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She wasn't sure he'd want to see her, but after a restless evening pacing her own quarters, she finally gave in and headed down the hall to his. She felt like a fool, not wanting to think about the impulse which had led her here, wondering why on earth she hadn't signalled him first to ask whether he wanted company. Too late now. The door slid open, admitting her before he even asked who it was. As if he had known she would come.
His room was very dark; he had the lights off and stood silhouetted against the stars from the viewport, as he had in the briefing room earlier. Taking a few steps forward, she smacked her hip into a table. It hurt enough to make her cry out. He came toward her as she clenched her eyes shut against the pain, touched her hip lightly where she was rubbing it, then put an arm around her to steer her around the furniture.
"This way. You all right?"
"I think so. How can you see?"
"I know the room well enough that I don't need to see. I didn't expect you to march in so quickly in the dark. I'm sorry."
"Just banged my side. You're not going to turn on the lights?"
"No." The word snapped out, severing their brief connection. "This will be easier if we can't see each other."
"What will be easier?"
"What you came here to say."
Was he expecting more recriminations? Surely he knew her better than that. "I just came to see if you were all right, Chakotay."
"The doctor says I've made a full recovery."
"That isn't what I meant."
He was silent, his breathing ragged. Pained. Angry as she still was, she knew he had not been acting under his own judgement--perhaps not even when he stood in the conference room with herself and Riley Frasier, refusing to meet her eyes. She couldn't fault him for making the choice which had saved his life so much as for the obvious need it had exposed in him. Part of a collective mind...she wasn't sure she could deal with that sort of vulnerability. Now, hiding from her in the darkness, he seemed to be on the verge of tears.
"I'm sorry they hurt you," she murmured. "I wish you wouldn't blame yourself for what happened."
"No?"
"I already told you that."
"Who should I blame?"
"You were coerced."
"Because I opened my mind to them. I seem to be the worst judge of character I know."
"You couldn't have known what they were planning..."
"Riley. Seska. Suder. Jonas. Tuvok. You know, I was even wrong about Tom--I thought he was an unprincipled mercenary." The despair in his voice unnerved her--another sign of his neediness. She wasn't in the mood to bolster his ego. Yet he obviously needed her help.
"You weren't wrong about B'Elanna."
"Do you know why I wasn't wrong about B'Elanna? Because of you. You believed in her, and that made the difference. With her, and maybe with me." He turned to look at her in the dimness. It took her a moment to come up with a reply.
"Were you wrong about me, then?"
There was a lengthy silence.
"I don't know," he said finally.
She grimaced. "Can't respect anyone who respects you?"
"I'm just not sure...where you and I are, now."
A deliberate opening, nebulous and fraught with danger, to a topic she'd been putting off for months--nearly a year. But this was an evasion on his part as well, from the topic at hand.
"You weren't wrong about the collective, Chakotay. Your instinct is to reach out to people. To help them."
"Don't condescend to me, Captain. I could have gotten everyone on this ship killed."
"But you didn't. And the collective saved your life." She changed direction, recalibrated. "I don't think I ever thanked you properly for saving mine."
His laugh was ironic, almost angry. "I didn't really. You fought off that alien."
"You resuscitated me."
"You did thank me for that. You took me on that sailboat ride."
"I know, but I don't think I was much fun. I couldn't even keep the champagne down." That part was still embarrassing to remember: her throwing up over the side of the boat had ruined the exhilaration which had stretched between them from the time they left her ready room to go to the holodeck. Between her trauma and his concern, they had both had to regain some equilibrium, and that had required distance. The barriers were still there. Almost dying, and almost seeing her dead, had caused them to reevaluate the hazards as well as the value of their friendship. At least, it had for her. She wasn't sure yet how it had affected him.
"I have to tell you something," he was whispering now, in a tone which chilled her.
"What is it?"
"I didn't put it in my report from before. I wasn't sure you'd want it to be official record. I know I don't, but I would have put it in if I thought you thought it would matter. It's very personal."
