Chapter Text
It's been almost two weeks. Janeway doesn’t bring it up, any of it. It’s staggering to him, how well she can separate any emotions that she might be feeling from their day-to-day interactions. They proceed at warp eight, travel a week out of their way to avoid unfamiliar radiation only to briefly encounter a Kazon warship and then, when they narrowly escape that, have to exchange fire with a Vidiian harvesting vessel that self-destructs just as a security team is about to beam aboard.
Janeway does stop inviting him to her quarters for dinner, and she does stop touching him quite as much. She only ever did it a little more than she touches the rest of the crew—that’s what he has to tell himself—so it doesn’t really matter. They eat dinner together in the mess hall instead. The crew always leaves a little bit of space at the surrounding tables, so that even when it’s packed it feels like they’re by themselves.
“Neelix did a good job with the stew today,” Chakotay says. “He’s getting better at hiding the flavor of the leola root.”
“He told me he wanted to make leola root ice cream. I told him to start with vanilla.” There’s that twist of humor to her lips that he likes so much.
“I don’t suppose Kes has been growing vanilla beans in the hydroponics bay?” Ship-related things are always safe with Janeway—safe for both of them.
Janeway spears a chunk of leola root from her stew and examines it. On a less controlled face, her expression might be called disgust. “I think she’s sticking to more basic provisions for now. Multipurpose vegetables, maybe a fruit or two. Herbs.”
“We should assign someone to help Kes,” he says. “If the replicators go out, whatever she grows will be all we have to eat.”
“Emergency rations,” Janeway points out. She swallows the leola root chunk without chewing it.
“I don’t care how many herbs you put on those emergency rations, the crew would mutiny after a a few days of them.”
Janeway laughs a little. “I suppose so. All right, we’ll find another farmer. Anyone in mind?”
“Didn’t you grow up on a farm?” It feels strange to tease her, to keep everything so surface-level, but it’s the only way he can maintain his cheerful persona. “You could spend your beta shift there.”
“No, thank you. I may have grown up around farmers, but I have a hard time imagining myself as one.”
“Oh, I don’t know—a straw hat, some overalls—” He can’t help grinning at the expression on her face. “I think you’d make a lovely farmer,” and danger, that was a slip of the tongue that shouldn’t have happened, so he rushes to say, “but I think Gerron would be better. He’s shy, Kes might be able to draw him out.”
“All right, I’ll see about reassigning him.” Janeway looks down at her bowl. “I shouldn’t waste food, and I know Neelix would be heartbroken if I gave him back a bowl with food still in it, but—”
He’s already reaching across the table to swap their bowls. “Let me help you with that.” He drinks down the rest of her stew bowl, wipes his mouth, and what a strange détente they’ve found themselves in now. Every easy moment could suddenly veer into danger, but he loves the easy moments, never wants to lose that to—his other emotions. He can’t pull back enough now to make every moment safe.
“Captain, there’s a ship approaching,” Tuvok calls.
“Janeway to bridge, I’ll be right there,” she says. “I suppose I could have just waited for an emergency to escape the rest of my stew.”
“They do come often enough.” Chakotay follows her out of the mess hall and up to the bridge.
* * * * *
It’s lucky—probably—that they’re not directly next to the drexim conduit when it blows. One minute they’re saying a surprisingly pleasant farewell to the alien ship, which turned out to contain a group of traveling musicians, and Janeway is lamenting the fact that she’s never learned to play an instrument. The next, every alarm is blaring as the computer declares, “Warning, dangerous gases detected. Please proceed to quarantine areas. Warning.” No one is listening. The air is taking on an oily pink sheen, emanating from every vent. Most of the bridge crew have very suddenly left their posts, including Tom.
“Doctor to Captain Janeway!”
Janeway taps her badge. “Doctor, what’s going on?”
“Captain, I need you in sickbay urgently. Come directly here and do not stop or interact with any other members of the crew.”
“I’m on my way. Chakotay?” She stands up and Chakotay stands with her. “Mr. Kim, you have the conn.” Harry is one of the few people still at his post.
