Author's Note: For the VAMB 2014 Secret Summer exchange for TB. My prompt was simply "J/C" which I took to mean do your thing with impunity. So I did. Dark, of course, I take it you know what page you've come to.

Rating: R for what it not said alone.

Abscond to Flight

You pin your pips to your stiff new collar.

One.

Already, your hands are shaking.

That's because your coffee is strong enough to beat back a Hirogen hunting party, Kathryn, you can hear in the smothering silence. And you know the shaking has nothing to do with coffee, and less to do with the stimulants you forced the EMH to dispense, against regs he might – and did – add. Still, the old joke makes past smiles chase a few of those demons from your glassy-blue eyes.

It's all right, about your hands. Even if they won't stop shaking, as long as you don't hold them above the podium, no one will notice.

A huff of disgust escapes your barely open mouth. Who are you kidding? Everyone will notice. Outside, the press is locust-thick. The vultures are circling, as Tom would say, and you know that to be true. Aren't they always now?

They're going to stare at you, through you, interrogate you, take pictures of you. Scrutinize your face for the invisible cracks they've been trying to pry their way into for some time.

I did what had to be done, you're going to tell them, if they ask. They are going to ask. You couldn't hide out in your new apartment forever. They've known it all along, and so have you.

Two.

Oh, it's bad. Shadow fingers of blurred motion shroud your hands. You might actually have to eat something before going out there. The idea makes you physically sick, but a standard antiemetic makes you even sicker. The smell it releases. Subtle to most, but belting like a drunken Klingon to you.

Here, Captain. This will help with the nausea. The unseen medic's hand on your neck, and not the medicine, made you turn and retch. They'd stopped touching you months ago; you were no longer used to it.

Three.

Time heals all wounds, as you've told your counselor, former crewmembers and yourself. Even those soul-deep wounds you're still working on from twenty-five years ago, right?

Right.

It's been five years since you last put these tiny circles of metal onto your collar, but even shaking, you don't miss a millimeter of precision. They're in perfect order.

Four.

Your hand stops shaking, but there's odd, vibratory movement in the reflective alloy, and belatedly, you realize this explains the appearance of steadiness in your arm. Your whole body is shaking now.

There's no ritual left to hide behind. You have to leave the quiet, temperature-controlled walls and the replicator that is doing you no good whatsoever. Still, it's what you know. This is what you can control, and these walls are as vital to your structural integrity as physical bulkheads are to a starship. They peeled off your armor and left you shriveled, helpless, a newly-emerged maggot with no external shielding whatsoever. Easy lunch for a circling hawk. Or vultures.

Once, you knew how to do this. Once, you flew higher, further, longer than any of them could ever fathom. Now you crawl, grounded, wingless. Wriggling along in a slime of your own broken miasma.

You should never have agreed to this. It's too soon. You can't.

Panic is paralyzing. You spent forty-five years refusing to succumb to it, but you know its salt, pepper, and adrenaline flavor intimately now. You don't even see how colorless your knuckles go as they grip the sink below for grounding. It's impossible not to feel the hard constriction of your pupils, though, or the iced sweat dotting your forehead.

A chime at the doors bolts you out of your misery, stopping your pounding heart cold. You aren't so good with unexpected sound yet, even half-expected sound. The cold sweat intensifies.

"Captain?" A not-so-young, not-so-eager voice is calling you through the solid doors.

He drew the short straw, then. Poor boy. Man, Kathryn. He's a man now, you almost hear the gentle rebuke reminding you.

"Captain, they're ready for you."

You slide the hypo out of your pocket, holding it against your bony neck. The you that voice is speaking to would have hated this, but the you holding the hypo has no choice. Chemical therapy is crucial to your neurotransmitter recovery, as the EMH assures you in the middle of the night, many times. And you know that there is nothing in the swarm outside that you can handle raw. Not tonight. Handle it, however, you must. What someone calls your damnable pride refused to let the admiralty arrange a private transport for you to the ceremony, and now you've got to make it through the feeding frenzy intact.

The artificial calm that overtakes you in one hiss is instantaneous, and hard not to melt into.

A second rap sounds, faltering this time, and now you've made the boy wait for far too long. Man, Kathryn.

"I'm coming, Harry."

And somehow, some way, you are.

The EMH knows what he's doing: the meds are good. Somehow you're no longer shaking, are the woman who beat the Borg again, the woman who changed an entire timeline to bring one hundred and thirty-seven of her people home.

