Chapter Text
The first officer had had a perfect sojourn on the bountiful planet that helped replenish reserves and bolster morale, until he was undone by a question from one of their hosts. If his brain hadn't been so addled from the drink they'd been sharing at the farewell party, he could probably have wriggled out of answering, and the whole thing would have been forgotten. But he was already under the influence of both the alien alcohol and his captain, who had been running her tongue rather provocatively around her lips to catch the last drops of the delicious liqueur. He wouldn't even have realized that he had been staring, but she spied him watching her and raised her eyebrows in amused wariness, making him grin...she shook her head and grinned back, as the disembodied voice from behind him spoke:
"Do you love her?"
At first he thought he must have misheard, but her head snapped back, the smile vanishing. Her eyes did not leave his face, however, as the voice repeated, "Do. You. Love. Her."
Maybe the universal translator was malfunctioning, he thought.
They all waited.
Chakotay tried to respond with a question, to turn the tables - what did they mean by it, what business was it of theirs, why did it matter? But these were sensitive people, who had not taken at all well to misdirection or refusal to answer their queries during the generous exchange. He knew that the longer he stalled, the more he risked causing a diplomatic rift. The captain - yes, the captain, not a name, just a title - shook her head slightly, and he knew he had to reply in the negative. He tried to convey his apologies for the brusqueness to her with an inclination of his head, just in case the slight was something she would take personally, but of course that was ridiculous, and she seemed to nod in agreement. Her lips parted as if she would tell him something else, but she remained silent. His mouth started to form the word, pulling into a rounded grimace. But for some reason Chakotay had forgotten to breathe in the moments after the question was asked, so he could not force enough air between his lips to pronounce the shape of the sound. He took a deep breath, tried again.
The syllable would not come.
The captain's nostrils flared and her jaw set as she glared at him, willing him to say no. He broke contact with her gaze, summoning the darkest thoughts he had ever had about her, knowing she would forgive him for whatever he told himself so that he could make the utterance. Still the sound would not emerge. When it should have been so easy. When he'd told himself again and again that he didn't love her, not anymore at least, and maybe he had never loved her at all. Maybe he didn't even know what the word meant.
He wasn't sure he ever had, but Neelix had reminded Chakotay recently of something he had told the Talaxian a long time ago. "What you gain in love is always greater than what you risk." He hadn't remembered having said the words, not until Neelix recalled the day and the corridor where they'd been standing, on a ship twisted by gravometric distortions. Then he knew why he'd said it, and whom he'd really been talking about, even if he couldn't say her name at the time - not even when he knelt by her unconscious form and tried to bring her back with words.
It should have been such a relief to take possession of the word that would end the pain growing inside him. To pull out the roots that closed around his heart, stabbing and suffocating him. To tear out the seedling, already deprived of light and fertile soil. To let it die already, this small shoot of feeling already stunted, collapsed under its own crushed, glistening weight. No point in mourning something she had refused to nourish. Maybe another would take its place.
Except something bloomed for an instant on her face - something she tried very hard to push down. It wove around her alarm at his silence, past decorum and duty, pushing aside protocol and the Prime Directive as it burst into the light.
And suddenly he was free, as if his hosts had offered him a way up from the ground but he had had to clear his own way into the sun. Smiling as if there were no one else in the room with them, he spoke directly to Kathryn, almost inaudibly but very clearly:
"Yes."
And felt himself burst into blossom.
Before Chakotay could watch her react, he turned back to their hosts and said, "Forgive me, but you startled me - where I come from, trade partners don't discuss such matters." The conversation turned to cultural differences, and the moment passed. He beamed back to the ship without discussing it with her - without discussing anything, not even the duty rosters. She kept her back to him for the rest of the mission, during the beam-up, all through the walk to the bridge. When his shift ended, she had hidden away in her ready room.
Remarkably, he felt no guilt. No embarrassment, no shame. Nothing but lingering joy and the certainty that he had said the right thing.