaxes, minutely.
Finally, they hear the hiss of doors opening and closing, and then Chakotay's voice activating the EMH.
Chakotay is awfully cagey for someone who walked himself into Sickbay, offering one- and two-word answers in response to the Doctor's questions. Headaches, distractedness, he says. It's so obvious there's something he's not saying that the Doctor, huffing irritably, decides to skip the interview and jump straight to scanning Chakotay's brain. They hear shuffling and then the telltale sounds of a medical tricorder, some indistinct murmuring. Several minutes go by in near-silence, and then—
"Commander," the Doctor asks sharply, "are you experiencing visual or auditory hallucinations?"
A weighty pause follows. "Both," Chakotay says finally.
"Can you describe them?"
Chakotay's speech sounds jerky, unnatural. "They're… indistinct. Dark. Strange sounds, nothing I recognize. It feels like I'm being watched. Sometimes I see my grandfather. But I can't hear him. There are too many voices, they're all talking over each other."
Tom catches Janeway's eye, raises his eyebrows significantly. She shakes her head once. Later.
"You have a genetic marker for a cognitive disorder known as sensory tremens," the Doctor says. "The primary symptoms are hallucinations, agitation, and disorientation."
"We called it the 'crazy gene'. My grandfather had it too," Chakotay admits. "But my family doctor suppressed it before I was even born."
"Well, somehow the gene's been switched on." A series of beeps follows this pronouncement, the clanging of metal on metal. A hypospray being prepared.
"Can you turn it off?"
"I can control the hallucinations with a neural suppressant," the Doctor offers reassuringly, "but I will need to run more tests to determine how to deactivate it."
They arrange a follow-up appointment for later in the day, and Chakotay extracts from the Doctor his assurance that he will not share this diagnosis with the Captain. He'll tell her himself, he promises, which sounds like a lie to Tom. Though if he wanted to be charitable—and in general, when it comes to Chakotay, he does not—he could allow that Chakotay might not have the chance before Janeway's regularly scheduled aneurysms.
The Doctor concludes his examination with a parting warning to alert him immediately if the neural suppressants aren't as effective as he expects. Tom feels Janeway shift uneasily against him, and he guesses she's thinking the same thing he is: either the treatments don't work very well at all… or the hallucinations have been getting worse.
Chakotay leaves. They wait another minute, and then tell the computer to deactivate the Doctor so that Tom can retrieve his combadge.
As he pulls the hatch closed behind him, he can feel the tension radiating off of Janeway.
"Chakotay's hallucinations sure sound a lot like—"
"My nightmares," Janeway finishes.
Janeway has described her nightmares as shapeless, more of a mood than anything. Churning darkness and a profound vertigo that abates only when she is fully conscious. Whirls of light, color, sounds she can't identify… and always, the sense of a presence. Like someone is observing her from her periphery, just out of reach.
She finds them unnerving, he knows. But they had both interpreted the dreams as her mind's reaction to being so totally out of control of what increasingly feels like an unsolvable problem. A boogieman of her own subconscious' creation, the semi-embodiment of their predicament.
A nightmare. Nothing more.
So what are the odds that she and Chakotay would be sharing the same experience, except that he doesn't know the first thing about the temporal mess they're in? And that the visions would haunt him while he's awake, but not her?
"We don't know what kind impact Chaotic space might be having on our physiologies," Tom suggests, once they're back in Janeway's quarters.
"It's more than that," she disagrees. "I can't explain it, but I'm sure of it."
"Okay…" Tom says slowly. "So, what next?"
"I don't know," she admits, pinching the bridge of her nose. "You said Kim and Torres found something anomalous?"
"Nothing definitive," he says, thinking back.
"Well, the good news is we can have them do it again," she says. "Soon, I think."
It seems like a needle in a haystack, but it's all they've got. Tom retrieves his coffee cup from earlier and recycles it, orders another. Janeway reaches for her own, still where he left it for her by her book.
Tom does not look at it. He doesn't want to pry. He's not even sure he wants to know.
"Tom," she says gently. "It's not what you're thinking."
He doesn't know what he's thinking, so he's not sure how shecould. He didn't read enough to understand the words, not really. He thinks of her fiancé, their life together cut short, all the things she'd lost bursting like stars upon her memory. But then he thinks of the loving way the woman is described as frail, and he feels sick.
That's not what he wants. It's not how he feels. Can that be what she thinks of him?
She opens the book to where she'd marked her place and turns the page over, mutely hands it back to him.
"'For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers'," he reads, the sentence underlined twice.
"Reading helps me think," she explains. "I was going to leave Mark. When we got back."
