If she's surprised to see me so late at night, she masks it quickly. Her quarters are dim as she invites me into them. Judging by the soft jazz she orders paused, the jacket along the back of the reading chair and the open book on the table, she was enjoying a few minutes of downtime before turning in for the night. It might make her more receptive to this confrontation than she'd normally be, or it may not.

It's happening in spite of her preference. I've let her put it off far too long.

We go through the motions of her asking if I'd like anything and me declining. Finally, she seats herself in her reading chair, motioning for me to settle on the couch opposite. I watch from my haze of admitted fixation as one bare-footed leg slides silkily over the other, a smooth motion belying utter comfort with surroundings that belong to her.

"If you're here about what happened on the shuttle," she opens casually, "you should know that I've decided–"

"I'm not." I save her the trouble of finishing that thought. The notion that she expected me to come here and apologize to her is faintly galling, but I keep focus, despite the fact that, right now, I can't give much of a damn what she's decided or hasn't about my recent actions.

"I see." She doesn't, or she wouldn't dare look so smug and contemplative, so sure of herself with that half cat-like smile as she prompts, "Then what's on your mind, Commander?"

Funny she should ask.

Unblinking, I tell her, in just a few words, what has me here. I say nothing of myself, of the two of us as a functioning unit, keeping it confined to Lessing alone. That's the most important thing. I state my case for having to insist that she apologize to Noah, sooner rather than later. Then I wait in silence for her to stare at me, a full minute slinking by while she considers my words. Eventually, she uncurls herself from the overlarge chair, places her shoe-less feet flat on the floor and sets her coffee mug down on the table between us. It makes a sharp click. In the softening echo, she sits back, still staring. And then:

"Have you lost your mind."

"Excuse me?" I can't have heard her correctly.

"I asked if you've lost your mind, Chakotay."

Or maybe I heard her more clearly than I'd wanted to.

If it was said in the tone of a question, as if there was the possibility that I have a point, the conversation might have been salvageable. It's the sheer frosted calm that gets me. It's the unaffected arrogance of her disbelief that's digging into me: a thorn in the bottom of my foot that keeps stabbing into inflamed, irritated tissues with every forward step I try to take with her.

"It's a legitimate request," I bite off, only just softening the too-sharp edges of every syllable my tongue is slicing through.

She shakes her head slowly, still staring at me I'm going to break out into a grotesque grin any second now and tell her Tom Paris paid me to say it. When I do neither, she leans forward again, reaches out for the coffee she'd only just set aside, leaning back and sipping at it again with infuriating deliberation. I'm left to endure the raking scrutiny of her consideration while she considers my presence, and how to handle it. Finally she says flatly, "I don't get it. Why now? It's been months. I thought we moved past this."

So did I, I almost say but catch himself. I don't let myself be fazed by false hurt she uses to justify her open irritation. It's an elegant attempt at side-stepping my point, but ignoring this hasn't worked out for anyone so far, and there's no reason to expect it to work now.

Calmly, so excruciatingly quietly, I ask, "Can you really sit here and tell me you don't owe him one?"

Her hackles are raised more than just a hair by my insistence; the arch of her neck alone says I've hit a major nerve. "A Starfleet officer who'd been hunting and killing innocent life forms?" she demands. "One who was given the opportunity to cooperate more than once, and who showed not even a hint of remorse for his murderous actions?"

Incredulity laces every tart syllable, enunciates each phrase, and I reject it all.

"A sentient being," I bear down on the truth with steady certainty, "no matter how misguided, that you almost killed."

She, being Kathryn, has the audacity to look openly hurt. When I don't blink or budge from my position, she's far past irritated as she snaps, "Is this what you came here for? To dig up accusations about something that happened five months ago?"

It almost stops me. Has it been that long?

"No," I maintain stonily, shaking off my surprise. "I came to have a serious discussion about what happened five months ago. And I thought you were a big enough woman to be able to admit that what happened in that cargo bay was wrong."

"I thought I had," she returns in a dismissive drawl at sharp odds with the steel in her gaze.

