Prayers to Broken Stone
 

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
 

I: Gesture without motion

A look.

Nothing more given, nothing more needed, and she knows that these feelings are real, even if for some incomprehensible reason their bodies can not follow the touching of their souls. In her dreams, the images are there.

"Regeneration cycle complete."

She wakes, and her eyes open, struck violently and forcelessly by the vaulted, chill solitude of a cargo bay.

II: The dream kingdom

Wind howls through the cargo bay, dislodging containers of stored items that crash to the deck with obscurely slowed motion. The metal plates beneath her feet shudder with every impact until she feels Voyager itself will be shaken apart.

The wind stills as a hand touches her shoulder. She closes her eyes at the contact, and when she opens them, the view before her is as if nothing had ever fallen.

Turn to me, a voice whispers.

"I can't," she says aloud.

Turn to me.

"I can't!"

Turn to me.

She turns, but no-one is there.

"Too late, Captain," another voice says cheerfully. "She's gone." Tom Paris waddles into view, half-devolved into a lizard. "But at least you've still got me."

"As you were, Mr Par -"

Turn to me.

Kathryn stops mid-word as the voice comes back. Paris shakes his head. "You've missed your chance, Kate, I'm telling you."

Turn to me.

She wakes to the solitude of her too-empty bedroom.

III: The supplication of a dead man's hand

Seven of Nine stalks through corridors and fields through crowds of screaming, writhing beings. People. Here she rips two lovers apart. Tubes of living metal erupt from her hand and bore into the neck of a beautiful man as another yanks and scrabbles at her arms. She drops the body as his skin pales and erupts steel sores. "Resistance is futile," says Seven of Nine, and she knows that it is so.

The screams. They pound at her. "Fear is irrelevant." Weapons glance off her shields. "Hope is irrelevant." Another life form plucked from the seething, howling masses, another drone wailing its last individuality. "You will be assimilated."

Silence in her mind. Where are the voices?

"Return me to the Collective." A plea, a need, a fear. A Borg cannot function alone.

She wakes. Horrored faces of past drones victims assault her mind's eye, and twin blue screams gaze out from a face impassive.

IV: The perpetual star

A breeze whispers across her soul as she looks out from the open airlock into the warm, dry reaches of infinite space. One star glimmers brightly, holding her gaze, and the absurd fantasy that she looks on her home catches her sighing.

Turn to me, says a voice behind her, and she tries to choose between the duty of her journey and the lonely whimper of her needing.

Turn to me.

With a cry of frustration and pain, she steps out into the void.

She wakes. The dreams are too frequent and too painful now.

V: Falls the Shadow

Kathryn checks the chronometer and notes without surprise the near approach of the dark, unnatural hour of oh three hundred. Restlessly obedient to the push of her own desire, she rises and dresses to leave her quarters.

She regenerates three hours in twenty-four, a voice in her mind reminds her. And she always steps out at six.

She enters a turbolift.

She'll be preparing to regenerate.

She leaves the turbolift and walks towards the bay. Images from her dreams assault her.

Between the motion
And the act

She raises her hand to touch the button that will open the door, and stops. Tonight she is too raw to withhold the emotion that desperately tries to whisper from her lips.

Between the desire
And the spasm

A soft touch, and the doors slide open. She has hesitated too long, or long enough, and Seven stands in pale perfection, framed by the sinister technology that cradles her. Kathryn watches her, long and silent, drifting closer until she can touch the ivory skin if she chooses.

Between the potency
And the existence

A soft cry escapes Seven's lips, and Kathryn realises it is pain. She has intruded. Warm fingers brush the chill, milky cheek in tender regret before she turns and leaves, a core of ice trailing tendrils through her mind.

This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.