Chapter Text
Janeway begins giving him orders almost as soon as they meet. After the destruction of the array, she calls him into her ready room. She gestures for him to sit down and says, “I’d like to invite you and the rest of the Maquis to join Voyager’s crew.”
“I don’t see a lot of other options for us.” He’s known this was coming since Voyager showed up, so it shouldn’t be as hard as it is now.
“We could drop you all at the next Class M planet,” Janeway offers. “I don’t think you’ll all fit in the brig.”
There’s a split-second of rage before he realizes she’s joking. “No. We’ll join.” He imagines pulling on that Starfleet uniform again, that badge, contorting himself until his conduct conforms to what the rules were. He spent twenty years in that uniform before abandoning it to join the Maquis. He doesn’t know how it will fit when he puts it on again.
“This ship can only have one captain,” she says, fixing him with her gaze. “You know that as well as I do—”
“Yes.” It will chafe to be relegated down below the lowliest ensign. He’ll hate it. His people will hate it.
“—so I’d like you to be my first officer.”
He snaps to attention at that. “What?”
“You’re a talented commanding officer. Your people respect you. If we’re going to have any hope of merging these two crews, you have to be sitting there with me on the bridge.”
“Your crew will accept that?”
“They will.” He believes it. Janeway’s crew will accept serving with the criminal Maquis—begrudgingly or not—before his crew will yield to Starfleet’s will.
In some ways, he thinks it’s easier for the other Maquis. They never attended the Academy. They never swore their loyalty to the Federation. Their anger—their hatred—is clean, focused. There’s no internal conflict, no identity crisis. But he and B’Elanna are different. They know what it is to be Starfleet. They know what it’s like at the Academy, learning about the lofty ideals of the Federation. B’Elanna never had to take an oath; he forswore his when he joined the Maquis.
Now he has to be the good Starfleet officer he once was. He has to stand firm in support of Janeway. This ship will never make it home if it fractures between the Maquis and Starfleet. In public, at every moment when someone else can see him, he has to maintain the façade. There will be no discontent tolerated. There will be no attempted mutinies, not even a whisper. He yells at B’Elanna—actually yells—when she can’t get it through her head that she can’t just punch Starfleet crew, even if they are idiot engineers. He smiles serenely and plays the gentle first officer, the temperance where Janeway is bold.
It's hard to keep it so tightly bound within him, the rage. He joined the Maquis to fight the Cardassians, to avenge his father. Now he’s trapped here, fighting Kazons and whatever other aliens come their way, for no reason other than that they’re in the way. And he has to wear this uniform and follow these rules and make sure everyone else follows these rules, and however much he admires Janeway, he’s starting to go insane with all of it. Whatever ‘peaceful Indian’ role he found in Starfleet, it’s the angry warrior of his youth, of the last few years, that’s struggling to keep control now.
The holodeck is his saving grace. He fights—Cardassians, usually, but sometimes he tells the computer to randomize it, as long as it’s someone larger. He doesn’t punch down. He’s fighting a particularly large Cardassian when B’Elanna says, “I think he’s a little out of your weight class,” and the sound of her voice startles him so much that he lets his opponent land a heavy punch. It leaves his ears ringing.
“Computer, freeze program.” He spits blood onto the floor. “No one is out of my weight class.”
She laughs mockingly. “No one, Commander?” She climbs under the ropes and up into the ring. “Computer, delete opponent, provide correct attire.” The computer provides boxing gloves, shorts, a tight shirt that barely covers her breasts.
“I’m not going to fight you, B’Elanna.”
She taps her gloves together and attacks him. He’s not ready for the first punch to his jaw that sends him reeling back, and he responds too aggressively with a body blow that forces B’Elanna against the ropes. She throws back her head and laughs, shoves him away with both gloves to his chest, until he’s backed up against one of the posts—and then she bites first his cheek, then his neck, hard. “You don’t have to fight me,” she says, and licks the bite-marks.
If they were both in a different frame of mind, a different place—on the bridge, even in Engineering—they would separate and laugh it off. But he knows B’Elanna’s rage, the storm in her, as well as he knows his own, and so instead he flips them around and kisses her almost brutally, teeth catching her lower lip, and there’s a very Klingon growl in her throat that tells him it’s the right choice. She wrestles him to the ground and he puts up only as much fight as he knows she wants before they’re rolling on the floor, hands rough in each other’s hair. He shoves her shirt up around her shoulders so he can get to her breasts even as she’s working his shorts down to free his cock. B’Elanna shimmies partway out of her own shorts so that he can thrust into her and they both groan. It doesn’t take long for either of them to come.
When Chakotay pulls out and rolls onto his back, staring up at the ceiling, some of the simmering rage inside him has retreated. He looks at B’Elanna. “I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy myself,” he says. “But what brought that on?”
