Chapter Text
He has to be even more careful than usual, now. Janeway can’t think that anything is different. That would be tantamount to a confession. They have dinner together again; Janeway makes an edible biryani, and he accuses her of having someone else program the replicator; he drinks a single glass of wine and sits in the chair next to her couch after dinner, but he can’t allow his legs to touch her own. When she doesn’t immediately return to the casual physical contact—the hand on the shoulder, on the arm—he does it himself, once or twice, to show her it’s all right.
Seska seems to intuit that something has happened, something that makes him vulnerable in a way that’s out of the ordinary. She’s mostly kept her distance, but suddenly she’s everywhere he turns. On an away mission, in the hallways, coming to his quarters with a bowl of mushroom soup made from stolen mushrooms. And then, when he tries to be the good first officer instead of the Maquis captain and discipline her correctly, she says, in her soft mocking voice, “You’d put me in the brig? After everything we’ve been through?” She walks up behind him and threads her arms through his, rests her forehead against the back of his neck, slides her hand up his chest and asks, “Can we make up now?” He holds her hands in his own as he turns and she asks, with that familiar grin, “Who else knows how to make your favorite soup like I do?”
“No one,” he admits, and for a second—for a minute—he remembers what it was like with her. The way she teased him, laughed at him, drove him to distraction—and why he ended it. “We agreed a long time ago this wouldn’t work,” he reminds her. There’s a reason he agreed to casual angry sex with B’Elanna, and a reason he never could have agreed to anything like it with Seska.
“Look around, Chakotay. There aren’t that many potential mates out here,” she says. Any ordinary day, that barb would land lightly. But now, so soon after Janeway’s—offer—it cuts deep. She can see it, too, punctuates it with another jab about young Harry Kim, as though jealousy is what would make him yield to her. If Seska herself didn’t feel so dangerous, he might anyway.
And then. Then everything starts to point to her as a traitor in the worst way possible. He probably knows it’s true from the first time that someone says Seska was off on her own when the Kazon arrived—knows, deep down, that she was involved somehow, even if he doesn’t want to believe that she actually stole technology. Maybe she was naïve, somehow (even though Seska has never been naïve since the day he met her). Maybe someone else did something wrong, and she was just—in the way. He tries, far too hard, to persuade everyone else of her innocence.
After they interrogate Carey, Janeway reminds him—viscerally—that he and the Maquis may be here, but they’re not truly crew members. “Carey has had a distinguished Starfleet career,” she says. “Seska has spent most of the last two years as an enemy of the Federation.” She spits out the last few words as she starts to walk away.
“So have I,” he reminds her. Janeway turns and looks at him—in horror? in surprise? as though she’s forgotten?—and that brief moment cuts deep before she walks away from him. He follows her onto the bridge, his heart heavy.
Then comes the worst of it, the worst that he never could have anticipated. Tuvok tells him—in front of Janeway—that Seska is a spy for the Cardassians. And not just a spy for them, but one of them. There’s nausea rising in his throat, and he feels like he’s been—not just duped but flayed, every tender part of him opened up to stinging air.
He goes to sickbay to see Seska to set the trap and because he still hopes, against all reason, that there's a different explanation. She lies to him about a childhood disease, about a bone marrow donation from a Cardassian. She asks him, her eyes pleading, “Do you think I gave you my heart to get your Maquis secrets?”
“I was starting to wonder,” he says. He knows, now, that she’s lying. She’s the traitor, and worse, the spy.
“I had only one agenda with you, Chakotay. And I never kept it secret.” He hears the emotion in her voice. If he weren’t so revolted right now, he might even wish it was true. But he dutifully lays the trap, telling her about the engineering inventory, how it'll show them the truth, and they catch her in it. “You’re a fool,” she tells Janeway, hate in her voice. “And you’re a fool to follow her.” Seska shakes her head at him and her voice turns gentle, poisonous. “I can’t imagine how I ever loved you.”
He can’t imagine that she ever did. After Seska is gone, he asks Tuvok, “From someone else who pulled the wool over my eyes—was I particularly naïve? Was I not paying enough attention? What the hell was it that let all you spies get by me?” There’s a certain kind of howling pain in the back of his head.
Tuvok frowns. “Like all humans, you depend on feelings and instincts to guide you, and they invariably let you down.”
“Did you ever see anything about Seska that made you suspicious?” That’s the only thing he really wants to know. Tuvok sneaking by him, well, Tuvok’s Vulcan. They’re impossible to read. But Seska—he didn’t just rely on Seska as another member of his crew. He thought he knew her better than anyone else on his ship.