I take a breath, exhaling the resentment that would let her pull me off course, and I never look away from her – no matter how much I want to. "The bottom line is that you owe Crewman Lessing an apology, and I'm surprised it's taken you so long to give him one."

There it is. Right there. That flash of deeper emotion I've been pushing for before the calm descends over her features, masking its presence. But I did see it. I'm getting to her, steadily making my way under her skin. It's exactly what I want from her. The single twitch under her right eye warns me of what's to come if I want to stay this course with her, or would warn me, if I was objective enough to be thinking entirely rationally.

The air around us chills to frigid levels. Kathryn stands, a slow, incremental motion that ends with her spine locking stiffly into place.

"All right," she seems to allow slowly, her right hand rubbing at unseen tension in the back of her neck before dropping to her hip. It's an offensive posture I know well: a posture meant to portray a deceptively defensive position as she says, "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're right. Let's assume that he didn't break, and that I intended to let those aliens kill him in that cargo bay."

I am right. She absolutely knows it too. Even if she wasn't the one who saw the fear in Lessings' eyes the way I did. But I wait for her to finish.

"What exactly do you propose I say that would make a damned bit of difference to him now?"

What? I almost make the novice misstep of asking it out loud. What does she say? What does it matter? I haven't given any thought to the wording. It's not my apology, and it's not supposed to be. But since she's going to make this as difficult as she can, I do the best I can on short notice. "For one thing, that you're sorry? For almost letting those creatures kill him?" I suggest.

Her mouth works as if she's considering that I have a point. "I could do that."

I nod caustic thanks. That was all I needed her to acknow–

"But I'm asking you what good it would do."

It almost freezes me, because I wasn't expecting it. But I don't let it throw me; I'll be damned if I let her throw me off that easily.

"It might reassure him that you're not going to try it again the moment you don't agree with his actions," I reach for and find with a bit of effort.

A slow nod, and I can physically hear a crick in her neck before, "I see." She circles around the coffee table to approach me slowly, making me crane my own neck up to watch her full-length movements. She stops in front of me, very close. Her perfumed bath oils invade my nostrils, the hint of coffee on her breath wafting down to me as she asks, "And are we talking about him now? Or you?"

My body hardens painfully, and it shouldn't. I'm no green novice at this, and I should have expected her deflective tactics. It's classic Kathryn, almost textbook her. I know better than to take the words she's twisted from my own mouth and let them distract me in some mutilated form. I refuse to let her to do that, and I vehemently rejects the power play of her standing over me while I sit, looking up at her.

I stand, matching her squared posture and knowing she hates the reminder of how short she is without thirty centimeters of heel or a ledge to stand on – like the one so conveniently located in her ready room.

"Lessing," I say pointedly. "We're talking about Noah Lessing, and if you ask me, it's past time we did."

"Fine," she spits out in open irritation. Her neck is the one to crane upward now. "Talk – I'm listening."

In any other mood, I'd laugh out loud. Famous last words. Better men than I am have failed to notice the calculated length of rope she dangles in front of me, inviting me to wrap around my own neck and be hung by.

Those men weren't as right as I am. None of them had the stake in her character that I do. Not one of them had a physical need to force her to confront what she'd come so close to becoming five months ago. What a part of me I didn't even realize is still terrified she might become, if we don't deal with this.

"You would never have done that to an alien," I find myself saying. "If he'd been anything other than human, you wouldn't have taken his actions personally enough to compromise your own humanity. You need to address that, if not for yourself then at least for this crew."

She scoffs disbelievingly. Mutters something unintelligible as she turns away from me again. Oh, no she doesn't.

"I didn't hear you."

Her head turns back to me with slow deliberation, her glittering eyes burning almost midnight blue in darkness of shadow. "I said," she painstakingly repeats, "that's where you're wrong."

I blink rapidly, unsure of where she's heading with that. "Meaning?"

"Meaning, if he'd been an alien, I'd have treated him the same way."

Chills wrack my stiff body. "And you see nothing wrong with that?" How can she not?

She shrugs. "There's plenty wrong with it. What I did in that cargo bay was wrong."