She seems to assume Chakotay will come with her, which is good because he’s not sure he could let her out of his sight right now. In the empty turbolift, they crowd together, until she has an arm around his waist and he’s wrapped his arm around her shoulders and is breathing into her hair. He can see the goosebumps rising on her skin as she bows her head and it seems natural—inevitable—that he should kiss the back of her neck, just above her collar. Janeway hums a little and leans closer into him. It's too familiar now, too comfortable. Hard to imagine living without.
The doors open onto deck five. Janeway turns into him and wraps her arms around his neck, turns her face up for a kiss, and then another and another. They only separate at the sound of a shriek very nearby—Chakotay hopes that was in response to something other than the sight of him with Janeway—and then the Doctor comms, “Captain Janeway to sickbay immediately!.”
They walk to sickbay. Chakotay discovers that he’s holding Janeway’s hand tightly in his own and has been running his thumb over the shape of her knuckles. When they get to sickbay, the Doctor frowns at them. “What’s the crisis, Doctor?” Janeway doesn’t release his hand.
“A drexim conduit on deck six ruptured. The leaking drexim has combined with the ship’s atmosphere to form dreximetic gas.” He says it like they should both immediately know what this means. Maybe Janeway does. Though she’s also worked her free hand into the waist of his pants, insinuated it beneath his shirt and is now stroking her fingers lightly across his skin. There’s a buzzing in his ears. “In liquid form, drexim is harmless,” the Doctor explains. “An excellent lubricant.” Or that’s probably what he says. Chakotay is having a lot of trouble listening. “But in its gaseous form, it’s highly dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” He realizes that he’s running his fingers through Janeway’s hair. “How so?”
“Acute exposure to high levels of dreximetic gas results in—the heightening of a person’s strongest desire, with little regard for anything else. Long-term exposure will…”
Janeway pulls him down into another kiss, long and deep and slow, her lips moving over his—almost in exploration, as though they’ve never done this before, and he cradles her face in his hands and returns the kiss. It feels like he’s dreaming.
“Captain!”
She breaks the kiss. Her cheeks are flushed. “Yes, Doctor. Long-term exposure would be dangerous. I assume you’ve come up with a solution.”
The Doctor looks peeved by Janeway hurrying him to the end of whatever long explanation he was going to give. “As a matter of fact, yes. Since I knew that we were using drexim with the ship’s bio-neural circuitry, I was aware of a substantial risk that we might eventually have a dreximetic gas leak. I’ve prepared antidotes, both for individuals and for the bio-neural gel packs that will spread the treatment through the ship’s systems.”
“Good thinking, Doctor.” Chakotay strokes Janeway’s cheek, runs his fingers over her lips, and she bites one of his fingertips very lightly. His breath catches and he pulls her hips tight against his own.
“Yes, yes.” The Doctor administers a hypospray to each of them without warning. Chakotay isn’t focused enough to care. “I’ve given you both the antidote. I want you to stay in sickbay until it’s taken effect, and then you can go treat the gel packs.”
“How long will it take?” Janeway is kissing each joint of his fingers and it’s very distracting.
The Doctor grimaces. “I’ll check on you both in ten minutes. Until then, I’ll be in my office if one of you begins to have an allergic reaction. Which you should not. Try to stay still and let the antidote work.”
Chakotay doesn’t think whatever antidote the Doctor gave them is working. He lifts Janeway onto one of the bio-beds. They’re trying to remove each other’s uniform shirts at the same time, and when they finally succeed, he pulls her bra off too and discards it somewhere. Then he drags her undershirt down enough that he can cup her breasts in his hands, lean down and suck at one hard nipple and then the other. She grabs the back of his neck and holds him there, panting. When she releases him, he puts her shirt back into place and leaves kisses all along her neck, biting a little, just hard enough to make her hiss and squirm and reach down to grab his cock—
“Captain, Commander, you’re displaying some very alarming behavior!” The Doctor’s voice is enough to cut through the haze, enough for Janeway and Chakotay to break apart. At least an inch apart. “Really, I think perhaps you should separate—”
“No,” Chakotay insists. “We’re—at least we’re—”
“Some of the functions—might require two sets of command codes—” Janeway has been rubbing his cock through his pants this entire time, and he keeps hitching his hips up a little, arching into her hand, to encourage her. The Doctor clears his throat loudly and Janeway pulls her hand away. “No, Doctor. We’ll go together. Keep each other on track.”
