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Title: Cocoon, (Episode Addition)

Author: kneipho
Beta: N/A
Rating: ® M
Fandom: VOY
Character/Pairing Codes: J/C
Spoiler Alert: Misc. episodes throughout Voyager's run. Dialogue taken from, and spoilers included forVoyager's Season 7 Episode, "Shattered."

Dedication: For Godfry. Love ya, babe.

"Love and hope and sex and dreams
Are still surviving on the street
Look at me, I'm in tatters!
Im a shattered."
-The Rolling Stones, 1978

I

Seska had been defeated; again, her attempt to take over the ship thwarted by a time-splintered crew and a Borgafied Seven of Nine. In a few moments, if everything went according to plan, the fractured segments of Voyager would "heal", allowing Chakotay just enough time to save the ship from ever being splintered by that fucking anomaly in the first place.

Janeway is right, he conceded. Temporal irregularities really can be a pain in the ass.

He watched her as she glanced down at her hands, seeming to examine the interlocked tangle of fingers with feigned engrossment, her head tilted slightly to one side. "For two people who started out as enemies, it seems we get to know each other pretty well." A sly, unembarrassed smile graced her lips. "I've been wondering, just how close do we get?"

A morass of light swamped over them both, the incandescent bog of blue radiating from the Warp Core bestowing a glowing sheen upon her face, and she looked, he thought, like a painted angel. Chakotay's heart skipped a beat. He shifted uncomfortably. He was getting an erection. Now is not the time for this sort of thing, he chastised himself. Not with the ship's reunification only minutes away from becoming a reality, but couldn't help it. The woman had been flirting with him all day.

Chakotay was no lack wit. He knew she had been doing it in part, so he would give up information. It had worked, too. He'd already blabbed out more about the future to her than he had intended. Her tactics reminded him so much of way he and his own Janeway used to flirt back and forth across the Bridge "way back when" in the early days of Voyager, he could not seem to resist. Chakotay sorely missed those interactions. The relationship between the two of them had changed, over the years, leaving him to wonder if their flirtations had been little more than figments of an overactive imagination.

He knew now that had never been the case. This adventure, working side by side with a pre-launch captainrefreshed truth. He had been deeply in love her once, even hoped, that someday she might allow herself the freedom to love him back. Of course, long-term survival in Delta Quadrant prevented that. The constant fight had made him old; used up the devoting part of his soul prematurely and his love for her died. The Delta Quadrant, its monsters, all the death, the never-ending heartaches had aged them both before their time. Until the Bridge became nothing more than a place of work, rather than a place where he and Kathryn spent the working portion of their lives.

And he moved on. At least he thought he had.

Chakotay looked down at this younger Janeway. This woman so much like the Kathryn he had loved, a captain unafraid; beautifully alive, a woman whose tenacity and quick wit had inspired him to want to be a better man. "Let's just say, there are some barriers we never cross."

II

He found her waiting for him on the Bridge, his Janeway, the matured, less impressionable, more predictable Janeway, right where he knew she would be: parked impatiently in her command chair waiting for him to provide her with an explanation.

"Do you mind telling me why B'Elanna burned out the deflector dish?"

It was good to see her again. He flashed an enigmatic smile. "Actually... I ordered her to do it."

Her eyebrows turned into caterpillars inching close together. "Why?"

"Trust me; it was better than the alternative."

"Which was what, exactly?"

He could tell she was getting annoyed. Enjoying her reaction, he refused to wipe away his smile. "I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"The Temporal Prime Directive."

III

"Forget particle fountains and subspace inversions," Kathryn was saying, swirling a glass half-filled with cider absentmindedly in one hand. "There isn't an anomaly scarier than a thunderstorm on the plains, especially when you're six years old." Having given up her battle with the replicator, she'd had their meal brought in from the long since consumed, and plates forgotten; conversation now stood up to take a turn. " I remember watching a bolt of lightning split an oak tree in my grandfather's yard. I climbed it just a few hours before."

Chakotay took a sip of his cider and tried not to grin. "Good timing."

She studied him for a minute, making him feel a bit like a bug under glass. He wanted to laugh. He knew what was coming. Sometimes he could swear he could see her mind working under that giant helmet of hair.

"So...what would've happened if you hadn't turned our deflector dish into a lightning rod?" She was attempting to sound casual. She didn't fool Chakotay. Kathryn was like a cat stalking prey sometimes, especially when she was chasing the forbidden.

He took another sip of cider, deciding he would tease. With a straight face and trying his best to adopt the tone of a beleaguered older brother, he said, "We've been down this road before."

She pounced. "Have we?"

"You, wanting answers to questions you shouldn't ask."

Undaunted, she leaned in from her comfortable perch on the couch, her perfume winding through the air. It wreathed its way across the space between them, reached out —tickled the hairs inside his nose. "But something did happen outside the normal space-time continuum."

Chakotay didn't answer, thinking instead, how much he'd always liked the way she smelled. A funny combination of lilacs and coffee grounds, he found her unique scent comforting. He had come to associate it, over the years, with a sense of "being home."

Those first years, though, in those first years when he wanted to be her lover so badly, her smell would just about drive him crazy. He'd spent a good portion of their work time together avoiding coffee, and trying to convince his penis it was not necessary stand at attention each time the captain exited her ready room.

He looked over at her. She was an attractive woman. Still, he was glad the days when he could barely get through a single shift without thinking that same thought at least a hundred times, were in the past. Obsessing over someone like that could be disturbing, not to mention exhausting. It was better now that they were merely good friends. They understood each other. It showed in the sharpness of their command.

Contentedly, Chakotay vowed not to trade that harmony for anything. It had taken forever to achieve. Sometimes he felt as if they were married. As if they were a stodgy, old married couple that had been together a lifetime. As if they had loved, then hated, then finally given up on fleshy connubiality but chosen to stay together for the sake of the children. Managing somehow to function through it all and emerge transformed as intimate friends. It was amazing to him that they had been able to create, from the ruined fabric of their would-be romance, a lasting bond strong enough to govern Voyager's crew through the Space Hells of the Delta.

"It's strange thinking there's a piece of your life you don't know anything about." His superior had grown reflective, unaware of the first officer's musings.

He dimpled at her and said, "Sounds a lot like the future." In his mind, he acknowledged, for the most part, Kathryn had, indeed, been a good wife. He was a lucky man. It was a shame about the sex though. He would've liked to have sex with her. At least once. He was sure she'd be a demon in the sack.

"Any predictions?"

Silently declaring himself the pig B'Elanna was perpetually accusing Paris of being, he lifted up the cider bottle to refill her glass. "Only that in a few minutes, this bottle will be empty."

She pouted at him in a way that made him think she looked adorable. "Then maybe you should go to the Cargo Bay and grab another one."

Chakotay stared over at her in genuine surprise. And he had hidden them so well. There was something else that made him look though, something about her tone he found distracting and gave him pause: a throaty quality to her voice he hadn't noticed in some time. Suddenly, he began to feel quite warm. Perhaps it would be wise to suggest Kathryn adjust the room's environmental controls. "How do you know that's where I keep it?" he managed to squawk.

She shook her head, a sexy sparkle twinkling in her eyes. "Oh, I can't tell you," she said.

"Why not?" he asked, mouth going dry.

"Temporal Prime Directive."

Chakotay fought the overwhelming urge to cross his legs. Then gave up, lifting one foot off the floor, as he concluded his arousal would be easier to hide if he concentrated on being confused.

Gods in Heaven. He was heading straight for trouble.

Cocoon, kneipho, 2004