A/n: I wouldn't blame any of you lovely readers for having to re-read this whole story before reading this long overdue new chapter, I had to myself before writing this. I do not own Star Trek: Voyager.
"You wanted to see me Captain?" Janeway looked up from her desk's console at the sound of Chakotay's voice, feeling her heart constrict in shock and sympathy as she saw the change in him. Just in the past couple of hours, the same shadows that had darkened the face of his aged doppelganger, revealing more than the passage of years, had begun to creep up on him and settle in the purple crescents of exhaustion hanging under his eyes, the deepening tension lines at his mouth. Even his rich voice had taken on some of discordant notes of disillusionment and anger that dominated the elder's voice. Somehow seeing this…domino effect on her friend was even more disturbing than interacting with 'Captain' Chakotay, it showed so clearly that they were the same man… And just yesterday his unusually upbeat mood, his readiness to smile even during the monotony of uneventful Bridge shifts, had piqued her curiosity. That feel like a lifetime ago, and what she'd give right now for a quiet, uncomplicated day! Chakotay's dulled eyes narrowed as he caught her own wide eyed gaze, "Unless it wasn't me you wanted to see?"
He did, to his credit, try to smile, but there was enough defensiveness in the tone that the question just couldn't come off as teasing. "Of course it is." Janeway replied quickly, flashing a weak smile of her own, "In this timeline, you're still my First Officer, that opportunity hasn't presented itself yet."
"If your fellow Captain has his way, then our opportunities in the Delta Quadrant might just be at an end." Chakotay remarked, his taut face unreadable.
Janeway sighed heavily and slumped back in her chair, drumming her fingers on its arms. "Maybe." She agreed quietly, "But I'm not counting on it yet."
"Yet?" Chakotay questioned, finally moving from where he'd been standing to attention in front of her, rooted to the spot, to instead perch warily on the chair on the other side of her desk; uncharacteristically leaning over the desk to penetrate their well-established, comfortable boundaries of personal space. "You're considering his plan?"
He carefully controlled his judgement, internalised it even, but Janeway knew him well enough, had been on the opposing side of his reserved pragmatism when she was determined to be inventive, to hear it loud and clear. "How can I not consider it Chakotay?" she asked pointedly, casting her expressive hands upward in appeal, "Tritanium armour plating, isometric shielding, multi-phasic torpedoes, and a direct route to the Alpha Quadrant…"
"A direct route through a Borg transwarp conduit." Chakotay reminded her grimly.
Janeway closed her eyes briefly, "There's the rub, and a big one at that." She conceded, running a weary hand over her face before she regarded him again with an intent gaze. "But nothing's ever easy, we've never gotten anything without risk."
"No, we haven't." Chakotay murmured, thinking of Seven as a case in point. The unconventional and violent way she'd ended up here, the risk they were each taking in opening their hearts, toughened as they were with scar tissue… Did it even matter anymore? Now that his future self has interrupted things so dramatically?
"It's a…convincing plan, a bold one." Janeway continued cautiously.
Chakotay replied to that with a tiny smirk, "One with your fingerprints all over it."
She stared at him like a deer in headlights for a moment, then laughed brokenly, "He did practically admit I instigated all this." She remembered ruefully. She stared down at the PADD, "I can almost believe that."
Chakotay took a deep breath, his lips curling uneasily. "But it was me who went through with that plan."
"And you've never done that before?" Janeway questioned, eyebrows raised, but quickly became serious again, "I don't know how I'd be feeling if it was my future self who had come back here, but I know it would be confusing…" She began tentatively.
"You have no idea." Chakotay cut her off sharply, eyes flashing, but then reined himself in again. "I just don't know what would possess me to make such a decision, pursue such a crazy plan of action!" he exclaimed in frustration, but his voice soon grew small with fear. Though revealing even a fraction of that fear to Kathryn made him shudder, he was helplessly bleeding the emotion. "You know I've had things happen in my life…many things, that I'd want to change, but I've never considered it. It's my past, a past that's passed by, unreachable, and it's made me who I am. I've always accepted that." His voice shook, the conviction leaving his tone, "What could've possibly happened to make me change so much? To make me disown those beliefs and tenets?"
Janeway flinched at the bitter, helpless, anxiety in his tone. "I honestly don't know." She admitted softly, "But Chakotay, temporal directive or not, I think I'll need to ask those questions if we're even to really consider this plan, or any like it."
Of course you will, Chakotay thought resentfully as he gave another heavy sigh and stood up abruptly. "Well, I don't know if I want to know the answers Kathryn." He told her resignedly, knocking his chair up against her desk as he left her to her prerogative of decision making and walked back out onto the Bridge.
Janeway sadly watched him leave, just as she watched his older self leave after passionately explaining their route home. Her eyes slowly refocused on the image on her console, of the Borg transwarp conduit, the monstrosity that eclipsed all this temporal hypothesis and self-analysis. Could she, in good conscience, exploit it to get home, whatever Captain Chakotay thought with the benefit of hindsight that she couldn't share?
