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Hearts Astray

Chapter 9

After reading non-stop through her logs for almost two hours, Kathryn took a break and replicated herself a cup of tea.

"Computer," she said as she returned to her chair, "continue logs in audio mode."

This would take longer to get through the logs, as she couldn't visually skim, but there was no way she could keep reading. Her head was hurting and her eyes were aching. Almost instantly, her own voice filled the room and began to narrate the logs. Kathryn closed her eyes and listened, but as she did a familiar nausea gripped her.

"Computer," she said. "End logs."

All went silent, but a whirring began in her ears and her body began to tremble. It was the temporal flux, Kathryn knew it. Six months had passed since her last injection and she was due one any day. But rather than drag The Doctor from the party to administer it, she chose to endure the attack, knowing it would subside in a few minutes. The onset of temporal flux always began with waves of dizziness, which went as quickly as they came, and she had at least a couple of days saving grace before an injection was essential.

Sure enough, the dizziness and nausea subsided quickly, and Kathryn felt herself again. Opening her eyes, she picked up her tea and was just about to reactivate her logs when the door chime played. Kathryn put down her drink again, got to her feet, and went over to her security monitor to see who was there. It was Chakotay. Half of Kathryn didn't want to see him, just wanted to keep going through her logs, but the other half longed to as she had so many questions that maybe he could help answer. After only a moment's deliberation, she opened the door. Even though he wasn't "her" Chakotay, he was still Chakotay, and she needed to share with him what she knew.

"Hi," Chakotay said as the door slid open. "I guess I'm the last person you're expecting to see, but the party's finished now, so I thought I'd come over and see if you're ok. The Doctor said you left on official matters, but Annika and I thought maybe you were upset."

"I'm fine," Kathryn replied. "You shouldn't have bothered checking up on me. It must be what, the early hours of the morning in Sweden? But now that you're here, I'd really like to talk to you."

"Ok," he said, "let me in and I'm all ears."

Kathryn smiled and stepped aside. "Come in. Sit down. Would you like a cup of tea?"

"That would be good, thank you."

Chakotay went to sit down on the couch and Kathryn went to replicate his drink. "Hot with sugar and lemon?"

"Please," he answered.

Kathryn made his drink to order and then carried it over to him. "Here."

Chakotay took the cup gratefully and Kathryn sat beside him. "I won't keep you long, I know it's late, but there's something I have to tell you. The trouble is, I don't really know where to begin. I suppose at the beginning. Do you remember that morning on Voyager, during our last few weeks in the Delta Quadrant, when I woke up in a state of temporal flux?"

"Yes," Chakotay answered. "The Doctor had to inject you with a serum to bring you into temporal sync. We tried to find out what had happened, why you were in a state of temporal chaos, but we could find no cause. We concluded you'd had an out of time experience."

"That's right. I thought that incident was a one off, but three months after we got home, I woke up in a state of temporal flux again. The Doctor re-injected me, which put me back into temporal sync, and we concluded it was caused by another out of time experience, probably related to the first. But when I had another episode six months later, and another episode six months after that, we could only conclude that something had happened that night on Voyager that had sent my body into permanent temporal chaos. Only the injections are keeping me in sync and the strain on my body is tremendous. That's why I suffered a miscarriage. Every day my body is degenerating at the cellular level and how long I have to live, or what the quality of my life will be if I live long, is anyone's guess."

"I'm sorry," Chakotay said. "Why haven't you told me?"

"I didn't want to worry you."

Chakotay put down his drink. "I'm your friend, Kathryn. Whatever you're going through, I want to share it with you. And that goes for Annika too. We want to be here for you."

"I appreciate that," Kathryn replied. "Truly. But I'm not the Kathryn Janeway you've both known all these years. The temporal flux is only half the story." She paused. "That's why I left the party. While talking with B'Elanna, Tom and Harry, things were said that suddenly made everything clear. The reason I'm suffering from temporal chaos is because I'm from another reality."

Chakotay was silent a moment as he absorbed this, then he spoke. "That's a big conclusion to jump to," he said skeptically. "And perhaps not the most plausible. From what I understand, being in another reality doesn't send a body into temporal chaos."

"No, but I don't know how I ended up in this reality. Anything could have happened. If I'm here because I was caught up in some kind of temporal anomaly, that would explain my temporal chaos and my reality displacement." She paused. "I've been through my logs and there are a lot of discrepancies between the events I can remember and the ones catalogued in them. I have to be from another reality."

"But if you're from another reality then..."

Kathryn finished the sentence. "I've been in it for over two years."

Chakotay fell silent again as he tried to make sense of this, tried to digest it all.

"I know what you're thinking," Kathryn went on, "that I've either gone crazy or have had too much to drink. The Doctor certainly thought I was drunk. But I'm totally sober and serious. I'm from another reality. I know its hard to believe, I'm having a hard time getting my head around it myself, but I'm from another Voyager in another timeline."

