Disclaimer: These characters belong to Paramount. I’m just playing with them!

Summary: Voyager has returned to the AQ, but the Maquis have chosen to leave the Federation and settle in an area called the Republic hundreds of light years away and across a dangerous region of space. Yet, fate plays its hand to bring some relationships into reality. Post Endgame J/C

Here There Be Dragons: Part 1

by Mizvoy

Time: Three years following Voyager’s return to the Alpha Quadrant

Place: The Federation

Admiral Kathryn Janeway tossed the PADD she’d been reading onto her desk and leaned back in her chair to stretch, muttering a few choice words under her breath in the process. Although it was just mid-afternoon, she was too tired and distracted to keep her mind focused on the work at hand, a phenomenon that had been happening with disturbing frequency of late.

Her aide looked up in surprise. The admiral had been giving him a continuous series of orders as she read methodically through a message from her boss when she’d suddenly started mumbling to herself. “Admiral?”

She sighed and slumped forward, resting her elbows on the desktop and her chin in her hands. “I said, ‘Enough,’ Lieutenant.”

He glanced at his notes in confusion. “Enough of what, ma’am? We’re not even halfway through Admiral Hayes’ questions.”

Instead of answering, she stood up and walked to the huge floor-to-ceiling windows that gave her corner office a stunning view of San Francisco Bay. It was a beautiful September afternoon. The blue sky was full of white puffy clouds and the sun was warm in spite of a cool breeze. She could almost picture sailboats tilting on the water. She could imagine the happy chatter of the jostling crowds and the delectable smells of food along Fisherman’s Wharf. She could remember her own brisk walk through the Starfleet gardens at dawn, the birds singing gaily in the bushes, the sky a delicate shade of robin’s egg blue. She had been tempted to sit down, relax, and drink in the quiet beauty of the pristine day, but she’d had an early appointment and had marched on without a moment’s hesitation.

When duty called, she said to herself, Kathryn Janeway answered. Like Pavlov’s dog, she had conditioned herself to respond quickly and without a second thought when there was work to be done. She was a workaholic, consumed by her job.

She stood there awhile, her hands behind her back, shaking her head once in awhile as if she were arguing with herself until she finally said over her shoulder, “That will be all for today, Jeff.”

“But, Admiral,” the aide protested, glancing at the PADD in his hands, “you didn’t even finish your sentence.”

She chuckled. “Remind me, and I’ll finish the sentence on Monday.” She turned to face him, and he was shocked to see tears in her eyes. “It’s Saturday afternoon, Jeff, and time to think of something other than work. Don’t you have a date tonight?”

“No, ma’am. I . . . I wasn’t sure how late we’d be working and didn’t want to keep a date waiting.”

“That’s my fault,” she said softly as she walked to him and took the PADD from his hands, shutting it off and tossing it onto the desk with the one she’d just discarded. “From now on, I want you to take the weekends off.”

“But, Admiral,” he protested, “everyone knows that you have to work nights and weekends if you want to have a successful Starfleet career.”

She leaned back against the desk and folded her arms over her chest. “Who told you that?”

“Nobody had to tell me that, ma’am. Look around headquarters. Everyone who wants to get ahead works extra hours. It’s a way of life.”

She grew thoughtful, remembering her own indefatigable work habits over the years, her own obsession with success, especially after the tragic accident that had killed her father and fiancé when she was a green ensign. Yet, in spite of her ambition, she had found time to become involved with Justin and later with Mark, and she had always made plans with friends for her off- duty hours and weekends.

That is, she had found time for all that before she took command of Voyager. It was while she was in the Delta Quadrant that she’d become obsessed with work, a habit she hadn’t been able to break since their return three years earlier. It was as if she’d built up such a momentum on the ship that three years later she had only just begun to slow down.

She studied her aide carefully. She hoped she could help him find a better balance between a private life and a career than she had accomplished. She would hate to think that he would arrive at her rank and age with regrets about his life—regrets she was beginning to acknowledge.

