Chapter Text
Kathryn loves her job. She really does. She loves making first contact. She loves investigating scientific anomalies. She loves the adrenaline rush of negotiating her way out of a tense situation, the satisfaction of a well-constructed trade deal that helps them get home faster.
But. Sometimes she wishes she were a little less essential to the functioning of the ship. And that Chakotay weren't quite so essential either. She has about six hours of peace after escaping sickbay—including her time with Chakotay—before Seven comms to ask, “Captain, are you functional?”
She considers her answer. “Minimally.”
“Please report to Astrometrics when you are able—”
“Belay that order, Captain. Report to sickbay when you are able. Astrometrics can wait.”
“I believe the Captain should be made aware—”
“I need to run scans to make sure she is healing—”
Kathryn closes her eyes. She should’ve said that she wasn’t functional. “Seven, Doctor, this is a shipwide channel. I appreciate both of your perspectives.” She lifts herself off the couch—painfully—and hobbles to the door before giving up and saying, “Computer, transport to sickbay.” She tries not to abuse site-to-site transports, but she suspects that it might become an emergency medical transport if she actually tried to walk all the way to sickbay.
The Doctor is displeased, to say the least. “I never should have allowed you to leave. I don’t know what I was thinking, putting Mr. Paris in charge of discharging you.” He gestures emphatically at the absent Tom Paris with his tricorder. “Under no circumstances are you to be running around to—to Astrometrics, or Engineering, or the mess hall, or anywhere else!”
“Are you confining me to quarters, Doctor?” It wouldn’t need to be her own quarters.
“What I am saying, Captain, is that if your other crew members would like your input on anything, they will have to come to you.”
Kathryn closes her eyes and briefly imagines what it would be like to be resting in her own bed—or better, Chakotay’s bed—while the crew dealt with crises without her. “All right. Set me up in my ready room with whatever medical monitoring you think is necessary. I’ll be able to access whatever information I need there.” The Doctor frowns in disapproval, but he places some kind of device directly over her chest wound—beneath her T-shirt, there’s no way she could get a uniform shirt closed over it—and another sensor on her neck, gives her another hypospray of God knows what, and tells her, “I hope you know that if you die under my care, Commander Chakotay will delete my program permanently. Please have a care for my well-being, if not your own.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Doctor.”
Sure enough, once she’s no longer willing to hurry to the different departments, everyone begins coming to her. Seven has detected a gravimetric distortion directly in their path that may affect their warp field; B’Elanna disagrees with Seven about the effect it will have, but also wants to know if the Captain would prefer to avoid it entirely or forge ahead and see what data they can gather. Chakotay comes to her with a very private smile half-hidden in his eyes, but there’s barely a moment to say hello before Tom rushes in to tell her breathlessly about a problem with the Delta Flyer, followed closely by Tuvok, with the news that two of the photon torpedoes have inexplicably armed themselves.
They stumble into an area full of space mines that do minimal damage to the shields but nevertheless make the ship rock every time they hit, and it’s only by gripping her chair tightly that Kathryn avoids being thrown to the floor. A very confused and apologetic alien trader tells them that he didn’t know their energy signature would attract the mines, and arranges repayment that he insists can only be approved by the Captain, not her second-in-command. Chakotay comes in for one of their regular dinners together, but has barely lit the candles before Neelix arrives with a special celebratory/healing meal for the Captain. He doesn’t take the hint when Chakotay says, “Thank you, Neelix, I’ll make sure that she eats it,” and instead sits down to update her on everything that’s happened aboard the ship since the original alien attack.
The Doctor finally pronounces her fully healed after another week, a week of stolen moments with Chakotay, kisses that never have time to go as far as they’d like, sleeping in the same bed but very rarely at the same time. It’s as though the universe, which gave them so much time together when things were confused, is conspiring against them to keep them from spending any time together now that they understand each other.
With her clean bill of health, Kathryn is determined to get at least an uninterrupted hour with Chakotay. She is, at last, very blunt with Tuvok and tells him, “You have the conn. Unless we’re under attack and shields are below fifty percent, Commander Chakotay and I are unavailable for the next two hours.”
Tuvok looks as awkward as a Vulcan ever can, having just been told exactly what his captain and commander plan to do, but agrees, “Affirmative, Captain.”
She tells Chakotay to meet her in her quarters. When he walks in, he fakes a double-take and says, “Kathryn Janeway, is it? I feel like it’s been years since I saw you.”
“You’re lucky I’ve had too much on my mind to come up with some kind of terrible time dilation field joke,” she says.
“Anything in particular on your mind?” There’s something dark in his voice, something that mirrors the desire she’s been feeling ever since he was last in her quarters.
“You.” Maybe it’s too honest. “Whenever I had a minute to think—you.” He’s very close to her now and she can’t resist reaching out to pull his body against hers, untucking his uniform jacket from his pants as she does.
