Contingencies

In which your loyal narrator has some fun with the holodeck. Immediately post-Endgame. J/C

Janeway was waiting at the door of Holodeck 2 when Chakotay answered her comm call. The senior staff were scheduled to take shuttles to Earth the next day.

"Before we both leave the ship, I have a bit of a confession to make," she said.

"A holoconfession?" he said with a chuckle. "Don't tell me – you altered Tom's Captain Proton program so that Queen Arachnia rules the universe in the end."

Janeway's smile was both genuine and nervous. "Uh … not exactly," she answered. "Come on in." He joined her at the console just inside the door as she began to type commands. In an instant, a holoimage of himself in his Maquis clothing, looking several years younger, shimmered onto the grid behind them. He looked from it to her and back as his features shifted from amusement to confusion.

"You programmed … me? Why?"

Janeway stepped away from the console, took a deep breath, and clenched her hands together in front of her as she exhaled. "This will be a shock, and I apologize. I almost told you about this when Tuvok's tactical scenario about a mutiny came to light and led to the unpleasantness Seska left behind for us. The truth is, Tuvok isn't the only one who holoprogrammed potential scenarios involving the former Maquis crewmembers. Even before I asked you to become my first officer, I programmed this one, but there are many more. I recorded every interaction so you can see, if you want to."

Chakotay was paler than usual, but he nodded. "Yes. I want to see."

At his affirmation Janeway grew markedly paler herself, but she swallowed and nodded. "These are playbacks, so you'll see me, as I was then, interacting with the hologram representing you. I was trying to evaluate your potential reactions." Eyes on him, Janeway pushed a button and her ready room lit up around them. Her younger self, hair piled on top of her head, strode in from the bridge.

"You asked to see me," holoChakotay said. "I'm glad. There are a few things I'd like to discuss about housing my crewmembers."

Younger Janeway held up a hand. "We will discuss all that. I have an offer that may go some way toward resolving the problem of the two crews. Please, have a seat."

When they were facing each other across her desk, she continued. "We have a long journey across the Delta quadrant. To me, the most important thing is to make that journey as a Starfleet crew. I am willing to make significant compromises to bring that about. For example, in exchange for your endorsement of Starfleet principles as the guiding command structure aboard Voyager, I would be willing to turn over command to you."

"Computer, halt program," Chakotay said with an impatient wave of his hand. "Kathryn, what is this? You were considering giving me command of Voyager?" He was incredulous.

Janeway swallowed. He was standing only a few feet from her and had gone from pale to rather red. "It was one of the options I explored," she said. "But the holoscenarios suggested that you would be willing to accept a role as second in command, so that was what I offered. Watch. Computer, resume playback."

Younger Chakotay leaned in. "You don't have to turn over your ship, Captain. All I want is for my crew to be treated fairly. We don't have a lot of options. We're willing to integrate into a Starfleet ship if you're willing to give us a chance."

"Computer, halt program," Janeway said. "You see, you gave me the solution yourself. We had enough intelligence on you before the mission – from your time at the Academy and in Starfleet – that the simulations were very accurate. And of course as you added your own data – personal logs, your own holoprograms, that sort of thing – to the computer, the scenarios became even more reliable. It was as if" – Janeway hesitated, then nodded and went on with more certainty – "after a while I felt I was talking to you in these scenarios. It was an enormous help."

Chakotay was examining her with wide eyes, as if he didn't quite believe what he was seeing. "You used the simulations frequently?" he asked in a low voice. His eyes had gone very black.

Janeway hesitated before answering. "Not frequently, but many times over the first five years. I turned to them when you and I had … significant differences of opinion, shall we say. I didn't always have time for it, but when I did, I wanted to know how you would react before I talked things through with you in person. Your opinion and your leadership among the crew have always been critically important." She was watching him with fluttering eyes, letting her eyes pause on his taut face, then moving them quickly to his clenched fists, his tight shoulders. "It was mission critical information, Chakotay. I needed to know that you would be with me." Her words were almost pleading.

A growl started deep in his belly and rose to his lips. "I was always with you, Kathryn," he said, twisting his head in frustration. "I always told you the truth. But I guess you never believed that. You needed these – these scenarios" – he said the word like a curse – "to figure out how best to play me."

"No. No, Chakotay," she said, stepping forward to put a hand on his arm. "It wasn't like that. This was my first command and suddenly we were in a life or death situation on the far side of the galaxy with half a crew who'd been labeled terrorists. I didn't have room for the usual new captain screw-ups. All our lives were on the line. I had to figure out how to do the right thing the first time, without losing your confidence in me. Do you understand?"

