Author's note: Ah, so this sprang from a post on Tumblr by Allamaraine who was – quite justifiably so – looking for a bit more depth to Chakotay than 'toxic-alpha-male-who-needs-to-control-Kathryn', which can make an appearance in fanfic. She wanted to see Chakotay struggling with his Maquis/ Starfleet choice, and it still impacting him years later. I tried, humbly, to deliver on it. I hope she likes it.

It infuriates me that his ship was BLOWN to bits but he has a medicine bundle! And while the cultural appropriation is painful, and so ham-fisted, I did have to rectify this with my own head-canon and so the medicine bundle makes a brief appearance. And I had to have a tiny bit of C/J, because it's basically a reflex.

Any kudos, reviews, or indeed critique, are very much appreciated.

Disclaimer: These characters don't belong to me, and nor does any reference or allusion to plots or idea that are recognisably Paramount's or CBS'. I make no gain – monetary or otherwise - from writing these stories.

"But a gentleman may embrace a doctrine without necessarily wearing the garb that goes with it, and he may wear the garb without necessarily comprehending the doctrine." - Zhuangzi

He stares at it, replicated, laying lifelessly – and paradoxically brimming with life - across the tightly folded sheets. It borders on an obscenity; empty and full all at once. Waiting. Beckoning, like a whore – legs open, willing, cunning. And dangerous.

The boots are just under the edge of the bed, peeking out, shining even in the dim light.

He turns away from it, trails his fingers lightly across the bulkhead walls, over the cabinet secured neatly to it, across the empty surface.

What he'll put here – if he'll put anything here – doesn't occur to him.

He opens his leather waistcoat, pulls out the bundle he's been cradling to his side. He holds it tenderly for a moment, and realises it's all he had time to bring before the Val Jean exploded.

Of what little he had, he has nothing left.

That's an abundant theme, a thread of heavy black silk, running through Chakotay's life.

He sets it down and changes his mind instantly, scooping it up again.

He's not ready for this.

He stuffs it under the pillow, pulls the tense sheets loose and into a state of messy relaxation, and then retrieves it from under the pillow again. Setting it in his lap finally – because that's the only way he can feel tethered to the sudden shift in his situation -, he sits down on the bed, the edge the first welcoming seat he's had.

It's comfortable, and he'd forgotten just how comfortable these beds could be. Comfort wasn't an inbuilt specification of the Val Jean. His bunk had been tiny, not made to cater a man who was as tall or as broad, and he'd lived with a constant ache in his neck since the moment he'd boarded her, forced to curl up crudely between the wall and the curve of the bulkhead in order to fit.

Despite the fact he loved her as much as he may have loved any ship, she wasn't a 'Fleet ship.

And it turned out he'd loved her even more for that fact. There was an exoticism in her rebelliousness, her otherness.

He had nursed her through her worst, coaxed her through her insecurities, and now she was blown to smithereens, atoms and fragments floating into the vastness of the Delta Quadrant.

He cares little for the insanity of the emotion, but he is grieving her. Even in this tiny moment, he is grieving her passing as he'd grieve any real love or any real relationship.

But he's grieving something else too, black, huge, settling on his shoulders as a weight he can't possibly carry.

Chakotay had been born a pilot, a Flyboy who was nothing like the Flyboys he'd been forced to compete and contend with at the Academy. He hadn't had the confidence of Riker or the daring of Thomson, his contemporaries. He'd been quiet, circling the periphery of stardom, balancing between out and out ambitions and retaining principles so often tested by the sheer doctrine of Starfleet.

But he had been a damn-good pilot, and tactically brilliant, and a person adept with people.

However those had never been enough to quell the anger and the feeling of a system pushing for perfection over the basics of humanity – fractional at first, only there on the periphery of what he perceived to be perfection. It had been like a marriage riddled with distrust: first disagreement, then despondency, then rage.

Then criminality.

Right now, he's floating aboard his own prison. And now he's its new XO.

As emotion washes over him, he clutches the soft hide of the medicine bundle, stroking over the fur at the edges. It soothes him in the most basic way, giving him something else to focus on.

He breathes – one, two, three.

Then he attempts to dampen the anger, the sheer futility he feels as he finds himself back here.

