A/N: Many apologies for the delay in updating. I've got an RL deadline that's keeping me busy, but I'll try to continue with this in better time from now on. Thanks to MissyHissy3 for nagging* me to update – and also for the swift beta read! *in the nicest possible way, obvs.**

Chapter Two

The dark was cloying. Kathryn Janeway had never suffered with claustrophobia, but this absence of light was relentless. It clawed its way towards her, creeping up her back, working over her shoulders until her throat was tight, dry not only with thirst but also with tension. It was impossible to keep track of time. The notion of minutes, of hours, became alien. There was only the rawness of now coupled with the agony of later.

They talked. It helped. The sound of Chakotay's steady voice held her in check, floating across the well of crippling darkness that constituted the tiny distance between their bunks. Whether hers did the same for him, she had no idea. Janeway had the sense that her first officer was better equipped to cope with a situation like this than she was. She had observed first hand his ability to accept enforced inaction: he found a way to placate any restlessness, a knack she had never managed to acquire. Quite apart from the dislocating effect of utter darkness, the stillness stymied her: Kathryn found it hard enough to evade thought even when she had an agenda longer than there were hours in the day in which to fulfil it. Here, in the dark, with nothing to occupy her, thoughts broke over her like waves thrown ashore from a stormy ocean.

The crew – were they alive? Dead? Imprisoned in similar circumstances? Where was Voyager? How had they ended up here? Where was here? What did their captors want?

Some of these questions formed the basis of their conversations. Without evidence of who they were being held by and where, the only answers they could give themselves were the product of educated guesswork. There was no way to know what had happened to the ship, and no matter how many times Kathryn attempted to stray in that direction, Chakotay would steer her away – worried, perhaps, that she would do herself more harm than good to dwell upon something they could never know the truth of while in that cell.

"It must be for ransom," she'd said, as they had tried to work out the reason for their capture. "We're not dead. They haven't tried to interrogate us for information. So why else take us? Why else keep us alive?"

Chakotay had agreed. "A reasonable assumption."

"Which would suggest," she had continued, "that there is someone to request ransom from."

"Perhaps," had been his cautious reply.

"That could only mean Voyager," she had pointed out, her heart swelling with a sudden rush of relief at the sense this made. If they were being held for ransom, then it stood to reason that the ship was still intact, and also still at liberty.

"You could be right, Captain," Chakotay had said. "And yet they haven't fed us or given us water. They left us in here with injuries that were pretty severe, after all. They're not acting as if they're worried about keeping us alive."

"Perhaps they don't know our needs," she reasoned, unwilling to let go of the wisp of hope that had wound its way around her heart. "Their species may not require hydration in the way that we do."

They had hammered on the door, yelling their needs, but no answer had been forthcoming - at least, not immediately. An age later, a hatch in their prison opened; grey light illuminating a small oblong cut into the wall beside the door. Through it was pushed something – a tray, bearing what may or may not have been intended as food, from the smell of it. The hatch shut swiftly, snatching back the light. Janeway heard Chakotay moving, down on his hands and knees, crawling carefully towards the offering, searching for it in the space left against their retina as a memory of light.

"Captain," he said, his voice hoarse. "There is a container here…"

She could smell the scent of water as he scraped open the lid, and had she been anyone else she may have wept at the relief of it. Absolute silence followed. In the darkness, he could have been doing anything. She thought, for a single wild, insane, impossible second, that he was no longer there at all.

"Chakotay?"

"Just making sure it is water, Captain."

It was. They drank, trying not to be greedy, trying to ration what they took.

Their memories had returned – not lost, as first feared, but merely mired in the pain of concussion. Slowly, they had both recovered, and as their pain had receded, comprehension had rushed back in to fill the void. Not that it did either of them much good: they recalled Voyager's stop at a trading colony, but little more than that. There had been no sense of foreboding, no veiled warnings of the trouble to come.

Perhaps, Janeway mused, that should have been warning enough.

When the thoughts would not leave her alone, when they were too tired to talk or sleep, she paced. Back and forth from her bunk to the wall, over and over as if the space were longer than the five paces it took her to cross it.

"Kathryn." His voice would rise around her, a susurration in the darkness that was far more eloquent than the scant shape of her name itself.

And so she would stop awhile. She'd sit on her bunk, hands gripping at the metal edge, imagining how her knuckles would have turned white with the pressure if she could see them. She tried to devise new methods of escape, though there was only the door and that had proven to be impenetrable despite their best efforts and a hatch through which was pushed, at irregular intervals, their food and water.

There was really only one reason to be thankful of the dark. It preserved the last of their dignity: there was no latrine and therefore they were forced to improvise. She turned her bed on its side, pushing the metal bunk against the wall so that its legs were braced against the floor at an angle, forming a 'V', which would have to do.

He would not allow her to sleep on the floor, and she refused to deprive him of his bunk. The solution was to take shifts. One would sleep, squashed against the wall to make room for the other to sit on the space that was left.

She sat next to him while he slept on his side, his thighs pressing against the small of her back. She calmed herself by listening to his breathing. She passed the time by inhaling and exhaling in synchrony, until they were breathing as one.

[TBC]

** (Whispers: I have to say that or she'll break my legs.)