Chakotay found that he couldn't stay on the Bridge any more than he could stay true to his self-denying statement to the Captain. He didn't want to know the answers, but the more deep-seated that precognition of doom became, the stronger his need to know for sure became, drawing him towards himself, the mirror image that reflected so much in himself that he'd never wanted to see. Hadn't he conquered the self-destructive martyr, the emotional hermit, that he'd been during many of his dark days in the Maquis? He didn't want to regress back to that, hated the idea that it was a possibility just as he was the happiest he'd been in years. What right did he have to destabilise everything? To bend the timeline to his will? Was he really that weak and conceited? Perhaps he did have his own best interests, and Voyager's, at heart, but wasn't the road to hell paved with good intentions?
In this distracted frame of mind, his anger building with every new thought, his feet found their way to the door of Joe Carey's old quarters. Whose idea had it been to put him up in here? Maybe his, to intensify the emotional blackmail. To remind the crew that if they followed his ordained plan then they wouldn't need to endure any further losses of good people like Joe.
He didn't bother ringing the bell, in a twisted way this was his room as much as his after all, but he regretted his hot-headed blindness as he tried to absorb what confronted him inside. He'd seen Seven in too many horrible, unimaginable if he hadn't witnessed them, situations; sometimes, he remembered guiltily, without as much pity and empathy as she should've inspired, but he was making up for that now as he recalled them. Those first lost, inky black, emotionally violent days in the Brig, the day she'd been drawn to the site of her assimilation, the Borg Queen's blackmail, torture on board the Equinox, the death of the assimilated baby she'd rescued, having death's scythe hanging over her herself… He'd seen parts of those traumas and more, but he'd never seen her cry before. She was crying now. Weeping brokenly, hopelessly, in his counterpart's arms. The counterpart whose gentle hold around her didn't waver even as their two sets of identical eyes met over the bowed golden head of the woman both of them loved.
"Seven…" Captain Chakotay murmured to her softly in warning, though oddly the competing feelings of relief and regret both reflected on his face as he accepted his younger self's presence.
Seven heaved a haggard breath of air, her reddened eyes, which had been squeezed shut against his shoulder in a useless attempt to impede the flow of tears, opening blearily to gaze up into his face. "I'm sorry…" She gulped convulsively, though she found the instinctive act did nothing to ease her speech, let alone lighten this new, complex but visceral, burden of grief, "…so sorry…"
"It's not your fault Seven." Seven tried to draw comfort from the words, then gave a start as she realised that Chakotay's lips hadn't moved. She turned at once, her heart in her throat as she saw Chakotay, the one who belonged here, standing in the doorway. The stricken confusion in his face made her heart splinter further, if that were possible now. It was as if she'd been thrown to the bottom of a lake; she couldn't breathe, couldn't hear, in that moment. Looking at Chakotay now was like staring up through the distortion of water, he shouldn't look like that. Just hours before he'd been smiling at her, his lips wet with her kisses, gaze open and warm, affectionate and hopeful. How could things have altered so much in such a short time? She still had the photograph in her hand, couldn't let it go even as it seemed to burn…
Chakotay swallowed as he saw her huge, glassy eyes fixate on him without seeing, tears sliding silently down her ashen cheeks. The irrational anger that had flared up at her when he'd seen her with him, with himself, died at once and he found that he could hardly summon it up for their harbinger of misfortune. "What's going on?" he whispered hoarsely, pleading, "What are you doing here?"
Captain Chakotay's eyes flickered between him and Seven, who remained motionless in his hold. "I'm here for us." He answered simply.
"Us?" Chakotay echoed incredulously, "Really? You're not here for yourself? You may believe you lost something you couldn't live without in 26 years, but for today, I had everything I needed, and you…"
Seven pulled herself together, Chakotay's crumbling façade tumbling through her haze. "Chakotay." She murmured, her tone was so eerily calm, even soothing, that she captured his fractured attention, his eyes pleading with her. She left the other Chakotay at once and stood in front of him, "Look at me." She requested thickly as he looked past her to the other, taking his hand with her reassuringly cool Borg one as he obeyed her. There was only one thing she could do, even as she felt the future bearing down on her. Gingerly, she pressed the photograph into his other hand.
Chakotay glanced down at the photograph, a basic paper copy rather than a holo-image, but only turned it over in his hand as Seven gave the slightest of tearful nods. The world seemed to spin as if the ship had been caught in a plasma storm as he stared down at it and understanding flooded in. He was glad of Seven's hand on his arm, knew she was the only thing holding him upright as he found confirmation in his own eyes staring back at him. "Yes." He said thickly, "I have nothing left to lose, and you have everything. That's why I'm here, to give you a chance of keeping it."
A/n: Please review. :) Thank you to Teya, who reminded me of this fic and led me to add to this particular story again after many failed drafts. Also, thank you to cojack, whose own updates of 'Dear Alixia' and 'Unite' were a much needed pick-me-up while I was writing this.