Disclaimer: Characters are not mine, Voyager is not mine, but I own all of the DVD box sets, so I think that's got to count for something!
Chapter 11: By Design Not Fault
Four years and one month- Night
Surprisingly his entry code still worked, and the doors easily slid open. The bright lights from the corridor flooded the darkened space, so that the room looked alive with silhouettes. His shadow fell on the floor, and grew larger as he made his way into the door opening to take a quick glance around her quarters. As always it was tidy with everything in its place, the smell of coffee lingered heavily in the air and a fresh vase of flowers on the book case; but she was nowhere to be seen.
Chakotay had buzzed for entry five times, and waited patiently between each buzz, but he had grown with worry in every second that had passed, and eventually he felt there was no other option than to enter without her permission. He ordered lights to a minimal level, and crossed the floor space in the direction of what had once been their bedroom. She was there, lying on her bed, shoes off, jacket on the chair but still wearing most of her uniform. Her hair was a mess on her pillow, but her face was drowned in darkness as she lay with her back to the door.
Kathryn didn't turn when her bedroom doors opened, he only hoped that the reason was because she was sleeping. He considered checking her pulse, but worried about waking her if she was taking nothing more than a nap, so in the dim light from the living area he make a quick inspection with his eyes for any hyposprays or pills that she may have taken, he was alarmed to see both on her bedside cabinet.
"Is there something you want commander?" she turned on the bed to face him; he didn't think she had been asleep.
"What have you taken?" he asked.
She lay on her back, and he could just about make out her tired and worn out face in the darkness as she met his gaze, "I'm not sure," she said vaguely, "something for the depression, and something to help me sleep. You'll have to ask the doctor if you want drug names."
"So they're prescription?" he wanted to make sure.
"What do you think?" she closed her eyes and raised a hand to her forehead.
"I'm worried about you," he said after a beat.
She sighed, already tired of the same conversation she had had with him every day for the past two weeks. "It's just my process," she explained, "I don't criticise your meditations."
"They don't go on for weeks," he was quick to point out, "…this isn't healthy Kathryn."
"Please Chakotay, just leave me," her voice sounded almost desperate.
"When can I tell the crew to expect you back?"
She sighed and he remembered the many answers she had given him over the past few weeks. At first her response had been that she would be back on the bridge in a few days. After the days had ticked by she had told him that she didn't know. Then she had spent some time averting his question with a shrug or a change in topic. Now she was resorting to sarcastic or comic comments, and she wasn't about to let him down. "Sometime between now," she paused to leave him some time to guess what she was to say, "and when we get back to Earth."
"I'll divert any transmissions from Starfleet command to your quarters then shall I?" he asked dryly.
"Only if they're important," she returned the jibe.
Expecting him to leave at that she closed her eyes and waited for the sound of doors closing, it didn't come though. Her eyes shot open to see his shadow still standing in the door frame. She frowned, wondering if he was going to give her another lecture, but it didn't seem as if he was bracing himself for one. Then she noticed something in his hand, it took her a while to realise that it was a piece of paper. "Is there anything else?" she asked.
He realised that she had noticed what he was holding, and for a brief moment he considered not giving it to her, of just leaving her quarters and allow her to wonder what it was. But he remembered his promise to pass it on to her and so he nodded, "Noah wanted me to give you this," he explained, holding up the card.
For a long moment she looked at what was held in his hand, wondering whether or not to accept it. "Leave it on the dining table," she said at last, much to her first officer's disappointment.
Allowing his hand to drop back to his side he let out an audible sigh, "he's been asking after you; he doesn't understand why he's not living with you."
"You always said that you wanted to spend more time with him," she avoided a direct answer.
"He misses you."
"He said the same about you when you moved out."
"You haven't seen him in over a week, and that was only for ten minutes on your way back from engineering," the frustration he felt towards the situation was now evident in his voice.
"There are no stars," she said exasperatedly, "and no stars means there's nothing to do and nowhere to explore." Their eyes met in a passionate yet furious exchange, "and with nothing to occupy my mind this past month, I've had nothing to stop me thinking about where we are, how long we've been out here, how far we have left to go, and all of the people we've lost along we way. People who's lives I was responsible for Chakotay! So I'm sorry if I need a little time to deal with this."
