Song

A/N: This was the first Voyager story I wrote and was posted in January 2014. I'd rediscovered the series accidentally and was re-watching it for the first time since it originally aired.

I would probably write it slightly differently now, but I haven't edited for this repost. Unbeta'd, as the original was.

Summary: Voyager at night is her solitude.

You're wondering if I'm lonely:

OK then, yes, I'm lonely

as a plane rides lonely and level

on its radio beam, aiming

across the Rockies

for the blue-strung aisles

of an airfield on the ocean

It is late. The ship takes on a subtly different atmosphere at night. The corridors feel at rest, even though the ever-constant, latent hum that always suffuses Voyager is louder now and far more palpable than during waking hours. Kathryn Janeway likes it. She likes to feel her ship around her, existing in and of itself, like a creature in its own right and with its own patterns of being; its own secret life. With no one else in the corridors, no other voices rising above the hum and no other footfalls ahead or behind her, Voyager feels far larger than her true size. Sometimes, Kathryn has to admit, she craves the kind of space that the cosmos cannot provide. She craves the kind of solitude, too. So many times she feels alone, abjectly so, and yet for every moment of loneliness, Kathryn Janeway is constantly surrounded. She has found that it is harder to escape the crowd than it is to escape herself.

Voyager at night is her solitude.

The concept of 'night', of course, is a fallacy aboard any starship. There is no true 'night', just as there is no true 'day' and just as there is no true 'light'. The division of time into hours is as arbitrary now as it was when the concept of an hour was first invented and serves the same purpose: to quantify the day, to regulate and encompass; to normalise. Aboard Voyager, this little ship lost on an unknown ocean, anything that normalises is to be cherished. And Kathryn does cherish it. During the day she belongs to the crew and this ship. She conducts her life as if there is no other mode to her being, as if she were born in uniform, as formed to her role of Starship Captain as the EMH is to his medical programming. But at night – or at least, the tiny portion of the nightshift that exists between 0200 and 0300 – she has carved out a niche for herself.

And so she walks. She asks the computer to wake her and, for an hour each night, Kathryn Janeway walks the corridors of her ship. It takes her a week to complete a circuit: she starts on the lower decks, where the scientific observational scanners are housed, and slowly works her way up, zig-zagging from aft to stern and back again so that eventually each level holds the memory her footfall. She skirts the forward landing hover-pad assembly and makes her way through the anti-matter production assembly. She clambers between the anti-matter storage pods and she bypasses the double-thickness door of the temperature-controlled secondary computer core. She pauses in the aft observation deck, which she would never have cause to visit if not for her nightly perambulations. She drifts through hydroponics, noting the incremental growth of the plants, night by night, week by week. She runs her hands over the flanks of the silent shuttlecraft and contemplates the mechanisms enclosing each of the escape pods. All of these parts of her ship she knows like the back of her hand and can precisely visualise in her mind whenever one of the crew has cause to mention them. It's a fact she is proud of, but would never explain. Her relationship with Voyager has been years in the making, and she would not have these precious hours disturbed. Thus, Janeway takes care to avoid any maintenance crews, using the Jeffries tubes if she has to, clambering between decks in her civvies like a stowaway. She skips Engineering, where there is little difference in bustle between day and night, and the mess hall, where the odd off-duty crew-member may linger still, writing reports or wake-dreaming of home, brooding, perhaps, over a loved-one's missed birthday. For once, for this hour, she does not want to listen. For 23 hours of every day she is Captain, but for these 60 minutes she is Kathryn, and this time is hers. Those worries can wait for another hour.

You want to ask, am I lonely?

Well, of course, lonely

as a woman driving across country

day after day, leaving behind

mile after mile

little towns she might have stopped

and lived and died in, lonely

Whenever Kathryn reaches the decks that house the crew quarters, she always hesitates. She worries about waking someone up, or that a door will slide open unexpectedly and she will bump into one of the crew, who will be momentarily confused and then almost immediately intrigued. The Captain out of uniform is rare enough to be notable, and to find her here, rambling the habitation decks? Rumours could not help but abound. Human nature, after all, requires diversion, and she knows she is an inevitable object of fascination for all manner of reasons. And yet, despite her hesitation, she cannot miss them out, these decks. She slows, training her footsteps into quietude, moving slowly past door after door. She imagines her people within, sleeping or otherwise going about their lives, hidden away in this tiny, fragile bubble of air, floating through a universe so strange, so alien in every sense of the word. This is a part of their lives she has no access to, and so she imagines them, and hopes they are at least content.

