Zeva system
U.S.S. James T. Kirk

Captain's log, Stardate 87791.2:

We received word from Dr. Jackson on the surface that the medical situation on Zeva V is, while still far from ideal, no longer critical. Thanks to the engineering teams, with special help from the field-trained physicians, several Zevian hospitals that were destroyed by the Nygleian attacks are now operational, and the Zevian physicians are ready to resume full-time care of their patients. We're expecting our teams to be ready to return to the ship within the next four or five hours. All of this means that I finally had the pleasure of speaking to Colonel Jena of the Bajoran Militia and giving him an exact time of arrival. He assured me that Kejal Company will be ready for transfer to the Kirk when we arrive. He also mentioned a transfer of command ceremony, which means I have some studying on Bajoran ceremonies to do before we arrive.

Captain Harry Kim leaned back in his ready room chair and sighed as he finished his log. He was glad to be finally getting back to his mission, but something was still bothering him.

He didn't have much time to ponder that thought before hearing the chime to his ready room door. "Come," he ordered distractedly.

Admiral Kathryn Janeway walked in, an impressed expression on her face. "Very nice," she said, looking around the space. "Larger than my office at Headquarters."

"No offense, Admiral, but I'm sure they planned on me spending more time here than you do in your office."

"If I had this view, I would change that," Janeway said thoughtfully, gazing out into the field of stars beyond. There was really nothing spectacular about it, but he knew what she was saying.

"You miss it, don't you?" he asked softly.

His former captain nodded slowly, her eyes not leaving the large viewport. "There are things I don't miss," she responded. "The battles, the wariness of strangers, the rationing of coffee." She said that last one with a thin smile. "But the exploration and the knowledge gained, the feeling of being the first to know something new; that made it all worth it." She walked over to the replicator, giving her former Ops officer a questioning glance, earning a nod in reply before she ordered two black coffees. "It was inevitable," she continued after taking a sip. "The promotion. It was all about timing—not timing in my career, by any means, but timing in the Federation. The Dominion War had just come to an end, everyone was rebuilding, and heroes—true heroes who would allow themselves to be thought of as such—were few and far between. And then we came home, unblemished by the events of the war, having achieved the impossible: enemies who came to work together and ended up living together, making it seventy thousand light-years in seven years, our principles intact, remaining true to the ideals of peaceful exploration as we searched for a way home, and destroying the Borg in the process. If all of this had happened five years earlier or later, we would have been applauded, but not glorified the way we were. Starfleet, and the entire Federation, needed us then to remind us why we are out there and why we do what we do."

"I never wanted to be a hero," Kim protested.

Admiral Janeway smirked. "You played that hero card, Harry. We all did."

He sighed. "I certainly don't feel like a hero right now. I can't even accomplish my first mission as a starship captain."

She blinked in surprise and shook her head slowly. "No, Harry, you're doing your first mission perfectly."

"We'll be more than a week late for Bajor," he argued. "How is that perfect?"

"Going to Bajor and picking up the infantry unit is not your mission, not really," she explained. "You are the captain of the flagship of OFA—Offense Force Alpha. Your mission, your real mission, is to go out there and get to the Nygleians before they get to us. Everything else is secondary to that. It would have been nice if you could have gotten to Bajor and picked up the ground unit on time, but it would have been the biggest mistake of your career if you chose to do that instead of doing what you did, sending your ship and your crew to protect Zeva. What good is having a ground unit if you're not going to fighting the enemy?" She didn't give him a chance to say anything before continuing. "Do you remember the first time we decided not to detour on our way home and explore a nebula?"

"The first?" Kim asked with a smile. "No, I can't say that I do."

"Well, I do," Janeway declared. "I couldn't sleep well for a week, just thinking about the opportunity we passed up, about how Starfleet is about exploration and discoveries. After all, Captain Archer in the first Enterprise spent extra time exploring the Arachnid Nebula, the proverbial stone's throw from Earth's doorstep. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was the right decision. There are millions of nebulae and other spatial anomalies between Ocampa and Earth, and if we stopped and explored each one, thinking that maybe this one will be different, will have something nobody's ever seen before, we'd still be fighting the Vidiians right now. Although we did have a mission to explore, we had a larger mission, and that was to get home."

Captain Kim sighed. "For the last four years, I have woken up every morning and focused only getting through that day, because that is all I could think about, and every night when I went to bed, I would only let myself think about what I had to do the next day when I woke up. I have lived from one short project to the next, one mission to the next, for four years, because I can't think about the future. I can't conceive of there being a future. You came to me and asked me to captain this ship, and I thought I could do it the same way I've been doing everything else for four years, but now I see that I can't. I can't do this mission to mission, because this mission doesn't end, this mission doesn't have an end." He shook his head slowly. "I don't know if I can do this, Admiral."

Janeway studied her former officer sympathetically. It didn't take much for Harry to get involved with a woman, but it always took a lot for him to get over her. She hadn't been as uninvolved as captain as some of her crew seemed to think; she knew about the girlfriend back on Earth he held on to for a couple of years, about the crushes he thought he kept secret, the Varro woman he became chemically bound to and refused medications to treat when their separation made him symptomatic. He met Naviana Torres three years after Voyager returned to Earth, and fell so hard for the then-medical student that when her older half-sister, still reeling from the discovery that her father had another daughter, did her best to forbid Harry from seeing her, he stood up to B'Elanna, and told her that if she made him chose between the two Torres sisters, he would be choosing Navi. Fortunately, it didn't come to that. In the end, Libby had been hard for him to get over, and Derran painful, but they were just transitory. Navi was the woman he married, planned a future with, and raised a son with; Janeway didn't know if he would ever be able to get over that.

She stood, returning her empty mug to the replicator and watching the molecules disintegrate as it recycled before turning back to the new starship captain. "I still think you're the right man for the job, Harry, but I'm not going to force it. Think about it for a few days, and if you decide that it's not right, we can find someone else." She gave him a solemn nod before leaving the ready room. Right before the doors slid closed, she turned and saw him again seated at his desk, his head in his hands.