You only have to be her on the outside. Just long enough to get this done.

"Captain, what was it like to be in a Cardassian prison for five years? How did you survive?"

Thanks to some powerful neural restructuring, you don't have to remember most of that. It's harsh whispers, inky, shadowed images and surface horror, mostly.

"Would you attribute your survival to your infamous determination and stubbornness?"

You'd had nothing akin to either quality left in you by the time of your arranged release. They don't know that. They think they'd like to.

They're wrong.

"The Cardassian government says it has cleaned up its act in recent years. They're claiming more transparency in their prisons, more oversight and accountability. Can you testify to that?"

The hell you will. Tribble shit, every syllable.

"Do you think you received special treatment while incarcerated, by virtue of your position and your notoriety?"

Think it? You know it. They made a prison mascot out of you. You can't think about that. You can't think about that. You can't-

"How do you feel being promoted tonight, knowing you've been exposed as a murderer to the whole quadrant?"

Your bottom teeth dig into your top teeth when you smile for the holoimagers, selectively deaf.

"Watch it," Harry warns them, but you barely hear him.

It's true. More or less. It could be. You have no way of knowing if you managed to crush that guard's skull with your boot so many decades ago. The fledgling Cardassian government wasn't entirely keen on making that distinction, either. Which you guessed when you offered full confession of the potentially lethal crime.

That's not their official spin on it. It's Starfleet's, of course.

It doesn't matter.

But they almost made you miss a step, and your fury at this imaginary victory is disproportionately intense. Your fight is not with these people. These aren't the Cardassian prison guards you knew so intimately, using pieces of you and hundreds of other voiceless prisoners to construct a sense of control over their devastated homeworld.

"Did your guilty plea have anything to do with the charges brought against members of your former crew?"

Or are they? It's hard to draw that line with the way they're badgering. It's getting to you. The relentless questioning. The scrutiny. The hounding, dogging at your heels. The prying, the lights: for the love of warp theory, what are they making streetlights out of nowadays, neutron stars?

"What about Commander Chakotay? Can you confirm the rumors that you can't forgive each other for various acts you were forced to commit in order to survive in prison?"

You almost stop cold at the verbal slap in the face. They're shameless when ignored. How have you forgotten that?

"Say the word, Captain, and I'll have these tree-sharks hauled out of here so fast they won't have time to catch it on camera," Harry grits furiously.

"And give them the satisfaction of knowing they got to me?" You cluck your tongue, resuming your death march, and it's almost like old times in the Delta Quadrant, when you'd speak to him through your teeth at negotiating tables. "You know me better than that."

"Yeah," your Chief Operations Officer admits in the same tooth-speak. "I guess I do."

He guesses he did.

Old Chief Operations Officer. Now he's someone else's security chief. You keep forgetting that, and it's easy, because it's not as if he switched uniform colors. Or that you've been here for the transformation.

"Given your experience, do you now regret giving yourself up? Would you do it again if you had the choice?"

Again. The photonic flashes are blinding, thoroughly disorienting, and the question is control-shattering at its core. Again. Would you do, let them do. What they did, again.

By choice, choose.

Choose to walk into that underground building, unarmed. Choose to submit yourself to the shredding intake process. Choose to shut yourself away in the deepest abysses of Cardassian justice, away from the staying eyes of mitigating powers or tempering galactic influence. Choose to be starved for weeks, as an opening gambit.

When they first let you loose with a replicator, you bit deep into your skeletal fingers, never realizing you'd finished the food in the carnal frenzy of hunger. Only the alkaline taste of your own blood pulled you back. It made you sick because it tasted wrong in its pure form, without the grounding grit of dirt and the musk of unwashed-

"Captain."

You blink, and you've stopped dead in your tracks. Impenetrable waves of photonic flashes are blinding you to facial features, leaving shadows of light-bleached outlines. These are not Cardassian outlines, you struggle to believe. They are human, Ktarian, Bolian. A handful of untrained, civilian reporters is beating you. You cannot breathe, and why did you think, for a nanosecond, that you were ready to do this tonight?

"Captain!" They've got you in their crosshairs. They must know it, the edge of bloodlust sharp in their urgency. "If you had it to do over again, would you have stepped forward in order to negotiate a lighter sentence for Commander Chakotay?"

