"I always feared this would happen to Voyager," she admits one evening when they're sitting in the mess hall, watching the colors of a nearby nebula swirl together to make new colors she doesn't have a name for through the main observation window.
Years. It's been nearly two years since she found herself on this vessel, displaced from her timeline and any recognizable version of her universe, but it's not the displacement she's bemoaning. It's the silent acceptance of being lost, of this being her new reality. A reality with a home that will never be seen again and an endless span of uncharted space before her with all the time in the world to explore it.
A scientist's dream, really, in many ways. And she's been making the most of that, filling up the ship's databases with information on new cosmic phenomena and helping to update diplomatic policies based on her own extensive experience with first contacts and the situations for which they previously had no guidance for that they had to figure out along the way. Kathryn is proud of the things she's managed to accomplish here in spite of impossible odds, putting her skills as both a seasoned commanding officer and quantum cosmologist to good use to the benefit of all aboard, but it's not what she was hoping for.
Not where she saw herself five years out from being flung far, far away from Earth. She wasn't foolish enough to think that they would have made it back to the Alpha Quadrant by now, but she also didn't see herself farther from Indiana than she ever imaged she would ever be. Or that she would have to say goodbye to both the crew she left behind and people she'd come to value aboard this ship.
For what she had feared would happen to Voyager was happening to the Danaë.
People were leaving. Leaving to join other crews embarking on promising adventures that catered to their interests or settling down on planets that had more opportunities available to them. Or ones they'd come to love and wanted to stay with versus remaining on a wayward vessel in hopes that they'd one day, maybe see home again.
"Towards the end of our first year, we came across a planet where the descendants of humans who'd been abducted by aliens in the 1930s had settled after breaking away from their captors. They had grand cities, reminiscent of the ones we'd left behind. I gave my crew permission to remain behind if they wanted, to start a new life there instead of facing the possibility of remaining in space for the rest of their lives. None of them stayed. Not a single one."
At the time, she'd seen it as a victory. A small triumph of reassurance that she'd selfishly needed and a great relief, but now? She isn't sure she'd view it the same way. Now, she's had a taste of what it's like to be out amongst the stars with home nowhere in sight and impossibly out of reach.
"We're losing people, Jim. And I can't fault them for it, just like I wouldn't have faulted my crew had they decided not to remain on Voyager."
That she wouldn't have left then and wouldn't leave now goes unsaid, but is implied. She understands why people are leaving and plotting new courses for their lives, but she can't.
"Do you think your Voyagers," this is very cute of him, actually, "stayed because they were at their cores all inclined to reject respite, or because they were officers, and a year's time could have been a fraction of a long-haul mission they may have signed up for?"
Maybe rhetorical, maybe worth thinking about. He doesn't say Starfleet officers, he knows by now how much of her crew was made up of paramilitary extremists, but he thinks the gist is the same. Professionals who had something to do, whether that something was to get back to a war or carry on with their stations on the ship. A year, to him, would be shockingly early for anyone in such a situation to lose hope.
But.
"Most of these people are civilians. Half of them hate their homes, or would be going back to the inside of a coffin. I'm... I dunno, Kathryn, I think I might honestly be happy for them."
Which is weird, because Jim has definitely withdrawn into himself over the years here; he, too, is stubborn, and will maintain this vigil until he can't (ships aren't immortal, circumstances may drastically change). But the experience has been an excellent host for one of his worst traits, the deep-buried self-loathing that he can prune back and learn to ignore but never fully eradicate. He is the wrong Kirk, and he has been banished, and he can't even get Janeway, who isn't an erroneous offshoot of a real person, back to her time.
At least so many of their comrades gave gone on to forge their own paths. It's good.
Voyagers. It makes her smile slightly in spite of herself, and she glares halfheartedly at him for puncturing a hole in her dedicated despondence.
"It was partly that. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about why they felt so inclined to stay. At the time, that early in our journey, we were half-convinced that we'd come across another array like the one that pulled us into the Delta Quadrant in the first place. That our tenure on the other side of the galaxy would be a relatively short one; like a deep space mission that had been extended a few months. Not the three and a half year journey it turned into. Or the decades we still had ahead of us."
She never wanted Voyager to become a generational ship, to take a page out of the novels of 20th Century science fiction where people raised children to continue the journeys they began. Stubbornly, she had held out hope that it wouldn't be like that for them, but the longer she's here, the longer she's convinced they would have either succumbed to that fate, gained more crew members from species wanting to see more of the galaxy (or just get the hell away from their own corner of it), or settled down somewhere.
Whether she would have stayed with them or continued to try and get back to the Alpha Quadrant is up in the air. She can't say right now.
