A/N: I like my croutons crunchy.
Force Majeure
He watches, helpless, as the door closes between them.
Their separation is not up for debate. Nothing here is. Centimeters of plated alloy and re-enforced grating, above, below, and behind. And if that weren't enough, his conjoined wrists are fastened to the stays welded at the midpoint of the bench. One thing is for sure, the Devore have domination down to a science.
The painful tingle of compromised blood flow creeps into his palms. It's nothing compared to the wound above his eye, crusted and reopened, three maybe four times since its inception. His body is still trying to adjust, pulse racing, pumping too surely into the uncirculated tips of his fingers.
He wants to scream but knows it will only summon the attention of the guards. They're as bored as he is, and only too happy to pass the time racking their rifles against his face. He won't ask for it again, and instead, dreams of a fair fight. One in which he's able to showcase his skill as a boxer, feint them into his kill zone, and then crush through flesh and bone until all that is left is a soupy mess.
Boots fall heavy against the grated corridors he can't see. He reminds himself this is all part of the torture, a more subtle form of sensory deprivation; hearing but not seeing, knowing but not being able to confirm that the lifeless drag that accompanies them, followed by the wet slap dropped into the cell beside him is, more than likely, her.
Day in, day out. Time pass on a routine schedule. Right now, it's feeding time for the lions. They've returned their plaything to her pen, but not bothered to fasten her back into place. No point. She's unconscious, but it's the best thing for her right now. Awake, alert, this would be torture. For him. For her. For all of them.
Footfalls dissipate back the way they came. He braces himself for the moment he hears the locking mechanism slam into place and the latch of partitioned walls disengage. He tells himself he won't look. When the walls come down, he'll take the opportunity to recover the layout of the room, instead of the blueprint of injuries she's sustained today.
He promises himself he'll look away, and pleads with his ancestors to give him the strength to follow through.
The walls drop slowly, drawn into lower-level places until the room is a skeletal maze of like cells. Like people pinned to the center joist of like benches. Through the buzzing glare of too-bright lights, his eyes catch Paris' first. Neelix is to his left, three cells away, and B'Elanna to his right. She's the only one who bothers to rattle her chains, arching and flexing against the raw places she's worn into her skin already. Harry isn't far from her, begging her to relax. Stay calm. Be quiet.
They're all quiet. Too quiet.
He won't look. He doesn't have to. He knows.
From what he can tell, they're not far from the engine core of this beastly ship. Tucked away in the underbelly, but still close enough for the relative humidity to matter. The Devore are cold-blooded, both figuratively and literally. Heat keeps them comfortable, which is a valuable observation to make, as he intends to push them out into a vacuous cold of space, one by one.
The tranquility of that thought lasts a lot long than he'd like it to.
A wet gasp seizes his calm. Her exhaling breath is equally ragged, halted. Painful to hear. He's almost hoping it will set B'Elanna off again, but it doesn't. It never does. All effort is focused into breathing for her, or at least following the echoing retreat of her tattered inhales with their own reverent breathes.
He lasts a full minute before he looks.
It's a hard thing to witness, even though he's trained for it, seen it in like places in other parts of the galaxy. He forces his mind back from connecting the broken, bleeding mess just meters from his feet to her name. But just as trying not to think about a thing becomes the only object within deliberation, this becomes the truth he cannot veer away from now.
Every selfish suggestion he wants to give her is followed immediately by a more practical proposal.
Get up. Stay down. Open your eyes. Keep them closed. Roll onto your side. Don't move.
Give them the god damned ship!
Breathe. Just breathe.
At some point this becomes his mantra, a wordless repetition as he reviews the accepted wisdom of the long-dead admiral who trained him in such things.
"The first rule of hostile confinement is to protect your crew."
For the time being, she's doing that. Aside from the occasional thump to his forehead and the self-inflicted lacerations on B'Elanna wrists, they're protected. Fed. Stacked out in three-by-three meter squares that are one minute claustrophobic, and the next leave them all too exposed to the violence these thugs can inflict.
"The second rule is: protect your technology."
He briefly wonders how the rest of them are handling this, if any of them have cracked and offered to override the security lockouts that are keeping Voyager dead still in space. They can't. She's made sure of that. It's sick satisfaction that makes him smile. Not even Seven can override those encryptions because they were installed with her brethren in mind.