No one has ever seen her on these nightly walks. No one has ever had cause to wonder where she has come from, or where she is going. She is ghost-like, ephemeral, but only on these decks. The sensation of transparency does not occur in the engineering sections of the ship, nor in Astrometrics or the caverns of the cargo bays. Around inanimate objects she is solid and seen, she is real and not imagined. Here, though, among the sleeping crew, Kathryn feels herself to be unreal, perhaps because her true self, to them, can only ever be a figment of their imaginations. No one knows her here, not really, because she cannot allow herself to be known. As close as they are, as friendly as she is, she is still other.

A face surfaces in her mind, as it always does, and she goes to brush it away, as she always does. And yet, as she turns into the corridor that leads to the Holodeck, it is as if her unconscious thought has conjured him into being. The Holodeck door opens. Kathryn freezes against the wall, hoping against hope that whoever is about to exit will turn away to the Turbolift, rather than toward her. When Chakotay steps out, she actually holds her breath. He does not pause, or look in her direction. She waits around the corridor's curve until she hears the distant swish of the Turbolift doors closing behind him. For a moment or two, Kathryn stays where she is, shaken somehow, though without knowing why. It is as if this brief and unexpected glimpse of him has pulled her back from somewhere she had not known she had been, and she cannot imagine why this is the case.

After a moment she starts to walk again, trying not to let any thought surface in her mind. The effort is shattered as she passes the Holodeck doors. The panel beside them clearly indicates that there is a program still active. Chakotay has forgotten to turn it off.

Kathryn stops again, staring at the multi-coloured touchpad. The program is called Chakotay-1, she notes, which tells her nothing about what arrangement of pixels has coalesced inside. She looks toward the Turbolift, hesitating. The best thing to do would be to close the program down herself and then continue on her walk. And yet, as she lifts a hand to end the session, she pauses. Curiosity has taken over, that devil's whip within her that turns the scientist into an explorer. Her hand stays frozen in place, an inch from the touchpad, and she cannot make herself press the requisite key. She is no longer ephemeral, she is once again flesh and blood, and something in her wants to see what he was doing. It is as if one of the doors in the crew quarters has indeed opened, and she, invisible, has been given a chance to see within without being seen. To know, where before she could only imagine. Kathryn, who has been compartmentalising her life for so long that it now comes as second nature, boxes off the 'whom' from the 'what'. It's not that it's Chakotay's program. It isn't. It isn't.

She drops her hand and, having made up her mind, raises her chin and strides through the doors as if going into battle.

If I'm lonely

it must be the loneliness

of waking first, of breathing

dawn's first cold breath on the city

of being the one awake

in a house wrapped in sleep

The chill of a night's air washes over her immediately. Kathryn pauses, reorienting herself to the outdoors. She is in woodland, standing beside young trees that are growing through crisp grass that is rimed with a light frost. The cold quickly cuts through her thin deck pumps, and as she shivers slightly, a sound comes to her. She is in woodland, yes, but there is a river close by, and quite a large one, by the sound of it.

Breathing in, feeling the ice in the air, she wonders where she is. Trebus, perhaps? That would make sense. Chakotay has chosen to visit the place that inadvertently set him on his long, turbulent path to the Delta Quadrant. Kathryn takes a step or two forward, drinking in her surroundings, surroundings that have been built from the memories of her First Officer. The trees are tall, their higher branches wavering in the slight wind, their last leaves rustling as the cold gusts curl around them. Above the treeline, a deep blue has permeated the ice-clear sky. There are stars: tiny, sharp pinpricks of distant, ancient light, fading toward the horizon as the dawn edges ever closer. Breathing in again, Kathryn smells the sharp clarity of winter approaching. There is no sound save for the rough and tumble of the river and the billowing of the last leaves against the wind. She shuts her eyes and something deep within her twists and skews as the simple, chill "beauty of the place cracks a chink in something she hadn't known she had cemented shut.

