Relative Orbit

Episode addition following Chakotay's thoughts during and immediately following the events of "Counterpoint."

Author's Note: I like my croutons cut into squares.

Fear.

Every fiber of this ship is vibrating with it. It could be a coincidence, or my imagination, but I don't think so. She lives and breathes this vessel. And it – her. Assuming her moods and affectations, channeling them into a matter-antimatter reaction that has burned brighter and hotter for every day we've spent in Devore space. The music piped through the overhead comm. only seems to elevate the surrealistic idea that today has spun so far out of control that not even the our deaths will be properly scored. In some hellish afterlife, my soul will still be humming a few bars of Tchaikovsky.

It's the first time I know, definitively, where we went wrong.

Not in letting Kashyk aboard, or the Brenari, or even attempting to cross this sector of space. Much farther back than that, when we stopped feeling this kind of fear. Paralytic, hard and hot. Blindingly real. For every ounce we forgot could exist, there's double that now; mine, the assembled crew's, but the vast majority of it is radiating from decks above.

I hear B'Elanna to my left, spitting phrases in a mix of standard and Klingon, but the only conscious thought I have is:

I really don't need this right now.

Her outburst is ended with a solid, crushing strike to her temple. It's enough to start a riot – almost does.

"Stand down!" I feel the words moving past my lips with a horrifying amount of conviction, given the circumstance. "Stand down!"

The crew shuffles back, glancing from me to the armed aliens, as if they can't decide whose wrath they'd rather endure. Dazed and still angry, B'Elanna fights off all offers to help her to her feet again, and then shoots me a glare of real hurt and disappointment.

It's for purely selfish reasons I don't remind her, or anyone else, that we're still missing one critical member of our crew. That she's somewhere, alone, between the devil and the deep blue sea. That's we let her, left her, and now have nothing to do but wait.

Minutes pass in slow, methodical detail. Harry is quietly searching for Seven, but coming to the fast conclusion she never made it out of the duck blind in Cargo Bay Two. Just as well. Seven is always an option unto herself, a back-stop of smooth, arctic intellect and vicious loyalty that makes her possibly the most deadly one among us. If she's afforded an opportunity, she'll take it.

Thankfully Naomi 's here with Neelix, but her mother remains unaccounted for. I hear a whispered assurance that she had been at her battle station when we were boarded, and I'm hoping she's still with Gerron. He's young, but fierce enough Samantha's safety won't be an issue.

The temperature in the cargo bay shifts at the same time the music changes. If it's a cue, we haven't discussed to what. She's flying solo on this one. As much as it pains me to admit, I'm almost thankful for a little mystery in the moment, if only to keep me rooted to the floor.

"We're not moving," Harry says softly. "Why aren't we moving?"

I want to say something pointed and bolstering about the number of tricks Kathryn probably has up her thin little sleeves, but the truth is I don't honestly know either.

"Chakotay." Paris nods toward the two Devore positioned at the door, the larger of which is pressing a hand against his ear, nodding and then muttering indistinctly to the others. Something changes in their posture and, without warning, they leave.

"Either they're disembarking or something is wrong," I say quietly. Then, for all to hear: "I want everyone to stay where they are. B'Elanna, see if you can get access to internal sensors and tell me what's going on."

With something to do, all hint of previous aggravation melts from her face. Before she can reach the consol, the music snaps off and the comm. reactivates.

"All hands, report stations."

I've never been so happy to hear that voice, but at the same time, I've never so terrified of it.

The return ride to the bridge is dead silent. I argue with myself about how and in what order we should exit the turbolift, but it all vanishes when the doors open to the dull glow of silent red alarms.

She's in my chair. Composed, quiet. Almost too still to be real. I don't know what about that unsettles me more – that fact that she's just left of center to her normal position or that she won't meet my eyes.

"Captain?"

She stands, smoothes the wrinkles out of her uniform, and heads for her office. Paris' eyes tack her movements the entire way. It's used to make me insane how he watched her, scrutinized her as if he was performing some variable mathematics where the cant of her hips minus the push of the boot told him everything he needed to know about the days to come.

