A/N: Voyager is the first series I ever wrote for (some of those fairly horrible stories are still on this site, even). Watching it again with adult eyes, I felt the need to render these characters in a somewhat more mature way, with a subtlety that strives to honor the depth of the original. Please enjoy.

Note: Tag to Season 4 Episode 1, Scorpion Part 2. In the aftermath of the alliance with the Borg, Janeway and Chakotay examine their wounds and find each other in the dark. Light/pre-JC.

Incunabula

The first sense his eyes made of the illuminating world was the dull gray of Sickbay's ceiling, the light relay sputtering in the diagnostic panel behind his head, and her face hovering over him, her lips pressed into a tight, bloodless line. The uneven light made a halo of her auburn hair. Blinking cleared up everything but her expression: her eyes were dark, her face quiet, her hands folded carefully on the edge of the biobed. He couldn't decide if she looked worried or just angry. For a disorienting moment he was upside down, remembering a smear of blood across her pale face, her shaking fingers digging into his jacket as she begged him to do something he had not done—then he caught the dull gleam of chrome out of the corner of one eye and heaved himself up onto his elbow, away from the image of the drone motionless on the far bed. His temples rolled with the sudden motion, the headache that blistered behind his eyes; her steadying hand on his shoulder was probably little more than reflex, but he would take it.

"The Borg," he croaked at her, tasting for the first time the dryness of his mouth. "The link…did she…"

"Lie still," she said, and because her voice was soft he didn't protest, let her push him slowly back down. Tried not to make too much of her hand forgotten on his shoulder. "It worked. We're safe, for now. Well done, Commander." She offered him a sliver of a smile, and he did his best to return it, though he was so rarely Commander here. He missed the way her voice lilted over the syllables of his name, the care she took with it that no one else did. He missed her hand as soon as she drew it back, both of them caught off guard by approaching steps.

"Ah. Commander. Back among the living, I see." The Doctor took up position on the other side of the bed, his tricorder chirping through the air above Chakotay's head. "No lasting damage to the axons in the brain or the spinal column…you appear to have survived your second brush with the Borg neural link unscathed—aside from your no doubt splitting head, that is. A little something for the pain."

He barely felt the hiss of the hypospray against his neck; his eyes were on hers, on the minute flickers of thought or emotion within the glassy blue, shifting too fast for him to read. Remembering the way they'd flashed as she held herself up against the central console, stared him down with her whole body shaking, her own hands the only thing she trusted anymore, almost made him sick. He turned his head away, but it didn't stop her voice from echoing in his head, the words that cut so deeply because he could see the hurt etched on her face as she said them: you never trusted me, you never believed this could work—like they were one and the same, like questioning her decisions was questioning her, like he had ever given less than complete faith since the moment he appeared on her bridge, looked into her eyes, and put his weapon down. He closed his eyes against his dulling headache, shut out their voices discussing the catatonic drone to search for the vibration of the ship underneath him, that spacefarer's lullaby, the sound he sought at night when his mind was too chaotic to sleep. It reminded him of a meadow of long grasses on the world where he was born, the words the wind whispered through the red tassels and his father's voice telling him to feel the rotation of the earth beneath his feet. It took her hand pressed over his heart to bring him out of it again.

This time he sat up slowly, swung his heavy legs over the side of the biobed as the Doctor moved to stand beside her, sparing an aggravated look for each of them. "My recommendation is light duty and plenty of rest—not that I expect you to follow it. But I insist on at least a few hours' sleep before you report for duty. Since I assume you'd rather not stay here…" He cast a short glance over Chakotay's shoulder toward the other occupied bed, "…I'll release you to your quarters, as long as you promise that's actually where you're going to go."

He wasn't sure what to say, wasn't certain he had it in him—his whole body still felt too heavy, disjointed, like he had left some knowledge of how to move it in the foggy reaches of his mind. Wasn't certain he could even rise until he felt her hand on his elbow.

"Don't worry, Doctor. I'll see that he gets there." He turned to meet her tired eyes, the small smile crooked on her lips. "Then I have to get back up to the bridge, see how Tuvok's holding things together."