“What’s the name of the woman you brought to the Federation Ball?”

“Mandy Bowers?”

“I thought she was charming. Are you still seeing her?”

He shook his head, scowling in an effort to hide the flair of distress in his eyes. “I was off-planet most of the next six months, you know, following up on the Delta Shuttle’s preliminary field tests. While I was gone, she met a guy at work, and, last I heard, they were supposed to get married soon.”

For some reason, Kathryn felt his pain as if it were her own, as if she shared in his anguish and loss. Perhaps it was because she, too, had lost so much because of the demands of her job. Perhaps it was just her maternal instinct kicking in. Putting a hand on his shoulder, she said, “Give her a call, Jeff. Make sure she knows that she has a choice between you and this other man before it’s too late. If you don’t, you’ll always wonder what might have been.”

“I’ve thought about doing that. But I don’t want to mislead her, Admiral.” He frowned and looked away. “I’m putting in for a deep space assignment, and, if I’m lucky, I’ll get the Enterprise. Is it fair to lure her away from someone who’ll be here all day, every day when I know I’ll be gone for months and maybe years at a time?”

Kathryn felt sick at her stomach as she tried to formulate a response, not that she hadn’t answered the same question a dozen times before. In fact, she had a pat answer memorized–decide what’s most important to you and do what you have to do to make it happen. Always before, the suggestion had seemed elegantly simple. But now, it seemed far too easy and much too one- sided.

“That’s a decision you and Mandy should make together,” she heard herself saying, instead. “Think through your options with her, and then decide.”

“That won’t work,” he sighed, getting up from his seat and putting on his jacket. “She doesn’t understand what it means to be in Starfleet, how it becomes a way of life complete unto itself. She’s jealous of the time I put into it and resents the way it dominates my life.” He stopped a moment to think, and then squared his shoulders to face her. “And, more to the point, I’m not sure I’d be willing to accept any option that doesn’t include going into deep space.”

She blinked in surprise at his honest admission of selfishness. She said, “Jeff, it’s easy to let the uniform decide what’s important for you.” Kathryn looked around her office, where she had spent an average of twelve hours a day, seven days a week for the last three years, and frowned. “Just don’t use me as your example of a successful Starfleet officer. I don’t have a ‘complete’ life. I have no family to speak of and no real interests outside of my career. Frankly, you deserve better.”

He smiled at her indulgently, as if she were teasing, as if she were trying to make him believe there was a better objective in life than a corner office in Archer Hall with six subordinates to manage the details of one’s big and important life. “With all due respect, ma’am, I want to be an admiral someday,” he replied, dismissing her advice as respectfully as he could. “I want to make a difference, and I know that in order to do to that I must put Starfleet before everything else.”

Hours later, Kathryn still sat in her empty office, her feet elevated, classical music playing softly, and a half empty bottle of wine in the chiller on the floor beside her. She watched as the sun went down and the stars gradually appeared in the darkening sky, absently recalling the route from one Federation system to another as their respective stars appeared. When had she memorized the star charts? After three years, she still had to print out the directions to her mother’s winter apartment in Florida, but she knew the vector between Earth and Vulcan by heart. She couldn’t remember the date of her niece’s birthday, but she could rattle off the orders required to take a ship out of space dock without hesitation.

The conversation with her aide haunted her. She didn’t have a Justin or a Mark in her life, nor did she have plans for anything relaxing or fun after work this weekend, next weekend, or any other weekend in the foreseeable future. In fact, her work schedule seldom recognized the weekends at all, unless she was visiting her mother for a Sunday dinner. She couldn’t remember the last party she’d attended that hadn’t been work related. She couldn’t remember any night that hadn’t included at least a few hours of work before bed. And tonight, a breathtakingly beautiful Saturday night in September, she sat alone in her office slowly getting drunk.

How had she let this happen?

