"Admiral, you have an incoming transmission from Vulcan."
"Put it through. I'll take it at my desk."
"Yes, ma'am." Heavy pause. "You know you have the committee meeting at 1600."
Clouded blue eyes flick up to the chronometer on the far wall. Three minutes from now. Good.
"This is an urgent call, Madeline." It isn't but compared to that godforsaken Committee of Nothingness it is. "Pass along a message that I may be delayed. And I'm not to be disturbed until I say otherwise." She cuts off communication from the room without bothering to hear the reply. Madeline is nothing but a placement of the upper brass who reports her comings and goings to those who still don't trust her. To those who never really will.
"Tuvok," she greets her old friend with relish, instantly brightening at the sight of his familiar face on her screen. No secret is made of her thorough perusal until she decides aloud, "You're looking well." Another relief, on some repressed level. The worry hasn't really subsided until perhaps just now: now that she sees him in good health once more. While his condition hadn't been overly evident to anyone who knew him less well than she or other Voyager crewmembers, he had been looking a little ragged around the edges by the time debriefings ended and he was cleared to seek treatment.
"I will be able to return to my post within several months," is his succinct report.
How she's missed those. And him.
"Well, I can't wait for you to come back to us." An impish half smile she almost means. "But I might miss the Vulcan coffee more."
"You received the latest shipment?"
"Just yesterday." She lifts her mug within view of the imager, takes a deep and appreciate sip. Swallows, and sighs, "You saved me the trouble of calling to thank you."
"I am pleased that you enjoy it." She knows that he is as he adds, "You also know that T'Pel will see to your supply when I return to Voyager."
"Yes, she was always very dutiful about that," Kathryn agrees with the first heartfelt grin she's flashed in months.
Tuvok's study of her smile, her face and complexion is as concealed as hers was. "Perhaps you will take a meal with me when I return, Admiral."
"I'm eating plenty," she laments with a rueful pat of a midsection he can't see beneath the huge silver desk. "Don't worry."
"And are you sleeping well also?"
Her brow quirks into a fluid red arch. "Bucking for Chakotay's job? Remember, you still have a rank to go before they'll hand you the captain's chair, old friend."
And that was the stupidest thing she's said in some time. It's the exact opening he's been waiting for for months now. The bare pause before he addresses it isn't even two beats long.
"I was in error nine years ago," he intones seriously, a darkness she hasn't seen for some time shadowing the flesh beneath his cheekbones. "I allowed you to instate him as first officer against my better judgment."
Both brows climb. "You allowed me?"
"I could have remained unswayed by your arguments."
"And you could have remained in the brig for the rest of the journey, too. You were vocal enough, believe me," her dour sarcasm assures.
"Perhaps not."
Tuvok, in short doses, can be as stubborn as Chakotay ever could. The things she's constantly forgetting about those closest to her, the longer she goes without seeing them. Warningly, she reminds him, "Your objections were well noted in my logs."
"As they were in mine," he returns, and she is suddenly reminded of the piquing annoyance Phoebe had wrung from her days ago.
Her raised brow serves as all the response necessary. It so often does.
Wisely, Tuvok allows the conversation to evolve to the point he'd intended to make at its opening. "It is not your failure, Admiral. Every one of us aboard Voyager came to trust Commander Chakotay. He was able to deceive all of us."
"Yes," she agrees tonelessly, suddenly as removed from the situation as she has been from most over the past long months. "He was, wasn't he?"
Why isn't that statement right? It's the truth. And yet she knows damned well that it's not. It's not the whole truth, it cannot be the truth, or the equation of Chakotay simply does not balance, and the question of why still plagues her. Haunts her.
Why?
Leaning forward obscures some of the background of her too pristine office from the imager. She's aware of that as her frame fills more of the screen. "Tell me about your grandson. I can hardly believe how much he's grown since his last picture."
