Finding Kathryn

a story by

vanhunks

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: Paramount owns the characters. I borrowed them for this sweet story.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

1) This story was inspired by some members of the Voyagerangel message board VAMB] who were looking for a double drabble. I wrote the first part, and it turned out to be more that just a drabble. For all the wonderful messages of feedback from them, I thank them all as it has inspired something entire new.

2) "Finding Kathryn" will be the story that launches an entirely new series [I hope!] called "The Sand Paintings].

SUMMARY:

A young cadet has read about the legendary Kathryn Janeway and her husband Chakotay. She searches and finds Kathryn, a meeting that has far reaching implications.

*

FINDING KATHRYN

It had been easy to find her. Kathryn Janeway looked pert, fiery, with not much grey in her hair as I might have expected. How could I not find her?

I arrived at the Academy with nothing but my excellent grades and the recommendation and promotorship of a dear friend of my late father, and my own, impossible, insatiable curiosity to come face to face with this woman. After my mother died the yearning and the restlessness started and my father had found it hard to deal with a fractious teenager who demanded to attend the Academy instantly. Maybe I had been restless all my life, looking up at the stars, on a homeworld deep in the Gamma Quadrant.

My father's gentle caution, the worry in his eyes that I would be disappointed remained with me all the time. He was afraid, not for himself, but for me. I had wanted to become a cadet ever since I knew there was an Academy, ever since I saw the crew of vessels that brought colonists to Caldo IV

"I don't want you to be rejected, or disappointed, sweetheart," he told me.

Then he died. My father. Who never told me the truth until the day he lay dying. That was three months ago.

I raged for days. Then the relief set in. I was angry with myself for feeling this relief.

The first time I saw her, I was sitting right at the back of my class, not wishing to be seen, blending in with the surrounding and looking like every other female cadet. Admiral Janeway walked up to the podium and greeted us.

I tried to remain hidden while I studied her, not taking any notice of the hidden mysteries of quantum physics. I peeped just behind Neelam Dayaram's head and took a good look at Admiral Janeway.

She looked…lost, I thought. Lost and lonely. I didn't think that someone who was married to Professor Chakotay, who had been her first officer on Voyager so long, could actually look lost. Maybe it was what I wanted to see, a vain or vague desire to know that she was indeed feeling the same aching emptiness I felt most of my life, despite having loving parents.

Yet, it couldn't be mistaken. There was something about the small droop to her mouth - when she didn't smile and curve it up aat the corner - that rocked my insides. An indefinable quality that I understood; the old yearning that had been in me, was it in her too? Did she feel any loss? A loss like I had?

Her voice cantered on;  information rolled from her lips; the cadets listened with rapt attention. They were going places. I had come to find a place.

I just looked at this woman who had intrigued me since my father died. I had known about her, about the vessel Voyager that had been lost in the Delta Quadrant.

Her hair had only few streaks of grey, but the colour was still the golden bronze from pictures I saw of this legendary captain. It was her eyes though, that spoke volumes, if not to the cadets, then to me least. Was it because I knew what to look for? I couldn't hate anyone.

I don't know. Perhaps it was instinct. I'd like to think it was instinct. My PADD lay on the desk, still untouched when the cadets rose to their feet.

Had the lecture ended? So soon?

"Dismissed."

From the first row, the front, the cadets filed out. I followed Neelam Dayaram and reached the door when I heard her voice.

"Cadet…"

I stopped dead in my tracks, my heart pounding. I knew that my cheeks were flushed from the heat I felt suffusing it. I looked everywhere but at Admiral Janeway. The floor seemed a good place to glue my eyes on. My ears buzzed. Neelam paused, but walked on when I nodded to her. Then the lecture room was empty.

I ventured to look at her while she turned to something on the desk. Admiral Janeway  looked stern, lips compressed. My heart sank as she took a PADD and scrolled. I forgot about the death glares I read about. I hadn't been paying attention. She was going to kill me with that look once she decided to look at me.

"Cadet Elizabeth Brinkmann?"

"Aye, Admiral."

