Notes: It's been way, way too long since I updated. My sincerest apologies. Hopefully the writer's block, which was the main thing that was keeping me from writing and updating this, is now broken for good. Thus, hopefully there won't be a delay this long again. Again, my apologies.
Many thanks to tumblr user absynthe-minded, and fellow fanfic authors cheile and m_class for their help with and support of this chapter.
I hope you enjoy, and I'd love to hear your thoughts - especially given the long update-time, and the fact that the tone of the fic is shifting due to the fact that I'm finally getting out of set-up and into the meat of it. Also, if you want me to start putting very specific trigger warnings on each chapter, let me know, otherwise I'll just use my own discretion for what will need trigger warnings.
tumblr user absynthe-minded made a playlist for this fic, like the amazing person she is. You can listen to it on playmoss dot com/en/absyntheminded/playlist/solis-febris
Part VI: De Igne Aquaque
Kathryn stood upon a balcony that overlooked a sparkling city square. A fountain burbled merrily, water pouring from a vase held in a dancing maiden's hands, ferns and flowers blooming in the beds around the pool at her feet. Wrought iron benches sat looking into the fountain and its flowers, clawed feet resting on silver marble etched with gold.
It was all burning.
Kathryn turned, stumbling thoughts racing to catch up with her surroundings. She saw latticed windows and a mosaic floor, rose gold sconces that held half-burned candles and pots filled with bright plants. The sky was grey with ash and smoke, and beneath her, in the square, men and women and children ran from the flames.
They were all human. This, for a reason that was lost to mist as soon as she tried to grasp at it, seemed significant.
Out! Every instinct in her body screamed for her to get out, away from the balcony and the three-meter drop to hard stone, which beckoned from beyond the wood-carved railing. But to do so, she realized as she turned again towards the building at her back, would require her to brave the flames.
It was, in the end, not a hard choice.
From within the depths of the building, she heard a scream—a child's scream, wild and high and pitched with terror.
The spark-gnawed door leading out onto the balcony shattered against Kathryn's shoulder, the latch, which glittered with heat, cracking out of the frame. She stumbled, the toes of her boots kicking up a flurry of embers and ash as she lost her balance. Smoke poured into her throat and up into her nose as she gasped, then coughed, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes in an instant.
Her training took hold. She lifted her left arm, covered her nose and mouth with the crook of her elbow, and forced her leaden legs to move. One step, two steps, three, into the fire-cast hell.
It was hot. So hot. The air ate her, dry and scorching, hungry. She coughed, on the smoke and on the heat, and she felt her skin blister. Her hair crackled. Her eyes burned. Her mouth and nose, even through her sleeve, scorched so that it was nearly impossible to breathe.
She was going to die. She was going to die, she was going to die, shewasgoingtodie.
Get out! her mind screamed. Get out now!
The child's scream crescendoed, a wail and a shriek, terrified.
Three more steps, Kathryn told herself—her legs, her chest, her muscles and bones and blood. Just three more steps. And then three more, and three more, and three more.
The building would have been beautiful, Kathryn realized, small and distant, as she ducked through a collapsing, arched doorway, choking and unable to cry. Paint ran down the walls in long, blackening streaks, and the rich carpets underfoot spat and popped as sparks fell and caught amid the soft fibers. Artfully carved furniture sat, squat and fearful, in corners and along the walls: chests, stands holding burning flowers, shelves holding smoke-blacked vases and sagging pottery, tables covered in the drifting ash of vanished paper.
She reached the top of a wide staircase. The stairs before her burned; the balustrade to either side of her crumbled, a cacophony of cracking wood and spitting smoke, then a riot of crashes. Behind her came a rumble, and she turned just in time to watch as part of the ceiling tore free and fell, heavy and burning, to the hall floor.
Kathryn grit her teeth and clenched both her hands into fists. There's no turning back now, she told herself.
The child screamed a third time—closer this time than before, rising from the first floor on waves of eddying heat. And then the scream fell abruptly silent.
Kathryn threw herself forward.
The stairs dissolved beneath her feet and she fell. Wood and flame rose with reaching hands around her ankles, her knees, her hips, her chest and shoulders. She screamed. The air was empty and fragile and burning, unable to hold her. There was nothing—and everything—and for a flash of an instant, she thought she could see the whole world.
And then she hit the ground. Her head smashed into something hard, and she saw black, then white, then once again hell. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't move. All she could do was burn.
Then, from somewhere close, a voice. And in that voice a word. "Please," they said—screamed. And again, "Please!"
She rolled over, forcing cut and blistered hands beneath her. She cried out at the pain of ravaged flesh peeling against searing stone, at the pain of bruised ribs and lungs. Her legs ached, throbbed, stung. Her feet felt numb.
"Please," the voice said with a sob.
She stood.
