But when all you have is the gaps between words, everything comes down to distance. What he feels can be divided up into seconds and inches and lightyears. The yawning void of space that fills the gaps between where they are and where they started and where they yearn to be.
“What are you doing?”
“Letters home. I started them a year ago. One to my family,” a pause, “one to Mark.”
How many times has he read too much into the spaces between words? Countless, throughout his life, but never since he was an infatuated teenager has the distance he perceives in the gaps between the syllables felt so important. It makes him feel foolish, and childish. He wants to berate himself for it, but he can’t quite bring himself to do it. Hope is the only thing keeping anyone going at this point, so what’s wrong with holding a little of it out for something impossible?
But when all you have is the gaps between words, everything comes down to distance. What he feels can be divided up into seconds and inches and lightyears. The yawning void of space that fills the gaps between where they are and where they started and where they yearn to be.
A million miles away, at loggerheads - she brought them here, she put him into this impossible situation and told him to handle it. There are black holes and gravity wells and impossible star systems crawling among their words. He can’t help but be resentful of the mess they’re in, the mess - that her compassion has landed them in. He can’t help but admire her tenacity and her commitment. He could happily have stayed at opposite ends of the ship and let the bulkheads take up the space so he doesn’t have to.
Years have closed the gap, inch by inch, a breath and a word and a glance at a time. He’s tried to tell her in the only ways he thinks he can without breaching their trust, without tearing down what they have worked so hard to build. In stories and unwavering support, in disobeying orders and building bathtubs – in so many ways without words he tries to transmit what he cannot say. In the shrinking distance between their shoulders on the bridge he encodes his message – close the gap so I don’t have to. Make the leap so I don’t risk the fall.
He’s never been a coward before.
If he were Vulcan he would have calculated the odds on this being a logical and worthwhile use of his time, figured out that it was pointless and given up already. She’s holding out her own hope, and though it’s not for him, he’ll be damned if he’ll take that away from her.
But for all his sins he is human and he cannot section off his emotions and fence them in with logic, push them down to take up no space in his mind and leave it free for other matters. He can hide them. He can stay far enough away to be professional. Never let it be said that he doesn’t try his damn hardest to do the best job he can, given the circumstances.
He hopes he has hidden them well enough that she won’t see. If she does, he thinks, she will try to let him down easily. She will be firm, but kind. She will be the best friend he could ask for – he would have all the space in the universe and all the time to wander it, but more distance is not what he wants.
She probably knows, he thinks on and off, while he’s stealing glances and savouring pauses. And if she does she will ignore it for the sake of keeping the status quo. Things must remain normal and controllable. Anarchy is not her style. No, Janeway is not one to indulge in stormy, Byronic dramatics when it comes to romance. Headstrong she may be, but never one to lose her head.
He is glad that Starfleet know they’re alive. He is happy that their loved ones know they aren’t lost, dead, MIA forevermore, a mysterious never-closed file – but a part of him screams at it. Because now the one she’s holding out hope for will know to hold his own out for her, and no matter how many lightyears there are, hope is a tough thread to break. And it will strengthen her determination to get back to him, to familiarity, to something she’s built for herself.
There is a long way to go between now and that eventuality though. So he will stay by her side, regardless, and hoard the gaps he’s reading into, keep the pauses for himself, and maintain a professional distance.
“You’re right, it’s probably a mistake for us to get our hopes up at all - we’ve been through this before.” A pause. “All right, I’ll admit it. I just finished a letter to my cousin in Ohio.”