And the Devore aren't half as savvy as The Collective.
"The third rule is to stay alive to fulfill one and two."
Did she hear that one passing though his head? She seemed to. Fleeting as it may have been, they've come close enough, been close enough, to read each other's thoughts before.
Her eyes register on something beyond the ceiling of the room. Crucible-borne blue drills past the latticework of conduits and steel plating, through the decks, and into the distant and unfathomable future, but that look only means one thing.
You are going to have to try harder than this.
If anyone else on this ship heard it, he's choking, inexplicably, on his food.
Seconds pass. Then minutes. Hours. Her eyes don't break from their position on the ceiling, giving her the time and critical space to section and secure each line of code into impenetrable vaults not even she will be able to reach when the time comes.
That is what scares him the most. That, coupled with the sheer amount of defiance she can still muster when she's laid out, bleeding on the floor.
She won't know when to give up.
He watches, helpless, as the door closes between them.
She's beginning to realize just how far down in her memory she's buried the truth.
Joints buckle under the pressing strain of the booted foot against her back. It's not a fight worth picking, a position worth holding, especially if he means to pound the breath from her lungs again. She'd rather be down for that.
Her right hand is broken, and the left aches, but she's having a hard time cataloging the injuries, then cross-referencing them with the time and method by which they were sustained. She's losing days, nights. It's a humbling place to be, outside of time. No wonder Captain Braxton was such an insufferable bastard. No wonder he lost his mind.
"Captain, I'm a reasonable man."
Speaking of bastards... insufferable, he is not. She can suffer the best he has ten times over. This is nothing, and there are dead Cardassians who could tell him so, if they weren't dead.
And it occurs to her, all that bravado and the delicious sexual tension that should make this so much worse, was the best he had to offer. As attractive as he is, it's all he is. Pretty bait.
He should have let her go when he had his chance.
"What's that?"
A gloved hand hoists her head up at an odd angle, so what she says is no clearer the second time. He uses the scuffed tip of his boot put her on her back again.
"Try again," he tells her.
She spits at whatever's closest. It happens to be the angular shoulder of his uniform, and the sight of it pleases her to no end. A hard sweep of his hand clears the majority of blood and saliva from his collar.
"I asked… how did… they take… the news?" She's also aware she's provoking him, but she means to. Unconscious, she's worthless. "When you… told… your superiors… you lost… the telepaths… and my ship." Bolstered by the fact that she still has enough strength to place emphasis on the correct words, she taunts him one final time. "Did you… even… tell them?"
His hand arcs back, puppeteered by rage. She braces for the strike, at the same time she welcomes it.
He stops. "You know what? No." His fingers depress the trigger on a communicator in his opposite hand. "Prax. Bring me their hologram."
The air is stiff and silent for a second longer than it should be.
"Sir?"
So indignant. So resentful. Now he's the one who wants to spit.
Go ahead, she thinks, maybe it will help you relax.
"The Captain requires medical attention."
The primal part of her is thankful that the pain has stopped, while the more analytical parts of her know, there will be an encore. But she's accounted for this, too.
If she has to start over, so does he.
So, she uses the time to gather what she can about the room, this ship. The adjoining spaces are more personal than anything. She thinks he's kept her here for the duration, but can't be sure. With no sight or navigational point, it's impossible to determine if they are still anywhere near the wormhole. But they'd almost have to be. Voyager most definitely is. He would have killed her by now if he had successfully unpinned her moorings in subspace.
Good fucking luck.
A door hisses open, and she can feel Prax's, cold, dead eyes inspecting her from stem to stern.
"Sir."
How someone so stoic can communicate so much with a simple word… Their exchange is brief, tiresome, and ends with both men sighing.
The Doctor shimmers into existence, asks the state of the emergency, and then answers himself before anyone else can. "Devore hospitality. Why am I not surprised?"
He doesn't wait for instruction or threat, but she supposes that is what has allowed him to grow past the confines of his programming. The real reason he is so unfailingly human, and yet not. He fears absolutely nothing.
"Treat her injuries. Inform me when you're done."
