Chapter Text
He spends three days in sickbay. The Doctor lectures him repeatedly and at length about the dangers of combat simulations. Tuvok announces to the entire ship that safety protocols are now tied into primary holodeck functions and cannot be overridden for any reason.
The former Maquis are righteously outraged, upon learning that Seska was a spy, and they keep coming to see him under the apparent belief that Seska is to blame for his injuries. Each time, Chakotay thinks to himself I endangered you by not seeing her for what she was. He accepts their anger, their reassurance that they never would have suspected her either, until the third day when B’Elanna finally comes to see him.
“It took you long enough,” he tries to joke.
“It took me this long to make sure I wasn’t so angry I would kill you,” B’Elanna snaps. “What were you thinking? You know that program is meant for at least two people, and you know it shouldn’t be used without safety protocols! I would’ve been responsible for your death!” She punches him in the arm.
“Ouch! You’ll make the Doctor angry if you undo his work,” Chakotay says. “I’ve been here for three days, I’ll lose my mind if I have to stay for another.”
“Think of it as self-inflicted time in the brig,” B’Elanna tells him. “I know you’re upset, but—”
B’Elanna, at least, will understand. “Seska wasn’t just a spy for the Cardassians. She is Cardassian.” He sees the shock, the understanding gradually sinking in. Janeway and Tuvok were the only other people who knew that particular fact. “I was—”
She puts a gentler hand on his arm this time. “No. I understand.” There’s a certain thickness to her voice, almost like tears, when she tells him, “I’m still very angry at you for almost dying!”
Apparently, he’s in an especially self-pitying mood today—three days in sickbay will do that to you—because he says to B’Elanna, very quietly, “You and Tom should be proud of yourselves.”
B’Elanna looks briefly puzzled, then raises an eyebrow. “You’re not going to make me less angry by telling me—”
“No, it all worked,” he says. “The Captain finally—suggested an arrangement.”
“An arrangement.” She sounds about as doubtful as he was.
“Pressure release. Strictly physical. No emotions involved.” He’s realizing how much Seska’s betrayal actually distracted him from that particular devastation. Silver linings.
“That seems a bit of a clinical way to describe it, but—” B’Elanna’s voice fades. “You said no.”
He stares up at the ceiling. He’s spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling. “I did.”
“Oh, Chakotay.” B’Elanna doesn’t ask why. She understands what he’s saying. “You’re not having a very good month with women.”
Chakotay laughs a little, more at himself than anything else. “Really, which is worse, discovering that I spent more than a year with a Cardassian, or realizing that I’m in—” He can’t make himself say it.
“Sometimes things—start that way. Strictly physical. And then become—more.” Despite how pathetic this all is, Chakotay can’t help laughing. “Yes, I realize I sound like I’m a sexual education instructor,” B’Elanna says.
“Maybe for other people. I can’t do that. Not—with her.”
B’Elanna might be about to say something more, but his communicator announces, “Janeway to Chakotay.”
“Chakotay here.” He hasn’t seen her since the first time he woke up in sickbay. He remembers asking her not to leave and feels the embarrassment burn through him at the memory of it.
“Report to my ready room when the Doctor releases you. Janeway out.”
The Doctor frowns at Chakotay and holds up a medical tricorder before he can even ask. “Oh, all right,” he grumbles. “I want to see you back here in 24 hours. Twenty-four hours, understand? Not a minute longer!”
Chakotay jumps to his feet and escapes sickbay before the Doctor can offer any further instructions. He’s torn, briefly, between reporting to Janeway immediately and taking a shower first. There’s no alert pending, no specific urgency, and he wants more than anything to turn a sonic shower to its highest setting and let it scour everything from him. He takes the extra five minutes, puts on a clean uniform instead of the hospital garment, removes three days’ worth of stubble. Then he takes a deep breath, braces himself, and walks to face Janeway in her ready room.
“Get in here,” she says, and he obeys. She doesn’t ask him to sit. “Would you like to tell me what on earth you were trying to do?”
“The holoprogram objective is to save the village.” Some rebellious spirit has infected him. “I didn’t accomplish that objective.”
“Damn it, Chakotay, you know that’s not what I mean!” Janeway stands, flushed with anger. “You could have died in there.”
“That wasn’t my goal. And I didn’t.”
“The Doctor wasn’t sure if he could save your life, when I first got you to sickbay! You spent days there—what if there had been an emergency and I needed my first officer?”
The retort has been on his lips since she first said it. “You have many officers with distinguished Starfleet careers who could help.”
She knows what he’s talking about. “Is that what this is about? Because I suspected Seska instead of Carey?”
Chakotay closes his eyes and focuses on the precise shape of his shoulders, on the placement of his hands, appropriately formal without the rigidity of anger. “No, Captain,” he says. “No, it really wasn’t about you at all.” When he opens his eyes, her anger hasn’t diminished.
“I know you were both Maquis! I fully understand that a substantial portion of this crew used to be Maquis.”
