Fan Fiction
TITLE: Going Home
AUTHOR: Brenda Shaffer-Shiring
RATING: PG
CODES: C
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Paramount owns 'em, though sometimes I wish they'd give these guys a bit more thought. FYI Part 1 of this story was originally published in Delta Quadrant 8 (Elizabeth Knauel, editor) under the title of "Personal Log: Stardate 51990.1". Part 2 was published in Delta Quadrant 11 (Elizabeth Knauel and Andra Marie Mueller, editors) as part of a longer multi-character story, "The Morning After: Personal Logs."
SUMMARY: Two entries from Chakotay's personal logs. In one, he admits he's not eager to return to Earth, but later he realizes the truth is more complex than that.
Stardate 51990.1: The Needs of the Many
(a log entry written after the events of "Hope and Fear")
Going home.
While we were dealing with Arturis, and the magnificent ship we thought had been a gift from Starfleet -- the ship supposedly sent to take us back to the Alpha Quadrant -- I didn't let myself think about it too mmuch. About what it would mean.
I couldn't. I'm the first officer of this ship. I have a duty to my captain and to our crew, a duty that in this case didn't allow ambivalence or second thoughts. I had to put a good face on it: smile, encourage the junior officers, act as if our final destination was as dear a dream to me as it was to everyone.
Home. Under the busy surface of our everyday lives, it's what a lot of our crew still live to find, the dream that keeps them from jumping ship and settling down on any one of a number of Class-M planets we've encountered. Safe haven. Journey's end.
Home. It's become a passion to Kathryn: an obsession, the Holy Grail that leads her forward and in whose pursuit she's done things that the upright officer of a few years ago would never have considered. The captain who, at the beginning of our journey, rightly refused to trade technology to the Kazon, became so anxious to shorten our voyage that she actually bargained with the Borg for safe passage. I warned her against that at the time, tried to tell her that her actions could have wide-ranging consequences. And we know now that I was right, though I admit, I could hardly have predicted how those consequences would come back to haunt us.
Home. Ever since I got Sveta's message about the Maquis, back at the Hirogen communications relay, the word has tasted funny in my mouth. When I look at my old colleagues, the other former Maquis --
It's been a while since I've heard any of them speak of home either, and no wonder.
What the hell do they -- we -- have to go home to? Dead families, slaughtered peoples, devastated planets. The Cardassians and their bloody new allies, the Dominion, strutting in triumph over everything that should have been ours, trying to annex still more worlds to assuage their endless greed. The Federation that left our worlds to the Cardassians' tender mercies in the beginning, and abandoned those worlds to their rampages in the end.
Oh yes. Let's go home.
To prison, where the kindly, crippling Federation bureaucracy will take us in hand. Where patronizing, soft-voiced counselors will "rehabilitate" us from the sickness of wanting to protect our worlds and our peoples, from the madness of seeking revenge on the monsters who sought to abuse and eradicate us, from the insanity of opposing our loving father/teacher/god, the Federation. Oh yes, they'll make us all better. Make us perfect "good citizens," incapable of opposing our benevolent Big Brother in thought, word, or deed.
Is there any reason we should hurry for that?
But what is our other choice? To stay out here, among worlds where the best we can hope is to win some races' wary tolerance, and the worst we can expect is sectors where every hand, every weapon, are raised against us? In our four years in the Delta Quadrant, we have come closer to death, or total destruction, or being stranded, more times than one can think about and stay sane. So we try not to think about it, to pretend those facts into nonexistence, but they don't go away. Then there's the loneliness of being the only ones of our kind out here. In this quadrant, no one really knows or understands us, and no one really cares. Nowhere we could touch down, nowhere we might settle, would we ever quite fit in. Our children might -- but then we wouldn't quite understand them; they would be as alien as all the others out here.
At least, back in the Alpha Quadrant, there would be the bond of shared cultures, shared beliefs. And even if they were in prison, our people would live. If the Federation's war with the Dominion was still going on, that guarantee wouldn't be absolute, of course -- but even if they ended up on the front lines, they'd be fighting with every resource the Federation could give them. Unlike here, where so often we have nothing with which to fight.
Sometime no roads will take you where you really want to go: to a place that's home in reality, and not merely in name.
Sometimes you don't have any good choices.
I tell myself that, tell myself we must make the best of the options we have. Tell myself that we must think of the good of the whole crew, not just of the Maquis, and that the greatest good, even for them, is clearly to get us back to the Federation. Tell myself that most of the Maquis are younger than I am (and wanted on less severe charges), and that no doubt even I will still have much of my life ahead of me by the time I've served my prison term. Tell myself that life in the Federation won't be so bad; after all, I lived there many years myself.
And sometimes, no matter what I tell myself, I know I am not sorry that the U.S.S. Dauntless, and the possibilities it proffered, were only illusions.
Stardate 52547.1: Where the Heart Is
(a log entry written after the events of the episode "Bliss")
It was one thing to discover that the wormhole wasn't what we thought it was. And something else again, to discover that I'm not who I thought I was.
