Author's Note: Sorry there haven't been any updates in so long! I do plan on completing this story. One more chapter should do it!

Disclaimer: What Paramount doesn't know won't hurt them.

Report

"So that's all, Captain, I believe." Emily spoke slowly, trying to keep exhaustion from slurring her words. "When Louisa left, I was put in charge of the ward. I didn't know what else to do, so I stayed and did what I—what I could." Her voice broke, and she fell silent. Had she really done what she could? Hundreds of soldiers had died in agony under her care, for lack of a simple remedy in the medkit hidden under her bed.

Her vision blurred, and she saw the hurt that had flashed into Louisa's eyes when Emily had checked words of encouragement and friendship and offered a meaningless platitude instead.

She blinked carefully until she could again see Captain Janeway's impassive face.

Since she had returned to Voyager, she had spent two hours under the Doctor's care and half an hour in the sonic shower (with Kes monitoring her life signs from outside the door) before being called to report. Now she stood to attention in the Captain's ready room in blue jeans and turtle-neck that somehow felt alien and unfamiliar. She didn't know how to move, how to hold her head, what to do with her hands. Apprehension, fatigue, and a sense of unreality made her faint and nauseous. She swallowed and concentrated on standing still. If she moved, she would fall.

Finally the Captain stirred, and her intense gaze dropped to the padd on the desk before her. "Miss Anderson," she said slowly, "the Doctor informs me that he treated you for advanced typhoid fever. Why didn't you treat the fever yourself, or vaccinate yourself before you contracted it? Surely you have sufficient medical knowledge to use the innoculations in the medkit."

Again the room swam before Emily's eyes. She closed them and stepped back surreptitiously to place a hand against the wall.

What was the question? I had typhoid?

"I…I didn't know, Captain." The words were little more than a whisper.

"You were working in a primitive hospital, and you knew that several of your colleagues were severely ill, and you didn't give yourself routine medical scans? That seems rather careless." The Captain was staring at her intently, almost as if she was looking for a specific answer, but Emily couldn't imagine what she was supposed to say.

"I…I didn't think of it, Captain," she said faintly. "I suppose it was careless, but I…" She stopped.

The Captain sat very still. "Go on."

"I—I… Everyone else was sick, and—and dying—and I couldn't help them—because of the Prime Directive of course—but—Captain, I couldn't use the medkit to save myself and let everyone else die! I mean, if I couldn't save my friends and my patients, I could at least suffer with them and not set myself above them, somehow, by being—" She stopped again, aware that her voice was spiraling toward hysteria.

There was a long silence.

"I'm sorry, Captain," she whispered. "But I thought… I wasn't on an away mission. I thought I was going to be there for the rest of my life."

Janeway's face was still impassive. "Did you want to die?"

"I…I don't know. I couldn't think that far past the bed pans and the dying people and…and getting through this moment, and then the next, and then the next… It didn't…occur to me that I might die. But—" she swallowed tears and went on— "but I'm not sure it would have mattered much to me if it had."

There was another silence, during which Emily stared at the floor and concentrated on keeping herself upright. Then the Captain stood and stepped around her desk. "Thank you, Emily," she said gently. "I am impressed again by your intelligence and your courage under pressure. You are a credit and an asset to this crew."

Emily raised her eyes too quickly. "Then—I did it right?"

The Captain placed a steadying hand on the young woman's shoulder, her face softened into an affection Emily could hardly credit.

"Yes."

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As soon as Emily materialized back in Sickbay, she dissolved into tears. Kes helped her onto a bed, then sat down beside her and wrapped her arms around her even as she surrounded her with a mental hug so full of caring it was palpable. Tearing, wrenching sobs wracked both their bodies until nothing else existed.

Some time later she became aware of a voice, as if in the distance.

Some little time later, she identified the voice as the Doctor at his most irate. She burst into fresh tears. So many times in the past six months she had wanted—needed, really, with a passion and desperation so great she could still taste the bile in her throat—to hear that voice again; to feel the safety and security and normality, even in the midst of chaos, that the Doctor's perpetual irritation and sarcastic humor represented to her. As she listened to him rant about something or nothing in particular, she thought that she had never loved anyone so much.

"…told the Captain it was out of the question! That it was too soon! That a prolonged series of questions could cause an emotional collapse! But no, it was worth the risk, the Captain said. She had to give the report right then, while everything was still fresh in her mind, the Captain said. The circumstances were too delicate to delay the recital of information, some detail of which might be vital to the timeline of this dimension or that. And of course I caved in—deferred to her despite my better judgment like a good little hologram—and now look at my patient! But does anyone take my advice seriously? Of course not. It's just the Doctor. Nothing to worry about. His trillions of specially engineered cerebral processors could not possibly contain more information than a simple, fallible, human brain. Kes, is she going to be all right?"