She drained her glass and refilled it, raising it in the light to admire its soft golden color. She idly wondered what her aide was doing with his evening. She’d seen him gather several PADDs from his desk before he left, and she imagined that he was studying them in his apartment rather than calling Mandy Bowers and exploring a far-different future. Would he live to regret that decision someday? Maybe, maybe not.

She hadn’t given him her usual advice about deciding what was most important. She didn’t think she would ever give that advice again. Thinking about it now, she decided it was one of those sayings that seems simple and true in theory, yet is horribly complicated in practice. How, exactly, do you go about deciding what’s most important in your life when your work’s responsibilities make it impossible to imagine anything but work? How do you examine your deepest wants and needs when your rank and position define you better and more completely than your own personality?

“Our Starfleet duties are the most important of all,” she thought out loud as she sipped the wine. “We think that Starfleet is the only way to make a difference in this big galaxy of ours, when really . . . making a difference in one single life can be just as significant. We allow the sheer number of people affected by what we do influence our decision.”

Then, with a shock of self-recognition, she realized that she had done just that on Voyager. She had let her responsibilities as captain and her guilt as the person who’d stranded the ship so far from home prevent her from making a true exploration of what it was she wanted in life. The captain was responsible for the ship and 150 crewmembers, while Kathryn, the person, could make a difference to a scant few–one or two at most. Wasn’t it right to assume that the captain and her crew should come first? Shouldn’t 150 people be more important than a single woman and one or two of her friends? Had she let her uniform make the decision for her?

She shook her head, refusing to second-guess herself. She’d done what she’d had to do on Voyager under the worst possible circumstances, and she wasn’t going to berate herself for those choices now, but the three years since their return was another issue altogether. She’d let the excitement and press of activities carry her forward like flotsam on the ocean, still caught up in the high tide of the Delta Quadrant. It was only in the last few weeks that she’d been able to slow down and think about what she was doing and whether she wanted to continue doing it.

For the first time in ten years, she found herself anxious to explore her options, anxious to rethink the direction her life had taken, but she needed someone to bounce her ideas back at her, someone who would be willing to challenge her assumptions and force her to consider all the possibilities. She needed someone who saw the woman behind the rank, who would listen to her as a person, not a Starfleet officer.

Someone like Chaktoay. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what he would say. She could hear his voice telling her that in order to know what is most important, she must first know who she really is. Self-knowledge, a deceptively simple, yet formidable undertaking, was the basis of his calm, steady outlook on life and one that Chakotay had spent many long hours contemplating. In contrast, she felt as if she had simply reacted to life, allowing her course to be influenced more by the events that surrounded her than by her own understanding of those events.

She shook her head. “I would, of course, dismiss his guidance as ridiculously naive. I’d tell him, ‘I know perfectly well who I am. I’m captain of this ship and a Starfleet officer.’ And he would smile at me and shake his head in resignation. ‘That might be what you are, Kathryn, but it isn’t who you are.'”

She carefully set the glass on her desk and stood up, studying her full length reflection in the window. Her uniform fit perfectly. Her hair was carefully and professionally styled. Her makeup was a little smeared at this late hour, but she knew she could restore it to its early morning perfection if she had to. Her admiral’s pips and commbadge gleamed in the soft light of her desk lamp. She was a picture-perfect Starfleet admiral, and she wore the rank like a glove. But that was just the surface, wasn’t it?

“Who the hell are you?” she asked the reflection. But, of course, it didn’t answer.

Two months later–

Kathryn Janeway had forgotten how much fun it could be to pilot one’s own ship. As soon as the Hudson Bay disappeared from her short-range sensors, she put the prototype Delta Shuttle through its paces, performing a series of stomach-wrenching acrobatic moves designed to familiarize new helmsmen with a ship’s characteristics. She could just imagine how Tom Paris would love this small, fast, and responsive cousin of the Delta Flyer. The ship was destined to be a favorite with the youngest and most daring Starfleet pilots for decades to come.

