Author's note: I love the Beyer novels, in case you haven't gathered, but Chakotay's re-telling of THIS night in the novel 'Full Circle' leaves a lot to be desired as far as I'm concerned. Finally J/C fans get what they want, and boy is it vague.
Here's my attempt to rectify that.
Any reviews, favourites, criticism etc. are greatly appreciated.
Thanks: to the one and only Mia Cooper, who always encourages me and improves on my terrible typos.
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' or indeed Kirstin Beyer's and her publisher/ agent or any other affiliates. I make no gain – monetary or otherwise - from writing these stories.
"It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal." ― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Midnight comes upon them, creeping into the depth of the station as if it's real. There's no time here, not really, but she's still on the clock.
She doesn't want to be but that never matters.
She never did think these quarters would see her again, certainly not like this, and certainly not as listless as she is now.
Decan is lingering somewhere, readying the shuttle, and she has to get ready yet she can't find the impetus. The warmth is too comforting, and the abated passion is still threatening to spark.
His fingers slide delicately across her abdomen, up and across her ribs, graze the underside of her breast. She is curved into his body, pale skin pressed against olive, sweat cooling now, the smell of them settling across his quarters.
They used to be hers.
He hasn't spoken, and nor has she. She's frightened that whatever they say won't be enough or, even worse, it will be too much.
"I don't want to go," she whispers it, admitting it almost as impossible as she imagined it would be.
The words rattle around her mouth, tasting bitter, before she lets them out.
"Then don't go," he says, and there's no humour in it.
-0-
She only agrees to meet him because there's a time limit on it, a set number of hours she'll spend before they both have to depart. And, in truth, the prospect of a meal, cooked by Chakotay, and quiet dinner conversation, is appealing in its nostalgia.
Her shuttle curls around the massive structure, and Voyager gleams – newly refurbished and retrofitted – and it hurts her heart just a little.
"Isn't she lovely Decan?"
Her aide merely raises a Vulcan eyebrow and says, "She is fit for purpose, Admiral."
He's not as poetic as she'd like, but it's also amongst his finer qualities. Plus he knows just how to replicate the right cup of coffee.
"I've missed her," she says, more to herself than anyone else.
What else – who else - she's missed, goes unsaid.
They dock readily, and Captain Willis (the commander of this starbase) welcomes them but will not linger. She likes that about Willis, he know how to make himself scarce.
"You're here to see Voyager, Admiral?" he asks, holding his hand out for her to step from the transporter, understanding what it means to love a series of bulkheads and relays and perfectly crafted engineering choices as well as she does.
"I am," she lies, partly.
"Well-"
"Admiral," a voice behind her greets, and she feels a smile tug at her mouth.
She turns.
"Captain Chakotay."
He looks good. He still has a solid, hulking body but there's definition in him where he'd lost it at the latter end of their journey. She'd lost it herself too, and she's been spending hours on the holodeck trying to reverse time.
It isn't exactly working.
"You've grown your hair," he says rather blandly, but his eyes are so intent on her face that she feel suddenly self-conscious with Willis there.
The other man seems to feel it too.
"If you'll excuse me," Willis nods deferentially to her.
"Captain Willis," she tries to sound as if she isn't lost, but she can't tear her eyes from Chakotay.
Willis goes, and then Chakotay holds his arms open to her in the middle of the transport bay.
She takes only one or two steps, then falls into them. And she feels small and insignificant and safe within his arms. He smells like the past; the stolen dinners, the moments of weakness she allowed herself.
The mistakes.
She touches the pips on his collar, moving her hand from his shoulders to do so.
"You've grown a pip," she whispers softly, then stalls when she feels his kiss on her forehead.
-0-
His kiss is bruising, demanding, as his fingers weave through the hair he's just pulled loose of its confines. He lifts her from her seat at the dinner table, his arms firm on her shoulders as he compels her, without breaking the contact of their mouths.
He speaks, darkly, against her lips.