“No. She quite expertly pulled the wool over my eyes as well.”
“Well. That makes me feel a little better.”
* * * * *
It takes another hour for his—deeper self to catch up to what’s happened. To Janeway, to Voyager, Seska is a traitor because she wanted to work with the Kazon; she’s always been a criminal anyway. He doesn’t care about the supposed betrayal of Voyager, not really; if the captain had come to him with the idea, he would have supported it. Seska’s betrayal of him though—he believed Seska was Bajoran, one of the few people that he thought shared the depth of his hatred of the Cardassians. She’s the one who brought him into the Maquis. Everything that was once between them was all part of her role as a spy, and worse than that, she’s a Cardassian. His outer persona is burning away, like cotton set alight, and beneath it the walls around his rage are crumbling.
He makes it to his quarters. He wishes he could vomit, would purge every trace of her from his body, but his own body is too well-trained for that. He could throw things in here. Could break things. Could destroy his own possessions in a tantrum—but no, he has enough sense left to know that when this passes, everyone will remember what he did. He can't leave traces of his weakness like that.
“Computer.” He recognizes his voice, but it’s not the voice of the man who serves on Voyager. “Is there anyone on Holodeck Two?”
“Holodeck Two is unoccupied.”
He debates, for a minute, whether he should waste the energy on a site-to-site transport. Too risky to walk there, through the hallways, where he might encounter someone. Where someone might express their sympathy for a betrayal they couldn’t possibly understand. He stacks the commands in his mind, the last few things that will require sense before he can give in. “Begin program Torres Beta Ten in close combat mode. Engage privacy mode. Lock program and set to end after one hour. Remove safety protocols.”
“Not recom—”
He overrides the computer’s objection, braces himself, and transports onto the holodeck just inside the doors. The battle rages in front of him—the Cardassian attack on a village on a world insignificant to anyone but the people who live there—and he draws a knife and a phase pistol and charges in. His desperate scream of anger is the last thing his conscious brain registers before he kills the first Cardassian.
Chakotay comes back to himself when the computer announces, “Scheduled program termination has been reached.” The program freezes and he looks around. He’s cut a swath through the invasion force in the last hour, but it didn’t matter. The village is on fire anyway, most of the villagers dead, the few survivors rounded up under Cardassian guard. His Maquis comrades are all dead too, except the one who the program has frozen just as she’s being knifed by a female Cardassian.
There’s a lot of blood dripping into his eyes, he realizes. When he tries to wipe it away, his hand comes away thick with blood—must be a head wound, they always bleed badly. He feels a sharp pain in his side and sees the wet patch spreading there. One of his sleeves is charred and beneath it he feels the incipient agony of a burn. He seems to be getting dizzier—very suddenly the world shifts and he’s on the ground. He should tell the computer to transport him to sickbay. When he tries, he can’t manage to speak. After all this, to be killed by Cardassians that are no more than photons and field emitters—he would laugh if he could. Seska’s final triumph over him.
He dimly hears the computer say, “Privacy mode disengaged” and the doors hiss open, hears a voice yell “Chakotay!” and then say what he couldn’t, “Emergency transport to sickbay!” even as the program ends around him and there’s nothing left but the clean sterile walls.
* * * * *
Chakotay wakes to the Doctor’s frowning face peering down at him. “Captain, he’s awake. I really must insist that the holodeck safety protocols be locked in place! Injuries of this severity—”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Janeway’s face replaces that of the Doctor. “Chakotay, do you know where you are?”
Shame uncurls inside him. He let the rage out, let Seska draw it out, and now things are…worse. “Sickbay,” he grunts. His mouth tastes like a small animal died inside it. When he tries to lift his hand to his face, Janeway grips his wrist like a manacle.
“No,” she says. “The Doctor had to perform surgery and it was—hard on your body. You’re only going to be awake for a few more minutes before he puts you under again to recover.” Her voice grows very cold. “You had no business risking your life in there.”
Chakotay closes his eyes against the words. “No,” he agrees.
“What if you had been killed?”
“I wasn’t trying to be.” Even saying that many words leaves him breathless. He tries to lift his other hand and Janeway grabs it and pins it to the bed. He struggles just the slightest bit, just to feel the strength of her hands holding him there. It makes him feel almost— “Safe,” he manages to say, and feels her grip tighten.
“Doctor, you should—sedate him again,” Janeway says. This time when he moves, she releases him, and he hears the hiss of a hypospray.
“Don’t leave,” he mumbles as it takes hold of him. He thinks that maybe he feels her hand on his cheek. He turns his face into the phantom sensation as darkness descends.