He looked down at her hand on his arm and her open, supplicating face and shut his eyes for a second. When he opened them, they were angry. "You know how hard it is for me to say no to you. You've known it since that first day on the bridge when I backed down. You've used it against me. And now I find out you were testing scenarios on my hologram – do you have any idea how violated I feel? Did you stop for a second to think about the ethical protocols?"

Janeway nodded and lowered her head. "Yes. I discussed it with Tuvok at the very beginning, and again when he devised his mutiny scenario. We decided that the good of the entire crew required us to take unusual measures. I'll probably be court martialed for this along with many other offenses. You can testify against me if you like." She raised her eyes and he saw fear and sorrow there, even a hint at tears that she would never allow to emerge.

Chakotay threw his head back and groaned. He stepped back from her and circled the holosuite for a few minutes, staring at the frozen characters in the middle of the room, the tentative first minutes of their friendship suspended here in the middle of what might be the last few minutes of their friendship. Finally he stopped beside her. "You say there's more recorded?"

She looked defeated and miserable as she nodded. "Hours more. The Equinox. Interactions with the Borg. Other … tensions. I haven't deleted any of it. You have the right to know, and now that we're home, it can't do any harm to the command structure for you to know everything. Your command codes will give you full access. I'll just …." With one last, abject glance, she turned to walk slowly toward the doors. She paused just short of them and said. "One request, Chakotay?"

His voice was not harsh when he replied, "Yes, Kathryn?"

"If you watch all of it, you're going to see things I wish you wouldn't see. Things I'm not proud of. Please try to keep in mind, I was doing my best. For all of us. For my friend." Before he could answer, she hurried out.

"What have you done, Kathryn?" he muttered at the recorded version of her. "And why did you have to tell me?" He contacted Seven to cancel a late dinner they'd planned, then gave the computer his command codes and resumed the playback.

The next conversation was Younger Janeway offering him a shared command of Voyager. "That never would have worked," he heard himself saying. "What were you thinking?"

The scenarios kept coming, most of them very short. Early on, he saw the arguments they'd avoided over B'Elanna's qualifications and the proper positions for many other crew members. He heard for the first time the accusations of disloyalty she'd leveled furiously at his holoimage, but never at him. Their angriest moments were there, and worse conflict than had ever happened in real life. Disbelieving, he saw himself demand to be left on the nearest M-class planet. He watched in horror as he seized command of Voyager and put his captain in the brig during their interaction with the Equinox.

Then, in one scenario that left his mouth hanging open, he watched himself attempt to talk her out of what he considered a disastrous alliance with the Borg by … oh Spirits, he didn't … pushing her up against the bulkhead and kissing some sense into her. The hologram pinned her easily and brought his mouth down on hers before she had a chance to react, and Kathryn – real Kathryn, the person who'd left the holodeck and sat down on the bridge beside him – responded like a drowning person to her rescuer. She wriggled her arms up around the hologram's neck, and just when Chakotay expected her to force her knee into his groin and throw him to the ground, she pulled him down hard into the kiss with a moan that made him stagger backward on shaky legs, even as a spectator.

As aroused as he was watching Younger Chakotay run a hand up Younger Janeway's side to settle firmly on her breast, he was equally horrified by the knowledge that this was really Kathryn he was watching. She had known all this time how much he wanted her, and she had – even as shame consumed him, he realized suddenly that her reaction in the simulation was not resistance – she had wanted him too. All this time. She wasn't fighting him off, she was responding. To his hologram. Was that her leg snaking around him as they writhed against the bulkhead? As he stumbled away from the characters, he felt the bulkhead rise up firm behind him and was glad for the support.

Then her voice: "Oh, Chakotay!" He had never heard her voice like that. If he had, he would have lost the use of his legs as he had a moment ago when he slid down the cabled surface of the holosuite, yet his hologram was pushing off her uniform jacket as if he seduced his captain in the briefing room every afternoon. "Oh Chakotay," she said again, so that he was all the more undone when she said all in a rush, as if forcing the words out, "Computer, end program!" and all of it disappeared.

The next, unrelated scenario began and he had to call out quickly to end the playback he wasn't ready to continue. He asked the computer for the time: 2337 hours. He rubbed his face and staggered to his feet to get a glass of water from the functioning replicator in the briefing room simulation. He braced himself against the replicator's small platform and contemplated his choices.

