Author's note: 'Year of Hell' is by far my most favourite two-parter. It's the ultimate Janeway show - she's outstanding.
Since they hit the reset button, and they don't remember it, then we have have carte-blanche to do what we want with J/C, right? Right.
Thanks: to Mia Cooper, who always encourages me and improves on my terrible typos and made me want to post this even though I didn't love it.
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.
"Never had she danced so beautifully; the sharp knives cut her feet, but she did not feel it, for the pain in her heart was far greater."
-Hans Christen Anderson
There are different kinds of hurt, he thinks, turning it once in his clammy palm, then setting it in the drawer. There is the hurt that only lasts moments, stinging – nettles – then goes, leaving the lingering sensation of what pain once was. Then there's the pain of the mind – intangible, light as air and heavy as brass. Something his people and ancestors warned of. He thought he'd suffered agony at its finest; mind wiping, breaks and perilous injures.
But this is a new pain, a disastrous novelty. It's infinitely more damaging than rejection. It feels, almost, like grief.
He lets his fingers linger on the handle, indecision sliding through him like a hot knife. Then he turns away and goes towards the washroom in his quarters. The emergency environmental generators mean the lights are low and dull, but he can see enough to shave. He lifts the sonic razor and remembers he'd be using essential power for an inessential task. Instead he rummages in the junk he stores under the sink, finds an old, blunt razor and the minuscule remains of some very old shaving foam and slathers it on his face. There's something therapeutic about it, using the tiny – but guilt-inducing – last of his water allowance for the day, letting the heat nourish his tired, tight skin.
He wants to sob, really, but there's no energy left for that.
Just as he begins to draw the razor over his left cheek the ship shudders, rattles again and banks to starboard, and he is thrown into the bulkhead slamming his shoulder into the hard wall and throwing the razor across, where it clatters into the toilet bowl in an act of serendipity that would be amusing it if wasn't under such dire circumstances.
He scrambles to right himself, and feels hot blood trickling down his cheek, and the disconnect between the joints of his shoulder sends a jolt of agony so severe that he forgets nearly everything else.
"Chakotay…"
Her voice cuts through the creaking, rumbling noises as the ship equalises itself. It's pleading – there's no formality left anymore, because everything is so fractured.
He slaps his fingers to the badge and gasps as fire rips through his shoulder blade and over his arm.
"I'm coming, Kathryn."
He swipes a cloth over the remnants of the foam on his face.
Eventually she convinces him to go to sickbay, after they stabilise the ship and he deals with ops with one hand (his other hanging limply at his side) and a face that's dripping blood onto the arm of his filthy uniform.
"Go," she insists, setting her hand on his shoulder as he winces.
She escorts him to the turbolift, sliding her hand onto his shoulder, the touch unintentionally crippling him with pain.
"Proving my point," she murmurs. "I will see you soon."
He moves into the lift, turns to watch her on her broken bridge like a voyeur; there's something brutally fascinating about her strength in misery. She hasn't turned away though, like she ordinarily does. She's staring at him, face grim with something he doesn't understand. Even now, even in this disaster and disorder, she seems – somehow – as beautiful as she's always been.
She's a warrior, he remembers, who harbours terrific pain, laced with determination. She wields justice and, sometimes, cruelty. And that is beautiful in its own daunting way.
But this is a battle she's waging in futility.
He wants to beckon to her, to ask her to leave before it's too late. He imagines hauling her into the shuttle and taking her away from all this.
Of course, every moment in which they are caught in this fraught engagement splits apart the logic and knowledge he has of this world and her, and makes him question everything he once thought.
If he thinks she'd do that, abandon her ship, he is entirely wrong.
But it doesn't make it something he desires any less.
I'd leave them behind, he wants to say, if I could have you. If I could take you away from this.
But he doesn't.
The doors close as she gifts him with a wry little smile, as if she read his mind.
-0-
She orders him to rest, even though she knows he won't.
She needs to focus on the things that need her, not the things she wants. This, she reminds herself, is who she has become.
She needs to assist Harry in fixing the replicator, help B'Elanna stabilise their increasingly fragile warp core. She has so very much to do, and such drive to do it.
She can't recall the last time she slept. She can't recall her last meal.
But she does recall her last smile.
And the pain she felt.
She does not believe in a higher being, or in the concept of fate or messages from beyond, but she does feel that soon – and sooner than she will ever be prepared for – she will lose him to something she cannot fight.
She wonders, then, if that agony will be worse than anything she will ever confront. She's faced her fair – too fair, too much – share of miseries but that would be uniquely damaging.
When she rejected his gift, earlier that morning, it was because the sincerity of the gesture reminded her of the ties, the arterial connection she had to his very person, and how they could not, must not, as the odds surely dictate, continue.
She has to cut it apart, separate herself from him.