“No, Captain,” he repeats. “You’ve said that many times, but I still don’t think that you do. You believe that we were—space pirates. Thieves, looters, opportunists. Maybe you think I was one of the good ones. But that’s not—” He takes a deep breath. Too much anger is showing, too much of the deep rage. “I’m sure there were people like that among the Maquis. But my crew—” His throat tightens. “We weren’t those people. We were true Maquis. That program, the one I was in, the one that B’Elanna made—she didn’t invent that scenario. That was a real village that we tried to save. The Maquis in the program, they were real people.” He’s getting dangerously emotional. “You discount what we did because it wasn’t approved by Starfleet, because there was a treaty. But we were risking our lives every day for people.” He takes a deep breath. “You know that I love the exploration, the study, as much as you do. But it’s not the same, and to trust one person because they were decorated by Starfleet for years of service—” The realization hits him. “That’s the only reason you trust me, isn’t it. Because I was Starfleet for twenty years before I was Maquis.”
Janeway doesn’t answer that. Her eyes are bright, color high in her cheeks, and there’s no quarter in her expression. “In point of fact, Seska was the traitor. Not just to Voyager. To the Maquis too.”
“To our crew.” He doesn’t specify which crew. “To me.” She was there in sickbay. She heard what Seska said. “You think I don’t know that? You think I haven’t spent the last three days going over—over every interaction we ever had? Every time that I should have known she was—”
“A spy?”
“Cardassian!”
Captain Kathryn Janeway, who has never known the kind of hate that he feels and who he hopes never will, stares at him. “Is that what you were doing? Putting your life at risk to remind yourself that Cardassians were the enemy, because you made the mistake of falling in love with one?”
Of all the open wounds to poke at. “I’ve always known they’re the enemy. Are you going to discipline me for my actions, Captain?” He means to sound like a defiant Tom Paris when he says it, but the words come out almost desperate, pleading for some kind of anchor. He needs some way to lock the rage back down, some rules to conform himself to.
“Holodeck privileges revoked for a month,” Janeway tells him. “As you undoubtedly heard, there will be no way to reduce or eliminate the safety protocols going forward.”
Wildly, he wants to tell her that he’s changed his mind, that he accepts her offer of an arrangement—anything, any outlet, for what’s inside him now. He retains enough minimal sense of self-preservation not to do it. “Yes, Captain.” He stares straight ahead, the way he would have as an ensign being disciplined.
“And I want you to tell me if there are other former Maquis crew that are struggling.”
“Other than Seska?”
“Other than yourself.” The words startle him so badly that he breaks form and looks her in the eyes, and her face softens. “Chakotay.” She reaches out and touches his cheek, the way he remembers from sickbay. He closes his eyes again and turns his face into her hand. That, of all things, quiets the storm inside him.
“I’m fine.” He’s obviously not doing a very convincing job of it. “I’ll be fine, Captain,” he repeats.
“You don’t have to try so hard to be the perfect first officer.” She hasn’t taken her hand from his face. She sighs softly. “I’m sorry.”
Chakotay stiffens his spine, and then relaxes his shoulders into the appropriate position again. “I’d like to be the first officer you need.” He opens his eyes to find her face very close to his, as though she’s trying to divine some insight into him. She draws her hand back abruptly and he misses its warmth.
“You must be hungry. I can’t imagine the Doctor pays much attention to what he feeds his patients. Come on, we’ll replicate something.”
He can’t stop a laugh, and she raises her eyebrow. “I revoked my own replicator privileges for two days along with a few other crew members.” He clears his throat. “Seska—they stole some mushrooms from the kitchen to make me mushroom soup. And I ate it. I had to make the consequences clear to everyone.”
“I know you were unconscious for most of the time, but it’s been more than two days,” she reminds him. “You revoked your own replicator privileges because you unwittingly ate something made with stolen food? A bit harsh, don’t you think?”
“I had to make clear that it was—unacceptable to do something like that, even if it was for me.”
Janeway frowns. She steps out from behind her desk and puts a hand on his shoulder, ushering him toward the door. “Well, now that you have your replicator privileges restored, why don’t you use them to make me some of this mushroom soup that’s worth stealing for? I think it’s your turn to cook dinner.”
“I think I’m just going to eat in the mess hall tonight,” he says. “Show the crew that I’m alive and well.” He can’t handle another few hours of one-on-one with Janeway tonight, not when he’s already this off-kilter.
“Tomorrow night, then.”
“Tomorrow,” he agrees. “I’ll make you mushroom soup. With the best mushrooms I can replicate.”
Usually, he tries to be careful in the mess hall, to rotate through different tables, avoid sitting with only Maquis. But tonight they form a kind of honor guard around him, glaring at anyone else who gets too close, and he doesn’t have it in him to turn it down. They escort him through the mess hall line, looking suspiciously at Neelix. They find a table where he can keep the wall at his back. Ayala and Torres flank him, Jor and Tabor across from him, Hogan and Gerron and Dalby and Chell gathered unsubtly at the two closest tables. There’s a warmth, a strength, that comes from having them around him. They’re not here because of Seska’s treachery against Voyager, a ship that some of them only barely care about; they’re here because they’re Maquis.
For all that Seska deceived him, Chakotay believes in these people. He believes Gerron and Tabor, the true Bajorans in his crew, whose despair at the idea of a Bajoran spy runs deeper than either of them can articulate. He can’t—won’t—admit to them that Seska is truly a Cardassian, even if it might be kinder to them. He believes in Dalby, whose hatred of the Cardassians surpasses that of anyone he’s ever met for what they did to Dalby’s wife. And B’Elanna, always, he believes in B’Elanna. Janeway is his captain, and the entire crew of Voyager is their crew, but this is his crew.