Chapter 1 – The Tortoise and the Hare
The cool air of the sickbay was a welcome relief from the stifling heat in the corridor. Holding his uniform jacket over his shoulder, Chakotay leaned against the wall, his arrival unnoticed by the person he'd come to see.
Kathryn Janeway was perched on a biobed, her back to him and straight as a rod. He knew her well enough to recognise all the signs of stress in the taut shoulders and rigid neck. He should have checked on her much earlier.
Echoing Chakotay's thoughts, the EMH grumbled while administering a hypospray to his patient. "You shouldn't have waited so long before seeing me, Captain. It's a bad habit of yours to always be the last one to come to sickbay to be treated."
"I've been busy, Doctor," she said. A deep sigh escaped her as the medication took effect. She dipped her head backwards, her ponytail brushing her shoulders. Chakotay could empathise with the visible relief she was showing.
"I've reversed the genetic tag that produced too much dopamine in your body," the EMH continued." The dangerous amounts you've been subjected to for the past few days should decline naturally by tomorrow morning."
He frowned as Janeway jumped off the biobed. "Excuse me, Captain. I haven't finished. I can't reduce those levels any quicker in case you develop withdrawal symptoms in the weeks to come. This means that you might still experience—"
Janeway's voice dropped one octave. "Thank you, Doctor, but I've got a ship to take care of."
"I would much prefer that—"
"Captain, it's good to see you," Chakotay said as he approached the warring pair.
Janeway whirled around. "Chakotay," she uttered, smiling. "How are you feel– "
Their eyes met, then he saw her gaze leave his face and glide down to his chest. She licked her lips, swallowed, glanced back up.
"The Doctor has done his miracles on me too," he said with a chuckle. "I'm back to my normal self, young and good looking again."
He waited for her to greet him with a reassuring hand on his arm and tell him how glad she was to see him. He would joke about his newly regrown hair, and her frown would waver, saying 'I missed you' and 'don't do that to me again'.
Instead, her smile faded. Then, she strode past him, staring straight ahead. He hurried in her wake.
"Captain?" Despite his longer stride, Chakotay found he had to break into a brisk trot to catch up with her.
"I strongly recommend you both take some well-deserved time off-duty," the EMH said in a loud voice to their backs, before the closing door silenced his protest.
"The Doctor is right, you should be getting some rest." She threw the words over her shoulder without slowing down.
"I've been resting long enough for the past few days," he said, thinking he could have done with another day of leave. The Doctor had reassured him his DNA was back to normal after the experience that had seen him thrust into old age in a matter of hours. Yet, it was as if his body remained unsure what biological age it'd been reset to. Even now, he needed to think about every movement carefully lest something hurt or did not quite work as it should. The heat was also making him sluggish.
Janeway stopped in front of a Jefferies tube hatch. "Where are you going?" he added, confused.
"Engineering is too short-staffed to check all the reported breaches. The turbolifts are offline from here down, so I'll go the long way, starting with Deck 12. I'll see you on the bridge." She opened the hatch then slid into the tube without looking back.
He contemplated the open door for a few seconds, then took a toolbox from a storage alcove in the corridor. Putting his superfluous uniform jacket in its place, he followed Janeway through the access door and into the endless low passage, trying in vain to ignore his aches.
"I really don't need your help, Chakotay," she said over her shoulder.
Before he had time to argue, he saw her recoil from the wall. "Ouch," he heard.
"Captain?"
"The plasma conduit. It's hot."
"Let me have a look at your arm," he volunteered, hobbling on his knees towards her. The toolbox banged against the side of his chest, and he hitched it up a little higher.
"I'm fine, Chakotay. I can't dawdle." Janeway glided a few more metres towards the junction ahead, then hopped onto the ladder leading to the lower decks.
Chakotay blinked the sweat away before seizing the nearest rung and starting his descent slowly.
When his hair had fallen out, he had felt pure dread. He didn't think he was vain and that enamoured with his appearance, but what he had seen looking back at him in the mirror – the wrinkled and tired face, the trembling knobbly hands reaching to his scalp – had shaken him. What had hurt most, more than the fuzzy vision and sore joints, had been the feeling he had hardly lived his life, that there was so much more he needed to do. That belief kept nagging at him as he stepped off the ladder and crawled through more Jefferies tubes following a sullen captain for what seemed to be hours.