I release a breath I didn't notice holding. "That's a relief to hear. Because I was starting to question whether or not you even –"

"But I did not do it because Noah Lessing was human or because he or Rudy Ransom had disappointed me."

Somehow, she's done it again. This was my confrontation, my idea, and suddenly, it's like I'm taking some critical test I haven't studied for. The explanation I've clung to so furiously, using to try and explain her unforgivable actions is being denied, and yet I see no viable explanation hanging within my grasp that could possibly replace it.

If not for the reputation of humanity, or Starfleet…?

"Then why?" I have to ask simply. "Why did you do it? What was it that pushed you over the edge and turned you into some woman that I barely recognized?"

"You're not being fair. I didn't initiate the confrontation with the Equinox."

My head shakes. "No one's saying that you did."

"But you're not taking it into account, either. It was their actions that determined mine. The crew of the Equinox showed their true colors the moment we found the research from their disgusting little experiments. They'd proven they were warped enough to torture and kill sentient life forms just to get home a little faster. I did what I did because they confirmed it by throwing this crew to the wolves they themselves had created without so much as a second thought – I did it because I knew then they had to be stopped at any cost." She leaves me to consider that as she steps around the dining table, moving coolly to the replicator to refill her cup, both unblinking and unflinching. "Lessing had the tactical information I required in order to stop them, and he was refusing to share that information. I was prepared to acquire it from him at any cost. That's the bottom line."

"There you go again with the absolutes," I can't help sticking on because it's a recurring theme on this ship and I seem to be among the only people who have noticed it.

Why is it always about absolutes with her? All or nothing. Complete agreement or disloyalty. With her or against her.Yet when it comes to her own actions, in something as black and white as life and death, she seems unable to see herself standing on the wrong side of the lines she's always drawing for the rest of us.

"Listen to yourself," I'm outright begging her now, frantically holding to the single thread of reason she's left me to cling to. "'At any cost.' You endangered this crew, your own crew, trying to stop them. Weren't the lives of our people worth considering?"

"Absolutely," she nods emphatic agreement, approaching me with her newly-replicated drink, "and I considered it." She takes the smallest sip, and I see the droplets of moisture along her nose from the condensing steam before it evaporates. She lowers her mug, and the air around us goes still and silent as a summer night before a pounding rain. "But in the end, I'd never allow any species to subjugate or destroy another race for personal gain. The members of this crew, of all people, should know that about me by now." She stops very close to me, cradling the mug against her chest, a solid object held between us. "You, of all people, should know that about me by now."

It hits like a plasma storm discharge. Because she has a point there. A good one.

Once, I'd taken up arms to stop a violent race of creatures from doing the same to other people. And during that time, I did far worse things than she did in that room. She knows it. She's told me how thick the intelligence file is that documents my actions.

But her point goes deeper.

Once, I'd defended her for firing on an alien space station to stop a similar race of thugs from decimating another innocent species, even at the cost of stranding my own crew seventy thousand light years away from home alongside hers. It isn't entirely lost on me, but I can't afford to get lost in imperfect comparisons, either. And they are imperfect.

She'd asked me to join her, despite my past and despite having stranded us here, and she'd done it with one nonnegotiable condition – that I adhere to the sometimes cowering, clean hands policy Starfleet holds so dear. The policy I'd thrown into the dirt along with the cold round pips that symbolized my commitment to peace between species in the Alpha Quadrant and my agreement to treat the life of any one sentient being as equal to any other.

What she'd done in that cargo bay flew in the face of everything she's asked me to embrace for her, and it can't be allowed to slide past us, unaddressed. Not today.

Not anymore.

I find myself swallowing thickly, licking dry lips and standing my ground, in part because I have no choice. "None of that excuses the actions you took against Noah Lessing in that cargo bay. You were going to kill him, Kathryn. That's against everything Starfleet stands for, and you know it."

There's a ripple of ire at the direct shot I aimed straight to her heart, but her features settle into an eerie calm far too quickly. "I was going to let the aliens kill him," she smoothly corrects, as if there's a distinction there that matters in any moral universe at all, "if it came to that."

