SICKBAY
...and their voices rose, fell, rose again, until she said something so blunt that it cut right through his anger and shut him up abruptly, as if she had just slapped him in the face. The silence was sudden and profound. Chakotay stepped away from her, sitting back against the table behind him, one arm across his chest holding his other arm at the bicep. He exhaled loudly through parted lips, but did not speak. Equipment beeped quietly somewhere in the background. She immediately saw that her words had stabbed him like a knife, the pain evident in his face. Her voice suddenly went quiet too, and very low and husky. "Oh, Chakotay..."
"...I can't believe I actually said that. Forgive me, I'm so sorry. But you do seem to bring up this subject at the strangest times, when I'm already upset about something, and - besides, you've already heard my opinion on my personal interactions aboard this ship..."
He remained silent, looking her right in the eye, not moving - the anger had drained from his face, leaving him looking pale and drawn.
J: "It's just that... as Captain, I - I certainly couldn't... CAN'T... especially when you, my most trusted officer and - friend - do things like this latest..."
Her voice trailed off, her hands open and pleading, extended in his direction, her eyes wide at what she was feeling, realizing that he had once again opened a part of her thoughts that she kept trying to keep closed. As she spoke, she seemed in perpetual motion, while he was still.
J: "It's just... imPOSSible to... there are too many things that would... I wouldn't be able to..."
She groped for words that didn't come, now standing directly next to where he stood, silent, watching, open, vulnerable...
J: "Chakotay, surely you SEE, that... we - I - simply cannot..." her words trailing off once again. (Still no response from him, he remained looking in her eyes) ...
(He looks so incredibly gorgeous that my heart aches...and what if he hadn't made it back to Voyager? What if I never again had the chance to even THINK about it...)
Janeway looked at him searchingly for several more moments, then said quietly, "Oh, damn..."
With that she leaned forward onto him, put her left hand on his arm and cupped his face with her right hand, her mouth swiftly finding his. The kiss, their first, was very deep and intense and still, their mouths tasting, savoring each other... Chakotay's eyes widened in surprise, wariness, then in wonder as he relaxed into the kiss - a kiss he never thought to experience...
His left arm dropped, then his fingers found the back of her neck as they both finally drew in a breath, their lips still close together; his hands brought her face back to him for another deep kiss before she pulled back, her hands on his chest. They both trembled from the emotions they were trying to control. Her eyes sought his again, then followed her fingertips as they traced the outline of his upper lip, his jaw, down the taut cord in his neck, across his collarbone, his chest, softly rising with his breath, his nipple...then back to his face, that marvelous face, every inch of which she had explored many times in her mind's eye...
A long moment passed as they simply looked at each other.
J: (Taking a deep breath, partly back to her best Captain's voice but still very shaky) "Commander, there is no easy solution to this. Maybe no solution at all. No Captain could ever ask more from a First Officer than I ask of you now and will in future. Be warned."
With that Janeway backed away, turned on her heel and exited without looking back. A long beat. Chakotay, still where he was, looked after her. Then looked at the closed door. Closed his eyes as he sucked in a deep breath. Smiled...hugely...briefly...lay back down on the bed in sickbay, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, not seeing anything but her face.
NEXT SCENE, A WEEK LATER...
Janeway walked rapidly through the corridor on her way to the turbolift, her stride even longer and more brisk than usual because of the clarity in her mind. She hummed a tune as she walked, and smiled though no one was there to see it. This will work, she thought. It WILL work.
The lift door swished open, and Janeway strode onto the bridge. "Report."
Kim and Paris spoke. (Sounds calm and peaceful, for a change, she thought. No emergencies, no attacks, no mechanical failures, no First Officers off on wild goose chases, no shuttlecraft destroyed...thank God. Chakotay? Must be off duty. Good. I can concentrate better.)
Chakotay and Janeway had not exchanged a dozen words, other than command and response, since their encounter in sickbay following his return.
It was as if that moment together had quieted something deep inside him, answered a nagging doubt, filled a void, put to rest a number of questions they had both asked themselves numerous times since the Caretaker had thrown them together. Something in him was suddenly at peace, something very deep inside him had seen the way - home. A fire now burned there in a fireplace that had never before known a flame. Janeway, on the other hand, had not known a moment's peace since their encounter, and her ultimate reaction to him had galvanized her into frenzied thought. There was no stillness in Janeway. A fire had ignited there too, but it was an inferno, turning acres of old growth forest deep inside her, forests where she once sought refuge and safety, to smoking embers.