The words were incidental, but appropriate, he couldn't help thinking—so many things were in pieces, and they were all just doing the best they could to hold them together. Her hand on his arm, holding them together as he slid down from the bed, rocked on unsteady feet. She was always the one who held him together. He wanted to do the same for her, but that wasn't the choice he had made.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "Not tonight, you aren't. You're still suffering some residual intracranial swelling from the disruption of your neural pathways, not to mention the subsequent surgery. When I prescribed rest, I meant for both of you. I've already informed Lieutenant Tuvok of the situation. Surely he can manage things until the next crisis—which, on this ship, is bound to be just around the corner." He glanced at the drone again, wary and fascinated, and Chakotay watched her expression fade from stubbornness to exhaustion in the time it took her to breathe out. He wondered, suddenly, if she didn't have it in her either.

In the corridor, they were both quiet, her voice little more than a murmur as she sketched for him the end of the story. There were things she was leaving out, he knew, but he didn't push her; he wondered if she was as ill at ease with the day's events as he was, afraid their ghosts might still be hovering in the space between them. Chakotay closed his aching eyes and let her lead him, her steady hand on his arm his lifeline, his guiding light, as she had been for the past three years. The warmth of her there beside him was almost unbelievable; it wasn't that many hours yet since he'd wondered if he would ever feel that warmth again.

The last few weeks, since those ragged moments in a howling storm as he'd fought to make her breathe, they had been so much closer. Only three days before, hovering on the edge of sleep, he'd sworn he could hear her heart beating through their shared wall, and that sound had become his new center, had replaced of the thrum of the engines as his lullaby. But there was none of that closeness in her face as she'd stared him down in Sickbay, across the battle lines.

"You never trusted me. You never believed this would work. You were just waiting for an opportunity to circumvent my orders."

He couldn't tell which of them was more astonished by her words—him, by the thought that she might believe that, or her, wrestling with the part of her that feared it might be true. He took a step toward her, felt her tense at the intrusion though they were still so far apart.

"Trust had nothing to do with it. It's about what I can live with—what we can justify in putting our own interests first. The Borg have been lying to you: they started this war." He could see the surprise on her face, but her walls were still up, something fierce and outraged flickering in her eyes. He lowered his voice, moved around the console until they were face to face. "You're the one who said we'd be a Starfleet crew, guided by Starfleet principles. How can we justify giving the Borg a weapon to wipe out an enemy they antagonized in the first place?"

They weren't even his words—they were hers, the way she'd taught him to think, the things she might have said if she hadn't backed herself into such a corner this time. But she wasn't in a place to hear them, and he should have known that; she was still angry, her shoulders back as she straightened to her full height, as much as she could with one shaking hand still braced on the console.

"You want to talk morality?" she demanded. "What about the morality of letting these people—our people—die at the hands of the Kazon, the Vidiians…Every time we're stopped, every time we slow down, we lose people—good people, people whose lives are our responsibility." Her voice wavered on the last word, but she wasn't done, her eyes boring into his with a desperation he almost could not bear. "Lieutenant Hogan, Ensign Kaplan, Crewman Bendera, Ensign Bennet—"

"Stop it, Kathryn." He hadn't meant to say her name, not here. She looked up at him as he ran a hand across his eyes, erased for just a moment the expression of anguish on her face. "I remember them all, too," he said, so softly he wouldn't have been sure she'd heard him if it weren't for the slump in her shoulders, the white in her fingers as she sagged against the console. He breathed out and looked down into her eyes again, couldn't stop his hand from rising to brush the loose wisps of hair back behind her ear, the straggled strands still rough with dark blood. "I thought you were going to be one of them," he whispered, and she closed her eyes, and for a moment they just stood there in silence, breathing together, mapping their frayed edges.

He wanted badly to cup her cheek, the way he had on the holographic sailboat a few weeks before, the false wind tangling her hair through the gaps between his fingers—but he wasn't certain she'd allow it now, and he didn't think either of them could handle one more misstep. He settled for a soft hold on her upper arm.

"There's only one Borg left to worry about. We should try to disable her and get out of fluidic space, back to the Delta Quadrant." Before he'd even finished speaking, he felt her shaking her head, her eyes blinking open, steady and determined but a much softer blue.

"There's no way out of this, Chakotay. If we try to back out now, we'll only end up facing the Borg and Species 8472 at the same time. We make our stand here, in fluidic space—we fight the aliens in full cooperation with the Borg."

