By:AW

Published in Unicorn Press. Editor: Nancy Border & Pat
Hayden.

You can buy it from Unicorn Press @
http://members.aol.com/UnicrnPrs/press.htm

Disclaimer: You know it, I know it, I don’t own idea
of Star Trek: Voyager. I just own the story.

Date With Destiny I

7. Kathryn’s Hope I

Kathryn had been in Indiana with her mother for a good week now, and had yet to hear from anyone…Chakotay included. She knew she was no longer
in Starfleet, but these people had been so much a part of her for so many years that now that they were no longer there she missed them. She heard someone coming into her room, and decided to ignore them. She didn’t
want to talk to anyone; she didn’t want to see anyone. She heard her mother’s voice, and heard the footsteps approach the doorway. Kathryn, in the week she had bene home, had yet to tell her mother that she had been booted from the fleet. She didn’t want to see the disappointment, or the sorrow in her mother’s eyes. This was all Kathryn had known for most of her life and now it was gone.

“Kathryn, let’s go out somewhere. It’s been a week…come on.”

“No mom, I’m not ready yet, just another…”

Gretchen looked at her daughter. “No Kathryn, I won’t let you do this to yourself again, and this time Phoebe isn’t here to pull you out of it. We’re going out. I got us tickets to a show. They’re doing ‘Les Miserables’ and you’re going to see it with me if I have to drag you out of the house in your pajamas.”

Kathryn looked daggers at her mother. “How dare you order me around like this? I’m…”

“You’re what Kathryn? You’re not the Captain anymore and even if you were I’m not one of your crew.” She saw the look of horror in her daughter’s eyes. “Yes Kathryn, we know.”

That was all that needed to be said. The dam broke and the tears spilled down her cheeks. Her mother held her in her arms like a little child. Kathryn would
always be her daughter, always be her little girl no matter how old or how big, she got. This was her little one; her father’s goldenbird. “Shh, it’ll be alright Kathryn.

Kathryn cried for what felt to Gretchen like hours. She finally fell into a tired sleep. Her mother held held her and wouldn’t let go for fear of waking the
sleeping child in her arms. In her fitful slumber she mumbled about a man named Chakotay and losing him to her own selfishness and her desire to keep command…of her mistakes in the Delta Quadrant, and her unattainable goals and protocols. Gretchen listened in awed silence as the terror of her daughter’s life seventy thousand light years from all that she had known and loved were revealed. Like a puzzle the pieces were finally starting to fit together. The enigma of Kathryn Janeway making itself known. She felt for the pain and anxiety, which Kathryn had endured in the name of command distance. She saw the humbling efforts she had made, and she understood the
pain of losing the one you loved to circumstances beyond one’s control. The only thing she didn’t understand was…why?

Kathryn felt the warmth of the summer sun on her face and knew she was safe. She looked around; she knew this place. It was ‘New Earth’, The place she had been the most peaceful and the journey that had been the most painful. Her struggle to let go and the fact that at a point she no longer had a choice. She felt everything and she relished it, and she missed it. How could she ever go back to the ship and the way things were. But she had gone back, she had suffered many hardships upon their return to Voyager. They had never gone back…one day though, he had forced the relationship to go forward, or he had tried. It would not be until years later, and their eventual transwarp flight, that they would really move forward, but the stops he took as their journey progressed, moved them forward in baby steps so that the eventual leap they took was really nothing more than the completion of a
trip they had started six years prior.

Slowly she looked up, looked up at the sun, and felt a chill run down her spine. She awoke from the dream, the same dream she had night in and night out. The way they met…the progression of their relationship. The final joining for two souls…the separation of their bond.

Kathryn reached up and wiped the tears from her eyes and realized that she was being held and cuddled like a small child by her mother. Mom always knows what to do to take care of me. She untangled herself and walked to the kitchen and replicated herself a cup of coffee. Not too long after her mother followed her to the kitchen. “Kathryn…you talk in your sleep dear. I heard everything, you told me your story. You told me about him, the man you loved, the man you lost…the man you kept at arms length. He sounds like a very special person. So there is only one thing I don’t know.” Gretchen looked up at her daughter and saw the tears threatening to spill over again.

Kathryn looked up through haunted blue orbs. “What mom? What don’t you understand?”

“Why?”

TBC in 8. Kathryn’s Hope II

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