She shifts the topic deliberately. Tuvok knows it. He allows it because the steel in her eyes dares him to push the subject any further than he has.
He was never an overly daring creature. When he had to be, maybe. This is not that time. She listens to the succinct relating of the boy's more noteworthy childhood milestones and wonders if he's secretly half relieved to no longer have that burden. She wonders if he ever really wanted it in the first place. She wouldn't have, in his place.
When he signs off, she's left with a bittersweet longing for things that exist only in memory – and all the questions that haunt her existence about the man her old friend had warned her against so adamantly all those many years ago. They should have listened to their instincts, he said. He's right. Only…her instincts had never given so much as a hint of warning from the moment she locked eyes with Chakotay over the view screen and that fact is slowly eating away at her from the inside out. Her instincts are usually sound. Dead on, in fact. Experience has taught her to trust them.
He's talked of loyalties and belonging and duty and honor. Of cabbages and kings.
Chakotay would have found that funny. It was his favorite line from the book, as she recalls…
Damn him.
At least the call gives her an excuse to skip the committee meeting.
It will be another month before two years has passed since his disappearance. Every likely backward colony or space station has been scoured. All strategically-placed agents have been recalled as of this morning. The investigation into Chakotay's whereabouts has been officially closed. He's still listed as a fugitive, but one who is too smart to show his face anywhere he'd be expected to. He has no verifiable ties to any Maquis sympathetic locations or organizations, as Starfleet's many spies have reported. Or if he does, it's only with factions Starfleet doesn't yet know exist. Considering the depth of Starfleet's network of spies and operatives in this Post Dominion world, the likelihood of someone whispering hints of that and not being overheard by their operatives is nonexistent.
He didn't leave her simply to pick up his old ties. That much is now apparent. But then why? Why liberate the remaining Maquis and disappear? Why do it at all, if there were no plans to rebuild what they'd once had? Everyone, including her, has naturally assumed that this was his primary goal and it's not the case. It doesn't make sense. None of it makes any sense.
The anger just won't come anymore. She's been waiting for that to resurface, the extra edge she needs to fuel her into finding him. She has every reason to be furious with him. Every reason. He's the last person to deny her that. Owen's words, the words of the stubborn few admirals adamant about finding Chakotay, and Phoebe's are just some of the comments that bother her. Not one of them has said anything she hasn't said to herself in those early months following his disappearance. They're all absolutely right.
It's just that, the fact is, every one of them is also dead wrong. In fundamental ways that are so easy to overlook, Chakotay has forgotten more about loyalty than most of them have ever known. Her included.
He stuck by her through thick and thin. Through right and unquestionable, ungodly wrong. Even when he shouldn't have.
She did a lot of good out there. There's no denying this even on her best self-hating of days. But oh, she did so very, very much wrong in the process. There's no way to deny this even on her worst of self-justifying days.
Stranding her crew for starters. Interfering with the Kazon and the Ocampa. Making an alliance with the Borg. The Borg for gods' sakes. Giving technology to the Hirogen. The Equinox. These are all the boring, glaring things that she has done and it's been done to death. She's sick to high hell of analyzing them, with counselors, inquisition panels, colleagues and friends. She won't waste any more time doing so. Oddly enough they aren't even what bother her nowadays.
There are so many mistakes she could so easily have paid for and didn't, mistakes that have gone largely unnoticed because they turned out all right in the end: mistakes that no one bothered to call her on – except Chakotay, really, and him only in private. Those days when she refused to compromise – refused to see reason. How many had they lost due to her inability to change, her absolute fear of bending, especially in the beginning? How many times had she snapped at one of them, at him for understandably human mistakes?
How many times had she modeled the unyielding, hard standards of perfection that had been taught to her at such a young and tender age?
There were days out there that her own arrogance and self-righteousness almost choked them all. She can see it all so clearly now. Through all of it, one man stood by her.