The same decision, the same sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he didn't challenge her again, because she was right, they were out of options, and because he was still the man who would follow her into Hell if that was where she set her course—or he wanted to be.

"You can't trust them," was all he said, his hand slipping slowly back to his side as she let go of the console, stood finally toe to toe with him, steady on her own feet.

"No," she conceded, and then tipped her head to one side, offering him something that was almost a smile. "But there's someone I can trust."

"Always," he'd promised her, and tried not to wonder if it cost her as much to hear that as it cost him to say it in this moment, when neither of them was sure.

He had lost track of his footing. He slipped away from her and staggered into the wall, heard his name slip from her surprised lips over the bang of his shoulder taking the brunt. She was with him again before he'd even righted his disoriented mind, forgoing his elbow to slide an arm around his waist.

"Lean on me," she murmured, and he did as she asked, though he could so rarely convince her to do the same. He sagged against her as she guided him the last few steps into the turbolift, wondering how she could still be such a mystery to him after all this time—he couldn't read her at all in this moment, couldn't decide if she was angry or apologetic, if her arm around him was a wish to bring that closeness back or just stubborn refusal to admit that her heart couldn't be farther from him. All those years trying to breach her walls, and he couldn't even tell if they were still standing. He leaned back against the shuddering cage of the turbolift, closed his eyes and breathed her in so that he would have something to hold against the darkness after she was gone.

But she didn't go. After she'd gotten him to his quarters, entered her override and helped him stumble to the bed, she didn't disappear as he'd expected, hovering instead at the edge of the mattress, a pale ghost in the half light from the glowing replicator console. Chakotay shuffled out of his uniform jacket and toed his boots off in the dark, didn't realize she was looking for an excuse to perch on the bed next to him until he gave her one, letting his head fall back too hard against the stiff standard-issue pillow and feeling for the first time the lump on the back of his skull where he'd hit the cargo bay floor. Her uncertain fingers chased the lines from his forehead.

"Are you all right?"

He managed a soft chuckle. "Fine. I guess the Doctor didn't see any reason to get rid of my goose egg." The darkness was too thick to see her clearly, but it didn't matter; he knew her well enough to read the grimace behind a heavy exhale, the hand coming up to massage her head in the faint rustle of cloth. He took a slow breath to keep his voice neutral. "What about you?"

Now it was her turn to laugh, almost. "I've had better days."

Chakotay pressed his lips together, measured the pain on the face that was only a crescent moon, a sharp sliver of her fractured expression illuminated by the fickle light. He had sworn to himself that he wouldn't push, not after today, not when the trust between them was as fragile as her feather-light fingers just tingling against his forearm—but this was a duty he could never ignore, a responsibility as deep in him as the bones that held him together: to take care of this headstrong soul who would not take care of herself. He pushed up onto one elbow in his gray turtleneck, disregarded the pounding in his head as he settled his hand over hers.

"Kathryn." The first time her name had passed his lips since he woke up in Sickbay—he knew she knew it too, felt her fingers tense and then relax under his. He traced the shape of her knuckles with an absent thumb, marveled at how small her hands felt in the dark. "You look like you're in bad shape. Might be good to lie down for a while."

A tiny shift away from him, the mosaic of her face changing as her lips parted on a sigh. "I will, as soon as I get to my quarters. Scout's honor."

He didn't believe her, but that wasn't what it was about. This, this was where he couldn't help but push. She wasn't ready to leave him and he didn't want her to go, and that should have been enough, but sometimes it wasn't. He tried to ease into it, shuffled toward her as his thumb mapped the caverns between her fingers, enlarging each space until his fingers could slide in between them. He squeezed her hand to his, palm to palm. "I have another pillow," he said, and then listened for her reaction through the dark, the tiny hush of her breath quickening in her lungs.

"My door is five meters down the hall," she told him, and already he could feel her slipping from him, the automatic recoil that always followed the realization of his nearness, her body stiffening with the instinct to rise. He kept hold of her hand, brushing soft spirals into her skin.

"I'm not sure you have five meters in you."

