ALL THAT YOU LOVE WILL BE CARRIED AWAY
By Angelina Vansen (angelina@gunmetaldark.com)

RATING: NC-17
CODES: J/C
SUMMARY: Companion piece to Shayenne's wonderful "Uisce Beatha". I couldn't forget it after I read it, and she was kind enough to let me write this. It really needs to be read to understand what's going on here. I highly recommend it.


I know what is coming. I can see it in her eyes as she slips into her soft blue dress, holding my eyes with hers. Brushing my fingertips with the merest hint of her fingertips as she hands me a glass full of that full red wine.

Oh my Kathryn. How I love her. I feel the anticipation, the arousal, build in my body as I watch her dress for me. Only me, as well. Six years ago today we married, and we're not going out tonight.

Fastening her anniversary pearls around her long white throat. Warming them with her untouchable flesh.

I know that alabaster neck, it looks as frail as paper. It looks as though I could wrap it in my hands and pull those pearls tight. It looks as though I could twist it, wring it, snap it.

What husband would think that of his wife on their anniversary? I laugh to myself as she chooses her shoes. I think she'd understand, though. Kathryn's death is definitely a laughing matter.

Then she comes to me, taking the glass from my hand once again, pressing her lips to my lips, cupping my face in her hands.

Once again, I am reminded of the shrine where this dance began, where Kathryn drank from a sacred spring and became immortal. I am reminded of the image I keep in my head of her that day, on her knees by the bubbling water. I had thought as she drank how beautiful she was, the sparkling liquid wet all over her lips, the cup cradled in her palms, almost a bowl.

I hadn't known. Neither of us had known.

That instant has been made eternity, just as my heart had wished for. Except now, she drinks from me, and when she breaks away, her lips are glistening wet from the moistness of our kiss instead.

Her eyes are so alive ... her skin that scentless white.

Oh Kathryn. How she torments me with her ageless beauty. Throws it in my face. She doesn't think she's doing it, of course, she thinks of this as lovemaking. She does it with an innocence that frightens me. I do not believe she understands.

What human could? Perhaps I am a little hard on her. How could she possibly understand that all that she loves will be carried away?

The straps of her dress fall and there, to my willing mouth, are her breasts. Perfect and immutable, like standing stones. I take the nipples to my lips and taste the things my own flesh can never know.

Sometimes, I have asked her how the water tasted. I have been close those times, you see, to drinking it myself. Drinking from the vial of it she has.

She has chewed her lip in the darkness of our moonlit bedroom and answered honestly, the way that Kathryn always does.

"Like a river," she says every time. "Cold, full of minerals."

I can imagine it then, the flavour of pebbles and reeds and grasses. It's sometimes been enough to satisfy me.

Then I can imagine the taste of it on Kathryn's skin, on the hot moisture of her breath as she kisses me, in the wet heat of her tongue as I suck it into my mouth. I can taste it as I plunge my head between her legs to drink, the bitter and the bland.

I fantasise that I can be made immortal accidentally too, simply by making love to her. I pray for it a little.

I envy Kathryn for her accident. The choice was made for her. It is me that has the torture of preference.

She sways her hips against me as I stand with her, rigid with need. She looks so good, eyes dewy and moist, pupils widened to the point of blackness. These eyes, I think, these eyes will see it all. The end of everything. I kiss each one on top of its closed lid and sigh her name.

I bury my lips in her neck, wishing for the scent of her skin, the scent I fell in love with, but of course it isn't there. She is only a statue of humanity now, nothing moves or changes. Her cells don't die, her skin does not renew. It gives off nothing. She has no scent at all.

But the flavour of her! Rich and full, it hasn't been lost at all. The taste of her tongue and her teeth and her breath will always be Kathryn to me.

I know what she wants. I know these kisses, they are desperate and lost. Scared kisses, anniversary kisses. The kisses she gives me on birthdays and at Prixin. Kisses for the times that denote the passing of time.

Oh Kathryn, I know you so well. I know exactly what you're asking me tonight.

Is my place in heaven worth giving up these kisses?

We sink into the warm cushion of our bed, and she's on top with the question of herself, the firm, soft question of eternity. How this question has permeated our marriage. Poisoned it too.

I think she sees it sometimes as a commitment issue. That she has never made me happy enough to drink. Oh, she pretends to understand my spiritual beliefs, she claims to, but she doesn't. It's like she thinks she can become my God herself. How very Kathryn Janeway.

She squirms and presses her breasts into my hands, an offering. Always for me, forever for me, exactly this way. That is what she offers.

My hands skate the silk of her ribs, the stone of the bone beneath. The eternity of her palpable and immutable. The youth and strength of her touch.

Desperate kisses.

I turn her and quiet her, take control and pin her hands against the pillow by the wrists. Surprise in her eyes, but excitement too. I fantasise about the bruises I can never cause. The pain I can never see.

An eternity of this, I think. Forever with no limits. No injuries, no matter what. New meanings to pleasure with no pain. This thought ignites in my blood.