"Kathryn, if we need to stop…"
She presses herself into him, letting the definitions of need and want dance into an oblivion beyond her understanding.
"No."
She feels the dense bulkhead against her back, and her own hands curving around his shoulders to the hot skin of his neck. Her fingers slide into his hair as his mouth demands more from hers, and she gives in because she's never wanted to capitulate to anything more than she wants to submit to this.
His hands slide over her rear and onto the backs of her thighs, and he lifts her up and against him.
She locks her legs around his pelvis.
Too many layers.
"Uniforms…" her voice, not her own – breathy, desperate, full – demands.
-0-
"You should take that jacket off," he touches her shoulders as the doors slide closed with a gentle hiss behind them.
She looks around, her fingers thoughtlessly following his instructions. These quarters – her home for so long – don't feel as alien as she had envisioned they would.
The realisation comes with a tangible sense of relief.
"The place looks good," she says, turning to him.
"I try…" he nods towards the table.
She feels cast back into the past as she looks upon it.
There are candles everywhere, across the linen-clad surface and replicator. Set with old silver and crockery she left behind to him because she didn't know how to take it with her. The long wine flutes remind her of so many shared, disputed, lost drinks across billions of stars.
She shrugs the jacket off and he catches it and sets it along the couch at the viewport.
She watches him.
"And you're doing a good job," she says softly.
"I'd hoped you'd think so," he turns and motions with a fine hand to the table.
He moves away and pulls the chair out for her. His hands tremble, and it occurs to her he may be nervous.
She doesn't know what it says about her that his anxiety makes her feel better.
She takes the seat, and is quiet as he moves to the replicator and keys in whatever he plans to cook for her. She doesn't ask what it is; she trusts his culinary skills enough to satisfy her, and it's so pleasant just to be here that she can't bring herself to curiosity.
"You've grown your hair," he says into the gentle silence, and it's the second time he's said it.
She laughs a little as she reaches for the decanter and fills their glasses.
"I have."
He turns to her, though he stays beside the replicator. His face is cast in shadow, and the anonymity it affords him seems to give him honesty too.
"I was…surprised, when you cut it all those years ago."
The decanter clinks against the wine glass, loosening in her hands, as she registers the oddity of his words.
"Surprised?"
She looks at him questioningly.
"It was impractical," she excuses, feeling a little accused.
He smiles – that half-embarrassed, half-irritated smile that she hates and loves in equal measure.
"It was literally kindling," he shakes his head and turns to the dish as it emerges in the recess of the replicator. "How is that impractical?"
"I got lazy," she shrugs. "I wanted ten more minutes lying in bed…awake, mind you."
He smiles and brings their starter to the table.
"Goats cheese salad," he explains, setting it down.
She doesn't spend time on manners, because she hasn't eaten all day.
"Hungry?"
She nods because she can't speak.
"Do you eat properly?"
She swallows and grins lopsidedly, "Don't…"
"Surely your aide makes you eat."
"He's a Vulcan," she takes a drink. "It's only logical."
He laughs from behind his own glass.
They eat for a while, the silence tranquil and light, with a quality of rarity she has missed so profusely it almost winds her.
Laterally, it wasn't at all like that.
The comfort had gone and the silence had become dense, impenetrable.
"I was distraught, actually," he says as he pushes his plate aside.
It takes her a moment to understand, and she doesn't really comprehend the severity of what he's saying because it feels so long ago.
"My hair?"
He nods.
"It was always so…" he shrugs. "You…we lost –"
He gropes for the words she knows will hurt, and he can't reach them in time to say them, so she gives him them anyway. She deserves them.
"I closed myself off…I grew cold. You associate that with my cutting my hair?"
It's ludicrous that she knows this, and that even a fragment of her can see his point.
He nods agreement, but she sees embarrassment on his face.
"You're linking two things which are unrelated," she says without anger.
But it is full of regret.
"Am I?"