It wasn't what she wanted to hear—but then, she never heard him the way he wanted her to. She could never read anything but challenge into his caution, doubt into his concern. It wasn't her he doubted. It was the demons skulking in the haze of his mind, the shadows of assimilation and senseless unity that had come to him through the neural link, the image he couldn't shake of her broken body laid out on the biobed, her bloodied fingers trembling against his shoulder. He felt more than saw her eyes on his face, the willful part of her searching for a reason to say no.

"Chakotay…"

"Kathryn." His voice was tired, more breath than sound, just a prayer that this could be his name for her, the other half of himself, the rotation of the earth beneath his feet. He pulled her hand to him, rested his lips against the back of it. "Please," he murmured into her skin. "Stay with me."

A long moment of silence, her indecision making the darkness thick around them. Her hand slipped from his and he closed his eyes, braced for the shudder of the mattress as she walked away. But it didn't come. What he heard instead was a dull thump, and then a second—the sound of her boots hitting his floor. Then she eased down onto the bed beside him, still in her uniform, and rolled over until they faced each other through the dark, the uneven light pooling in the hollows above her cheekbones, haunting her half-lidded eyes. He slid one hand up to unfasten the silver barrette resting at the base of her neck, cast it over the lip of the mattress. His fingers got caught in the spill of her hair on the way back to cupping the slope of her cheek, the way he had four weeks ago as they lay side by side on the rolling deck of her sailboat, the whisper of the water in their ears and the black sky stretched over them sewn with stars neither had seen in a long time. He couldn't remember why he hadn't kissed her then. He wasn't sure, anymore, when he might get the chance.

Her hand was less certain than his, hesitating for a long breath in the void between them before settling where it always settled, in the space above his heart. Chakotay closed his eyes and focused on the heat of her touch, the pulsar she ignited in him with that one indulgence. He felt her close her eyes, too.

"I can't do this without you," she whispered into the dark, and he wondered, again, why it always seemed to cost her so much to say it, to put words to the admission her touch branded into his skin. He brushed a tear from her flickering eyelashes with the pad of his thumb.

"You'll never have to," he vowed, the second vow he'd made that day that was tender in the broken places. But she didn't question him, didn't shy away from his hand as it settled in the small of her back and pulled her just close enough for their feet to brush. Tomorrow he knew they would have to look at each other in the light, find a way forward from the wreckage of a shattered alliance and an aborted war. But for now she was next to him, and her heartbeat was steady against his, her fundamental sound filling the hollow in him, and that was enough to carry him through the night.

Head wounds always made her queasy. She woke in the stale hours of early morning with her head pounding, burning up under all her layers and the warmth of the arm thrown across her waist. For a few disorienting moments she couldn't remember where she was, why her pillow didn't smell like her shampoo and whose arms she was in. Then she finally got her eyes open and found herself face to face with him in the unfamiliar dark, his features quiet except for the scatter of worry lines across his forehead. She couldn't help wondering if she had done that. She rested for a few minutes just watching him, torn between the roiling of her insides and the weight of his unconscious embrace. Sluggishly, battling her weary limbs, she struggled up onto one elbow and stripped off her uniform jacket, then the turtleneck underneath it, careful in spite of her aching head not to dislodge the arm wrapped around her, because she knew herself too well—if she slipped out of his embrace, she wouldn't be able to bring herself to slip back in. The cool air of his quarters chased goose bumps up and down her bare arms as she slumped back into his bed in her gray undershirt and settled into the dip of her pillow, begged the chill to slow her racing pulse so she wouldn't have to leave him.

Some part of him had sensed her movement; she had barely sunk back into the mattress before his arm tightened around her, his fingers fisting in the back of her shirt, holding them together. Kathryn pressed her lips into a line, lifted the hand curled between them to soothe the furrows from his brow. He was always the one who held her together, even when together was the last thing she wanted to be. Lying there in the dark, she allowed herself to look at him in a way she never dared in the light, tracing the lines of his tattoo with idle fingertips. He was so quiet, accommodating even in his sleep, his whole body bent so that he could curl an arm around her but still leave her space to breathe. She couldn't help being in awe of the way they fit together, like they had been formed as one first and then broken in half, like there was a space in his body that had been left open just for her to slide into. Or maybe what she was truly in awe of was that he'd made the choice to leave himself open to her, even now, when the wounds they'd left in each other over the last two days were still open and raw.

