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“In my time, Mister Starling, no human being would dream of endangering the future to gain advantage in the present.”
—Janeway, “Future's End”
In most timelines, it’s Harry who goes back. Maybe because he knows that this is in his nature—knows, because he’s told himself so, that he has defeated time before. Maybe he is simply too haunted by that final game of Kal-toh,
(I'm free and feeling lucky)
by the plan he’d so easily abandoned,
(Where's your sense of adventure?)
by the data, ten years late, that says that he was right, he was right, he was right,
(Don't you want to find a way home?)
not to make the attempt.
But he is quickly swayed by his former captain. By her idealism, and that of his younger self. He’d forgotten, in the intervening years, what being here was like. He is convinced to move against the Borg. It never occurs to him to bargain with the Queen.
and if that journey takes a little longer so we can do something we all believe in, I can't think of any place I'd rather be—
(We might as well just hand the Flyer over to the Borg—)
In most timelines, Harry dies.
To the journey!
In another, Miral goes. If grief demands a witness then she is her parents’, of the embattled marriage they cannot forfeit because of all who died to secure their future together. The entire Voyager crew is this way, entrenched since their return, as though to choose any other way of living—to choose to live at all—dishonors all of their dead. They orbit each other, their shared history a collapsing star, though that orbit has been decaying for much of her life. Her Uncle Harry hurls himself into deep space over, and over, and she suspects that one day he simply won’t return. She never really gets to know Tuvok, and Tuvok does not know her at all. Her mother is never not angry, never forgives Chakotay for dying while the rest of them have to go on. Miral’s inheritance is a litany of nevers, of can’ts, of won’ts.
She spends six months brokering a trade with Korath right under Starfleet’s nose, an experimental weapons system for something far more dangerous.
You are your mother's daughter.
Miral, too, is compelled in the end by the idea of some higher purpose than getting the crew home.
Miral dies.
And to those who aren't here to celebrate it with us.
And Tom goes, sometimes. In a dozen timelines, when he can no longer bear the weight of his own life. When he knows that B’Elanna will never leave him, because they’ve been playing out the same grim brinkmanship since the day he made that vow, over their unborn daughter’s DNA, that he wouldn’t walk away. Often, he learns from Harry what Kathryn is planning. When he can’t intercept her himself, Harry trusts Tom to stop her.
I am home, Harry.
Tom never tries to stop her. In every universe, Tom’s loyalty to Kathryn is absolute.
They die together.
And to those who aren't here to celebrate it with us.
Seven dies. There is no timeline in which Seven goes back.
Chakotay dies. There is no timeline in which Chakotay goes back.
And to those who aren't here to celebrate it with us.
Kathryn is not the first to try. Kathryn understands better than anyone that there is no discharge from the forward march of time, that the consequences of corrupting history can be hideous, inconceivable,
I know what the consequences are if we do nothing
but in certain timelines, she looks at Tuvok, huddled on the tenebrous floor of his hospital room, alive by technicality only, and she breaks. She is the first to understand that nature abhors a vacuum, that the universe demands a price, one life for another. She saves Seven, and kills Harry along the way, an EPS overload at his console. She saves Seven, and Tom is thrown from his station. She can only love one person at a time. A life for a life.
We can't destroy the hub and get Voyager home.
Finally, it occurs to her to offer herself.
(Are you absolutely sure about that?)
Kathryn dies.
And to those who aren't here to celebrate it with us.
But her counterpart does not. In this timeline, Voyager gets home sixteen years early.
And Seven lives.
Chakotay lives.
Tuvok lives.
To the journey!
And countless trillions of lives are altered. Preempted. Destroyed.