"You're not dealing with it though," his voice was raised a few notches above hers, "you're just stewing."
"I'll leave you to command Voyager for four years then," she shouted, "see how you fucking cope!"
He realised that the conversation was again getting them nowhere and decided it was time to leave, "hopefully better than this," he replied, slamming the card their son had made her on the dining table as he left.
/\
Nineteen years- Timeless
He didn't love her. There was a time when he had thought he could, but that time had been and passed and nothing had changed. Strangely she loved him. He wasn't sure why, but she put up with his obsession with Voyager, didn't comment on the pictures he kept up of his dead wife and son and seemed satisfied with the small amount of affection that he could give. He should have been grateful. He should have just left it there. He shouldn't have listened to Harry.
For a long while they weren't sure what had happened. They had entered federation space without Voyager but waited patiently for them to arrive. A minute went by, and then another, by the third they both knew that something was wrong, after an hour they realised that they had arrived alone. It was a heart crushing moment for Chakotay when he realised that he had been separated from his young son, there were no words to describe how he felt when they reran the simulations and he knew they were all dead.
Returning to Earth without the rest of the crew had been traumatic, they had both felt guilty, and for a time Starfleet didn't believe their story of how Voyager had used a Borg conduit to enter transwarp, and they had used the shuttle to fly ahead and calibrate quick course changes for the intrepid class vessel. Eventually, with no evidence to the contrary they had been released, Chakotay had been discharged from Starfleet, his field commission and crimes in the maquis ignored by the federation, and Harry had left a couple of years later.
They had stayed close in the fifteen years since the accident, and had become better friends than either man had ever thought possible; but the loss of their friends had given them a common grief that had brought them together.
It had taken Chakotay a long time before he felt ready to move on with his life; he remembered it wasn't until two years later that he had made the decision to return to university, and it wasn't until two years after that he had started to date other women, preferring to remain the mysterious bachelor for as long as possible. For many years it had only been the occasional romance, that had lasted no longer than a few months, or however long it took the women to realise that he wasn't in for a serious relationship. Then five years previously he had met a woman who was willing to do whatever it took to keep him, and realising that he was getting tired of playing the field, he settled down as best he could.
Harry was a different story. The women in his life since Voyager had been few and far between. He had married at one point, but divorced after a year, Chakotay had never asked why. His career in Starfleet had come to a disappointing end, and he had taken a position on a Vulcan science station where his obsession with what had gone wrong with the Borg conduit and navigation of Voyager was only fed by his emotionally insensitive co-workers.
Two years ago he had approached Chakotay with the idea of sending a message back in time to Seven through her cortical implant, that would allow her to make corrections to Voyager's flight path that would land them safely in the delta quadrant. At first he was dubious, Harry had come to him many times before in the past with farfetched and illegal plants to save the ship, and he had usually been able to talk him out of them. But this plan was different: firstly it was plausible, and secondly there was a good chance that they could get away with it.
So here they were, back in the delta quadrant for the first time in fifteen years, and about to send the message to Seven of Nine, for the first time Chakotay was grateful for her presence on Voyager. Harry had told him that he would be able to send an encrypted message to Voyager through Seven, and so he had spent half an hour considering who to send it to. In the end he realised that there was no one he wanted to send a message to. He didn't need to remind himself in the past how important his family was to him. There was no need to tell his son how much he loved him, as Noah would be told by his father in his own time. Kathryn would never approve of his breaking the temporal prime directive, especially if he tried to explain his personal reasons. B'Elanna didn't need any words of advice or encouragement. So he put down the padd he had intended to write a message with, and told Harry that he wouldn't be sending anything.
/\
Fours years, five months- Counterpoint
"Was the kiss completely necessary?"
Kathryn looked up as her first officer sat down opposite her in the mess hall, with a smirk across his face. She knew what he was going on about without need for explanation, but she decided that there was only one way he knew about the kiss, and she wanted him to confess before she did. "I don't know what you're talking about," she ploughed her fork into her pasta and glanced back down at the padd she was reading.
