Title: Endings
Author: Jewels
Email: jhantor@geocities.com
Rating: R (for violence)
Codes: A, Dark; T
Summary: Voyager has returned home, but it's not been such a happy
occasion for B'Elanna Torres.

Disclaimer: I doubt that Paramount would ever be this nasty to
B'Elanna, but her character still belongs to them.

I wrote this when I was extremely angry and in a very dark mood. I only
wrote this much, a few scenes, it doesn't need much more, but it
creeped me out at the time.
Voyager has returned home, but members of the Maquis have been shipped
off to prison camps. B'Elanna was unfortunate enough to go to one of
the worst places possible.



B'Elanna came to in darkness, and for a moment wondered whether she had
gone blind. Her eyes were open, but she could see nothing but the pitch
darkness. She started to panic, and because of it, she started
thrashing around, only to find her movements restricted.

She still herself, still hyperventilating, and tried to control the
adrenaline that was flowing through her veins. Her Klingon side wanted
her to kick her way out of this place, but she couldn't, no matter how
hard she tried, she couldn't get out.

Something within B'Elanna was growing tenser and tenser, and suddenly
she snapped, yelling at the top of her lungs for someone, anyone, to
help her.

When she had been in the Maquis, she and a small group of others had
been on a raid of a Cardassian supply depot. Someone in the Maquis had
betrayed them, and the team was captured, some were killed, others,
like B'Elanna had not been so lucky.

They had locked her in a cold dark pit for hours, giving her no light,
no heat, letting her lie there in a puddle of water, getting colder and
colder, letting her listen to the screams of her fellows as she waited
for what seemed inevitable.

Eventually they came to take her, but not for the torture she had
imagined. She had known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that what
had happened to her was likely to in the end. Everyone knew of the
Cardassian's reputation towards women prisoners, especially those they
had considered attractive.

B'Elanna had resisted at first, but eventually, her resistance had
grown weaker. She developed a mind set. Don't think about how cold you
are, don't think about how tired you feel, don't think about those
bruises and cracked bones that are shrieking pain at you with every
movement. And whatever the hell you do, do not think about the fact
that you are lying on a cold, damp floor, being raped by three
Cardassians.

Her 'confinement' had lasted a little over two weeks before a Maquis
attack drove the Cardassians from the colony they had taken over.
B'Elanna had spent months convalescing, and was never quite the same
again, filled with fury at what the Cardassians had done to her.
Everyone in the Maquis knew her feelings. They weren't that uncommon
among them.

This coffin-like· thing, was bringing all those memories resurfacing.
She was panicking, beating on the lid with her arms, feeling the
bruises that raised, but unable to see them.

Eventually, her adrenal system seemed to run out of steam, and she lay
there, panting for breath, trying to bring her mind under control. It
was then she began to notice the silence. It was oppressive. There was
only the sound of her own hoarse breathing inside the container and
nothing more. And the walls of the thing seemed to absorb sound.

After a while, B'Elanna's ears started ringing, hearing the movement of
air in her ears, deaf otherwise, and she tried to feel her way around
the coffin, testing her surroundings.

She appeared to be in a tube a little larger than a photon torpedo
casing. There was an irregularity in the metal near her head that could
have been a microscopic grill for her air supply. And just where her
mouth was were two tubes, one dispensing some bland tasting paste, and
the other giving water. Either could be drugged, but obviously her
captors did not want her to starve to death.

Now, that brought about an interesting question. Just who were her
captors? Cardassians? She wouldn't put it past them to devise something
like this, but it seemed too subtle for them. They would go in with a
blunt club, but whoever was keeping her hear was doing what they were
doing with the point of a sharp knife. The effect was no less
devastating, perhaps even more so.

The silence was driving her mad, B'Elanna tried screaming, just to hear
a sound, but her voice quickly became hoarse. So she screamed inside
her own skull, hearing the mental voice echo in her imagination. She
couldn't keep that up for long, so she turned to memories of childhood
stories her mother had told her. Sometimes her mother had told her
stories in Klingon, but B'Elanna had never been able to catch more than
a couple of phrases, so she just didn't bother trying to pick up what
her mother had been saying. But now, just to stay sane, she repeated
them to herself, remembering with a perfect memory all the phrases,
sentences, intonations, just as her mother had recited them. She
applied her meagre language skills to translating them into English,
repeating the stories over and over again in her mind until she had
translated them fully.

It felt like years were dragging by as she recited these stories, and,
after she exhausted them, she applied her mind to engineering, her
passion. She remembered in detail the specs of Voyager's engines the
day that they had been going home, there had been problems with an EPS
conduit behind the Astrometrics lab, B'Elanna had been arguing with
Seven over repairs·

B'Elanna's body was racked with sobs as those memories poured forth
into her mind like floodgates opening. She was never going to see any
of them again, those her were her friends and family, everything she
had ever wanted or needed was on that ship, and now she was here, in
this coffin, waiting for death most likely.