His breath catches and he says, “Kathryn,” and lets her pull both the jacket and his shirt over his head before he leans down to kiss her. He breaks away only long enough to remove her shirt as well and his kisses are overwhelming, her mouth and her neck and back to her mouth until she’s dizzy with it. He kisses her knife scar much more gently, tentatively.
“I promise it’s safe.” She lets her hand fall to the front of his pants, rubs her knuckles across his rapidly hardening cock through the cloth, and he kisses her and groans into her mouth, kicking off his shoes even as she unfastens his pants.
“I thought I was going to go crazy waiting for this, now that it’s real,” Chakotay says. He undoes her pants just enough that he can slide his hand inside and feel how wet she is through her underwear. He breathes in sharply when he does, pushes her underwear to one side to touch her, and she’s so slick that his finger slides inside her easily, just for a second, before he withdraws his hand entirely. She’s already shucking the rest of her clothes, stripping off the rest of his, and he walks her backward toward the bed. “I’ve had all week to think about it,” he tells her. “To remember the way you taste, the noises you make, what you like best—” He half-lifts her off the ground when they reach the bed and lays her down a little too carefully for her taste.
Kathryn pulls him down too, drags her nails through his chest hair and feels him shiver. He kisses her mouth, her chin, the line of her throat to her collarbone, the new scar on her chest, between her breasts. He says, “I’ve missed you” and his eyes meet her own, and oh does that send a shock through her, watching him kiss his way down her body until he’s between her legs. He licks her clit and it’s electric, she’s been thinking about this all day, his hot mouth, his tongue. She grips his hair to pull him closer, get his mouth in just the right place, and when he laughs a little, she feels the vibration of it through her entire body. He slides one thick finger inside her and it’s so good, even better when it’s two.
“More,” she tells him, and he adds a third finger as his tongue works furiously—finally she feels almost full, almost, and she comes around his fingers, shaking. Chakotay pulls his fingers out of her while she’s still spasming and sucks each one in turn, lips closing around them, and she shudders again, clenching on the phantom feeling inside. “Get up here,” she says, half-dragging him and pushing him until he’s on his back, and he goes more than willingly.
He’s desperately hard and she loves the way he moans when she grips him firmly, when she sucks just the head of his cock into her mouth and strokes her tongue across it in long wet stripes, when she takes him as deep as she can once, twice, three times before pulling off entirely and he begs “Kathryn.”
“Impatient?” She moves up his body, holds him in place as she sinks down onto him and there, that’s the fullness she’s missed. She doesn’t move, just enjoys the feeling of it, until he tries to thrust up a little. “Not until you make me come again,” she says, and if he begged she would relent but if anything she thinks he’s harder.
Chakotay gets one hand between them, thumb on her clit, and sits up partway so that he can lick one nipple, bite it very gently, until she makes a high-pitched noise because it’s too much. Then he switches to the other nipple and every fiber of her being wants to move as he does this, but she’s apparently decided to torture them both. Instead all she does is pull his head closer to her breast, gasp out incoherent noises, and clench down on his cock over and over until she does come again, almost blindingly. He says “Kathryn, please—”
“Yes,” and she does move the way they both desperately want her to, holds him down with a hand on his chest as she rides him. His pupils are blown wide and he thrusts up to meet her every time, both his hands on her hips as he tries to get even deeper. She leans down and whispers, “I love you,” and something seems to snap in him. He rolls them over, never pulling out, and she wraps her ankles around his back as he turns desperate, uncoordinated, just before he comes. She tightens around him through the aftershocks, could almost have come again just from this, until he finally pulls out and collapses flat on his back, chest heaving as he gasps for air.
Kathryn licks sweat from his chest, grazes a nipple with her teeth—he shivers—and then kisses him. He just barely has the wherewithal to bring his hand up to the back of her neck and hold her there for a minute as she kisses him before he drops his hand away again.
She leans in close to his ear and bites his earlobe gently before saying, “I mean it. I love you.” She sees his full-body shiver and it’s wonderful.
“You’re just saying that—because that—was amazing,” Chakotay pants. “Part of some—master plan.”
“Yes. My master plan to keep you.” She’s not that much more coherent than he is, but it seems important to say the right thing. Kathryn adjusts her body so she can lay her head against his chest and listen to his heart beat. “I love you,” she says a third time.
“I love you too, Kathryn.” He puts his arm around her and holds her and for a few minutes it feels like they’ll stay like this forever.
* * * * *
“Captain,” Tuvok comms. “It has been two hours, and shields have dropped to below 50 percent due to an unidentified power drain.”
Kathryn groans and presses her face against Chakotay’s chest. Chakotay laughs. “He was always punctual when he was pretending to work for me too,” he says. “I suppose we’d better get back to the bridge.” He kisses the top of Kathryn’s head. “Dinner later?”
“You bring the wine, I’ll experiment with the replicator,” she says. She loves the way that he smiles.