ECHO
a vignette
rewriting the episode "Non Sequitur"
by vanhunks
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Paramount owns Janeway and Chakotay
vanhunks June 2008
NOTE: 1. This vignette was a response to the "Writing Extravaganza" challenge on VAMB [Voyagerangel Message Board] in which members were encouraged to write a vignette to a non-traditional J/C episode.
2: I chose "Non Sequitur", and established a "what if" scenario: "What if it was Janeway who slipped through the temporal inversion fold and found herself in bed, like Harry did in the episode?
3: The suggested length of 500 words was slightly exceeded. It is very possible to expand this shortie since I had to take some great jumps with it.
ECHO
Preamble
Kathryn woke up, emerging from a dream, it seemed. Her surroundings felt familiar, yet strange, cloaking her in intimacy and mystery. She looked around, confused. Ivory sheets covered her loosely. She wore a nightgown that clung gently to the swell of her breasts.
The room was large, airy, one wall fitted entirely with glass. She touched her forehead, moaned and fell back against the pillow. Only now she heard sounds, like water running. A shower? Who was there? The sound stopped, a door opened, closed.
Approaching footsteps…
The next moment she saw him in the doorway. Kathryn gasped.
"Chakotay?"
He walked towards her, slowly, his expression shocked. His lips turned white, his eyes dark, filled with ageless sorrow.
"It cannot be…"
"Where am I?" she asked.
"Nicole…how…?"
Chakotay reached the bed, sat down beside her and held her shoulders. His hands trembled.
"I am not - "
"Your ship, Nicole …we lost Voyager in the Badlands…almost two years ago… There - there was a memorial service…"
"My name is - "
"Nicole, my beloved wife," Chakotay cried out. "Have you come to haunt me?"
***********************
Twenty four hours later…
Kathryn fingered the circular temporal disc gingerly. Her heart raced. If this didn't work, she could be cast into another dimension, thousands of years into the future, or she could find herself back on Voyager. The last twenty four hours had been a mad dash to determine what had happened. She remembered her shuttle, that her time stream intersected the temporal inversion fold in the space-time matrix, throwing her into this reality, so familiar, yet all she wanted to do was return to Voyager.
Getting back meant stealing the runabout Yellowstone designed by Larry Byrd, to be piloted by Nick Locarno. It meant the man standing before her risking his career to help her.
It hadn't taken her long to convince him of her identity.
"You're identical," Chakotay had said sadly. "Yet you're not. Nicole is left-handed…"
A mirror identical, she realised.
Their journey to this point, where she was ready to recreate the conditions of the accident that brought her to this San Francisco, had been fraught with cunning and adventure, the urgency to find a way back the undercurrent that drove her forward.
Kathryn looked at the man standing before her. A gentle man, so familiar that her heart bled with longing. But he was not hers. His Nicole and Voyager pursued a notorious Maquis cell leader into the Badlands. He was from Dorvan, but had remained in Starfleet. He was already an admiral, his wife Nicole Janeway the captain of Voyager, with Magnus Rollins her first officer.
It was time to say goodbye to this Chakotay.
"You said she's like me, Chakotay. Then Nicole Janeway will find a way home."
In the last twenty four hours she had come to know this man, a man who believed her, comforted when she despaired of getting home, helped her at great risk to his own career. She had told him that the Chakotay on Voyager was a Maquis, her good friend and first officer. In her heart she knew now that on her Voyager waited a Chakotay cut from the finest cloth in the universe, just like the man standing before her.
Chakotay's smile reached his eyes. He looked happier, she thought.
"Captain Janeway," she heard the voice of Nick Locarno, whom she tracked down in a tavern in Marseilles, "we have to hurry. Security has been alerted…"
She gave a solemn nod, turned to Chakotay.
"Chakotay…she will return to you…"
"Kathryn," he began, pulling her closer to him, his hands gripping her shoulders, his eyes filled with peace, "please tell your Commander Chakotay he is a very lucky man…"
She threw herself against him and hugged him fiercely. When she stood back, her eyes swam with tears.
"I will tell him how lucky I am. Now more than ever, he needs to know how I feel…"
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END