It only took seconds to realize she wasn't the intended target.
Ripped from her bridge, Janeway landed on Kurros' shuddering floor and the ripple of surprise and almost fury on his face was hard to misread as the Hazari bombarded his odd little ship. His companions chittered and crooned in shrill, dissident languages amid chaos. She felt Voyager's attempt to lock onto her and forcefully retrieve her but something Kurros did kept stopping them – why? She locked gazes with the sly alien as she lumbered to her feet on the pitching deck. Why was he stopping them?
He fixed the communications console an instant later and erected a forcefield to contain her in motion before she could touch him and disrupt his inscrutable machinations.
The field burned on impact. Her forehead, shoulder, and hand screamed in impotent distress. Glittering burns dotted her skin through holes in her uniform. He left her there in pain while his ship recloaked, ignored her as he disappeared to see to any number of urgent repairs and evasive maneuvers alongside the only other humanoid creature with the strange face and chittering words.
They all ignored her barked orders for release, discussion, or explanation.
Not that she needed the latter. Upon reflection, she knew what Kurros intended. What she didn't yet know was how to outsmart him and a well-meaning former drone when he tried to trade her back to Voyager in exchange for Seven. But she began to plan for the eventuality.
A little too soon, the turbulence of battle ceased and so did the tingle of a fighting transporter lock. They'd managed to slip back into the relative obscurity of subspace. Her stomach sunk. It meant a much longer stay than she preferred.
It took some time to realize that even with their collective brilliance, the ship was too badly damaged to repair completely. Kurros transferred her to some dull, closet-like compartment that only had room in which to lie down. It seemed soundproof, at least from out to in. After what must have been thirty-six hours of burning need, she finally managed to make enough noise against the opaque door/wall to make him appear and to convince him that she needed certain biological considerations: for sanitation if nothing else. He disappeared for an interminable time. Just as sweat broke out on her forehead and her control nearly fled, the closet widened just enough along one side to include a crude toilet – and no sink. It emptied itself after she stood in abject relief. The addition to her cell remained.
What felt like days passed without food, water, sound or humanoid, although she awoke without her nonfunctional communicator after the first time she slept. When Kurros finally appeared again, covered in sweat and filth, it was with a sarcastic, "I don't suppose you could be convinced or trusted to help us with minor repairs in exchange for food and water?"
Her throat burned beautifully with thirst when she told him to go to hell. Unsurprised, he blinked away her disdain, fed her anyway, and what felt like a victory turned sour when he came back once to feed her the next day, then again once the next.
The third day, she pelted him with questions the moment he appeared.
"Why aren't you trying to ransom me back to Voyager?" she demanded.
"How do you know that we are not?" he parried.
It was true. She didn't. But she was relatively sure: "You're still too badly damaged. You won't risk it."
After so long in silent captivity, all but disregarded by her captors, his simple nod drove her crazy. She wanted him or herself dead. "Leave me on the nearest planet, " she suggested. "When I get back to Voyager, we won't pursue you. You have my word."
"I'll give it some thought," Kurros said, handing her a tray laden with a thick bowl of liquid and no utensils.
While he was extended, she struck, knocking the tray aside and striking at his throat with a well-thrust elbow.
Some kind of field sizzled around him, burning her the same way it had the first day, burning another hole through her clothes so painfully that she sank to one knee with a grunt. She knelt in what she later learned was the famous "terra nut soup", gazing up at Kurros in anger and abject pain. "Why are you doing this?" she growled, musing on the technology he was employing to protect himself yet still enabled him to touch objects at will.
Instead of speaking, he only eyed her reproachfully, then increasingly with another emotion, one she hadn't yet seen from him.
He didn't even try to engage her for the next three days. He brought food and she tried her stunt again, this time using the objects he brought to try to penetrate his field. It ended the same.
On day twelve, she ceased this method. The next day, he took her under careful disruptor aim to another nearby compartment, this one smooth and smaller and entirely empty. When he shoved her inside, alone, she wasn't entirely surprised to find the purpose of the new compartment was cleansing. Not water or sonic but some other kind of cleaning method was applied, transport technology, most likely. If it was powerful enough, she might be able to knock him out and use it.
