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*
She expects to vanish into time itself. She doesn’t.
*
“Captain?”
It’s Cavit, her first officer, and she’s looking at a ghost—but she’s not, because he’s in front of her, hale and whole, and she’s no longer wearing a chroniton-infused harness made to travel through temporal barriers.
“Scan for temporal anomalies,” Janeway orders. “Any abnormalities.”
“I’m not detecting anything,” says Harry Kim, this week-old ensign who will one day—may one day—invent an astrometrics lab and become one of the people she relies on most.
Cavit prompts, “Is something wrong, Captain?”
“Probably nothing,” she says, looking around her shiny new bridge. “It never hurts to check.”
She should have forgotten all of it. Maybe that means there was nothing real to forget.
*
They’re in the Delta Quadrant. They’re in the Delta Quadrant, and Cavit is dead, and Janeway feels like she’s a marble rolling down a mountain. All you’ve seen are bits and pieces, Chakotay said, and this mystery in front of her wasn’t one of them, but she feels herself picking up speed toward an inevitable future she should know nothing about.
She can’t think like that, though, can’t act based on the specter of a future trapped in deep space when it may all have been a dream. A split-second hallucination, a blink out of time. These things happen in space, and are rarely explained, and it’s not even the tenth most important thing on her plate right now with a missing crewman and a powerful alien talking in riddles.
She’s a Starfleet captain, she has years of training and experience, and she’s in command of a real ship in real time. She has to engage with what’s in front of her.
But Chakotay—there’s something electric when she sees him, a one-sided tug of familiarity. She went through something remarkable with him, and he doesn’t know who she is. It gives her power over him, but more than that, it gives her a trusted ally in the clothes of an adversary. She makes a unilateral decision that they’ll work together, with no doubt that he’ll agree to it. He seems bewildered, but just as she knew he would, he follows her every step of the way.
She asked him: Whose lives?
An alien culture. The Ocampa.
Janeway watches the few pieces she has fall into place amid all the ones she doesn’t, and then she’s on the damaged Array, the remains of the Caretaker entity in her hands, the choice laid out in front of her.
“Shall I activate the program to get us back?”
She looks at Tuvok, her friend, her trusted comrade. He warns her about the Prime Directive.
The Array would have destroyed itself, without Voyager. They’ve already violated the natural cause of events, through no fault of their own, just by being there. There’s another Prime Directive—the Temporal one—that tells her she shouldn’t know what happens next.
But it doesn’t matter—not that she knows, not that she promised the future to a man she met outside of time. With the cards in her hand, the cards on the table, her answer would always have been the same. “We didn’t ask to be involved, but we are.”
*
She destroys the Array.
In the moment, she’s absolutely sure of her decision.
She’ll wonder though, for years, if she would have done it, if she didn’t already know that she would.
*
Chakotay accepts her proposal to combine their crews. She talks around it a little, lets it seem like it’s at least half his idea, lets it be a pleasant surprise how easily she’s willing to forgive the Maquis the crimes they committed 70,000 light-years away. It’s nice to have the tables turned with him, to be the one with the upper hand.
They’re alone, in an uncharted part of the galaxy, and the sprawling dangers in front of her feel like fingers around her throat, but it’s a relief to see him in uniform.
*
She writes down, in a triple-encrypted file, everything she remembers. It takes her a few days to get to it, though. Life is moving too fast, and she’s already losing details of her last adventure amid the one she’s living now.
She should try to forget it entirely, the Temporal Prime Directive and all, but they’re lost in deep space and she needs all the help she can get. She has no backup, but she has this. It's a double-sided promise: if time plays out like it did before, they’ll still be trapped here seven years from now—but they’ll still be alive.
She writes down the important parts, and allows herself only a little color commentary: He has a lovely smile.
The slivers of the future she saw weren’t laid out for her on a timeline. She doesn’t know when things will happen—or if they will, given the nature of temporal anomalies and her fervent hope that they’ll find a way home tomorrow.
She gets some things wrong. B’Elanna Torres isn’t ready to be Chief Engineer, any more than she’s likely to hop into matrimony with Tom Paris anytime soon, so Janeway assumes that’s a twist that will come down the road.
But in the shuttlecraft, B’Elanna’s brilliance and self-doubt in full display, it falls into place. She’s no more ready for her new role than Janeway is to captain the only Starfleet ship in an entire quadrant, but here they both are.
