Chapter 3. Rebellion
With the first rays of morning sun breaking through clouds on the horizon, B'Elanna perched on the low stool to which she'd been led almost an hour before. She was part of a small circle of witnesses to the one-year mortuary ceremony for Kathryn Janeway, late wife of Chakotay, son of Kolopak. Others in the circle were Chakotay's close kin and neighbors, and three tribal leaders, one of whom beat with tireless hands an unwavering cyclical rhythm on a resonant drum.
A deep pit smoldered near one edge of the circle, releasing fragrant smoke and a gentle heat in the chill air; the elders in the circle were positioned behind it. Some two meters before the pit, in the very center of the circle, Chakotay sat alone in the dirt, cross-legged and motionless. He faced his sister Sekaya, who was flanked by her husband and children. B'Elanna was positioned to Chakotay's left. The sky, lightening behind him, cast his face in profile before her and obscured his tattoo in shadow.
For at least half an hour, the village shaman had been dancing a slowly twirling shuffle within the circle, as those present passed a series of chants from one side to the other. As the sun finally rose, however, the shaman stopped shuffling at a point just behind Chakotay. There was a sudden, dramatic pause in the drumming and chanting as the shaman raised a wooden bowl and upended it over Chakotay. Fine dust poured down over his head, settling in his hair, on his eyelashes and shoulders, drifting in his upturned palms where they rested on his bent knees.
A slight breeze carried an acrid scent to B'Elanna - wood ash, like the campfires of her childhood, but with something else she couldn't place, bitter on the palate. She wondered how Chakotay bore it without choking. She saw him swallow, his breathing shallow and eyes blinking furiously.
The shaman cried out in a high-pitched voice, then seized the collar of Chakotay's coarse brown tunic and pulled it upward. Chakotay raised his arms to let the garment be drawn from his body. Ash rose from his figure and hung close in the air, rendering the tableau hazy and muted. The shaman flung the tunic behind him to land in the pit. B'Elanna supposed it would burn there eventually, but for the moment it served to block the rising smoke.
Chakotay slowly lowered his arms as gravity and the rising morning breeze cleared the air. Then B'Elanna heard a gasp to her left. As she turned her head to look, Sekaya rose to her feet and threw a bundle in the dirt before Chakotay.
"How could you, brother? You mock us all." She grabbed each of her children by an arm and strode angrily away, shushing their protests. After a moment, her husband rose, sighing. He looked around the circle, then back at Chakotay, sighed again, and turned wordlessly to follow his wife.
The shaman walked past Chakotay toward the gap left in the circle by his sister's family's departure. He then turned slowly to face Chakotay. Whatever he saw from this angle broke the spell of ceremonial reverence with which he'd carried himself up to now. He tipped his head to one side, raised his eyes skyward, then looked Chakotay in the eye. "What the fuck, man?"
Chakotay shrugged. "Can we finish, or what?"
The shaman looked to the tribal elders. Seeing their lack of comprehension, he told Chakotay, "Stand up and turn around." Chakotay climbed to his feet, slowly and with some difficulty, then stood straight and proud as he turned in a circle. Exhalations and mutterings of anger and disgust followed the sight of his bare chest around the circle. Bewildered, B'Elanna noted the presence of a new tattoo that spanned his collarbone and left pectoral - a large, vivid blue dragonfly - but didn't understand the significance or why it apparently was disrupting the ceremony.
The elders conferred silently, then rose as one and left the site. One by one all the other witnesses followed suit, until only Chakotay, B'Elanna, and the shaman remained.
There was a long silence. Finally, the shaman bent, picked up the bundle that Sekaya had thrown down, and shook it open and free of dust. It was a light blue shirt. The shaman held it a long moment, then said, "They say you always were a contrary." He handed the shirt to Chakotay and watched while Chakotay pulled it on over his head. The dragonfly's wings were just visible above the wide neckline.