B'Elanna's vim and vigor towards him hasn't dimmed since that first day. Her anger leaves no room for Tom's, and he's probably the closest ally Chakotay has on this planet. Bizarrely. Even this morning, when Janeway dutifully stops by for an early morning in-Paris-house breakfast, when Tom asks grimly if there's any word or sighting, she knows it's out of concern – which is the only reason she doesn't snap but prepares to answer him. B'Elanna utters the usual string of Klingon expletives at the sound of his name alone, saving her former captain from having to formulate a response that divulges nothing classified.
Janeway and Paris both pretend to listen but ignore her, used to doing so, and when Janeway excuses herself to find the bathroom – this isn't her first cup of coffee this morning – they think she can't still hear them speculating to each other.
"You're being a little harsh, don't you think? He was more your friend than ours."
"I thought he was. But he cared more about misplaced loyalty to a dead cause than he did about her trust. Or mine. It's that simple, Tom."
A meter from the door sensor to the bathroom, Janeway halts at that last statement, the churning in her gut about as wrong as any sensation she ever feels anymore.
"You were just as much Maquis as him not all that many years ago, if I recall."
"Our cell was crushed by the Dominion War. The entire movement was. And I grieved for that loss."
"I remember," Tom says quietly, and Janeway's belly kicks even more uncomfortably because so does she.
"But I finally accepted that some things aren't meant to last. It would be one thing if I was as deluded as he is about being able to revive the movement," B'Elanna's stony voice carries firmly into the adjacent hall, broken only at tiny Miral's vocal insistence that Tom put her down. "But those colonies are dust and rubble now. I have a daughter now. What I might have cared about two years ago and what I want now aren't remotely the same things. The truth is that Starfleet is the best life we can give her. "
"They've changed, though. We all see it."
"Those border security protocols are necessary. The neutral zones are too unstable."
Janeway lingers only in surprise, of course, not because she's so rude that she'd intentionally eavesdrop. The lack of segue into B'Elanna's argument suggests it's an old point of contention and that makes sense. The debate is being had at the highest echelons of Starfleet Command as well. But to hear B'Elanna be the one to defend Starfleet policy – they've come a long way indeed. Yet in which direction? Forward, or back? The distinctions between them grapple like shadows in the fog, with no clear victor anymore.
"Those border security measures are borderline militaristic, is what they are," Tom grumbles around a mouthful of something very large, from the muffled quality of his syllables.
Janeway won't admit it yet, but she secretly agrees with him. In her heart of hearts, she does.
"Maybe. All right, probably – Miral, no. We do not pull hair. But I can't even say I'm that upset about them caring more about security these days than philanthropy. If it means she's safe, I can live with it. And I don't see how you can argue it, either– ow! Take your daughter, please."
The conversation swiftly diverges into the kind of argument so familiar to her between this particular husband and wife. Janeway stops listening, but the conversation sticks with her all day. Chakotay, her tormenting inner arguments about loyalty, trust, stick with her all day.
The more she tries to cling to the certainty of those around her, the more accusing Chakotay of lacking loyalty is something that she just can't do without serious introspection.
Even with Equinox, the glaring things, he had stood by her. In the ways that mattered, he had. Even when he probably lost the support of most of the crew by standing back and choosing inaction, he hadn't budged. He'd never tried to take her command.
She still has not been able to put a finger on where exactly she's gone wrong. When did she lose him? Really lose him? Clearly it was well before she ever even thought it. It had to be for him to go to Seven of all people. That still stings, but he admitted his stupidity, apologized for it. Holding that against him any longer would make her a bitch, wouldn't it?
She certainly hadn't been holding it against him when his body had covered hers in the darkness of her bedroom. In those instants of unfiltered need, she hadn't been thinking of Seven. Or of him, if she is honest now. Had she been only slightly more aware of his internal war, whatever the nature of it, they would not be here now.