For the first time in ten years, Kathryn was heading off in a direction of her own choosing. In three days, she would rendezvous with the research team studying the temporal and spatial anomalies of the Serena Expanse, a Beta Quadrant no-man’s-land on the farthest edges of Federation space. For the two months after that, she was to take the tiny and agile ship through the Expanse in order to do some much-needed mapping for the team and simultaneously see how the small ship handled in very tight quarters and during constant and demanding use. She couldn’t believe how excited she was to be doing something so completely different.

Once she was comfortable at the helm, she spent a few minutes plotting a course that would brush tantalizingly close to the Expanse on the way to the research team’s home base on Starbase 800. She thought she might as well get a good look at what would be “home” for the next two months. In the meantime, she prepared and sent messages to some friends, began reading a few books that had been intriguing her, and got a great deal of sleep. Not once did she think about the projects she’d left behind at Starfleet Headquarters. It was her hope that this time alone immersed in science would help her reconnect with the Kathryn she had once been and rediscover the balance she had always managed between her career and her private life.

Two months earlier, on the Sunday morning following that moment of crisis in her office, Admiral Owen Paris had found Kathryn Janeway fast asleep on the sofa in his office’s reception area. He’d leaned over and shaken her gently. “Kathryn? Are you locked out of your office?”

She’d sat up and pushed her hair from her eyes, remembering too late the excess of wine she’d consumed the night before. She’d squinted to focus her blurry vision, slumping against the sofa’s cushions as a headache began to pulse between her eyes. “Oh, hello, Owen. I was waiting to talk to you.”

“Well, here I am.” He’d guided her into his office and handed her a cup of coffee before he’d asked his next question, deciding to neatly sidestep her obvious hangover. “Have you been out there all night?”

“Not on your sofa, no, but in the building.” She sighed. “I had no good reason to go home.”

He’d frowned at the depressed tone of her voice as he sat down across from her. “What’s wrong, Katie? It’s not like you to drink alone.”

“Is it that obvious?” She winced and then relaxed as she took a sip of the steaming coffee. She and Owen Paris knew each other too well to let something like a hangover become a problem between them. “I think I’m finally winding down.”

“From the conference last week?”

“From seven years of constant pressure on Voyager, Owen. It’s taken three years, but I think I’m finally ready for something completely different.”

“Well, I’d say it’s about time.” He leaned back in his chair, watching her take another long drink from her cup. “Tell me about it.”

As always, she’d found him to be a good listener. She’d poured out her thoughts about the way she’d let her career take over her life, and she’d discovered that he was completely sympathetic, if not even similarly troubled by his own work habits. They’d talked for hours, finally leaving the building and walking through the gardens until she was nearly asleep on her feet. But, with his help, she’d realized what she’d needed to do and found the courage to do it.

“I need a couple of months to doing something completely different, like mapping the Serena Expanse with the prototype shuttle.”

He’d nodded, finally giving in to her demands. “It’s something I wouldn’t mind doing myself, Katie. I’ll talk to Rancini about getting you the shuttle while you contact the Vulcan Science Academy about joining their research team. They’re doing important work. We need to understand the more volatile areas of space if we ever expect to get past them. Right now the Serena Expanse and non-aligned space have kept us from exploring further into the Beta Quadrant.”

“And Admiral Hayes?” She’d shuddered at the thought of confronting her very demanding boss with a request for an extended leave of absence. “Who’ll convince him that he should let his personal workhorse take some time off?”

“Leave that to me, too, Katie.”

They’d made their way back to Archer Hall before Paris had let the other shoe drop. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Maquis, does it?”

She’d stopped in her tracks. “The Maquis?”

“Well, they did leave for the Republic two years ago today.”

She’d walked to a bench and sat down heavily. “I’d forgotten.”

“I sent you the pictures of Tom and B’Elanna’s new baby just a couple of days ago,” Owen had said, sitting beside her. “Did you look at them?”