"Thanks, 'Pelah." Chakotay turned from the shaman, who stood with arms folded, shaking his head sardonically. Chakotay strode away, beckoning to B'Elanna to follow him. She rose, still confused and growing angry, but did so.
"Oh, don't mention it, Chakotay. It's not as if I'll be hearing the fallout from this for weeks to come or anything. Glad we could give you an audience for your little tantrum!" The shaman had to raise his voice to be heard as they walked away.
Reaching the main road, Chakotay paused at a public spigot to half fill a bucket with water. B'Elanna stepped back just in time to avoid being splashed as he unceremoniously dumped it over his head. He swiped a hand down his face, then did likewise to each arm, leaving streaks of wet gray ash. He squatted to run a little more water from the spigot and drank briefly from a cupped hand. He finally looked at B'Elanna and gestured a silent question: Want some? She shook her head, more in bewilderment over the recent proceedings than in denial of thirst. But he had already risen to his feet and was again striding onward.
The walk back to Chakotay's house was silent, as he seemed intent on ignoring B'Elanna's hard, questioning glances. They passed homesteads waking for the day, people out doing chores. Chakotay acknowledged each greeting with only a brusque nod, never breaking stride. B'Elanna tried but failed to connect this hostile, self-absorbed man with the Starfleet captain he'd been a year ago, or the first officer he'd been on Voyager - hell, even with the angry Maquis leader she'd first known.
Their walk was also long. By the time they entered Chakotay's house, his shirt no longer clung wetly to his skin, and B'Elanna was footsore, thirsty, and hungry - and her temper was well and truly up. As he carefully closed and latched the door behind them, she stood in the middle of the main room, hands on her hips, and glared at him. He leaned back against the door, spread his hands in invitation, and waited. She didn't need to be asked twice.
"Now that you've got me safely out of view, would you mind telling me just what the hell all that was about? What's the problem with your tattoo? Why was everyone so angry about it?"
"We aren't supposed to permanently alter the body while we're in mourning. It attaches death in a way that can't be cleansed." He answered her calmly, back in the cadence of a lecturer, explaining an abstraction.
"And you knew this?" B'Elanna was irate. Of course he'd known it. He hadn't been surprised or chagrined at any point during the ceremony. Chakotay didn't bother to confirm what was obvious to anyone with eyes. He simply folded his long arms across his chest and gazed back at her steadily.
The motion tugged his shirt collar down further, revealing more of the dragonfly. She stared hard at it, shaking her head slightly in puzzlement. "What does it even mean? Why a blue dragonfly? And when did you get it? Why?"
"It's a long story." His tone made it sound final, like a dodge, not a door opening.
"I don't believe you." She was shaking her head harder now - not denying the truth of what he said but calling bullshit on how he was saying it. "You drag me all the way here from the Sol system for a ceremony you deliberately ruin, and now you're trying to shut me out? What the fuck is wrong with you, you idiot?"
Seemingly by way of answer, Chakotay walked across the room to the single kitchen cupboard, reached up high, and brought down two glasses and a bottle. He turned, placed them with deliberation on the table, and gestured B'Elanna toward a chair.
She rolled her eyes. "It's barely 0800, Chakotay."
He shrugged, sat, broke the seal on the bottle. Looked at her.
"We haven't eaten any breakfast," she argued. But she was walking towards the table, so he poured their drinks. She sat, gave him a long look, and picked up her glass.
"To absent … friends," Chakotay pronounced, and knocked back a slug. B'Elanna sniffed, then sipped carefully. Whiskey, of better quality than she'd have thought to find anywhere near Dorvan. She sipped again and raised an appreciative, quizzical eyebrow.
"We were saving it for our fifteenth anniversary."
B'Elanna did the math. Her anger ebbed just a tad. "That was six months ago," she murmured. He looked at her, pain in his eyes. "Why didn't you open it then?"