"Yes?" she asked, in a voice somewhere between his captain and his friend.
"It's about Riley."
She had seen that much coming. "Chakotay, I know you feel guilty for coming to me to plead for her agenda when you were under her neurotransmitter's spell." And hers, she added silently. He knew she hadn't missed the looks which had passed between them in the conference room, and his moody stare when she had gone. She blamed him more for his muddled loyalties than for his obvious attraction to the other woman. When she needed to, she could blame the mental link for how he'd been drawn to Dr. Frasier--the link, and his belief that he'd finally met a woman who held nothing back from him. There was no point in worrying about it further. He and Riley had known each other barely three days, after all. "Her people gave you no reason not to trust them. She was using you, and you had no way of knowing that."
"You don't understand," he broke in. "It wasn't just the deception. When they severed the link, the first time, after they saved my life, I heard them all in my head. For a little more than an hour. That whole time...I could still feel her."
"Yes. You put all that in your report."
"Not all of it. Not what I did that hour."
"I assumed you were recovering from the effects of the link."
He snorted. "You could put it that way. Recovering, I wish I could blame it on that. She was waiting when I woke up. She was talking directly to me, in my head."
"None of the others did that? She was communicating with you privately?"
"I don't know. Probably the rest of the collective must have known...I didn't think about it. I didn't sense them with her."
"You think she might have been reading your mind?"
"It was more than that. I could feel what she was feeling."
"What was she feeling?" She herself was confused; a private link might have made him feel beholden to Riley rather than the rest of the collective, but that hardly seemed to be the driving force behind his actions. "You think you should have picked up on her intentions?"
He turned away from her again, shaking his head. "Yes, but that's not the point. I don't just mean her emotions."
Hands running through his hair--he was nervous. That unnerved her. "Just tell me what happened." Quickly, she added silently. Get it over with. For both of us.
"I could feel what her body was feeling. She touched her face, and I could feel that...on my face. Then she started stroking her arm, and it gave me the shivers. When she touched herself, and when I touched her...I was so caught up in the feeling, I didn't know what was her and what was me...it was incredible...I didn't even think about stopping, because she wanted it, and I was feeling what she was feeling..."
She was suddenly hot and cold all over, glad of the dark. Sick, the way she'd felt right after she'd almost died--dizzy and desperate, those moments when she witnessed her death from outside her body courtesy the alien. When Chakotay pulled her into his arms...no, she was not going to think about that now. Not now, never again. A wave of grief washed through her, the way it had when she'd witnessed her own memorial service, but worse, because she was alive--he'd done this when she was still alive...
She rose and walked slowly across the room, away from him, hearing him begin to talk again behind her. "Even when the link ended, or at least I thought it was ended, I felt so connected to her. I actually asked her to come with us..."
"You don't have to explain." She'd had a brief nightmare vision of that possibility when she'd told them that she'd be willing to take some of the collective onto Voyager--Riley Frasier on her ship. How she would deal with that woman insinuating herself into the command structure, coming between herself and her first officer--not just professionally, she admitted now, she hadn't only thought about it in terms of their jobs. Her hands and feet were numb in the dark room, which was spinning; she was still nauseous, barely able to keep her footing. A sense of loss so deep she could hardly find her equilibrium.
Absurd: no one had died, nothing was irrevocable, and she'd been the one to cut the string between them, or at least failed to take up the slack. She'd let him go, almost asked him to go, by her practiced indifference. If he'd taken her up on the offer, she could not fault him.
"Kathryn, I'm sorry."
She heard her own voice from a distance. "You don't have to apologize to me for that. I doubt it made a difference in their plans, in the end..."
"Please. Don't pretend it's not your business. Don't use this as an excuse to push me away."
