11. Chackotays POV
"Chakotay" Her colorless lips hardly move as she says my name in monotonous surprise. "What brings you here?" Without her uniformjacket on she looks even thinner than she had before. In an attempt to hide her fragility she adjusts her dishevelled hair and with whiteknuckled fingers combs the loose streaks behind her ears. She seems hesitant to open the door to her apartment above headquarters and raises two inquisitive eyebrows in an invitation for me to cut to the point.
"We'd hoped to see you at one of the pulic functions. We watch the enumerations closely and, quite frankly, the crew is worried about you." I fear my offer for help and friendship leaves her more lonely than she had initially been as she smirks absentmindedly and seems to stare at my commbadge as though she longs for something it represents.
"You can tell them they have a tough captain." We both realise her grammatical mistake for she hadn't been our captain for several weeks. Neither of us is willing to confront this fact that was anticipated to be a relief but is now manifesting itself as a great loss, and so her loss of ship and crew lingers in the air like a poisonous gass.
"They know that allready." I say "Can I come in?"
She bluntly deliberates as she remains silent and looks me straight in the eye. For a moment I expect her to turn me down but eventually she steps back, opens the door and precedes me into the spacious suite. She treats the replicator to a careless wave "Help yourself" she says.
As soon as I clear the walls from the corridor the state of the grand livingroom shocks me. The only light that is permitted in is moonlight, large windows allow half the floor to be visible with the white-blue tones of the moon and the occasional shuttle that comes hissing by projects a passing glare of light. The entire floor is covered with padds and portable viewscreens, enlightened letters and numbers on each one of them. Holograpic sheets are pulled up against the walls, all covered in logarithms, texts and pictures and a large viewscreen holds an intricate map with what I recognise to be Voyagers trajectory. To a fly, hovering in the middle of the room, it must seem like a starsystem, or even a complex universe made up from yellow enlightened figures and digits rather than rocks and gasgiants.
"Kathryn, what is this?"
"Choices," she says "... decisions. Seven years worth of it."
She lingered in a corner next to the hallentrance and lets me explore the room on my own. I recognize the structure of the Omega-molecule on one of the padds. A picture of Maje Culluh on another. I pick up a viewscreen at random and scroll down the algorythm that predicts the anomaly Kashyk had been looking for. I move towards the holosheet and see a video is stuck on repeat, it's the fake video Arturis had shown us to fool us into believing his ship would bring us home. Still holding her calculations in one hand I turn to her in search of an explanation for this madness.
She had squatted down at a padd in the far end of the room. Looking at her in that position, and from this distance, it occurs to me she looks like a child, fishing in a vast river or rummaging in an endless pile of dirt. The conscentious, ever-taking-the-high-road Captain Janeway was made to doubt herself, and it had caused a short-circuit in her brain.
"You could help me, " she looks up at me "I've been going over this: when that species 8472 was stuck on the ship, and that Hirogen was hunting it down, do you remember that?" She looks hopefully.
Careful not to tred the countless padds on the floor, I move towards her through the darkness, my eyes still hadn't accustumed to the light. "Briefings will last only a few more weeks, I won't come out unscaved but I can at least try to attend well prepared." She explains as I kneel down in front of her. "Now," She holds up two padds and blocks her face from mine. "Why did I let him hunt him down like an animal, he was clear about his intention, his prey was allready wounded, why, Chakotay, why did I permit it? I didn't even take my time to properly deliberate it..."
I shove the padds aside and replace them with my hands. "Kathryn, how would you like to get a coffee somewhere and talk properly." She looks at me intently and exhales in what I perceive to be relief "I don't need to be slapped with hollow assurances and vague generalizations. You know better than to patronize me." She looks down at our intertwined hands "I need clarity before the next enumeration."
