AN: Here we are, another chapter here.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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Even though the unpredictability of life on New Earth was different than it had been on Voyager, life was still unpredictable and it was fragile. Sometimes it was easy to forget just how fragile it could be until they were confronted with the possibility of a tragedy.

"We have to induce vomiting right away," Chakotay said.

His heart was pounding hard in his chest, but he was doing everything he could to ignore it and keep himself under control. Kathryn needed him right now and he wasn't going to let her down.

She was probably going to hate him, but she would eventually forgive him. She felt bad, and he knew that she must or she wouldn't have woken him with her concern, but he had to do what was necessary to save her life. When she'd insisted on helping him test animals and plants for toxicity to add to their catalogue, he'd warned her that getting sick was a possibility and that, if that happened, they'd have to help each other by doing everything possible to clear the poison out of their systems.

When Kathryn protested inducing vomiting, Chakotay took matters into his own hands and gagged her himself, holding her against her attempts to get away from him. He'd forgive her for fighting him. He'd forgive her for biting him. He'd forgive her for spitting curses at him. He'd forgive her for losing the contents of her stomach on him as she protested his attempts to make her do just that.

He could handle anything that Kathryn could throw at him. The only thing he couldn't handle was the thought of losing her.

Kathryn was physically quite strong, especially with the added strength that her fear lent her, but she was no match for Chakotay when his own fear threatened to drown him.

He apologized to her repeatedly as he gagged her until he was content that there was nothing left in her stomach beyond acid and bile. By that time the floor of their house was a mess, both of them were a mess, and Kathryn had given up fighting and had practically collapsed into him.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry," Chakotay repeated, rocking Kathryn in his arms, his own heart still thundering in his chest. He couldn't let his guard down entirely just yet, but he had a good feeling that the poisoning wouldn't be too severe and Kathryn would survive it. "I have to get you water. We have to get as much water in you as we can. You have to flush the toxins out, Kathryn. What did you eat? What were the plants that you tasted?"

Chakotay sat Kathryn up enough to get her out of the soggy nightgown that she'd put on when she'd gotten up to try to deal with her suddenly unsettled stomach. She didn't fight him and she seemed to have very little strength left with which to assist him. He'd forced her into quite a few rounds of violent vomiting and she would take a little time to recover from that. Chakotay put her on the bed and quickly went for water. He returned with a cup and a small bucket of the fresh drinking water that they had on hand.

"What did you taste, Kathryn?" Chakotay asked. He helped her sit up and he put the cup to her mouth. "You've got to drink this, as much as you can."

She looked at him wide-eyed. Was there fear there? He never wanted to scare her, but he thought he saw fear. He hoped it was fear of the poisoning and not of him. Whatever emotion it was behind her eyes, it made her drink the water without argument. She stopped drinking suddenly, though, and gagged, so Chakotay helped her move so that she could empty the contents of her stomach over the side of the bed if she needed to. Cleaning the floor was cleaning the floor. He didn't care how much there was to clean up when this was over as long as Kathryn was resting peacefully and not dead from some unknown poison.

"What did you eat, Kathryn?" Chakotay asked again.

Kathryn gasped for air. She pushed at the cup as Chakotay tried to put it back to her lips.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you," Kathryn said. "Before you tried to kill me. I haven't eaten anything."

"Something made you sick," Chakotay said.

"I don't know what," Kathryn admitted. "I ate—last night. I ate the rations. I had the rations and some of the—the bread. I had some of that. I tried the one plant. It looked—it had..." Kathryn stopped talking while she gasped for air. Chakotay left her alone. He worried, now, that fighting him during her earlier vomiting might have caused her some problem with her breathing. He sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her back while she leaned against him.

"It's OK," Chakotay said.

"It doesn't feel OK," Kathryn said. "I don't feel OK. Chakotay—I'm going to be sick again."

"You can't, Kathryn," he told her. "There's nothing left. You haven't even kept any of the water down. You're probably going to feel sick until we can get your system flushed out. Which plant was it?"

Kathryn groaned and rubbed her face against him. Clearly she was forgiving him for any injustice he may have done to her.