"I'm not pushing you away." She spoke too forcefully, command mode, but she couldn't help it. "And you were right, it's not really ship's business, so it isn't really mine either. It was bad judgement, but you couldn't have known that when you met her and you were incapacitated." She stopped to draw in a breath, felt it catch in her throat--knew he had heard it, because she could hear him stand behind her and begin to move toward her, his own breath uneven. "I thought you might find someone else if I let you wait long enough. I even hoped you'd do it quickly, to stop us both from second-guessing."
So fast, so impulsive...so she'd been vaguely jealous of his attraction to the former Federation science officer, but it was superficial, she'd thought, like his attraction to any strong woman they'd encountered. This one, exacerbated by the mental link--Dr. Frasier wasn't unlike herself, a former science officer, the leader of her people now, making decisions for the good of the collective. She somehow hadn't thought that it was so personal--that he'd have recognized Riley's passionate speechmaking for the manipulative rhetoric it was.
But he tended to see what he wanted to see, hear what he wanted to hear when he needed to hear it. It was why he thought she was biding her time with him instead of putting him off indefinitely. Until now. He never struck her as the kind of man who would have a casual fling. So this must not have been casual--
"I wanted to stay alive for you. It was my only choice, and I wasn't thinking clearly afterwards. I wish I could take it all back."
"You couldn't have known what she would do. You made a decision based on what you wanted. The fact that it didn't work out with her doesn't change anything." She heard the same cutting tone in her voice which he had used with her earlier, in the ready room avoiding her eyes. His hands came down on her shoulders; now he could feel them trembling. She shook her head sharply, damning herself for not being certain she had the strength to walk out of his quarters and back to her own without crying in the hall. Infuriating.
"It wasn't really what I wanted."
The anger turned outward. "No? Well, you can't pretend I'm what you wanted when you fucked her," she hissed.
She felt him stiffen in surprise at her use of the profanity, and all it suggested. Expected him to rebut the statement, one way or another. Tell her he had been out of his mind--some excuse for what happened. Or worse, declare that he really cared for Riley, so it wasn't vulgar, like she was suggesting--like Riley had made it by using him as she had. It confused her when she felt him slump, his hands slipping down her shoulders. "I guess that's what it was. Probably that's all it was for her. I'm sorry." More passive acceptance.
"Don't apologize to me." That came out sounding far too much like a wounded woman and far too little like the captain of the starship Voyager. She lowered her voice. "You're the one who was taken advantage of." Damn, and that sounded like it was designed to stab at him. She felt him flinch.
"Kathryn. I didn't think it would hurt you like this."
"I...didn't expect it to hurt like this." No point in pretending. There were tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes, rolling down her face, probably onto his hands. She swiped at them, heard him sniffle. That broke her completely for a moment, and they both were silent, alone despite the proximity.
When he finally spoke again, it was a whisper. "I should have told them to let me die."
"Stop it, Chakotay."
"I should never have listened to her, when I was so weak..."
"Don't start in with recriminations about her."
"This has nothing to do with her!" His anguish, at least, was real. "This is about me, and you. I don't know what I can say, Kathryn, I don't know how I can apologize--"
"Stop," she said again, and turned out from under his touch, wiping her face. "You're upset now, because she didn't turn out to be what you thought she was, and you're hurting. Don't confuse yourself. If it was me you wanted, you wouldn't have been so drawn to her in the first place."
"I only noticed her because I couldn't have what I really wanted! I thought...I thought you wanted what you said, for me to get over you--you haven't given me one sign, all these months. I thought she was accepting of all of me, not just the Starfleet Commander part--she was there, I needed someone, I thought I understood her..."
"Too good to be true," she muttered, bitterly. She had understood him all too well. "It's done."
His voice was quiet in despair. "It's over, you mean. This is going to be your reason for saying...never."
"Listen to me. It's better this way. We have to be able to work together. You're still my friend, and that matters more than..."
"I love you."
He spoke in even, measured syllables, enunciating carefully, over her last phrase. The words went right through her, shaking her so that for a moment she thought she must have imagined him speaking them.
It would not have been the first time she had.