Someone more poetic might call it destiny.
*
There’s something about Chakotay that’s like slowly unwrapping a gift.
He’s all lines of tension at first, trying to navigate the difficult role of protecting his old crew and serving his new captain. He fights with her, but not as much as she can tell he wants to. In the first weeks, he always seems to be holding himself still, like if he lets himself breathe, all the energy coiled in him will erupt.
“I’m not used to wearing a uniform anymore,” he admits, in an honest moment, when she asks what’s bothering him.
“I know you’ll grow into it someday,” she says, because she knows how well he will wear it, but when her words hit the air she regrets the phrasing. “That sounds patronizing; I’m sorry.”
He considers her, a look on his face she can’t immediately parse. “Don’t apologize,” he finally says. “I’m glad one of us is confident.”
She promises, genuine, “I have all the confidence in you.”
Something shifts in him, peeling back a layer. His next breath is deeper, his shoulders relaxing, some pride in how he lifts his chest. She sees a hint of the casual ease she remembers in him from the future. “I’ll have to remember that.”
Twice that week, she has asked him to join her for breakfast or lunch, and he’s declined, opting to focus on work.
The next day, with that warm smile she remembers, he invites her.
*
They’re trapped in paradise together, and it’s impossible.
Impossible, or wrong, or at the very least temporary. She’s seen the future, and they’re both on Voyager. If this happened in the other timeline, that Kathryn Janeway found a cure. If the future is written, she has to do the same, and she has to find it soon, before Voyager is too far out of reach. She can’t bear the thought that they’d lose years, somehow, waiting for time to reunite them.
Chakotay doesn’t understand her urgency, because in his mind, Voyager is already out of reach, traveling at speeds their shuttlecraft can’t approach. She knows better, though, so she works each day from dawn to well past dusk.
He nests, building a home around them, coaxing her out from her research long enough for a meal or a late-night glass of replicated synthale under the stars. There are moments when it’s so tempting to relax and enjoy where she is, and who she’s with. Would it be so terrible to let the future pass her by? To miss her appointments with the horrors she saw on the fractured ship?
After the storm, Chakotay’s hands on her neck, the same tide of arousal rising in both of them at once—it would be so, so easy.
But she can’t. There are some barriers we never cross, and if she does, she’ll be abandoning the future, damning them to a life of no consequence. If she gives in to the urge to turn to him, to run her fingers across his chest, to kiss every part of his beloved face, she’ll be admitting that Voyager will have to go on forever without them.
We’ll be following a captain who never stops believing that we’ll get there.
When she tries to shore up the bulkheads between them, he gives her his heart in the form of a legend. Another piece falls into place: that steady devotion she saw in him, his unwavering faith in her.
“I can’t,” she says, and grips his hand to try and make him understand that it’s not no, it’s not I don’t want you. “Not yet. Not yet—give me time, Chakotay.”
He nods, drawing himself in.
In the weeks after, she wavers. He’s gentle and patient and kind, and they have time together in a way they didn’t when research filled her every waking hour. Their interactions turn playful, familiar. She revels in their enforced closeness, how they can brush up against each other in the cabin in a way that neither of them could swear, definitively, is unintended. They spend long nights talking, and the frenetic, action-packed future she saw on her first week as Voyager’s captain feels very far away, if it ever truly existed to begin with. There are days—weeks—when she doesn’t think of it at all.
Kathryn feels the edges of herself uncurl, reaching for him. Sometimes literally, when they’re sitting by a campfire or watching the fireflies rise in the evenings and she’ll brush her fingers over his arm, just to see warm hope dawn in his face.
It’s pouring rain outside and they’re in their little living space, exchanging stories of their faraway lives. “Oh, Chakotay, you should have seen her,” she says, laughing. “This little thing no bigger than a coffee mug, trying to drag a whole blanket with three other puppies on it, all twice her size.”
“She was the runt of the litter?”
There’s something familiar about those words in his voice, but she doesn’t place it until she answers, “I couldn’t help but take her home. I thought she had spunk.”
It’s like all the air is gone from the room, with the realization that she’s still on that nightmare path she saw ahead of her. She hasn’t moved to a kinder timeline after all.
“… Kathryn?”
