Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [107]
Kathryn nodded silently. With a palpable mixture of sadness and relief, she took the box and stared at it until a question furrowed her brow.
“So this symbol… it’s another word for love?”
Chakotay answered her quietly. “Actually, it means ‘hope.’ “
Lifting her eyes to stare fully into his, she felt warm tears beginning to form, but refused to allow them to fall. Placing her hand on his arm, she managed a quiet “Thank you, Chakotay.”
“You’re welcome,” he answered honestly.
As he turned to go, Janeway opened the drawer in her desk where the silver watch he had given her for her last birthday sat, and placed the Bonding Box next to it. When she was satisfied that she could address him without faltering, she found voice to say, “You realize what this means, of course?”
He paused at the door, his back to her.
“What’s that?”
“I still owe you a birthday present.”
He turned, smiling.
“I think there’s plenty of room in my quarters for a toaster,” he suggested.
She laughed, dissipating the tension.
Much better.
“Chakotay,” she asked, “have you ever tried oolong tea?”
“It’s one of my favorites.”
“Would you care to join me?”
“I’d love to.”
They fell into easy conversation for the next few hours, catching up on everything they’d missed in the last two weeks. Janeway laughed so hard she almost fell out of her chair when Chakotay told her the story of Neelix and Chell’s culinary conflict.
When Kathryn was alone again, curled in bed, she decided that she was more determined than ever to reach the Alpha Quadrant as soon as humanly possible. She had always wanted this for her crew, absolution for all the years they had lost because of her choice. Finally, she wanted it just as much for herself. She would get Voyager home. And when that was done, maybe she and Chakotay would have a chance to find out whether or not the bond they had forged in the crucible of their circumstances was meant to become something more.
Alone in his cabin, after he had bid her good night, Chakotay managed to finish the first three chapters of Moby Dick. He was still more anxious to return home than he had been at the start of their journey. But he refused to waste one more moment regretting the life he had or the passage of time.
He had been thinking of time as an indicator of what he had accomplished or accumulated in his life. But focusing on its unassailable pressure only forced him forward and away from those things. If all matter exploded forth from some original indefinable whole, time was the measure of the distance that grew between those particles. Ultimately all things might be meant to diverge in the vast ocean of time. But solitude was only one potential destination. He would trust the spirits to show him the others, when he was truly ready for more.
The fuel that would sustain them both was hope.
Brief Candle
Christopher L. Bennett
This tale unfolds in the weeks immediately following the sixth-season episode “Survival Instinct,” before, during, and after “Barge of the Dead.”
Christopher L. Bennett
Christopher L. Bennett, a man barely alive, was rocketed to Earth from a dying planet. Searching for a distant star, the weather started getting rough, and the