Their last moments together play in her mind, a torture reel of images, sounds, sensations. They melt into prior arguments and quiet moments that stretch all the way back to the tail end of the Val Jean on her view screen as she chased his ship into the mercurial badlands–
A plasma jolt striking her full in the face would have less impact. It hits her now, hard. How stupid she's been all along.
She sits straight up in her stationary chair. Of course he isn't in any of those fixed places they've been scouring. When Chakotay is being pursued, he trusts the mobility of ships to the limitations of unmoving land masses under his feet. He'd always preferred it. So has she, in fact. That is a fundamental fact she at some point knew of him and had forgotten. Maybe because of how long she's been grounded herself. Stuck in one place, with one view, one set weather pattern, one kind of people with one real philosophy to choose from – eventually, it molds one's thinking to conformity with the majority.
Chakotay is not that majority. He's contrary. He doesn't stay in one place for long. He'd never take a transport ship to a station or settle down on some remote outpost, posing as someone else. This is not really news to her. It shouldn't be. Yet for two years, she has been approaching the matter of finding him the way she would most any other person.
Why? She wouldn't be a scientist if that wasn't the first question she'd been asking ever since she was a little girl. Why would she be so obtuse about something as simple and uncomplicated as finding Chakotay the Betrayer? He made her look stupid: absolutely incompetent. Twice. Twice, he entered her bed, took what she offered him and left her holding the bag. Twice she let him do it. The anger won't come, no matter how hard she baits it.
Why?
He's stood by her. Yes, he's hurt the hell out of her, but that's never been a one-way street and it's never been for intentionally trying to hurt the other person. She likes to think the good has outweighed the bad – far outweighed it. That at the end of the day, Chakotay is a good person, and that he believes this of her, too.
Out there in the Delta Quadrant, all they'd had was each other. He'd given her honesty first and support second, and he was her redeeming grace more times than she can count. He is the one person to have fully understood the impossible choices she was faced with. There may have been plenty of times that he'd disagreed with her on how to handle them, but it never changed the fact that Chakotay understood the constant no-win scenarios she'd been thrown into. He understood her. Of all of them, he's the one person who–
He stood by her. Even when she was wrong.
It makes what she has to do even harder, she thinks, hardening herself against those unwelcome realizations. They can't and don't stop her from ordering the untouched archived surveillance data she should have been looking at all along. Now that she's looking at the ion trails in the proper fashion, not for end destinations but for total flight time and vectors, it only takes her two days to find what she is looking for.
She tells no one what she is planning. Not quite yet. What is the point, if this proves to be one more false trail in a long string of searching? Especially now that the investigation into his whereabouts are closed, she tells herself.
No. Not quite yet.
When she returns to her empty apartment to pack her things and prepare for her early departure to the fringes of Federation territory the next morning, it's with a heavy heart that she can't seem to reconcile to what she's about to do. By no means will this be easy. It scares the hell out of her, if she's honest. But it has to be done. She's been left with no other viable alternative.
The only remaining question will be how much support, and how alone she'll really be when all is said and done with it.
The letters she needs to write can be composed en route to her destination. However, before she leaves, she has a house call to make. She only hopes the person she most needs to speak to won't refuse her invitation.
Phoebe hands her a steaming coffee mug, looking pissed to be pulled to their mother's house so late at night, but the first words out of Kathryn's mouth suck the edge right out of her.
"I've been an awful big sister. I admit it."
The tension lines around the younger woman's eyes and mouth melt considerably. "Pretty bad, yeah," Phoebe agrees, sipping less angrily at her own mug.
Kathryn thumps her sister's shoulder playfully, scowling. "You weren't supposed to agree with me."
"Sorry. Should I lie?" Phoebe asks, carefully steadying her ebbing beverage against the extra movement. The drink settles, and she looks up. "Okay. You're the best, Katie. I never missed you when you left for the academy and never called home to see how I was doing."
