Thanks a heap for your patience and the wonderful reviews!
A/N: This fic is turning out to be a lot darker and more angsty than I had intended, but I've decided to go with it. Expect more updates soon. :)
Eyes on the gate, Chakotay was only aware of Tom's sudden proximity when the younger man cleared his throat.
"Some of us were thinking about grabbing a bite to eat before we all head home. Care to join us?"
Chakotay glanced around at the others, all of them struggling to conceal the various degrees of sorrow on their faces.
"Thanks, Tom, but I think I'd better get going. Rain check?"
It was obvious that Tom had expected an answer like that, and he wasn't deterred: "No, offence, Chakotay, but you look like a ghost. I know what you're going through," Tom stated, and – lowering his voice – he added: "You shouldn't be alone right now ..."
He was right. While the prospect of going out to lunch with some of his former crew would usually seem like a great opportunity to catch up with their respective lives, at the moment he wanted nothing more than to go home and fall to pieces in the privacy of his own home. He didn't want an audience. He didn't want sympathy, and least of all he wanted to reminisce about their days aboard Voyager.
Nonetheless, he found himself nodding and forcing a smile so artificial it hurt. "Sounds great."
The beam-in site in downtown San Francisco wasn't very crowded, and so it took less than an hour until they were all seated around a long table at a restaurant. Chakotay wasn't really sure which restaurant it was or even what he had just ordered.
The others quickly recovered from their shared experience and were soon making jokes, enjoying their meals, and telling their favourite Janeway stories. It took Chakotay a few minutes to compose his features, but then he started scanning the familiar faces. Most of the crew were laughing by now, while a young ensign from Voyager's security staff was sharing a story about how he had once happened upon the captain in a state of agitation. During their first year in the Delta Quadrant, they'd had to conserve energy, and the entire crew had been forced to make sacrifices when it came to personal indulgences. For Kathryn, that had meant that she'd had to forgo coffee.
There was no way that anyone who had spent more than a few hours with the captain could be unaware of her caffeine addiction, and the ensign was garnering much laughter from his description of how the lack of coffee had driven her to raiding Neelix's pantry, where she had caused enough of a clatter to alert security.
Chakotay smiled despite himself. He chose not to disclose that more than once he had used his own limited replicator rations to help her stave off withdrawal symptoms. Remembering the look she had given him on those occasions drove a spear through his heart.
At the end of their meal, however, everyone was in high spirits, and even Chakotay had caught himself chuckling with the others from time to time.
When they had all finished and were shrugging back into their jackets, Tom approached him again. "You know, if you have any questions about what it's like … in there …," Tom offered, straightening the collar on his rain coat.
Chakotay nodded. "Thanks, Tom. I'll get back to you on that."
He doubted that knowing about the conditions and treatment Kathryn would have to endure would help him deal, but later that evening, he found that his brain was conjuring up the worst case scenario of torture and persecution. By the time he finally went to bed, visions of Kathryn being brutally beaten or threatened prevented him from finding sleep. After a few hours of tossing from side to side, calling Tom seemed like the only reasonable option.
Kathryn found that she had already lost track of time. When her cell door was unbolted, she could not have said if minutes or hours had passed since the guard had locked her in. A window would have helped her determine the time of day, but Kathryn supposed that being denied the view of the clear New Zealand sky was just another way of punishing the inmates.
She rose when the door opened and was pleasantly surprised that it was not the same guard who entered the cell.
The bathroom experience was another pleasant surprise. It was very clean and she had it all to herself ... with the exception of the guard. As Kathryn combed her hair, she wondered idly why she hadn't seen any people around the premises who weren't humans. She was quite certain that she had seen at least two or three off-worlders during her last visit, so why wouldn't there be any now? As she came to think of it, she hadn't seen any inmates. There seemed to be only the guards around, so the prison was eerily quiet.
"Is it always like that?" she finally asked, as she was being escorted back to her cell. "It's much quieter than I remember."
The guard glanced at her, but said nothing.
"I just mean that it seems strange for a building that's filled with people - there's remarkably little noise."
The guard did answer that time: "We run a tight ship."
They reached Kathryn's cell in no time and she was locked up again. As she sat down on her narrow cot, the guard's words reverberated in her mind, dragging a memory to the fore that she had almost succeeded in repressing.
Captain Ransom had said almost those exact words to her while they had been making repairs aboard the Equinox. 'You seem to run a pretty tight ship,' had been his assessment of her style of command. Thinking about the man whose own determination to get his crew home had resulting in the deaths of countless living beings, Kathryn hated how similar she was to him.
Back on Voyager, there had been days, weeks even, when she couldn't remember why she had decided against using the Caretaker's array, why she hadn't traded technology with this alien race or that, why she had insisted on upholding the Prime Directive to the detriment of her own crew …
Her mind was so used to those thought patterns that she couldn't do a thing to stop them. The dizzying whirl of guilt and shame, of anger and anguish, weighed her down until she finally fell asleep, exhausted beyond measure in its wake.
Her nightmares were filled with the same eerie silence that she had experienced earlier. She seemed to be standing inside her cell. There were people there, but all they did was stare at her. She recognised all of them: There was One, the drone who had committed suicide to save Voyager from the Collective; Quinn, the Q who had sought asylum and then thrown his mortal life away ... there were more, but some of the faces kept shifting in and out of focus.
Somehow, that dream was infused with more fear than usual. Even in her nightmares, Kathryn could generally find a way out of most situations, but this time, she was unable to escape. The silent people cornered her and stared into her eyes, frightening her more than a Borg cube appearing on Voyager's viewscreen would have.
She was shaking when the scraping of a key in the lock of her cell door jolted her awake.