Title: The Albatross
Author: Christinecgb (luberluber@yahoo.com.au)
Category: VOY J/C
Rating: PG
Archive: Yes to anyone and everyone.
Disclaimer: Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the
stars...
Summary: "He admits to himself that he wishes she would come
to him. Just once."
Acknowledgements: At the end
*
The Albatross
*
Eventually they gave her a ship. Some time after the celebrations
had died down and the debriefings had ended, they saw fit to
once again bequeath her with the only thing she ever asked them
for.
A small ship. Enough room for a crew of forty
The crew was her responsibility, as was the refitting, but the
naming of the ship was theirs, so it seemed somehow unusual
that the ship should be ominously titled, The Albatross.
He saw it before he left. It hung outside the viewing deck at
Utopia Planetia while he waited for his transport.
"What will you do with it?" he asked her. He was heading
for
Bajor and she was seeing him off. She was seeing them both off.
"Whatever they tell me to do," she said.
And that was goodbye - no tears and no regrets. That was what it
was like with them. And he wondered whether it was because
she counted on seeing them again or whether she refused to
entertain the possibility she might not.
*
He hears things.
B'Elanna communicates on a regular basis. Updating him on
what she knows and, significantly, what she doesn't.
"The Beta Quadrant!" She tells him. "On the edge of
Romulan
Space. They nearly shot her down."
"What was she doing there?"
"A survey mission, apparently. Starfleet backed up her up -
they
always back her up - but Tom says they were as surprised as the
Romulans."
Weeks later he hears another report. She has been sighted in the
Katarian Sector, and then the Deltan Sector.
Seven keeps track, as reports filter in. She plots the Captain's
movements on a chart.
"Erratic," she says, surveying the information.
"But localised.
That region is of interest to Starfleet Astrometrics. An anomaly
has resulted in temporal fissures that have caused remarkable
fluctuations in telemetry. It would explain the lack of method to
her movements."
She is of interest to them both, but Seven's interest is masked by
a scientific curiosity. He can never tell how concerned she really
is. But she follows the Captain's movements regularly and
hypothesises on the objectives of her mission.
There are days when he watches Seven work, admiring the
fluidity of her movements. There are days when he reads -
Vulcan Philosophy, the teachings of the Prophets of Bajor,
Andorian poetry, Nietszche, Plutarch - all different and unusual
but somehow mundane, as if he is beyond the extraordinary.
And then there are the days when Seven isn't around. On those
days he studies her chart and wonders if there is something he
forgot to do.
*
Seven is a gracious celebrity. Unlike his publicity-shy self, she
takes to fame easily and with little of the self-consciousness
that
accompanies public scrutiny. After years of invisibility from the
Captain and the Commander, Seven becomes the face of
Voyager, the one about whom the stories are written.
In human terms, if not in others, it is an attractive face.
After yet another public engagement she returns tired and
irritable.
"Why do you do it?" He asks her. It isn't a rhetorical
question.
"I was invited."
"You can say 'no.'"
"That would be impolite."
She seeks refuge in her abruptness, a familiar and comforting
pattern of behaviour in times of stress. He doesn't like to push.
"You should visit the temple some time." He is observing
an
archaeological excavation on one of the moons. "You'd find it
interesting."
She smiles a little. He knows it's an apology.
"I'd like that," she says.
It occurs to him that she does it for him. Because she is all too
aware that he doesn't want to and she thinks it's a responsibility
someone must bear.
*
One day she finds him staring at her chart.
"Is there something I can assist you with?" she asks.
He is sorting through maps. Comparing each to the sector of
space that Seven has charted.
"This temporal fluctuation - there must be theories on its
behaviour? Some sort of pattern to the dispersal of the telemetry
that no one has thought of yet?"
She knows what he is asking. If anyone can solve riddles, she
can.
She seats herself in front of the date he has collected.
"There's a similar phenomena in the Entigan Sector," she
says.
"We should begin there."
*
It is weeks later when he arrives home to find her seated in their
living room, packed and waiting for him.
"I'm leaving," she says.
"So I see. Where will you go?"
"Earth."
