Chapter Text
Janeway is either selectively amnesiac or truly doesn’t care about what happened in the turbolift. “Chakotay, come look at this,” she says, beckoning him over in the mess hall. “There’s a planet that appears to have extensive ruins and fruit and vegetable life only three light-years away. We could stop by, let Neelix see if he can find anything to add to his kitchen storage—there’s no indication of any sentient life or ships in orbit that would indicate danger.”
Chakotay is experiencing some severe cognitive dissonance. Since the turbolift incident, he’s taken a shower, come so hard that he thought he was dying, taken another shower, spent a brief period of time trying to re-center himself, tried not to think about what just happened, and then replicated a fresh uniform. Meanwhile, Janeway has been sitting here with a cup of coffee reviewing scans of neighboring star systems to find supplies for the crew, apparently undisturbed by anything that just happened. “It looks like—a good candidate for a side trip,” he manages.
“Good,” she says. She offers him her cup of coffee and he drinks from it almost automatically. “I thought you might like to be on the away team. I recall you telling me that you’re interested in archaeology.”
The coffee helps bring him into reality. “Yes, thank you.” He walks over to Neelix and says, “One plate for the captain, please.” Then, when Janeway reaches for her coffee, he hands her the plate of food. “You get the coffee back when you’ve eaten,” he tells her.
It takes a few hours to organize the away mission, enough time for Chakotay to almost persuade himself that he imagined everything in the turbolift. Paris is supposed to pilot them down, but he comms from sickbay, the snake, and says, “Commander Chakotay, I’m not feeling so well. I think you and the captain will have to go ahead without me.” Chakotay would suspect B’Elanna of putting him up to this if not for the fact that Tom and B’Elanna openly detest each other.
Neelix and a few security personnel are taking the other shuttle to collect supplies, and their rendezvous point is carefully designated. Voyager will be waiting for them. That’s the plan, at least. Not long after jumping to warp, Chakotay hears an explosion and their shuttle is thrown out of warp; he and Janeway are both flung from their seats.
“Are there any ships on sensors? Anything to explain what just happened?” Janeway asks it while they’re both still standing back up, already turning to the console to answer her own question. “Nothing on sensors. Not even an asteroid field or some kind of spatial anomaly.”
“The warp engine is offline. We’ve lost all of our antimatter somehow.” He walks gingerly to the rear of the shuttle to check the systems there.
“What’s our situation?”
Chakotay makes his way back to the cockpit. “The long-range communications array is destroyed. We have life support for less than a day, assuming we keep the temperature controls low. I’ll drop a message buoy in the hope that Voyager will pick up the signal, but…”
“I’ll see what I can salvage of the communications array,” Janeway says. She works in silence while Chakotay reviews the shuttle systems to see if he can figure out what went wrong.
It’s getting chilly in the shuttle. Not so cold that it’s dangerous yet, but definitely unpleasant. Chakotay has moved to the floor, sitting against the wall, as he examines the scans. Janeway looks over at him, her hands still deep in the shuttle’s guts. “You always seem to be so—calm, Chakotay. Unfazed by whatever happens. As though you’re certain everything will work out. How do you do that?”
It still surprises him, when she misunderstands him so badly. He supposes it’s a mark of success, that his performance is so complete that she sees only the calm, smiling first officer, always steady, always easy. “When Tuvok was on my ship, spying on us—did he send you reports about our conduct, our personalities? What we—what I did?”
Janeway frowns. He can see her suppressing a shiver. “The information he deemed necessary. We talked about it more when I invited the Maquis to stay on the ship. He said that you were a captain devoted to his crew and a cool head in a crisis.”
“That doesn’t sound like Tuvok.”
“I’m paraphrasing.”
He laughs harshly and lets his head fall back against the wall, too hard. “Have you ever killed someone, Captain? I don’t mean fired on a starship in self-defense. I mean—stood on the ground, facing someone, and ended his life with your own hands?”
“No,” she says. “I’ve never had to.”