"The one that looked like a fern," Kathryn said.

"I ate it too," Chakotay said. "You had to have eaten something else."

"It was the only one," Kathryn assured him.

Chakotay offered her the cup of water again and gently urged her to drink from it. She accepted it and swallowed down some of the water. When she tried to respond to the water by gagging again, Chakotay rocked her against him gently and did his best to keep her from getting sick.

"Shhh," he soothed. "I know you feel awful. I know it feels terrible. But you've got to try to hold it in, Kathryn. You've got to try to swallow it down. Keep it down. It must be a slow-acting poison. The problem with those is that you've already digested the plant. There's no quick way to get it out of your body. We've got to flush the toxins out. You didn't eat more of it than I told you, did you?"

"No," Kathryn responded. "Chakotay—I'm going to be sick again."

He smoothed her hair with his hand. She was sweaty, but she was wet with everything else too. He was wet as well.

It had been a rude awakening for the both of them. He'd been worried that she would get sick from testing the plants, but he'd never truly been prepared for it. Nothing could have prepared him for the way that he'd felt when she'd woken him up, sick and at least a little panicked, to tell him that she might be suffering from the effects of some kind of poison.

"Try to keep it down," Chakotay said. "Just a little longer. We'll get a little more water in you and you'll keep it down. Just a little longer."

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Chakotay had been watching Kathryn carefully. He cleaned the floor and cleaned himself up. He wiped Kathryn's body down with a wet cloth and dried her before he'd tucked her gently back into their bed. He'd given her water and he'd supported her as he'd taken her to relieve herself.

Without him gagging her to induce it, the violent vomiting was done. She complained of nausea when she moved, but when she curled up in the bed it seemed to pass even though she complained about her stomach feeling uncomfortable. Part of that, Chakotay reasoned, could be her muscles' response to the earlier bouts of sickness.

As far as Chakotay could tell, she was getting better, but she still didn't feel well. If he were to have to guess, he'd say that the poison was leaving her system. She was getting better and she'd make a full recovery from having tasted one of the wrong plants.

The only thing that really made him uncomfortable with that hypothesis was the fact that he had also eaten the same things that Kathryn had eaten the night before. The food that he called bread was something they had regularly. It was a seed and grain bread that they ate with a great deal of frequency. He knew the ingredients weren't harmful to either of them. There was a chance that the rations that they'd shared had expired, but those packets were supposed to last for a long time. Though Chakotay had lost track of how long they'd been on the planet, he could be sure that it wasn't long enough for the packets to expire. Chakotay had eaten the same plant that Kathryn had eaten, a fern that they'd found while on a walk the day before and brought home for testing, and it hadn't affected him negatively. Even allowing extra time for his body to metabolize the plant differently, he'd felt not even a twinge of discomfort.

Chakotay started to doubt whether or not Kathryn had been poisoned. But if she hadn't been poisoned, then there must be another explanation for her illness.

Somewhere around early afternoon, Chakotay had left Kathryn resting to prepare food. Neither of them had eaten and they were both going to have to have something eventually. Kathryn left the spot where he'd left her tucked in bed and found him at his job. She was a little paler than usual, and her hair was somewhat more tangled than it normally was, but otherwise she looked well.

"Are you sick again?" Chakotay asked, leaving what he was doing with the food he prepared over his fire pit to go to her.

"No," Kathryn assured him. She reached her arm out to him. "I'm not sick. I think the nausea has stopped. I don't feel like throwing up."

"What about smelling the food?" Chakotay asked.

"That's why I came," Kathryn said. "It smells good."

Chakotay smiled at her.

"Soup," he said. "I thought you could drink the broth. Soak some of the bread in it. It'll be easy on your stomach. You don't want to eat too much until you know how your body's going to react."

Chakotay found her a place to sit and helped her to get situated. He could tell, from the way that her muscles were shaking slightly as she clung to him, that the events of the morning had taken something out of her. She'd feel better when she got some of the broth into her stomach and she started building her strength back up.

"I'm sorry for this morning," Chakotay said.

