II
Chakotay
They explode into the Alpha Quadrant, and Seven gives him a meaningful look that he only halfway returns. The wrongness of it surprises him. Unsettles him. She notices, lingers before turning back to the viewscreen with apparent reluctance. He knows what she wants from him; he's given her every reason, and emphatically, to expect it from him. He thought he knew what he was doing with Seven. He thought he knew why he was doing it.
But: home.
The word, unwelcome, ricochets through his skull.
He meets Kathryn's eyes across the Bridge for a long, unsmiling moment, feels Seven throw him yet another glance and does not acknowledge it. As he moves to take the helm, Admiral Janeway's calculated sacrifice pulses through him like a toxin. With every poisoned drum of his heart, he thinks: For us. For Tuvok. For Seven. For me. For us. For us. He carefully does not look at Kathryn again as their paths cross.
He wonders whether the Admiral had been aware that his relationship with Seven was already underway, and in retrospect finds it bewildering that she didn't ask. Kathryn Janeway, who could never let a mystery lie, or leave a question unanswered. So, yes, she must have known. And she'd constrained herself to speaking with Seven about the future, just Seven, and Seven took it all the wrong way; but he sees now that the Admiral was trying to give her the opportunity to save their future, not preempt it. Because if she had spoken with Chakotay…
Well, what would he have thought? That she was asking him to wait for her – or anyway, her younger counterpart? That she was challenging the choice he had made?
Maybe.
He knows Kathryn Janeway, better than he knows anyone else living or dead, and he believes now that the Admiral did not approach him about his relationship with her protégée because she would not have had the strength to give him her blessing to his face. She wanted to uncomplicate their togetherness, his and Seven's, and maybe she could only do so if she wasn't confronted with Chakotay himself.
And he feels, suddenly, the full force of his betrayal, like a sucker punch.
Eventually he hears Kathryn rise behind him and turns to track her fluid movements across the Bridge and into her ready room. He wants to follow, but there's no one else to take the helm, and anyway he cannot begin to imagine what he might say. So instead he faces front, avoids all eye contact, takes umbrage with the excitable chatter behind him surging in the Captain's absence. Mind and heart in asynchronous disarray, he longs for something more complex to focus on than flying in a straight, escorted line toward… home.