"The shuttle bay, the kiss between yourself and the inspector before he left the ship," he knew prompting her was useless, but he thought he'd surprise her with a couple of details.
To his annoyance she looked nonplussed as she took a lazy look across at him, "and how would you know about that commander?"
His smile fell, to get her to admit that she had kissed Kashyk, would involve him disclosing the information about how he knew. "I saw it on the security monitor," he admitted.
"I knew it!" she exclaimed, "I told you specifically that I didn't want my conversations or interactions followed."
"Only when you were alone with him," he explained, "and besides it was Tuvok's idea."
"That he needed your clearance for," she pinned the blame back on him.
Chakotay sighed, "fine," he gave in, "I'm sorry." His smile belittled his apology, but she decided to let it go.
"So I guess you saw what happened in my quarters then, the night before?"
His jaw dropped, he hadn't thought to install a security monitor in her quarters, and now the goodbye kiss made a little more sense. For a brief moment he felt his stomach knot at the thought that she had moved on, that she had slept with Kashyk, and that if the alien hadn't have betrayed her they might be making plans to pursue a relationship on Voyager. Then she broke into a smile and started laughing, and he felt like a complete idiot at the way she had so easily duped him.
"Oh please Chakotay, I'm not that easy," she said between bouts of laughter.
He had to smile a little at his own gullibility, "you had me going there for a moment," he admitted.
Kathryn sobered and beamed widely, "you were worried weren't you?"
Looking down into his own plate he nodded, "only because I got Harry to watch the monitors in your quarters," he said with a straight face.
This time it was her face that dropped for the brief nano second that Chakotay was able to keep a neutral expression for. She rolled her eyes and shook her head as he took his own turn to laugh at her gullibility. "You're lucky you're only joking Chakotay, because there would be hell to pay if you weren't."
He smiled, "like you could punish me without risking a mutiny?"
She grinned wickedly, "I think I could find a way."
Chakotay swallowed hard, it wasn't too difficult to guess what she was probably considering right at that moment; he'd seen that look on her face when they had been involved, and it usually meant trouble. "So was the kiss completely necessary?" he diverted her attention back to his original question.
"He kissed me," she defended.
Folding his arms he leant back in his chair, "from what I could see, you kissed him back."
"He was a good kisser," she explained.
He narrowed his eyes, but decided that no further response was needed, and as he didn't want to risk the conversation turning sour when she realised the real issue was his jealousy and not his concern for her safety, he decided to change the topic. "Did you get a message from the doctor?"
She frowned, "about Noah?"
"Yeah," he gave her a baffled expression, "do you know why he wants to give Noah an immediate medical?"
He expected her to shake her head and say that it was probably just a regular check up, but she didn't, in fact she looked rather reluctant to reply. "When the Devore were here, their scans of Noah may have picked up on something that the doctor has missed."
"Like what?" alarm bells were suddenly ringing in his head.
She shrugged, "it's probably nothing."
"But it could be something?" he pressed.
"It's probably just a flu virus that he caught," she attempted to put his mind at ease, "their scanners are more in depth than ours, and they probably just caught the virus in a much earlier stage than the doctor can normally detect in a routine examination."
He sat back, her explanation made sense, and he reasoned that there was no reason to worry for nothing.
"Do you want to take him or shall I?" she asked, eating a mouthful of pasta.
Chakotay frowned, "I was thinking we both could."
She looked about ready to excuse herself from the event, but then she shrugged, "we can take him in later today."
-
It was five months previously that Kathryn had started to enter into her depression. At first it had been seclusion in her office for hours on end, then she had stopped turning up at crew events being organised to save them all from boredom. At that point Chakotay had been concerned, but it had only been when she had asked him to take care of Noah on a more permanent basis that he had really started to worry.
As soon as Noah was living with him she retreated more into her depression, and before long she was spending all hours alone in her quarters refusing to speak to anyone but her first officer. There was nothing that he had been able to do to bring her out of her depression, and in the end it took hostile aliens endangering the ship, to take her mind from the guilt and helplessness she felt at having stranded Voyager to pull her from the brink of insanity.