Another set of vertical steps, another slow descent. "One more deck and I should be able to access the environmental controls section," Janeway said from beneath him, her voice breaking through the cloud of his mind.
She stepped aside when he landed on the small platform, breathing heavily. "Are you okay?" she asked.
"Just feeling a bit stiff." Exhausted was closer to the truth, but he smiled to himself. Either it was the exercise or the heat, but Kathryn was talking to him again. Despite his best efforts, he still had no idea why she'd been pushing him away for most of the afternoon. After another rebuff, he had put down her surliness to the stress of the past few days. The crew, and their captain, had been through a lot and she was allowed to feel short-tempered.
Janeway was already jumping on the next ladder. "Let's go then. We're almost there."
He breathed a sigh of relief, then leaned over and grasped her shoulder. "Don't you think it's getting hotter?" he said, letting her go when she flinched at the contact.
She whipped the tricorder off her belt and waved it at the walls, while slowly descending. "The temperature beyond these bulkheads is rising fast," she noted before scrambling back up again, her tone anxious.
"If there is a fire on Deck 12 and it spreads to the areas immediately above and below, we can say goodbye to navigation and Main Engineering," Chakotay said.
"Not to mention warp engine controls," she noted. "We do need to put more distance between us and the pulsars."
She tapped her comm badge. "Janeway to Engineering."
~Torres here.~
"The Commander and I are in Jefferies tube 24A. We suspect there's a fire on Deck 12. We'll determine its size and report back. Monitor the temperatures of the adjacent decks just in case."
~A fire will mean we won't have access to the turbolifts or be able to restore normal environmental conditions for another day at least.~
"The Jefferies tubes exist for a reason, Torres, and the crew can survive the heat a bit longer," Janeway snapped back.
~Yes, Ma'am,~ came the curt response.
Chakotay had heard from Voyager's scuttlebutt how B'Elanna had been at the end of Janeway's sharp tongue in previous days. The Chief Engineer obviously had no wish to remain a target of the tetchy captain.
"I'll let you know when you can activate the extraction fans. Janeway out."
She hit her comm badge with more force than necessary. "The internal sensors must be offline for Engineering not to have picked up the rising temperatures earlier. A fire is the last thing we need right now."
"B'Elanna is right though," Chakotay said in a neutral tone. "The heat and the lack of turbolifts are not making things easier for the crew. They're yet to fully recover from what the Srivani did to them."
"I know." Janeway rubbed her forehead. "I was a bit abrupt, wasn't I?"
"You've got every right to be after what you had to endure for days on end. What the Srivani inflicted on you was pure agony," Chakotay said.
She hesitated. "I'll understand if you'd prefer to go back to the bridge rather than follow me. I haven't been the best person to be around lately."
"And I am sorry I could not be there with you, but now that I am here, you won't get rid of me that easily." Lifting the heavy box with extra care on his shoulder, he couldn't avoid a wince at the lingering pain wedged in the small of his back.
A worried frown appeared on her face. "You should have listened to the Doctor," she said.
Chakotay chuckled. "Nothing better than a bit of exercise to loosen up the joints, but we better get going or I might freeze in mid-movement."
"Freezing would make a pleasant change, but you need to let me know when you've had enough," she said.
It was clear she was pushing him away without making it an order. Maybe she did need some time alone to deal with her memories of the past few days. He was not ready to talk about what he had endured either.
Then he noticed the deep lines around her mouth, the listless hair. What worried him even more were her eyes darting left and right, never staying on him for long. If he was the slow tortoise bound to the gravity of old age, she was the spring hare, bouncing unceasingly against the walls of her drug-impacted mind. He could not abandon her in her current state of heightened restlessness.
"I'll be fine, Captain. Show the way."
Looking uncertain, she nodded, then turned away and stepped down the ladder. He followed once more, heavy with fatigue.
Reaching the bottom of the well, Janeway stood in front of a side passageway and flicked out a tricorder from her belt. "The temperature is seventy degrees down this section, aft wall. Too low to be a fire. The internal sensors must have tripped, and the environmental controls have gone in overdrive. Pass me a transmitter and I'll affix it here."
Chakotay foraged in the bag and handed her the small device. She stuck it on the wall and pressed a couple of buttons. "Two more of those on this deck, and B'Elanna will have a good idea of the size of the affected area."
Shuffling along another length of Jefferies tube, he almost rammed the derrière of his captain who had stopped abruptly at the end of the passageway. He gratefully put the toolbox down and sat down, his back against the wall. He had to fight the temptation to close his eyes, lest he nodded off on the spot.