Now, I know all too well what those quick steps and near imperceptible swing means. Coupled with the sweep her hand makes of her lips just as the door begins to close, I'd say the damage she's taken today may never be fully resolved. We'll dance towards and away from these events for months, even years, before they erupt without warning into some analogous moment.

How many more regions of space do we have to cross, containing how many more malevolent cultures? All it once it seems too much to consider, and rips me back down into the seat still containing the heat of her skin.

Where, then, had Kashyk sat?

My eyes slip daringly to the right.

Of course.

The last bit of stain seems to emanate from everywhere and nowhere. Following an incident, there's always a small degree of it on every ship. Here, doubly so. Still, I imagine it will resolve itself in time, smooth out and forget the source of its upset.

Days pass, then a week. We meet up with our missing shuttles, accept the thanks of the Brenari, and burn away at warp. The Devore, and their Imperium, wick from our aft sensors, forgotten. Activity returns and duty restores to normal.

Almost.

It's just luck that when I find myself falling back into my nightly routine of hot tea and a good book, that this stippling unrest crystallizes into something tangible and real. I close my book. Sit back. Think about it. Rerun the days and nights; each shift since we've left Devore space turned out and over, until I realize I can't find the image I want because it simply doesn't exist.

In more than a week, she hasn't sat in her chair.

She has, of course, been on the bridge, but I can't recall a single moment when she wasn't pacing like some wild, caged thing. Back and forth, rail to rail, sometimes reading a report, sometimes checking off system analysis with her hip hitched to the wall. When she is required to sit, she retires to her ready room.

How odd, I think. But then, it's all too reasonable. There were worse things Kashyk could have done when left alone with her, but this was a violation of subtle context and deliberate approach.

Once I've made up my mind and filled in all gaps that will see her dismissing me back to the drawing board, I wind my way to her door and find her splayed out across the couch, juggling any number of reports.

"Shift's over. Dinner?"

She doesn't look up, shakes her head.

"I was thinking," I continue, "while I was in the cargo bay waiting for relocation…"

Her eyes do come up this time, wincing, but letting me continue on without comment. "I was thinking about the last time I was afraid, truly afraid that we weren't going to make it. Do you know what I came up with?"

Something softens in her expression. Paired with the gentle shake of her head she looks almost like an adolescent – curious, fragile, and just on the brink of real tears.

I hold out my hand, wait. "Come with me?"

There's a reluctance in her face I haven't seen in a while. Cautious, sidelong looks paired with even more cautious smiles. Where's this women been for the last couple years? Dead, I thought. Why she's chosen to resurrect her now… well, I don't even want to know. She appears almost thankful that we're not headed for a messhall, then less so when we enter the holodeck.

"I thought you were a man of your word, Chakotay. I guess I was mistaken."

A chill rattles down my spine. How Tuvok successfully made those words sound so distinctly her speaks to exactly how much familiarity they share. And maybe what aggravated her most about the Devore wasn't so much about their extrasensory loathing, but that they hated him simply because of it.

"I thought we agreed to delete this program?"

"We did," I say, "but I asked B'Elanna to leave it. I never actually ran the full, un-Seska'd version."

Despite herself, she chuckles at the term.

"She had that effect, you know?" I offer. "The distinct ability to put her mark on everything she touched."

"Are you including yourself?" she asks none too gently.

"Most definitely."

Oblivious to our real presence, the simulation continues on around us, and holo-her is firing on the holo-me. The ship rocks hard enough for her to reach for the deck railing.

"What does she think she is going to accomplish?" I demand of holo-Paris.

Seska's voice pulls our attention around to Ops. "We can obliterate them in one shot!"

"Computer, remove characters," she manages before I can. The holo-images of a much younger us shimmer away, leaving the bridge dully quiet. "And is that why we're here?" She turns on me, literally, as well as in tone. "To revisit what Seska almost did to this ship?"

It's not the most pressing thing on her mind, I know, but it's also not that far away from what is.

"Regardless of who she turned out to be," I say, "the part of me that loved her was deeply embarrassed. For a while, it was hard to wake up every morning, put on this uniform, and sit in that chair beside you, knowing what that love had almost cost."

A flicker of dull recognition shifts into a listless smile. She crosses her arms over her chest and releases a long sigh. "Point taken."