"You are," she whispers.
-0-
"You're not cold," he murmurs in her ear, his fingers winding up to pluck blindly at the pins that are doing a valiant job of trying to keep her hair, now chaotic, from completely falling. "I didn't meant that."
He unfurls it, and the pins drop with tinny little rings to the floor.
"I know," she slides his jacket off, and it joins the pins and her boots and his trousers.
His fingers tangle in her freed hair, and he kisses his way from her jaw line to her ear and along the curve of her hairline. His mouth is hot and desperate as it returns to hers.
"I don't want you to think I'm cold," she drops her head into his shoulder, breathes the smell of him: earthy and warm.
Like the smell of summer or heat.
"I want to show you I'm not..." she continues, with blinding ineloquence, into the skin of his neck.
He shivers under her mouth and presses her further into the bulkhead.
She doesn't feel any fragments of ice now, it's gone.
He promised her Venice, once.
This feels so much better.
"I know you're not."
-0-
"I am sorry it upset you," she stands to clear their plates – a habit of so many dinners past – but he stalls her.
"I don't mean to ask you to apologise Kathryn," he says sincerely. "I just remembered how different you were – I was – at the start. And just because we're different, doesn't mean we're somehow…less as people. I just remember how hard it was to watch you – us – change."
He doesn't say what he wants to, and perhaps he can't. But she hears the words beneath the surface. And they hurt; needling, precise, staying in her skin even after they've been uttered.
Her face reddens and tears prickle behind her eyes, burning and sore.
She watches him as he calls up their main course, and she is silent before the words fill her mouth to bursting and she can't wrangle them into her control.
"Was there ever really 'us'?"
He stops as he grasps the dish, his body suspended in motion, and he doesn't turn to face her.
She realises he can't.
"I thought there could be, yes."
He shrugs, girds himself, and turns to put the dish on the table.
"This wasn't the night you were hoping for, was it Chakotay?"
He stalls as he leans across to place it in the middle of the table, and her question seems to loosen the knots of tension that have suddenly sprung up.
"I suppose I didn't think it was. It turns out I do want to have this conversation, Kathryn," he looks at her, and there is such sincerity in his eyes that she has to look away. "I am concerned you don't want to."
She traces the linen under her fingers, watching as they make patterns she doesn't understand.
"It's not a matter of wanting…I don't know if I can," she confesses, her voice weak and immaterial in the heaviness of the room.
His voice is tight as he replies, but he battles – something she has admired about him, the urgency he has to self-immolate as a martyr of his truth – through, and he begins serving dinner onto both of their plates.
"Has it really come to that?"
She looks up finally as he asks.
The sadness in his eyes, laced through with despondency, renders her breathless. It's like being jolted awake, heart racing over a nightmare you can't recall, and trying to calm yourself against terrors you cannot possibly combat.
"I don't know," she says softly. "I should hope not. It's simply…"
"Nothing simple about it," he says, and there is anger just under the surface of the control he's trying to manifest.
There is silence as she pushes the vegetable biryani around on her plate.
Then that burning question, corrosive and painful. A question that's changed the form and shape of what she thought of him, and what she thought her heart was capable of sustaining.
She shouldn't have to ask.
"Why Seven?"
"Because I wanted to hurt you," he says softly, with no malice at all.
Well at least she had known that much. And by all that was gracious, he had been entirely on the mark. Phaser-precision with his utterly unforgivable decision.
She wonders if he could see her bleeding.
"You hit your mark."
She looks him directly in the eye. He doesn't look away, but it isn't defiance. And she has no right to harbour fury for his choice. It was a calculation which paid off.
"And I've never felt worse," he says.
Everything in her shatters.
-0-
The feeling of his mouth isn't just a novelty, it's an entirely new sensation. He keeps his mouth on her neck as he sidles her along the wall to the door of his bedroom. Then she is against the jamb, her spine curving indelicately away from it to press her chest into his hands.