He caught her eyeing the controls and smiled. The smile curdled her insides. After that, when he escorted her, the other humanoid creature stood back, also armed, and out of reach. She could easily incapacitate one of them. She would not easily reach and neutralize both.
She tried to escape this way a dozen times anyway. Each time she met with varying levels of success but they eventually outwitted her. Without Seven to interface directly with their systems, Janeway was unsuccessful in disrupting their collective link again. They were simply too formidable for the zero resources available to her.
As punishment for each attempt, Kurros left her alone for increasing periods of time: alone in a windowless closet with no sound or sight or smells. When he eventually reappeared after hours, days, Janeway could no longer keep her silence – not even out of spite. After such a punishment, he never withheld engagement after appearance, no matter the fury or scorn or lack thereof in her greeting. Mentally starved, she craved stimulation, conversation – even his.
Slowly, it began to seem that, wherever they were in subspace, Voyager couldn't find them; if it was taking this long, it probably wasn't happening at all. It took longer to fully accept that he wasn't returning her or trying to bargain her back for Seven of Nine. His ship was still too damaged; Voyager would still take it in a physical fight. He wouldn't risk it.
The distasteful notion began to penetrate that the only way out of her tiny closet would be through Kurros' blessing; he was the only one who showed any inclination of acknowledging her. He even seemed to enjoy their verbal sparring each evening, and he descended to engage her in a battle of words or to purposefully continue evading her questions regarding his motives for not releasing her. With increasing disgust, Janeway remembered some of his first words to her and believed she understood what he got out of it.
Tactics. Pure psychology. The best kind of puzzle, he said with the same mild smile he offered her at each appearance. Containing her, modifying her behavior through consequences, had become a personal challenge.
He was a psychopath by any human standard of the word. A coldness started to spread within her, but not even this filled the emptiness of an entire day with no mental stimulation whatsoever. He was her only mental release from a growing autophobia, a fear he was deliberately instilling.
He began tempting her with various topics of interest and gauging her difficulty in refraining from animated speech. She was able to keep fairly tight-lipped and their evening interactions were one-sided. For a while, at least.
In the end it was her humanity that forced her to participate in these ritual evening discussions or go insane. Eventually, she couldn't bring herself to make it unpleasant for him in her space when he casually began joining her for meals. The longer he stayed, the less hallucinations she endured.
Then one day he brought her a change of clothing, a simple tunic and leggings combo that he must have taken from Voyager's schematics and she realized what that elusive element in his demeanor was. Consideration.
And she finally understood. He was never solely after Seven's mind. Despite his mental connection with his gang of intellectual thugs, he felt physically alone on this ship after so many years. For him, the appeal was both the former drone's intelligence and her physical presence as a companion for him, perhaps on more than one plane. Now that Seven wasn't available, he was coming to terms with the options open to him. Her.
She wasn't his ideal of a humanoid companion but she would do. Kurros was taking his time, learning her, even conditioning her to accept his presence.
After at least eight months, possibly ten to twelve – spent mostly in a silent closet the size of two of her in any direction – it was working.
Without warning, he leaned in and kissed her. She stiffened, moving away.
"Don't," she warned, entirely ready to defend herself even if it meant more burns from his confounded selective shielding.
He smiled blandly. "As you wish, Kathryn."
He left her alone in the godforsaken closet for three weeks and she nearly lost her mind. After nine days she was pounding on the walls, yelling herself hoarse and after two weeks she felt insects crawling in her skin and tried to rub them out.
When he finally returned, he acted as if nothing had happened. He studiously healed her self-inflicted injuries as she shook, stoically transported her to the shower compartment then back, and calmly served a meal he knew that she preferred. He spoke sedately about his daily activities and pursuits over the past two months while she shivered and listened.
When he leaned in and kissed her again, she forced herself to still, desperate not to experience a repeat of the previous torture so soon. There was no way that she would survive it with her mind intact. As she guessed, her silence emboldened him, and when he moved over her she was genuinely surprised by how little she felt him there.
It took seconds to realize that she didn't hate the feel of his hands on her as much as she thought she would, days to understand that she could probably live with it every day if this was what it took to eventually escape, and months to know that he would never let her go despite her perpetual fantasies of leaving and that even if he did, she would no longer be able to survive outside of the little ship.
It took years to accept that she had grown to need him, too.