A/N: Thank you very much to MissyHissy3 for betaing so speedily. Sorry, this breaks the patterns of quotes, but I just can't think of one to go with this chapter at the moment!

Chapter Six

The concrete came up a week later, peeled slowly from the earth in crumbling segments like the decayed skin of an atrophied orange. It took two backhoes almost a day to clear the site. It was a Saturday, and the activity attracted the attention of the stalwart residents who hadn't yet been driven out of the area by the creeping deprivation of neglect. Between club sessions Chakotay stood with the small crowd, watching the work. Some of the gathered faces he knew, but others he didn't: the usual invisibility of city life. He'd probably been living within a block of all of these people for years and never even noticed passing them on the street.

Kathryn was in the thick of the action, directing the work. Dressed in battered blue jeans and a black top, her hair tucked away under a red hard-hat, he was surprised to find that she looked so at home amid the dust and dirt of a construction site. On their previous meetings she had seemed so polished that he had imagined that was her natural state and one she would be loath to discard. But as he watched her – something he found himself doing frequently – he almost couldn't imagine her any other way. She was animated and confident. Small as she was, Kathryn appeared to almost effortlessly command both the attention and action of the workers she'd employed. She knew what she wanted done and how. Apparently, in this context at least, not one of the burly men handling the backhoes and the subsequent rubble would dream of even questioning her. She wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty, either. More than once he watched her heft a ragged lump of concrete into a dumpster as easily as he's seen other women toss back their hair.

It made Chakotay feel something, to watch this woman at work. It wasn't just admiration. It was fascination too, both bounded by a form of trust that had quickly become so deep that he was surprised at himself. They hadn't seen much of each other over the past week, partly because he'd wanted to give the dust a chance to settle after his altercation with her assistant, Tom. Maybe he'd been too hard on the kid, but out of all his students, B'Elanna was the one of whom Chakotay was most protective. He'd been worried by her abrupt departure that day and his concern had only increased in the interim. Torres hadn't missed a session, but though she'd been present, she'd been distracted and surly. Tom Paris seemed to be keeping his word, though, for which Chakotay had to be grateful.

As if summoned by Chakotay's thought process, Tom appeared at the site gate, carrying a cardboard tray of Starbucks coffee. Kathryn saw him coming and lifted her hands in a gesture of excitement that made Chakotay smile. This he already knew about her: there was probably as much caffeine in her veins as there was haemoglobin. Every evening he would come into the gym to find cardboard cups overflowing from the trash basket and dotted around the place, marking out the routes she'd taken as she worked. The wall of her office had become a mood board of such epic proportions that it had spilled out into the hallway as Kathryn had pinned more and more images to it, as if it were a map to a long journey into unknown territory that she was marking out as she went along. She'd annotated the images here and there, adding lists of questions, suggestions and notes that were at times so cryptic he couldn't even begin to decipher them. Twice his curiosity had been so aroused that he'd scribbled notes of his own to leave on her desk for the next morning, hoping she'd answer in kind so that there would be a similar note containing the answer waiting for him when he got in himself. Twice he'd thought better of it at the last minute and gone back to scoop them up, crunching his paper scraps into balls that he tossed into the trash alongside her endless discarded coffee cups.

This was the other reason that Chakotay had chosen not to cross Kathryn Janeway's path too often in the past week. He didn't understand it, the strength of this sudden and unreasonable attraction that had gripped him. It went beyond the acknowledgement of how beautiful she was. If that was all that preoccupied him about her, it wouldn't have been cause for worry, but he couldn't help thinking – fearing, really – that there was something else there. But it was probably merely a combination of factors, he reasoned, and not for the first time. Her unconventional entry into his life, her energy, the enthusiasm with which she pursued her ideas, the magnetic pull of her drive and determination, perhaps. Besides, he was still feeling the tremors emanating from his split with Annika. Inevitable or not, the dissolution of their life together was nevertheless proving painful, its shards as sharp as those of any broken relationship. That Kathryn Janeway had appeared when she did – well, maybe the peculiar pull he felt in her presence was merely down to that and nothing more.

Whatever the cause, he hadn't failed to note the sparkling band she wore on her ring finger. Even had it not been there, as unconventional as their working connection might be, they were now colleagues. She'd asked for his help with genuine intentions, adding another brush stroke to a line he saw running between them and that he had no intention of crossing. So Chakotay thought it best to stay away from her as much as possible for a while. Just until this – whatever 'this' was – had faded.

He watched Kathryn embrace the coffee Tom had brought, clasping it between her two hands as if it were an old friend. Even from this far away he could see her eyes flutter shut as she took a grateful mouthful. Standing here, watching her rather than the work itself, Chakotay was aware he was fast shattering the rule he'd set for himself. But at that very moment, Annika was moving the last of her things out of his apartment. He'd be going back to a place peppered with absences where another person used to be, so right now he'd prefer to be fully occupied here, standing in the sunshine and watching a woman he could not have and yet could not, at this moment, turn away from.

It'll pass, he told himself. It'll pass and she'll never know. So where's the harm?

