Chapter 2. Evasion

Chakotay had made a real dinner for a change but was now pushing it around on his plate instead of eating it. He'd been telling B'Elanna what she could expect tomorrow, at the ceremony. Calling up the long-unused persona of the anthropology lecturer he'd never been, he had described for her smudge pots of sage and willow, shamanic chants, the symbolic change of garb.

"It all cleanses the bereaved -" himself, he meant, only him - "of their association with death, and it marks the end of the community's obligations to the chief mourners." His lips pressed together tightly, reflexively holding back.

"What obligations?" she wanted to know.

He shrugged. "The things people do after a death. Food. Help around the place." He saw her studying his drab little home, looking for recent evidence of such support. She didn't ask why he wasn't living with Sekaya's family, after his sister had been so eager to get him back to Dorvan. He added, perhaps unwisely, "For me, extra prayers, mostly."

She cast him a skeptical glance. "Why for you?"

He shrugged again. "I was gone a long time. Back from a great distance. Not many people here ever do that."

"They think you're some kind of lost sheep?" She sounded ready to take offense on his behalf.

"I was," he answered, simple words in a dead voice. Still am, he didn't say, but he suspected it echoed in the silence of his small empty house.

There was too much food. He'd planned for two guests but Tom wasn't here and his own appetite wasn't much, knowing what tomorrow would bring. He knew he'd lost weight from the way his clothes hung loose on his frame, and he knew why: without a ship's schedule or Kathryn to take care of, it turned out he was as prone to forgetting meals as she had been back on Voyager.

B'Elanna was thinner too, and he didn't know why but did know she wouldn't thank him for pointing it out. He watched her twisting her wedding ring; it fit loose on her finger, and it didn't take an empath to add that to the new lines on her lovely somber face and come up with trouble.

He knew he should warn her about what would happen tomorrow, how the ceremony would really go when everyone saw what he'd done, but it would take explanations he couldn't quite assemble even for himself yet, and more energy than he had tonight. B'Elanna could just be pissed with him later; the familiar was always reassuring, he thought, and almost chuckled.

She asked him, "When you're … cleansed of death, or whatever - what does that mean? Are there things you'll be able to do, that you couldn't before?"

The flash of warm humor turned cold in his gut. "Yeah," he said, looking down at his uneaten meal. "I can plant crops - not that I ever did. I can carve wood and throw ceramic pots for ceremonial use - not that anyone needs me to do that either."

He looked up and saw a half-amused quizzical look on her face. It made him irrationally angry. "And I can remarry," he added, with a bite of cruelty. Her eyes widened. "Not that I'm going to," he said flatly, as he stood and took his plate to the sink.

He considered bringing out the bottle he'd been saving, but Tom's absence changed his sense of the occasion. He'd expected them to be here together and apparently he'd been counting on Tom's easy-going, comfortable charm to buffer his own raw feelings from B'Elanna's intensity, her engineer's intuition for broken things that must surely need fixing.

He felt guilty for feeling so awkward around her. They went back what felt like several lifetimes now, all the way back to their years with the Maquis, when she'd been a brilliant, fiery slip of a girl who'd both loved and resented him for taking her under his wing. Not loved loved, of course. Never that. He'd been twice her age then, even if he hadn't yet learned from Seska precisely how terrible an idea it was to bed women under his command. There's an irony for you, he thought, in Kathryn's general direction, wherever that might be, and brought his hand to his chest.

B'Elanna, clearing the table with him, noticed the gesture. "You okay?" she asked.

"Sure," he replied. "Just fine." By which he meant, his heart was still beating, though its purpose escaped him now. It had always had a mind of its own. Then, closing down any more lines of questioning she might have been preparing, he said, "We should get some sleep. We'll be up really early tomorrow." He saw the hurt look in her eyes, felt worse, and told himself he'd make it up to her tomorrow - after the ceremony.

Later, lying sleepless again in the too-large bed that he'd never shared with anyone, he tried not to hear B'Elanna, moving around restless and probably lonely and no doubt time-lagged in the middle of Dorvan's night. Tried not to think of Kathryn, and failed miserably. Feeling the insistent beat of the stubborn, contrary heart under his hand, he finally dozed. For once, he did not dream.