They have no concept of what they're asking you. Do it again? Walk back there, again? Now? You can't-

"Yes." The stationary sea of reporters surges to motion under a dark-haired storm you least expected, and most rely upon. He is emerging from deep in the throng, somehow parting its iron front with deliberation and strength he should not have as he assures them and you that, "She would."

You smell him first, under the layer of aftershave, feel him second and, thanks to the flashes, actually see him last as he reaches you.

"What are you doing here?" Your voice cracks, but he hears you. Years of reading your lips, your very essence would have enabled him to decipher your demand with no discernable sound.

You mean thank you, of course. Along with how. Why. Does your counselor know you're doing this. You shouldn't be here. Go home. Turn off your chime, shut your blinds. Leave me behind. Save yourself this time.

But he's beside you, the maelstrom of questions surging over every buffering admonishment you seek to level. They only pause for him to say with untinged finality:

"If any one of you knew Kathryn Janeway as well as I do, you'd never even think of asking that question."

It causes the flashes to explode anew, a pleased chattering erupting at his stately words. It's just the kind of truncated feed they've been waiting for, from both of you.

But you're not so sure about that answer. Deep inside of you, where your entire identity has been shelled out to the marrow, you just aren't certain that he's right. He is certain. It has to be enough for now.

"Commander, did you know what Captain Janeway had done for you at first?"

"Yes, did the Cardassians tell you she was in another prison for the first year of your sentence, only kilometers away from where you were imprisoned?"

Oh yes. He'd known. They'd made sure of it.

"Before you transferred, did you know there were allegations of brutally inhumane treatment regularly occurring in the state-sponsored prison where Capt-"

"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen." You can feel him shaking as hard as you had in your bathroom earlier. Or is that both of you now?

That's it. You're putting an end to this inquisition.

"That will be all for this evening." With his arm across your shoulders and yours curling around his waist to propel him onward, your steel syllables ring with a finality you've not achieved from the moment you set foot on the late-fall walkway tonight.

"But, Captain-"

"They said, that's all." Harry steps in to affirm. "Take your last pictures quietly as we walk out of here or Starfleet Security will have you removed from the premises."

"You can't do that," a familiar voice declares, and you recognize that tinny voice from years ago, during a wildly different interview. The flashes keep you from seeing his face, but it's William Harkins, senior journalist at the Alpha News Agency. You used to respect him.

"Captain Janeway, can you confirm that Commander Chakotay was housed with you for the last half of his sentence? Did you in fact share a cell in his final moments of incarceration?"

"Tell us what it was like to have your basic rights denied for so long?"

"Was it hardest to experience or to watch-"

"All right. I warned you." Harry is serious. A tap of metal and accompanying command from him becomes grey and yellow forms, arriving directly in your midst.

"Step aside, now," a ranking commander orders, and the grey and yellow is between the Voyagers and the press right away.

Fake outrage spews from the crowd, now ravenous and faced with the prospect of their carrion escaping their collective grasp. Clamors of "Freedom of the press" arise behind you as Starfleet Security converges, but ancient arguments about speech and infringement on personal privacy will continue without you because you are swept past them, into the waiting cloak of night.

"How have you been, Chakotay?"

A small, private lounge permits few stolen moments to catch up before the ceremony. Its smartly-furnished walls are just well spaced enough, just bright enough, to keep unvanquished demons at bay.

"In pieces." You're the only person in this galaxy who would get that kind of honesty from him when he offers his profile to you. "Bigger pieces, every day."

He looks stronger than you know you must. It doesn't surprise you. He's been a paradigm of strength from the moment you met, and well before.

"I've missed you."

If you wanted any chance at a healthy relationship, you had to repair separately. Even if, especially if, every boson in either of you bled out, craving the symbiotic connection you'd forged in there.

"Officially, we still have two weeks."

Two weeks from nine months. Nine months of relearning to wake up and not reach for one half of yourself. And you know you needed it. There is no part of who you were or will be that can respect codependence under any circumstance. There is no part of you, even the part that is him, that will allow this.

"You shouldn't be here." You can't really mean the admonishment and he doesn't flinch, well knowing it.

"You walked into hell for me. I couldn't not come when I knew you needed me."

How he knew you did is moot; arguing is moot. Truth is no longer something you fight, not with him. His full visage presents itself for the first time, his tired eyes so lined and dark with loyalty are scouring you for your unspoken needs, as always.