"What?" Tom gasps, before he can stop himself. "Why?"
"I was running, with Mark," she admits. "I felt like I'd lost enough, after the prison camp, and then my father. Mark wasn't going anywhere, never even left the planet. He was safe. We'd… known each other since we were kids. And I knew," she adds, "exactly how he felt about me.
"But I kept putting off planning the wedding. We weren't even living together. And when they gave me this mission, right in the middle of all of that, I was thrilled. Because I knew by then that I didn't care for him the way he cared for me, and I knew what I had to do, what I wanted to do… I just didn't know how to do it yet."
"Why are you telling me this?" Tom asks hoarsely.
"They say confession is good for the soul," she says, not at all an answer. "He deserved more than what little I could give him."
"But if you grew up together," Tom says, forcibly ignoring the parallels he could draw to their own past, "he must have understood about Starfleet life."
"He did. It wasn't that."
"Then—"
"Captain to the Bridge," Baxter interrupts over the comm.
"Time to go," she says mildly.
Tom takes the hint. She waits for him to set his cup down, and they leave together in silence.
Janeway attempts to recreate the bizarre briefing from before that led to Harry and B'Elanna discovering the information she wants. Unfixed pocket of subspace, she declares, inexplicably drawn to Voyager. Find out how and why, and do it by noon. Tom is impressed that she can remember it all, considering how many of these things she's had to run now. Not to mention that the data she originally requested is not even what they'd ultimately found. The only change she makes is to push the deadline up an hour, so she can comb through the results herself.
It doesn't go over any better this time than it did the last. They goggle at Janeway, waiting for her to fill in the blanks. As before, she does not. And as before, B'Elanna is the first to take this in stride, leading the others out of the briefing room.
This time, however, Chakotay lingers.
His eyes dart from Janeway to Tom, and he scowls. Janeway gives Tom a nod, so he unhappily excuses himself, waiting just outside. He knows, rationally, that she can take care of herself. But he doesn't want to take any chances, knowing what they know.
After a few minutes, Chakotay strides out and takes his station, not sparing so much as a glance for Tom. He pokes his head into the briefing room and Janeway waves him in, rubbing at her unyielding headache.
"Did he tell you?" Tom asks.
"He did not. He accused me of, how did he put it? 'Withholding critical information that may be putting this ship and her crew in mortal danger'."
"So we can add paranoia to the list."
She sighs, frustrated. "He isn't wrong. I didn't know how to explain that every time we try to elaborate…"
"He goes off the deep end. Yeah, I can see how that would be a difficult conversation."
"My kingdom for a reprieve from these briefings," she laments. "We should get going."
She wants to split up again, which he doesn't love. But when she tells him that she intends to monitor the efforts in Engineering, he has to admit that every atom in his body would prefer to stay as far away from that place as possible, what with the absolute wrongness of the atmosphere in there, the way its tropical heat had weighted him portentously. So he lets her go, while she sets him to, once again, searching for signs of the temporal boundary they know must be close by.
This kind of work requires very little brain power from Tom. He wouldn't even be doing it himself, if they had any way to hand it off to a science officer. Most of the computations are handled automatically, once he inputs the parameters, so when the scans are off and running he allows his mind to return, cautiously, to the conversation in Janeway's quarters.
She'd said something that had stood out in the moment, though he couldn't have explained why, and then he'd been sidetracked at the end. Now he turns her words over in his mind, tries to remember them verbatim.
He was safe, she had said.
I knew how he felt about me.
And then it's like every nerve ending in his body lights up all at once.
He'd tried to ask her what she thought she couldn't give the other man. But maybe—he's almost afraid to voice it, certain he must be wrong, certain that the consequences of being wrong would be disastrous—but what if, what if the answer to that question has been staring him in the face all along?
He stands abruptly, earning himself a disapproving look from Tuvok. He wavers. Should he wait for her to finish? If he interrupts them now, will they lose out on the data she wants, have to do it all over again in the next loop?
He looks down at the scans he's sure will be fruitless, then over to the turbolift.
He can't wait.
It takes every ounce of his restraint not to sprint down to Engineering, and he hardly allows the doors to open before he skids inside, scanning the room. He spots her bent over a console with Harry, stripped down to her tunic in the heat.
"Captain!" he calls, walking over to them with forced calm.
"Oh, Tom!" she beams, turning. She puts a hand on his chest, seeming to forget herself in her obvious excitement. "You're not going to believe this. It was the only question I missed in exogenetics my senior year."
"Someone lives here," Harry supplies eagerly.
"I need to talk to you," Tom says, ignoring all of this. "Right now."
She looks taken aback, but she nods and leads him out into the corridor.
