Disclaimers, ratings and warnings are in Part 1.
THE BADLANDERS
PART TEN
Chakotay couldn't take his eyes off Kathryn where she stood opposite him ready to seat herself at the table. She looked good in the clothes he had replicated for her, surprised that he had instinctively assessed her size correctly. A three-quarter length top over her pants gave her a fragile appearance. She was thinner than he had imagined. Yesterday he had been unconcerned by her physical build except... He sighed inwardly. Yesterday he didn't care.
"I see the clothes fit," he said, a lump working in his throat. It was at least a reasonable starting point to a conversation. When he gone to sick bay to collect her, no words were spoken between them. He had simply held out his hand - yet another unaccustomed action on his part - and she had followed him out, giving the doctor and that Vulcan a concerned look.
They could remain in sickbay, he decided. He had already instructed his men not to touch any of them. It was the least he could do in the face of his extreme atrocities. About the other prisoners... Sometime he would have to make a decision about them too, relieve their plight a little.
And all of it was the fault of the woman standing in front of him. His unbridled beating of her, the unbridled and uncalled for sexual dominance over a body that was half-unconscious...
"Well?" he asked.
"Thank you."
She remained standing, her reluctance to be in his quarters palpable. She was afraid of what he'd do to her even though he promised he wouldn't harm her again. Though to look at her, it was impossible to gauge that that was what she was feeling.
"Please, you haven't eaten in three days. Eat."
He could see how hungry she was and was relieved when she sat down and began to eat. There was silence for several minutes as he watched her. He had hardly touched his own food, just observing Janeway. There were tell-tale bruises he could see in her neck and on the back of her hand. He knew that Krell hadn't removed all the bruises on her body. It shocked him again, though he hadn't wanted to feel anything for this woman who seemed to know him from somewhere.
"Chakotay..."
"I promised no harm would come to you, Janeway. You will be a guest in my quarters."
"The others?" she asked, reluctantly, it seemed to him, meeting his gaze. He knew she referred to Torres and Paris. Torres had not touched her when she'd taken the clothes to Janeway, but he was dead certain that she did do something, like spitting in Janeway's face.
"She spit in your face."
"How - How did you know?"
"I know my people, Janeway. Every vice. Torres has her moments."
She sighed, and finished her dinner. He had replicated wine as well and she had taken very delicate sips from the glass, leaving more than half of it still there.
"You have duty, Chakotay. I - I need to do something here..." her voice trailed away.
"Dalby is in command right now. I - I want to spend the evening with you."
He frowned. A flash - something from those corn fields under bright sunshine, blue skies, full moons, dawn over the Grand Canyon - and a sharp pain stabbed through his head. He gave a small cry, clutched at his head, trying to understand something that was beyond explanation.
"Is anything wrong?" she asked.
Her voice was full of concern, the worry clear in her eyes.
"Don't feel sorry for me, Janeway. It's nothing - "
"But - "
"It's nothing. Leave it at that," he bit out, rising suddenly from the table.
He was surprised that she followed him and sat next to him on the bunk. The bunk was bigger. Torres had been none too happy when he ordered that she arrange a larger, three-quarter sized bunk be installed in his cabin. He had given Torres a dirty look, wondering when she was going to explode. Torres was jealous. She was jealous of any woman who became his afternoon and evening fuck for longer than five days. They were nothing to him, simply objects that were fitted with a cunt, a mouth and an anus.
A hand rested against his back. Again he experience a blinding flash leading to momentary pain. Why was this woman affecting him so much?
"Janeway..."
"Please, call me Kathryn..."
"Yesterday...yesterday I did you no favours, Janeway. I treated you like I treated every other female on the ship."
"I'm a prisoner," she stated simply. He looked at her, still feeling the palm of her hand against his shoulder blade. He blinked, trying to stem the blinding flashes again.
"I raped you, Janeway."
She looked away, but not before he saw the shame in her eyes again. He wanted to take his dagger and cut out the part of his brain that made him do the things he was doing. He couldn't see beyond his violation of her, and yet that was what he did. So why did it feel to him again that she stirred something hidden very deeply inside him? He was always in control of his faculties, always the hardened Maquis rebel leader bent on destruction, of breaking the spirit of their prisoners, especially the female prisoners. Nothing was ever going to melt the hardness away and reveal something that wasn't there. A softness he disregarded as part of his make-up.
The hand against his shoulder felt like a cress and distracted, he pulled her closer. Her softness, the subtle fragrance of the cologne he had replicated along with the clothes entered his nostrils, assimilating every nerve in his brain, turned him inside out. She buried her face against him. It sent shock waves through him - this caress, this endearment.
He wanted to tell her again that he hadn't spared her the previous day; he wanted to tell her that she was no different from any other woman on the Liberty and therefore she deserved to be violated and beaten by him again and again.