She gets up, without explanation, and leaves the shelter to stand in the rain. A few minutes later, he comes out, bringing her a waterproof blanket. “It’s okay to miss her,” he says, assuming her grief is for the past.
*
She’s quiet the next day. She goes through her things, looking for the thrice-encrypted PADD with her scribbled secrets of the future.
Chakotay’s been checking in on her all day, gently, hovering around the edges of her activities. This time he picks up a book she has moved out of the way.
“Is this a real antique?” When she looks up, he’s carefully turning the pages of Dante’s Inferno. “I’ve never read it.”
“You can borrow it,” she says, and it feels like another nail in the coffin.
*
Voyager returns. Or rather, they’re return-ing, leaving them thirty hours to turn back into Starfleet officers. The sad, accepting smile on Chakotay’s face is the same one she saw from his older self in engineering, telling her they were never lovers. She wonders now if he was thinking of this.
“You were right.” She can hear him trying to keep his voice even and emotionless, like through force of will he can keep her from seeing how sad and frustrated he is. “Somehow, you knew.”
She wants to wrap her arms around him. She wants to stop what she knows is coming. She wants, more than ever in her life, to be wrong. “I know a legend, too.”
He turns his face away from her, as though she can’t see the pain as clearly in his back, like she doesn’t know him as completely as she does. “Not now, Kathryn.”
“Listen to me. Listen. I know what’s coming.” She approaches him, lays a hand on his shoulder and refuses to feel rejected when he tenses away from her. She grips her fingers down, not letting him leave, and he yields to the force of her intention, like he always does. “We’ll leave this planet behind, but we’re not leaving our friendship down here.”
He nods, taking shallow breaths.
“We have years ahead of us in space, leading our crew. We’ll face unbelievable dangers. Anomalies, the Kazon, the Borg, things you can’t even imagine now. We’ll lose members of our family, and we’ll gain others. You’re by my side for all of it. Always.”
The story, less poetic than his, hangs in the air between them. Finally, he asks, voice rough: “How does it end?”
Her prophetic vision only stretches so far, but it’s her legend, and she’s going to finish it. “We get home.”
*
The Kazon take the ship. She knew this was coming, too.
“We’re going to be rescued,” she tells her people, with no rational explanation. She sees in Chakotay’s face that it’s an effort to believe her, when he’s drowning in complicated guilt over his role in Seska’s plan. Janeway says, “That’s an order,” with all the confidence of time on her side.
When they see Voyager flying above them, returning in triumph, she pokes her elbow into Chakotay’s ribs. “You should never doubt me.”
*
They meet enemies, ones she saw coming, ones she didn’t.
Her faith in the future makes her reckless, with her life, with her ship, with the lives of the others she knows for sure will make it at least seven years. She’s quick to arm the self-destruct, and whenever she does, it feels like she’s staring in the face of the universe, waiting for it to blink.
It always does.
*
She feels the same way, staring down the Borg. Staring down Chakotay, when he disagrees with her.
He shouldn’t doubt her. She hasn’t told him why, of course, though at this point she no longer knows if it’s the Temporal Prime Directive making her keep her own counsel with this, or the fact that she’ll have to explain why she never said anything before.
But he should trust her anyway, because she’s his captain. Because she’s more than that to him, and she’s not above leaning into that when she needs to. Because she hasn’t been wrong yet.
Maybe she’s reckless with his loyalty, too.
*
Knowing the future doesn’t make it easier to live with, day to day. It might actually make it harder.
She might suspend disbelief, might commit herself fully to any opportunity that presents itself on the off-chance the timelines have slipped their gears, but whenever they fail to get home and the crew around her have to overcome their disappointment, she has an additional weight to bear. She has to encourage them, “Maybe next time,” when she knows that whatever wormhole or technological marvel they find around the next star won’t get them home either.
And Chakotay…
She wants, and sometimes she’s angry for wanting. Angry for him wanting her, when she has to keep disappointing him.
But mostly, she takes him for granted. She watches herself do it, and feels terrible, but she’s so many years into running on adrenaline that she can’t seem to stop. The uncrossed barriers between them grow wider. She used to fantasize about balling up her uniform, tossing it aside with all her obligations and best judgment wrapped inside it. She’d call him up and say, just once, if we swear it never happened, we could just have this once.
She fantasized about saying to hell with it, and having it more than once. Consigning the future to look after itself, and letting Chakotay look after her.