“If you’ll forgive my saying so, Captain, that seems less than likely.”
Janeway shakes her head like she’s trying to wake herself and climbs down from the bio-bed. Chakotay is—useless right now, sliding his hand over the curve of her ass and squeezing a little, trying to memorize the shape. “Chakotay,” she says, and there’s enough steel in her voice that he snatches his own hand away. “We know what we need to do, Doctor.” She lifts the bandolier of antidote vials, slings it around her chest, and passes the other one to Chakotay.
“You’ll have to inject a bio-neural gel pack on every deck, ideally more,” the Doctor reminds them. He frowns. “I would prefer to wait until the antidote has taken effect for you two, but I’m starting to think we don’t have that long.”
Janeway has been dragging her nails lightly across his bare chest since she handed him his bandolier, but she says, “We’ll be fine, Doctor. I’m sure the antidote will start taking effect soon.”
“Hmph.” The Doctor attaches a small cortical stimulator to Chakotay’s neck. “I’ve programmed it to give you a small electric shock every five minutes. If the two of you get—distracted, it should help snap you out of it.” The cortical stimulator shocks Chakotay and he yelps in surprise; Janeway steps away from him. “Good, it works. Now get going.”
They make their way out into the hallway, slowly. Everyone is reacting differently to the dreximetic gas leak. The mess hall is crowded with people gorging themselves on whatever they can find. A brawl has broken out in one of the turbolifts. Tom and B’Elanna are half-naked and seem to be slamming each other up against walls between vicious kisses.
Janeway opens the first panel to inject the gel pack and Chakotay crowds up against her body, so that when she finishes and turns back around, she’s in his arms. She kisses like she’s drinking him in, hands roaming across the bare skin of his chest, and he can’t get close enough, especially when she starts to slide one hand into the front of his pants and he’s hard, feels like he’s been hard forever—
The cortical stimulator shocks them both. He swears and Janeway pulls her hand out of his pants. “How many more of these gel packs are there?” he asks.
“There are forty-seven gel packs in total,” she gasps. “Three on every deck, two redundancies. But if we get one on every deck, that should be enough.”
“Up or down?” He’s trying not to let himself touch her again. Maybe the Doctor should’ve set the shocks for every three minutes. Or every minute.
“Up. I don’t want to have to climb fourteen decks to get to the bridge at the end of this.” Janeway looks longingly at the turbolift for a minute.
“Captain,” he says. “I don’t think we’ll do well in a turbolift.”
She meets his eyes and he feels it, the weight of that particular memory. “No,” she says. “Jefferies tubes it is. We’ll go to back to the bridge and work our way down.”
It’s easier to keep their hands off each other climbing four decks up in a Jefferies tube, if only because she’s climbing quickly and Chakotay can make himself stay a few feet behind at all times. It doesn’t stop him from admiring her from below, though. When he exits the Jefferies tube behind her, Janeway has already made her way to the bridge where one of the gel packs lives.
The bridge is empty but for Harry Kim, whose nose is pressed so close to a control station that his breath is fogging it up. He appears completely unaware of what’s happening, which means that when Janeway unzips Chakotay’s pants and shoves him down into the captain’s chair, Harry is blissfully oblivious. Chakotay loses himself in the sensations as Janeway pulls his cock out and climbs atop him, slides down slowly until her face is pressed against his neck and she’s panting hot breaths against his skin. They find the right rhythm fast, too fast—maybe she remembers they only have five minutes before the next shock—and he kisses her, messy, too overwhelmed to do more than lick into her mouth.
The cortical stimulator goes off again but it doesn’t matter, an entire Borg fleet could drop out of warp and it couldn’t make him think of anything but the feeling of Janeway, Janeway, Janeway, as she clenches hot and tight around him—
He comes as the shock stings again—that’s probably crossing some wires in his brain. Janeway climbs off of him and pulls her pants up and says, “Come on, we have a ship to save.” Her lips are red and a little swollen, her hair a knotted mess, her undershirt pulled so far to the side that the edge of her nipple is showing. He wants to live in this moment with her forever. But she’s right, they have a ship to save and what they just did provided some minimal relief, so he straightens her shirt, tries to set himself to rights and follows her back to the Jefferies tube, down a level.