He could walk away now and pretend he'd never watched as far as he had. It was a coward's way out, but it held its temptations. Talking to Kathryn about this filled him with equal parts anticipation and dread. He could go to her now and confront her about what he'd just seen. Or – and even as he thought about it, he knew he wouldn't be able to resist this option – he could watch the full playback, every last scene, and see every moment she'd spent with his hologram. Then he'd decide what to do about it, with all the information.

"Computer," he said in a weary tone, "resume playback." He turned around and slid back down the wall.

When he rang the chime on her quarters at 0335, she met him at the door minus her pips, jacket, and shoes, but still in her turtleneck, holding a cup of coffee in her left hand, looking unsurprised but very reluctant. "I thought I might see you at some point tonight. It took longer than I expected, to tell you the truth." Her voice dropped and she gave him a guarded look as she stepped aside to let him enter. "I guess you watched all of it."

He stepped inside. "I could use a drink."

"I figured that too." When he looked down, he saw that she held a glass of whiskey in her other hand. She held it out to him. "Twelve year Scotch."

He took the glass and drained it before turning toward her. "Why did you show me the holosimulations?" he asked. His face had gone ashen. "You could have just told me about them. You knew what I'd see. Why did you want me to see that?"

"Please," she said with a wince and a small gesture of her hand. "Have a seat."

"No thanks," he answered. "I've been sitting on the floor of the holosuite for hours. It took a while to find the strength to stand again."

"I'm sorry," she whispered, clutching the cup with both hands. "Maybe I should have waited. But I've felt guilty about it all these years and I needed you to know. It was selfish of me. But I didn't think you'd watch it all the way through. I thought you'd accept what I told you."

"You knew the simple fact of the simulations wouldn't upset me much, not after Tuvok's. We all laughed that off." He walked to her replicator for another glass of whiskey and knocked it back before facing her. "You know what brought me here."

She took a big sip of coffee and faced him. "Yes."

"You encountered that possibility and you obviously enjoyed it, but then you deliberately avoided it in real life." His eyes narrowed.

"Yes." She was unnaturally still.

"Why?"

Another gulp of coffee. She wasn't quite meeting his eyes, but she cleared her throat and answered him. "For the same reason I never initiated any … intimate contact between us myself. It would have distracted from the mission."

His whiskey glass slammed down on her desk. "But on the holodeck, with my hologram, that was okay?"

She drained her cup and set it beside his. "I am very ashamed of what I've done," she confessed. "I understand that it is your duty to put me on report."

His face twisted. "Don't be ridiculous, Kathryn. This isn't about Starfleet. I deleted everything after I'd seen it, and Starfleet's forensic investigators won't find the bithole I dumped it into. I've learned a few tricks from B'Elanna." He took a step toward her. "This is about you and me. What you did to your friend, when you knew all this time how I felt about you, and you felt what you did, and you just let me" – he broke off, shut his eyes, and ran a hand roughly over his head, pushing his hair into little spikes all over. His hand stilled as another question came into his face. "Why did you stop? A few years ago, all of a sudden, no more."

Janeway had let her hands fall to her sides, as she did when facing some new and daunting challenge. Her face looked hollow in the half-light of her table lamp. "I had an important realization. But it's not important anymore. The important thing is that I stopped. And I told you. And I'm very sorry."

"Oh no," Chakotay growled. He closed the distance between them and backed her up against the bulkhead, just as he had in the holoscenario, so that she was forced to tilt her head back to look at him. "In for a microcredit, in for a megacredit. You started this. You don't get to keep secrets about it anymore. What realization did you have? That you were breaking half the rules in your precious Starfleet manual?"

Janeway turned her head to avoid his eyes and took a deep breath. "Okay," she said, then, so softly he could barely hear her, even this close, she whispered: "I realized I was in love with you."

Chakotay jerked his head up and away from her and held still for a long moment, still pinning her to the bulkhead. When he looked back, his face was a mask. "And did you play out this scenario in advance?" he demanded in a low, dangerous tone. He leaned even closer, his arms on both sides of her head. "Can you predict the precise effect of this stimulus on your marionette? Is this the only thing you could tell me at this point that would bring me to heel?"

She blinked and her mouth fell open. "No." He could feel her breath coming faster, the mad thumping of her heart against his chest. "I'm winging it."

"Wing this," he growled and pushed his mouth down on hers, with the exact movements he'd seen his hologram use. It was as if he had stepped inside the scene on the holodeck. She did not resist but stretched her arms around his neck as if they'd played out these moves a dozen times – and after tonight, he knew they had. "It's your move," he muttered as his lips left her mouth and moved roughly across her cheek to her neck. "Remember? Now's when you push me away."