The communicator he'd used to summon Prax clatters somewhere off to her left. The Doctor doesn't chase it, nor does he turn his eyes away from the task at hand when The Inspector storms off deeper into his ship. Just the touch of his hand is stabilizing, forgiving, merciful bliss.
The Doctor pleads with her, all out begs her to end this. "No ship is worth your life."
Is he certain of that? She's not.
She's beginning to realize just how far down in her memory she's buried the truth.
The devil is not as black as he is painted.
He knows the message is meant for him by the same method she knew he would be the one to find it.
The book is left open, paged out for inspection. There are similar terms in his native language. The computer finds them cleanly enough, but he can't help but wonder what he's missing in translation. He thinks he's reviewed enough of her database, picked through the antiquated collection peppered around her living quarters, and turned over enough human history to understand.
Her culture has weaponized every emotion, but no one as brutally as love.
Is that what she wanted him to feel? If so, she's succeeded. Sure as a blast from her phaser banks, she struck true. Now, he imagines, she counting on that love to carry her latent touch across the pages, imprint her thoughtful expression as she scanned the text for the exact phase she intended to leave him. To remind him, to convince him.
To break him.
Not everything was a lie – he confessed that much. There was a time, before her, when the Brenari were less threatening, and he saw no point in killing for killing's sake. A lifetime spent eliminating one race to protect another. There was a time this would have ended differently and he would have returned to her, freely and wantonly. Embraced her and let the universe be damned.
He lifts his head from the book in his lap and considers the space around him. The line of windows overlooking his own ship. The smooth, delicate petals of a flower he can't name. The dark, dreamy expanse where her bed sits in wild contrasts of blistering white. He tries to envision himself there, with her, but every time he does he's attacked by the truer notion that he is just another relic to adorn the walls of her most private suites.
It's with that in mind that he returns to her. Book in hand.
Her hologram vanishes with a protest half-ringing in the air between them. She's on her feet for the first time in days, and he realizes he's almost forgotten how well she wears her arrogance. Covered in her own blood, still conceited despite it.
Without question, she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
And possibly the most repulsive.
"We're going to start over, you and I," he tells her. There's no recoil in her stance when he reaches for her neck. As much as he wants to close his fist around that flexing tension, what he reaches for is far more intimate, and one by one, he plucks the pips from her collar.
He imagines he sees the first real hint of fear in her eyes. He knows he doesn't. Not yet.
Prax, for all his insolence, could not have better timing. In the space beyond her shoulder, the matte gray panels that shut the stars out of the room vanishes. Her ship stands behind her, hard and defiant. He almost regrets what he's about to do, to both of them.
"You were right about one thing," he admits. "My superiors did not take the news well. More than likely, I'll be reprimanded severely for allowing the Brenari to escape. Your ship, on the other hand…"
A smooth gesture toward the wall suggests she should investigate his meaning for herself, but the gahary bitch is as still as she is silent. His hand seizes her throat then, marching her backwards until he twists her to face the true meaning of Devore absolution.
His warships flank either side of her ship as a third moves into position. Boarding pylons connect with the smooth outer, biting their hold at port, starboard, and aft. The final point is her own creation, the fixed grounding she's encoded to drop the inverse warp field he can't budge.
That won't be a problem in a minute.
The dull glow of competing impulse drives burn at the rear of each warship.
He feels the wet slide of her tongue as it moves inside her mouth, doing it best to suppress the welling dread when it fills her throat. "Kashyk, don't do this."
She tries not to scream, to suppress the agony of dying hope, but the sound creeps up into her throat and comes out as a strangled sound.
"Please." Whether she's choking on tears or his hand around his throat, he can't say. He doesn't bother to investigate. "I'll give you—"
He knows what she's willing to give him in the moment is more than she's ever given anyone. Her ship. Let him fly under the banner of the Imperium, or strip her down to alloys. Herself. That, too, he can strip bare and violate in any way he wants.
The first break takes time. Slowly, and then suddenly. Fire and flares of burning coolant ignite the blackness of space. Her knees give out with the first nacelle, but he holds her there, until the second comes free. Then it's all too easy to let go. Let her slid to the floor with her wings torn off, nursing injuries too deep for medicine to heal.
He still has no idea what her message truly meant, but he's glad to know it.
The devil is not as black as she is painted.
fini