A/N: Cred2029 asked a very valid question about ages in this fic – although B'Elanna's obviously younger than we see her on Voyager, Janeway and Chakotay are pretty much the same age as we know them at the beginning of the series, so late 30s for her, early 40s for him. Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, it really makes a difference.

An extra large thank you to MissyHissy3 for reading this chapter when she's so busy and when she's got her own (brilliant) fic to concentrate on (The Only Constant, it's awesome).

Chapter Three

in each other's shadows we grew less and less tall

and eventually our theories could explain it all

and I'm recording our history now on the bedroom wall

and when we leave the landlord will come

and paint over it all

and both hands

please use both hands

oh, no don't close your eyes

I am writing

graffiti on your body

I am telling the story

of how hard we tried

~ from Both Hands – Ani de Franco

"Annika?"

He pushed the door shut behind him. The apartment was quiet, but Chakotay could hear muted music filtering into the hallway from his bedroom. He crouched down to undo the laces on his sneakers, waiting for the storm front to appear. He could feel it gathering in the quiet. Annika had a gala at the university that they were both supposed to be attending tonight. He'd promised that this time he wouldn't let her down – that he'd be there, on time and scrubbed clean despite the endless lesson planning and grading that went with his particular territory and the club that he chose to spend time on in addition to everything else. He would have been, too, if not for Kathryn Janeway and the notes she refused to let go, if not for the injuries he'd felt compelled to treat and those eyes that had seemed intent on studying him both inside and out.

Urban renewal, he thought, as he pulled his laces loose. From anyone else's mouth I'd dismiss it as a buzz phrase, a political sop. So why-

He looked up to find himself confronted with the naked perfection of Annika Hansen's immaculately toned thighs. She was barefoot but wearing the silver dress, the one split ankle to hip that on any other woman would look like a prom-night mistake but that managed to make her look like a supermodel who'd simply taken a wrong turn on her walk to the runway. Her arms hung loosely by her sides but her fists were bunched in restrained anger.

"I'm sorry," he said, immediately. "Five minutes, that's all I need. I'll be ready."

"You should have been here twenty minutes ago," she said, the smooth blonde fall of her thick hair framing a face whose icy beauty could only be Scandinavian. "You promised me."

"I know." He stayed where he was, reaching out to circle her slim ankle with his hand and then running his palm slowly up her calf. For some reason at that moment he wanted nothing more than to turn her around, push her up against the wall and kiss the skin at the back of her thighs. It wasn't something he'd ever thought about doing before, but at this moment he wanted to know how that would feel against his lips and tongue, what it would taste like. His fingers reached the spot above the back of her knee as she said:

"It's transference."

He froze, looking up at her. "What?"

"All this time you waste on those kids. In psychological terms, it's transference."

Chakotay pushed himself to his feet, feeling sick and angry and not sure whether both or either were with her or just himself. "Don't do that," he said. "Don't analyse me. You know I hate that. And it's not a waste. How can you even say that?"

"What would you call it?"

He put his hands on his hips and shook his head. "Showing compassion? Making an effort for those less fortunate than ourselves?"

"You think I don't do both of those things?"

"I've never said that."

"No, you just imply it. Because you think earning a decent living trying to solve the problems of people who do the same is somehow selfish. Because you'd rather spend hours on a dead-end project than on building a real life for yourself with people who might actually contribute to your life rather than simply draining it dry."

"And from what do you draw this superlative psychological insight?"

She spread her arms. She was really was stunningly beautiful. "Oh, I don't know, Chakotay. Where do you think? The fact that I'm about to go out alone, again? It's becoming a running joke in the department, you know - that you don't really exist. That you're a figment of my imagination: 'Psychologist treat thyself'. It's a joke that's running perilously thin."

"What do you want me to say?" he demanded. "I've told you I'm sorry. I would have been here if something hadn't happened that I couldn't just abandon. I'm trying to make a difference, Annika – a real difference to lives that no one else seems to care about. Including you."

She raised her hands. "Oh no. You don't get to do that. You don't get to make me out to be the bad person here just because I'm realistic."

His anger was almost enough to fill the hallway in which they stood, tired of this argument they'd been having over and over for far too long. It was a fault line they both should have realised signposted a more fundamental threat to their relationship than a simple difference of opinion.

"You can be so damn cold sometimes."

"One of us has to be," she shouted. "We can't all just live in a dreamworld where everything turns out all right in the end just as long as we try!"

The buzzer to his apartment formed a barbed spur to the end of her words. They stared at each other for a second. It sounded again.

"That's Andrew," Annika said. "I called him when you were a no-show. Asked him to pick me up."

Chakotay nodded with a grim smile. "Not exactly going alone after all, then. Bet he was just sitting by the phone waiting for that call."

She shrugged as she stepped into silver heels that lifted her four inches off the floor. "Your choice, not mine."

Annika reached for the door. This would usually be the moment where he'd stop her, remind her why they kept flaying this dead horse over and over with a kiss that would leave her knees weak and her mind free of any man's face but his. But this time was different. He knew it and so did she. He felt a curious kind of relief. She turned back to him from the open door.

"This isn't working."

"How did we ever think it would, Annika? Really?"

She looked out into the hallway, a statue carved in marble. "I wanted it to."

"So did I."

She didn't look at him. "I'll come back to get my things."

He nodded but it was to the door, already closing behind her.