She’d nodded, remembering the fuzzy pictures of the couple, B’Elanna holding a tiny bundle while Tom held a smiling three-year-old Miral on his lap. “Conner. I’m sure B’Elanna was relieved that his forehead ridges were less prominent than Miral’s.”

He’d nodded, studying her carefully. “I’m just as upset as you are that they moved so far away, Katie.”

She found herself wanting to cry and struggled to hide the sudden ambush of her emotions. She was still hurt that nearly half of her crew had decided to leave the Federation and move to an area of the Beta Quadrant that was impossible to visit and difficult to contact by subspace. “You’re thinking maybe the study of the Serena Expanse will make it possible to travel safely through non-aligned space. Or at least solve the problems with subspace message traffic so you can have a clearer picture of your new grandson.”

“Maybe I am.” They sat in silence for a few minutes before Paris finally said, “Have you heard from him?”

“From Tom?”

He smiled at her indulgently. “From Chakotay.”

Her eyes had flashed with anger, and she’d lifted her chin in defiance. “We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”

“But you miss him, don’t you?”

She’d narrowed her eyes. “You don’t believe the rumors, do you? I’ve told you time and again that Chakotay and I were never more than friends.”

“Oh, I know that, Katie. But a close friendship like the two of you had is more durable than romance, you know.” He waited a moment. “His breakup with Seven of Nine proved that.”

She’d slumped against the back of the bench and sighed. “I do miss him. We worked together for so many years and through so many hard times that, I swear, I can hear his voice in my head.”

“Maybe you should take the initiative and write him first. Break the ice.”

She’d just laughed. “And say what, Owen? Wish you were here? Wish I were there? Are you sorry yet that you left?” She’d stood up and stretched, noticing for the first time that the sun was slowly setting. They had talked the entire day away. “I think I’ll go home and get some sleep.”

“Think about what I said, Katie. All you have to do is say hello and tell him what you’ve been up to for the last two years.”

“I’m beginning to see where Tom gets his bossy attitude,” she’d teased, heading for the main gate. “Thanks for helping me think this through, Owen.”

Back on the shuttle, she roused herself from her thoughts and studied the long range scans, remembering that the Serena Expanse was considered the foothills of non-aligned space. Her planned route would take her to a spot that could give her a good first look at the distant area that many considered the galaxy’s worst navigational impediment. It effectively separated Federation space from the area called the Republic and had been a roadblock to exploration for decades.

She gasped when the telemetry from non-aligned space registered on her view screen, trying to imagine the difficulty of navigating across two hundred light years of constant plasma storms, spatial rifts, and temporal anomalies. She tried to imagine the Maquis taking their ragtag assemblage of ships into that chaos, shaking her head in bewilderment. In ancient times, the maps would have adorned an unknown region like this with menacing sea monsters and the warning: Here there be dragons.

She remembered the day Chakotay had come to tell her of their plans to cross non-aligned space and settle in the Republic on the far side.

“You want to leave so much that you’d risk your life crossing that hellhole?” she’d challenged him. She’d argued against their decision to leave. She’d reminded him that the Maquis’ sentences had been commuted and that the Federation was famous for giving individuals like them a second chance, but they were anxious to start fresh, without the shadow of their former Maquis activities hanging over them. While she’d helped them avoid serving time in prison, she couldn’t erase the past, no matter how much she wanted to do so. And her warnings about the anomalies and the unsavory pirates in non-aligned space had fallen on deaf ears. They were going, and that was that.

She could still see the determination on Chakotay’s face a few weeks later when he’d come to tell her goodbye. “You did all you could for us, Kathryn,” he’d said, taking her hand, “but we have no future in the Federation as convicted felons. We can make a new start in the Republic. They’ve offered us responsible positions in their defense force and jobs in their technical plants, and we’d be crazy to pass up the opportunity to start with a clean slate. I promise we’ll keep in touch.”