Even her features seem unfamiliar as I scan the planes of her face against the shadows of the dim lighting in her quarters. "I'm sorry, but I can't accept that." My head shakes back and forth on stiff shoulders, trying to fathom what's happened to her. "This isn't you, Kathryn. I don't who you are, but it's not the woman I've known for the past five years."

"No, Chakotay." She sets the coffee down on the table, shedding the symbolic physical barrier between us in a downright dangerous sign of aggression before arching upright to study me. What she finds, inexplicably, seems to sadden her. With a flash of pained pity crossing her features, she says softly, "It's not the woman you think you've known. I'm afraid you're confusing the two."

"Excuse me?" My eyelids shutter rapidly, downright stupefied by her disjointed assertion.

This time, it's her turn to ignore the chance to back down. "You heard me," she maintains.

I wouldn't expect anything less of her, but spirits above, below, and around us, if she could just be a little less her sometimes, I might not have to fight so hard not to strangle her.

I have to force myself to take a deep breath. Focusing on the woman standing in front of me, speaking the foreign words she seems to be speaking, I fight to clear out the intruding images my mind has been trying to mesh into her for months, and to hear only the words she's speaking at this moment. It's not working very well. "If you're trying to make some obscure point, I'm afraid I'm not following."

"Not obscure," she insists. "Just hard. The fact of the matter is that I'm not a saint. I'm human, I'm fallible and I err. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to get over it."

Like hell I will.

"I honestly don't have any idea what you're talking about right now. And I'm not going to let you change the subject. We're talking about you. You and Ransom, and you and Lessing. If you're not capable of sticking to the subject, I don't see how we're going to get anywhere with this."

"You're the one who came here and initiated this conversation, remember?" she needles. "Well, I didn't ask for it, but I'm obliging. The least you can do is to have the guts to face the reason you're so angry with me."

"That's exactly what I'm doing. You're not listening!"

"No. You aren't." She searches my stony confusion, scanning for the acknowledgement I can't give her. "Can you really not see it?" At my clueless shrug of frustration, she gives an exaggerated sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose in a familiar gesture that indicates failed patience with a child, that infuriating way she does sometimes. "This is what happens when you hold someone up on a pedestal, Chakotay. They invariably fail to live up to your image of perfection, and then you're left floundering to find anchor in the stormy seas that follow. I learned that through Ransom, and you learned it through me. It may have hurt, and that's unfortunate, but it's a lesson we both needed to learn. If anything," she straightens too casually, a hand on her lower back for support, "you should probably thank me. You won't make that mistake again."

There are moments that I can't breathe when trying to fathom her reactions. There are moments, just occasionally, when I seriously wonder if she's clinically insane and very good at hiding it most of the time.

"This isn't about pedestals and disappointed expectations anymore than it was about the regulations and logs you kept throwing in my face," I try so desperately to argue calmly. "It's about right and wrong, just like it was in the beginning. And the way you treated me was wrong. Almost killing Noah Lessing was wrong. I thought you saw that in the end, but if you can't, I'm not sure I can continue serving under you."

Her chin comes up sharply, glittering blue eyes assessing him with keener attention than I've received since the moment I got here, and that's saying something significant. "We're back to that idle threat again?" The razor edge of her words slices sharply through the cold air between us, but none cut as sharply as, "Mutiny?"

Speechless, I blink against the casually flung obscenity we avoided using even in the thick of this mess so many months ago.

There's no dirtier word aboard a starship; there's no lower blow she could have struck.

When I'm recovered enough to form some coherent thought, some of the edge of her words has sharpened my own. "I was talking about resignation, but thanks for the vote of confidence." The steady, accusing silence calling me a liar is even more hurtful. Fortunately, I'm still numb from the first blow. The numbness lets me continue. "I'm still talking about it, because you refuse to have an honest discussion with me about what you did in that cargo bay."

"You want honest? Serious?" She's on the verge of raising her voice as she hisses, "Fine. My honest and serious belief is that Lessing would have broken. The minute he saw the first fissure open, he would've been screaming for us to reshield the section and deep down, I think you know it, too."