"Oh, Phoebe." God. It goes that far back. "I was eighteen and it was my first real taste of freedom," Kathryn tries to explain. "I had everything to prove to myself in the most competitive organization on Earth. In several systems, actually."
"You mean you had everything to prove to Daddy," Phoebe corrects.
"I'm not interested in getting into that with you again." It'll be one short conversation if that happens.
"Fine." By her tone, it's not, but for once, Phoebe drops the issue. She rubs the side of one artistically styled boot against the other, staring at the floor from the high stool she sits upon. "You could have called sometimes."
"I did, at first. You always seemed too busy to talk to me. I remember thinking you could have been more interested in what I was doing, as a matter of fact."
Phoebe shrugs half-heartedly. "I was mad, Kathryn. And lonely. What did you expect? I missed you."
"So you were punishing me." Kathryn nods, finally able to fill in pieces she didn't even know were missing.
"Fat lot of good it did," Phoebe snorts. "You didn't even notice."
Not really. No.
"I thought about you all the time." That much is true, at least. "It took months to get used to not tripping over you or your art supplies every time I turned around. Sometimes I'd turn around to make some inside joke with you – and you wouldn't be there. I looked forward to graduating and seeing more of you again but…" Kathryn trails off, memory failing.
"But by the time you did, years had passed. We'd grown apart."
"I suppose so."
"You don't have to be jealous of my art."
Kathryn starts in surprise. "I'm not–"
"I know you've got the yearning for it. You've probably got the physical ability somewhere. Just not the patience."
"I don't," Kathryn denies ruefully on the heels of the silence that stretches between them for a time.
Phoebe frowns. "You don't what?"
"Have the physical ability," Kathryn admits, cringing to swivel on her own stool and face her sister more fully. "I tried," she says, embarrassed. "When we were out there, on days that I missed you really badly, I…sometimes, I sculpted. Or painted. It helped clear my mind. And it made me feel a little closer to you, even though you were so many light years away. But the results were less than stellar." Her sister's wide grey eyes make her self-conscious. She shifts to pull her oversized sweater closer against an imaginary chill. "You don't have to be jealous of my crew. I love them, yes. Unconditionally. And I love you with the same intensity. Differently, maybe," the last weeks of serious reflection finally allow her to conclude, "but just as much. Tell me you can believe that," Kathryn requests plaintively.
"I know that," the younger woman sighs. "I do." She shrugs at her sister's penetrating look. "I can't help it if I've got a selfish streak where you're concerned."
Kathryn thinks back to Daddy. To times when she fought the same irrational resentment over the cadets he trained and worked with. She thinks she understands. She hates that: causing that pain in anyone else. But she understands it.
"But if one of them resigned Starfleet," Phoebe asks out of the blue: a habit of hers that stretches well back into childhood and one Kathryn is slowly readjusting to. "If he quit to become an artist. What would you say to him? I'm curious."
"I'd tell him…he could do both," Kathryn tries carefully.
A caustic huff escapes her sister. "Yeah. That's what I thought," Phoebe says flatly, looking away to the opposite wall. "Next subject."
"Phoebe…"
She holds up a hand. "I know. I know." They're silent for another small time, sipping bold brews in uncomfortable unison. Phoebe opens again. "Starfleet isn't what it used to be. The war has changed them."
"I know," Kathryn has to quietly concede.
"Do you?" The sidelong glance is ruthlessly assessing. "Do you really?"
"Yes. That much was obvious from the moment we returned. But I didn't want to see it." She can't help but see it now.
"Now that you do…are you going to stay in?"
The thought gives rise to a muted sensation akin to panic but it's easily discarded. "I've never imagined doing anything else."
"What if they keep you out of space?"
This time the panic seems wilder, but she quells it quickly. Swallows softly to ask, "What of it?"
"Space is where you belong. You've never stayed on Earth for more than a year at a time."
At that, Kathryn has to laugh, however bitterly. "I spent seven years fighting to get back here. I'm not in any great hurry to leave."