He doesn't know why he agreed, or perhaps he does, and that's why bile is surging into his throat, drenching his larynx in an acid which climbs into his mouth and swirls around his back teeth.

It's not as basic as her being a powerful woman, and the fact he's got a weakness, just below his gut and just at the front of his brain and just at the bottom of his heart, for those kinds of women.

But he's under no allusion that she played a part in his agreeing to this. That he said 'yes' to her is testament to his urge to follow with a dedication that makes him feel terrified. Instantly, no question. It was a reflex, a surge of his reptilian brain to push the words out from in front of his tongue.

Her eyes are science-blue. And he's sure she's mostly composed of fire.

Fuck, he thinks. And there's not much else to be said on that aspect of his reasoning.

But in that answer too, the propelling force for his breathless 'yes' when she turned the question on him, was the ten year old boy who had looked upon the stars, and a Starship, and fallen hopelessly in love.

There's a long-buried dream, built around heroes and the worship he'd been inclined to.

But they had been false Gods, these Kirks and Sulus and men wielding phasers, going boldly where he was desperate to venture.

He'd learned of the illusion when the organisation - and the principles to which he'd applied himself with a rigour worthy of an ancient priest - had allowed the wholesale slaughter of his people at the hands of the Cardassians.

He'd been a grown man when his innocence had been ripped from him, that irrevocable moment when a child witnesses the duplicity of its first love, humiliated in the face of the realisation that the relationship had always been desperately one-sided.

He'd loved blindly, with a fanatical zeal, and been used relentlessly because of that devotion.

There's something pitiful about it and something laughable. He's done and felt both emotions, sometimes all at once, when he's forced to recall his past.

He remembers - with a dull recollection of a pain he knows he'll never recall as vividly as it was supposed to be felt - the ink coursing into his eyes, blue-black, clouding, and mingling with tears. The needle burning across his temple, and the whiskey whispering lustily through his veins.

In the ashes of what was left - the bodies of his people laid out row by endless row across the blistered, smouldering grass - he had sat astride a boulder carved with the symbols he'd grown to despise and the artist had set to work on his temple, holding him as the child he was.

Skin prickling with a trauma running so much deeper than the tattoo, the invasion of the ink coursing through his blood – setting his ancestry alight - , he'd settled at his desk to compose his resignation.

It had been easy then to shed the vestments of his trade, to slide the scarlet from his shoulders and leave them at his feet. He'd worn the colour of blood, but he'd have no more on his hands – vicariously or not.

It had been cathartic, to choose righteousness, to turn back to look once more at the gleaming insignia and see it for the falsity it was. He'd gathered his pips, set them neatly upon the resignation, and felt them go from his blood.

Traded for: leather in the place of replicated cotton, scuffed boots – he misses the clean odour of polish still – and a ship that was ancient, creaking, and right. A new faith.

And a crew of dispossessed misfits, who had worn their anger like cloaks – covering, consuming and tripping them at every turn.

"Father," he speaks into the humming of the distant warp core, thrust into the present by the pain of the recollection, "I've messed up."

It's an underwhelming sentiment and he gets no answer.

Not that he's come to expect one.

His faith is stretched already, thin and transparent, because he's reneged on his promise to himself.

He sucks a purified, engineered gulp of air in. Then he sits the bundle close to his hip, pressed to his body.

It's all he can do, he tells himself.

He ignores the honeyed voice that slips into his head, which welcomes him back, soft as the gentle thrum of the ship, and tells him this is where he belongs.

It's seductive but empty.

And he listens anyway, regardless of how hollow the promise is.

He toes his boots off, tucks his socks into them.

It takes ten minutes to gather the strength to slide the waistcoat off and to pull his shirt over his head, and then another five to lift his hips off and slide the slacks off.

It takes half an hour for him to pivot his head to look at it, still lying beside him, again.

Black, sleek, there. Scarlet.

Beckoning.

His gut clenches and, tentatively, his fingers are coaxed by the absurdity of the situation to touch the black material.

He's touching a promise made, and broken. He's caressing the loss of one set of beliefs and the gaining of another.

He's touching his past as a real, tangible thing, and he's really not sure if he can go back to it, without losing a piece of himself.