She knew, at one point, without a doubt, that he’d accept, no matter what stipulations she offered. She doesn’t know that anymore.
It’s hard to watch him change, in subtle physical ways, into the man she once met, while at the same time she grows farther from the bright and idealistic woman she was. She doesn’t know if it’s worse to acknowledge that to herself, in the mirror, or to see it reflected in his face. They keep the weekly dinner appointment they’ve long had on their calendars—the one that never seemed necessary, when they used to end every day dining together anyway. He still smiles, still laughs at her jokes when she manages to tell them, but where he once was so open with her, he’s guarded. For months, after the Equinox, it’s almost like he can’t look at her at all.
No wonder, she thinks, no wonder he shut down in the face of her flirtatious question in engineering when they met outside of time. He shook her hand and let her down easy, that innocent version of Captain Janeway who had no idea how complicated their relationship would grow over the years. How stagnant it would become, when she refused to let it grow further.
It’s all a distant memory now, played and replayed in her mind so often it’s difficult to know what’s still authentic about it, but she tries to hold on to the way that Chakotay looked at her, the version of Captain Janeway he reflected back to her. She didn’t know him then, but he knew her, knew her now, and his every action still radiated loyalty and trust and a deep affection. Chakotay has no ability to lie, none, and she clings to this as proof that they’ll come back together again, that what’s between them may be strained, but it’s not broken.
She opts to give him space, taking her shore leave in another star system so he can command Voyager on his own, offering him long away missions that he always accepts.
In his absence, she sometimes reads over her list of temporal memories, ticking them off as they happen. Icheb is here now. B’Elanna and Tom get married. Even the cider the future Icheb once mentioned makes its way on board the ship, spoils of one of Chakotay’s long adventures in the Delta Flyer with Tom and Harry.
The first bottle shows up at one of their weekly dinners. “There’s more where that came from,” Chakotay says. “Don’t tell Neelix.”
She laughs, grateful for the easy evening between them, for how he seems to have genuinely missed her in his two weeks away. She missed him, more than she can say. “He won’t hear about it from me. Where are you hiding it?”
“Hmm,” he says, eyes twinkling. “I think I’ll keep that to myself, so you don’t drink it without me.”
She remembers leaving an adult Naomi and Icheb in an astrometrics lab her ship didn’t yet have, one that Harry and Seven built almost four years ago. At the time, Harry was surprised at how readily she agreed to the proposal.
That Chakotay told her about a case of Antarian cider that Icheb helped him hide in a cargo bay. Hopefully your knowing that won’t disrupt the timeline too much, he said with a chuckle—the least consequential secret he revealed on their entire adventure, and the last piece of the puzzle to slide into place.
She feels anticipation rising.
*
When it happens, of course, she’s not involved.
She played her role in Chakotay’s extra-temporal adventure seven years ago. It’s an ordinary evening for her, an anomaly in the Delta Quadrant, another dinner interrupted first by a broken replicator and then by a call to the bridge.
But when Chakotay comes to the bridge, there’s something different about him. He’s cagey about what happened with the deflector dish, but that’s not what it is. He’s happy, eyes bright in the same way they are every year on May 20th, when he’s trying to set up a surprise by acting as though he’s forgotten her birthday.
“I can’t tell you,” he says, when she asks him to explain what happened. “Temporal Prime Directive.” He reaches his hand out, inviting her to re-join him for dinner.
And she knows.
*
She’s sitting with a secret all through dinner—but then, so is he, and she’s lived with hers far longer. He can’t help but drop hints, and she feels a warm, unbounded affection for him, for his entire lack of guile. If he’d been the one to know all this seven years ago, even if he had all the intent in the world to preserve the timeline, he wouldn’t have lasted a day.
She’s free of it now, the obligation to the future that has woven in and out of her time in the Delta Quadrant, and that will take some getting used to. It was never the most important thing, but always somewhere in the back of her mind.
Chakotay is indignant when she reveals his hiding place but dutifully goes to fetch another bottle of cider, maybe sensing, as she does, that the evening isn’t yet meant to end and they’ll need another drink to see it through. This time, it’s not a premonition. She’s done with those, but the veil of time is thin tonight, and they might both still be sensitive to it.
When Chakotay returns, she has left a PADD on his chair.