Chakotay had thought things would return to normal after that, but they hadn't. Although their friendship was growing in strength every day, she was still spending far too much time alone, and shutting herself off emotionally much more than usual. She hadn't asked for Noah to be moved back into her quarters, and when he asked, she just replied that there was no rush, and Noah seemed happy to be living with his father anyway. Under most other circumstances he would have been thrilled at the chance to spend more time with his son, but in the months since her 'miraculous' recovery from depression, she had been spending less and less time with Noah, to the point where their son had given up on the expectation of seeing his mother every day.
They sat in the doctor's office side by side, the view of Noah sitting contently playing with Tom through the glass windows. The doctor came around the table, and took his seat opposite them, from his face Chakotay could tell that it wasn't great news.
"What's wrong?" Kathryn was first to ask.
"I'm not sure if it's anything wrong," the EMH replied, "but there is something most definitely different with Noah from when I first scanned him as a baby almost fours years ago."
Chakotay shifted uncomfortably in his chair, "what do you mean?"
The doctor turned his computer screen to an angle so that they could see, "this is Noah's genetic code from when I first scanned him as a baby, which from every angle appears completely normal," he explained what they were looking at. "And this," he pulled up another image, "is the one I took yesterday."
"Right?" he prompted for an explanation as to why they were there.
"To the untrained eye they would look completely identical, except on a higher resolution scan it can be seen that there have been several minor alterations to eight of the chromosomes at some point in the last four years." He shrugged, "I can't tell you exactly when these alterations occurred as these are the only two in depth genetic diagrams that I have taken of Noah, but from what I can tell, his genome is still changing."
"Into what?" Chakotay asked.
"The changes affect higher brain function," the doctor explained, "that's what the Devore brought to my attention when they ran scans on him; it would appear that he has the potential for mild telepathy."
"How the hell can he be telepathic?" Chakotay couldn't be sure if he was more confused or worried by the revelation.
The hologram shrugged, "the alterations echo some of the caretakers traits, I can only assume that this is by design not fault."
"Four years ago you guaranteed me that my son would be completely human," Kathryn spoke.
"He was when he was born," the doctor defended, "and he still is, but I'm not certain what will happen in the future. The changes to his DNA may stabilise with no phenotypic consequences, or the changes may accelerate, and then I'm really not sure what to expect."
"Is it dangerous?" Chakotay's voice was flooded with concern for his son.
The EMH let out a long hollow breath, "I can't be certain, but if the changes to Noah do continue then it could be. I'm sure you both remember the near miscarriage of Noah at about five months gestation," they both nodded. "The miscarriage was almost caused by a faulty paternal gene, one that I repaired with a sample of your DNA commander. What I considered a fault then, I'm almost certain now was in fact an early alteration, that at such an early stage would have killed Noah, but now he's almost four years old the changes are much less harmful, but only if the differences in his genotype are very small and far between."
"Is there a way to stop it?"
The doctor looked across at his captain who had asked the question. "The alterations are only occurring on the paternal chromosomes, and so I could use gene therapy with a sample of the commander's DNA like I did four years ago. However I'm uncertain as to what is causing them, and without a full explanation, and as Noah is not currently at risk, I'm reluctant to go ahead with gene therapy without knowing fully what we're dealing with."
Instinctively Chakotay reached across, covered her hand with his and squeezed it gently. She glanced across at him and he gave her a small reassuring smile before releasing her hand, then they returned their attention back to the doctor. "So we just sit back and wait?" she asked, not liking the idea of not knowing what was going to happen with her son.
"That would appear to be the best option at this time," he replied.
There was a long pause before they were asked if they had any more questions, but they were both too stunned at the news to be able to think of anything further, so with a word of farewell they left the office and went to pry Noah away from his game with Tom. Chakotay lifted his son into his arms and left sick bay with Kathryn by his side. Further down the corridor as they waited for the turbo lift he invited her back to his quarters so that they could further discuss everything, but she made the excuse that she had work to do, and not wanting to push her he didn't argue as she instructed the computer to take the lift up to the bridge.
To be continue