The sound of his voice makes her jump out of her skin.

"Kathryn?"

She spins around and sucks in a breath. "Chakotay! Oh, god…" Her mortification is instant and complete: That she has so thoroughly invaded his privacy, firstly, and secondly that he has caught her in the act. "You forgot to shut down the program, and I… should have closed it down. I'm sorry." It is not in her to attempt to excuse herself for that which is inexcusable.

He steps forward, and Kathryn sees that in his hands he holds a thick woollen blanket. She forces herself to look up at him, and instead of reproach, sees a slight, lop-sided smile, of the sort she wishes for her soul's sake did not exist at all. For a moment she feels numb. It's a safety valve she put in place, long ago.

"I didn't forget to shut it down," he tells her. "I went back to get a blanket. Dawn can be cold here at this time of year."

Kathryn nods, edging her way toward the Holodeck doors, extraordinarily glad that the darkness of his chosen hour has disguised the flush in her face. "Well," she says, "I'm sorry, Commander. I had no right-"

"Kathryn," he says again, softer still. "You have every right to be here. Here, of all places."

Something in the tone of his voice makes her pause. "What do you mean?" she asks, and then adds, "It's beautiful, Chakotay. Is it Trebus?"

He smiles again, and as he does so, he drops his eyes to the blanket before looking back up at her. The look in his shadowed eyes turns her heart over, and then it begins to thump, painfully, and Kathryn Janeway finds that she is holding her breath again.

"If you look around," Chakotay says, wryly, "there's probably one of those damn insect traps hanging up somewhere."

She can't speak for a moment. And then with difficulty, she manages to ask, "This - this is New Earth?"

He nods silently. "Do you remember the boat?"

Kathryn moves her chin in a stiff jerk, her throat too painful to make actual sound. The boat. Of course she remembers the boat. The boat that never was.

Chakotay points back over his shoulder, towards the noise of rushing water, "When I was first thinking about how to design it, I hiked up and down the river a little way, just to see what sort of conditions it would need to withstand."

"When-" her voice comes out in a croak. She stops, clears her throat, starts again. "When did you do that? I don't recall-"

He smiles at her, with an affection that makes her ache. Her safety valve has failed. "Remember all those times I sloped off to chop more wood? I told you I needed to go a long way to find the right sort of hardwood…"

Her mouth falls open. "You were lying to me?"

Chakotay grins again. "Not completely. Not always. But sometimes. Just enough not to make you suspicious. I didn't want you to ask questions. I wanted to surprise you."

"You did," she says, softly. "Oh, you did."

"Well, there's a wide curve in the river, just through these trees," he says. "Wide enough that in the shallows it's sheltered and calm enough to pull in and anchor. It's beautiful at sunrise. I wanted…" Chakotay stops for a moment, and then says, slowly, "That was where I had intended to take you, Kathryn. For our first voyage in the boat. To see the sun rise."

She blinks, the heavy, painful thump of her heart so "loud in her ears she is sure he must be able to hear it. At some point she has crossed her arms against the cold, and now she shivers, but not because she feels the chill. He walks towards her, opening the blanket and pulling it around her shoulders.

"Watch it with me now," he says, so softly she hardly hears him, so softly that she cannot resist.

They walk to the river, not touching, not speaking. The path he leads her along is narrow and knotted with tree roots twisting beneath the crisp earth. The sound of the river grows louder, until suddenly they are at its edge. The loamy soil falls away and there is the curve Chakotay had described, and in its shelter bobs a small boat. It, too, is lined with frost, the white rind glinting slightly in the growing light.

She expects him to lead her down to it, but instead Chakotay moves towards a felled tree that lies alongside the steeply banked river. As they get closer, she can see that it has been carved where it lies "in the soft earth; chipped, whittled and smoothed to create a wide, flat ledge, long enough to lie on and deep enough to sit comfortably in. Kathryn recognises his handiwork, remembers the feel of polished wood beneath her fingertips before she has even reached out to touch this latest version of his work.