God it's almost too much. Too much as I press between her soft chalk thighs to slide thick and fat and full inside her. Kathryn, right now she feels like a God. A slow, wet God with the world of the future in her eyes, looking into my eyes.

She hasn't even begun to understand what this means yet, and she's not asking me to join her. She really isn't. Not in words.

I worry. I think of the way we were on New Earth, two separate entities entirely. It's difficult to imagine right now, as we're joined in the union of sex. But we were. The only two people on the planet and we didn't know where to begin. We lived utterly separate lives.

Okay, that was a long time ago, and since then a lot has happened. We've had a happy marriage. Beyond happy. But I still worry. She is my wife, but sometimes I look at her and see the Kathryn I could never have, the Captain. The Captain hurt me. I loved her and she hurt me.

Perhaps it really is a commitment issue after all.

She sighs that breathless sigh and turns her hips up underneath me, scrunching her face and stiffening. I am touching her. She looks soft, and she is Kathryn once again. Can I spend eternity battling this duality?

I am touching her. Deeply, and she loves me. Her fingers bending on my back, grabbing. Nails ten points of tension. God she loves me.

Her love fills me, makes me taut. Her love tightens up my buttocks and my thighs and my belly. Runs like liquid light up the shaft of my penis, and I am hopelessly lost. Consumed by fire, consumed by flood, by waves and gales and hurricanes. By forces of nature. By Kathryn. Kathryn, who will outlive all of those things with these kisses. These kisses ...

I think I know how it would feel to drink that water. It would feel like this.

One moment touching eternity. An eternity that lasts just a moment. With Kathryn. I am crying with the pleasure and the agony. My face is wet and she gently kisses each of my tears and drinks them. Her soft warm tongue, evermore.

I will do it, I think. Damn everything, damn my Gods and my people, this is my destiny. She is. She is more than everything, and I can be too. We can be such creatures as we sit scentless, watching the human race burn out and die.

I cannot speak as I pleasure her slowly, using my tongue and holding the words in my mouth like a breath. I think of drinking. I think of waiting until she is asleep and getting the vial from the drawer in the safe, taking it out of the pouch, drinking it. Maybe with a little whisky. That seems right somehow.

Then what do I say? Do I wake her and tell her? Or do I just put it back, wait the years and the decades and the centuries for her to detect?

I suspect it wouldn't take anywhere near so long. She would know from the smell of me almost at once.

I grin up at her from between her parted legs, tug gently at her sex with my teeth. Teasing her. Her belly flips and contracts; she's close to the edge.

Oh my dear Kathryn, nowhere near as close as I am.

I devour her with a passion, drinking the water of her life, and she comes. Hands clenched tight in my hair, voice crying out to God. Thanking me.

We cuddle together in the warmth of our bed, naked and soft and young. Holding hands. As she sleeps, I think of the vial.

I go downstairs naked and a little cold from being away from her skin and her heat. Go to her study and sit at her desk without turning the light on. Her small Newton's Cradle ticks and tocks beside me, one beat after the other after the other. Almost in rhythm with my heart. My mouth is dry.

I pour myself a little tumbler of her whisky, drink it neat for courage. Pour myself another and swirl it, looking at it. It is almost an hour before I can bring myself to get up and move the picture that hides the wall safe where she keeps the vial. I enter the combination and hold it in my hands.

I sit at her desk and hold it in my hands. Take it out of the pouch and hold my thumb across the stopper. Only gently.

I think of my father in the rainforest. Kolopak. I say his name aloud sometimes, to the winds, to honour him. I think of my father's body, burned and disfigured and dead on Dorvan. Birds circling above us in the rainforest.

None of that will matter. Nothing, not Starfleet or Maquis or Cardassia or the Demilitarised Zone. Not my anger. All of it will leave and die, be memories.

Everything will die but me. Me and my love. This love for Kathryn will be the only absolute. Those kisses ...

The terrible wrong of that hits me then. It's the same wrong it's always been as well. Life is never absolute, and love certainly isn't. It was never meant to be that way.

I imagine us, millennia from now, relics. Decadent and stale and pale and jaded. Living worlds apart because there is nothing left to say. Because the things that we have to say are dangerous to each other.

Just like New Earth. Awkward. Out of place. Sexless. I doubt we will be interested in pleasuring each other in four thousand years. We will have done everything by then. We will be beyond that. Not human. Something altogether ... other.

It hits me hard in a way I'm not sure it's hit Kathryn yet. Forever is a mighty long time. The vial looks like a poison in my palm right now.

I drink my whisky and put it back in its pouch. I put it back in the safe and lock the door. I put the picture back in place. I am shaking as I walk back upstairs to bed. I press back in behind her and wrap her round me. Kiss the top of her head.

She stirs and wakes and wants to make love again. I let her and please her and sate her with everything I have, as if it's my last time.

One of these times, thank God, it will be.

THE END


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