Gravity
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Just a melancholy musing of my favorite Captain. Nothing in particular. No pairing. Unbeta'd.

For Ann, who got me thinking about these things. I hope you enjoy a little Janeway.

There were days when the sky was too low. It pushed down on her. She could feel its weight against the crown of her head, against the fine hair along her scalp; could feel the individual vertebra in her neck contracting, the empty space between them collapsing, like the fold-up ladder her parents had in the attic of the farmhouse. When she was a child she had wondered if the sky was higher in the humid jungles of Ecuador or along the grassy plains in Kenya or the stifling wilds of Borneo; if somehow the engulfing mass of space didn't close in so much around the squat middle of the world.

Even now, forty years later, the thought tiptoed along the edges of her consciousness, frightened of being seen by the ever rational part of her scientific mind; the thought that maybe the earth really was flat, a dormer room in an old house, the ceiling slanting down as you moved toward the outside walls, so that standing by the window to gaze out at the dead remains of the garden below, you had to stoop, the sky edging lower.

Even here, out in the middle of the field, the earth hard and dry under her feet, the remnants of furrows like minute hills and valleys uninterrupted as far as she could see, gravity overwhelmed her. She could swear that she could reach up and feel the woolen bristles of the ash gray clouds. It wasn't like this in space.

In space there was no up, no down, only the artificial designations given to them by the ship. There was nothing to hang over you, pressing down. There was only the emptiness of it, the absolute nothingness. Even the depression that had settled on her in the Void, when there had been no stars to guide them, no point of reference to be found anywhere that they even existed beyond their own determination that they did, even that had not felt like this. Like the air was being slowly forced from her lungs, leaving her lightheaded and off balance. Leaving her pinned down beneath the weight of it.

She loved Indiana. She loved the farm. She loved waking in the morning to the smell of real coffee being brewed the way it had been for centuries, the succulent aroma drifting up the stairs to where she lay, cocooned in blankets, the glow beyond the pulled shades only the suggestion of light. She loved hearing her mother humming softly to herself as she went about her morning routine. She loved walking the farm, now that winter was on the fields, the trees along the edge of the woods stripped of their fine apparel, left bare to weather the cold of an Indiana January.

It was just that she missed the stars. Missed the vastness of space. The knowledge that it was something to be feared, something to be conquered. That it held beauty to shatter the soul and horrors beyond imagining. That in it, there was nothing to ground her. She had thought that stranding her crew 70,000 light years from home had been her greatest mistake. She thought that the endless hours, the endless days and weeks and months and years of ruminating, of debating and regretting all the bad choices, all the wrong decisions, all the paths they might have taken had been her punishment for what she had done. Now she knew different. The universe wasn't that kind.

At least during all that time she had her crew, her friends, her companions. They had made it easier, made even the knowledge that it was all her doing bearable. And she had the stars, the rush of them slipping by the hull of her ship, the infinite reaches of the galaxy and other galaxies, stretching in all directions as far as her mind could imagine. She knew that though she might die out there, she would do so on her own terms.

She had no terms now. No ship. No crew. No vast stretch of space. No stars, except the ones that glimmered, tauntingly, in the blackness of a winter's night. Just an old farmhouse and an aging parent. A sister who visited when she could. Friends who sent the occasional message, thinking that they were disturbing her well-earned rest. And gravity, the weight of a universe full of losses and missed chances and unspoken words, a gravity she knew she could never escape.