She has to, for the sake of the ship.
Instead of listening to that niggling, puncturing little voice, she goes to the store of Antarian cider she isn't supposed to know about and fishes a bottle from the depths of dust sheets, space suits, carvings he's left half-finished.
She stops by her own quarters and stands in front of the mirror.
She can't recall the last time she looked at herself, but she's glad it's become a rarity. She scrubs the worst of the grime from her face with a damp cloth. Looks at her makeup and the mild contemplation of applying it quickly dies. She combs her fingers through her recently-shorn hair - a practical choice rather than an aesthetic one - and then shrugs off her tattered uniform jacket and chucks it onto the ever growing pile of destroyed Starfleet uniforms that are rotting in the corner of her bathroom.
She sighs again and makes her way out.
She doesn't bother ringing the chime, but she overrides the lock.
His quarters are dark, and she doesn't want to trip over the wreckage of the ship that's fallen onto the floor. She picks her way to the dull light of his room. He's propped up in bed, a book in hand, squinting to read the pages. Even in the constantly smouldering air and odour of the ship this room, where she's never been before, smells fresh and clean and of him.
It settles a rearing terror in her that she didn't know existed.
"Fancy a nursemaid?"
She holds up the bottle.
He looks up, squints through the greyness.
"You or the bottle?" He sets his book aside and smiles.
She shakes the bottle.
"Do I look like a nurse? And booze is as good as any medication, if you ask me."
She settles on the side of his bed and swings her legs up.
"Budge up."
He does as she asks, and she crosses her ankles and wrestles with the wax seal of the bottle. She feels his eyes on her, and feels the urge to explain.
"It's my birthday, and I want to get drunk. I know it's irresponsible. But they won't attack us. I have a few hours' grace. I have so much to do-"
He takes the bottle from her, takes a swig then holds it to her mouth.
"Don't talk yourself out of it then," he says softly, pressing the glass to her bottom lip. She takes the bottle and takes a long drink, swallows, then sets it between her legs.
When he leans over in the half-darkness and presses an open, warm kiss to her shoulder, it hurts.
"If you could do anything for your birthday, what would you do?" he asks, pulling the bottle from between her legs and taking another drink.
"There's an ice cream shop under the Golden Gate Bridge. We'd take Molly, we'd walk there and get espresso ice cream, then you and I would go home."
He smiles in the half-light.
"Can I cook you dinner?"
She grins, takes a drink and offers him the bottle.
"And make me a cake."
They are silent for a moment, as they contemplate a future consigned, now, to the vestiges of fantasy.
"Sounds good," he says softly.
"Sounds impossible," she counters.
"Aren't all the best things impossible?"
She feels, suddenly, tears beginning to press at the back of her eyes. She wasn't sure she had tears left but, now they're here, they feel urgent and demanding.
She swipes them away, and he watches her with that deferential kindness which she loathes.
"We'd go home?" he clarifies, reaching out to touch her damp cheek in the half darkness.
"Yes," she says softly.
"Our home?"
She nods.
"Isn't it easy to imagine a future you know won't exist?" As she asks, she sidles nearer him so there is no space between their hips or legs or arms.
He says nothing, and she hears the agony of the realisation prickle between them. She hears him, though he does not say it aloud, ask why now.
Because they're dying.
"I'll die with this ship," she says into the darkness, answering his unspoken question.
"Don't-"
"Promise me you'll get off," she curls herself into him, and curls herself into his silence. "They need a leader, they need you."
"Don't do this to me," he grits out, tightening his fingers around her upper arms. "Don't ask this of me."
"Chakotay," she tips her mouth up to his jaw, dragging her lips along the firm, half-shaven skin there. He winces as if it burns, but he hauls her nearer and into his lap as she sets the bottle against the headboard and balances it there.
His mouth finds her, searching, tentative at first. The darkness, years of propriety, fear, mutate what should be natural and easy and instead make it awkward and stilted until she breathes into his mouth, and feels him come alive under her hands.
"You're going to leave me," she murmurs, pressing herself into him as his hands tug her tank top from her waistband.
"Don't say that," he groans, pressing his fingers to her jaw so he can taste the gritty skin of her neck. His tongue slicks over the delicate spot behind her ear and she moans.
"One night," she whispers, swinging her legs round so they're on either side of his pelvis.
Desperate, and so sure yet entirely unable to understand the forces compelling her, she grinds herself against him. A part of her, so long lost to this kind of encounter, is shocked when she feels him grind against her in return. If she had any pride left, she'd be delighted in the reaction she'd elicited from him, pressing firmly into her, throbbing and hard against the inside of her thigh.
But this is not an act of pride, it is an act of desperation.
He pushes her shirt over her ribs, feeling each and every one as a punishment. She stalls his fingers, looks into his eyes in the darkness which masks the worst of both of them.
