Gravitation

A/N: This morning I finished a big project, which I have been working on since the beginning of the year. Into the ensuing brain space slid this oddity. Hope it interests some people… Thank you, as ever, to MissyHissy3 for betaing.

One

I see her before she sees me.

Don't ask me why I choose that moment to look up. There isn't any real reason for it. In this sector, at this trading post, not being noticed is somewhat essential to one's continued good health. When a door opens and you're crouched over a drink, as I am at the moment, you don't look up. You just do a quick mental check of where your weapons are on your person. Just in case. Then you carry on about your business because no one else's is any of yours.

But still.

I look up.

She stands in the doorway, black as sin. It isn't just the boots and leathers but her face and hair, too – her cheeks and forehead are streaked with grime, her hair dyed black. She looks as unlike herself as I have ever seen, and I have seen her in – almost – every way you can imagine.

I shouldn't be able to recognise her so easily. I shouldn't be able to feel her, not this far across this stinking targ pit of a bar, not this far removed from… all of it. But I can. How else to explain why I look up? How else to explain how I recognise her when her own mother would struggle to pick her out in that get-up, in this place?

Not that it means anything. As her eyes begin to scan the bar I turn back to my drink. Whatever she's here for, it isn't me, and it has nothing to do with me. It's been a long, long time since anything in her life has intersected with any aspect of mine. I have no reason or desire to alter the status quo now.

It's been five years since I've seen Kathryn Janeway. And now, of all the gin joints, in all the space docks, in all the universe, she walks into mine.

Getting home changed everything, not because of us, but because of them. The Dominion War had warped the Federation, turned Starfleet so defensive that they had forgotten the difference between security and fear. Voyager had been trapped in a bubble, and when she reached home that bubble burst. We'd been waiting for it to happen – praying for it to happen – but when it did, we weren't prepared for the world we found beyond. We – or one of us, at least - had spent seven years imagining that getting home would instantly make everything right. Instead, it merely shattered any illusion that somehow, somewhere, there was still a normality for us to return to. I should have blown that damn copy of her up the moment she showed up on our viewscreen, old and grey-haired and bitter and not a fraction – not a fraction – of the woman I once knew.

The debriefings were difficult to begin with, and then impossible. They degenerated into de facto court martials, though no one ever told us what we were accused of or gave us the opportunity to form a defence. How could they, when there was no clear line of attack? It shook her – iron core or no – I saw it, the incremental deaths that went on behind her eyes every time she sat in on another little 'chat' with one of the rest of us. If we had it hard, I could just imagine what they'd put her through (and I had to, because hers, as Captain, were firmly closed), just as easily as I could imagine her putting up with it, finding a way through it. She'd come through worse and after all – what else did she have? What was she going to do, give up? Admit that what she had struggled for every day of those seven years – what had kept her rising in the mornings, what had kept her sane – was now taking her and the crew she cared about apart, piece by piece?

I never was as strong as her, or at least not in the ways she cared about. Not for the things she cared about. I'd joined her crew for the sake of my own, after all, not out of any renewed sense of loyalty to the 'Fleet. Now my people – and once again that's what they were, however much she tried to protect them, my people - were in a tough spot. I had put them there. It was my responsibility to get them out.

So we went. Slipping past Starfleet security isn't so difficult, especially, I discovered, when there is a sympathetic Admiral's son in the equation. It's why I didn't even ask B'Elanna if she and Miral wanted to join us. She was a Paris now, and safer where she was.

My final debriefing was on the last day that I ever stood on Earth. I had decided that after that day I'd be gone, whatever the outcome. She sat as she always did when she attended these gatherings, stiffly, her hands in her lap, her face impassive. Sometimes I thought she was looking at me, but other times I could have sworn she was not looking at anything at all.

That was five years ago, and that was the last time I saw Kathryn Janeway.

Until now.

I figure I'll stay where I am and nurse my drink until she drops out of sight, then I'll up and leave, go back to the ship and have Ayala move us on. Of course I'm curious about what she's doing here – the last time I'd seen her was at Starfleet HQ, in uniform, neatly coiffed and every inch the admiral she'd always been destined to become. How she comes to be here, on a trading post on the outer reaches of the last curling frond of a galaxy that I can't even pronounce, let alone spell, is beyond me. But it isn't my problem. She isn't my problem. Whatever it is that's brought her here, it clearly falls into the 'somebody else's business' category, which means my best bet is to let it slide past and join all the other imponderables that characterise the substance of my relationship with Kathryn-fucking-Janeway.

I stare down at the undulating amber surface of my drink for a moment before lifting it and taking a heavy slug, right in the back of the throat. As I put the glass back down, I hear a voice next to me.

Correction. It isn't so much a voice as gravel scraping the thick dregs of an empty fuel tank in the cadence of words. I haven't heard that sound for half a decade, except in the dreams that I resolutely tell myself are so occasional as to be non-existent.

She's no longer on the other side of the room. She's standing beside me, leaning over the bar, her black-clad breasts pressing against the residual stickiness left by glasses just like the one I have my hand clenched around. A slice of black hair slides down towards the viscid bar as she converses with the barkeep. She's asking for someone by name, a name I don't recognise. He points into a dark corner and she nods, then orders a drink before leaning back again.

I should have walked away while she was talking, but for some reason that I can't fathom I didn't and now it's too late. She casts a glance in my direction, and my god she covers it well, but I see it.

A split-second freeze-frame, blue eyes locked on my face.

A minute later her drink appears in front of her and I see the shock she can't conceal emanating from the white-hard grip of her fingers on the glass.

Then she's gone. I'm not, after all, the person she's looking for.

I drain my glass and slam it on the bar, tossing down the strips of latinum I owe as I stand, with a little extra because with a face as recognisable as mine, it's a good idea to grease the wheels in anticipation of those times that you want to be professionally forgotten. The barkeep nods at me, I nod back – pleasantries exchanged, deal done. Time to go, before the black hole that has suddenly reappeared in my life manages to catch me in its event horizon.

I don't even make it half way to the door before it happens – the low rumblings that spell the beginning of a fracas, the first raised voices, the sound of chairs being scraped back.

Not your business, I tell myself. Don't look. Don't-

I look. Kathryn has a phaser pistol levelled at some guy's head, another pointed at the four men who had stood as she'd interrupted whatever it was they had been doing. The guy she's there for is still seated, his hands raised. She looks to have everything under control. And yet…

I see the fifth guy. He's behind her, no way she can clock him. He has his hands on the back of a chair that I know is going to fell her in the next ten seconds. I glance around, wondering where her back up is. Because she has to have back up. Whatever she's doing here must be something to do with Starfleet, and Starfleet don't send four-star admirals under cover to dives like this without making damn sure they have back up.

Not your business, Chakotay. Not your problem.

It really isn't my problem. She really isn't my problem. She should never have been my problem.

And yet, by the time I see the guy lift the chair, I already have the disruptor in my hand. I've fired before he even has a chance to swing it.

Janeway takes a jump-step back at the sound of his death scream, twisting her head to look over her shoulder. I'm already half way to her side, fuming to myself, angry, so angry, but going to help her anyway.

What else am I going to do?

[TBC]