Morning came swiftly, she always thought. A little too swiftly as the early dawn light illuminating the room, urging her eyes to open. For a moment she lay still, lured by the arm around her waist and the warmth shared between them. Sleeping like this for the past couple of weeks had become natural to them; and what had started out with a tinge of trepidation had slowly metamorphosed into a means of comfort.
She let her thoughts drift to her ship again, to the all the people that she loved on board. What were they doing, she wondered; where were they? Not a detail left unmemorised, she traced the cavities of the ship; the intricacies of the bridge, her ready room, her quarters... And not for the first time, a pang of loss settled in her chest. This was her grieving.
Almost a little too briefly, the last week had passed them by. Christmas, not that Kathryn had been paying attention, had come and gone with little consequence. Jan and Gregg hosted a small Christmas party for the medical students and interns who had been on call. She had nearly laughed at the sight of them hobbling in through the front door. The lot of them looked too much like herself during her early days in the Academy; dishevelled, tired.
The cabin was always too cold in the morning, she thought as she peeled away the covers and stepped onto the icy floor before she looked back to make sure she'd not woken him. In her growing mental catalogue of things about him, she had quickly noted Chakotay's penchant for sleeping. Taken off the ship and out of the strict schedule he'd been fit into, he could stay like this all day. And sometimes she was tempted to let him if for no other reason than to watch him.
He looked different in repose; not younger, just happier. Supine, the wrinkles on his forehead smoothed and showed off the sweeping lines of his tattoo. And his hair, she smiled as she reached her hand out, touching it softly so he wouldn't notice: it fell messy, long and boyish.
Even though they shared a bed, there was no intimacy between them. After the first night, she had learned that the responses he generated were nothing more proximity - fomented by their respective abstinences. And he held her, she frowned, not because he loved her, but because it was the easiest way to get to sleep. When they were on New Earth, there was an unspoken inevitability to their rapport; they were the only two people on a whole planet. And there was the assumption that one day they would become lovers. But more than their extreme degree, that expectation existed because that final step was what they had been careening towards since they day they'd met. And, if she believed in Fate, even before.
He woke slowly, tugged to consciousness by a small tickle on his face. Disoriented, his eyes flew open to find a scene he never expected. "Kathryn?"
So engrossed in her thoughts, she didn't notice he'd opened his eyes and now, had found her fingers dabbling in his hair. "Oh," She pulled her hand away, startled like a child whose hand had met a hot stove. "Good morning uh-" She cleared her throat and began to move off the bed before he caught her hand.
"What were you doing?" He yawned, not angry but amused.
Abashed, she looked down to hide her face and shook her head. "Nothing," She whispered. "Just watching you sleep."
"Oh," A flutter spread through his belly as Kathryn had never been so bold with him before. She had touched him yes, but never something so chastely intimate. "Well," He yawned through a smile. "Are you hungry?"
"Well," She looked up at him with a tell-tale smirk. "What I really would like-"
"Is a cup of coffee?" He finished for her.
"Mm," Kathryn nodded her head and shared his look before something else occurred to her. "Chakotay?"
"Yes, Kathryn?"
"We haven't talked about the shuttle since a few weeks ago."
He took a deep breath and let it out as he pulled himself up against the headboard. "It's not like us to forget about something like that."
"No," She agreed. "But we have to destroy it, bury it somehow."
"It's in an isolated enough spot," He remembered the place, albeit hazily now that a few weeks had passed. "At the base of a small climb."
Kathryn pulled herself back up onto the bed and drew her leg up to her chin. "But how are we going to bury it with just the two of us?"
"I don't know. Somehow," He thought for a moment. "We'll have to trigger a small avalanche and hope that we can bury it."
"But the shuttle has no power?"
"Well," He shrugged. "You're the engineer. If I recall, you were as good as B'Elanna at generating energy out of thin air."
She rolled her eyes in amusement. "I'll check it out. We'll go on Monday, after Jan and Gregg have left for work."
"It wasn't far from here - maybe a three kilometre walk."
Kathryn nodded her head, taking a deep breath as she started off the bed again and indicated for him to do the same. "You'd sleep all day if I let you," She joked as they walked out into the tiny kitchen.
"That I would," He grinned. "I've always been a good sleeper."
"So," She handed him the can of coffee as he readied the rest of the machine. "Monday."
"Yes," He told her. "Monday."