“What’s this?”
She takes the bottle from him and pours cider into their glasses. “Read it.”
His eyes flick around the page as she drinks. It’s not dated, out of some desire for plausible deniability should it fall into the hands of the Department of Temporal Investigations, but it’s all written in the future tense. We’ll encounter the Borg. At some point, the Kazon will take over the ship, and a Cardassian will be with them. Samantha Wildman will have a daughter, named Naomi. She wrote about him, too, in broad strokes. He’ll become her first officer. They’ll come to trust each other, implicitly. It seems Chakotay and I will grow close, but there are some barriers we never cross.
She remembers writing that as an afterthought, at the end of her letter to self. At the time, it didn’t seem nearly as important as everything else—right now, with the weight of prophecy finally lifted, it feels like the most important thing.
“Kathryn, what is this?”
“You and I had an adventure once.” Her grip is tight around her glass. She realizes that, for the first time, they both have all the facts.
“You shouldn’t have remembered anything. It should…” His eyes snap up to hers. “You knew. When we were leaving New Earth, and you said you… you knew.”
She nods.
“And that’s why—” A dark flush crawls up his cheeks, and he looks above her head at the stars. After a minute, he lets his gaze fall down to his hands, shaking his head. “I never should have said it.”
“You were right to. It wasn’t our time yet.” Her heart’s racing. There’s so much on that PADD, seven years of a thing she never shared with him, that would have made his life easier if she had, and he jumped right to the end.
He taps the PADD against his fingers for a moment, then rests it on the table and picks up his glass. He drains half of it, and she watches his throat when he swallows. His voice is quiet when he asks, “Will it ever be?”
She can’t see the future anymore. “Do you still want it to?”
He meets her eyes then, and it stops her breath in her throat. If she’s been holding onto one secret all these years, he’s been holding that, and it’s like a bolt of lightning, illuminating the entire sky. She’s seen it before, that raw and desperate longing, but not since they shared a planet, not since a year later when she nearly died in his arms. After that, she thought he let it go, but he must have packed it away instead, carefully, somewhere she’d never see it.
It feels like he’s throwing her a rope, and she didn’t know she was drowning. “I should have kissed you.” It comes out in a rush, seven years late. Five years late, after New Earth. Four, after a moonlit sail, her limbs still tingling with the rush of being alive and Chakotay watching her like he couldn’t breathe without it. How many other times? “I wanted to. Chakotay…”
He sets his glass of cider on the coffee table and leans toward her. He pulls her glass away too, then holds both her hands in his. “I’m sorry you had to carry all this alone.”
She told him once, not yet, not yet, because her hands were tied. Now the future stretches out before them, unknown and undiscovered, and she doesn’t want either of them to face it alone. It’s finally, finally time.
She doesn’t think past the impulse to kiss him. She’s dreamed of it, longed for it, but she still doesn’t expect the way seven years of fractured events come together at once. He’s lived a lifetime in a day, and she feels every hour of it in the sound he makes in her mouth, the way he grips her shoulder like she might fade away into smoke if he lets go.
She slides off the couch toward him without breaking contact, straddling his knees, and tries to give him every lost kiss at once. His hands fall to her waist, pulling her closer, and she grips his hair between her fingers like she could crawl inside him, thinking thank god, thank god. She knew they would live this long, saw how they would grow close and connected, but until this moment, she wasn’t sure.
She’s the one who pulls back first. He’s breathing heavy, eyes still closed, eyebrows drawing toward each other with something like concern.
“Hey,” she says. “What?”
“I can’t…” His fingers flex on her body, and her heart skips a beat. “I can’t kiss you just once, Kathryn.”
Oh, Chakotay, she thinks, caressing his dear face. For all the eternal trust in her leadership that he expressed so clearly in their journey out of time, he doubts her in this. She can’t blame him—but she spent seven years bearing the weight of the future on her shoulders, and this is her reward. She waits for him to open his eyes, and smiles at him with all the love in her heart. “There’s no chance of that. You’ll be putting up with me for a long, long time.”
“How do you know that?” He still has such a lovely smile. “Temporal Prime Directive?”
“Oh no, nothing as complicated as that.” She plans to stay in this timeline, with no deviations, as long as she can. She kisses him again, slow and gentle, and promises: “We have all the proof we need right here.”
*end*