"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." ― C.S. Lewis
A hacking, harsh cough awoke him. Not that sleep had been much of a companion, but exhaustion had finally won out. He rolled over on the hard, cold ground. The gritty earth felt cloying, and it coated everything in a fine dust that didn't even abate at night. He sat up, stretching out his arm to stave of the stiffening that was a result of the awkward angle at which he'd fallen asleep.
The hack cut through the quiet night again, making the others in the outcropping stir. He looked around, took account of the people there, and noticed the small space – the place where she had been.
He rose, knees sore too, and made his way out into the dark, star-pierced vastness of the primordial world on which they'd been stranded.
He followed the noise, knowing exactly who he was going to find, picking his way across the jagged cliff edge to the tip of the outcropping under which they'd taken what passed for a poor imitation of shelter.
She was sitting with her feet dangling over the edge of the stone, fingers curled around it, elbows hyper-extended to a stiffness which must have hurt. The cough came again, sent now into the freedom of the atmosphere, and it ricocheted hard off of the stones encircling them. Her back curled and straightened with each burst, and her hair – loose now from confines which had defied the humidity and harshness of their new world for only a few days – fell forward and into her face. When the jag finally abated, she pushed it away only to have it fall back.
"Can't sleep, Captain?"
She turned slightly, her face silhouetted against the unimpeded moon. The illusion of its closeness was highlighted by that fact that, from here, it was almost level with her. Huge, white and, in any other circumstance, painfully romantic.
Now it just seemed to violate the little privacy she was looking to find.
"I could hear you behind me" – another ragged cough – "but I couldn't breathe enough to answer."
She paused for a moment, and he noticed her fingers whitening even in the pale moonlight.
"There isn't enough damned air on this wretched planet!"
The fury which had risen in her set off the cough again, stealing the last consonants of her speech and twisting them into sharp, guttural barks that shattered the quiet of the night to a frightening degree. He moved the few steps between them, settling down beside her, thighs touching. Of its own volition his hand slid over her grit-dusted uniform to smooth over her back, a helpless attempt to stave off what had to be a painful tightening in her muscles and chest.
"I…" she breathed, tried again. "I…oh it's no use. It's no fucking use."
A moment later her small forehead crashed, with a sharp jar, onto his shoulder. Then the cough was replaced by racking, heaving sobs which made her body react in much the same manner- sore, stiff, painful. If he had expected to be blindsided by such a show of emotion it would have been because he hadn't imagined she was capable of it. The truth was, he thought this kind of outburst was long-overdue. She'd lost everything, in a succession of failures which she couldn't really prevent, and now the entire crew – the crew she'd sacrificed her own contentment for – were stranded on this godforsaken, and barely habitable, planet. He tipped his chin towards the crown of her head, curled his arm and adjusted slightly so he could hold her more comfortably, and let her bury her face in his chest and sob.
He uttered unintelligible, softly chastising, delicate murmurs of comfort. He was a man with his finger in a flooding dam, holding back the tide of the inevitable.
"Kathryn," he murmured, trying not to breathe the flavour of her hair. "Kathryn, you can do this."
"I can't," she grimaced, he could feel, into his uniform. "I can't do this anymore. Naomi is…Naomi is…"
The words wouldn't come and he knew that, if anything, voicing them was enough to make her give up.
In a purely selfish, unfeeling way, he could not allow that. He needed her to remain strong because, if she did not, he could only imagine himself walking off that deliberately destructive precipice behind her.
If he'd been able to separate business from pleasure (an issue which plagued him even now) and had managed to keep his pants on around Seska, this wouldn't seem half as much his fault as it was.
"Kathryn, she's going to be fine."
At these words she lifted her head, eyes a strange combination of indignant disbelief and hope. They were lifeless too, though – years of sacrifice had dulled them of that once breathtaking sparkle.
"Give me this," she said simply. "Then I'll come back to you. Now, now, I need this. Hold me."