"Maybe he would have." My estimation of Noah's breaking point might have been the same as hers once I saw the look in his eyes just before I closed the opening fissure, but it made no difference then, and it makes no difference whatsoever now. "It's a chance you never should have taken!"

"It was a calculated risk, and I took it."

It's the cold certainty in the statement I've heard in many waking moments since hearing it pass so glibly from her lips in her ready room. Hearing it again pushes me closer to the abyss, and we're full on arguing now. "It was a bad call!" Hearing my words ring in my ears lets me mute my next statement, bringing my volume down a notch, but it doesn't dim my intensity. "The wrong call," I insist.

"Maybe." She calms somewhat at my correction of volume. Her nod is deep and reflective, but not nearly as stiff as it should be if she's absorbing the full weight of the admission. "Morally, probably. But tactically? I can't tell you that I wouldn't do the exact same thing again, faced with identical circumstances."

"And if our calculations had been just a little off?" I barely feel my feet moving, taking me closer to her, incredulous and refusing to accept that she could be that cold: that reckless with human life. "If the aliens had adapted more quickly than we anticipated? Then what, Kathryn? Did you even consider that?"

I honestly can't believe that she could have. That's what this boils down to in the end, not the confused notion she seems to have about pedestals or expectations.

Typical Kathryn, she doesn't back away from my approach. Even if she probably should. Her right shoulder jerks upward in a half shrug that is downright maddeningly infuriating. "That would have been the risk Noah Lessing ran by refusing to cooperate with us."

"Damn it, Kathryn," I hiss. Incensed by the madness of her cool aversion to truth, I'm catching her by the shoulders to keep her from turning away from me yet again without realizing it. "I don't believe you. I don't believe you believe what you're saying right now!"

I'm not sure what I thought I was doing, or what I want from her anymore. But if I wanted her to recoil, I chose the wrong method. Far from cowed, she absorbs the impact of our bodies coming so close together, my inertia colliding with hers, and she doesn't flinch. "Why not?" she demands, scanning my face with insistence, with eyes that sweep over every facet of my expression and miss no telltale flicker or twitch of admission. "Because you don't want to believe a woman you shouldn't love is capable of making decisions that turn your stomach?"

My stomach drops into his boots. "What?" It comes out in a disbelieving hiss because I was dead wrong only a minute ago. Apparently, mutiny wasn't the lowest blow she's willing to throw at me.

Not by half.

"I can't be what you want me to be," she's saying too softly to me now. "Not out here. If I'm sorry for anything, it's that."

Her words seep in slowly, the icy, deliberate intent to hurt shocking through my systems one by one. I can feel my face twisting into some parody of the contortions my clenching stomach makes – and then absolute fury clenches my teeth so hard against each other that pain shoots along my jaws, and it takes physical effort to unclench them enough for coherent speech.

"Don't do that," I warn, a darker undercurrent of threat running below the surface of my words than I've ever used with her before. She's gone lax against me, all of her tactics in her sharp, piercing words, and I have to shift and adjust my grip to keep her pinned, but I sure as hell do. And I'm not letting go of her anytime soon. "Don't you dare."

I won't be manipulated into turning this into a conversation about us.

"Don't what?" There's no resistance to my hold, no indication that she's uncomfortable with our proximity. She has no right to seem so calm, so unaffected by my warning as she drawls, "Don't speak the truth?" Her darkened lashes sweep down to rest against her white cheek bones, her intent gaze landing on my tight mouth. "I understand if you don't want to hear it," she says with devastating softness, a hint of sympathetic honey that sticks to my skin, "but it is the truth, Chakotay."

"It's not," I whisper fiercely, all conscious effort going into keeping my grip on her arms from becoming an angry vice that would leave black imprints on her cold white skin for days to come. "It's a cheap shot and you know it. I accepted our positions a long time ago. I've moved on."

"Have you?"

She leans into me, pressing a body fuller than I'd noticed lately dead against me. If not for my hands on her arms, she'd be as draped against me right now as she is in my cursed dreams.

