Summary: Janeway returns to the delta quadrant in silence
Characters: Hey, I just found them lying around unused.
Beta: thanks to Christinecgb, for more than I can say.
Feedback: Yeah, baby! elizabeth_barr@yahoo.com.au

Anyone who read my West Wing fic "On the Seventh Day" will recognise a couple of ideas. Evidently, I still needed to get them out of my system. Anyway, if you can't plagiarise yourself, who can you plagiarise? Isn't that the Berman-Braga philosophy?

This might be my last Voyager fic ever; the Trek muses have been distant lately. If it is, then I'm pleased that it can be a story about my favourite pairing.  Perhaps some people will follow me into Harry Potter fanfic and the weird, wild world of Blogger. Probably most won't, but it's been a fun ride through Trek fandom just the same. Of course, maybe I'm wrong; maybe I'll come back. Who knows. But I had to say this, just in case it is the last time: thankyou.
 
 
 

She said, "Don't you get tired of living this way?"

I didn't answer.
 

***
 

I don't know exactly why she came back. I don't even know how they survived to reach their goal, her ship and her crew.

Perhaps they survived because of her.

She succeeded, she brought them home, and then she left.

She came back, like a ghost returning to the place where she died. Human, Devore, some myths are universal.
 

***
 

I don't know if she had a goal, or if she was simply retracing her journey. She was arrested for a raid on a relocation centre. Freeing the gaharays, saving the telepaths, in silence, with none of the sermons I remembered.

I don't know how she thought she'd avoid arrest.

Perhaps she didn't intend to.

I recognised her name on a list of dangerous prisoners, and used my not-inconsiderable influence to have her brought to me.
 

***
 

She walked like a queen between the guards. They were uncomfortable, they knew that they became her honour guard. There was a bruise around her eye. One of them, at least, had tried to break her. Tried, failed and given up.

She blinked in the sunlight, harsh after the dim cells and corridors. Then she looked at me, and nodded in recognition.
 

***
 

She watched me closely. They'd called her dangerous, and I'd expected a madwoman, a haunted animal, but she watched me like a scientist considering a particularly disappointing experiment.

Her hands were clean, dry and neat. Impulsively, I touched one. She didn't pull away.
 

***
 

"Don't you get tired of living this way?" she asked.

I didn't answer. My words would have been treasonous, and Prax was vigilant as always.

We left four days later. The pursuing forces didn't give up on us for another four months.

It was a one way trip. Returning would have meant execution. I was leaving forever, and I didn't mind at all.
 

***
 

Sitting in the cabin of our small, stolen ship, I was abruptly aware of my skin, my breath, my heartbeat, and of Kathryn, silent beside me.

I must have laughed, because she looked at me and smiled slightly and touched my hand.
 

***
 

In bed she was silent; our shared breath was the only noise. She was silent but never still. Her skin was soft, but there was a scar on her hip, remnants of twisted cybernetic implants. Unmistakably Borg.

Her medical technology was advanced; they could only have remained because she wanted to keep them. Battle scars. My silent gaharay soldier-scientist.
 

***
 

We went as far as our ship would take us, then replaced it and went even further. We sometimes encounter others, fellow nomads, refugees, traders. We join them sometimes, but rebuff all offers of more permanent arrangements.
 

***
 

There are no words for this; we don't need them anymore.

We don't need words, only bodies, skin, heat, regret, pain.

We have those things in abundance.

We have no words.

We tell ourselves we don't need them.

Sometimes it's true.
 

***
 

Kathryn is silent. She watches me in silence, she fucks me in silence. She is a presence, a ghost, a reminder of all that I left behind. People define her by her silence; never to me, but I hear things.

These people, these acquaintances, these clumsy people who still need words, they find her terrifying.

It's ironic, that of the two of us, she is the one they fear.

Some of them are telepaths. They should know better. Rumours spread far across the quadrant these days.

They fear her anyway.

She creates silences, and they fear silence the way small children fear the dark.
 

***
 

She creates …

There are no words. She is like a ghost, but I'm only alive with her.
 

***
 

I never ask why she left her home, but sometime she speaks of it.

"I was tired," she said, "I looked at Starfleet and realised that I couldn't belong there anymore. It was too … I'd given up too much. Too much had been burnt away."
 

***
 

Another time she said, "I was becoming … I was becoming something I didn't want to be. A malevolent pragmatist. Power without soul. I was so close … I had to leave."

I understood that, just as I understood her long silences and her regret over the things she'd never change, even if she had the chance.

Words, oaths, promises … in the end, these things are always betrayed, and she was the one who destroyed it all.
 

***
 

She said once that, in the end, her crew had hated her. That they had called her amoral, dead.
 

***
 

"I didn't need to stay. There was nothing left to keep me. And I needed to come back to the delta quadrant … see how much I'd damaged."
 

***
 

She believed in words, and she betrayed them herself. Now she is silent. Now she doesn't need words.

She sighs beneath me. Her hands are strong, small, slightly alien. They hold me close; her nails scratch my skin.

There are no words for this: silence, skin, heat, peace. We don't believe in love. That's just a word.

We don't need words.
 

end
 

Star Trek Voyager and all related characters and situations are the property of Paramount Pictures.  No profit is derived from this work of fan fiction.