Author's note: 'Workforce', as with a vast number of Janeway related incidents, always annoys me in its failure to address the insanity of having your mind wiped, falling in love - physically and emotionally - and only hugging him and crying a bit at the end when you realise how terrible the whole thing is. There's no way that's all there was to it. It was really intrusive and violating. And I had to look at that.

There is explicit language in this and unsettling themes around consent and violation. Consider yourself thoroughly warned.

So instead of writing something happy, which I set out to do in order to celebrate the auspicious 50th birthday of Trek, I ended up with this.

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. I just enjoy it, and hope others do.

Kudos, comments and critique are most welcome.

"But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed."

– Federico Garcia Lorca

The water rushes into the tub, the sound of it gushing to meet and bounce off of the steel disquieting to her mind. She nearly reaches for the faucet to close up the flow, to close up the noise.

To close up the blood rushing in her veins. The thought stabs at her for a second, cuts through the dark, cerebral realisation of who she is and of what she could become.

Maybe what she has become.

She has to wash the grit, the oil, the dust from her skin. The earthy, thick cloy of the planet. The man. She has to wash that man from her skin. He's on her, like a slick oil which has to be soaped away. Lingering, obtrusive, under her nails and secreted until afterwards, when she thinks she is clean, and it's still there.

Her mind jangles with the concept of it, pulses with a fear she's never felt before.

She has no memory of it. No memory of the intimacy.

She has no solid, easily-recalled memory of intimacy any more. Mark has gone – a lingering, lukewarm anamnesis of passion. Sometimes she feels it, vague and fluttering across her mind; her rear pressed to the edge of the desk in her long-ago apartment, his thick hips between her smaller thighs. Then Justin. Justin is consigned, now, to the realms of disbelief, to the fantastical mind-palace of a woman just left girlhood. The sticky, driven heat of it is all that remains; an oblique sensation. She dreams of him, but as he moves within her his face is blank, featureless.

At first it was disconcerting but now the dream is comforting.

She has another fantasy – it takes numerous forms – but the main player, the protagonist of a wistfulness she almost finds humiliating, remains constant. She calls it up only when she really needs it, and now it is required with an infrequency which makes her gut ache.

She has no energy left for her own passion, or even her own relief. And anyway, that kind of tension is just the order of punishment she deserves.

She wears chastity because it reminds her that she chose this. As if she needs reminding.

She strips off the alien garments – like leather, but not quite, and a metallic blue which she finds confounding it is garishness. It does not deserve a second look as it goes into recycler, churned into atoms that will be better serving Voyager.

Serving its purpose and her purpose.

She's never been afraid of reality, she thinks for a moment. Then she realises she's been afraid of it before – of course she has – but that she's spectacular in her ability to face it.

The reality which greets her, staring back from a mirror she spends time with only fleetingly, is compelling in its horror.

Ribs, jutting out, avian in their delicateness. Hips and pelvis that show, skin stretching translucent over them. Breasts that have lost something, but it's not age; it's the nothingness she's relegated them to that's made them this way.

She looks age in the face, and disappointment, and the futile desire to succeed, and it looks right back at her. Stares her down. Defiant.

And, in its own grotesque way – skating on a higher plane than human consciousness can permit – it is beautiful. It is beautiful like the peace of a corpse, or the quiet of a disaster.

She turns away, her own disgust curling her mouth.

She shuts the water off, and climbs in.

The nodules of her spine rub against the steel of the bath and the bluntness of the pain makes her jerk up before she settles again, finding an angle that doesn't hurt as much.

The concept of intimacy – as abstract as it is for her now – terrifies her. Yet just these past few weeks this body, this vessel, has shared intimacy with a man. And she cannot recall it.

She can't know it. Even if she tries, even if she wants to.

And something about that is utterly invasive. She's been violated by what her body wanted and her mind couldn't know. The detachment splits her apart, renders her appalled by what these hips, this neck, these arms have done.

Another intimacy she can't get back, she's been robbed of. Yes it terrifies her, but she can't begin to explore how badly she desires it.

