B’Elanna ran onto Voyager’s bridge and stared at the viewscreen as the ship exploded. The ship they had called Liberty because it would help bring them freedom from the Federation-Cardassian treaty. The ship that had become her own freedom over the years she had served on it.

She hardly noticed the battle going on around her. Maybe it would have been easier to focus on it, something to take her mind off what she was feeling. But she couldn’t concentrate. She didn’t have anything to do. She didn’t want to do anything. She didn’t know if she would have been able to do anything without blowing a fuse and making things worse.

Worse?! She shook her head and snorted to herself. What could be worse than Liberty being destroyed?

She found out not long after. "What right does she have--"

Chakotay stopped her. "She’s the captain."

She stared at him, too tired to argue. Seventy thousand light years from home. Liberty destroyed. That was all she could think as the captain told them that they would get home somehow. Liberty was destroyed. How would they get home without her? Liberty *was* home.

"It was necessary," B’Elanna repeated, her stomach tying in a knot with the realisation that the captain didn’t understand what had happened to her. Sure, killing what was effectively her child was difficult - more than difficult, harder than anything she’d done before. But it had been her decision. It had to be done. It was what had happened to her-- She turned her head suddenly and looked out at the stars.

3974 had been so sweet when she had first met him. She hadn’t objected to his flirting - was it flirting? Or was it seduction? She knew it was something more than the naivete the others on the ship had assumed. She knew machines. Sometimes she thought they were all she knew. And 3974 had been flirting with her.

She had trusted him. When he had told her about the war she had wanted to help. She *would* have helped, if the captain hadn’t decided that the Prime Directive wouldn’t allow it. It had torn at her to watch him realise that she wouldn’t do anything. She might almost have done something anyway if he had asked.

But instead he took her.

It was that simple. No matter how much she had begged him to let her go, to let Voyager go, no matter how much… He simply took her body and forced her to give her mind.

She wondered, sitting there at the table with the captain, if it really had been that difficult to kill the prototype. It wasn’t really her child after all, as much as it was his. And no matter how much it had hurt her to look into its eyes and stab it, she couldn’t say that it hadn’t given her some pleasure to see the look in 3974’s eyes as it was destroyed. She couldn’t say that there wasn’t some part of her that wanted to hurt him in return for the way he had used her.

"Who would have thought, after all those weeks we spent together, perfecting your programming, that we’d end up here, trying to kill each other?"

The carbon dioxide level was definitely building up. She barely heard Dreadnought’s answer, the answer it gave in her own voice. She glared at the magnetic constrictors, focusing all her energy on burning through them with her phaser.

It probably served her right, for sneaking out all those nights so long ago in the Alpha Quadrant. All those nights, sneaking away from Chakotay, and from Liberty. Especially from Liberty.

What had she been thinking? Liberty may have been old, but compared to this treasonous Cardassian piece of *trash*-Of course she hadn’t known then that it would betray her like this. And it did serve her right, because she had left Dreadnought at the end of those weeks, without a word of explanation, without a word of apology, without a word of goodbye.

At least she had gone back to Liberty, difficult as it had been to admit what she had done. Things had never really been the same between them after that, but at least they had been on speaking terms. At least they had never tried to kill each other.

Was it really an accident that Dreadnought was here? Not here in the Delta Quadrant - that could hardly be planned. But here, in this situation, after the way B’Elanna had explained to it what had happened, could that really be a mistake? It knew her, inside and out. It had been planning this for years. It wanted to kill her.

The carbon dioxide level was definitely building up. She was hot, sweating all over, and gasping for breath. But each breath felt so satisfying, each little bit of oxygen she extracted from the air so invigorating, that she didn’t want to leave. She almost cried as she was pulled back to Voyager’s sickbay by the transporter, knowing that, out there, Dreadnought was dead.

And it was her fault.

She stared at the stars, knowing that it wasn’t only the tears in her eyes that made them twinkle, but also the planet’s atmosphere. She wasn’t on Voyager anymore, because Voyager was gone.

"B’Elanna?"

She didn’t turn, couldn’t turn. "Chakotay," she whispered.

"Are you okay?"

She shook her head silently, wrapping her arms around herself and trying to hold back the sobs that were threatening to wrack her apart.

Chakotay held her gently until she was calm again and could talk, albeit with hiccups breaking up her phrases. "I didn’t realise," she said. "Not until they took her away. She… She’s home. And we can’t do anything to get her back."

She talked to him for ages, feeling as if she was telling him everything, when in fact she was holding everything back. But it didn’t matter, somehow, that she wasn’t talking about her true feelings for Liberty and Voyager, and barely even mentioning 3974 and Dreadnought. She still felt that he somehow understood what she meant, until he said to her, quietly, in that way of his, "We’ll make a home here too, B’Elanna."

She froze inside at those words. She looked up again at the stars and slowly pulled away from him.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

She nodded silently, and didn’t speak about it again.

Then she was back.

It seemed like she was dreaming, walking through the halls, standing in the turbolift, coming into Engineering.

B’Elanna stood in the room, staring around her. Her mind was full of hatred at the thought of how they had treated her ship, but her heart was full of joy. Even after all the Kazon had done, she was still elegant Voyager, full of pride in itself. A pride that conquered even the damage they had inflicted on it.

She ran her hand along the smooth railing and gazed at the deep blue of the warp core. It looked back at her, and she knew that Voyager could tell what she was thinking just then. *Later,* it seemed to say. It winked a pulse of blue light at her, and all of a sudden everything that had gone before - with Liberty and 3974 and Dreadnought - none of it mattered anymore.

She smiled back at it and looked around again. "Okay, Voyager," she said, "Now I’m back, I’ll soon get you fixed up again." She stepped towards the warm blue pulse and stroked the cool glass alloy with soft fingers. "And later," she whispered, "we’ll spend some time alone, together."