Her laugh is as fierce as ever. “I know you, Chakotay, and I know anger. You’re ready to explode and you’re trying so hard to keep it in, to be the mild-mannered gentle first officer to the Captain.” She shrugs as well as a person can while lying down. “I figured we could both use a little—relief.”
“Well. If it prevents you from punching Lieutenant Carey again.”
“Look,” B’Elanna says. “I don’t want to start something like you had with Seska. But once in a while, to keep us from going insane—”
“Once in a while,” he agrees. “When necessary.”
* * * * *
Once in a while becomes a few times a week because B’Elanna is going a little insane and his control over his rage is always on the verge of slipping. It doesn’t occur to him that his quarters are next to Janeway’s, that the walls aren’t that thick, and that he and B’Elanna can be very loud until Janeway calls him into her ready room and says, “Commander, I need to discuss a matter of…protocol with you.”
“Captain?” He’s thinking that maybe one of his Bajoran crew continues to wear jewelry, or that Seska has been insubordinate.
Janeway frowns. “It’s against Starfleet regulations for a commanding officer to maintain a sexual relationship with a subordinate in his chain of command.”
Three thoughts hit him in sequence: first, that he doesn’t really care about the regulations; second, that he should have known she would find out; and third, overwhelmingly, heat through his entire body at the idea of Janeway lying in bed next door and listening to them. Did it annoy her? Or did she hear the noise and—imagine it, even for a moment? Did she picture him and wonder what he was doing to cause the sounds B’Elanna was making? He likes the idea that she did. He likes it too much.
“This predates our rejoining Starfleet.” Not true, but she doesn’t know that. “Things are different, among the Maquis. That kind of relationship is treated as a…pressure valve.”
Janeway looks unimpressed. “You and Lieutenant Torres, of all people, are both well aware of Starfleet protocol.”
“We’ll be quieter.” When she says nothing, he says, “Captain, I’ve supported you in every possible way. I’ve adhered to all other protocol and I’ve made sure that my former crew have done the same. You’re welcome to talk to Lieutenant Torres to ensure that she doesn’t feel coerced in any way. Let me have this,” and if his voice is a little rough at the end, Janeway doesn’t comment on it.
“I’ll speak to Lieutenant Torres,” she says at last. “If I hear one word of this around the ship—”
“Straight into the brig,” he agrees.
At the end of shift B’Elanna comes to his quarters laughing and says, “The captain had quite the talk with me today. What on earth did you say to her?”
“What did you say?”
“Oh, that I wasn’t being coerced, that we’d been fucking like wild targs for years, that it’s all that keeps me from punching someone on a daily basis, and that I would be happy to tell her about it in great detail.” She leers at him a little. “She turned me down on that.”
“I told her we’d be quieter,” Chakotay says, and B’Elanna raises an eyebrow. She takes it as the challenge Chakotay knew that she would, throwing him against the adjoining wall and yanking his pants down just enough that she can get his cock in her mouth and swallow him down, deep enough that he hits the back of her throat and can’t keep himself from yelling at the slick pressure of it. He wants to hold her head in place and thrust but he won’t let himself, slaps his hands flat against the wall instead and finds the corner of a bookshelf, anything to hold on to. He isn’t quiet.
When he’s too close, B’Elanna pulls off, her eyes dancing as he curses in Klingon. He lifts her and shoves her against the wall, pushing inside in a single desperate stroke, and they both moan at the sudden feeling of it. He’s fucking her hard against the wall, her legs wrapped around his hips, when he hears Janeway say “Chakotay!” He comes, helplessly, blindingly.
B’Elanna, who realizes what’s just happened, stares at him in—horror? amusement?—as he awkwardly lowers her to the ground. Chakotay fumbles with his pants until he’s covered, if not exactly decent, and turns to face Janeway.
She’s looking him up and down very slowly, appraisingly, but when he looks at her, her eyes snap to his face. “Commander Chakotay,” she repeats. He shivers and tells himself it’s just left over from B’Elanna. “I believe we had a discussion about this.”
“Be a little quieter,” he says dumbly. “Yes.” It’s harder to think with her standing there staring at him, after what she’s just seen. His neck prickles as she looks at him.
“It’s my fault, Captain.” B’Elanna steps forward. She’s reassembled her clothing somewhat. “I got carried away. He’s just so—” She shivers theatrically. “I suppose you heard.”
Janeway fixes them each with her piercing gaze. “I did. Don’t make me regret allowing this to continue.” She turns on her heel and walks out.
As soon as the doors shut, B’Elanna exclaims, “Chakotay!”
“Not a word, B’Elanna.” An order she’s never obeyed in her entire life.
“You—the Captain? No wonder you have so many pent-up feelings in there!”
He resents the glee in her voice. “No—”
“You came just because she said your name.”
“There were a few other things happening too!”
“You can't fool me.” There’s almost sympathy in her eyes. “Chakotay, you know she’ll never let it happen.”
“Yes, thank you for that insight.” He knows the rules that come with this uniform. Janeway has allowed him to bend one, but she’ll never break one herself.