Though speech had been lacking since then, they had looked at one another, often, whenever no one seemed to be noticing. He looks at me with new eyes, Janeway decided. His eyes don't quite say "What now?", but there is a certain look there that wasn't in his vocabulary before... Well, it seems that *I put it there*, so I must - what? Accept it? Deal with it? Explain my behavior and my words? No. He doesn't want that. He's just waiting, ready for - whatever I do next. At least I think he's ready. Actually I think he's been ready for some time! I was the one who wasn't ready... He knows, though, what it took to get me to that moment, and he won't push me, or ask pointless, answerless questions...
On the OTHER hand, she thought, this is the man who - how many times? - has taken precipitous action into his own hands to settle something, without asking any permission from anyone, not even from me. There's something wild and totally unpredictable about Chakotay, and though I am Starfleet through and through and disciplined and responsible and all that, it is THAT element of Chakotay that I am passionately in love with more than anything. That wild thing, that eagle forever poised on the edge of flight or fight, who feels so much and says so little, until it really matters. That paradoxical being made of equal parts of compassion and combustion, peace and war. He may wait now, but he won't forever. If I don't move, he'll come for me. And it'll be a lot messier.
But that's all right. I'm on schedule. I'll be ready. This will work. It HAS to work.
LATER THAT SAME WEEK
It's ready! she thought. I've put so many hours into this, and checked and re-checked, and looked it over again and again, and it's all here, at least as well as I can remember it...
The shelter, beige walls in, gray walls out. The garden I started. The wonderful bathtub. Chakotay's painstakingly crafted headboards, now side by side. The replicators, the sand painting...the grove of trees where the little primate first appeared to me in my towel, and weren't Chakotay's eyes hungry when he looked at me that night! The waterfall where Chakotay would sit to meditate and spread out his medicine bundle, and the granite rock cliff where he had enjoyed climbing, clinging with fingers and toes and sheer will to the steep surface, muscles slick with sweat, a glint of conquest in his eyes. All present and accounted for, Captain, except the primate. Don't want him this time, she smiled... but maybe I'll program in an plasma storm or two, in case I feel like breaking things...
This will work. It MUST work.
Taking a deep breath, she smoothed out her jumpsuit and brushed a wayward wisp of hair from her mouth. Should I change clothes, I wonder? No time, though - we agreed on nineteen hundred hours. As if on cue, her com badge chirped. "Chakotay to Janeway..."
"Thank you for being so prompt, Commander. I'd like to see you - in Holodeck Four."
"On my way, Captain."
Now, NOW, he'll be so surprised! She giggled gleefully. Looking around her one last time, she felt her pulse quicken in anticipation. "Well, I may not be subtle, but I am thorough..."
The comlink spoke again in his voice: "Chakotay to Janeway, it seems that the holodeck entry is password protected?..."
"Quite right, Chakotay. The password you'll need is - EYES OPEN."
A pause. "Interesting password."
The holodeck door hissed open, and Janeway turned to watch as her First Officer strode in. She wanted to see his face as he saw -
The fresh warm breeze blew her loose long hair around her face, and the last light of the day was turning the sky violet and gold and burgundy. Janeway had programmed in an extended twilight, so she knew its effects would linger as long as she wanted them. And she wanted them to last especially long this night.
Chakotay stopped to look at Janeway, silhouetted against the colors of the sunset, slim and tall in her tight sleeveless jumpsuit. He could not see her blue eyes but could feel them on him, and he felt all his senses heighten, felt goosebumps spill onto his arms and neck. Something very special was at work here tonight. SomeONE very special.
He walked forward to stand in front of her, then saw her huge grin. The grin he had seen only when they were at their most unguarded and intimate, when they were stranded on -
Looking around him suddenly, past her earnest smile, he saw the shelter they had built together. "It's NEW EARTH!", he laughed as he looked back at her, a quizzical expression crossing his face.