Then she looked up from the PADD, straight into my face. I knew the nanosecond that recognition would dawn. Her eyes grew wet, I think and she swallowed hard. Her hand went to her temple as she closed her eyes. I thought for a moment she was going to faint.

Then she opened her eyes again and looked at me. It seemed she tried to assimilate me into her eyes, into her head and her mind and heart, that sort of thing. I don't know why I thought it in those moments, but it felt to me as if our souls touched, or something.

Maybe I was right about instinct. I looked at eyes the exact colour of my own. I looked at hair which but for the few grey tinges, looked exactly like mine. Perhaps it was my hair style, but my ponytail looked like hers as she had worn it during her early years on Voyager. I saw the pictures. When she had spoken earlier and smiled at Cadet Moldoon, I saw the lift at the corner of her mouth. Much like I smile.

My heart thudded. I think maybe, it was the dimples that form in my cheeks when I smile, that got to her.

Recognition can be joyous, sometimes painful, stirring up memories of a past never to be contemplated.

Her hand touched my cheek, a gentle touch that was as light as the flutter of a butterfly's wings, a touch that seemed at first hesitant. In her eyes flitted what I thought was pain, regret, anger and joy - all mingling.

She knew me. Recognition. I don't know the history or the pain of why I ended up with Paul and Marina Brinkmann. I was looking at the woman who gave birth to me.

Her hand remained connected to my skin, the softness of my cheek and the dampness that resided there. I felt home, at last. I knew my mother finally. I also knew my father. I inherited his dimples.

Admiral Janeway spoke stiltedly, her voice soft, filled with deep emotion:

"They told me you were dead…"

***** 

END

PART TWO

How do I quantify what I felt when Admiral Janeway said those words with so much darkness and pain?

Recognition.

I didn't have to tell her I'm her daughter, for I didn't know the history. Paul Brinkmann's words on his deathbed were as astounding now as they were then. Someone else gave birth to me, not Marina, his wife. He was not my natural father, someone else was. I should hate him and Marina Brinkmann who kept quiet all these years. There were gaps in stories told and untold that I couldn't fathom. The pieces of the puzzle were still too scattered, too fragmented for me to gain any concept of just how two people could lie to me, and how two people could suffer. Or what forces out of everyone's control determined such a different path for all of us.

She recognised me, sensed me as only a mother who had yearned for eighteen years to see her little girl grow up and couldn't, yearned. My face was a reflection of her own. Events in the past, the vastness and terror of it all coalesced in the single sentence she spoke.

Always, I had been so selfish I guess, thinking that my parents never understood me, that they didn't share my drive, my insatiable desire to explore the universe, or understand why I could feel so unfulfilled. They stereotyped my restlessness as the angst of growing pains, something every parent who had children experienced. So I performed the way they wanted, for I never knew why I felt different, never could give a viable alternative to their perceptions of the trials and tribulations of youth.

I didn't resemble them, but the thought that I didn't belong to them in the strict sense of true filial bonding, never struck me.

Yet they loved me. I could never deny their devotion to me. They gave me their hearts, their generosity, loved me with unflinching support. It was what they withheld from me, in the late understanding of my true history, that I found unable to reconcile.

As I said, there were too many pieces of the puzzle that needed fitting.

"They told me you were dead."

The words brought an instant understanding. Kathryn Janeway and her husband Chakotay didn't give me up voluntarily. They didn't throw me to the wolves as I had been ready to believe. Maybe Paul Brinkmann's words, that "we were given no alternative" would come back to me later, when I'd consider with a clear mind why they kept me in the dark. So yes, I was ready to battle Kathryn Janeway on that score. I was ready to throw everything of my own pain, my subconscious longing at her and demand why she had given me up.

Me. Me. Me.

It was her terrible pain that lay close to the surface, that showed in her face and trembling hands and stilted words and constricted throat hardly able to mouth those words that found reciprocation in my heart.

Suddenly, there was no longer 'me'. I bled with her.

Something happened, something cataclysmic that separated me from my mother, separated husband from his wife.