I look around at the product of her compulsive obsession and then back to her. "Let's see, we may need to 'replay' every single one of these padds, analyse them, weigh the options, evaluate its affect on the crew...on you." We sit across from each other with our hands and eyes loosely locked. "Along the way we might even figure out what kept us going and what made the crew so loyal to you." She hadn't expected that. I take another look around me and conclude "I'd say we need about seven years."
A chuckle turns into a laugh and evolves further into a tearfull sobb. She shakes her head at her own inability and looks around, the unsurmountable task weighs too heavy on her slender shoulders. Her pointy collarbones scream of their presence, even through her turtleneck, and are a clear reminder of her weakened state.
"...at least." she admits in a whisper.
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I'm surprised to find she's changed the codes. Eager to finally find out what's going on I choose to walk around the house and see what's going on inside, rather than to override the system. "Stay there, I'm just going to take look inside!" Layla and Edward are exhausted from travelling back and forth to DS9 and are frustrated with my unexplained desire to return home.
As I stumble through wet bushes and almost trip over some toy I reach the conservatory where the supposed woman climbed down from. I fold my hands into a cilinder on the glass to filter out the moonlight and watch closely through them. I see nothing out of the ordinary and continue to the livingroom windows. I spread both hands on the thick glass and squint my eyes to make out the vague figures in the unforgiving darkness inside. I lean forward so my nose almost touches the glass and my breath condensates in two odd eggshapes.
A large blurr, that I recognise to be my sofa, is not in its usual place. Suddenly, I notice a stange man sitting on a chair in the middle of the room. He's unconscious. Next to him, there's a Klingon spread out on the floor, he has my plasma cutter lodged deeply in his eyesocket and a small stream of blood trickles down his temple. Now desperate to pinpoint Kathryns location and to get down to the bottom of this I stand up straight and am about to walk back to the front door when I notice movement from behind the fireplace.
A small figure comes crawling toward me. I freeze as I recognize Kathryn trying to get up and walk but she stumbles over a piece of furniture. "Kathryn!" I know the stubborn windows won't let my shout reach her. She continues to cross the three meter gap between us by crawling on her hands and knees. My eyes race over her body to see if she's hurt but the darkness doesn't permit me the information. She finally looks up when she's closer and I'm terrified to see her face has large smears of blood on it. Steadying herself against the window she leaves a bloody handprint, I bend down to put a hand on hers and yell for an explanation. She points to her right. I must go to her. Tearing myself away from her I stand up to head for the door when I'm frozen once again. Two glistening eyes approach from behind the fireplace and slowly move out of the darkness. The monstrous being is something between a skeleton and a man and moves in a slow, controlled manner. I pound my fist on the enforced window "GET AWAY". In but a few strides he reaches Kathryn and with his left hand he grabs the hair on her head as if to collect her scalp. He pulls her away from the glass and with a stretched arm steadies her head at his side. Still on her knees, she is now more vulnerable then ever and hangs at his mercy like a ragdoll. The unforgiving glass renders me powerless and I feel as though I'm watching a fake horror on a viewscreen. They might as wel be in a different world, a different dimension. I violently pound the window with all the strength I can muster. I'm not sure what I'm screaming but whatever it is, it won't reach them. The skeleton is unmoved by my violence. I hold my adrenaline and the urges that come with it so I can watch him closely as he slowly lifts his right finger and points at me by tapping his finger on the bloody stain Kathryn left on the glass. Without wasting a single blink, he raises the pointy finger to his throat and moves it horizontally to leave a thin red line. Die, he says. Die.
I snapp out of my reverie and run at a speed I probably never ran before. The toy is no longer an obstacle as I fly past it and the bushes go by unnoticed. My body hasn't yet lost its speed as my eye is allready at the iris-scanner by the door and clumsily slams the wall like a sack of potatoes that's thrown down a first floor window.
'Scanning' The system says. The second lasts an age.
'Hello Chakotay, welcome home, do you wish to alter the setting to your securitysystem?'
"NO!"