"I should never have ordered Voyager to fly through the pulsars. I wasn't thinking straight," Janeway said, entering a couple of digits in the pad near the hatch.
The change of topic took him by surprise. Harry had told him about Janeway's mad plan and Tuvok's remonstration at her recklessness. Chakotay didn't know if he would even have tried to stop her when she had given the order that had freed the ship from the medical experimenters-cum-torturers.
"You had no choice. You had to do something." He wondered if Janeway's off behaviour since the aliens had left the ship was entirely due to the dopamine. She was prone to overdo the guilt trip at the best of times and today she was jumping out of her skin.
"That's what I keep telling myself. And you know what, Chakotay? I don't sound too convincing."
"They'd killed Ensign Luke right in front of you. Sooner or later, they would have collected enough data according to their sickening criteria and terminated their experiment. And all of us with it." He stifled a yawn.
He still regretted that he'd been too slow to recognise that her brusque behaviour on the bridge earlier in the week had been out of character. The rapid ageing he had been subjected to had not caused his brain to go to mush, and he should have known then she wasn't herself. Working closely together, they might have discovered the Srivani's activities much sooner and avoided the tortures the crew had faced.
Janeway punched the door code again but the hatch did not budge. "It felt like the most natural thing to threaten to crash the ship, instead of trying to make the Srivani see reason."
Shaking her head, she took the manual release from its niche and slammed it against the door. "Tuvok was right. I made a rash decision. It was completely unprofessional to let my emotions take over," she countered.
"It's difficult to ignore what our altered minds and bodies have been telling us for what could be weeks. We have no way of knowing how long the Srivani had been experimenting on us."
He straightened up his back. His own body was certainly clamouring for him to slow down.
Hands braced on the manual handles, Janeway turned her head sharply at his words, bearing an expression he couldn't read. If he didn't know her better, he thought she looked … hungry.
She took a deep breath and yanked the door open. A wave of scorching air crashed over them, parching their skin and throats instantly. Coughing, Chakotay pushed against the heat and helped Janeway close the hatch tight. He collapsed beside her, gasping for air.
###
In a daze, she unfastened the front of her constrictive jacket. The under-shirt was sticking to her dank skin, beads of sweat careering between her breasts and down her back.
"Let me help you," Chakotay said.
She could smell the sweat glistening on his arms, feel the heat emanating from him even in the stifling warmth of the Jefferies tube. This close, there were new wrinkles in the corners of his dark eyes she'd never seen before. A tinge of silver shone in his black hair in the dim lighting, and she wondered what it would feel to thread her fingers through his short-cropped hair.
When she'd seen Chakotay last, he'd been a husk, a man aged beyond his time, his skin blotched, his movements cautious and stiff.
Now, in the confines of the tight space, he was pure magnetism with his strong arms and wide chest straining against the close-fitting shirt. The man had been overwhelming her senses since he had appeared in sickbay, nonchalantly holding his jacket over the shoulder. How he could not know what he was doing to her was beyond comprehension.
She felt a sharp sting as he helped her out of the sleeves. For a half a second, she forgot his body so close to hers as he delicately nudged the fabric off the small injury.
"Sorry, Captain. It's not deep, but you'd better let the Doctor look at that burn," he said, bending over.
"Do that again," she grunted. She watched his lips open and licked her own in response.
"That?" he asked, a frown showing as he prodded her arm more forcefully.
"Yes," she said.
"Why?"
Why. Why? Can't you see I'm a quivering mess?
"Are you all right?" His eyes were dark, searing through her.
"Yes."
No.
"I can't handle this much longer," she muttered, tearing herself away. "Commander," she said aloud, "go and see if B'Elanna needs some help. I'll check the temperature on the other side of this section."
How long had the Doctor said? Tomorrow morning? She would never last that long. She was burning here.
"You are not going anywhere without me." Chakotay settled back against the opposite wall, his long legs blocking the corridor, then blinked a few times.
She gave up melting into the bulkhead behind her. "It's an order, Commander," she said in a last-ditch effort. Her voice didn't sound like her usual commanding tone. It was downright pleading to her ears.
"Tell me what's wrong, Kathryn," Chakotay said. "Talk to me." He closed his eyes.
Damn, Chakotay. We haven't done anything else than talk for the past four years. I need more. Now.