"If you're so certain," Chakotay replied, "then I believe you. I just...I don't want to believe it."

"I'm not sure I do. And yet....another part of me does. A part of me is relieved by all this. Because for so long, ever since we got home, I've felt displaced, like I don't belong. Nothing has gone right for me and everything, from you being with Annika to Tuvok being ill, has felt so wrong."

"When time is out of balance," Chakotay said, "everything is wrong. Either that or its too right. A wonderful dream or a terrible nightmare. At least, that's the conclusion I've come to." He paused. "What exactly was said at the party that made you realize you are displaced?"

"Tom, B'Elanna, and Harry were discussing Tanya Marshall. In my reality, she died when Voyager got pulled into the Delta Quadrant, so it totally threw me when they started talking about her."

"Then we definitely are from different realities," Chakotay answered. "Tanya Marshall was a huge part of our journey in my reality."

"From reading my logs," Kathryn said, picking up her cup of now cold tea, "I get the impression that you and she were involved."

"Yes," he answered. "We dated for over a year."

"If it's not too painful to talk about, what happened? B'Elanna mentioned something about her betraying you in some way."

"She did. But she also betrayed all of us. Behind our backs she collaborated with Seska to sell us to the Kazon. I was taken prisoner, as was Vorik and Joe Carey, and she personally tortured me during interrogation. When she was captured by us later, and put into the brig, she claimed to have been acting under mind control, but no one except Neelix believed her. But, because she had a convincing story and injuries that seemed to back it up, we had to officially give her the benefit of the doubt. I ended things between us, because there was no way I could trust her again, and a few months later she was killed in a shuttle crash."

"I'm sorry," Kathryn said. This woman had clearly broken his heart, just like all women had before Seven.

"I should never have gotten involved with her," he replied. "B'Elanna warned me against her, as did Ayala, but I was so crazy about her that I wouldn't listen. I thought they were reading her wrong, that they misunderstood her. I wanted to marry her, and had made up my mind to propose, but then we found out about her involvement with Seska. I was devastated. I also started to question my judgment because it seemed like every woman I got involved with was only using me. I didn't get involved with any woman afterwards until Annika."

"How did that happen? In my reality, you and she were barely friends."

"Really? That's hard to imagine. We didn't always have romantic feelings for each other, and for her first few months on Voyager I had little to do with her, but that all changed when we got stranded on a planet together. We crashed into an ocean while on a mission to collect dilithium crystals and were trapped at the bottom of it for two weeks. The planet had a volatile atmosphere, which made it difficult for you to scan for us, so it took you that long to rescue us. With only each other for company, we got to know each other well and became friends. Things became awkward when we started to see each other as more than friends, and I distanced myself from her as I didn't think she felt the same way, but then I found out she'd been running holograms with me as her lover and I knew that she did. I confronted her and, well, the rest is history."

"It all makes sense now," Kathryn said. "everything. I couldn't understand how you and Annika had got so close when you'd hardly even been friends." She paused, almost painfully. "What about us? What were our...personal parameters?"

"If by that you mean what was the nature of our personal relationship, then we were only ever friends. But, as you're asking, I gather in your reality we were more?"

"Yes and no," she replied quietly. "We loved each other, at least for a time, but never acted on our feelings."

"That's hard to believe," Chakotay reflected.

Kathryn smiled. "What? That we had feelings for each other or that we never acted on them?"

Chakotay smiled back, dimples showing. "That our realities are so different and yet so similar."

"Yes. But it only takes a missing thread in a tapestry for the image to change."

"That's true." He paused. "But it must be difficult...having personal relationships with people in this reality that are different to the ones in yours. I'm sorry if I've done or said anything to hurt you."

"I've found this reality confusing at times," Kathryn confessed, "and, now I know it's not my own, I feel as though everyone in it is a stranger. But, on another level, I feel as though I know everyone so well. And in so many ways I do. Because no matter how many realities we exist in, our core personalities are the same. Which is both a comforting and scary thought. In some future I became the Admiral Janeway who changed time to get us home. It was wrong, even if her motives were good, and it's unsettling to think I could betray my principles, principles that I clung to so hard in the Delta Quadrant, to change history to my liking."

"I suppose Fate is Character as much as Character is Fate," Chakotay mused. "What we become doesn't just depend on who we are but on what happens to us. I never imagined I'd one day be a Federation outlaw. Admiral Janeway belonged to this reality, or at least to a dimension of this reality, so she was a product of what happened to her in this reality. If we were still in the Delta Quadrant now, and what happened to her was to happen to you, then you might still not become her because you don't have her exact history. Something might have happened to her three or four years into our journey that shaped the woman she became, but that event hasn't happened to you. Like you say, it only take one missing thread."