"You said you knew how Mark felt about you," he says.
This is clearly not what she'd expected to hear. He imagines the other man's name sounds as strange on his tongue to her as it does to him. She folds her arms across her chest protectively, glancing down the hall to be sure they're alone.
"Yes," she answers, reluctantly.
"You didn't know how I felt about you."
She hesitates.
"You didn't know how I felt about you?" he repeats, a question this time, urgent.
"I—"
"Kathryn, I was in love with you," he says. "I was always in love with you."
The stricken look on her face makes him want to pull the words back into his mouth as soon as he says them. He takes a step toward her but she backs away from him, shaking her head. He stops himself with difficulty, waits for her to give him some indication of what she wants him to do.
"I need to get back in there," she says.
And then she steps past him, and is gone.
He holds out as long as he can. He respects her need for distance, no matter how badly he wants to apologize to her, to make this right. They've gotten by just fine so far without acknowledging his feelings, and they can do it again. He can. He would rather take what she is able to give him, her company, her friendship, than have nothing at all. But they are almost out of time, and she has not contacted him. He paces his quarters, asking for the time every few minutes.
He holds out as long as he can. And when he can't wait any longer, the computer tells him that she is in her quarters, and he goes.
He requests entry instead of letting himself in, holding his breath, hoping she takes this gesture as he means it. When, to his relief, the door slides open, he finds her curled up in an arm chair with PADDs all around her, her eyes rimmed with red.
"Getting to be that I hardly know my own quarters from yours," he tries to joke. They've been in each other's rooms so often now that it seems a safe thing to say, something inane to get them back on course. But she looks, if possible, even more uncomfortable.
"The light," he clarifies, clearing his throat, desperate to salvage their last minutes of the day.
She sets the PADD she's holding down on the side table. "It's your color," she says, her voice gravelly.
"Yeah," he agrees, latching onto this conversational lifeline. "Always been my favorite. You should've seen my dorm at the Academy."
She closes her eyes for a moment, and when she looks at him again her expression is… difficult to interpret.
"No," she says. "It's because it's your color."
He frowns, confused. Her face is drawn, hands clasped tightly in her lap. With a jolt, it occurs to him that she isn't just upset. She is nervous.
And then finally, it clicks.
"You chose orange… because I chose orange?"
She nods.
They all got to put in their requests before leaving drydock, a silly Starfleet tradition that is supposed to bring crews good luck. He's always thought it probably has more to do with wanting them to feel at home on a strange new ship, a long mission, but nobody wants to admit to coddling officers.
He's struggling to process what she is telling him. He feels several steps behind, like he's missing something crucial. "How did you even know?"
"It's your favorite," she says simply.
And she would know this, wouldn't she? She has spent enough time at his parents' house, just as he has at hers, their mothers hosting one party or another on behalf of Admirals Paris and Janeway. Or perhaps he'd even mentioned it to her himself, in passing, the kind of detail he'd expect very few people to recall and certainly not years later. Not after so much had come between them, his father, his prison sentence, her engagement; wildly disparate events, indelibly linked in his mind.
Her orange light has always seemed unaccountable to him when she otherwise surrounds herself with soft pink flowers, favors earth tones when she's not in uniform, but he has enjoyed this thing that they unwittingly share, taking some small comfort in it night after restless night on her couch. To learn now that the point is that it isn't her color, but his? And why? After all this time, to be reminded of him?
His heart seems to lodge itself in his throat.
"You said you were." She comes to her feet warily and she looks so vulnerable, so alone that it's all he can do not to go to her, but he wants to be sure, this time.
"I don't understand," he says.
"You said you were in love with me. Past tense."
She doesn't phrase it as a question, but he hears it anyway.
"Present tense," he clarifies, his mouth dry. "Am in love with you."
Slowly, tentatively, Kathryn closes the distance between them. And they have mere moments left together, and they've unearthed more disasters lately than they have solutions, no closer to getting out of this place than they were before but now with the added burden of voices in the first officer's head, the time bomb that is the warp core. But Tom cups Kathryn's face with one hand and draws her to him, and readily she seems to sink into him, her mouth opening under his, twining her arms desperately around his neck, his hand tangling in her hair. And she is so small in his arms, on tiptoes he realizes, but she is also strong, she is extraordinary and brave, and he recalls again the emphasized words from her book, 'the years had not quenched his soul, or hers'. And he vows to himself, deepening their kiss as the clock ticks down, Not us. Never us.
A/N:
The orange lights are real, and Janeway & Paris are the only two to share this color. FFn won't let me link to it, but I've just posted a relevant gifset over at Tumblr (grissomesque).