And he did. Rather than offering useless platitudes, and promise he could not keep, he followed her orders.
Because that was what he always did.
He stroked his hands over her hair as her fingers curled around his neck, and he pulled her from the edge to settle them more comfortably against the smooth rock face behind them. He was silent as he found himself hoisting her achingly small frame into his lap, her legs stretched over his and out to the side.
To hell with protocol, he thought, hoping that argument would stand as firmly in the light of day.
She did not protest.
The tears abated eventually, manifesting now and then as a mixture of sore little coughs and puffs of tired breath.
"I can't do this," she muttered against the skin of his neck, fingers threading into the insides of his jacket to graze the grey material of his turtleneck.
"You can. I know you can. We can get us, and them, through it together."
She didn't look at him, her face still buried in the dip of his neck and shoulder.
"Chakotay, I'm empty."
The words were dense with more than just their stranding here. They had formed, somewhere, a long time ago, maybe in the moment she'd discovered the magnitude of her decision.
"This isn't where it's going to end, we're going to get home."
Her fingers were cold, tracing the outline of his pectoral muscle, shuddering against his flesh.
"Maybe this is where I deserve it to end," she looked up this time, face contorted with a pain which could only be borne by guilt, and her sharp nails dug through the cotton into his skin.
"You did nothing wrong," he swore, and meant it.
"You are blind."
He turned his face away, unable to bear her searching eyes, and the sudden intensity of the feeling of her. These were things he'd learned to suppress, fold away into a recess of his mind he only let unfurl in his dreams, but the sudden rawness of her brought them crashing back into his consciousness.
"Maybe I am."
He was silent for a moment, as was she, before she spoke again.
"You want me, don't you?"
He only nodded, afraid of relying on his own voice now.
"I've never had a man look at me the way you do. You don't see the faults."
"I do, I just love you even more with them."
She dipped her head again, to brush her lips against the skin of his neck.
"There's a difference between love and want."
"I feel both, acutely. I told you, once, I'd be whatever you needed. That's what I'm doing."
"That's what you always do."
He nodded. The exposure of his desperation was a sensation akin to being burned; a lingering sting which culminated in a throbbing, visceral ache.
"Kiss me, just once."
He looked her dead in the eye, tightened his grip, until it was almost sore, on her waist and on her shoulder.
"I couldn't stop there."
"I don't know that I'd want you to," she whispered.
He shook his head.
"When we get our ship back, you'll need the parameters in place. Don't ask me to do something I might have to give up."
He knew his own voice was pleading.
"Kiss me, just once. And you'll know how to stop. I trust you to stop."
He did as she asked then, a bruising, demanding, painful kiss which spoke of a tempered desire underscored with hopeless desperation. She tightened her body to his, her mouth warm and pliant, her hands tightening around his neck as his found their way into her hair.
He knew, now, if he did not stop, she would not prevent him. He imagined himself stripping her here, upon an altar neither of them wanted to worship at, and taking her against the caricature of a moon. Thin, pale skin, desperate lips.
It was enough, as an image, to cull any lingering wish he had to be within her. He couldn't do that to her.
"Enough," he pulled back, breathlessly.
She traced his tattoo for a moment, longer than it needed to be, regaining her breath – breath threatening to wheeze into a cough.
"Enough," she agreed eventually.
He pushed her up, gently, to her feet and watched as she tried to brush the dust from her clothes. He did it instead, though it was so useless it seemed almost funny, and then wrapped his arm around her as they made their way back down to the shelter.
The pitch black allowed anonymity, and when she lay down he knew no protest would come when he moved behind her, hands tracing her back to stave off the pain he knew lingered in every sinew. He curled his fingers into the hollow of her hipbone, suppressed a desperate urge to take her away – to disappear, to hold captive a woman as elusive as air.
"I think the worst thing is that you love me."
"No," he touched his lips to the nape of her neck. "It's that you will never believe it."