Work Text:
There was no one around to hear Gabrielle when she screamed.
Pouring her frustration quite literally into the void, her rage at Control and at the Klingons and at herself and at time itself for everything all of them together had conspired to put her through. Leaving her once again on her hands and knees in the middle of the same barren wasteland that made up everything after a certain point in the timeline that she just couldn’t seem to budge.
She slumped over, breathing hard, about ready to just collapse into the dust. She knew she should get up, that at some point she would, that she’d get back to her base, plan her next move--but what could her next move possibly be? Some point had to come when she’d exhausted all of her options--and what would she do then? She’d be trapped here, alone, with no way forward and no real way back, her life wasted and in vain.
She didn’t know how long she stayed there. What did time, minutes, hours, what did it even mean anymore, like this? The sun beat down on her, in the long-sleeved insulated garment she wore under her timesuit, meant to keep her warm as she hurtled through outer space. However long she stayed there, she would be returned to the same moment after her next jump. A slightly different moment she’d never visited before, but in every way that counted the same, inescapable nothingness and failure.
“Are you all right?”
Gabrielle snapped back to awareness, heart pounding. It was another voice--an unfamiliar voice--but it couldn’t be, there was nothing, there was no way--
She looked up. The voice belonged to a silver-haired woman, dressed in red--what looked like a uniform of some kind, though not one Gabrielle was familiar with. And a uniform suggested some sort of society, which would mean quite a lot of people, which her suit had just told her there weren’t. There couldn’t be.
“What does it look like?” Gabrielle said bitterly. She would never have wanted a stranger to see her like this.
“It looks like you’re absolutely exhausted.” The woman squatted on the ground to get down to Gabrielle’s level, her piercing eyes looking straight into Gabrielle’s--Gabrielle wanted to look away, it was suddenly so much. She wouldn't, though. She stared back anyway, as if daring the other woman to do something. “Are you hurt?”
“I--I don’t think so.” Her whole body hurt, but it had hardly stopped since all this had started. “The suit--it should have protected me. It always has.”
The woman’s eyes flicked to the time suit next to them. “I’m Admiral Kathryn Janeway,” she said. “You?”
Admiral. Gabrielle glanced at the Starfleet insignia on the woman’s chest. Where had she come from? Where-- when was there still a Federation? “Doctor Gabrielle Burnham,” she said.
“Do you live out here?” Janeway asked. “Where were you headed? My shuttle’s sensors didn’t pick up any other life signs for--”
“I know,” Gabrielle said. “I do live here--it’s just over--” She gestured vaguely in the general direction. She could see the place from there, the suit always dropped her not too far off from it, right in the same spot--but why did it feel so far all of a sudden--
Janeway looked over in the direction Gabrielle was pointing. “I assume there’s someplace in there that’s more comfortable than just lying here on the floor?”
“Slightly,” Gabrielle said.
Janeway extended a hand to Gabrielle. “Let’s get you there, then,” she said.
Gabrielle stared at Janeway’s hand for several moments before finally taking it.
“You’re a time traveler too, aren’t you?” Janeway said. They were inside Gabrielle’s shelter now; she’d collapsed into a chair, while Janeway stood examining her surroundings. The place was small--there had only really needed to be room for one person, after all--but she was used to it. Better that than the endless emptiness of out there.
“How did you know?” Gabrielle wasn’t surprised to hear that the other woman was a time traveler herself--what else could have explained her presence there?--but she was the first Gabrielle had encountered since she’d begun this journey.
“My shuttle’s sensors detected substantial residual tachyon energy. And it wasn’t coming from me.”
“Well, you got me,” Gabrielle said. “I am.”
“So,” Janeway said, “where--or rather, when do you come from?”
When did she come from? Gabrielle almost wasn’t sure how to answer that anymore. “I come from a long time ago,” she said. “More than nine hundred years ago.”
Janeway smiled slightly. “Relatively speaking, we’re not too far apart,” she said. “It’s about eight hundred for me.”
“Relatively speaking,” Gabrielle repeated. “And I assume this isn’t what you expected to find.”
“No,” Janeway said. “It certainly wasn’t.”
Eight hundred years into this place’s past--more than one hundred years into at least one version of Gabrielle’s original future--there was no sign of all this, Gabrielle realized. There were people. Enough people for a functioning Federation.
Maybe there was a way out after all.
“I didn’t mean to come to this time at all,” Janeway said. “I meant to go in the complete opposite direction. And nowhere near this far.”