'Do you wish to change your entrance code?'
"YES!"
'You are free to make alterations.'
I hit the button that says immediate entrance and the door finally opens. I am welcomed by an eardeafeningly loud second Waltz by Sjostakovitsj, one of Kathryns favorites. My peripheral vision is a blurr and all I can hear through the music is my heartbeat that seems to resonate through my sight as the veins in my eyes drum on the rythm that my adrenaline dictates. I seem to fly through the corridor and into the livingroom.
I'm just in time to see two figures shimmer off into oblivion as the pattern of a transporterbeam dissipates.
I run towards it but can do nothing but stand where they had before and yell out her name. She can't hear me, I can't even hear myself through the music.
I'm unsure of what to do. How to act. The kids are outside. What to do? What just happened?
I see the man in the chair moving his mouth. I grab him and give him my hardest swing. He moans without sound and opens his eyes so wide they seem to grow to the size of pingpong balls. He spits out a mixture of teeth, blood and spit as I yell in his face "WHERE IS SHE?" He screams in fear. I hold him at the collar of his shirt and lift him up. My strength is fed more by anger and desperation then by muscles and I'm surprised to find the chair doesn't fall from beneath him. I drag him into the light of the hallway. 'Stop' he seems to shout. He averts his face and tenses his muscles awaiting my next puch. That face...where had I seen it before?
Then I know.
"Mark?!"
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I should have made her keep her promise.
It´s not even like her to break promises.
All my attempts at assuring her of the incompatability of familylife with a promotion into admiralty had fallen on deaf ears. She had said her days as a scientist were counted, that her determined focus on motherhood needed relief, that she would always be a mother, a woman and a wife before being an admiral. In the end I had indulged her. Of course, for how could I not? Seeing her so alive, so different from the woman she had been years earlier during the debriefings, had filled me with joy- I would have agreed to anything she desired. So, as if she were a pilgrim that had reached her Mekka, she had come fullcircle in her life as the ambitious Starfleet officer that she is and she had flourished in her new position.
I feared for her sanity however and the image of me standing by while the Fleet devoured her once again, used her up like a dealer would his junky, haunted me. I had often pretended to sleep as she worked late and silently slid into our bed, while the light of some datapad still lighted up the room for hours like a proverbial needle in her arm.
She said she had wanted to join me for Sekaya's weddinganniversy but she just couldn't let this opportunity for Kronos slip by; she preferred to go to San Fransisco. I hadn't resisted for I had excepted the Fleet proved too much of a competition in the fight for her time. The carefully built understanding that is still the foundation of our life together and that is honoured by careful compromises and close communication, reminded me that, as I need her for my peace, she needs the Fleet for hers.
"Sir?"
Nevertheless, it felt like a break of promise, a promise I should have made her keep.
"Sir?"
I let her rosary slide through my fingers as I lean with one hand against the fireplace. The cut through cuff is in front of me and is a clear reminder of what she had had to endure.
Someone is clearing his throat behind me.
"Sir?"
"Yes?" I turn around to find the captain of the local police behind me. The house is crawling with officers en forensic analysts. Large, bright lights that they had installed fill the room with a cold, clinical air, leaving shadows where there normally aren't any. I'm facing the window with the bloody hand that looks like a smudgy face with five big hairs and is engulfed by the surrounding blackness of night. I hope I don't have to see it once the sun has come up for the nature of the damning face might change and seeing a living, moving world behind it could give it more characteristics then I want it to have, the worst of which being for it to show the passing of time.
"Sir, you asked to be informed when Starfleet made contact with Voyager..."
I stand straight "Yes, do we have a connection?"
"You do indeed sir, Starfleet routed them through, you can acces your kitchenpanel if you like."
"Good." I step past the investigators and as I move through the line of sight of reporters standing outside the opened frontdoor and evoke an unwanted wave of clicking holocamera's, I silently add 'now we can really get something done'.