How fortunate it was that it was the last lecture of the day, on a Friday!

Touching came easily to Admiral Janeway, my mother, as it came to me, her daughter. My hand, in tentative gesture at first, with my blue-grey eyes following the movement of the hand, accompanied by my own perplexity at how fundamentally natural the action was, touched her hair, traversed across damp cheeks, rested lightly over eyes that had closed.

Finally, I dropped my hand. What could words say that our hearts felt?

"Admiral…"

"Elizabeth…was the name I gave when you were born," she whispered, her eyes still closed.

"M-my parents…" I stammered suddenly, "m-my father, said it was the name he had to give me. I – "

I was still so young, so raw and untutored in the big emotions and traumas felt by others who had gone through so much in life. Too many things for me to absorb in a few heavy minutes, minutes filled with so much darkness, pain, joy and love, deception...

I burst into tears. I stood there and wept, my hands limp by my side. I wanted to find my mother, I needed to see her. I was ready to hate her. I wanted to find my father, a Native American called Chakotay - Professor Chakotay who was to teach me Cultural History and Anthropology. I needed to know why I was separated from my parents. I needed to understand why I could instinctively and unconditionally love this woman standing in front of me. I wanted to see them together and tell them that I must have loved them always, even when I didn't know they gave me life.

How could I have searched for something all my life when I didn't know that it was this? The old, aching emptiness filled, brimmed, overflowed.

It was all too much.

I felt two hands take my shoulders in a tender grasp; I felt myself pulled into her embrace. My eyes were wet, my cheeks stained with my tears, my mind whirling from the overflow of emotion which in those moments was to me impossible to understand and contain.

But I had two protective arms around me. I smelled her, and gained a sudden vision of being held against her breast when I was just born. It was a smell my memory, jolted to new knowledge, had committed in those first moments of birth. I remembered it.

She held me close. I thought absently how Kathryn Janeway put aside her own pain for a moment to offer me, her lost daughter the solace I craved, the comfort I needed; she stilled my angry, restless heart.

She let me weep for as long as I needed to.

I read the public files on Voyager. I know that there was nothing that Kathryn Janeway wouldn't do for her crew. I learned that she made sacrifices, many of them, to bring Voyager and her precious crew home. I learned that there were many times that she put the happiness of her crew before her very own.

These were the things I studied, absorbed, learned about this remarkable woman, my mother.

The way she held me and murmured words of comfort, the way she stroked my hair, touched my cheek, pressed her lips against my forehead… I knew every word I had read about Kathryn Janeway was irrefutably true.

At length she held me away, but disinclined to break contact. Her hand touched my cheek again.

"There is so much to tell you, Elizabeth, so much I desire to know - "

"Me too," I told her, my voice terribly wobbly and tear-filled.

"There is someone you should meet - "

"My father?" I asked her. She nodded, and I detected another flash of pain in her eyes, the way her brows knitted together as if she tried not to cry. Was something wrong? Again?

"I dreamed for three months of this moment, Admiral," I said, stammering again, not certain how to address her now in this utterly new dimension of my life.

"You can call me Kathryn. It's okay, Elizabeth," she said, smiling that gentle smile that was so different from the stern, aloof face of earlier when I entered the lecture room.  But I couldn't… I was struck with indecision for a moment, and she noticed it. Things were too new, too sudden.

"Admiral, perhaps it would be better if I met Professor Chakotay first?"

Could she hear the eagerness in my voice? I had been thrilled beyond measure when I discovered from the records that not only was she my mother, but that the man she married was my father.

"I understand. You're staying in one of the dormitories? I'll wait for you…" 

I thought her eyes darkened a little and I didn't want her to be unhappy anymore.

"No, I'll come with you. I would like to meet with him as soon as possible…"

"You must understand, Elizabeth, that your appearance…" She sighed deeply. "It's very sudden. Your father…"

There was that flash of pain again, of remembering things that didn't want remembering, it seemed like to me. So I followed her out of the room and accompanied her home, for he was waiting for her there. On the way she had explained that he didn't have classes for the day. They were going to Indiana for the weekend.