"During that first year, there was a part of me that wondered if being disconnected from my ship and my crew would help me to find myself again. To let go of the stranglehold I had on Captain Janeway and rediscover who Kathryn was, but the truth is I left Kathryn on Deep Space 9. It's made me envy those who can just let go and live, who can find happiness in the circumstances they didn't ask to be a part of even more."
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hieroglyphics2022-07-18 03:26 am
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Years. It's been nearly two years since she found herself on this vessel, displaced from her timeline and any recognizable version of her universe, but it's not the displacement she's bemoaning. It's the silent acceptance of being lost, of this being her new reality. A reality with a home that will never be seen again and an endless span of uncharted space before her with all the time in the world to explore it.
A scientist's dream, really, in many ways. And she's been making the most of that, filling up the ship's databases with information on new cosmic phenomena and helping to update diplomatic policies based on her own extensive experience with first contacts and the situations for which they previously had no guidance for that they had to figure out along the way. Kathryn is proud of the things she's managed to accomplish here in spite of impossible odds, putting her skills as both a seasoned commanding officer and quantum cosmologist to good use to the benefit of all aboard, but it's not what she was hoping for.
Not where she saw herself five years out from being flung far, far away from Earth. She wasn't foolish enough to think that they would have made it back to the Alpha Quadrant by now, but she also didn't see herself farther from Indiana than she ever imaged she would ever be. Or that she would have to say goodbye to both the crew she left behind and people she'd come to value aboard this ship.
For what she had feared would happen to Voyager was happening to the Danaë.
People were leaving. Leaving to join other crews embarking on promising adventures that catered to their interests or settling down on planets that had more opportunities available to them. Or ones they'd come to love and wanted to stay with versus remaining on a wayward vessel in hopes that they'd one day, maybe see home again.
"Towards the end of our first year, we came across a planet where the descendants of humans who'd been abducted by aliens in the 1930s had settled after breaking away from their captors. They had grand cities, reminiscent of the ones we'd left behind. I gave my crew permission to remain behind if they wanted, to start a new life there instead of facing the possibility of remaining in space for the rest of their lives. None of them stayed. Not a single one."
At the time, she'd seen it as a victory. A small triumph of reassurance that she'd selfishly needed and a great relief, but now? She isn't sure she'd view it the same way. Now, she's had a taste of what it's like to be out amongst the stars with home nowhere in sight and impossibly out of reach.
"We're losing people, Jim. And I can't fault them for it, just like I wouldn't have faulted my crew had they decided not to remain on Voyager."
That she wouldn't have left then and wouldn't leave now goes unsaid, but is implied. She understands why people are leaving and plotting new courses for their lives, but she can't.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
She's stubborn like that.
no subject
Maybe rhetorical, maybe worth thinking about. He doesn't say Starfleet officers, he knows by now how much of her crew was made up of paramilitary extremists, but he thinks the gist is the same. Professionals who had something to do, whether that something was to get back to a war or carry on with their stations on the ship. A year, to him, would be shockingly early for anyone in such a situation to lose hope.
But.
"Most of these people are civilians. Half of them hate their homes, or would be going back to the inside of a coffin. I'm... I dunno, Kathryn, I think I might honestly be happy for them."
Which is weird, because Jim has definitely withdrawn into himself over the years here; he, too, is stubborn, and will maintain this vigil until he can't (ships aren't immortal, circumstances may drastically change). But the experience has been an excellent host for one of his worst traits, the deep-buried self-loathing that he can prune back and learn to ignore but never fully eradicate. He is the wrong Kirk, and he has been banished, and he can't even get Janeway, who isn't an erroneous offshoot of a real person, back to her time.
At least so many of their comrades gave gone on to forge their own paths. It's good.
MONTHS LATER a wild super rusty tag appears
"It was partly that. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about why they felt so inclined to stay. At the time, that early in our journey, we were half-convinced that we'd come across another array like the one that pulled us into the Delta Quadrant in the first place. That our tenure on the other side of the galaxy would be a relatively short one; like a deep space mission that had been extended a few months. Not the three and a half year journey it turned into. Or the decades we still had ahead of us."
She never wanted Voyager to become a generational ship, to take a page out of the novels of 20th Century science fiction where people raised children to continue the journeys they began. Stubbornly, she had held out hope that it wouldn't be like that for them, but the longer she's here, the longer she's convinced they would have either succumbed to that fate, gained more crew members from species wanting to see more of the galaxy (or just get the hell away from their own corner of it), or settled down somewhere.
Whether she would have stayed with them or continued to try and get back to the Alpha Quadrant is up in the air. She can't say right now.
"During that first year, there was a part of me that wondered if being disconnected from my ship and my crew would help me to find myself again. To let go of the stranglehold I had on Captain Janeway and rediscover who Kathryn was, but the truth is I left Kathryn on Deep Space 9. It's made me envy those who can just let go and live, who can find happiness in the circumstances they didn't ask to be a part of even more."