"What?" she choked out. Needing to hear it again. To make sure, to see if she had the same reaction in her gut. To figure out what to do if she did, now, when it was too late to matter. He grabbed her arms and pulled her close, so close that she could feel his breath on her face--the moisture, the heat--she could see him crying.
"I love you. I'll say it again if I have to, Kathryn, but don't try to pretend you didn't know. Don't tell me you had no idea."
She jerked away from him. "Well, it doesn't mean a hell of a lot right now, does it?" This time the words were calculated to injure; she was not in control of them, manipulated by him and by her own emotions. He heard her rage, and responded.
"When did it ever mean anything to you before?"
"You never said it before!" she nearly shouted. These were all the wrong things to say, she knew, she was supposed to be gently telling him that she couldn't reciprocate his feelings, she was sorry. "Angry warrior legends, a little posturing over me and Q, but you've never told me anything about your feelings that couldn't be interpreted as a statement of command loyalty. How am I supposed to respond to that?"
"I've given you flowers! I built you a bathtub! Other than writing you love poetry, I could hardly have made myself any clearer without pressuring you! And what have you ever told me? Kathryn, I serve under you--I am not exactly in a position make declarations like this without a great deal of risk!"
"You think I am? What would it have done to the command structure if you'd thought I was harassing you?" She forced herself to take a deep breath. Control. Save the working relationship--that had been the goal all along. Let go of the anger, she'd chosen this path, stop letting him believe that anything else had ever been possible. "You said it yourself, you needed someone like Riley. I can't be that someone. You're trying to salve your wounds from what she did to you--her, and Seska, and you think you can trust me because I'm not like them. But I am never going to put you first. I am always going to put this ship before any relationship..."
"Why do you always act like I'm asking you not to? Like you think I want to take you away from your duty instead of making it easier for you? Did you listen to one thing I said to you that night on New Earth?" A topic they'd been scrupulously avoiding since their return, as if some unspoken rule of conduct forbade its mention. "You thought that was all a speech just to get you into bed with me? Tell me, when have I ever asked you for anything other than the slightest sign that you knew how I felt about you, to make it bearable if I had to wait forever?"
"You're asking me now for something I can't give you. I can't say what you want me to say."
He was really crying now, not caring if she heard. A sharp change from the passivity which frustrated her so. All the pain displayed, his and hers both. "Kathryn," he murmured, "Kathryn." She wasn't sure whether it was a plea or a farewell. Either way, she knew, she had to leave. Right away, before she started bawling as well.
"It won't upset you so much in a few days," she managed to say. Walked past him, let her fingers brush his shoulder. No reaction to the contact. He whispered her name again, as if she weren't there--as if he were mourning her.
She found she couldn't move the final steps to the door. Could not leave him there, crying her name as if she were dead, any more than she'd been able to leave with that alien when he'd told her that her life was over. Chakotay remained hunched over, whispering her name to himself, not seeming to notice that she hadn't left. Already lost to him.
A sob escaped her lips. He raised his head, looked into her face, and gripped her tightly in his arms before she could recover her wits.
For a few moments they were in direct communication, wordless and heartfelt. Pressing tightly together, cheek to cheek, torso to torso, limbs shifting on one another for a better fit. She was making small sounds as he squeezed the air out of her, and he was answering her, quiet moans of understanding. She felt his groin stir in response to her closeness, wrapped a leg around him to prevent him from withdrawing. Not erotic so much as powerfully intimate, accepting, both of them, the need for the contact overwhelming desire and embarrassment and all other feeling. She held on to him, knees buckling at the enormity of the relief.
Nothing's changed, she tried to tell herself when she could breathe again. The same problems are still there. What happened between him and Riley hasn't changed. This is an aberration for both of us, if we hold each other for a minute, take some comfort where we can, it doesn't mean...