“You and me both,” Gabrielle said.
“So you’re trapped here too?”
“Not quite,” Gabrielle said. “I can jump to other parts of the timeline--but I can’t stay for long. I always get pulled back here somehow.”
“And you’ve got this whole place here for yourself,” Janeway said. “You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said Gabrielle. “I have.”
“And you’ve been alone all this time?”
“...What does it look like,” Gabrielle muttered again.
Janeway rested her hand on Gabrielle’s shoulder. Gabrielle froze--she wasn’t used to this, not anymore--but found herself wanting to lean back into the other woman’s touch. This woman she hardly knew, had no reason to trust.
“Come here,” Janeway said quietly, and Gabrielle found herself pressed against the other woman’s body, arms wrapped around her as Janeway’s thumb stroked her arm. As soon as she did, part of her wanted to pull back, embarrassed at the way she was reacting to this woman she’d only just met--and yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“I felt so alone,” Janeway whispered, “for such a long time.”
“I must say, I’m incredibly curious.”
Janeway had insisted Gabrielle rest while Janeway went out to examine the shuttle, to figure out if any actual damage had been done to it or if it was simply that the device she'd used to travel through time had burned itself out, as she'd known it would. Gabrielle always found it difficult to sleep there, and it wasn't just the fact that her living quarters weren't the most comfortable, having been pulled together out of so little--but she tried. When she woke up, she wasn't quite sure how much time had passed--it was always hard to tell with so few of the usual markers--but she did feel a bit more like a person than she had before, or at least what she thought she remembered that felt like.
Now, Janeway was standing in front of Gabrielle’s time suit, examining it. “This spacesuit of yours. You say you’re from my past, and yet I’ve never seen anything like it. Is it from this time? Our future?”
“No,” Gabrielle said. She wasn’t sure how much she should reveal about the suit--it was Section 31 tech, not for just anybody to know about. But if this woman was a Starfleet admiral from the twenty-fourth century, who could be sure what she did or didn’t already know?
“So you brought it here with you,” Janeway said. “It’s not just a spacesuit, is it--it’s your time machine. All these years, and it still works?”
“Obviously,” Gabrielle said. Something was off. “You seem awfully interested in that. It’s not as if you haven’t seen time travel tech before.”
“Of course,” Janeway said. “I’m just--fascinated by how it can be that something made more than one hundred years before my time can have improved on what came after. My shuttle stranded me here after one jump, and yet this can still travel--”
“Don’t even think about it,” Gabrielle said. “There’s only one of it, and it only works for me. Biologically encoded to my DNA.”
Janeway did look a little disappointed at that. I should have known. The whole damn universe needs something from me. She wasn’t going to be an exception.
“But you can take things with you,” Janeway said. “My ship can still travel through space just fine--just not time, at least not on its own. But if I could follow you through--”
“You know, you never actually told me why you left your own time in the first place,” Gabrielle said. “You said you lost everything--but you clearly had a whole world waiting for you, didn’t you? A world full of people and lives and all the choices you could want.”
“Ah, yes,” Janeway said. “All the choices. And I made the wrong ones.”
“So you’re trying to set it right,” Gabrielle said. “Change the past.”
“People died,” Janeway said. “Members of my crew. Some of the people most important to me in the world. I lost them. I have to make it right.”
“Look around you,” Gabrielle said. “What do you think happened to all the people you don’t see? This is so much bigger than any one person, any one ship--”
“And that,” Janeway said, “is the exact thing I promised myself I would never do again.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I put the needs of an alien race ahead of those of my own crew,” said Janeway. “I thought it was the right decision at the time--but I didn't know, I hadn’t fully processed the cost it would have. Or perhaps how much those people would come to mean to me, over the years I spent with them. If I could do it all again...”
“So that’s what you’re going to do,” Gabrielle said. “Go back and reverse that decision you made? Condemn them all to save the ones you lost?”
“No,” Janeway said. “I thought about it--but I couldn’t. Something that big, who knew what effect that would have? But just a few people--it couldn’t possibly matter that much to the timeline, could it? But to me… oh, how it matters to me.”
“You’d be surprised,” Gabrielle said. What mattered to the timeline, she’d found, was deeply unpredictable, idiosyncratic, tied into all kinds of factors even she was only beginning to understand.
“Seven of Nine was--she is the closest thing to a daughter that I will ever have,” Janeway said. “How could I abandon her?"