"You're apologizing to me?" Kathryn asked. "I should be apologizing to you. You'll probably never be the same. You'll never look at me the same after that."

"Why wouldn't I?" Chakotay challenged.

Kathryn laughed to herself.

"It couldn't be very attractive," Kathryn said. "Watching all of that. Taking care of me like that."

"We discussed what would happen if either of us was ever poisoned before I even started testing the plants here," Chakotay said. "If you could agree to do it for me, why wouldn't I be able to do it for you?"

"I was only suggesting that you'll probably look at me a little differently now that I've vomited all over you," Kathryn said. "Repeatedly."

"I look at you as that much more precious," Chakotay said. "Because I was woken up with the absolute fear, Kathryn, of possibly losing you."

Kathryn laughed quietly.

"You could have let me go," Kathryn said. "Not had to deal with me anymore. You could be free and everything could be yours."

Chakotay laughed.

"You're feeling a lot better, I see," he said. He served a mug of the broth up for her and offered it to her. "Good enough to give me a hard time. It's hot, Kathryn. Take it slow."

"I notice you didn't say that you wouldn't like it," Kathryn teased. "Your freedom."

"I'm not entertaining that with a response," Chakotay said.

"Did I scratch your face?" Kathryn asked, furrowing her brow. The scratch wasn't too bad, but it was noticeable.

Chakotay smiled at her and held up his hand.

"And chewed my fingers up," he said. "But it's fine. That's what I get for getting in a fight with Kathryn Janeway." He shook his head when he saw the concerned expression that took over her face. "Now it's me that's giving you a hard time. I'm not angry with you, Kathryn. You were scared and you were hurting, and I'm afraid that I might have hurt you more. I can only apologize to you for how rough I was. I was—I was scared too. Terrified."

"Did you throw out the ferns?" Kathryn asked.

"I did," Chakotay said, serving himself a bowl of the soup that he'd made. He allowed himself to enjoy all the ingredients. Kathryn could have more of them as she proved her ability to keep down the easiest portions to digest. He sat near her. "I thought that, just in case, it was a good idea to dispose of them. This planet offers enough that we won't miss them, even if they aren't poisonous."

Kathryn moaned as she slowly swallowed the first mouthful of broth that she'd taken in.

"Chakotay, this is so good," she said. "So warm and...perfect."

"Slowly," Chakotay said. "You don't want to make yourself sick again."

"What do you mean if they aren't poisonous?" Kathryn asked. "We know they're poisonous. That's all I had."

"I had them too," Chakotay said. "They haven't made me sick. It's been long enough that they should have by now. So that leaves two possibilities. Either there's something about you that makes you sensitive to the poison in the ferns that I don't have in common with you, or it wasn't the ferns that made you sick."

"What else could it be?" Kathryn asked.

"I've thought about that," Chakotay said. "How do you feel? Right now?"

Kathryn considered the question carefully before she answered it.

"Better than I did," Kathryn said. "My stomach is more settled. I feel tired. A little weaker than usual. My throat is sore. My chest and my stomach ache. A few places on my body are sore."

"Most of that is probably my doing," Chakotay said. "And I'm sorry for that. I only did it because I thought it was best for you."

"I'm not angry with you, Chakotay," Kathryn responded. "You can stop apologizing."

"I'm just concerned that, given the circumstances, it wasn't poison," Chakotay said. "And I think—in light of the fact that it hasn't affected me, we need to think about other possibilities."

"What other possibilities did you have in mind?" Kathryn asked.

"I don't even want to say it," Chakotay admitted.

"But you've got to," Kathryn said. She looked like she might be feeling sick again. She clearly had lost interest in the mug of broth that she held and Chakotay couldn't quite find his appetite for his soup. He put down his bowl and moved next to Kathryn. She put her mug down and reached for his hands, seeking out comfort there. "What do you think it might be, Chakotay? Tell me."

Chakotay hated his own thoughts, but Kathryn needed to hear them and they couldn't exactly hide from what had happened.

"Kathryn—what if it's the virus? What if whatever it was in the atmosphere that was protecting us from the virus starts to break down over time? What if this is the first sign that we're no longer immune?"