Though they were his quarters, part of her had expected to wake up alone, had hardly believed, even in the moment she was drifting off with his heartbeat pulsing in her fingers, that it was possible to be this close to him again only hours after she'd turned away from him, closed her ears to his voice in favor of standing alone. There was a chasm between them, a scar in the earth, and she didn't know how to cross it, but somehow she'd never had to—in the end, he always came to her. It was one of her miracles, the light she held onto when the world went black at the edges; but then were days like this, when there wasn't a dark enough gray to excuse what she had to do—days that made her wonder how far she could push him before that light went out.

The cold was creeping into her. She wished now that she hadn't thrown her turtleneck quite so carelessly into the darkness. There had to be a blanket somewhere, something she could use to hold in the heat that was evaporating from her skin—but she couldn't move, couldn't risk displacing his hand. Already they felt farther apart than they had a minute ago; she hadn't realized how much darkness had slipped in between them. She could sense the warmth of his body like a distant lighthouse, a beacon calling to her across rough waters, but all she could feel was the wind and the rain, the heave and shiver of a sea at storm. His arm around her was all that tethered her to the shore.

On the bridge, with her back to the wall, she took the only road that seemed open to her and committed to it wholly, counting on her will to get her through whatever came. Sometimes it wasn't until the quiet moments after, like this one, when she realized the enormity of the choices she had made, the futures she had conjured and erased through the fog of the trenches. It had been that way after the destruction of the Caretaker's array, when she shot up in bed beneath a window of alien stars, staring into the void of exactly what she'd condemned them all to. And that was how she felt now, shivering in an unfamiliar bed, recognizing for the first time the sharp gash she'd left in herself: the knowledge that only chance had stopped her from being responsible for the annihilation of an entire race, from making the Borg even more deadly than they already were. Chance, and this hand pressed into her back, the only patch of warmth on her entire body.

There was a part of her, the part that had walked home seven kilometers through the rain because she lost a tennis match, that had wanted to be right, whatever the consequences. But the better part of her, the part that had learned to turn to him before she made her decisions, to seek agreement in his soft brown eyes, was so grateful that they had managed to find a middle road, a path they could walk together. At least this time it was only the might-have-beens that had her trembling.

Kathryn squeezed her eyes shut. She knew she could get back to sleep if she could only bring herself to inch in, bury her face in his chest and seek a different kind of dark. But she couldn't close the distance, no matter how many times she stood on the brink. That was the thought that haunted her in the small hours: that one day he would look at her across this expanse that separated them and declare her too far gone, and let go. From this distance, she had nothing to offer him.

He was more attuned to her than anyone she had ever known. Though this was the first time they had slept side by side, though she had kept herself silent and her hand had long left his face and fallen to rest on the sheets between them, something dragged him from the haze of sleep; she heard the change in his breathing, felt the stretch of exhausted muscles as his arm coiled against her back, his head just rising from his pillow.

"Kathryn?" It was little more than a murmur, barely enough to carry to her ears; she wasn't sure he was even really aware of her, allowed herself to imagine, just for a moment, that he always woke with her name on his lips. His eyes struggled open and then slipped closed again. "Something wrong?" he asked.

Gently, she shook her head. "Nothing. Just…cold."

She watched as his features pulled into a shallow frown, couldn't help smiling a little at his blind hand searching the far side of the bed, seeking the blanket that had vanished into the dark. Then that arm slipped around her, too, his fingers twining through her tangled hair, and as he pulled her in she wondered how it was so easy for him to do this, close the distance, how even half asleep he knew this was how they were supposed to be, their foreheads pressed together, the tip of her nose tingling where it hovered against his. She envied him the effortlessness of that, the surety. She loved him for the heat racing up her skin, a different kind of shiver.

"Sleep," he mumbled into the dark. She could feel him slipping away from her again, back into dreams, his limbs growing heavy where they were thrown over hers. Kathryn let her hand drift to rest over the curve of his side, sensed the movement of his ribs with every breath in and out, felt her breath becoming shallow too.

"We're stronger together," she whispered, not sure which of them she was begging to remember that. Then she closed her eyes and sank into him, and prayed they'd wake up with such little space between them.

Note: "Incunabula" means the first stages or traces of anything.