“Both of our quarters are on this deck,” she observes. As if they need quarters to do what they’ve been doing. He can see a bruise forming on her neck where he must have bitten her. When she opens the next panel, he presses close behind her—she arches back against him. Chakotay laces his fingers in her hair and pulls her head to the side so that he can kiss the spot. At the noise she makes, he bites just a little, just the slightest pressure of his teeth against the bruise, and she gasps and moans and rubs back against him. He keeps his mouth there, teeth and tongue, and slides one hand down the front of her pants to find her clit, the other hand beneath her shirt. There are few things he wants more than to feel her come against him. Chakotay works his fingers until he can tell she’s close, rubs his cock against her ass—he shouldn’t be getting hard again but he is, he blames the gas—and says “Come for me, Kathryn.” She does, her entire body tensing in a single instant before she sags against him, and he leaves another biting wet kiss on that bruise to hear the high-pitched noise in her throat. The Doctor will erase everything when this is over, every scratch and bruise, but until then—
Deck three. Somehow Tom and B’Elanna have made it all the way up here only to stop in B’Elanna’s open doorway. Tom has her up against the doorframe, fucking her as she yells and digs her nails into his back and the doors keep trying to close but can’t. B’Elanna sees Chakotay and Janeway and raises an eyebrow—
Electric shock. Right. This time he’s the one to find the panel. He has to crouch down to open it and inject the gel pack. He feels the heat at his back and when he turns a little, Janeway is right there, grabbing his hair and holding his head just there, forehead just against the waist of her pants. Chakotay brings his hand up and rubs along the seam of her pants—the dampness is leaking through, of course, she was already dripping wet and then he came inside her and none of it matters, he wants to feel her clench tight around his fingers again, wants her to pull his hair hard because she can’t help it—
Electric shock. Damn the Doctor. He stands up and grabs Janeway’s hand, drags her back past Tom and B’Elanna, back to the Jefferies tube and the ladder down to deck four. The energy grid is down here, three gel packs clustered together, and he injects all three in the hope that maybe it’ll help whatever ship-wide antidote move faster. Whatever the Doctor gave the two of them doesn’t seem to be having much effect.
Electric shock, just as he’s starting to lose himself looking at Janeway. They go down past deck five, then have to crawl through a horizontal tube to get to the energy grid on deck six. Janeway stops short partway through and Chakotay bumps into her and somehow he ends up on top of her in the tube, bracing himself on his elbows. “I want,” he says, and then leans down to kiss her. It’s slower this time, here in the close dimness of the tube, just the feeling of her lips on his own, her soft slick tongue stroking against his. His brain dimly registers one, and then two shocks, which means they’ve been lying here just kissing for more than five minutes. It’s enough to separate them, and Chakotay slides past her slowly, tortuously, to take the lead in the tube.
There are all kinds of noises coming from the holodeck and he’s glad that the safety protocols are hard-wired in. He doesn’t know if it’s an orgy or a Klingon battle or both and he feels entirely justified not investigating. They’re closest to the leak here. The dreximetic gas floats low and thick in the air below the energy grid and it makes his skin tingle, like he’s been stripped naked and—like the time on C’Nihua, when Janeway painted every inch of him except his cock, when she claimed him with her red handprint. When Janeway has injected the pack, he lifts her and pushes her against the wall—her legs wrap around his waist almost automatically—and rubs against her, like trying to scratch an itch he can’t quite reach. He buries his face against her neck, whispers something that she’d never let him say in real life, marches kisses along her neck up until her ear and then can’t stop himself from saying it into her ear. “I love you,” he whispers, and he would think she hadn’t heard except for the way her entire body jolts, the way she wraps her legs tighter around him—
The electric shock feels sharper now and he releases her, pulling away slowly. They should get away from the concentrated gas, back to the relative safety of the Jefferies tube, maybe even a turbolift. He doesn’t know which will be worse, when it comes to being in proximity to Janeway. She’s opted for the turbolift. They stumble into it and she gasps, “Deck seven.”