There is a silence and then he sits down opposite her. He opens
his hand, palm out, and closes it again.
"You have nothing to say?" She says. Her voice cracks on
the
last word. It's a rare sound.
"Don't go."
She stares at him for a moment.
She is able to hold a fixed
expression for longer than most people. "It isn't
enough," she
says eventually.
"What do you want?"
Her expression falls. "I don't know." She says.
He doesn't know either. He isn't sure whether anything Seven
wants is within his capabilities and maybe it was all wrong to
believe he was in love with her, maybe it was a hubris of his to
think that he was the answer to the yearnings of a brilliant
misfit.
Maybe he just didn't try hard enough.
"I'm sorry," she says before she leaves. And he is too.
*
He finds, that having lost his way, he begins tracing his steps
back to a point that is familiar. And it's only in doing so that
he
realises just how lost he is
It takes a long time for him to get there, and it's not just the
distance in between.
But he finds her eventually.
Her ship is docked at Deep Space Twelve. He finds her in the
observation deck, seated and watching the stars. She looks lonely
and he reasons that she probably is but she was often lonely
amongst a crowd So now she is lonely and alone, and he thinks
he understands her better this way.
She turns when she hears her name and she is surprised to see
him, although her manner is, as always, composed.
"Commander. What brings you here?"
"My sense of timing."
"Not your curiosity?" She is smiling now.
He takes a seat in from of her, leaning forward with his elbows
on his knees and clasping his hands in front of him.
"One more day and I would have missed you."
"Yes - how did you know?"
"Seven..."
"Ah." She leans forward mimicking his position.
"How is
Seven?"
He pauses to think, but he decides on the short story. "She's
gone."
"Gone?"
"She left me."
"When?"
"Two months ago. Bajoran months."
She looks away, contemplating the stars again. "She never
told
me."
"Did you expect her to?"
She shrugs.
"She never did what I expected her to. Where is she
now?"
"Earth. Starfleet HQ."
"Is that why you're here?"
"That's part of the reason."
"Seven leaves and you come running to me?" A pretence.
He
doubts this bothers her.
"I ran to you for seven years and you turned me away every
time.
Seven caught me on the way back." And he realises now that
she
always knew it. "But Kathryn - it's only part of the
reason."
He looks outside. In the view of the main portal he can make out
three ships: the Argo, the London and Janeway's Albatross. The
London is a galaxy class ship and dwarfs the other two.
"Why doesn't your mission have a crew?" He asks.
She looks startled. "I have a crew."
"No, you don't. You signed on a fake crew from Starfleet with
at
least fifteen names of personnel that don't even exist. You
falsified records for them and somehow managed to breech
Starfleet security in order to get their files into the system.
Only
you did this by overwriting the files of Voyager's Maquis crew
members who quit Starfleet on our return."
"And you recognised their personnel numbers? "
"You can overlook one number that seems familiar - but
fifteen?"
She is silent while she takes in the floor. She shakes her head
and
shrugs. "Okay," she says.
"Okay?"
"Okay, you caught me. There is no crew. I didn't want a crew.
I
wanted to complete this mission alone." Her voice is low and
even. Almost apologetic. Almost.
"And your mission is?"
"I'm investigating the spatial anomaly that is particular to
this
region. I'm sure Seven has told you all about it."
"She told me that it was a study in chaos theory - go in one
side
and you never know where you'll end up. Or when."
"It's a temporal distortion. It allows you to travel great
spaces in
minutes."
"Only it's unpredictable - or is it?"
She raises an eyebrow. "What did Seven tell you?"
"She thinks you might have found a way to predict the exit
point."
"Did she?" He wonders if it was always like this. Did
Janeway
always pit herself against Seven's Collective knowledge? Was
that the yardstick by which she measured herself?
"No she didn't."
Her shoulders slump and she looks away once more. She seems
to smile but he thinks it may have been a brief trick of the light
-
the shadows of 'dawn' on the space station playing across her
face.
"Neither did I."
"And if the fissure opens tomorrow? Where will you go."
"Somewhere else."