Not even sex – not the feral, almost-violent, entirely reptilian act of copulation which leaves the residue of intimacy after the brutality of the joining. The juxtaposition of it has never been anything other than evident to her, and it is a knowledge she's relished since the moment she recognised it. The agenda is set, the court begins, and the act is – of its nature – one of invasion. And living, sentient beings welcome it, seek it out. Desire it. She did, once, frequently. With men she loved.

She wants that, but not as badly as she wants intimacy. She wants to be held; with no agenda, with no expectation. Kathryn, she thinks. Kathryn needs to feel the heat of someone else bleeding into her, softening her. Moulding her. She's losing her form. Even her mother, even her sister. Anything. Anyone.

She wants to be held, to feel someone else's skin against hers. To know that there is still value in touch. To value it like she used to.

The last intimate encounter, that she remembers anyway, – she cringes, berates herself – was that hologram.

She fucked a hologram. Then changed him. Or did she change him first, then fuck him?

She can't imagine she was even there, not really. Her fingers might have keyed the demands, her voice forcing the changes, but she can't remember feeling there.

It doesn't matter. After it was over, he added even more of a vaccum – photonic, cold, solid and entirely unreal. There was nothing left in her after he had faded away, returning to the binary codes he lived within, existing only as the bastardised version of Tom Paris' innocent fun. And leaving her, a victim of the act and an absentee of the intimacy.

She nearly fucked Kashyk. She thinks there has to have been something akin to an unearthly advocate keeping her trousers firmly around her waist, despite the ache lingering just below it. She can't imagine the Devoran would have paused to hold her, or to even enjoy being within her. It would have been an act of ownership, and only a fragment of self-preservation had stopped her from letting him carry it out.

And then this man, this kind, decent man from Quarra. She imagines him as a gentle lover, as someone who didn't pull or tug at either her body or her boundaries. Half-darkness, covers pushed to their waists, fingers grappling for a generous hold on each other.

He's been there, deep within, and she cannot know it – not even in the most basic sense. She has no memory of what has been done to her body, but she can catalogue the infinite damage that has been done to her soul.

She has to wash him from her.

She sinks lower in the bath, her head disappearing under the smooth water. Despite the torrid, fluid sting, she opens her eyes to the whiteness of the bubbles and feels the fragrant – too pungent, too much – oil of her bath swirl around her.

Maybe this is why she bathes, waiting for her skin to prune and shrivel, puckered and mottled – almost alien - afterwards. Waits for her bones to scream with the scalding intensity of the water she's learned to withstand as if it is a pleasure. The heat feels like bed covers, like the safety of an embrace. It's not a man's arms – or anyone's arms for that matter – but it synthesises a heat she is forced to believe she has lost forever.

She assesses the extreme capabilities of her lungs. First the lack of air is uncomfortable, then it is painful, then it is nihilistic. It engulfs her, dares her to ingest its heat, to let it gurgle into her blazing lungs. It tightens her breastbone, a halting burn which climbs her throat until she resurfaces, gasping into the ambient air of her ship. Her entire body spasms in reaction, a rage against her sudden desire to cease.

It takes a moment – an infinite one, where she recalibrates her decision to step over the edge - to realise she is no longer alone.

He is there. There is no metaphor. He is literally there, at the foot of her bath.

She acknowledges the distant, tantalizing reality that she should be alarmed by his presence here. He's overridden command codes to steal into her quarters, to steal into this harrowing moment, and it should aggrieve her.

But the heat makes her weak, loosens her sense of time and her sense of propriety.

And she needs to wash that man from her skin. With him here, it might be possible.

He is facing away from her and she doesn't know if he ever looked in the first place. It doesn't matter anyway.

The lines of his shoulders arch downwards, detracting from the broad, aristocratic bearing she's so admired – and occasionally admonished – over the years. He's shouldered more than just the scarlet uniform through this vast, uncharted perdition into which they've been flung. Dauntless at first, their determination is giving way to a despondency she didn't know she was capable of. At their worst, they have managed a viciousness she didn't know they could encroach upon each other.

She wants to reach out to him, to clamber from the tub and press her soaked body against the hewn, exotic darkness of him. Flesh to uniform, then flesh to flesh. She wants to reach up, to make a tactile memento of his tattoo with her fingers.

