AUTHOR: Sally M - posted April 2004
SUMMARY: A sense of loneliness – set after Voyager’s homecoming. Angst warning.
RATING: PG
DISCLAIMER: Characters are not mine but Paramount’s – I am mere playing
NOTE: This is another ‘old’ piece, in that it was begun two years ago. I found it today while ‘cleaning’ email files. It has not been beta’d so any screw ups are my own.
FEEDBACK: Is always appreciated.
To the casual observer on the street she was just another member of Starfleet. The more attentive person might have recognised her face from the newsvids, or seen the rank on her collar. But to everyone who passed her by, she appeared to be a woman on a mission – someone with a place to go and in a hurry to get there. Her face blank of expression, she made eye contact with no one as she strode down the street.
But she didn’t have a mission and, while she did have a place to go she wasn’t in a particular hurry to get there. Her destination was her apartment located close to the Presidio; a cold, unwelcoming place, that was less of a home than her former quarters had been on the ship she had captained for seven years through uncharted territory. Those seven years had been the best of her life and now they were gone.
She kept her head down, not because she wished to be unsociable but because she knew that if she were to look up she would start searching for familiar faces, the faces of her former crew. But she found that not even the dead would come back to haunt her. For all her times of self-imposed solitude on her vessel she never felt more alone than she did now.
There were always people around her at Starfleet Headquarters, where she had her office. Aides and fellow officers were always asking her advice on this or that matter. Potential wormholes to the Delta Quadrant seemed to be found and lost on an almost daily basis. Apparently she was the only one available to answer their constant questions. But all that was mere noise, and there was no one she could class a friend there.
It was at these times - the times when she allowed herself - that she would remember one that she had worked with, that she had been able to call a friend. During those seven Voyager years they’d been the closest of friends, perhaps closer than a husband and wife. But they had never taken that ultimate step, made that total commitment. If she thought about it, she could still hear him saying, “There are some barriers we never cross,” but she could not remember when or where he’d said it.
Darkness was falling now. People in a hurry to get home from work were beginning to give way to noisy groups of cadets heading for a night out in San Francisco. But she too was near home now, just one block to go before reaching her building. Just one more block until she could shut herself away from the world and accompany herself with a glass or two of bourbon. If coffee was her vice of choice at work then bourbon was its home equivalent. She barely ate these days, only grabbing a light sandwich at work when she remembered. For her voice of conscience was no longer with her, to tell her when to eat and when to rest. As a consequence she barely slept either, sometimes watching the sun come up if she brought work home with her.
Shutting her front door behind her, she began to wonder just how she’d become so dependant on someone else. A sudden sense of desperate loss flowed through her, and she asked herself why she’d not felt it before. Why now, she asked herself. Why now after almost a year of being back on Earth? Looking across her abode, done out in bland beige almost devoid of personal mementoes, she sighed and walked over to the apartment’s mini-bar. Pouring the first of what she knew would be several drinks that evening she asked herself again what had happened over the past eight years. So much loss, so much gained that she had also lost.
Few of her crew surrounded her these days, though she knew they met amongst themselves, connected by a common bond that only such a voyage as they had taken could forge. But she distanced herself from them, at first through necessity; later because she felt that they needed to make their own connections back in the Alpha Quadrant. And so they had gone their separate ways, first the majority of her crew and then even her senior staff - each to their homes, each to their families.
He had gone too, home to his people, and taken HER with him. Seven had returned a few months later. She’d walked into her office, announced that his planet was not to her liking and stated that she would not be returning to it. What she had meant by that was still uncertain. Kathryn shook her head and swallowed the liquor in one gulp. Seven would always be a mystery in life, but she bore no grudge towards a woman who had pounced at a chance of happiness.
Happiness. Happiness was miles away, or might as well have been. An aide had mentioned it in passing today. Did she know that Commander Chakotay was back in town, the aide had queried. Oh sorry, forgot he was no longer a commander but still, he was in town, talking about his home planet and the devastation caused by the Cardassian occupation. But anyway he was staying with friends, the Paris’. Kathryn had nodded at the aide and walked away.
He was just a few blocks away, but he might as well have been a thousand miles from her. They’d not spoken since the formal homecoming dinner. Shortly after that, the crew had all gone their separate ways. He’d not even said goodbye. Pouring another drink she grimaced. That was her fault, she now realised. She’d gone straight from the dinner back to Indiana. After a short rest there she’d returned to her work with a vengeance.
Her work - it was always her work. Her commitment to her work had carved most of her life. And at the end of the day, what was there to show for it? She had a large office, high up in Starfleet Headquarters, she had a title that meant that others were at her beck and call but what did she really have to show for her life?
She poured the contents of the glass down her throat. The answer was nothing.
FINIS
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