B'Elanna tried to imagine herself physically wrestling those thoughts
away from her mind, for therein lay the path to madness. She turned her
mind to star-charts, translating the light-years into kilometres, the
boundaries of space, then, pure mathematics.

She tried to imagine looking at each number, holding it in her hands,
feeling the shape and sense of the number, and when she had assimilated
everything she could from that number, she pushed it away and moved
onto the next one.

She was up to 54215 when the voice first appeared.

"B'Elanna?" came the voice, and B'Elanna almost shrieked with joy at
hearing a voice other than her own, a voice that didn't come from
within her.

"B'Elanna, I can help you, but you have to do what I say."

B'Elanna was desperate as she responded. "Please, get me out of here."

"I will, but you have to promise you're going to be a good girl, and
not make so much noise this time."

"I promise!"

There was a brief pause, and the voice returned. "I don't think you
mean it," it said calmly, almost as if it were discussing the weather,
rather than the state of B'Elanna's sanity. "I'll come back when you
do."

"No, please!"

But the voice had already vanished.

B'Elanna spent an indeterminate amount of time wondering whether she
had really gone over the edge, whether the voice she had heard was
merely a figment of her imagination, driven to the point of creating
audio hallucinations in order to keep her from going insane.

But wouldn't the hallucinations mean she was already mad?

Whatever had produced the voice, B'Elanna clung to the hope that it
would, somehow, return to her, even if it was a mocking and cruel voice.

Hours, days, months, or years passed, B'Elanna couldn't tell, she'd
lost all sense of time, locked in this coffin. She wanted to scream,
but if she did that, the voice might never come back.

"Hello, B'Elanna."

B'Elanna began weeping with relief. "Please don't go again," she
begged, her voice edged with hysteria. "I'll do anything, just· don't
go."

"Are you ready to be a good girl?"

"Yes, anything you say."

"Alright then, are you listening?"

"Yes."

"Good. You remember the people you used to work with? The Voyager crew?"

B'Elanna almost burst into tears again, but didn't, for fear of
alienating the voice. "Yes, I remember them."

"I'm sure. We have a slight problem, you see, we can't find Voyager. We
need to find them so they won't make more trouble for people. All you
need to do is tell us where they were going after the Maquis left
Voyager."

"Oh?" B'Elanna was desperate for the voice to keep talking, and was
barely clinging on to what it was actually saying.

"Yes, you tell us, and we can let you out of here."

B'Elanna's wariness suddenly overcame her desperate need for
companionship. "What?" she said dazedly. "You mean you want me to lie
and put my friends in danger?"

The voice was harder now, not as soft. "B'Elanna, this is important-"

Defiance rose in B'Elanna's stomach, overpowering her terror and
loneliness. "Forget it! I am not betraying my friends, no matter what
you do to me!!" The end of her outburst made her feel quite proud of
herself. But the voice's next words chilled her to the core.

"Fine. Then we'll see how long you last in here. On your own."

The voice vanished without even a parting click to indicate a closed
com channel, but B'Elanna knew that the speaker was gone. She lay there
for a long time, sobbing quietly, the tears soaking into her already
matted hair. She wasn't feeling now, couldn't feel. No anger, no pain,
no resentment-nothing, just a terrible loneliness.

After a while, her tears dried, due to the simple fact that she
couldn't produce any more tears. She took a drink of her water to try
and unlock her throat from the tightness that seemed to have engulfed
it. She returned again to the numbers.

One· Two· Three·

**

B'Elanna screeched as a blinding light invaded her sight. After so long
consumed by the pitch darkness of her coffin, such a light, dimmed
though it may have been, hurt her sensitive eyes and caused her head to
start pounding an angry beat in her temples. She started sobbing from
mere pain, but two gruff pairs of arms grabbed her by her own arms and
hauled her out of her coffin.

B'Elanna's muscles were wasted, she wasn't able to support her own
weight, so instead she was dragged along, her feet creating long
grooves in the dusty ground of whatever cavern, on whatever planet they
were on.

"Smells a bit, doesn't she?" said one booming voice; one of the guards
that was hauling her along. His question was met by raucous laughter
from the second guard.

"What do you expect? She's a Klingon!"

Both man laughed uproariously at their joke. B'Elanna tried to lift her
head, to angrily retort that what had they expected after keeping her
locked in the coffin for· a very long time? But she couldn't summon the
energy to do so.

She noticed she was still wearing her Starfleet uniform. They obviously
hadn't bothered to take her out of that, and it was stained with
various bodily fluids from her time spent in the coffin. The room she
was in was like an examining room, with various pieces of equipment
around the lab. The guards, she did not fail to notice, were Human.

So was this a Federation prison? B'Elanna found that hard to believe,
the Federation had never been so brutal to its prisoners.