He looked away and drained his glass. Like he was drinking to forget, though she knew he couldn't. Eyes on the tabletop, he muttered, "Didn't want to drink it alone."
She stared at him in disbelief. "Why would you have to?" she demanded. "Chakotay, you are surrounded by your people here. That's why Sekaya brought you back here. I thought that's why you've stayed so long."
Chin almost to his chest, he shook his head back and forth - not in denial, she thought, but in helplessness. He placed his empty glass next to the bottle, fingers curled around the base, and waited. She heaved a sigh, poured him another. But before he could raise it to his lips, she put her hand on his wrist. "Wait. Talk to me. What's going on with you?"
He swallowed, pursed his lips, blinked away tears. "I - " He broke off, shot her a desperate glance, took a drink. She waited. "I can't be without her, 'Lanna. I won't."
She blinked, then said harshly, "Kathryn is dead, Chakotay. You can't be with her."
"I know that, dammit," he growled. "That's not what I mean."
"Then tell me," she responded, in an overly reasonable tone, "what the hell you do mean."
"The people here. Our ways. None of it has room for her. For me to carry her … her memory. Who I was with her."
"How so? I don't know your culture, not really. You have to explain things to me." B'Elanna hoped that if she could just keep him talking, she'd figure out how he'd gotten his head shoved so far up his ass as to piss off his only surviving family members over the timing of a tattoo.
He shook his head again, more slowly. Still helpless but trying to get a foothold. "We believe death is polluting, spiritually, but also ... dangerous to your health, if you're too near it. So we have a lot of ways to keep distant from it. From corpses and such, of course, but more than that." He lifted his glass but then put it back down, thinking.
"Like how?" B'Elanna prodded.
"Linguistically. We never name our dead. Hardly ever. They can only refer to Kathryn as my … there's a term for it; in practice it means 'late spouse,' but literally it means - " and he winced, choked back a sob. "It means 'severed heart.' Severed heart! To avoid naming my wife, uttering the name 'Kathryn,' they stab a hole in my chest, every time!" His right hand went unconsciously to his left breast, thumb stroking the skin between the dragonfly's wings. "Every conversation leaves me bleeding out, B'Elanna. I'd rather be alone. I am alone."
"So you got the new tattoo … to not be alone? Or just to say 'fuck it' to the people here?"
His large hand moved inside his shirt to cover the dragonfly. His face grew more anguished. "I got the tattoo to remember her. On her birthday. Her sixtieth birthday."
B'Elanna's hand had slipped from his left wrist to her lap as he spoke. Now, on an impulse, she leaned over to embrace him, temple to his left shoulder, right arm across his upper back. "I wish you had called me sooner, old friend. You didn't have to face that day alone." His muscles stiffened at her touch, and her words tore a sob from his throat. As his shoulders began to shake she stroked his left forearm, resting with fist clenched on the table.
"Damn it, 'Lanna! This wasn't supposed to happen! She was riding a desk and attending diplomatic functions! I was the one still flying dangerous missions. Of all the stupid fucking mistakes, just a glitch in a warp core and she's gone with thirty other people? She was just a fucking passenger!"
B'Elanna just had time to wonder how long it had been since he had actually wept for his dead wife, and then he was shaking free of her, standing so suddenly his chair flew backward. His hunched posture had the look of a coiled snake. She had the presence of mind to snatch up the open bottle and the two glasses, securing them just before he roared and tossed the table away from them. It landed on its opposite edge and skidded almost to the door.
Chakotay stood still, breathing heavily. She watched him, transfixed. She opened her mouth to speak without knowing what to say, and was shocked to taste salt, as tears ran from her face onto her tongue. She closed her mouth, swallowed hard, then turned away to place the glasses and bottle safely on a counter. She scrubbed at her face furiously, berating herself for losing control.
She turned back to Chakotay in time to see him stumbling from the room. The bedroom door closed behind him, and she was shocked to hear him latch it from the inside, locking her out.
"Fucking hell," she said.
