Disclaimer: Not mine! I'm borrowing it so don't bust on me for copyright infringement or what is sure to be the heinously inexact science or anything! Do I sound like Paramount's think tank?
Chakotay had stayed with her, much to her relief . . . and for once in her life she had discarded social embarrassment (What social embarrassment, after all? Nobody was on the ship) and saved him the discomfort of her couch by sharing the bed -since the couch was too narrow for him and it was her bed after all. It had helped that much more to know without any doubt that he was there, to hear his breathing when she woke up at intervals in the night. She whole heartedly admitted that she was afraid he'd disappear like the crew had, and he had allowed that he felt the same, roles reversed of course.
He'd protested of course, but, surprisingly, she hadn't been interested in his discomfort, nor her own. Kathryn Janeway did not like being scared, or unsure of things . . . and the only thing that was right on the ship was Chakotay. He was her constant, and she needed that. And upon first returning to consciousness, she realized that she had never felt more rested since coming aboard Voyager, despite their present predicament.
But as she slowly willed herself awake, she realized that it only took one person to be embarrassed. One of his arms was around her, as if to make sure she was there, and his hand rested just above her stomach. He was close to her, almost completely against her back, and she could feel his steady breath on her neck, which had always been a sensitive area. She wasn't used to such tactile contact, let alone from him, and her body was telling her that in no uncertain terms.
She tried, gently, to move his arm, not wanting to wake him and thus embarrass them both. He didn't wake up, but his embrace tightened, unwilling to let her leave. She suppressed a gasp as his hand moved upwards ever so slightly-
She didn't bother trying not to disturb him as she shot up and fairly crawled out of the bed, finding her knees in a state nothing short of absolutely useless. What kind of an idiot was she, anyhow? She knew it would get to one or both of them. Oh, Chakotay had tried to warn her, but no . . . she was feeling needy.
She sat slowly against the wall, trying to collect her fuddled wits and hoping desperately that he didn't wake up and find her thus bothered. She hadn't anticipated waking up in this state. Oh, but what a way to wake up!
She put her face in her hands for a moment. She couldn't let it get to her. No, she could not. Oh, she made her excuses . . . trying to blame Captain-subordinate protocol and whatnot, but really, it was her personal protocol that stopped her. She wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Putting her hands down, she let her eyes rest on him.
And she could have killed herself, but she wanted to climb right back in.
Slowly -oh, ever so slowly- his eyes opened. He didn't move or speak. He merely regarded her there, sitting on her bedroom floor in her nightgown with her face flushed and her eyes more than slightly fevered-looking as she tried to wind herself down from the feeling of having hands -his hands- on her . . . Even though, on his part, it had been unconscious. He coloured slightly himself.
"I-"
She scrambled to her feet, intent on making her way to the sonic shower as soon as possible and get the hell away from the look in his eyes. "Shh-hh!" she shushed him, nervous and showing it, much to her own disgust. "Don't you dare say anything!" She bent hurriedly and retrieved a fresh uniform from her open drawer. She always had extras in case she ran out of rations like she always did. "I'm going to take a shower."
Without further ado, she retreated from the room and from him.
Once inside the sonic shower, she allowed herself the time to do some real blushing. It was her fault entirely, or course, for weaselling them both into that situation. And he'd tried to warn her! Oh, what didn't she ever listen to people? Even when she trusted their judgement implicitly, she never really listened. Sometimes she just happened to agree with them.
Command and exploration were her forte . . . sexual tension that more often than not fouled up such commanding and exploring was most definitely not.
There, she'd admitted it! Yes, she was attracted to him! She almost always had been . . . but until now her subconscious had never figured out a way to make her really pay for covering it up for so long. And now she was alone on the ship with him, with no possible way of avoiding him or his eyes and no way of avoiding herself when quarters got too close.
The sonic shower hummed complacently throughout her mental tirade, removing the slight sheen of sweat she had developed seconds earlier. She just hoped he wasn't out there still. Could they just meet in the corridor like nothing had happened? Did he even know what had happened back there? He probably did. He was smart and he knew her far too well.
The shower turned itself off and she donned her uniform as quickly as possible. She was not going to turn hypersensitive today! She was going to march out there and face him without so much as batting an eyelash. Similar things had certainly been done before, and it had always worked. Today was like any other. She was going to be a professional out there, no matter what question lurked in his eyes.
After fixing her hair, she cautiously stepped out of the bathroom, and was relieved to find him gone. Not that she could avoid him for long, and not that she really wanted to, since the previous night's fear still troubled the back of her overtaxed psyche.
It didn't matter. Today, she was going to find out what had happened to her crew.
She made a point of picking up her tricorder, since she hadn't had it yesterday. She was going to go to Astrometrics and pick the ship apart atom by atom if she had to. It had to be that anomaly, despite the fact that the sensors showed nothing. Inside, there was a normal time line and outside, there was a normal time line . . . she was sure there was something more to it than that, something she was missing. . . .
The door chimed once and opened. They looked at each other sheepishly for a moment, until she spoke.
"I'm going to Astrometrics. I'm going to dissect this ship if I have to," she said, attaching the tricorder to her belt.
"It might not be the ship, you know," he said solemnly, watching her.
"I know, but it's a place to start. Like you said yesterday, it's mostly dead space out there." She finally managed to get the hold put on, and looked up at him. "Are you coming with me? You could run spacial scans while I do the internal work."
He seemed to ponder that for a moment, then nodded. "I'll come with you."
She suppressed a slight wince. "All right."
"But first, we're going to the Mess to get some breakfast." His tone brooked no objection.
She really didn't feel like arguing with him anyhow. She followed him out into the corridor and to the turbolift, not really fancying getting into a confined space with him.
Let it alone, she told herself. Today you are going to find out what the hell happened, and act like what happened back there is no issue, even if it kills you.
"Deck two," he said, about as noncommittal as one can be when giving an order to a computer. His expression was neutral as well, but she could see him watching her out of the corner of his eye. He and his expressions! How could he convey so much without even twitching an eyebrow? Impossible man. And nosy. The question would come at some point. . . .
"Are you even hungry?" she demanded. She wasn't, but a coffee would be nice. . . .
"No, but we should eat something anyhow," he replied. "You especially, since if I didn't bother you about it, you never would."
She shot him a look. "How do you know? I eat when I'm hungry. Right now, I'm not."
"Eat anyhow."
She pursed her lips. So he was going to be disagreeable? Well, he knew well enough that she could outdo him in that department. It was going to be a chilly day on the starship Voyager.
The turbolift halted, and the doors were opened. The hall was silent, as she expected it to be, but not as it should have been. The Mess Hall was always a hub of activity on the ship, even when it wasn't meal time. It was wrong in some vague way that she couldn't hear anyone's voice . . . more so not to have Neelix move directly over to them when they entered, ready to rattle off his often suspicious menu. She was surprised she missed that.
But the most salient feature of the Mess at that moment was the preponderance of trays still sitting on the tables. It had been dinner time for most, when everyone had disappeared, and evidence of the fact was everywhere. Most of the food was uneaten, and undoubtedly cold.
"We should probably clean up," Chakotay murmured, looking around. "Go make sure the stove burners aren't on."
She didn't expect them to be, since there was no burnt smell in the room as there would have been had one of Neelix's concoctions been simmering all night. She moved around into the galley, and found nothing out of place but a cutting board, a paring knife and a few leola roots. Something about that struck her as funny, and she laughed.
"What?" Chakotay asked from where he was recycling meals into the Mess Hall's replicator.
"I just had a thought. This is a perfect opportunity to kill the leola root," she replied as she put the knife and cutting board back where they belonged.
He smiled slightly, almost sadly. "Yes, it is, but I don't have the heart to do it when he isn't here . . . that and it's not as funny when you can't see Neelix angry."
She rolled her eyed, grimacing at him. "I can't believe you. You just guilted me out of saving us all stomach aches with one sentence!" She looked around at the galley, putting her hands on her hips. "I don't think there's much to do back here, really. I don't understand why Neelix likes it so much. It's almost cramped."
"Maybe we should expand the kitchen," Chakotay said, placing more trays into the replicator and watching them disappear.
"No, we need the common area. It's always crowded at meal times, and the crew's expanding too. Did you know that three more of the female crewmen are pregnant? Withing days of each other?"
"I did . . . aren't they all down in Stellar Cartography too? I thought that was a bit odd."
She came out of the kitchen, and proceeded to gather trays from the front tables. "I know. I thought so too . . . and if it was really any of my business, I'd ask the Doctor who the fathers are . . . Either it's just a coincidence or someone's cutting a swath down there."
"It's your business if you make it that way," he said piously, taking the trays from her as she approached. Oh ever-loyal, henpecking Chakotay. He was a fool sometimes, in that respect.
"That's the problem. I don't think I want to know. Before all this happened, I was going to look into finding some nice little planet we could take shore leave on. Everyone was getting pretty bored, and I didn't want it all resulting in a population boom on the lower decks or something. That, and we always need a little peace around here."
He looked around. "This looks pretty peaceful to me," he stated.
She was grateful he didn't make a comment about population booms. That had been a bad move of her part, considering her present mood. "Yes," she agreed, "but at a cost. When I said peace, I didn't mean complete silence."
"If I could forget the fact that we don't know where the crew is, this might not actually be so bad," he said, placing the last of the trays in the replicator.
She shrugged ambivalently. "That depends upon how you see it." She waited for the last of the uneaten food to disappear. "Coffee, black," she stated.
He directed a long look at her. "You should have more than that."
"Later," she replied, though it was entirely probable she'd never live up to that.
The hypocrite that he was, he didn't order anything but tea. He never took his own advice, and it bothered and worried her at the same time. He wasn't as bad as she was, but he'd steadily picked up some of her bad habits over the years.
"If we're just going to have drinks, we might as well go down to Astrometrics."
"Lead the way," he said, gesturing.
When they reached their destination, they both began their tasks silently, she running internal scans, he running the external ones. She modulated, re-modulated and even hit the console once, but it revealed nothing. Whatever temporal disturbance she had hoped to find was not there . . . and if her luck held out it was on the other end of the sector instead of there explaining her problem.
Chakotay didn't come up with anything of note either, or he would have told her. He pretended to be quite studiously applying himself to his work, but she could feel and see him watching her. She was trying to forget what had happened earlier that morning, but the look in his eyes clearly told her that he wasn't trying as hard as she. In fact, some of the looks he gave her made her want to scuttle out of the room like she'd done something wrong. And hadn't she?
Seven's holographic adventures notwithstanding -or maybe they were- she didn't really feel quite right working in the ex-drones domain without her knowledge.
Seven didn't know that she knew . . . she also didn't know that she had hurt two people in the process with her little experiments on the holodeck. The Doctor had moped around the ship for days until she herself had looked into what had caused Seven's near brain failure. It had made her feel strange, to see what Seven had been up to . . . and she was afraid to admit maybe even resentful.
On the other hand, could she blame her?
She winced as her finger connected a little too solidly with the console, facilitating an uncomfortable bending of the digit. Snatching her hand back, she did her typing with the other, shaking her injured fingers slightly. That was what ill-concentration got her.
"What did you do?" Chakotay asked, watching her favour the injured hand.
"I hit the console a little too hard," she muttered, uncomfortable being addressed by the main subject of her musings. Damn it, they'd been alone on this ship too long already. She was starting to lose her reserve.
He frowned quizzically at her for a moment, then turned back to his work.
The problem was, it was only her causing the problem. She was the odd element in this set up -getting both of them thinking about things they shouldn't. What should have been happening was the complete scan of the ship and the area. And that was, but nothing was coming up. Temporal stability inside, temporal stability outside . . . A thought came to her.
"Chakotay, have we compared the readings from inside the ship to those outside?"
He looked down at his console. "No. We don't usually anyhow. Why?"
"Let me see," she said, approaching his console and fairly forcing him to move aside. "Look at that. That's the scan of that G-type star outside right?"
He looked at it. "Yes."
"About ten hours have past, right?" she asked, fingered taping on the surface as her mind did the math.
He glanced at his chronometer. "I suppose."
"And if that's true everywhere, and that star is at maximum and putting out plasma at the speed it's doing, shouldn't the plasma it ejected yesterday be well out of the system by now?"
He looked at the readings, and then back at his chronometer. "Yes. Absolutely."
"Well it's not. Look at that. It hasn't even reached this system's excuse for an Oort Cloud yet. And our sensors, running on our time, are picking up its correct speed, but it's not going that fast. The sensors are lagging."
He shook his head. "So there's a time differential?"
"A big one, by the looks of this. Hours in here to the second out there, at least."
"But the time lines are stable . . ."
"Yes, but look. They're both stable, but they're different. We're just not used to seeing a stable time line within an anomaly! Usually they jump all over the place on you, but this one isn't. It's just as stable as the real time line! We just weren't looking for differentials between the ship and space, we were looking for disturbance, variance, and there isn't one! Just a simple differential!"
He caught her hands in his, belaying her enthusiasm at the discovery. "But that doesn't account for the lost crew. Shouldn't they be in this time line with us? And if that anomaly hops around like Seven said it did, why isn't it moving off of us?"
"It probably will, in a few of their seconds! The differential, Chakotay! What's a few minutes out there will be days in here!"
"That still doesn't explain the crew . . . or the lack of one."
She removed her hands from his. "That's what we have to find out. If there was a subspace disturbance at the time that the anomaly hit us, maybe it displaced them spatially too, and us and the ship just temporally. Who knows? The point is, I think we have the root of the problem!"
He smiled down at her, and her knees weakened slightly, along with a small piece of her defences.
"Who says most of your ideas come from me?" he asked.
To be continued . . .
***