"Yes. Who knows what happened to me to make me her. But I should have realized before now that the threads of this reality are different to my own. It just never occurred to me that I'm in some kind of alternate universe. For the passed two years I've lived day to day and haven't read my Voyager logs or discussed our journey in any great detail with anyone since we got back. I've given a few interviews, and have been asked a lot of questions, but from what I can tell the basic framework of our realities are the same so without looking closely at the fabrics, I haven't noticed that the patterns are different. If someone interviewing me, or talking to me, said something that wasn't was quite right, I just assumed they'd got their facts wrong. It never dawned on me that I'm in another reality."

"That's understandable. I haven't read my Voyager logs since we got back either. And with Annika and I gone for two years, the two people you were closest to on Voyager, who would you talk to about those years who lived them with you? Harry's been in space, Tuvok on Vulcan, and you've only seen Tom and B'Elanna a couple of times since we got back. We've all had new lives to get on with and have gone our separate ways."

"That's true. I just...I should have noticed I was on the wrong Voyager. As captain, I should have noticed I was on a different ship."

"If it looked the same, had the same personnel, how could you? If our realities are just slightly different, but otherwise parallel, how would you notice? And where was the time to go through Voyager's logs? There was barely enough time to make today's logs. You spent most of the day, every day, either in your ready room or on the bridge dealing with some emergency. Where was the time to socialize and reminisce about the past? We had a crew to get home and a ship to defend. We lived in the now, in the present, yesterday was forgotten."

"You're right. I suppose I'm being too hard on myself, as always."

"The question we should be asking," Chakotay said, picking up his drink, "is how do you get back to your reality?"

"That is the question," Kathryn replied. "But maybe I can't. Maybe I'm trapped in this one."

"I'm not convinced the universe works that way. The laws of existence are precise and I don't believe they can be violated. At least not indefinitely. You being in the wrong reality is a violation and the laws will want to set that right."

"Then they'd better get to it. Unless, of course, I'm meant to be in this reality. But I doubt it. I know Harry and Naomi come from a different Voyager but they weren't from a different reality, they were from a duplicate ship. That's different."

"It is," Chakotay agreed. "If our understanding of temporal mechanics is right, and we may well be wrong, then there's a profound difference between time-travel and reality-travel. When we go back in time, we don't go to another reality, we go back to a point in our past. That means we're only moving between different points in the same timeline. If the future has changed because we change the past, then that future is erased from time. But when we find ourselves in another reality, for whatever reason, we're not moving between different points in our past and future, we're existing in a completely different timeline. That's what's happened to you. Somehow, someway, you're existing in a timeline that is not your past, your present, or your future. Maybe it was your past once, but at some point before Voyager got pulled into the Delta Quadrant, the timeline split into another. Maybe into hundreds. Who knows. You existing in a timeline that is not your own disturbs the space-time continuum and that has to explain the temporal flux."

"I guess it does."

"And, if our understanding of temporal mechanics is right, there can only be one ultimate timeline. The others will cease to exist when the threads of time are bound again. That has to mean, as much as it chills me to say it, that either this reality, or your reality, or neither is that ultimate one. And I think it's yours. For you to be displaced in time, and none of us, it has to mean that you are the connection to the ultimate timeline. And if your reality is the ultimate timeline, then everything you're experiencing now is just a shadow, a shadow of what is to be, a reflection in a mirror: there, but not there."

Kathryn lay back against the couch and closed her tired eyes. "Temporal mechanics always gives me a headache and its giving me one now. All this is crazy, I say it myself, and yet and the same time so sane. But just because I'm the one displaced, doesn't necessarily mean that my reality is the ultimate one. I might be the one that is a shadow, a reflection, a ghost that needs to be exorcised from time. But I strongly suspect that when, or if, time is whole again, the last two years will be rewritten for both of us. If your reality is the ultimate one, then everything will happen for you as it has. If mine is the ultimate one, then who knows what our fates are." She paused. "As to getting back to my own reality, the only way I can think of is to not take the injections The Doctor gives me. He says I'll die if I don't, but maybe I won't, maybe I'll just go back to my own reality."

"Sounds risky," Chakotay replied. "We're only dealing with the hypothetical. We might be wrong. Maybe something else is going on here. Let's not do anything hasty. Let's investigate and weigh up the evidence first. Let's read our logs and re-study all the data collected at the time of the first incident. We might have missed something. I don't need to tell you that just one missing piece of a puzzle, no matter how small, is enough to distort the picture."

"You're right," Kathryn said. "There's too much at stake to be hasty. The history of all our lives. We'll investigate. But promise me one thing."

"Anything."

"That you won't say anything to Annika about this, not yet. I don't want her to worry. Her pregnancy isn't going to be easy, not between her borg implants and carrying twins, and she doesn't need the stress of all this. If we have to bring her in, because we need her expertise, then we will, but for now, let's keep things between you, me, and The Doctor."

Chakotay put his hand on her shoulder. "You have my word, Kathryn. This stays between us."

END OF CHAPTER NINE