He touches her through layers of fabric and her skin prickles to an intensity she didn't know she had left.
She moans and he smiles and the feeling is inescapable.
He prises her undershirt – a rich maroon, in line with the new uniforms – away from her body and over her head.
"Yours," she demands, fingers tugging at his to pull it over his head, shoving it down over his arms where it jams on his wrists.
"For Christ…" she huffs, tugging it more firmly.
He laughs gently in her ear.
"You're being impatient," he admonishes, shaking it off of his hand so it lands with a soft rustle on the floor.
"I…think…" he tips her head back, pushing on her jaw with his fingers to expose her skin to his mouth, and her answer flees.
When he bites softly at the juncture between her neck and shoulder, she nearly weeps with relief.
"Seven years…" she tries to say.
He kisses the rest of it away.
-0-
"Seven years, and then you did that…"
"I know what I did was wrong-"
"No it wasn't," she interrupts, but she does not draw her eyes away from the linen that's creasing under her tight fingers. "You were entitled to a relationship. I just resented it…"
"With the one person I knew would kill you," he says. "I used her…and I'm not proud of it. I apologised to her but never to you."
As shattering a revelation as that should be, all she feels is a dull ache.
"And she stroked your ego?"
The rancour sounds diluted as it comes out, but he flinches as she says it.
"I…yes."
She lifts her head finally.
"I ended it with her before I hurt her," he says, though it lacks the surety he's usually so used to conveying. "I tried to wait-"
"I never asked you to wait," she bites, angry and sore.
Suddenly his jaw hardens.
"The fact you think it was a choice –"
"Don't…"
Silence descends, smothering the anger that is sparkling, now, in the air between them.
"You shut me out," he murmurs, brushing his hand over his mouth as if he's lied.
Nothing more true has been uttered between them than those words.
"I had to."
"No, you didn't. You were never alone."
-0-
"I don't want to be alone."
They come out of their own volition as her back collides with the shelves beside his bed and his fingers fumble for the seal at the hip of her trousers.
"Here…" she directs his fingers and he finds the top and pulls it apart.
"You won't be," he vows, pushing them down over her thighs and away from her body.
"I don't – "
"Trust me," he urges, his fingers brushing over the cotton of her underwear, grasping her gently but fully, and she moans at the contact.
"Always."
He pulls back and smiles at her, more daring in his movements as her breath snags in her larynx and he pushes the material aside.
His fingers are inside her, and the sensation is dizzying.
-0-
She feels suddenly bewildered about this conversation. Its very nature is fruitless; there's too much blame they can attribute to themselves, to their decisions and reticence and sadness in which she's wallowed and she suspects he has too.
She tells him the truth, even though it nauseates her to be so open, so exposed, when there is nothing left.
There is nothing left.
"I know I wasn't alone," she whispers, "But I wished you would leave me."
His smile is not of this world, it is pitiable and agonized.
"Do you know how difficult that was, how impossible?"
She shakes her head.
"We promised once, to try…"
She doesn't intend for it to happen, but her laughter is bitter and acrid as it escapes into the tension.
"And you want that still?"
He is hurt by her cruelty and it shows in his dark eyes, which flash with pain. She immediately regrets it, but she's spent so long warring with her desire to simply let go that she can't, now, cease clinging to her urge to get as far from him as she possibly can.
"You were the one who gave up on us," he says, and his voice is smarting with anger. "Long before I did."
What she wants to come forth is accusation after accusation, ripe with blame and stinging with vitriol. She wants him to suffer the indignity she did when suddenly he left her side, and chose nothingness over just a little. Distance over a feigned sense of closeness.
She wants to touch him, and she wants it to hurt.
So she stills her body, feels the disappointment of the years gather in her bones.
And what she wants to come forth doesn't come, instead honesty does.
Sometimes that's worse.
"Yes, I did."
There is catharsis in it, to be brutal about her decisions as much as she can be.
She gave everything up. Laughter. Him. Then herself.