"Good." She follows my unfolding arm to the vacancy of my command chair, attention shifting ever so slightly to her own. "Have a seat."

"I'm fine, thanks."

"What are you going to do, Kathryn, stand for the next fifty years?"

She might. She's thought about it, maybe even gone so far as to alter the parameters of her uniform boots to accommodate it. It's cost her a few centimeters height, that pride.

"When he realized the wormhole wasn't there, and the Brenari were gone…" She turns away from me, eyes struggling to climb up from her own entangled grip. "All I could think was, they're dead. Tom, B'Elanna. You. He could have…"

I believe her, as much as she believes herself, but confessions like this one are only countermeasures, meted out to feel reminiscent of what she's actually hiding. Just so, her voice strangles out on either fury or tears. But we've been here before, recently. Not too many months ago she was wearing almost the same implacable expression of self-loathing. I didn't approach her then, but I've had time to review that decision, space to redesign my response into something a little less public than the soft-mutiny it took to resolve in the Void.

"And what would he have done to you?"

Because she needs to consider this, too. She's as much a part of this as we are, no matter what lies she's concocting to avoid it.

As if to prove my point, her response of, "Doesn't matter," comes out breathless and uneven.

"Humor me," I press. "Do you think he would have kept you alive?"

"Yes."

Good. At least we can agree upon that much, and there's no reason to ask what for. "You know, it was bound to catch up with you eventually," I say.

She holds my gaze for an extraordinary length of time. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"You have, on occasion, used more than just diplomacy to get your way." I list out a few lesser known examples, aliens who she courted a little too freely for technology and resources we couldn't continue without. She hears them all, but bristles when I mention, "Gath."

"The Sikarian?" Why she takes issue with that one, I can't guess, but her expression becomes defiant, pulling her soft frown into something closer to disgust. "Please."

Of all of them, he impressed me the least, so I can live with being wrong. At least, about that one. There were a half dozen others she didn't deny at all, which puts us closer to what bothers her the whole ordeal.

"It's not a horrible thing, you know?" I try to pull the slack out of my voice, turn it down to something richer, thicker than the anxious delirium this entire conversation evokes in my head. "You can be quite persuasive when you're being seductive."

Over the years, I've been certain that, under all those sharp, uniformed lines lies an even sharper body. What I've seen of it – bare shoulders, sculpted back, and lissome arms – has helped keep this suspicion alive.

I'm certain of it now.

Each individual muscle in her face goes absolutely still, a comfortable rest that leaves no indication of tension or stain. Simultaneously, her hands relax back to a soft, motionless curl at her sides. Stationary, immobile. A statue poured into hard, emotionless detail.

Lesser men have crumbled under such intensity.

Others have resigned their moral objections to Starfleet and donned a uniform in pursuit of it.

"What are you accusing me of, Chakotay?"

Only surviving, the best way she knew how. Roll back the clock to a time when we were confronted with an impossible journey, and an even more impossible alliance, a time when she wasn't as sure she could trust me. Much less love me.

"Were you in love with him?" I ask.

Because she has to fall in love, at least a little. To make it work. It's subtle, so Starfleet, but that's part of her charm. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that even I was chasing a little more than a ride back to the Alpha Quadrant when I took up this coveted place beside her.

"No."

But, could she have been? It's a fantasy worth playing out, if only because it addresses a topic we haven't touched since her letter from Mark. The point she made then, about the chaotic life of the only starship captain in the Delta Quadrant, isn't something that's going to change, but she's had some time to sit with it. So I'm wondering…

"If he hadn't been a murderous bastard, could you have grown to love him?"

Suspicion now. I suppose I've earned that much, pushing this hard. Forcing her to step down to mere mortal planes with the rest of us and admit: she's lonely as hell and doesn't just want a few hours with an alien she'll never see again.

"Humans aren't meant to be alone, Kathryn, be they starship captains or crewmen assigned to maintenance. You know this." She knows this. We know this. But if she doubts it, there's a few thousand years of archeological history I could show her to support my point. "It's okay for you to need someone in a more intimate capacity."

Trapped, like a moth between window panes, her ego batters around for a second, trying to find a way out. "I know that," she says finally, "but he wasn't that someone."