"I can admit that I want you, Chakotay," she's all but purring tauntingly in my face. "Now tell me that you don't want me. Tell me you moved on years ago, that this," she shifts, and I find an insistent hip rubbing too near the half-hard flesh between my thighs, making me grit my teeth, and shove her centimeters further away from me, "had nothing to do with your sense of betrayal when I had you confined to quarters."

My head is whirling with fury and disbelief. When I came here tonight, I'd known she wouldn't be very receptive to my point of view. But this calculated? This vengeful?

I'm starring in open contempt at the stranger in my grasp pressing herself against me. It reminds me of my dreams, which fills me with an entirely unwarranted sense of shame to top it all off, and all I can think to growl at her is, "Is that what you need to hear?"

It certainly seems to be, from where I'm standing.

She ignores the intimation. "Tell me," she insists, "and it ends here and now. You can resign if you want, and I won't try to stop you. I'll even throw in that apology you're so convinced I owe you."

"Damn it, Kathryn," I snap, pushed to the brink at last, "I never said–"

But i had thought. I may as well have said. And I was wrong. Not about that, but it doesn't matter now, because the cold realization that she's seen through me so easily softens my grip just enough that her mouth has the ability to close the tiny gap between us. Her open mouth is crushing into mine, suffocating the lie I wanted so desperately to tell myself.

She kisses me.

It's not a soft kiss. This is an open taunt, a below the belt jab intended to make me admit the real reason I'm angry with her, the real reason I feel so betrayed. It's both everything I've accused her of being in the heat of anger and everything she's not been through this whole, twisted mess.

It's what she could be, what I could want her to be, what the real her would never be all wrapped up in one, but it's not the brightest tactical move she's ever made, trying to bring that point home to me, because the bottom line is that it's her. Against me.

It's her and it's me and the people we used to be knew better than to ever let this happen.

All the anger and built up hurt pours into the connection, tipping the precarious balance we've maintained between reason and repressed lust, and suddenly, it's clear that coming here tonight was the stupidest thing I've done yet because reason never stood a chance in this room.

Hands are everywhere, gripping, flattening, stroking – zapping thought from both of us. Her shirt is over her head and behind us, somewhere on the floor. My pants gape open, my lips apart and flushing warm breaths against her neck before she pushes me away from her, holding me at arm's length for a brutal moment and I'm straining to hear the husked words emanating from her reddened mouth while she draws my left hand down the front of her pants and deep between her legs, leaving no mistake about her level of desire for me. "Tell me," she dares in the husked hint of breath I've left her.

I can't, damn her. Even if I could, I wouldn't be able to. Triumph blazes in her against a thick backdrop of lust as she realizes it, and I don't even care, as long as she doesn't try to move. She reaches behind her, using the pressure of my mouth against hers to hold herself steady while the fingers of my trapped hand rub at odd angles against her slick, wet heat. It's enough to keep her frantic about the way she removes her bra, which disappears before my free hand closes greedily around her hip, the other snaking a slick trail from between her legs and up to her bared, pale-silk breasts.

It's not the body I'd fantasized about years ago those few months planetside, when fantasizing was safe. Gone are the slender planes and angles I'd so painstakingly exorcised from my brain. There's a disarming, fleshier grip for my hands in her hips, a softer fullness in the bare breasts that had been crushing into my chest not a moment earlier, a curve and weight to them in my hand that belongs here, against me right now. Mindlessly, I bury my mouth in the soft round flesh, kissing and licking a ravenous trail from one achingly hard peak to the other, reveling in the low sounds vibrating in the back of her throat and the small hand that rakes cool nails through the sensitive hairs at the back of my head.

On the last conscious level I can attain before all remaining blood drains out of my neural pathways and pools in my groin, I realize what she's known about me all along. It's not want for that younger woman I've been fighting to stifle so recently; it's raw desire for this one fueling my need, and at least part of my anger. As I roughly divest her of the cloth barriers keeping me from my ultimate goal, I resent the nearly-naked woman in front of me for replacing the one that I'd loved, the one I'd thought of as infallible, incorruptible – the one I followed blindly as half a saint. I am downright furious at her for failing to keep that Kathryn alive. For herself, for me, for all of us.