Sometimes they smart with a lusty urge to do just that, to feel the smoothness marred and inked by a tribalism she wants to understand. For all the science in her, the logic and curiosity coursing through her blood, she doesn't know what she could discover.

That's as tantalizing as it is unnerving.

He says nothing, and he does not look.

But across the space between – the heated, curdling, parched space through which their emotions cannot possibly traverse – she feels his intentions.

And they are intimate, and kind.

Tears: salting, stinging damnation, gather at the periphery of her vision and linger, blurring there, taking her back under the water. The distance between kindness towards her and the body she now occupies has been infinite, so it takes more than a moment for her to recognise it as an act of kindness, rather than one of transgression.

"I am here Kathryn," he says finally, voice lifting a fraction as it ruptures under the burden of emotion.

Then he slides down, to the slickened floor, to sit directly against the bottom of her tub, facing out towards the door and resolutely away from her. No one will come, she knows, but that is beside the point. He's here as a declaration of his loyalty to her, and his friendship. And whatever it is that goes between them, unsaid and unexplored.

She can't say love, because love is too paltry a word. And too daunting.

He is Praetorian in his tenacity, despite his silence. A Praetorian for the ages, a Praetorian for her.

Caligula, she thinks.

He might be the end of her. He might be the ultimate push, the final morsel of herself that she concedes to this gaping emptiness that is growing steadily more concrete as the days pass in a streak of stars. She's naked, he's here. And it would be effortless to yield.

But finally she is safe.

She is safe to reach for the sponge and rub it over her arms, then over her aching gut and down between her thighs – sore, unused, suddenly opened and resuscitated without her mind's consent. She washes the other man away, and he disappears into the swirling burn of the water lapping at her skin.

Now he's gone from her body, what she has done might take its leave of her mind.

He does not look, he does not speak. He does not move. And she is grateful for every moment that his breath is in the same room as hers.

He attends however, with a singlemindedness that is an intimacy all by itself. The clemency he shows, the lack of judgement, the inviolability he gifts her is all there as he faces away from her. It all sits on his shoulders, almost visible, for her to read as openly as she wants.

He's here, as he said, and he's always here.

'Friends', he told her, back on the planet.

And she wants to wonder if there could be anything more, but she knows she can't. So she doesn't.

She drains the water, reaches for her towel, and wraps it around her breastbone before he finally stands and faces her.

There's a reverence in his respect for her destroyed body which makes her want to disbelieve there can be such goodness in the one man. Despite her anger at his honour, she knows not one shard of his regard deserved to be attributed to mockery. It is completely pure and entirely real.

If she was a stronger woman, she would withdraw from the dangerous way he manages to enfold her, to wrap her in the belief that she can do anything when he will pick up the pieces of whatever she's managed to annihilate.

There is a mutual consent to their next steps, but he lingers in the sitting room while she towels the water from her clean, scorched skin. Ivory blooming angry, irritated pink. She wears it well, her pain on the outside.

She slips a shapeless, comforting cotton nightgown over her body. Scrapes her wet hair back with a cursory brush.

A few seconds later he is curling into the back of her, solid and real and full- uniformed, in the darkness of her room and the cold loneliness of her bed. There is no sex in the act, but there is a jarring, warm, terrifying, delicious intimacy to it.

She knows, instantly, that sleep which has been so absent will make a welcomed ingress tonight. She'll let that into her body, and into her mind, and there will be the white-calm she needs to reset her equilibrium.

Her custodian curls around her, pushing her legs up to her chest slightly with his own. They are cocooned, ribboned together. He sets a large and soft and warm hand on the flesh of her stomach, the heat turning frigidness to a sloshing lightness she hasn't known for a long while.

As if in water, her body sinks into elegant sleep.

Before she finally surrenders to the incessant urge to drift, dreamless oblivion tugging at her eyelids as his breath gusts hotly against her neck – breathing, forcing, life back into her - she assures herself he will not be here in the morning.

Tomorrow morning she will have to be the Captain again, and she will have to bank this violation of her mind and her body with the others.

But tonight she can let the pain recede, ebb and flow as it laps around the woman she is but does not know. She can do this in his arms, she is safe to do that here.

And both her mind and her body know it.