She heard the voice in her head before it echoed through her ears. Heard the heartache and the weariness that came with long journeyed traveling. Heard the wistfulness of walking the corridors one used to call home, with no current place to settle down.
She had no idea how to respond.
“Hello, Kes.”
So this is what it had come to, Sara thought. After all these years, after all this time, staring at a simple shadow of what the woman had been.
“You’ve changed,” Kes managed a smile through the bitterness in her eyes. “Grown up. Grown taller a bit, I think.”
Sara didn’t tell her that she had changed as well, simply drew a deep breath and released it. Sadness welled in her heart, cracks threatening. Her blue eyes grew more luminous as the minutes passed, two women, one now old and one still young, stared at each other.
“You are what I wish I could be,” Kes’s face drooped into its haggard lines. “Still here, aboard Voyager. I should never have left.”
“You did what you thought was best for everyone,” Sara told her. “There was no way you could have known what happened, what waited for you there.”
“No,” her longtime friend, never forgotten, told her. “I didn’t.”
“I think,” Sara stepped closer to her, “Looking back on it all, that we should not look on what has happened, but what the future holds.”
“Even you can’t see that.”
“No,” Sara agreed. “But I can be…grateful…for the here and the now.”
“To what end?” Kes looked angrily at her.
“To know that I had the chance to say goodbye,” Sara whispered. “To tell you goodbye now, to tell you that you were and always will be my friend.”
She caressed Kes’s cheek, the skin leathery and rugged under her fingertips. “No matter what happens, you will always be in my heart.”
Her eyes flashed, and for a brief second Sara saw and felt what had been, the woman that Kes was, instead of what she had become. An embrace was shared, taken and given, as two now-grown women lived years of memories in a simple minute of time.
“Don’t remember me this way,” Kes whispered into Sara’s ear, still holding her against her body. “Don’t remember the tired old woman that stands before you now, the weak woman that you hold in your arms. Remember what I was – remember the innocent child that you called your friend.”
“I always have, and always will,” Sara blinked back the foolish tears that gathered in her eyes. “But young or old, I will always call you my friend. Good luck, Kes.”
“Good luck, Sara.”
Kes vanished almost as soundlessly as she had come, the sound of the doors opening and closing the only evidence of her presence, taking her to the transporter room where the Captain, Neelix and Tuvok waited to send her on her way. It was as the Captain had said – it did not matter which Kes went home.
Choices.
That’s what it came down to now – choices. She could choose to remember Kes as a vibrant, innocent young woman, whose long blond curls tumbled down her back, whose eyes sparkled with love, with life, with laughter.
Or she could choose to remember the haggard, tired old woman with short-cropped gray hair and bitter darkened eyes that had come back to the ship two years later. A woman bent on revenge and destruction, with a hardened heart full of hatred.
Sara chose the former.
She stared into Neelix’s glittering orange-yellow Talaxian eyes when he exited the transporter room, following the Captain and Tuvok.
“Well?” he asked, sadly.
“Well what?” she asked back.
“Did she tell you anything? Something to explain…” his voice drifted off. Tears clouded the yellow orbs as he stared at a now-closed metal door.
“She said to remember the way she was,” Sara was quiet. “And I choose to honor that request.”
“So should we all,” Captain Janeway broke in, a comforting hand on Sara’s shoulder. Tuvok nodded solemnly, signifying his agreement, though Sara swore she felt a flash of regret from him, permeating his Vulcan shell. “So should we all.”