The turbolift has barely begun to move when he feels the shock—five minutes before the next one—and says, “Halt turbolift.”
“Chakotay—” she starts, but it’s more of a plea than a warning.
“Four and a half minutes,” he says, and he drags her pants down just enough that he can pull her underwear to the side and slide three fingers inside her all at once.
She moans long and low. She’s slick and almost painfully tight around his fingers. She lets her head fall back against the wall, spreads her legs wider and says “Come on” as he pumps his fingers in and out, curls them inside her until she says “Please, please” and grabs his wrist to force him deeper. He finds her clit with his other hand and she comes on his fingers, crying out and clenching so tightly that his fingers are almost numb with it. The cortical stimulator delivers its shock just as he’s slowly pulling his fingers out and he feels her jerk and spasm as it hits.
“Resume turbolift,” he croaks.
Deck seven is crew quarters, mostly. The gas is heavier down here; he can almost feel the weight of it in his lungs. They stumble through the hallway to the nearest gel pack and Chakotay is losing all sense of time and distance. His fingers are slippery and he almost fumbles the vial when Janeway, standing behind him, sticks her hands into the back of his pants and grips his ass tight. She squeezes almost experimentally, throwing him off-balance, and then spreads him open, just enough that she can slide one slick finger back and forth across his hole, and he would let her, he would let her do— “Anything,” he chokes out. “Anything.” He pushes back against her and she starts to press her finger just inside and then there’s the electric shock again.
Janeway pulls her hand out of his pants and slaps his ass, hard. “We have to—go,” she says. “We’re—only halfway.”
“We’re not going to make it like—this,” Chakotay says. He turns and looks at Janeway—eyes wild, bruises from his teeth set into her neck, the curves of her breasts showing through the thin cloth of her undershirt. He knows what he must look like, bare chest heaving, pants riding low on his hips from all the abuse they’ve taken. They could give up. He wants to give up. He would never say it to Janeway, but they could give up, toss the bandoliers aside, strip naked and do everything to each other that they haven’t managed yet until eventually the gas kills the entire crew— “Maybe the doctor was right.”
She looks at him sharply. “About what?’
Every part of him howls at what he’s about to say. “Maybe it would go faster—if we split up.”
Janeway knows he’s right, as much as she hates it. “We are distracting each other, I suppose.”
“I want to touch you every minute that I can see you,” he says. “And when I can’t. It’s taking twenty minutes for every level because we can’t stop ourselves.” Even now, they’re inching closer together.
She catches herself, stops, and then takes a determined step backward. “We have to,” she agrees. “I’ll take decks eight through eleven, you do twelve through fifteen. We’ll meet on fifteen to confirm.”
“All right.” It was Chakotay’s idea but he finds it almost impossible to take the first step away. Janeway returns and kisses him again, long and sweet, like two lovers saying goodbye before going into battle, and he holds her against him for a long time. When the cortical stimulator goes off, he pulls himself away. “I’ll take the turbolift first,” he tells her. “I don’t think we can risk being in one together.”
“No,” she agrees. He makes it back to the turbolift and watches Janeway as the doors close.
It’s a good thing that they separated, because the gas is billowing through the hallways of deck twelve. Without Janeway there in person, he’s able to stumble his way all the way to environmental controls and inject two of the three gel packs there. He taps his comm badge. “Captain, I’ve completed deck twelve.”
“I’m done with deck eight,” she says. “Heading to deck nine. Leave the channel open.”
Even the sound of her voice makes him want to go to her. “All right.” He means to start walking, but he finds himself unbuttoning his pants, discovers that his hand has already made its way onto his cock and he’s thrusting into his fist there in the hallway. “Kathryn—”
“Wait until I’m there with you.” Of course she knows what he’s doing. He likes to think she knows because she was touching herself too. “Wait until we’re on deck fifteen, Chakotay.”
“Yes, Captain.” If he injected himself with one of these vials, would it make the antidote work faster? Does he want the antidote to work? The cortical stimulator shocks him. Damn the Doctor.
