Epilogue

It took them weeks to stabilise the bridge enough to repressurise the space. The rift hadn't only ripped a hole between universes, it had also torn into Voyager's hull. Tuvok and Tom Paris organised work gangs to operate in zero-grav space suits and the crew worked around the clock. They had resigned themselves to the loss of their captain. They would not lose the ship too.

"What if she's still out there?" Tom whispered to B'Elanna, as they lay together, exhausted after yet another extended shift, another day on reduced power, reduced rations. "What if she's waiting for us to find her?"

"She wouldn't wait for anything, Tom, you know that," B'Elanna told him. "She'd be trying to get back to us. And she'd be expecting us to move on."

It was Tom who found the watch. It was battered and dented but still ticking, its chain broken. It had somehow snagged itself on the Captain's chair, so perhaps it had snapped as she'd lurched from it, trying to save what crew she could before she herself was lost. Tom held it up for Tuvok to see and the Vulcan had regarded it with his customary impassivity. He knew the story of how and when the first officer had presented it to his friend. He also knew the significance of the story behind the watch, both the original and the replica that Tom Paris now held up. Janeway had shown it to him when they had recovered Chakotay and Tom from the Krenim, having feared both of them dead. Tuvok had heard the tremble in her strong voice and had realised that her heart had reached breaking point.

Tuvok had had the sense that she had been asking his permission, though she hadn't needed it. He gave it anyway. It had been clear to him for years that Janeway had found more than a first officer when she'd taken the Maquis leader as her second.

He took the watch from Tom. He kept it safe as they patched their battered ship, as they had tried to find a way to bring the Captain back to them, as they had finally accepted that Kathryn Janeway was not coming home.

Before they set a new course of the alpha quadrant, Tuvok held a ceremony. He'd felt it important to provide an occasion that would both mark an acceptance and a new beginning. In it they fixed the pocketwatch beside Voyager's nameplate. It seemed to the new acting Captain that it provided a perfect reminder of how well two apparently disparate sides could come together to form a whole.

When the USS Voyager set a new course for home, they did so in the spirit of their lost command team.

Determined.

Together.

[END]