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."
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."