She tried to speak. She choked, on ash and smoke and pain. She tried to swallow—only her mouth was bone, her tongue wood. She coughed, and it was the dry, hacking rasp of a dying animal.
"Please," the voice said again.
She stumbled forward. The voice was near—nearer, she hoped, than death. She had to reach it. She had to. She—
The huddled form of a young child materialized before her through the smoke and flame. It sat huddled in the middle of the floor, the smoldering remains of a bed behind them in a corner beneath a window. The glass of the window was shattered, the wall and frame around it devoured.
Three more steps, she whispered, silently, to herself. One. Two. Three.
She knelt. The child looked up at her, dark and wide-eyed and terrified. There were no tears, only burns and soot and smoke. The child—was it a boy or a girl? She could not say—reached for her, palms blistered and fingers burned to the bone. "Please," the child whispered.
She took the child's hand in her own. Pulled the child close to her, wrapping them in her arms. "I'm here," she whispered in return—or tried to whisper. She felt her lips move, but no sound made it past her lips. The child clung to her, and she realized it didn't matter if they had heard her or not.
One arm under the child's arm and behind their back. The other beneath their legs. Stand.
One step.
One step.
One step.
She was halfway to the window when the world tilted. The fire billowed, the smoke roared. The floor cracked, the ceiling cracked, the walls cracked. The flames reached for her, all hunger and need.
A beam, eaten through and alight, fell mere feet to her left. Sparks rose in a dizzying waltz where it landed, and heat sprang over her and the child in her arms. Then another beam fell. And another.
One step.
Crack.
She looked up. The ceiling was alive; worms of red and orange and yellow crawled across the wooden planks and beams, gnawing and writhing. And as she watched it all sagged, worms and ceiling alike. It groaned.
The floor had swallowed her feet. She could not move. The child in her arms was lead and stone and iron. With the child weighing her down, she would not reach the window—not before the ceiling collapsed.
She looked down at the child. The child looked up at her.
She smiled.
Above them both, the ceiling looked down and groaned. Split. Fell.
She fell with it, curling down over the child in her arms. Elbows and knees struck the floor, but she felt no pain. Chin down, shoulders hunched, back arched, covering the child's head and chest and legs.
Thud.
She heard, more than felt, the ceiling strike her. She heard the crunch of wood and of bone, heard the tearing rip of fire, heard her own grunt of pain.
And then she burned, all of her, bone and muscle and flesh. It was in her, and on her, and all around her but beneath. She was flame itself, burning with heat so great it felt like ice. It swallowed her, like water, and she could not breathe for drowning.
The child beneath her grasped at her hand. Gripped her fingers in theirs. "Don't leave me," the child begged. Their voice was the murmur of a winter's breeze. It scythed through the roar of the fire's wind, cleaving it to fluttering shreds. "Hold on."
She held the child's hand—his hand—and she burned, and she promised, silently, "I won't."
Then the cold swallowed her, and everything went black.
She opened her eyes.
Chakotay knelt against the edge of Kathryn's tub, soaked and panting, head half-bowed and conscience drifting. The lukewarm water was cooling quickly on his left hand and arm, on his chest where his tank clung, sticky, to his chest, on his face where it mixed with the sweat beading on his forehead. His breath tasted stale and scared on his tongue and in the back of his throat. His right hand, submerged up to the wrist, ached with the first blush of bruising, and stung with the pain of five bloodied nail-marks dug into his knuckles.
His mind and his sight were lost in echoes—of her voice, of her face, of his name screamed hoarse and jagged from her lips. He felt her hand in his, nails digging into his skin, fingers bruising his knuckles, clinging desperately while she screamed and thrashed and he held her down; and he could feel her hand in his now, soft and limp and as bruised as his own.
A hand fell on his left shoulder. Then a familiar voice, sounding very far away, said softly, "Okay, Commander. I think we can take her out now."
Chakotay blinked. His heart lodged in his throat as his breath hitched. His knees ached from the hard ground, and his hand stung, and he shivered against the water on his skin. The hollow, gnawing pain buried deep within his chest shattered and roared—and before Chakotay's thoughts had caught up to his body, he was on his feet and bending down, over the tub.
If he had been soaked before, he was dripping in an instant. Her body was small—so small—and delicate in his arms, cradled against his chest as he lifted her free of the tub and the water that had made her beg for compassion. Her ribs and spine pressed against his arms through her skin, and as Chakotay carried her out of the bathroom and toward the towels draped over her bed, he realized for what felt like the first time just how skinny she was.
Too skinny. How long has it been, Chakotay asked her silently, since you last ate a proper meal?
Why are you so damn bad at taking care of yourself?
A flash of scarlet anger. This is your fault, Kathryn, Chakotay told her, still silent. If you just took care of yourself like I told you to, this wouldn't have happened.
But that was unfair of him. Mostly, anyway.
"Dammit, Kathryn," Chakotay murmured—though what exactly he was damning her for, he wasn't so certain of.