"I wake up and you're not there."

It wasn't even something you'd had to live with before...before. It's odd. Disheartening.

"I look at the stars." When he can't sleep. When he can't breathe. When his mind is a whirling frenzy of piece-mealed memory and cramped solitude. "And I make sure they're still in the right position."

"I know the feeling." In ways that are visceral, visual. You know it in yourself. In him. You know exactly what that looks like in his face, when he searches those familiar spheres of burning gas and compressing metal for a sense of self. For grounding.

You take a chilly breath that shouldn't be so cold indoors, your exhale dissipating into unseen grey fringe. "I never really understood before. Growing up the way that you did, and being in Starfleet for as long as you were, it was never easy for me to understand how the Maquis was your choice."

"I know."

Despite youthful personal experience. Despite Owen. Despite the violence they wrought from you, and learning what they'd done to Justin. Young you burned your internal incense, recited your quantum mechanical rosaries and swept all that inconvenient dirt under the proverbial rug. A single, grudging act of compassion healed the rough edges of those wounds. But you'd had your sister and your mother, and Mark, waiting back at home for you, all in safety and convenient warmth. Had that mattered? You honestly can't remember, can't say.

"I almost did," you want him to know. "But I never really hesitated when they handed me your file and set me after you. I was convinced that violence was never the answer. And even most of the time on Voyager, I would look at you sometimes and wonder."

"I didn't want you to understand, Kathryn. I'm not sure I ever did."

"I'm not sure how hard I really tried."

This isn't those days so calmly referenced, aboard Voyager. Now your blood runs darker with a dangerous malice. Veins Ransom unearthed have taken root somewhere too deep to eradicate and what the two of you have endured together has been no less than hell. What you can remember, what they couldn't fully erase, leaves you breathlessly ill.

Prolonged cruelty for the sake of it. Ruthless violence. Depraved indifference. Utter, intentional debasement. Systematic murder of ideals and people. Your knuckles again white against the ledge of a table, another table, a dark, hard table, this grey-polished table. They're all the same table, and it's always been the same choice. Even before you knew what you were choosing between.

But enough about you. You have yet to discuss him.

"Do you know what you'll do?"

"I'm not sure I'll do anything." His hand is rubbing at the ghost of a beard on his smooth chin when you look back at him. "Some days, I think I'm just looking for a clean, well-lighted place."

Your heart squeezes painfully. God, does he think you're both that old? Or…

"Are you saying you think we're finished? That we should just, what, retire? Just like that?"

The flicker in deep obsidian elaborates on unspoken assumption. Retire. Redirect. Revive.

"I'd never presume to speak for you, Kathryn." He knows better. Usually. The suggestion that you join him in taking up old mantles for a stubbornly persisting cause is ever-present, ever-silent.

The frown cutting your face feels deep and stern. "Your counselor should be warning you about making life decisions at such a transitional time."

Not that yours hasn't. Not that you haven't ignored him completely, as evidenced by the winding clock that is a promotion ceremony, for you, building up outside of this sequestered lounge.

"Your counselor should be asking what spirits he pissed off to be assigned to you."

The laughter belts out of you, free, delighted. It's not cruelty in the slightest. It's stone, cold truth. After all, he had the job unofficially for seven years. He knows what he's talking about. But…

Neither of you likes stone anymore. It shadows your smile. The temporal fact remains that there's no blow coming to swipe the forgetful curling off your lips, or his. You are only just relearning this.

"Are you going to take it?" He has a right to know what you're thinking.

How can you not take it? But how can you? Nothing has changed. If anything the Dominion War has left the Federation even more willfully blind to the injustices of the darker corners of the quadrant. Resources aren't nearly recovered.

"I don't know."

"You have as long as you need to decide."

About two minutes, before the opening address begins and you have to duck your head for the ceremonial pinning or else publically refuse. But he's reminding you that you can defer. Nothing is final. Not even your principles, at their core. You learned that, together, in seven years of dragging each other and tritanium crew through the maws of deep space.

For seven years, and then five more, the two of you did what you had to do, what you would never have slept again without doing. You're both used to collateral damage. To yourselves. To each other. To the people you knew you were pushing into the ground sometimes, hoping to save their skins so they could live long enough to resent you for it.

Those people who danced and squabbled, loved and bled on your ship are waiting outside just a few sets of metal-alloy doors for you. They're waiting for you to step out of shadowed convalescence and prove that you believe peace is the answer, always. Against any foe.