“How many people do you think I’ve killed? Did Tuvok put that in his report?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” He closes his eyes. “The first one—the first with my own hands—was a Cardassian. I crushed his head with a rock. Like a savage. I think—I hope—that they were all Cardassians, maybe a collaborator or two. You don’t always know.” His voice is thick and he clears his throat. “I’m not calm, Captain. I—” He struggles to articulate it. “Imagine if we returned to Earth and when you saw it from above you couldn’t believe the destruction. You were sure someone must have hidden, must have escaped. And you stepped onto the surface to find…slag. Not even ruins. The total erasure of every place that you knew. Every member of your family, every person you’d ever known.”
“I can’t imagine it.” Her voice is very soft. It would probably be soothing if he weren’t so deep in the memories.
“When I say in the ritual that I’m far from the bones of my ancestors—there are no bones, not anymore. They were vaporized with everything else.” He clears his throat again. “It’s easy to say that there’s a treaty. The lucky worlds on the right side of the line are under Federation protection. But the Maquis know that the treaty means nothing for the people on the wrong side of the line.” Chakotay strikes the bottom of his fist against the floor, hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to damage himself. “I’m not calm,” he repeats. “For years I couldn’t feel anything at all. And then the only feeling that came back was anger. That’s what’s useful in war.”
“Chakotay, I’m so sorry.”
He closes his eyes, shrugs as best he can leaning against the wall. “I had a purpose, before this. I killed Cardassians. I tried to protect the worlds that still weren’t like my—home. I tried to protect my crew from the Cardassians and the Federation alike. I had a ship. It was war. And now—” He keeps his eyes closed. He doesn’t want to see her expression. “If I let anyone see the anger, anyone who doesn’t share it, I’ll never be able to keep the smiling face on again. The calm man, the smiling face that the crew needs, that you need.”
“You’re showing me now.” He suspects that Janeway very much wants to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, on his arm. It’s good that she doesn’t.
“No. I’m admitting it. That’s very different than ever letting you see it.” Chakotay opens his eyes, stands, and paces the length of the shuttle. It’s not a long walk. “I suppose even admitting it means I secretly think that we’re going to die.” He finally meets Janeway’s eyes. It’s hard to read the emotions there—is it shock, compassion, horror, grief, disgust, something else? “I don’t regret what I did as a Maquis, Captain. I know it isn’t the Starfleet way, but I left Starfleet before I became a Maquis.”
“It must be difficult to have returned to Starfleet.”
He wants to scream. This is the problem with lowering the façade around her, even for a moment. “There was no choice other than to return. And there’s no way to keep my old crew in line except to be exactly who you think I am—who you need me to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Janeway says again. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
Chakotay has to end this conversation. The more they talk about it, the more he frays. “We should eat something,” he says abruptly. “To help keep our body temperatures up.”
She lets the conversational thread end. “Lieutenant Paris usually hides a few extra rations in the toolbox in that compartment.” Janeway also stands and walks over.
They both reach for the compartment at the same time. He has a good five inches of height on her and it brings their bodies close together. In the chill of the shuttle, her body exudes warmth and when she doesn’t recoil, he can’t help leaning into it. His hand finds the toolbox. “Got it,” he murmurs into her hair. He wants to put his other arm around her and pull her tight against him—for warmth, for comfort, for who knows what else—but he only lifts down the toolbox and forces himself to step back into the cold.
“Well,” Janeway says, “Either we use the power to heat them and lose about five minutes of life support, or we eat them cold.” They both look down at the ration packs. Vegetarian chili. Not ideal.
“I think that’s a command decision.” He wants the specter of his admission stuffed firmly back inside of himself, so he smiles as he says it. She looks at him strangely, like she doesn’t believe the smile. “I would heat them. Five minutes is unlikely to make a difference either way and we’re both cold.”
Janeway frowns. Of course. In her mind, Voyager will come for them, and so they have to stretch their life support for as long as possible to give Voyager time. Even out here, she’s still stuck in the Starfleet mindset—that they have other support, that someone will come to help them. The Maquis know better. “If we heat them and turn down the temperature controls by two degrees, it should balance out.” She bends and puts the ration packs on the heating charge.
He imagines what it’s going to be like to sit in this small cold box for another ten hours, gradually reducing the amount of power to environmental controls to squeeze out every last second of life support, slowly lowering the temperature until it’s just above the point of certain hypothermia, reducing the power to the CO2 scrubbers until the air contains just enough oxygen to prevent hypoxia, all lighting off to preserve any conceivable power. “You know,” he says, “life support would last a lot longer with only one person on this shuttle.”