Decks thirteen and fourteen pass in a blur. The doors to the holodeck on deck fourteen are open and he carefully avoids seeing inside. He doesn’t want to know any more of the crew’s deepest desires than he already does. “On my way to deck fifteen,” he tells her, his voice thick.
“Confirmed.” She sounds as wrecked as he does, and when she steps off the turbolift, she looks it. “Have you found the gel pack?”
The gel pack. That’s why they’re there. “I was waiting for you,” he admits. Another electrical shock. “Over here, I think.” He finds the panel, stands beside her as she injects it, and then they’re done, they’re free, he curls himself around her and starts to shove her pants down. Janeway turns in his arms, strips her undershirt off over her head so he can see her breasts in the dim light. They’re right out in the corridor, only a few meters from the turbolift, but it doesn’t matter. She wraps her fingers around the cortical stimulator and pulls it off his neck, which stings almost as much as one of the shocks. Then she leans in and licks the spot. At first it’s gentle and then she sets her lips and teeth to the spot and it hurts, oh it hurts, and he wants to tell her to stop but he’s harder than he’s ever been and it’s the best feeling. He wants to be inside her, around her, pressed as close together as every cell of their bodies can get, wants her to mark him everywhere. She pulls his cock out and breaks away long enough to step out of her pants. In that momentary break, Chakotay turns her around and tugs her underwear out of the way so that he can pull her back onto his cock.
Janeway almost growls at it, reaches behind her to dig her nails into his hips and pull him harder into her, spreads her legs wider and arches against him so he can thrust as deep as they both want him. He reaches for her breasts, finds her nipples and pinches lightly at first and then harder when she keens, and he’s half-crazy with the feeling of her bucking back against him. That’s when she says “Stop, get on your knees,” and turns around, and he has his own hand tight on his cock even as she’s pushing him down onto his knees in front of her. “You’d better not come yet,” she tells him.
“Yes, Captain,” he breathes, and he knows what she wants, drags her underwear down entirely, finds her clit with his lips and tongue and teeth as she pulls him so hard against her that it’s almost difficult to breathe. Janeway hooks one leg over his shoulder, then the other, until he’s the only thing supporting her, one hand under her and three fingers on his other hand pumping in and out as she thrusts against his face. Maybe she’s being inconsiderate but he loves it, loves the way she squeezes tight around his fingers, the little noises she makes when he scrapes his teeth very lightly against her clit, the way she’s unraveling all because of him. He feels her come, feels her body seize and clench around him and then relax.
Carefully, awkwardly, he stands with Janeway still draped over him like that, ankles behind his neck, her legs spread wide open to him. He grips her ass to hold her in place and then slides back in—he tries not to think of it as one last time—and fucks her hard, feels her shuddering around his cock. She cries out and grabs his hair, pulls his head to the side so she can set her teeth back into the bruise she’s left where the cortical stimulator was. It hurts, bleeds into the white-hot feeling crawling up his spine until he’s certain that the only way it will stop—if he wants it to stop—is if he comes, if he loses himself entirely in her. He does, his entire body shaking, her name emerging strangled from his throat. Even when the aftershocks have stopped pulsing through him, he doesn’t pull away; Janeway leans her forehead against his own and clenches down on him over and over, like she’s trying to come again on his cock, and it shakes little shivers of pleasure out of him.
Chakotay doesn’t want to let her go. His head is clearing, which means the antidote must be working at last—and if it’s working on him, it’s working on her. Worse, his back and his legs are reminding him in no uncertain terms that he’s forty-two years old and that very shortly he’s going to feel like he’s fallen down a Jefferies tube. Still, he doesn’t begin to disentangle them until Janeway lifts her forehead away from his and meets his eyes. Then he can’t hold her gaze and he has to awkwardly put her down. Her legs don’t hold her at first and she has to take a deep breath.
In the long silence that follows, Janeway retrieves her badge and says, “Doctor, I need a full set of my own clothing and a full set of Commander Chakotay’s clothing transported to deck fifteen. At your earliest convenience, Doctor.”
For once, the Doctor doesn’t argue. Two full uniforms materialize in the corridor. They dress quietly and Chakotay dumps their old clothing into a recycling unit. “Captain,” he says, with no real thought for what he’ll say next.