She moaned. "I always put a stop to it."

"Always?" He opened the back of her shirt and yanked it off her. "I remember it going this far."

Her cheeks went bright red. "Once. Once we did. After that time" – but he'd stopped paying attention. He lunged for her breasts. She cried out and held his head to her. He pushed her up the wall to get a better angle. "After that time?" he demanded.

"I … oh!" she exclaimed, momentarily distracted as he pulled down her bra. "It was – I had to put an end to it, after that. I was … mortified. I could hardly bring myself to step onto the bridge the next day."

He lifted his head to meet her eyes. "You started to pull away from me. I remember."

She nodded, hair falling loose around her face. "Yes. You probably noticed how I avoided being alone with you the way we used to do. Our dinners. It was … dangerous," she panted.

"You're damn right." He attacked her mouth again, her perfect mouth, open and pliant as he hadn't dared imagine it would be for him, in all the times he'd pictured doing exactly this. The idea that she'd known how he wanted to – wanted it herself –but had maneuvered them away from this scene, was forcing all rational thought from his mind. He broke away from her mouth to let his lips move across her face. "I drove myself crazy trying to figure out what I'd done to make you shut me out."

Her hands were unfastening his trousers, reaching for his length. He called her name, loud in her ear, as he pushed her trousers and panties below her hips. She kicked them away and wrapped a leg around him just as she had in the holoscenario. He had to brace himself against the wall to stay standing. Her hand slid down his jaw and brought his eyes back to her for an instant. "You have to know, I never would have done this with the hologram. I wanted it to be you. It just couldn't be – not out there."

He wanted to argue but his power of speech seemed to have abandoned him as he pulled her the final few inches to him. Both cried out and clasped the other. Later, after both were satisfied and carpet burned and the ceiling had stopped spinning, she pulled away and began collecting her clothing. He lay on the floor spent, watching with a smug half-smile. She went into the bedroom and came back out in a silk robe he had never seen before, hair brushed. She knelt near him, but a little beyond his reach. "Well, I guess we scratched that itch. Can you forgive me, for the holoscenarios? In the end I did trust you. I hope you saw that."

He sat up and shook his head. "Are you still worried that I'd report you? Kathryn" – he stretched out a hand for her, but she shifted away a few feet.

"That's not what this was about, if that's what you're asking," she said with a nervous little laugh. "I'm not playing you. But I understand that you were angry. Maybe you needed to take it out on me a little. And I know you have different obligations now. I will understand if this needs to be goodbye. You don't need to feel guilty."

Chakotay's eyes had grown very wide. "Different … oh, you mean Seven." He sighed and reached for his briefs. "I don't know what you heard, but that hasn't gone far at all. She tried to break it off with me the other day and I should have let her. I won't be hurting her, if that's what you're worried about. I'll just tell her that you and I finally worked things out. I think she'll understand."

Janeway had frozen several feet from him, arms wrapped tightly around herself. "I see." She gave a little choking cough. "I had … I had prepared myself for certain things. Just" – she held up a hand and got to her feet. "Give me a minute." She turned away and took a few steps toward the bedroom.

He pulled up his briefs as he stood. "Things? What things, Kathryn?" He took a few steps toward her.

She shook her head. "The Admiral told me a few things I wish I'd never heard, that's all."

"Such as?" He came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. She shivered.

"Oh," she said with a little dismissive flutter of her hand. "Tuvok getting sick. You and Seven getting married. At first I thought it was just crazy stories, to coerce me, but then when I talked to Tuvok, it was" – she clapped a hand over her mouth, but he could feel the stifled sob move through her under his hand. He spun her around and pulled her close.

"Whatever she told you, I love you too, you little mad dictator," he murmured in her ear. "As I would have told you years ago if you'd ever let me in on your crazed scenarios. You have a lot to answer for, you and Tuvok, once he's cured and I can yell at him again."

Janeway gathered herself and looked up at him with an arched eyebrow. "I will answer for my crimes," she purred, blinking back the last of her unwelcome tears even as she rallied to challenge him. "But I'm not the one who's been dating a gorgeous blonde half my age."

Chakotay performed a smooth roll that brought them both down to the sofa with him on top, propped on his elbows. "I can see," he told her as he tugged at the belt of her robe and settled his lips on her neck, "that it's going to take a whole review board to sort this out. Hours of interrogation."

She wrapped a leg around him and pulled him down to her. "Do your worst, Commander."