"One time, I need to touch every inch…" he says, embarrassed, eyes desperate.
She nods her understanding, lets him slide his hands over each protrusion in an act of worship which paralyses her.
"Kathryn," he murmurs. "I wish it was different."
"It can't be," she answers, helping him pull the shirt over her head and throw it on the floor. When he moans, sore and depleted in the back of his throat, she speaks instead.
"Let's pretend it is, for tonight…" she says softly, hands wandering to his own shirt to pull it from him.
"And we'll have this," he suddenly crushes her to his body, winding her, breathing life into her all at once. "If we have nothing, at least we'll have this."
But they won't, she knows, though she can't explain why. Even this, this exquisite pain of a joining forced into reality by the sad fact of their hopelessness, will be taken from them.
She just knows it, like she knows the inevitability of time and of destruction.
She moves back, instead, sliding from his legs and standing – knees weak – against the edge of the bed. He sits up in front of her, swings his legs to either side to press her own within his and slides his hands over the planes of her thighs to the seal of her trousers. He slips them down, pulling the material over her legs and pushing them to her feet where she kicks them away into the darkness. She bend down to unzip her boots off and she hears the rustling of the sheets as he lifts his own hips and removes his shorts.
"You're beautiful," he mutters, pulling her into position again between his legs.
He reaches forward, and trails his mouth over her hips and ribs and stomach and pelvis. His fingers curl into the low elastic of her underwear, pulling them away and down where she shirks them with a kick of her foot.
The Krenim, she thinks, the world that's breaking her, she thinks, don't matter now.
She prays to a god she does not believe in that the red-alerts, the sirens, the agonies, can be abated just a while longer. While she gets to have this; the one thing she's always wanted.
In any other circumstances, in any other intimate moment, she'd push his head away when his mouth latches on to her and he grips her hips, pushing her back and slipping his hand between her thighs to devour her.
Instead, she realises, she wants this more than she wants anything she ever has. This entirely intimate, exceptionally physical act.
So she winds one hand into his hair and uses the other to achieve balance, bracing against his firm shoulder.
"God that's…oh…" she becomes – a woman so used to control over the last few years that she's forgotten anything else – incomprehensible.
The unconscionable act of abandoning her ship in this way, abandoning protocol and the promises she made the moment she laid eyes on him, seems to wane in severity as his mouth works a marvel lost to her.
It's only unconscionable when there's the chance of survival.
She knows now there is no survival: only slow, malingering death.
She comes, hard and fast against his tongue, hips jutting up and away from him as she cries into the air of his quarters. He holds her in place, arms firm on her waist, mouth determined and damning.
He lies back then, beckoning her with a soft hand.
"I want you," he tells her, as if she didn't know.
She slips down onto him, easily and slowly, without preamble or teasing. There's no room for that.
He moans, reaches up to grip her neck and pull her face towards his to kiss her. She balances one hand on his shoulder and the other on his chest as she moves, watching him in the gentle greyness that their eyes have created.
But it's not enough, she thinks, wanting everything she knows she can never have again. She pulls up and away from him, sliding down to take him in her mouth.
He pulls at her hair.
"No."
If this was once an act she committed only because it seemed reasonable, now it's one of subjugation to him and to her long-suppressed desire. He tastes of a future she won't be allowed, and the taste of them will linger in her longer than this will last.
And then, she knows, he will be gone.
God, it hurts.
She lifts her eyes, mouth moving over him, and watches him watch her. He looks as if he's in pain.
And she fully understands it.
"Kathryn, my love…"
The guttural, urgent affectation slices through her, splitting the moment to shreds.
She loves him, she knows it, but knowing it only brings her pain.
She moves to the side, lying beside him and pulling him to lie between her legs.
When he slides into her, warm and solid and so real, there is something hellish about it. About knowing this is the first and the last. About knowing that, in this reality, they can have nothing which resembles happiness.
He said she could bring them home, that she could be just like Captain Cray.
Bring the ship home.
There is no home, she thinks, no home but here.
As he moves in her, measured, deliberate, wringing the moment of every last fragment of joy it has to offer, she knows he will go.
That, for a reason beyond her, he has to.
She will die with this ship, she thinks, as another death – blistering, real, and intense in its pleasure - comes upon her. She cries into his skin, teeth latching onto his shoulder in a desperately feeble attempt to leave a mark on him which will reach beyond this lost moment.
A moment of hell, as this is, and a moment of pain.
He comes then, stiffening in the cradle of her arms, murmuring into her skin and hair and against her mouth.
Then they lie silent, for hours, until the red-alert they knew would come sounds through the ship. He won't let go of her, and she doesn't know how to either.
But of course, eventually they have to part. And unlike every other pain, every other agony, this one is the worst.