“I had a daughter,” Gabrielle said. “A precious, beautiful little girl I held in my arms, a girl I protected from all the monsters under her bed.” But not the ones that were real. “Nine years I raised her. And I let her go.”
“How?” Janeway looked genuinely shocked at what she’d heard. “How could you possibly ?”
“It happens,” Gabrielle said. “I didn’t have a choice. I imagine it hasn’t been too long for you--”
“Twenty-three years,” Janeway said. “Twenty-three years it’s been since I lost her. And I think of her every day, her, and Chakotay, and--” She broke off. “You’re wrong. You are wrong.”
“I’ve seen Michael die too,” Gabrielle said. “Over and over again. I’ve seen this whole galaxy die, and yet somehow she hurts me the most. I wouldn’t have been able to go on that way. And someday, you won’t either.”
“I don’t intend for that day to come,” Janeway said.
“You think I did?” Gabrielle shook her head. “After all these years, I think it’s inevitable. You think you’re smarter, stronger, quicker than time itself? Then you’re a fool, and time will make a fool of you.”
“And if you really think you’ve let her go, as you say,” Janeway said, “then so are you.”
“I don’t know if what you want is even possible,” Gabrielle said. “This timeline--it’s not always the same, I’ve seen a lot of different versions, but in every one I’ve seen, the world you say you come from--it can’t exist. Everything is long gone by then.”
“And if that’s what we find, we’ve lost nothing we hadn't already,” said Janeway. “But if we find something more--then perhaps we’ve both gained everything.”
Gabrielle stood in silence. Maybe Janeway did have a point. Gabrielle certainly wasn't feeling like she had much to lose by trying. But something was still bothering her--something she knew shouldn't be bothering her. It shouldn't matter at all, not now--but it did.
"Was it only ever about wanting me to take you home?" she said. "Was that all you ever wanted from me?"
"Of course not," Janeway said, and somehow, Gabrielle believed her. "I knew, as soon as I saw you, I wasn't the only one stranded here. I wasn't the only one who needed help." She smiled slightly, shaking her head. "And I suppose that's still what I do. And then, as we talked, I really saw something--that you understood things most people couldn't, other than the two of us." She seemed to hesitate for a moment. "Maybe not even that."
"And you showed me something I thought I might never see again," Gabrielle said. "A future."
"A future long ago," Janeway said.
Gabrielle crouched on the dusty ground, back in her suit, preparing for takeoff. Behind her, Admiral Janeway was in her shuttle, waiting. She’d given Gabrielle the coordinates of where and when she’d actually intended to end up. All they could do was find out what would happen when they tried.
They'd said goodbye before Janeway had gotten into her shuttle, before Gabrielle had gotten back into the suit. Gabrielle had wanted to reach out and touch Janeway, run her hands over the other woman's body as if to see if she was still real--but no, it was more than that, it was so much more than that, and she knew it just as much as she knew she couldn't--
But Janeway had laid her hands on Gabrielle’s arms, looked at her with an expression of wonder on her own face--and somehow, Gabrielle had found herself kissing her, this woman of an impossible world, who tasted of long-dead stars. She’d pulled Kathryn Janeway into her arms, held her there like she wasn’t ready to let her go, not yet, not when she’d finally found someone who might understand.
“I didn’t start traveling to save the future,” Gabrielle had said. “Not at first. I didn’t expect to find this any more than you did.”
“You tried to go back to save your daughter, didn’t you,” said Janeway. “Michael, you said her name was?”
“Yes,” Gabrielle said. “Her. My husband, too, her father. But I’ve seen the world I left--I’ve watched her grow up. I’ve watched her do incredible things. She’s--she’s her own person, her own amazing and wonderful person. I don’t know if she needs me anymore.” She gestured around at the empty world. “They do.”
“I can’t tell you that,” Janeway said. “I’ve never met her--or at least, I don't think I have. But I’ve met you, and no matter what you say, I know you want to go back to her.” She looked straight at Gabrielle again. “Shouldn’t that count for something?”
Gabrielle didn’t even know anymore. What she should want. What she could do. Who was right. Certainly not what the future held. Kathryn Janeway had certainly seemed to think she knew it all. Gabrielle knew better than to ever think such a thing--or at least, she thought she had.
They were walking the same path, or they had to be. Twenty-three years. Gabrielle still found it hard to believe--although, the more she thought about it, the more familiar it felt, the more sense it seemed to make.
But as Gabrielle launched herself into space once more, stars shooting past, each with the possibility to host whole worlds in its orbit, if things were different--
--she knew the paths to be walked were endless.