She straightens abruptly, eyes sharp. “Absolutely not.”
“You’re the captain. The crew needs you.”
“Our crew needs both of us.” She slaps the extremely hot ration pack into his hands and says, “Stop talking that way and eat.”
He thinks he’d rather die quickly than suffocate in this little coffin, but there’s no point bringing it up again right now. The food is exactly as he expected it to be, but it clearly makes them both feel a little better. Maybe it’s that little bit of energy that emboldens him enough to ask, “How close to the end of our life support would we have to be, for you to abandon Starfleet protocol?” For her to stop caring about the chain of command, for her not to think of herself as his superior officer, for her to—
“Given the Doctor’s abilities, he might be able to revive us even after life support stopped functioning, if they located us quickly enough.”
“Never, you mean.” That should be clear enough for him. “You don’t ever give up, do you, Captain?”
She’s meticulously squeezing every last drop out of the ration pack. “I think you can call me Kathryn, given the circumstances. And—no. Not out here. Not when there are people depending on me.”
It should frustrate him. It should make him angry—angrier—her stubborn belief that they’ll survive in the face of all evidence to the contrary. But he wants her to be right. “Hypoxia will start to affect us well before we freeze to death,” he points out.
For the first time, she looks annoyed at him. “I’ve programmed the life support controls to automatically balance the power to temperature and CO2 scrubbers for maximum length of survival,” she says. “Were you hoping to die faster?”
“Kathryn.” He tries it out. “No, of course not.” Smile. Be calm, be steady, that’s what she needs. “I want to have a full picture of the situation.” He knows where the medical kit is, what it contains. If it becomes necessary for her survival, he’ll do what has to be done.
* * * * *
They’ve been emptying every compartment, looking for every possible item that might allow them to get out of here—or at least, prolong their miserable short lives, as Kathryn is determined to do—when Kathryn laughs and says, “Of course.” Chakotay turns to see that she’s holding a bottle of what’s clearly liquor.
“I thought we had to do everything necessary to extend our lives,” he says. “I hate to say it, but won’t that increase the risk of hypothermia?”
“As you’ve pointed out, spending another nine cold miserable hours waiting for likely death or unlikely rescue is going to be unpleasant.” Kathryn lifts the bottle. “I’m willing to take the risk if you are.”
He extends his hand for the bottle and she passes it to him. It’s unopened, which is good—he hates to think that any of the crew are drinking on duty. He cracks the seal and inhales. “It smells like rum.”
“Appropriate, for a ship.” Kathryn smiles. “Go ahead.”
There are probably cups, but he puts the bottle to his lips anyway and takes a swallow. He doesn’t usually drink liquor, only the glass of wine he’s had at their two meals together, but it’s smooth. “I suppose it’s fitting that the last bottle of alcohol I ever drink will be with you.” He passes it to her.
“No,” she says, “We drink only on the condition that neither of us calls it the last bottle ever.” She takes a swig, her mouth easing over where his just was, and passes it back to him.
He’s already beginning to feel it—he’s a little warmer now, everything a little smoother, softer. Straight liquor when he’s only eaten a single ration pack in the last twelve hours may be a bad idea, but there are no good ideas now. How long, he wonders, until he tells her that the smudges on one side of her face look better than any makeup ever has? That her hair has fallen half out of its severe bun while she was digging into the shuttle’s wiring? That, at least, she knows, because she catches him looking at her hair and says, “Yes, it’s a mess, I know.”
“Here,” he says. “I’ll fix it for you.” That’s innocuous enough, isn’t it? She raises an eyebrow, but she takes the bottle back from him and shifts until her back is to him. He breathes on his hands to try to warm them a little before he pulls out a few pins and the bun collapses entirely.
Kathryn takes another drink and sighs. “That already feels better.” She angles her head one way, then the other. “I must have done something to my neck when we were thrown around.”
“Here, let me help.” He runs his fingers through the length of her hair once or twice, then collects it in one hand and drapes it over her shoulder to keep it out of the way. He massages her neck very gently and she groans.
“Oh, that feels good.” She tilts her head back against him.
“I’ve had a lot of practice at this.” He can confide it now, when she can’t see his face. “My mother used to get sore necks all the time. I was the only one she’d trust not to make it worse.”