"Liar."
Kathryn gives her a look and Phoebe smirks knowingly. "Kathryn, the thing about you is that you want what you don't or can't have. The second someone says 'can't' to you, you're all over it. That's Daddy's fault."
"Even if I was going to say you're right about the first, you're dead wrong about the second."
"No I'm not. I'm just not blind to it the way you are. I watched you chase his approval for twenty five years. He'd stopped trying with me early on. Probably because I'd decided at about four that his approval came with too steep a price tag. Mom's arms were always open unconditionally," she says again.
So they were. Kathryn is sorry she wasn't a better daughter to their mother, but that was what Phoebe excelled at. Kathryn, on the other hand, had been what their father needed. She can't help defending him. Even now. "Daddy pushed us to excel."
"And you have," Phoebe acknowledges openly. "But what do you have for it?"
"I don't know." Irritation sparks, mostly at the amount of times her sister has wrung this response from her. "And I told you I'm not getting into that with you."
"Okay, okay. No Daddy." Silence. "I loved him too, you know," Phoebe's voice is barely loud enough to audibly add. "I miss him too."
The break in her sister's voice puts one in Kathryn's too. "I know that." She does, or her sister would never have made it past young adulthood with some of the things she's said about him. About both of them.
Kathryn has always understood that Phoebe channeled all her grief over their father's death into being so angry with him for dying that she couldn't see straight when thinking of him. For her, that has been easier.
It might have been easier for Kathryn, had she been able to, she thinks sadly now.
"You still need to find your answers, Kathryn," Phoebe breaks into her thoughts. "Somehow, you have to resolve this crossroads you're stuck in. You're not eighteen anymore. You don't have your whole life ahead of you. You're going to have to make some kind of decision soon. And it starts with getting yourself back out into space. That's where you belong. We've known that forever."
Kathryn sighs deeply. "I know." She does. She just hasn't wanted to admit that she is slowly going crazy on this beautiful planet she'd strived so hard to reach again.
"Okay, then. As long as you know." Phoebe pats her shoulder bracingly. Straightens from her chair and grins, setting her empty mug on the counter for her sister to recycle for her. "Good talk, Sis. Let's do it again sometime. Maybe not soon though. Or this late, either."
"Phoebe…" Kathryn's hand shoots out to grab her sister's retreating arm.
Phoebe glances down at the fingers wrapped tightly around her forearm, faintly alarmed at the strength behind the grip. "What?"
Loosening her hold, Kathryn waits a beat to make sure she really means what she's about to ask. Is filled with relief to realize that she does. "Stay?"
Phoebe raises an eyebrow, but she can read the sincerity in her sister's eyes. If she's surprised, it's a pleased kind of surprise. "Sure," she says, plopping back down in her vacated chair less awkwardly than she would have expected. She taps fashionably black-painted fingernails on a cream countertop. She's never been all that good at still life. "Wanna watch a holovid? Mom still keeps all our old favorites on file."
She would. It's classic Gretchen. Kathryn shrugs. "Not really. I think I just feel like talking. Like we used to." So, so many years ago. Back when things had been simple.
"You? Just feel like talking?" Phoebe teases. "I knew you were an alien pretending to be my sister."
A wry half smile is wrung at that. "Yes. Me. I feel like talking."
"Okay. What about?"
Kathryn studies her very pretty sister, considering. Damn Phoebe for not showing her age yet the way she does. She takes a breath. Exhales. "Tell me about your art," she requests. "What are you working on now?"
Kathryn stares in horror as Phoebe's eyes water. Her full lower lip trembles mutinously as she tries to blink back gathering moisture. She fails utterly, bursts into tears. Loud, very loud tears.
For the first time in very long months, Kathryn feels a complete and total connection to another human person as her arms open to enfold her sister, who burrows deep into her neck and bawls without reserve. It feels so good that her own eyes sting.