But, and the irony makes him smile grimly, he's made his bed – he's sitting on it – and he better get ready to lie in it.

First the turtle neck. It's not an irony, either, that it might as well be a noose.

His neck tightens and sweat dribbles from behind his ear and disappears into the greyness.

It's freezing in here, and the sweat is a manifestation of his shame because it's certainly not a result of being warm. If anything, he's chilled to the bone as he considers what he's doing – redressing, costuming himself, in everything he's professed to hate.

What is he, if he's not a traitor?

Maquis, no, not quite. Starfleet, no, not entirely.

A false god – or a worshipper whose faith has fled in both directions simultaneously, splitting him somewhere between heathen and zealot.

It's as safe as armour though, against his skin, and the rightness of it is exactly why it is so wrong.

He stands, pulls the trousers from the jacket, and slides them over his hips.

Then the jacket.

As natural as flexing, his fingers find the seal and slide it up over his chest, no hesitation. It's as seamless as breathing.

And it fits perfectly.

He turns to the mirror, looks at himself, and lets the breath he's been confining to his chest rush out through his cheeks.

It's an image he's missed, even if his body is on fire with its own perfidy.

His fingers reach up to the tattoo, and the jarring reality of this ancestral geometry against the equally sharp lines of the 'Fleet strikes him like a blow. He almost reels back.

They don't match, and the clash is cymbals shattering the silence he's been maintaining in his brain, the silence he's had to enforce so he can avoid the reality of what this choice really means. There's a cacophony, a hymn underscored by the bass of the warp-core, as his guilt translates into the white noise of an orchestra discordantly warming up.

Here's a man, standing in front of him, who's chosen to follow blindly. The mirror offers someone he can't possibly recognise anymore.

He almost strips it off but his fingers won't move. They stay, welded to the lines of the tattoo, and he stares and stares and stares.

He doesn't move for what feels like hours.

Then it goes, and there is a calm he can breathe again.

After people make their worst choices, there has to be a moment of acceptance – the sinner coming to accept the inevitability of his own decision.

Acceptance comes far more quickly than he expected, violating him, robbing him of the guilt and locking it away in a place where he knows he will only recall it at his weakest, when he is most inclined to self-abuse. He pictures the acceptance as something physical; seeping into his body, the colour of violet, as he stands in front of the Starfleet mirror.

This journey will be infinite and he knows, as it goes on, he'll open that place, deep in his conscience, and take this decision out and examine it like it's a grotesque curio.

And it'll be a relic of a crime he's committed against himself, a symbol of his own misery.

He doesn't look forward to those moments he's going to, inevitably, be faced with as their journey progresses. In those moments, the urge to scrape the uniform off of his skin, to rip the rank bar from his collar and tear the badge from his chest, will be as overwhelming as any urge he's ever known.

But then the urge for the stars will come to him, and conquer him.

And he'll submit himself to the emptiness of their doctrine.

"Commander?"

She might be made of fire, but that voice is certainly made of steel.

And if it wasn't so demanding, so laced with the superiority those Fleet brats are born with, he might find it grating.

Instead he finds comfort in it.

It takes a second to realise she'd addressing him. His fingers dance over the badge on his chest, and he takes a perverse pleasure in tapping it softly.

Commander, is she sure?

Because he sure as hell isn't.

"Captain?"

"Report to my Ready Room," she orders, "We need to get started."

He looks at himself once more and knows that whatever he's started, there's no stopping it now.

And that the man in the mirror is more sinner than he'll ever be sinned against.

-0—0—0—0—0—0—0—0—0—

He peels this new uniform from his body, sets it aside on the huge bed, and turns from the glittering lights of the Bay to the mirror. He'd come in here to simply change into a fresher uniform, but the paralysing guilt that sometimes ambushes him seems to have decided to mount an attack.

He keeps the turtle neck on, his fingers settling on the newly gleaming pips for a second, stalling there and clouding the metal with the heat of his hands.

All restored, all forgiven, his Maquis days consigned to a blip on the otherwise virginal record under his name at Starfleet.

But contrition isn't to be found as easily, he thinks.