The light is gathering, the deep blue overhead fading into an azure the stars cannot compete with.

"You must be cold," Kathryn says, noticing for the first time that he is dressed only in a linen shirt. "Here - take the blanket, Chakotay. It's yours, after all."

He turns and looks at her for a moment as she holds out the large square of fabric to him. Then he takes it from her with one hand, and gently grasps her wrist with the other.

"Come here," he murmurs, and draws her to the fallen tree. He sits down first and turns her around, touching his hands lightly to her hips to guide her between his parted legs until her back is flush against his front, and her own legs are flanked warmly by his thighs. Then he wraps the blanket over his shoulders and holds it closed over them both with one hand. His other arm wraps itself around her waist, pulling her back against him until they are closer than they have ever been before - closer even than when he held her fast during the storm that closed so many doors but opened one other that was so much more significant. His lips are against her ear, and she can feel the day-old stubble of his chin catching in her bobbed hair every time he moves.

She can hardly breathe, and when she does all she can inhale is his scent – he smells of earth, of wood, of water. He is so warm, so solid against her back, and she can't move, even though she knows she should. She can't move and she doesn't want to. They aren't on Voyager any longer: they are back on New Earth, as if they had never left, as if they have been there for years and done this every morning for most of them. She feels tears on her face, and then his warm fingers on her skin, brushing them away.

"Ssh," he whispers in her ear, as the glow from the horizon grows brighter. It burns pink, and then orange, then a pure, ecstatic white before settling into a perfect turquoise blue. The trees come to life, shining with the melting frost, a forest of surviving leaves cut as if from rock crystal. There are clouds drifting in the clear air and rain is falling in the middle-distance, the smudge of precipitation masking the furthest landscape. It is beautiful, so beautiful, and his arms around her cannot stop the tiny sob that escapes her lips, because this is his memory. When he thinks of New Earth, this is what he chooses to remember. The promise of what had been in their future had they stayed, measured against the truth of the separation that followed their return.

They stay like that for a long time, not moving, just watching the flow of the river, listening to the wind in the trees and watching the frost slowly vanish, as if someone had wiped the world clean and intended to start again.

"How often?" She asks, eventually, the solid heat of him behind her deliciously, illicitly, dangerously palpable. "How often have you come here, to watch this?"

He doesn't say anything for a while, and when he does, his lips brush so close to her ear that he may as well have kissed the lobe. "Many, many times. But this is the only one I'll remember."

She loops her fingers through his, where they rest against her stomach beneath the blanket. "This was so long ago," she whispers. "I thought you had moved on. I thought I had moved on."

"No matter what happens, Kathryn, I always find myself back here. I think I always will."

She shuts her eyes and tries not to be glad about it. "I don't think that's good. For either of us, really. Is it?"

He laughs softly, the motion tickling his breath against her neck, and she knows she has to leave now, or she never will. But she must, because they are not on New Earth, they are on Voyager. When they stand, she can hardly bear to look at him, but she does anyway. She can't believe that the universe is so cruel as to bring her this man, in the only time and place she cannot possibly accept him.

"Sometimes I think about the fact that, somewhere out there, there's a parallel universe where you and I are still on New Earth," Chakotay says then. "Have you ever thought about that?"

"Yes," she says, simply. "Yes, I have. I… do."

Chakotay smiles that crooked smile, and nods. She leaves him there, on New Earth, and walks back through the forest to the Holodeck entrance. Back in the corridor outside, she watches the doors close, and then heads for the Turbolift. In future, she thinks, she will route her nightly walk in a different direction. Just to be on the safe side. She stands in the Turbolift, still smelling him around her, feeling his lips against her ear, his warmth against her back, and it takes everything she is not to walk straight back to him.

Because the ship feels different at night. She feels different. But it's not night any more. It's morning again, and she is the Captain.

If I'm lonely

it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore

in the last red light of the year

that knows what it is, that knows it's neither

ice nor mud nor winter light

but wood, with a gift for burning

[END]

(Song, by Adrienne Rich, collected in 'Diving Into The Wreck', Poems 1971-72)