She watched him walk around, exploring what she had reconstructed, touching a tree here, the tub there, looking back at her with that devilish grin, then disappearing into the shelter. I wonder what he'll say about the headboards, she thought...
Then he erupted out the door, still laughing, and came toward her at a trot. His delighted smile was intoxicating to Janeway. (He likes it... he understands... he knows where I'm heading...)
He stopped in front of her, hands spread outward, palms up, as if to say, all this, for...and there was that new look in his eyes again...
But before he could speak, she handed him the garment she had been carrying. "Here - it's your climbing shorts and shoes, the ones you replicated so you could be comfortable. And your medicine bundle, or rather a copy I took the liberty of replicating from memory. Why don't you go visit your favorite place by the waterfall? It's all there, waiting for you, just as it was..."
Chakotay looked at the clothes and the bundle, then back at her, a bemused look still playing on his lips. "Are you coming too?"
"No, not just yet. In a while. Go ahead and enjoy your time alone."
"But - all this - you -" Janeway placed her fingertips on his lips.
"Just enjoy, Chakotay, and trust me. I'll be back later."
LATER
As the brilliant sunset lingered on, Chakotay sat on his favorite boulder, high above the cascading waterfall to his right, relishing the comfortable warmth of the rock under him. On the planet, he had carved out a shallow seat in the stone with his phaser, and Janeway had made a good copy of it for him.
He leaned back on his hands and faced upwards, eyes closed, letting the still-warm sunlight spill over his face, chest and legs. The water droplets still glistened on his golden skin and trickled down his face. His wet climbing shorts lay in a heap at the foot of the rock, and though he would prefer to dispense with it, he had draped a bit of his shirt delicately across his groin in case he was interrupted in his nakedness...
How good this feels, he thought... I haven't felt this relaxed since we were here last, here on New Earth. Now Kathryn's New Earth... Here, where I can simply BE and not do. Just breathe and - feel. The climb and the swim in the stream were so wonderful, just what I needed...
The icy water, and now the warm sunlight, and the soft breeze perfumed with - what? - somehow added to the sense of heightened awareness he still felt about the whole evening. As if his senses were hyper-sensitive somehow, and the touch of a feather could send him up into the sky with the bird it came from...
The touch of a feather, or the kiss of a Captain... his mind drifted back to their encounter in Sickbay. A hundred times he had analyzed that moment, trying to decide what wondrously converging planets finally put her into his arms and her mouth on his. What did I do? Or say? Or was it me at all? The mind of a complex woman like Kathryn was not to be explained... any more than he could explain the fact that she had recreated this world in such minute detail...
For me... (All this for me? Or rather - for...)
Surely she wasn't sentimental about New Earth... (*I* was the one who dug in and made a home of it, she wanted nothing more than to leave it... *I* chose to inhabit my days here. To be present and involved. Well, perhaps she WAS beginning to surrender, though, when Tuvok contacted us, if there had only been a bit more time...)
But who knows! he laughed. She's a woman of strong will and mercurial energy. Two weeks later she might have been chomping at the bit again, ready for a starship-size adventure, to hell with all this peace and quiet and domestic bliss, and how can you accept just SITTING here, Chakotay!...
He smiled again at the thought of Kathryn bouncing off the walls of the shelter, trying to compress the vastness of her ideas and energy into the tiny teapot of life on New Earth, her motion washing over his stillness like huge ocean waves until he was overwhelmed by her storm and wanted to put his arms around her and hold her to him until the tempest passed, like a child who has had a bad dream... No, this woman, this lovely, dynamic woman belongs in a starship in search of her destiny. Destinies. Many of them. Her universe is huge, as it needs to be.
And yet, here I am, sitting in the tinier universe she has created WITHIN her vast domain. A life within a life. This feels like an - offering - somehow, an offering to me to substitute? is that the word? for what she could not accept on New Earth. A - parallel universe of sorts. The eye of the hurricane. A place outside time and space, or rather deep within them. A place for something to exist that perhaps cannot exist anywhere else...
Us!...
Kathryn-and-Chakotay!...
As he knew the answer and felt its rightness, he smiled, feeling the goosebumps once again, and settled back onto his elbows. The fading sun felt so good, cool and warm all at once. Like her.
Taking a deep breath, Chakotay waited.