The answer to the next logical question – who is? – is too big of a risk to my ego as it assumes things we've never come close to voicing. But I didn't come here looking for a reaffirmation of the heat and compulsion we feel in each other's presence. That's always been there. It's here now, calling to the primal parts of both of us that sense danger and feel fear.

I reach for her, a friendly gesture, and one I've made a hundred times before. All at once the last few weeks crash in like a wave, descending like a liquid shadow over her features, dusky but still sharp in its intended trajectory. Hungry. She looks hungry. But it's the depth of that hunger that gives me real pause.

My hand is still hanging in the air between us, palm flat and reaching. She skims the soft part of her torso along its length, reacting as if I had initiated the contact in the first place. Our mutual body heat becomes a flaming maelstrom of shallow breathes and anticipatory silence. She doesn't kiss me. Instead, she traces my mouth with her breath, inhaling my scent and then releasing it in her own pleasant sighs.

It's a skilled maneuver, one that surprises me. Such a proper little thing, spinning all her carefully controlled fiction about protocol, contrasted against the wicked woman now egging me on like a veteran Dabo girl.

This might look like permission, taste like permission. But it's not.

Then I realize: somewhere beyond all that decorum and propriety she wants this, has always wanted this – anger burns a hard line down the back of my neck – and it's only now, after Kashyk, that she finds it within herself to admit she could ever be attracted to someone like me?

A traitor to her Federation.

A criminal.

A liar.

Fine.

If what she really wants is to be fucked across the bridge of her starship…

I might never look at that command chair the same way, but at least she's sitting again. Still, I wonder if the way she's pours herself into it, stretches out lithely like some sated jungle cat, is silent punishment or reminder.

Whatever it is, it's working.

The image of her divested of her colors warms a sick part of me, but I keep the smell of her wet heat and skin set just out of reach of my fully conscious mind. Any closer and I'll buckle, recall the weight of her legs drawn up around me, the hardest part of her nested against me. Remember that, for a blistering few seconds, I saw nothing but the red impression of my teeth on her supple skin, tasted nothing but her blood, coppery sweet and tainted bitter by all the coffee she drinks, and felt nothing but all I am racing into her.

Shifts don't end fast enough these days.

As my birthday draws closer, I have a sinking suspicion that Neelix is gearing up for something I'll most certainly hate. I want her to tell me what it is, but I can't seem to bring myself to be alone with her. Not now.

So then, there we are. Caught in some kind of strange, relative orbit; though who is circling who in the moment is still up for debate.

"Are you ever going to speak to me again?" she asks.

I hadn't even heard her come in, certainly hadn't invited her. Not that I mind. There was a time I dreamt of her entering these quarters with smooth familiarity, if not complete disregard for my privacy. I sit up, offer her something to drink, but she waves it away.

Sits. Considers me with an exacting eye, until finally, she asks, "Well?"

"I was never not speaking to you, Kathryn."

She resigns herself to a more thoughtful tone. "You know, I'll tell myself for years I didn't know what was happening on that holodeck. That I didn't see it coming… but the truth is, I think, that is, I expected it quite some time ago."

"If I didn't know you better, I'd say you have a pretty high opinion of yourself."

It wins me a smile, albeit slight. Eventually, she sobers. "We can't do that again."

"I know."

"And you're…"

She wants me to say I'm okay with it and I will, under one condition. "Promise me something."

Her chin rises a few bare millimeters, waiting.

"When we get home, you and I can…" I chuckle, shake my head. Try again. "We'll take the time to find out if this is worth pursuing."

"That might be a long time from now," she reminds.

"I know. But I'm worth it."

She nods once and stands, letting her eyes drift over the few objects I've collected over the years. Her fingers trace the patterns in the rough fibers of a Mayan blanket hung beside the door. I know that touch now, feel it reflected across my skin. Then again, I'm certain she meant for me to.

"Indeed you are."

There's a sting to her final admission, a fullness and a void. Warming hope intermingled with a cold, crushing reality. We're on the outbound circuit now, moving more and more distant with each passing day. I can't say what will happen in the coming years – who we'll become, what we'll survive – anymore than she can promise when we do make it home, the option I just asked for will be on the table.

Her smell lingers in the air for a full minute after she's gone.

fini