For Kathryn, there was always something special about this stage of a project – breaking ground felt almost ceremonial, the ensuing dust sending a smoke signal into the sky: This is beginning. We are underway. Here though, now, her excitement was somehow greater. She felt a sense of exhilaration that she now realised must have been lacking from her work for some time. Perhaps it was the scale of this project, the public nature of it – Kathryn had managed plenty of major undertakings, but most of them had been for rich private clients, their gardens locked away for the use of the few, not the many. She was always a conscientious worker and never delivered work she could not be justifiably proud of. But here in Maywood, she had rediscovered a joy in her work that must once have always existed but had, at some point, been buried. Ideas came to her at the oddest times, waking her from sleep so often that she had started to keep a notebook beside her bed. Once at the site office, she transferred them to walls so cluttered that she thought she should probably apologise to Chakotay for encroaching on gym wall space. She would, when she saw him again. He'd not been around much at all over the past week, a flying visit here and there, but nothing else. She understood: he must be busy juggling school, boxing club and the girlfriend he'd mentioned the first time they met. She suspected he was setting a precedent, too. She'd asked for his help and he'd agreed, but he clearly didn't want to end up spending all of what precious time he had fielding her queries, so he was letting her know up front that the time he'd be available to her would be sparse. That was fair enough.

It was also probably a good idea, given the pulse of personal disappointment she had so far felt every time Chakotay had left instead of staying. She was determined to get over this ridiculous frisson she always seemed to feel in his presence. The fact that something in her kept insisting that she'd really quite like to get to know him better told her that she should really stay as far away from him as possible.

The sun was beginning to drop lower in the sky, timed to match perfectly with the last chunk of concrete being torn from its resting place. She looked around, coffee cup in one hand, the other shielding her eyes. What she saw was satisfying. She clapped Tom on the back, smiling.

"We've done good work here today, Tom."

"Really?" He looked around at the uneven, dusty ground. "Just looks like one big mess to me."

"Ahh, but that's good," she told him. "It's mess we can work with. Earth, Tom! Real earth! And look-" she nodded to the knot of bystanders whose numbers had fluctuated since the work had begun that morning. "We've been noticed. That means that when we put the posters up announcing the consultation evening, interest will already be piqued, and-"

She spied a figure she recognised amid the small crowd. Broad-shouldered and dark, Chakotay stood head-and-shoulders above most of those around him. She smiled and lifted her arm in a wave, unreasonably happy when he returned it.

"And?" Tom prompted.

"And what?"

"You were about to say something else. Before you were…" he glanced over at Chakotay, "…distracted."

"Oh yes, sorry. And that should bring plenty of people in to talk to us, which is just what we need. Tom, go and tell Joe he might as well finish for the night, will you?" She started to head towards Chakotay.

"Joe?" Tom called after her. "Who's Joe?"

Kathryn turned back to him, gesturing across the churned ground. "Joe – the second backhoe driver! He's done for the day, send him home!"

She heard Tom mutter an acknowledgment, but by then she was mid-way to the fence hemming the site from the pathway. She smiled as Chakotay broke away from the other bystanders, hands in his pockets as he came towards her.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey yourself," Chakotay said, smiling. He nodded to the desolation behind her. "When you set your mind on something there's no stopping you, is there, Kathryn Janeway?"

She felt herself smiling from ear to ear. "My defining characteristic, or so I'm told."

His eyes danced with laughter as he nodded at the cup in her hand. "I would have said that was an extraordinary capacity to consume coffee."

Kathryn glanced down and grimaced. "Oh god, you've discovered my weakness."

Chakotay leaned one shoulder against the fence, which gave slightly under his weight. She resisted the urge to move closer. He didn't seem in any rush to leave today, which made her disproportionately happy. "So what's next?" he asked, looking past her to the site.

"Well, I wanted to talk to you about that, actually. I'd like to hold a consultation – we'd put posters up inviting local residents to come and see what this is all about – part of finding out what people in the area want from the space."

Chakotay nodded. "Sounds like the gym would be a good place if you want to accommodate a good number of visitors."

"That's what I was thinking," Kathryn confessed. "But we'd have to do it in the evening and I know that would interfere with the club…"

"I wouldn't mind that as long as it doesn't become a habit," he said. "But what about holding it on a Saturday evening? The club wouldn't be open anyway and you'd probably find more people will turn out on a Saturday than a work night. Although I know that'd mean you'd have to lose more time out of your weekend…"

Kathryn smiled. "That's not a problem at all."

He met her eyes, one eyebrow raised. "No? You must have a very understanding fiancé."

"I do," Kathryn agreed. "Mark's a saint. Actually he'll probably come himself – I spend so much time talking and thinking about this place, it's about time he saw it for himself."

Chakotay pushed away from the fence, his gaze drifting back out over the site as he smiled slightly. "Well. I'll leave the details up to you. But I'll be on hand to help if you-" he broke off, staring hard at something on the far side of the site.

Kathryn turned to see what he was looking at just as the noise of the second backhoe died away. In place of its stutter and grumble rose a higher-pitched sound, long, drawn out and moving closer. Four black motorbikes revved along the road edging the wasteland, their riders crouched over their sleek vehicles. Each was dressed in black from head to toe, aside from the bright red slash of the bandanas tied across their mouths and noses. They slid slowly around three sides of the square, passing not a more than a meter from where Kathryn and Chakotay stood. The gathered crowd had begun to disperse as soon as the bikes had appeared, dissipating like smoke into the sunset.

Chakotay turned, watching the bikes until they turned a corner and disappeared between the grey buildings.

"Trouble?" Kathryn asked.

He looked down at her, a tight frown on his face. "I hope not," he said.

[TBC]