He laid her down on top of the towels. Her small, wet body sunk down into the mattress, the straggles of her wet hair clinging to her skin and making her eyes and cheeks look hollower than they were. Her hand remained fastened in his, her fingers clutching at his knuckles, but her head lolled weakly.
It was but a moment's work to dry her skin and rub the water out of her hair with the towels piled atop their twins at the foot of the bed. Her skin was still damp, her hair still tangled and sticky with moisture, but she was no longer dripping wet.
With a firm, quick movement, Chakotay lifted her up with one arm, and with the other whisked the water-logged towels out from under her. They fell in a rumpled pile by his knee, limp and soggy, and almost instantly began to soak the right pants leg. He ignored it, focusing on lowering Kathryn gently back down to her bed. She still wore her bra and underwear, but Chakotay intended to let Kes take care of that when she arrived from Sickbay.
Chakotay knelt, reached a tentative hand out to cup one cold-flushed cheek. "It's over now," he murmured to her. He watched her shiver, saw the goose flesh that rose across her neck and shoulders where his warm breath brushed her. "It's done."
"Commander?"
The Doctor's voice was a hammer against Chakotay's ears. He startled, looking sharply up at the holographic man that he found standing at his shoulder. He had neither heard nor seen him approach, though by the pinched expression etched into the lines of his face, the Doctor had not been quiet about it.
Chakotay suddenly realized that his left hand was still touching his captain's face. He jerked it away, as if he had been scalded, and stood abruptly. Kathryn clutched at him, and as he pulled his right hand free of hers, he heard—barely discernible, barely audible over the thud of his own heartbeat and the whisper of the recycled air humming from the vents—her give a small, aching mewl.
Chakotay's heart twisted into his throat, and in that moment, all he wanted to do was lay down on the bed and pull her into his arms where he could soothe away the pain.
"Yes, Doctor?" Chakotay said, wrenching his mind away from his pain and yearning.
The Doctor hummed, deep in the back of his throat, and flipped open the medical tricorder he carried. Chakotay's head jerked back, as if the tricorder were a viper. "Doc—," he began, only to be cut off by The Doctor clucking his tongue disapprovingly.
"I thought so," the Doctor said. His eyes were fathomless and infinite in a way that made Chakotay's mind reel, endless eons of light bound together and harnessed to give the impression of sight, eternal in their view and piercing in their knowing—and then The Doctor blinked, and he was simply The Doctor once more. "Commander," he said, all brisk business and curt bedside manner, "you're in shock."
It was Chakotay's turn to blink. He looked at The Doctor, brain, still reeling from the odd moment with the hologram's eyes and the sound and sigh of Kathryn so wretched, struggling and failing to understand what he had just been told. "What?"
The Doctor's eyebrows rose. "Shock," he said again. "You are in shock." He pursed his lips and regarded Chakotay for a long three seconds. Then, bluntly, he said, "I think you should leave this to me and Kes for now. Go take a shower. Get some food if you haven't yet, and then go to sleep."
"But," Chakotay protested, not knowing exactly how he was meaning to convince The Doctor that he was still needed but driven to do so with every fiber of bone and blood. "But won't you need—"
"Kes and I can handle it," The Doctor said, cutting him off. "And if not, we will summon you or Mr. Tuvok."
"But," Chakotay tried again. This time it was him who cut himself off. He sighed, understanding finally settling down through his chest and into his stomach with the weight of a lodestone. "Fine," he said stiffly, after a long second of staring at The Doctor. "But if you need help, call me, not Tuvok."
It wasn't that Chakotay didn't trust the Vulcan; in fact, Chakotay would trust his life, and Kathryn's, with him. Chakotay suspected that Tuvok knew just as much—if not more—about Kathryn, and her life, than he did. That, though, was a sore spot that Chakotay refused to call jealousy—and that, in the moment, was part of the problem.
Earlier in the day Kathryn had chewed into Chakotay for bringing her weakness even possibly to the attention of the crew. The Doctor and Kes were already involved; Chakotay did not want anyone else involved. Not until Kathryn was doing better, and this was merely a haunting nightmare lost to memory.
That included Tuvok.
Again The Doctor looked at Chakotay with a long, hard, and unreadable expression. But then he nodded. "Very well, Commander," he said, tone just as stiff as Chakotay's had been a moment before.
Chakotay nodded. He glanced at Kathryn, small and pale and still shivering, and once more fought the desire to pull her into his arms and smooth the trembling out of her limbs. He glanced at The Doctor, watching him with eyes that were far too knowing.
"Good night, then, Doctor," he said.
"Good night, Commander," The Doctor said.
Chakotay felt his eyes following him as he disappeared through Kathryn's sitting room, and out into the hall. Somehow, Chakotay thought, as he turned toward his own quarters just down the hall, I don't think I'll be getting much sleep tonight.