I was excited, with my heart hammering in the anticipation of meeting Commander Chakotay of Voyager. I was ready to throw myself in his arms and cry my heart out at the injustice I knew must have separated a child her from natural parents.

I met my father that day.

As I said - I was young, raw  and untutored in the big emotions that govern the tragedy of the lives of others.

How could I have been prepared for the terrible rage with which Chakotay screamed and screamed my name until I couldn't bear it any longer?

*********

END

PART THREE

I think I cried more in one day than I did in my whole life. Everything became a blur after I entered the home of Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay. I remembered with a kind of vagueness that there was a painting against one wall of the lounge, and on another, a large artefact which I later learned was a medicine wheel. But it was the burn, the rush of air from my lungs as I waited for him to appear that prevented me from taking notice of my surroundings.

He appeared as soon as the front door of the apartment had opened, ready I guess, to grab his wife in a bear hug. He looked the kind that could swallow one in a bear hug. My mother was very small, petit, like I was. She would have drowned in his arms.

Then he noticed me. The wide dimpled smile froze in an instant. His eyes grew wide, the momentary frown making way for awareness. My heart pounded. I heard Kathryn's voice break through the heavy veils of recognition.

"Chakotay, I - "

"Are the spirits playing tricks again, Kathryn?" he asked in a soft voice in which I thought I detected hope and despair simultaneously. Mostly, I guess hope and despair were tinged by disbelief, a kind of wariness borne out of having suffered too long. The fates may have been playing tricks indeed. Those words made me think that there could have been many occasions in the past that their hopes were raised, then in a second killed and buried until the next glimmer came along.

It was heartbreaking to see a great, big, rugged man break up.

I looked from Kathryn Janeway to him, then back at her. Her eyes were full of concern for him, I think. She seemed wary to deliver the truth, whatever it meant to him.

"Chakotay, this is Elizabeth...our Elizabeth..."

The pallor had made way for a flush that spread across his features. He didn't look glad, or sad or with that deep aching emptiness I saw in my mother that day.

Maybe those emotions had all been there. I just didn't notice it in the haze of the next few moments. I flinched at the rage that grew in his eyes. Who knew what went through his mind then? All the agony he had suffered since my birth? The fates that conspired against them? The conspiracy of deceit and vengefulness that played havoc with the lives of Janeway and Chakotay? Maybe, the overriding fact that I was alive after all, had never died or been killed as they had convinced him?

He moved towards me. I shrank back.

"Elizabeth," Kathryn said softly, "this is your - "

My mouth gaped, opened and closed like a fish. Chakotay gripped my shoulders and it was so painful that I must have given a little cry, for Kathryn tried to free me from his grip. But he held on, his angry eyes never leaving me, his nostrils flaring. I thought for a moment that like my mother earlier, he would faint from the overload of emotions. But that was not so.

Everything that went wrong in their lives, the tragedy of the loss of their daughter, the tormenting circumstances surrounding my birth overwhelmed him in those seconds that he gave a loud cry. It sounded like my name. I couldn't quite make it out, because I had never been so afraid. I couldn't move away from the tortured cry.

"Chakotay!"

But he paid her no heed.

Like a wolf - a lone wolf of the ice filled Steppes of  Siberia - Chakotay, the Angry Warrior raised his head and screamed. It was the cry of a wounded animal that in its dying moments howled its desire for release. Over and over I heard my name cried, my senses reeling from the onslaught.

It was more than I could bear.

How did I break free from his punishing grip?

I don't know. From somewhere I summoned the strength to free myself and run. I ran away from them, ran as hard as I could. In any direction. It didn't matter. I ran until my chest burned from the exertion. I couldn't see for the tears that streamed down my face. I didn't care who saw me. I didn't care. I just ran.

That was how I found myself in the gardens of the Academy. I was wheezing, taking in deep breaths trying to calm down. I looked around me, dazed. I was surrounded by rolling green lawns, beautiful flowers growing everywhere. I sat down on a bench, still too stunned by what happened. Down the short embankment there was a pond that lay glistening in the afternoon sun. The water rippled. A duck followed by her brood of ducklings were hastily making their way to the bank.