None of that changes the fact that I still want the hell out of her. The man I was three years ago might have learned to turn off his attraction for the woman she had been, but the man I am today, and the woman she has become, are an entirely different story. She's backed across her dining table, her pants dangling from one leg, and she's guiding my throbbing cock to where it wants so desperately to be.

Under normal circumstances I would wait, and the borderline pain in the pleasure wouldn't be there, and I hate myself even more for it, but this pain of hard and fast and raw is more erotic than soft slowness. It's clear from the slightly sharp nails she usually trims digging into my bare shoulders that waiting isn't what she wants, maybe is never what she wanted as she sits upright on the edge of the table, pulling me closer despite the initial resistance her body offers.

"Now. Here," Kathryn demands, heedless to that resistance, and it cleanses me of any doubt I might have had about continuing.

She wants this. She started this. She wants me, here, now, angry, disillusioned but real – not blind devotion springing from a man with a washboard stomach and rippling pectorals exploding on the advertising image of some idyllic new holo-romance. And it may well come at the cost of some of my self-respect later, but I'm not in any frame of mind to do much more than to oblige her. I drive her own point home to her, letting her have the smaller victory because this is all that matters anymore. At least in this one frantic moment, and those that follow.

She takes all I have, her body jerking back along the surface of the desk from the force of my movements, but my hands on her hips keep her from sliding very far.

"Bridge to the captain."

With her thighs clenching compulsively around my waist, it too slowly penetrates that the red alert klaxons sounding around us aren't from the impending climax we've been racing toward for the past frantic minutes.

The word that leaves my lips is one she'd muttered three seconds ago and for an entirely different reason. Dumbfounded, red-faced with exertion and frustration, I watch her scramble to crawl to her shirt and tap her commbadge after shoving me off of her and sliding off of the table I'll never be able to look at the same way again.

"Janeway here." If she sounds breathless and irritated as hell, it should be maskable by the late hour and having presumably just awoken to a startling comm. call.

"Sorry to wake you, Captain, but we're reading some unidentified distortions in the surrounding space," Harry is claiming. "Engineering is reporting we've got a massive buildup of core pressure but we can't identify a cause."

This is a joke. Paris is behind this. He has to be. My entire soul leaks out of my pores in a flood of disbelief. They've got to be kidding. Now? Right now? I'm numbly watching her expression, which is closing in on murderous by the second. "What's the reading?" she growls, and I can't look away from the gleaming white curve of her backside just yet.

"43,000 kilopascals and climbing," Harry Kim reports tersely, and every word deflates the raging erection I'd been trying to extinguish through entirely more pleasurable means before the good Ensign interrupted us.

She exchanges a hard glance with me, and even through everything, I think I know what she's thinking, aside from an entire list of obscenities that are running through both our minds. The number's not critical, but if it continues climbing…

"Is it still rising?" she asks curtly.

"Yes, ma'am. 44,200. The distortions outside the ship seem to be increasing with each rise."

That's it. Our last hope of maintaining this mood, much less finishing what we'd started, is crushed under seven hundred kilopascals of warp core pressure.

"Shields," she snaps. "All stop. Check that the sensors are functioning properly. Have B'Elanna report the minute she gets to Engineering. I'll be up in two minutes." She's already half dressed, one leg into the crumpled pants she's had to search to find. "I have to go," she tells me as the comm. line falls inactive.

I didn't need to be told that while I fumble to collect my scattered clothing, the shock of the intrusion into a heated moment fully deflating what had been a painfully hard erection only a minute ago. I feel her eyes fall away from my bared body, wonder if the ship had actually been rocking and we'd failed to notice, and I grit out, "I should come too."

I pretend not to see the way she stiffens, even hunched over to pull on her shirt, and reality reasserts itself with a vengeance.

It doesn't change certain hard facts. Whether or not she wants to admit it, it's true. My place, until she relieves me of it or I resign, is still on the bridge, beside her. She doesn't argue. It takes me less time to dress than her, my clothes being closer together, and I'm ready by the time she is, but we leave the room in absolute silence. Neither of us able to look the other in the eye anymore.

It's an awkward ride to the bridge.