She drew near him. Her lips grazed his and his eyes flashed open. There was surprise in their depths, but not the protest she'd been dreading. A smile came to him and he leaned his head back while closing his eyes once more, lips slightly open and his breathing deep and even.
Janeway felt the last fragments of her self-control vanish, replaced by the irrepressible allure of desire and pleasure at his relaxed pose welcoming her. Needing to feel him against her, she kneeled between his legs sprawled on the deck grates, and placed his heavy strong hands on her shoulders, their touch surprisingly cool against her skin. His fingers trailed down her breasts leaving shudders in their wake like the footprints of sparrows in the spring snow.
Watching Chakotay's body surrendering to her, she forgot the heat and the damaged ship. He was giving himself to her. He was hers, completely hers.
She dived in.
###
Of all the things you've done, Janeway, this one does take the cake.
"How is he?" she asked, her face in the shadows.
Slight snores were rising from the prone man lying on the biobed. The silver streaks in his hair were almost gone, and she found herself missing them. They spoke of maturity, of overcoming the challenges brought by a long and eventful life, of hard-earned wisdom. She should have heeded their silent words instead of falling head over heels into the temptation of instant gratification.
"He is sleeping, Captain," the EMH said.
"Is there really nothing the matter with him? I could not arouse him."
She forced herself not to groan at the slip-up. By the time she'd hitched his shirt up and undone his belt, the man had been fast asleep. Unable to get more than a few lethargic grunts out of him, she had pushed his shirt back down and fastened his trousers before asking for a site-to-site transport to sickbay. Her mind in turmoil, she had spent the next few hours securing the area they had been investigating and helping Engineering with the long list of repairs.
Back in sickbay, she wasn't sure if she should laugh at the whole situation, or cry.
"If I had known the Commander was going to roam the ship for hours, I would have insisted that he stayed in his quarters for at least another shift."
The EMH's words stung. She'd been completely oblivious to Chakotay's exhaustion and then had seen fit to throw herself at him. She had failed him as his captain and as his friend. What she'd done was unforgivable.
"What should I do?" she whispered, knowing full well where her duty lay.
"Letting the Commander sleep is the best medicine to help him recuperate," the EMH responded.
He waved his medical wand at her. "In your case, the physical exercise must have hastened the metabolization of the excess dopamine. I am pleased to say that its levels are back to normal."
No amount of medical explanation was going to help or lessen the impact of her appalling behaviour. Officers had been justifiably kicked out of Starfleet for less.
"And the rest of the crew?" she asked, her hand to her brow.
The EMH smiled. "Between my diligent ministrations and the restoration of the environmental controls, all have recovered and are functioning within normal parameters, as Seven would say."
Her fingers dropped to the side of the bed. Parameters. Four years of using parameters to keep him away, and now…
To start with, no more flirting, soft touches, candle-lit dinners. She would have to tell him to forget about her birthday coming up in less than a month. At their last dinner together, he had hinted he was researching the history of nineteenth-century old Earth sailing ships for a present.
Well, there would be no birthday celebrations this year. Or for the next seventy years of the journey.
~Torres to Janeway.~
"Janeway here."
~Temperatures across Deck 12 are down to 35 degrees Celsius, Captain. I am heading there to get the turbolifts back online.~
Janeway bit her lips. What had she told her and Tom? Thrown at them rather? Adolescent behaviour. Using better judgement. Maintain the standard for the crew.
"B'Elanna…"
~Yes, Captain?~ came the cautious voice.
"I'll take care of the turbolifts. You've worked miracles today. Take the rest of the shift off."
The Chief Engineer's beaming smile could just about be heard over the comm badge. ~Thank you, Captain. Torres out.~
Tuvok saw right through me when he asked if he should flog them as well. I should be the one getting flogged. Wouldn't be difficult to disengage the holodeck safety protocols and purge myself of—
"Captain!"
"Sorry, Doctor. What did you say?"
"How long since you've slept? A full night, not the three hours you had before you came and saw me this morning."
Sleep?
"I can't. Too much to do."
The turbolifts first, then she needed to record her logs, starting with her decision to throw the ship into the twin pulsars. Write Ensign Luke's obituary. Ask Neelix about the best route ahead through the vast territory spread at the edge of Voyager's astrometrics charts.
That should keep her busy for a while. She needed to be busy.
Until Chakotay wakes up and she would have to face his disgust – or worse – his pity.