“Thank you,” Kathryn says, but she doesn’t pull away, and so he doesn’t stop.
His world narrows to those points of contact, each place where his finger meets her skin, and he finds himself pressing a kiss to the cool skin of her neck. She groans again and grabs the back of his head, holds him in place. There’s nothing he can do but inhale deeply, turn the kiss wet and hot with the slightest bit of teeth against her neck to hear her hissed breath, kiss further along her neck to where her collar covers her skin and then all the way back to her earlobe, the shell of her ear.
She inhales deeply and then releases him without saying anything. He remembers he was only ever supposed to be fixing her hair. He pulls back and combs his fingers softly through her hair, braids it loosely, and—he can’t stop himself—breathes a last kiss into the crown of her hair before he releases the braid. “There,” he says. “Is that better?”
“Much.” She passes him the bottle again.
“Kathryn,” he says. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” and every other part of him is screaming at his brain for saying it.
She turns a little and it would be so easy to kiss her now, to lean forward just enough to catch her mouth with his. He remembers, vividly, the feeling of her lips, her tongue, beneath his fingers in the turbolift. He wants to feel that again. If he kisses her, Voyager probably will show up. Voyager will rescue them and this will again be forgotten, or at least Kathryn will forget it.
It occurs to him that he’s actively contemplating not kissing her, just to ensure that they die rather than be rescued and face emotional discomfort. He starts to lean forward, but she’s already stood up again, leaving the bottle with him. He takes another drink and stands as well. “Looking for something more to do?” At her look, he says, “I know you well enough to know that you hate just sitting here waiting to be rescued.”
“Apparently you know me a lot better than I know you.” That stings. She contemplates the bottle. “I don’t suppose anyone stashed some water here to go with this rum.”
“If they did, I’m sure you’ll find it.” Chakotay regrets having told her the truth about himself now, without even the liquor to blame it on. “Kathryn—I don’t want it to—to change the way you see me, whether or not you trust me, what I told you. About myself.”
She looks almost surprised. “It doesn’t,” she says. “Maybe I didn’t know the details, but I knew that you were Maquis. And I know that since you came to Voyager, you’ve been the best first officer I could hope for.” Kathryn presses her lips together. “But—I hope you’ll come to feel that you can share these feelings with me. That you don’t always have to be—who you’re pretending to be.”
Personally, he thinks that’s almost impossible, but he smiles and nods. “Maybe eventually.”
* * * * *
It’s very cold now. They’re curled up together, Kathryn half in his lap, his arm wrapped around her back. The emergency blankets draped over them might as well be tissue paper. The only warmth is that of her breath against his neck, a steady in-out that reassures him she’s still alive. The air is thin, thinner than that of the highest mountains at home. “Warning,” the computer says. “Five minutes until complete life support failure. Warning.”
Kathryn stirs a little, just enough to say “I thought I’d turned that damn voice off.”
“Warning. Two minutes until complete life support failure. Warning.”
“Kathryn,” he says, “I know you’re not going to give up on being rescued, but I’m going to give up so that I can violate protocol myself.” She makes a questioning noise and he adds, “I’m going to kiss you now unless you tell me not to.”
“Warning. One minute until complete life support failure. Warning.”
He isn’t expecting it when she surges forward and kisses him instead. Their lips are papery, mouths dry. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s the lack of oxygen or the hypothermia, but his entire body is warm now, one hand pulling her as close against him as humanly possible, the other tangled in her braid as she clutches the back of his head, as they breathe last breaths into each other’s mouths—
* * * * *
He wakes up in sickbay. “Commander Chakotay! You and the captain gave us quite a scare,” the Doctor declares. “A minute later and even I wouldn’t have been able to save you!”
Chakotay is cocooned in hot blankets and every part of him is too warm. He can just barely manage to turn his head and see Kathryn—is she Janeway again?—similarly wrapped in the next bed over.
“Chakotay, I am so sorry,” B’Elanna says. Tom and B’Elanna flank his bed, wearing identical expressions of shame.
He has a sudden horrible suspicion about the nature of their shuttle malfunction. “You’re both confined to quarters. You know why.” His tongue feels very heavy in his mouth. They both nod and walk out of sickbay together.