A knock at the door heralds the end of your stolen interlude, if not internal debate. Stomach churning as if at plasma storm with malfunctioning dampeners, you relinquish your grip on the immovable table. His face, too, is still when your fingertips brush against his sad face. The warmth of his hand, as he wraps it so-softly around your wrist to hold you there, is bracing.

And you know that you would do anything to wipe that sadness away. Anything he asked, anything at all. He's earned the right to ask even this of you. Even if he isn't outright asking it.

"Promise me you won't decide just yet, Chakotay."

Stepping past him, you wonder if he knew all along what you're going to choose. Probably. It wouldn't be the first time he knew you better than you knew yourself.

You pause because you haven't heard the integral rustling of him at your back. Strange how you missed that, then didn't, and do.

He isn't coming with you. He hasn't moved. You won't ask him to. Over your shoulder, because you don't want to see him decline, you ask, "You'll be here when I get back?"

His dark eyes meet yours in the silence which forces you to turn and look at him, and there is only the two of you in any space.

"Always."

Open space cradles your body with a firm freedom that simply cannot be achieved on land. No one, except for perhaps your former pilot, ever understands that. There are those who accept it about you. Chakotay is one of them.

It's all you ask.

It has taken fifteen months for you to fly. Fifteen months of reconstruction, and if you are a ship, you've been overhauled from stem to stern: freshly polished, gleaming from simply-styled hair to shiny new boot tips. The detailing on the inside is still underway.

"Then, the eighteenth it is. We'll be there." It's with the sharpest, bittersweet pang of happiness that you see how she shines with contentment, having found her place in this imperfect world without you. "Thanks for calling, Seven. I've missed you. So much."

Galaxies lived and died upon how much you thought of her, all of them, but especially her. She's absolutely thriving in spite of you.

Movement behind. The steady footfalls of a hiker, firm on the tarsals, light on the heels. Breath with the resolving rasp of recurrent rheumatoid flare-up. The doctor just issued him a modified antiviral. The vicious little Cardassian bug is difficult to eradicate. Stress brings it out with a vengeance.

He'll be better soon. As soon as this mission is complete and you set course away from this dark sector. Even the moonlight here is empty, falling coldly over your silhouettes in the long viewport when you stand and join him in stargazing.

"We're getting together with a bunch of the crew, to celebrate seven years of being returned to the Alpha Quadrant. Some can't make it, but Tom's arranging for those who want to to be able to participate in a group comm. session so we can still interact."

"Sounds perfect."

"The eighteenth. We'll be back by then."

You will. Your decision shaped his. Not even for shifting principles will one of you choose to live without the other again. Looking at his face, and in your reflection in the viewport, at yours, you tell yourself that you have done the right thing for both of you.

It would have destroyed him from the inside out again. For you, and only you, he stays, plays the part he is only slowly coming to re-believe. What he won't know is how much you have stayed for him, and not for yourself. Maybe you were always that little bit darker than him at your cores, but he could never live with that lifestyle, no matter how much he thought he was handling it the first time around. Only you have seen both full sides of that coin.

You still owe him an answer from earlier.

"Chakotay-"

"Shh. It's not the time." Not time to answer a question hastily posed, that would have been asked so much earlier if things had been…

Different.

Cutting frowns draw your brows together, give you minor headaches. It doesn't change the fact that it's your default resistance mechanism. Or so you've been told by present company.

"You deserve an answer."

"And you'll give me one, when you know what you want." God, his fingertips in your hair. It's still short, but he'll never ask you to grow it out again, satisfied with the abrupt end to his path curling just under your ears. "Just promise you won't decide right now. Not right this second."

Anything you could do, you would do. Taking both his hands in yours, a gentle squeeze of sincerity only half calms him.

"All right," you agree, quieting the storm of his dark eyes. "Not this second." You understand why it's important.

It's time.

With half-steady hands, you pin his pips to his stiff, new collar. The newly-accepted fourth circle is almost right, somehow. In many nearby universes, it is exactly right. You can only work with what you have, as he is so fond of reminding both of you.

His breath warms the top of your head. The scent and the heat of him: so warm. He makes so much heat, always, even starved he'd kept you so warm against stone. Several heartbeats have passed, perhaps a full minute.

You've kept your promise; he has always kept his.

And now, you know your answer.