I'd thought Earth held nothing for me. That if I tried to help take Voyager back to its homeworld, it was for Kathryn's sake, and the sake of our crew. That if, in the face of any of the (false) possibilities of getting to Earth that have been dangled in front of us these last few years, I was happy -- that was only because getting back would mean that I'd kept my word to Kathryn, that I had helped to take her burdens from her shoulders entirely.
I was a colonist. I'm Maquis. Earth isn't my home.
So I had told myself. Then that creature, that space-going psychoactive drug, let me see what I wanted most.
B'Elanna said that she saw the Maquis again, believed they were alive.
I saw myself returning to Starfleet.
Seven said the creature intensified our desires, made them seem even more attractive than they normally would have. Thus blinded, we would never question the actual nature of our "wormhole," our path to those desires. It stands to reason, though, that such a lure would work best if it focused on a longing that already existed.
In view of your exceptional service to Starfleet and the Federation aboard Voyager, my letter read, I am authorized to offer you a full and unconditional pardon for your actions in the matter of the Demilitarized Zone. If you wish to continue serving in Starfleet, your commission will be restored immediately. I've suggested to the Admiralty that you be offered a teaching position at Starfleet Academy, in the field of anthropology, and they've authorized me to make that offer.
There was a personal note afterward, from Admiral Nemimbeh Welcome home, Commander!
Welcome. Home. Commander.
I haven't let myself think about it for a long time. Guilt, I suppose, especially since we learned what probably happened to Dorvan. But there was a time when Starfleet was the only home I wanted, when I would have done anything, anything to attain it -- deny my heritage, turn my back on my birth planet, sever my ties with my father. Even destroy my own family, since, when my father refused to sign the papers for my early admission to the Academy, I pressured my mother to sign instead. My parents' marriage was already on the rocks, and I knew it would be the last straw for them, if she granted permission over his objections. I pushed her anyway.
My people were primitives by choice; to my young mind, fools. My planet was small and dirty and remote. And if my father and my family stood in the way of my dreams --
I went to the Academy, went into Starfleet, feeling almost like I was being delivered from bondage. My new world was sparkling, clean, streamlined, perfect, and I embraced it with the fierce joy of a convert to the faith. Of all the wonders it offered me, I especially loved flying. Despite everything my father had tried to teach me about the spirit plane, my spirit had never soared. But in atmospheric crafts, shuttles and ships, my soul was an eagle's.
I'd be lying if I said I never missed my father, never missed my sister, never felt a little lost among these people who didn't know anything of the way I grew up. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't happy anyway. I didn't feel much need for family, and when I did, there was still Mom, teaching at her college in Arizona. We wrote a lot, and she was always glad to see me.
Then the war drums sounded in the DMZ. I got that truncated message from my sister, begging me to return, to help --
Makaiya had never begged, and certainly never of me. I dropped everything, called in every favor I could to get back to Dorvan quickly.
Not quickly enough. But then it couldn't have been.
I don't suppose there's much point in recapping the rest. But when I saw what the Cardassians had done to my village, when I heard what had happened to Kolopak, when I found what was left of Makaiya -- when I learned that my people had asked for help from Starfleet and the Federation, in vain --
I knew then that I could never go back, to Starfleet or the Federation. And I swore that I never would, even though I felt like an exile, even though it was like amputating my own arms....Though I'd made the choice in pain, in time I took pride in my conversion, my service to the Maquis. Despite the price, it was the only right path, the only one I could walk. I told myself I had come home.
I've suggested to the Admiralty that you be offered a teaching position at Starfleet Academy, in the field of anthropology, and they've authorized me to make that offer.
It shames me now, to remember how happy I was when I read those words, but the shame doesn't diminish the memory of the happiness. To know that the Starfleet for whom I turned my back on my world and my father, the Starfleet who left them to die, is the Starfleet to whom, despite all of that, I would return in a heartbeat if the offer were only forthcoming...
Traitor, my conscience accuses, even for the wish. Traitor to Dorvan, to my father, to Makaiya...
But I'll never get Father or Makaiya back, and I can never go back to Dorvan. My heart, no less than any other man's, seeks a resting place; maybe I shouldn't be so surprised that it turns to my other home, the home I chose for myself when I was a boy, and lived in for so many years.
The home that, for all my fantasies and Kathryn's fond hopes, would never welcome me back in the fashion that letter suggested. Just as Dorvan rejected me for turning to the one home, Starfleet and the Federation will reject me for having turned to the other. In their eyes, I will always be Maquis, and expatriate.
It's true that to be a son of two worlds is to be at home in neither. But that's a truth that it's easier to contemplate in the abstract than it is in person.
And I wish, before all the spirits and all of my ancestors, that, sooner than make me see the truth, that space-going demon had simply left me to my bitterness and my pride. Let me believe that I had only one home to which I could never return.
�END�
