Disclaimer: spiel about infringement and how I didn't mean to do it honestly! ad nauseam
Note: Uh, depending on how touchy you are, the rating of this chapter might be a stronger than the others . . . about PG-13. I don't think it's that bad, but I'll err on the side of caution.
Chapter Twelve
She supposed this was what people called "the wee hours of the morning" . . . when everything was so still and quiet, even in a city the size of San Francisco. The gray false dawn lighted the room somewhat, and gave the pale curtains at the windows and ethereal look.
She had seen many a "wee hour" before this, Queen of the Late-Night Long Haul, but never from this perspective -lying on her side in bed, with some strange awareness surfacing that the two soon-to-be-people inside her were getting a lot more sleep than she was. A wee hour on Earth was something different, she surmised, as opposed to the shift-cycles of a ship, which had no discernable beginning or end. Only the twenty-four-hour clock decided whether it was daytime or night . . . following the rotation of a planet that really had no bearing on it.
Intermittent insomnia had always plagued her, until lately when the weight of the twins had begun to truly tax her. She also often wished that Human beings did not carry their offspring in such an inopportune place as the front of their abdomens. It had made her body decidedly unwieldy, she noticed.
Tonight, even the strain of pregnancy had not sent her willingly to sleep. Maybe she had slept a little sometime earlier, but she now found herself wide awake and staring through the window across from her bed. The sky was, for once, not overcast and she could watch the stars wane in the face of the impending dawn. Those stars . . . would she ever be up there again? Not for a long time. She had other things to worry about now.
She fought at the dawn mentally. Another dawn meant another day . . . a day of knowing what everyone else did not and dreading it. A day of knowing that she was that much closer to giving birth. She could feel the odd muscle twinge already, and knew what that meant. Only six days now.
Six days.
It scared her to be alone, as much as she hated admitting it even to herself. Of course, she had known it would be like this. . . .
Somewhere in the back of what she hoped was every female psyche was that impression of the "right way" to go about the process of organizing a family for oneself. No matter how hard human females had fought it in history, there were always the imperceptible inklings about homemaking and how one might go about it. She didn't like that part of her at all. She wanted to be and was a Starfleet Captain, not a housewife.
In point of fact, she wasn't even married.
Now that hit it, some part of her had this great conviction that early-morning musings about impending motherhood should most definitely include . . . someone on the other side of the bed.
She exhaled into the silence that greeted that thought. And grimaced as other parts of the stressed mind added to it. "Someone on the other side" became a protective, familiar, dearly loved, dark-haired and tattooed someone.
Of course everything about her current situation was far less than par with anyone else's. She was giving birth to the twins of two of her best friends, one of whom was dying and the other which she just could not justify her attachment to. And an added note of discord, the twins were verifiably 10.87 percent her own.
And what on numbers? If Seven died . . . when she died . . . the babies would be left to her almost by default, since Chakotay was likely to be too heartbroken to even deal with his own children. Or maybe not. Chakotay could pull himself up by his bootstraps when he had to, she had witnessed it. Surely his children constituted a "had to."
Oh, and Seven. Seven! Goddamn her, really. Not for being as she was . . . everything would be much better if it could even be hoped that she would live . . . but all of Tuvok's carefully drummed-in logic welled up in Kathryn and she knew Seven was dying as surely as anything. The Doctor would not lie, and Seven would never say such a thing just for shock value.
Seven, an inestimable thorn in her side, even when she wasn't trying to be.
Seven, alternately a good friend and cold-hearted bitch.
God, she was going to miss that particular thorn.
She rose -well rather she huffed a bit and hauled herself upwards and out of bed, quickly regaining her equilibrium with an ease born of practice. It was hard to stand up straight sometimes, when one had to lift up and throw forwards such excess weight and then carry it because it -they- were part of one's body. Her muscles twinged, a natural physical response produced by some unheard biological signal that it was about damn time to get it all over with.
Not part of her for much longer, she supposed, but then forever . . . forever afterwards.
She knew that at least one baby was turned downwards -she had been receiving kicks to her lower rib cage instead of punches. At least one . . . Acoya or his unnamed companion, yet which? Somehow she thought it was the girl. She didn't know why, but some feeling told her that the girl-twin was more audacious than her brother.
Yes, about damn time to get it over with.
She walked out of her bedroom into the hall beyond, heedless of the gloom that made everything ripe for inauspicious collisions. One thought figured above all. She wanted -needed- coffee. She craved it like she'd been craving myriad things for months.