But then· Voyager had been away for a very long time·

In short order, she was stripped of all her clothing, shoved through a
sonic shower, and her hair, grown in the time she had been in the
coffin, was shorn off, the ragged ends hanging limply from her head.
She was given loose grey trousers and a top to put on and then was
almost thrown into another room, a lab, and left to heave deep breaths,
trying not to feel agoraphobic at the sudden space available to her.
She somehow managed to push herself into something resembling a seated
position, her eyes gradually adapting to the light around her.

A door slid open and a tall Human walked in, his expression superior,
condescending. B'Elanna wanted to throw up. He gave her a raised
eyebrow.

"Name?" he ordered.

"Torres·" B'Elanna's voice cracked, seemingly gone from disuse.
"B'Elanna Torres."

"Hmm·" the man made a thoughtful noise, and made a note on a padd. He
glanced at her again, and an expression of distaste. He obviously
didn't think much of her. He raised a hypospray and injected something
into her neck, and B'Elanna felt the small pellet of some sort of
marker implant itself under the skin of her neck. She absently reached
up and touched it as the man recited,

"You are prisoner number 4701, you will respond to that as such.
Understood?"

B'Elanna could only nod weakly. The man then summoned the guards, who
hauled her up by her arms again, and lugged her out of the room.
B'Elanna wanted to shrug off their hands, to walk proudly by herself.
But she couldn't.

Not anymore.

They walked her through sterile grey corridors, with dozens· no,
hundreds of doors leading off them. B'Elanna could guess what was
inside. Soon, her suspicion was confirmed she was shoved inside one of
these cells, and then left alone.

At least it wasn't the coffin.

It was a small metal room about two and a half meters by three meters,
with· "toilet facilities" against one wall, and a metal slab that was
probably supposed to serve as a bed against the other. Nothing else was
in the room.

But at least she had light.

**

B'Elanna fell into filthy water for the third time in a row, and spat
it out of her mouth, trying to ignore the filthy, disgustingly
contaminated taste that it left her with in her mouth. Her stomach
tried to retch, but there was nothing in there to get rid of.

B'Elanna tried to use shaky arms to push herself to her knees, but a
month in an isolation tube had left her with all the resiliency of a
piece of Neelix's hair pasta. She had found out it had been a month
from one of that guards who had been only too glad to tell her
information, for a price· not that B'Elanna cared much about the
'price' any more.

The sun stroke, and the burns that the hot yellow star raised on her
face, neck and arms, were of no help to her atrophied muscles, and she
collapsed again on the soft ground.

"Get on your feet you lazy bitch!"

The other prisoners, B'Elanna noted, were careful to avoid any
confrontation between her and the guards. There was a pause, during
which the guard hurled more abuse at her, and then there was a sudden
pain in her side that indicated the guard had used his shock stick on
her, trying to get her to stand. The jolt caused her to shriek and curl
up liked a poked insect. Yes, leave it to real pain to show her how
starvation, sunburn and fatigue were all pretenders.

"On your feet!" snapped the guard, and hauled her upright, shoving her
towards one of the crude hand tools that the prisoners were to use.
They weren't mining, they were doing seemingly meaningless work. They
would walk through these water logged field, grabbing the produce of
the long tall plants (which looked a little like corn) and taking it to
a central collection point. Then they would go through the plantation,
cutting down all the now-useless plants. Then they would plant new
seeds.

This would take about three weeks, and then they would move onto
another field. B'Elanna had been here long enough to learn the routine.

One other thing she had learnt, though, was that if you weren't
careful, you'd wind up dead. She'd found that out pretty quickly, in
fact, as soon as she was released from her cell, for the evening
"exercise", which had turned out to be something of an arena for the
guards to lay wagers on. In the normal manner, they'd pick two
contestants out of the prisoners and set them against each other,
laying amounts of gold-pressed latinum on who would win. There was an
added twist to make it more fun:

It was a fight to the death.

B'Elanna was one of the unlucky two to be picked out, and was set
against a flaxen haired Betazoid who was seemingly equal in height and
build. B'Elanna looked deep into the other woman's black eyes as they
were forced into the arena, and if she could have described the feeling
she gained when she had done that, she would have said, "I'm sorry, and
I understand." That was enough. They were both tired of life, and had
nothing to gain from dying, whichever one of them survived would not
mourn the other.

It had all blurred together for B'Elanna, but her Klingon fighting
genes had kicked in, overriding the weakened muscles she had gained
herself from lack of exercise after the coffin. And suddenly she was
standing over her victim, the other woman's eyes void of life, her neck
at an odd angle. And the blood· B'Elanna stared mutely at her hands·
there was blood everywhere.

After working in the fields that day after falling three times, she sat
there contemplating what her life had become. She'd been a good wager
for many of the guards, and had killed others· the blood had stained
her hands and soaked under her fingernails, leaving a permanent mark
there.

B'Elanna was tired, she just wanted to sleep. To close her eyes, to
slow her breathing, to slow the heart· to slow the blood pumping around
the body·

Slow· slow· slow· stop.

-Fini



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