He unclasps his hands and rests them on his knees, where they
look restless - somehow ill fitting. There is a great deal he
needs
to know and so much more he needs to say. And this time he
wants to make a difference.
"Kathryn - why?"
She looks outside again. "It's the Albatross," she says.
"The ship?"
"Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem. The Albatross is a symbol
of everything that is good and prosperous in the Mariner's
journey. When he shoots it down nothing is ever right again.
They wouldn't give me Voyager, Chakotay, you know that, but
that ship was my albatross and when I lost it, nothing worked.
Nothing prospered."
"That's not true..."
"Isn't it? What do we do now Chakotay? What do we do that
gives our lives purpose? We completed our mission, we're not
needed anymore."
"And you think flinging yourself across the galaxy to some
unknown point will give you what you had on Voyager?"
"No I don't think it will. But it will change -
something."
He takes another look out the observation window. The
Albatross does indeed remind him of her bird. Perhaps it was that
shape that informed her analogy. She had a tendency to see
poetry in events.
But so did he. "The Mariner shot the albatross, Kathryn. Do
you
remember that part? He's the cause of his own destruction. You
didn't get us home on your own, no matter how many times you
liked to think you did. We were there right behind you all the
way, and when you gave us an out, we didn't take it. You didn't
shoot Voyager down, you landed it safely."
"But it's gone, Chakotay."
"Kathryn, you may be the cause of your own downfall, but you
lost sight of your albatross years ago." He moves in closer
and
catches her eyes. "And this is your last chance to save
it."
She waits. She lets his words sit between them for a moment
longer. The space station security makes another round noting
their presence but leaving them to their private space. The
departure of a few stragglers from the London has left the deck
empty save for themselves, and it feels as large as it is.
"Chakotay - I don't want them to tell my story now. Not when
it's unfinished. I don't want the last line to be that I retired
to the
quiet life of a science survey vessel or..." she looks away.
He
notices the way her hands clench and relax intermittently. "Or
that I married my First Officer and set up home on a Federation
colony."
The room suddenly closes in on him.
"Is that it?" He can barely speak. "Am I too boring
for you,
Kathryn?"
He rises to his feet. He is angry with her, but mostly angry with
himself. It must be some ego he has that makes him think he can
make a difference. And yet he keeps beating his head against the
same wall - Seska, B'Elanna, Seven and Kathryn - all
formidable forces and he's continually throwing himself against
them.
"How could you possibly know what I want - you never
asked!"
He walks away but it feels like a run.
That's it, he thinks. It's over. Never again.
And he is almost gone before he stops and turns around.
He sees her standing now. The backs of her knees rest against the
chair she has just risen from. If she was about to follow him she
was not in a hurry.
He admits to himself that he wishes she would come to him.
Just once.
But of course she doesn't and he goes to her as he has always
done and as he imagines he always will, because maybe she
needs to know that. Maybe she needs to know that this thing
between then can survive anything, everything. Her.
He takes her hand and she doesn't pull away.
"You missed," he says.
He leans in and kisses her, brushing against her lips with his.
When he pulls away he notices her eyes are open and wide - and
maybe she's scared, but she's still there and it's enough.
And it becomes an artificial dawn on an artificial world. The
station's inhabitants filter into the observation lounge on their
way to the transports - ordinary lives in extraordinary
circumstances.
*
Acknowledgments: This story is the result of something Jemima
P. said to me, "what do you think you owe jetc?" I don't know
about jetc itself but I reckon I owe a lot of really nice people
in
jetc a debt of gratitude for being so nice and supportive when I
was starting off in the great wide world of fanfic.
So seeing as this is the last J/C I'm likely to write (and it's
one
more than I thought I'd write) I hope you'll all bear with me
while I thank Becky Anne, Laura Jo, Clare009, Aquiel, Shiv, the
wondrous Lin "Cookie" Booth and her amazing beta skills,
the
incomparable Ms Liz Barr (who is, I think, a genius) and the rest
of the gals at jetc22. Cheers guys.
For Jemima too - because there are some things we agree on.
The Albatross references are in no small part inspired by an
episode of Seachange called "Love in the Time of
Coleridge."