Warning: this is a very depressing story. I guess it's a sequel of sorts to
"Under the Boardwalk" and "Poisoned," though it's not in the first person.
Feedback to emwycedee@writeme.com please, and be gentle; I'm not happy about
it either. This is dedicated to Kate Mulgrew.

FUTURE'S END
by YCD

When he looks at her now, he sees her as if from behind a wall of water. Her
outlines are often indistinct. Sometimes, at an angle, she comes into shocking
focus, and he notices how she has aged. The circles have darkened beneath her
eyes, and what had been laugh lines around her mouth are turning into the
beginnings of wrinkles. But when she turns to him, or away from him, the clarity
fades, and he sees her as he has seen her all these years. More an aura than a
presence, though that is fading too. He wonders if he has wanted her physically
because he always sensed that her spirit would remain beyond his grasp.

His emotions suffer from the same sense of removal. He remembers loving her,
sometimes so strongly that he believes the memories to be feelings,
which can take his breath away. Often an image will trigger them--her eyes
flashing in certain light, with an echo of smile as if the sun were dancing in
them. Sometimes the mere sight of her hands and her long, tapered fingers can put
him in a frenzy. But her hair brings him back to reality. His passion was already
fading when she cut it, so the short bob does not have the power to evoke in him
the searing desire which the ponytail did. He clings to the memory of those long
locks momentarily cascading over his hands.

Long ago he stopped believing in a someday with her, and learned to take
consolation where he could. Sometimes when he makes love to a woman, he still
imagines that it is she who touches him, crying out her joy in the magic of the
dark. But lately that fantasy brings pain. It is easier to live in the present
with someone else--anyone with whom he might have a future. She has always chosen
to love phantoms, holograms and memories, fantasies; he will not make the same
mistakes.

Earlier this year, she wore a dress to a party which she had worn on New Earth,
and he almost wept to see her in it now. He wants at least to cherish the past,
not to have it disrupted by present reality. Sometimes he hates her violently for
what she threw away, but the hate fades, as the love fades. He wonders whether he
is still capable of that depth of feeling.

His body has a mind of its own, however, and sometimes he takes small comfort in
its instinctive reaction to her nearness. He still feels pleasure at her touch,
less frequent now, but pulling like a form of magnetism. He thinks that if
his body can still respond, then perhaps it is not too late. One day he might
find someone else who can evoke that same feeling in him, though it won't be her.
It can never be her now, not even if she were willing. He has learned to shut
down, to protect himself from her.

He tries not to look too closely when she seems vulnerable. His past fantasies
superimpose themselves on reality, and for a moment he sees the woman he has
always wished she were, someone who could share with him and let him share with
her. For so long he has shouldered her burdens that they are indistinguishable
from his own. He has no strength now to be a source of comfort to her, no matter
what consolation she offers.

She is ever closer to home, that elusive goal which once belonged to them all.
Now it has shifted, moving through space-time at the speed with which only an
idea can travel. B'Elanna and Tom have been home for years. The Doctor has always
been home. Tuvok will never be home--not even when he sees his wife and grown
children, grown strangers. Wildman's home has moved. She still longs to see her
husband and introduce him to their daughter, but that is not her only reason for
pressing forward. Samantha wants to stake out new territory, to teach her child
how to live among the stars.

He is surprised that most of the crew have not left the ship to carve out homes
on the planets they've encountered, but perhaps they are really explorers at
heart. They do not all share his aching need for a place to anchor the spirit. It
was the threat to that abstract, the idea of home, which drove him into the
Maquis. For him, Earth had always been home, but when the Cardassians came and
destroyed the houses and families of others, he had felt strongly the duty to
defend them. More than duty, even: he had known in his gut the betrayal, and had
fought from a deep sense of justice. It was for the same reason that he'd found
it so easy to ally with his Starfleet pursuers, to create a foundation when his
own ship was destroyed. He'd thought that for the first time, he might have a
hand in creating his own home. And he almost had.

He could count in weeks the stretch of time when he had truly felt home. From the
moment she took his hand after he told her how he felt about her through the
moment after Tuvok signalled them, when he looked into her eyes and realized that
the planet wasn't the only thing she intended to leave behind. He hadn't given
up--he'd kept reaching out for months, feeling that if he just said the right
thing at the right moment, the tenuous barrier which separated them would fall.
He did not know then that her command status did not create the barrier, but was
her excuse for the barrier. The slow realization, which he tried to deny for
months, interspersed around stolen moments with her--on Earth after falling
through the time rift, on the holodeck after saving her life.

He couldn't have named the moment when he saw that the barrier was immutable.
When he realized that he was seeing her as if from behind a wall of water. Even
after he knew, he refused to acknowledge what it meant--not about her, and not
about his own feelings. Then one day, it was as if he had always known. And he
had, in a way. But the fact that the dreams were always doomed did not diminish
them. Nor did it invalidate them. The love was precious in its own right, even if
it existed only in a bubble, never to be shared. Or so he had thought. Now he
wonders whether he must crack the bubble and destroy the love in order to break
free, the way one must escape from a static warp bubble.

Yet he can't seem to do it, or perhaps he won't. Somewhere inside his soul he
supposes that he hopes she shares that feeling--the pain of the prison. He
doubts that she does, and wonders whether she is capable of feeling this much
for another person. One other person. She has an easier time falling in love with
abstracts. Maybe that's what he has done as well, in loving her.

Most days, the pain is bearable. She is ever with him yet never with him, bodies
in orbit. He dreams of fire. Perhaps in an inferno, they would be crushed
together, dissolving into each other to share eternity. Their legends surely will
be intertwined, their names linked so. In the end, perhaps, the story itself will
be the only resolution.