He turned his head, and kissed her. Hard, bruising kisses which turned soft and delicious the moment she responded--again, her body seemed to be making decisions on its own, doing what it had to to survive. She would have been grateful at that moment to learn that she was under control of an alien--Q, the Bothan, even a Borg neurotransmitter taking over her thoughts, making her cling to her first officer, admit to him all the things she wasn't ready to admit to herself about her conflicted feelings. But there was nobody to blame but herself--she'd been denying for too long. Everything she'd blamed on his inaction, his passivity, she could blame on her own as well.
He loved her. He'd finally said so. The words spoken. Now.
Too late. She threw her weight against him, and slammed him to the floor.
He took it, absorbed the weight of their fall and the violence of her response. Even though she was almost pummeling him, pinching him, her hands gripping his skin hard enough to hurt, seeking proof that he meant those words--and beyond, that everything she had witnessed in what she had thought was her afterlife meant something. She began to cry again, for what she had let him throw away. He shifted her in his arms to cradle her like a child, his arms completely around her.
"Can we talk now?" he asked, hoarsely, when she quieted. She nodded. But he didn't say anything, just sat with her. For more than half an hour, though they both needed sleep before duty. There on his floor, wrapped together, his legs supporting her weight. When he finally stretched, she knew he must have been in real pain to risk breaking the connection at all.
"I'm not getting up. Just moving a little."
She whispered, "I want to stay with you."
"I want you to."
"Not to make love. I just want to be together."
"Me too."
It had taken a great deal of effort on her part, she realized, to have gotten him to the point where he had been able to defy her wishes. He must have been hurting beyond his ability to cope. She felt equal parts guilt and frustration. Frustration because he was still her first officer, and she needed him as such.
"I'm going to replicate something else to wear," she told him as he helped her to her feet.
"Want one of my shirts?"
The thought of wearing his clothes sent a frisson through her which not even the thought of getting into his bed could equal. Taking off the uniform, putting herself in something of his--what was she agreeing to? Being his for the night? She pictured herself wrapped in his clothing, not a trace of Captain Janeway anywhere. Not that there was a trace of Captain Janeway in the room at the moment. Nor of Commander Chakotay. Just a couple of people in Starfleet uniforms who had been crying together.
"Yes," she said, so forcefully that he came back and hugged her.
"It's going to be all right, Kathryn."
"Not if I keep falling apart like this, it isn't. Especially not if both of us do it at the same time."
"Then maybe we need to be there for each other, to make sure it doesn't happen again."
"We can't risk that."
"Seems to me that what we can't risk is hurting each other any more."
She knew she'd been trying to get him to say something like that, so she could shoot it down, argue the opposite: that if they were this emotionally involved without even being...involved...then it was far too dangerous for them to become any more connected than they already were. Except she could hear the opposite argument, in his voice but in her own head: that if she hadn't been holding him away, forcing them both into a state of loneliness neither could tolerate, then they might not have come to this in the first place. A vicious cycle.
"It has to be all right," she said.
"It will."
She knew, ironically, that he was right. That she could trust him--that he would never hurt her intentionally, had not hurt her deliberately. The conflicts in their relationship stemmed from her refusal to trust him as much as any conflict they had. All the energy she had spent worrying that he needed her overmuch had been denial of how much she wanted to depend on him.
"I can't say I love you." She looked up at him. He swallowed hard, kept his eyes steady. "I might not ever be ready to say that."
"Never is a long time."
"So is sixty-seven years."
He led her through his dark quarters and handed one of his shirts from New Earth to her. The material was soft, fragrant, he smoothed it across her back. Then he lay down with her, stroking her hair until she was too sleepy to think about the reasons she should leave.
"Kathryn."
"Hmmmm?"
"Nothing."
"What was it?"
"I just wanted to say your name and hear you say yes."
She smiled sadly. There would be so many times when she would have to say no to him. "This isn't the sort of command unity I had in mind when I came here, you know."
"Well, it's the best sort I've been offered in a long time." He chuckled.
When she awoke, he was soundly asleep. She pulled her uniform on and headed back to her own quarters to think about how she would look at him on the bridge in the morning. How they would disagree now. Where the next barrier would arise.