It was fully dark when Kathryn pulled up outside Mark's house in Pasadena. She sat in her car for a moment, looking over the neat garden. It had been four years since she'd moved in, but Kathryn still thought of this as Mark's house. It had been the family home, too beautiful to let go once his parents had passed and too valuable besides. She'd done her best to maintain the garden that surrounded the colonial four-bed building, but she'd done so according to Mark's late mother's tastes rather than her own. This did feel like a home: just not necessarily hers. She observed this without chagrin, merely as fact. Kathryn had spent most of her adult life moving around the country from project to project, chasing work and something else she could not or would not quantify. When Mark had proposed, it was the culmination of years of a steady, quiet relationship that had fitted like mortar between the bricks of her frequent months away. It had suited her, not because it felt like freedom but because it felt like security, something to come back to that would still be exactly where she left it. But she'd always been aware that sooner or later Mark would want something more. It hadn't occurred to her to turn him down: he had been patient through all her wandering. Now it was her turn to sacrifice, not that she would describe her decision in those terms to anyone besides herself. Mark was a good man – steady and dependable. She was lucky to have him. Everyone said so, including herself. Well, almost everyone. Her sister Phoebe was frequently vocal in her opinion that Kathryn was settling. Perhaps that was true in some senses, but so what? She knew plenty of people who didn't have the luxury of settling for something as good as Kathryn knew she had here.

The lights were on in the dining room downstairs and in the study on the first floor, which told her that despite the fact she'd warned him she'd be late, Mark had not given up hope of them eating supper together. This presented her with a quandary: she'd been hoping to get into the house and changed without him seeing. Obviously she couldn't hide her face, but if she could disguise her ripped clothing and bandaged leg the impact would surely be less. If he was downstairs in the snug she might manage to slip up the back stairs and into their room before he noticed, but if he was in the study there would be no chance of subterfuge of any sort.

She got out of the car and grabbed her bag, shutting the door quietly behind her. She slipped around the back and went in through the kitchen door, toeing off her boots to cross the tiles as quietly as possible.

She made it as far as the stairs before the dog gave her away. Molly spotted her mistress coming and barked once before Kathryn had a chance to silence her.

"Kathryn?" Mark's voice came from the study, accompanied by the creak of his old leather armchair as he got up.

"Hi!" she called back, brightly, petting the happy dog. "I'm so sorry I'm late. Have you eaten?"

He appeared at the top of the stairs, glasses on and book in hand. "No, I had a snack earlier and thought I'd wait for you. I-" he stopped. "Good god, Kathryn, what happened?" He dropped the book on the floor and ran down the stairs.

"Oh, nothing. Honestly, I'm fine," she said, as he reached her. "It was just an accident. Nothing to worry about."

"An accident? What – did someone hit your car?" He cupped her face in his hands, turning her head to look at the cut Chakotay had cleaned and covered. "Have you been to the Emergency Room?"

"No," she said hoping he'd just take that as an answer to the latter and forget about his former question. "Honestly, Mark, please don't fuss-"

He stepped back to look down at her leg, then back up at her face, his jaw setting. "This wasn't a car accident, was it?"

She sighed. "No, it wasn't."

"Kathryn. What happened?"

"Look, it's nothing to worry about-"

"Were you attacked? Is that it?"

"It really sounds a lot worse than it was," she told him. "Some guy just tried to grab my bag, that's all. Knocked me over. It was done in minutes. And look – I still have my bag, so everything's fine."

Even later she would be unable to explain why she didn't tell Mark about Chakotay, about how he'd come to her aid and then patched her up. It was something about wanting to keep that encounter hers: something unsullied by description, private and in her mind. Or perhaps it was simply that she wasn't sure she could talk about him without giving something of herself away that she would prefer to keep away from her fiancé.

Mark was shaking his head. "I knew this was going to happen. I knew it. What did I tell you?"

She stepped away from him, holding up a hand. "Please don't over-react."

He stared at her incredulously. "Over-react? Are you serious?"

"I'm not hurt except for a couple of bruises and if I'd just let go of the bag instead of fighting him for it, I wouldn't even have those. He didn't want to hurt me, that was just – incidental."

"Are you seriously suggesting that that makes it all right?"

"No, of course I'm not," she snapped. "I'm just pointing out that it could have been worse."

"Yes, you're right. It could have been," Mark said, matching her tone. "And now I hope you realise now that what I've been saying all along is right. These people just don't deserve-"

"'These people'?" Her voice rose along with her incredulity. "What people would they be, Mark? Exactly?"

He shook his head. "I didn't mean-"

"You meant exactly what you were going to say," she said, hotly, "that 'these people' aren't worth the effort. As if somehow, in a city less than two hours from where we are now, they are different from us. As if there isn't exactly the same ratio of good to bad as there is everywhere else on the damn planet!"

"You can be as liberal as you like, Kathryn, but you've never been brutalised walking down this street."

She raised her chin and glared at him, so angry she couldn't even speak. Mark flinched and she knew what the next words out of his mouth were going to be even before he did. For some reason that just angered her even more.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Kath, I'm sorry. I love you, that's all. You know that. And you're doing this thing and I don't understand why. I don't understand why you need to do it. You've raised all this money and it's an amazing thing, but why can't you just let someone else be the person on the ground? Why can't you just be happy to be here, with me?"

His contrition caved in her anger with a sledgehammer, followed by a flood of guilt so abject it churned her stomach. Could she blame him, really, for this reaction? Here she was with a slash across her leg, a scar on her cheek and a job that no one seemed to want her to do stretching into a future that would take up much of her time from now on. He always tried to give her everything. He was always waiting for her to come home.

"I am happy to be here with you," she said, taking a step towards him. "Oh Mark, you know I am. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

He reached out and gathered her in, pulling her against his chest. Kathryn raised her head and let him kiss her, again and again, wondering why it suddenly felt as if she might have told him a lie. Everything she needed was here and everything here was safe. Why would she ever need anything more than that?

[TBC]