He wanted to brush his lips against hers and feel the light electric shock that not only curled in rolling waves in his body, but kept his lips connected to hers. He wanted to run his tongue gently along her lower lip and feel how soft under his touch it was. He wanted to nudge her lips open that he could slip his tongue into her moistness and just linger there, tasting her nectar, the faint smell of the Picard Shiraz on her breath, allowing her own moistness to lubricate his parched lips. He wanted to run his tongue along her teeth, feel each one in succession, until he could probe into her warm depths. He wanted to die of the shock of feeling her tongue bruising his own, so heated it was, burning into every taste bud, every pore that affiliated itself to salt, sweetness, even bitterness. He wanted to feel her teeth nipping his lower lip and die of the pressure, even though it must have been the lightest of feather-like caresses.
He wanted to press her down on his bunk - the extra large bunk - that would allow two persons to lie comfortably in each other's arms.
He had no idea of time or space or even texture. Everything coalesced into a continuum where all things pertaining to space and time, past and present and future, every point in the universe occupied simultaneously where he knew he would, no matter where he found himself, see her lying before him, naked. He would see her needing him; he would see himself needing her with such a great intensity that it would be impossible to measure the depths of his need.
"Chakotay..."
His name fell from her lips like a sweet benediction, a prayer that filled his continuum where he could hear it over the icy aloofness of mountain peaks, the silvery sheen of the Great Lakes of Ketarcha, the distant plains of the Serengeti...
It was a sound that caressed in the mellowness of a well-matured wine.
His eyes fell away from his face. His ears were filled with sounds that resonated from the very same tranquillity and timeless peace that the Himalayas always seemed to evoke. It seemed to him that his fingers moved through her skin where her bruises silently, mercifully dissolved and with them, his sin.
"Kathryn, I am touching you..." came his anguished words which when uttered, staggered his mind because he couldn't understand them, and it was this incomprehension, once acknowledged, that emblazoned itself in every touch he made on her skin.
He had no idea how he had come to be lying naked beside her or how his hands, defenceless appendages that listened not to him, but acted on her impulses, removed her clothing.
Entranced, a little perplexed, he caressed her peaks, soft, firm, full breasts that ended in tight, erect little nubs. Hands raised, hands lowered, hands that tasted, yes, tasted the texture of her hair, traveled over her body and where he hesitated at the apex between her thighs were given an unexpected bonus of being guided to her moistness, the weeping depth of her, yes, even 'instructed' numb index finger to probe that moistness, the weeping sides of her sheath. They told him she waited for more.
How could he give more? He was incapable of understanding, knowing only hardness against hardness, where nothing gentle and soft dwelled in his realm. Yet, the hardness was there, tempered by the softness, the sweet invitation that she wanted to be a part of him just as, the spirits help him, he wanted to join with her.
"Kathryn..." he murmured her name again as he raised himself over her, positioned his shaft where she, just as driven by her own need, had already spread her thighs and lifted her hips to him. Her hands roamed the landscape of his body - great plains, deep ravines, rustic mesas and triggered the rains that came not from the skies, but oozed from his drought-filled realm upwards and rested as thousands upon thousands of minuscule droplets on his parched skin.
Rain. His dry season was gifted with it and it came in abundance. His head was brought close to hers, hands that left the rugged rain-filled plains and cupped hungered cheeks. Her legs shifted, her hips raised; her soft folds burned him alive as the tip of his cock touched, nudged and then slowly journeyed into her.
Not the hardness and violence of before. Not the terrible punishment of before. Not the hatred, the anger he could never understand in himself, only feeling it and feeding it. Not the object with an orifice that didn't invite, but got invaded.
No, none of those counted now as he lodged in her, not moving yet, simply revelling in the joy of the connection, the bond. Once they moved together, he couldn't discern whether he was lying over her, or on the bed, or in her. The only awareness was that they were floating, rising higher and higher, flying over icy mountain ranges, dipping sometimes to skim the silvery waters of the lakes. There was no point that he could articulate what pleasures he experienced, the suddenness of the indescribable waves of sensuality that enveloped them.
He sensed he moved in her and that she returned every thrust measure for measure, although it never registered as a definite, actual thought in his head. They moved. They thrust. They clung to one another with an abandon that shocked as much as it rejoiced.
Never had he experienced this. Yet somewhere, from far, far, far, away, he sensed that there must have been a time that he loved.
Kathryn's soft moans alerted him finally to the present, the immediate, his body thrusting deeply, strongly into hers.
Strange, so strange how he measured her strength and matched it with his own.
His body, rigid in his preparation for the final release, capped itself over her, yet his chest heaved, straightened, and then came the explosion.
It lit his continuum into bright light so white that he was blinded. Yet it was a blindness in which he could see things so clearly.
He saw her running towards him. She wore a blue dress and the skirt of it lapped against her ankles. She was laughing, her hair fanning in the breeze, her voice bright when she cried his name in joy.
Only when he wanted to touch the spectre of his white realm, she dissolved.
"Kathryn!!"
A silence settled around them and bathed them in its softness. Her hands held him close to her, protectively, possessively. He lifted his head in agitation, for he had seen her again, for a moment only, in her blue dress.
"Chakotay? What is it, sweetheart?"
He gave a giant sob even as his body was still joined with hers. He collapsed, burying his head in her neck.
"Kathryn, Kathryn," he cried with desperation, "in the name of God, tell me: who am I?"
*****
END PART TEN