She’d let them go, of course, admonishing them to write her on a regular basis, to let her know their experiences, their progress, and their needs. As much as she was sure of their good intentions, communication had been haphazard and infrequent. Subspace messages seldom made it through without heavy distortion, and she was never sure if her messages were received in good condition, if at all. Once in a great while, a message like the one about Conner’s birth arrived in decipherable form, but it was the exception, not the rule.

She’d let them go, but the pain of their departure and her feelings of abandonment hadn’t lessened with time. She regretted that she hadn’t done more to convince them to stay. There were times when her thoughts strayed to the Admiral Janeway who had come back to change Voyager’s future. At the time, she had wondered how her future self could have broken the temporal prime directive for such selfish reasons, and yet . . . she pushed the idea away firmly. She’d chosen this solitary life, in spite of her chance to change her future, and there was no way she’d do what the other older woman had done.

“Coffee, black.” She stood in front of the shuttle’s replicator and watched as the coffee appeared in a black column only to splash out of the compartment onto her boots as the mug appeared some seconds too late to contain it. She smiled as she remembered a similar malfunction in the Delta Quadrant. That time she’d turned to Chakotay, who’d stood behind her with a PADD full of needed repairs and a grin on his face; he’d said, “I’ll add replicators to the list.”

She sighed as she wiped up the coffee and then pulled the panel from the wall. She wondered if her balky unit on Voyager had somehow notified every other replicator in the Federation of her calling it a glorified toaster. The mechanism’s components were strewn about her on the floor when she was suddenly overcome with loneliness and regret.

She laid down her tools, remembering how many times Chakotay had chatted with her while she fiddled with her replicator. It had been a running joke between them that her quarter’s replicator had a mean streak that made it torment her by producing burnt roasts, undercooked potatoes, lukewarm coffee, and so on. How he had laughed when, upon their return to the Federation, Tom Paris had admitted that he had toyed with the unit as an on- going, seven-year practical joke. She’d almost had Tom thrown into the brig until she’d seen the laughter in Chakotay’s eyes and realized how funny the situation was.

She missed them. She stared at the shifting lights in the expanse, wondering where they were, what they were doing. When they’d left, she hadn’t realized how far they were going or how little she’d hear from them or about them. She added their departure to her long list of regrets and considered, for the first time, what her first message to Chakotay would say.

“I miss you,” she whispered. “I want to talk to you.” She stopped, shaking her head. “No, I need you beside me.”

Her reverie was interrupted by a sudden warning chirp from the computer. “Unknown anomaly on the port bow,” the voice calmly stated.

Kathryn jumped over the disassembled replicator parts and returned to the pilot’s seat. She saw the usual streaming starlight against the black velvet of deep space, but nothing remotely out of the ordinary. “Computer, modify screen to display the anomaly.”

Immediately, a sprawling, boiling mass of light and vapor appeared, punctuated by huge arcs of multicolored lightning that nearly overloaded the sensors. A quick check revealed chronotron emissions off the chart.

“A rip in the space/time continuum,” she whispered, recognizing the signs. “Computer, activate the ablative armor. Warp six on this heading.” She tapped instructions into the panel and waited, but all she could hear was the rhythmic sound of the armor snapping into place. “Computer? Status?”

“Unable to modify course,” the computer reported some seconds later. “Warp engines off line.”

The tiny ship began to rock as the anomaly grew larger and more menacing. Kathryn tried every trick she could think of to break free from the powerful graviton forces, finally realizing that she couldn’t escape. She was trapped like a fly on tar paper, helplessly drawn into the gaping maw of light.

“All power to shields and structural integrity,” she ordered, hoping the newly designed ship might be able to stay in one piece in the storm. She gripped the arms of her seat as she realized that after all she’d been through, after all the thousands of light years she’d traveled, she was about to perish inside the relatively safe confines of Federation space.

Seconds later, the ship was drawn into the maelstrom, which then folded in upon itself like a flower returning to the bud, drawing down in size until, mere seconds later, nothing remained but cold, black space. And with the anomaly went all traces of the Delta Shuttle and Admiral Kathryn Janeway.

To be continued . . .