Yet she hesitated at the kitchen door, staring at the long-unused coffee machine. What was the harm in a cup? Two cups? Two small cups? Well, her muscles were already twitchy, a stimulant like caffeine was ill-advised at this juncture. There was no fear of sickness anymore, which had abated long since but . . .
There, she could hear it. The amused voice, an audible smile, the tangible devotion.
"No, Kathryn."
She sighed. No, Kathryn. How many times had he told her that? How many times had she told herself that? No, Kathryn, not so close, not so far, too much, too far, you're leading him onto this, how can you-
Whose fault was it that her thoughts were running away in the middle of the night? Hers, his . . . Seven's, because she had wrung a confession from her, though Kathryn had never voiced it.
"That you love Chakotay, and that you will stay here."
She had said it so calmly, with such surety that Kathryn wanted to beat the impassive face in for a fleeting moment. That she would stay here. Where to go? Indiana? Phoebe, she loved, but everyone was a stranger to her except for the people she had led for seven years.
Sisterly love was . . . nothing . . . to this. . . .
Kathryn still stared intently at her coffee machine. No, it was nothing to a voice . . . the mere memory of a voice that could deter her from coffee. Nothing to the conviction that she could help Seven become a mother. Nothing to strange pride she felt whenever she saw Tom, B'Elanna and K'Athra and nothing to that other sort of pride she had experienced upon seeing Harry promoted.
There was nothing, no matter how rooted in childhood and past, that surpassed that in her mind. She had longed for home and Earth, but then her fiance had run off, her dog had died and then her mother had passed away.
God damn it, she wanted Voyager back. She wanted the laughing and the fighting, tears, isolation and everything. Oh, God, how she missed it. She even missed the days when she and Chakotay had barely been able to be in the same room together, due to one type of discomfort or another. And then . . . and then what? Had he left her too, then?
What claim had she to think that the closure of a door that had never been opened warranted some sort of betrayal, when she had been fighting since New Earth to keep it closed?
It was her fault. She had pushed him away.
Could she blame Seven for seeing that the way was open?
No.
Some part of her screamed yes, that she would blame her for the rest of her life.
"I do not miss the strange irony of you carrying Chakotay's children simply because I was not there for everything."
If that wasn't confirmation that Seven didn't know full well what she was up to, Kathryn didn't know what was. But it didn't matter. The fault did not lie with Seven. Hell, who was she to even be thinking of . . .
Pining for and lusting after another woman's husband? Mental lechery. Way to go, Kathryn Janeway. "No, Kathryn" indeed.
Strange thought, a woman nine months pregnant having the energy to lust for anything, but there it was. She couldn't pretend that she wasn't attracted to him, and it wasn't something you could just ignore at will. Hormones in general plagued her sometimes.
The strange irony of . . . oh, sure, there was a thought. Carrying Chakotay's children, though with none of the regular preamble of course. Hurray for medical science, it killed the fun in everything.
No, no, no, no!
She could not -would not- go there. She would not.
Love and test-tube babies were one sort of thing, sexual frustration was another.
She stared still. She really needed a coffee.
And yet the Starfleet Captain still looked down upon the weak mind of Kathryn, who was too rooted in the carnality of advanced pregnancy and what could literally be termed a seven-year itch to see the facts of the situation. Former First Officer or not, and his marriage aside, he was still her subordinate and should be treated as such if she ever expected to retain any dignity at all.
What had ever happened to self-control? Self-respect?
Hell on control and respect, I'm going insane.
Maybe she should talk to someone. The Doctor maybe. Perhaps her problems really were rooted in the hormones she was exuding in the last week of her term.
Oh? So why have I been feeling this way for . . . oh, seven years? Maybe almost eight by now? This just reminded me I felt that way and how on some nights on the ship I was practically climbing the walls . . . Ha! I wonder what the crew would have thought of that. The Captain's late night work-a-thons born of a need to distract herself from fantasies.
I need coffee.
"No, Kathryn," she said aloud, suddenly conscious of the fact that she was gripping the doorframe. There was an outlet for stress, she could put nail gouges in the doorways. Not exactly what her nerves were wanting.
The Captain was right, as always, and the part of Kathryn that was actually on Seven's side was right as well. No matter what Seven thought would occur after she was gone, nothing was going to happen. She would say nothing and do nothing but try to help Chakotay through it all. Nothing else. Not even if in his grief he wanted her to-
Hell, damn and no! No! Shit! Don't even think about it!
No coffee, either.
"No, Kathryn."
Exactly. Couldn't have put it better.
She jumped when the phone console beeped. She looked sourly over at it, as if it could be affected by her glare. Who the hell would be calling at this hour? It beeped insistently.
To be continued
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