I found I couldn't smile at the display of protection, how the tiny ducklings shook the water from their wings and scampered after their mother. It was quiet. There weren't many people about. Most classes had ended for the day and many cadets had gone off for the weekend. Even Neelam, my roommate had gone home to India.

Where could I go? I wondered. I was still shaking from my ordeal, still trying to gulp back the sobs, still trying to make sense of what had happened in the apartment. Maybe I was coming down with something too, a cold or flu because I felt hot, feverish. I pulled my feet up under me on the bench and rested my head on my knees.

It was hard to understand my father's reaction. I sensed mostly like I did my mother's deep-rooted sadness, his own pain. Perhaps that more than anything else softened him in my eyes. The brief glimpse of him, just before the raw terror broke loose, was enough for me to love him forever. He looked...everything. Kind, rugged, handsome with his tattoo and the dimple as he smiled at his wife when we entered the apartment.

Yes, he looked like he could die for her.

My tears came again, soaked into my clothes, dripped over my hands. All I wanted was to find them and to know that they were good people. All I wanted was to see them, and to feel the oneness of our blood-bond.

All I wanted was for my restless heart to find peace.

The bench creaked as someone sat down next to me.

"Elizabeth..."

Why, oh why did his voice sound now like golden jewels, or rich burgundy cloth, so smooth and clear and unfettered? I must have flinched again, because I heard him sigh. I was afraid to look at him, afraid I'd see the intense pain again. I didn't ever want to see it. It tore my heart open at his grief. I know now that he must have thought too, of how much they lost, of never experiencing the joy of seeing their daughter grow up.

"Elizabeth, will you look at me, please?"

Still I couldn't look up. I didn't want to hurt him. He was hurt so much already. My hand reached for him and a shiver went through me when he clasped my hand in his.

How can I explain the healing of just a simple touch? Not the angry, enraged gripping of my shoulder earlier, but the taking of my hand in his and holding it like I was a little girl come to find reassurance from her daddy.

That was the fullness of  his touch. His hand was warm, comforting as it swallowed up my own small hand. It gave me courage.

My feet slipped off the bench and I sat back, daring to look at my father.

There it was. The smile just like he had for his wife earlier when she greeted him, was there and it was for me. It covered me, took me in and welcomed me. The pain still lurked in his eyes. Maybe it was regret too, but his face was the face of a man come to rescue me at last. His hand touched my hair reverently, it seemed.

"My little girl..." he said. "Our own Elizabeth...how like your mother you look!"

I threw myself against him as I had in the lecture room falling into my mother's arms. He held me in his strong embrace, so reassuring, so welcome.

"I am sorry...it was stupid of me to run away - "

"It is to be understood, Elizabeth. You must forgive me... I recognised you instantly, you know?" There was a touch of wistfulness in his voice. "Just like your mother..."

"H-how come?" I asked, already knowing what his answer was going to be.

"Because, when I met your mother, she was sitting on this very bench, in the uniform of a cadet and she looked exactly like you are looking now."

"I'm glad," I said, smiling through my tears.

Parts of the puzzle that were missing or fractured were beginning to ease into fitting. We all needed time, I guess, for it was an adjustment to make. For me to get used to my parents and call them Mom and Dad, and for them to let me into their precious circle of love.

There was movement; I hardly realised she had been standing just a little away from us; Kathryn sat down on the bench beside me. There was that feeling of breathlessness again, of the beginnings of a wheeze when I realised I was flanked by my natural parents.

"We're going to Indiana for the weekend," my mother said. "We'd love for you to come with us. There - "  Her voice stilled suddenly; the flash of pain was back.

My father rescued her. "There is much we need to know, and much that we need to tell you, Elizabeth. It is not an easy story to tell, but now that you are with us, you should know..."

"Everything?"

"Everything."

*********** 

END

NOTE: This story will be followed by a series called "The Sand Paintings"

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