“Chakotay.” Her eyes light high on his neck, and he touches the place that she’s staring at. It’s where the cortical stimulator used to sit, where she’s left a mean messy bruise that’s already throbbing. “You should get that—fixed.”
“So should you, Captain.”
“I have…an illicit dermal regenerator in my quarters,” she admits.
He can’t help smiling at that, even in all the absurdity of the situation. “Of course you do. You would never go to sickbay for something that could be fixed by a dermal regenerator.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t report it.” She’s smiling too, her lips a little swollen from kissing. “You know how the authorities on this ship can be.”
“Real disciplinarians,” he agrees. “I won’t report you, on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“I get to borrow it after you. I don’t need the Doctor commenting on every little mark left on my body.”
Janeway laughs. It feels like they’re in a brief perfect bubble right now. “Come back to my quarters. We can help each other regenerate our dermis.”
“That probably shouldn’t sound as appealing as it does,” he says recklessly, and she doesn’t even resist it, doesn’t try to put the distance back between them. In the turbolift, Janeway tells the computer, “Deck two, direct.” Then she looks at Chakotay and raises an eyebrow. “What do you think are the odds that the antidote will have caused the rest of the crew to forget everything they did and saw?”
“In the case of Tom and B’Elanna, I suspect that the amnesia will have taken hold as soon as they were physically separated.” Chakotay shakes his head. “If there’s one thing I’ve observed in my time on starships, it’s that people have an amazing ability to selectively forget the side effects of just about anything.”
In Janeway’s quarters, she finds the dermal regenerator and offers it to Chakotay. “As the person who liberated this from sickbay in the first place, I’m declaring the right of first use,” she tells him. “Which means I’ll need you to use it.”
“Anywhere in particular?”
Janeway removes the uniform shirt that she very recently put on and lays it across a chair. “I think you can find one or two places.”
“Ah. Yes.” The bruises on her neck, bite marks on her breasts, the back of her neck—he erases each of them, one by one, watching as they fade away like he never put them there. He turns her chin with a very light touch, runs the regenerator down her arm and watches the imprints of his fingers vanish. He hadn’t realized exactly how aggressive everything had been, after those first few drunk-feeling kisses. When he’s done, he passes it to Janeway.
From the beginning, it’s torment. It’s good that his body is so exhausted, because Janeway seems determined to drive him insane. She traces each mark before she heals it, ghosts her fingers across it as though she’s reminding him exactly what she did to leave that particular mark. He has to take off his shirt for a few of them and he could swear that she’s running it across places that were never marked to begin with. His skin pebbles with goosebumps when she brushes the back of her knuckles across his chest, catches the tip of one hard nipple as she lifts her free hand to the messy spot on his neck where the stimulator was. “That was a good idea the Doctor had,” she says, and she runs her thumb in an ever-increasing spiral out to the ragged edges of the bruise.
“You weren’t attached to it.” Chakotay’s voice is rough, rougher than it should be in response to this. “Next time he puts it on you.”
“It got me a few times when I was touching you.” He remembers those times vividly. “It wasn’t even as bad as touching an electric fence.” At his questioning noise, she adds, “When I was growing up, some people still used old-fashioned electric fences to keep their horses in. Once the horse gets shocked once, it stays away from the fence.”
“Well, if that was the doctor’s plan, it didn’t work very well,” Chakotay says. He thinks he can feel a slight hum from the regenerator, which she’s still holding over the same spot. “How’s it going?”
“Almost done.” She looks around her quarters and then says, “Computer, begin filling bathtub.”
Janeway is really testing the limits of his fortitude here. “A bath?”
She steps back from him and turns off the dermal regenerator. “Yes. With water. I find it relaxing. And after today, well, I can already feel my muscles seizing up.” She can probably tell what he’s about to say, so she adds, “The water is filtered and recycled. It’s perfectly drinkable if it becomes necessary.”
“I’m sure. It sounds wonderful.” He can see Janeway teetering on the edge of inviting him to join her. As much as he wants to, he gathers the last tattered vestiges of his self-preservation instinct and says, “I’ll leave you to it. Enjoy.”