"I don't want to become her," she says, and she looks him in the face. "And I'm afraid I'm going to become her."
"Then don't," he whispers.
-0-
He falls with her into the bed, whispering wickedly against her skin about what he will do.
She'd known he had a filthy mouth anyway, but that one day it would be for her had died somewhere in their journey home.
She doesn't know how to answer, because that woman left so long ago, so she just listens and hopes she'll be able to reciprocate one day.
He sits back for a moment, shirks off his undervest so the only thing between them is a pair of black underpants. She slides backwards over the cotton of his bed, so her head comes into contact with his pillows.
She watches him as he watches her, her legs falling listlessly open.
"You're beautiful," he says, and the sincerity of it splinters the animalism that's come from years of want suddenly becoming action.
She turns her face away, because she can't bear how wrong he is. She's not beautiful, not anymore.
She's hardened with age.
He leans forward, over her, warm breath ghosting over her thighs and stomach and ribs and breast, and then he touches his fingers to her cheek and makes her face him.
"You're beautiful," he says, and kisses her forehead. "And even if you become her, I will love you. Because I've loved you at your worst…and I always will."
She doesn't answer – she doesn't know how.
-0-
The silence stretches out, the biryani untouched, and then he gets the confidence from a reserve that, in her, is depleted.
"I still want you…" he says. "I know I shouldn't, and I know that it would be hard. But I still want us."
His candour is limitless, and the simplicity of what he says dances on a spectrum between creating maddening joy and insane terror in her. It translates to breathlessness which tightens her chest and her mouth.
"I want to try."
He says it as if it depletes all of his energy, and she understand why. Admitting something which leaves anyone so grossly open to rejection is horrifying.
For the first time, in a long time, she doesn't have to calculate what her words will do.
"I do too."
-0-
"I want you," she manages, but he won't leave his exploration of every inch of her.
The woman who lives in her skin, so used to control and dominance, finds his determination infuriating. The other woman, the woman who's emerging – pale and full of trepidation – into this new world, enjoys it with a vague recollection of what it is to be loved.
He kisses his way along her arms, his mouth sucking on the pulse point at her wrist.
"Chakotay…"
"Kathryn," he answers with a smile, and she can see it tastes new on his tongue.
She supposes it is.
"You're in my bed," he laughs, and the laugh is loud and booming and wonderful.
Once, she used to laugh like that too.
So she tries, and it works. She laughs openly, letting tears that are half-joy and half-misery spill over her cheeks, and he pulls her into his arms and promises her Venice.
She'd almost forgotten.
They laugh until the joy fades, and in its place is desire and lust and need and carnality.
He pulls her thighs up and around his body, pelvises flush and ready, the smell of them making her delirious with the newness and rawness of it all.
Then he is within her, and he switches so he is under her and she is on top and she has to dig her nails into his chest to achieve balance.
He smiles, groans.
"You have to…" he explains, incoherently. "I won't last if I set the pace."
She nods and drops her head to kiss his mouth, chin, dimples, and tattoo. She moves slowly at first, afraid of how much she can take, but the sensation is too much. His fingers move to touch her, and she forgets the material world and remembers why she loved him, why she loves him still.
Because he knows her.
-0-
"I know you, and I know you're afraid," he stands and comes behind her, and his hands find the slither of skin between her hair line and high neckline and trace across her skin.
She shivers.
"Ten months," he whispers, and begins unpinning her hair.
She knows, suddenly, he's wanted to do that for years.
"But we can have tonight, then we can meet in Venice."
"Venice…" she agrees, eyes sliding closed at his touch.
There's no point in pretending that their duties don't come first, but there will be room – she'll make room, because if she doesn't there will be nothing left of her, and nothing to give – and they will work at it.
Despite how hard it will be.
"Promise you'll be there," he grips her shoulder, one hand still coursing through her longer hair, and the touch isn't sore as much as it is demanding.
"I promise."