In a moment that horrifies him, and a realisation that makes him question if there's any moral fibre left in him, he is relieved – not grateful, and certainly not happy, but relieved -they are dead, so he doesn't have to face them and show them what he chose, what he decided he should do. There is no Maquis Council to stand up against and apologise to. They are gone. His friends are gone and so he will make no account to them, he won't have to explain.

It's a cold, vicious thing to think but it pushes its way to the front of his consciousness and sits there, immovable until he looks upon it.

A fraction of him, however despicable, is relieved that he won't have to confront it head on.

And that is grotesque.

And then the stronger, more solid part of him, wants to explain it to all of them. Sometimes, in the nightmares that silently plague him, he tries to explain.

But the words don't come out. He can't make lies to tell, not even in his dreams.

His fingers ghost up towards his own tattoo, the ink faded into fine lines he's collected over the last seven years.

When they lie - bodies pressed in the heat of the sheets and stacked against the insomnia of their shared past - she likes tracing it with her fingers, like a curiosity she's studied in depth, but will never fully comprehend.

Everything has changed, including him, and it's bizarre to think they came back to a world where he was once a fugitive, and now he's a lauded officer. A Captain of the 'Fleet no less.

And all he had to give up were his morals, the moment he said yes. It was a startlingly easy transaction.

It was so simple to just say 'yes'.

It was easier, much easier than he'd ever imagined, to come full circle and to fulfil the dreams of the boy he'd once been.

He's softer than he used to be, filled out, more whole, and not just in the literal sense. The peace the uniform brings – has brought - is unsettling to him, and it's also completely comforting.

But he hasn't forgotten it, and he won't ever forget it. To forget isn't an option.

But to live with himself, he has to shut it away. And at times, living with it has been impossible.

"You need to get ready."

That commanding voice, rendered from steel but tempered with a gentleness she reserves just for him, a gentleness borne over many years, says.

He turns to her, where she stands at the door.

Her hip is pressed against it, her arms are crossed, and she's watching him. The new design suits her - though she wears everything with a unique arrogance, as if it's lucky to be draped on her body.

And it is.

"Sometimes I feel guilty for saying yes," he tells her, voice quiet and completive, not sure what she will say.

She understands him instantly.

She smiles patiently, gently, "I know."

And she does. If anyone understands what it's like to re-learn yourself, and re-define your parameters when your moral compass is challenged, it's her.

That's why they're here, now, their relationship sharing the same inevitability of the sunrise and sunset. It took a while to get here, but the conclusion had been written up the moment the Array sucked them into their future.

They're both sinners - born from different doctrines, but as equally as guilty of their crimes. Hers: an unbreakable single-mindedness which stripped her of everything she'd once been. His: the decision to sever his connections to his righteousness for a dream he couldn't help but pursue.

And if anything, they deserve each other.

She tips her head to the side, cocks an eye brow.

"We've suffered enough. You shouldn't dwell on it."

It's not a suggestion, it's a command.

And it's one which lets relief settle and sing in his gut. He nods.

"I mean it Chakotay," she holds her hands out to him.

He will always battle it; the decision to renege on the high ground he'd once been proud to mount, Maquis rebel and despiser of the Federation. Sometimes it's a battle he loses, guilt waging a war in him so fierce that it blinds him with its severity, but not today. And not all the time.

He breaths in, then touches the pips at his neck. They are cool, clean, hollow. But they are as permanent, and as jarring, as the tattoo across his temple.

"I love you," she says suddenly, emphatically.

"God knows why."

She rolls her eyes.

"Because misery loves company Chakotay."

Her dark, dangerous laugh fills the room and she opens her arms, and he lets himself be wrapped in her. Her hands come up to his chest, settle there, over his heart.

And her claws fit, and she is something much more than the Captain who asked him, and much more powerful than the woman who captivated him. She's small but infinite, demanding a fealty he's submitted to only once before, and she is a symbol of everything he professed to hate.

But he can't hate it. And god knows he's tried.

There's a boy in him, staring up at the stars from a scorched planet, brow furrowed with grief and ink, willing the 'Fleet he loves to goodness. Willing it to be as right as he always thought it could be.

The cotton of her uniform is warm against his body. Soft. Easy.

It's easy to be a sinner with a sinner by his side.

And anyway, he had never stopped missing the feel of Starfleet against his skin.

I hope you enjoyed it. Please review if you can.