The last sentence, spoken with an anxiety radically different from the tone of his previous tirade, yet without so much as a pause for breath, struck Emily as hilarious. She burst into peal upon peal of hysterical laughter over which she had no more control than she had had over her tears.

Kes tightened her hold and spoke over her head. "Don't worry, Doctor, she'll be fine. Let her get all of this out."

The Doctor sniffed and muttered half-audible imprecations against the idea of 'getting all of this out' that only induced more hilarity from his patient.

Finally, both tears and hysterical laughter subsided, and Emily, completely drained, slumped against Kes' side, unable to move. Kes laid her gently back onto the bed and arranged her limbs as if Emily were a large rag doll. "Go to sleep now," she said quietly. "We can talk when you wake up."

Emily nodded. "Doctor?"

Faint as the whisper was, it brought the Doctor to her side instantly. "Yes?"

"Thank you."

The Doctor's puzzled expression was the last thing she saw before sleep claimed her.

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Of course, it wasn't like on television, where she would have put the whole experience behind her with the fade out on that last scene in Sickbay, and shown up in the next episode as whole and happy as if nothing had ever happened. That wasn't the way real life worked, even on Voyager.

Andrew and John worried about her constantly because in the midst of recreation she would suddenly start to cry. Not violently anymore, but silently and uncontrollably, as if there were a vast reservoir of tears inside her that would simply overflow when least expected. Neelix became visibly distressed when this happened as he told one of his pattering, random funny stories, and it took the combined reassurance of all her friends, plus Emily herself, to convince the good-hearted Talaxian that he hadn't hurt her feelings in some way.

Nearly a month after her return, Harry found her in her quarters sobbing over her clarinet. When he asked her what was the matter, she was forced to tell him that she couldn't practice. Every time she tried she was haunted by waking visions: Louisa, and the hurt in her eyes when Emily rejected her friendship; Tricky Tom's lost expression as he looked down at the space where his left leg should have been; her sister Trixie's gamine grin; the love in her Daddy's eyes when he looked at her; Q standing over her in her darkened quarters; the Doctor with whiskers and a tail; the sadistic cruelty in Dunbar's face as he backhanded her into a wall; Andrew, jaw clenched with fierce, desperate hope as he pulled her from the jaws of a land eel; bright, white light that seemed to engulf her and make her vanish entirely.

Harry took the clarinet away from her gently. "Maybe it would help if you talked to someone about all that stuff," he'd said, with an endearing mixture of hesitation and authority. "You've been through a hell of a lot in the past ten months, and you really haven't had anyone around you consistently enough to bounce things off of—to keep you grounded. I don't know if I'm the right person to do this, but I care about you, and I don't go on shift for 24 hours. I literally have all day. So—talk."

And Emily talked. She told him about her family, about growing up on the fringes of late 20th Century America. She told him things she thought she had forgotten. The arguments she used to have with her mom; the elaborate worlds she and her sister created with their dolls; the joy she felt when she converted to Christianity at age 13 and began attending the local Episcopal church. She explained the loneliness and isolation she felt when, at 17, she had gone off to music school. She had never before been away from her family for more than two weeks. For the first time she haltingly tried to describe the blinding white light, and the odd, spiritual pain that accompanied a journey to another dimension.

Her voice gave out as she articulated her desperate, though successful, attempts to fit in aboard Voyager, and her deep and abiding homesickness. In a whisper, she described her second brush with death in Starling's office, and went on to explain her nightmares, her panic when Voyager entered the Continuum, and her confrontation with Q.

When she lost her voice entirely, Harry replicated two cups of mint tea before she had to ask, and they drank them in silence. Then, haltingly, she talked about Louisa May Alcott and her betrayal of the friendship they had built between them. She described the cold, the loneliness, and the despair of the hospital work when Louisa was gone. She cried as she told him how many men she could have saved with the simple remedies in her medkit, and she laughed as she remembered the antics of the men, and their desperate attempts to keep each other's spirits up. She told him how she had prayed, there, for the first time since her arrival on Voyager, and how she had hung her com badge with the cross around her neck.

"They were both—symbols of faith, I guess. Faith—if I hadn't had it—I would have died, I think, or gone crazy. Then, if not before. I'm still not entirely sure how it's possible to go through as many times and dimensions and experiences as I have and stay sane at all. Except that I'm too afraid to go mad. I'm in love with normality. I couldn't even stand to be away at school and here I am across the universe in a different dimension. But…"

She fell silent. Harry just sat with her, for a long, long time.