Chapter Three

A/N: Thanks for MissyHissy3 for betaing this, and for her suggestions, which have been brilliant (of course).

He meditated, though it was a solace he sought only sparsely and usually only when he could be sure that Janeway was asleep. Chakotay was all too aware that in taking himself out to that place at the bare edges of his consciousness, he was leaving her behind. Leaving her alone, in their pitch black, inescapable, stinking cell. He had tried to help her meditate too, so that her own spirit guide might ease her anxiety, but without success.

"I can't, Chakotay," she said, as their latest – last – attempt failed. Her voice broke roughly against the close walls of their prison as she moved abruptly away, her presence receding in the dark. "I just… can't."

He reached out to find her hand, working his way up her arm until he gripped her shoulder with a pressure calculated to offer comfort. He understood. This was a ritual he had known since childhood, and yet there had been a long period when he himself had been unable to settle into its rhythms. Yes, Chakotay understood perfectly the tumult of an unquiet spirit.

She's losing weight, he thought to himself as his hand slipped away, an imaginary imprint of the hard press of her bony clavicle against his fingers. But then, so am I.

They played word games. They told stories – conjuring imaginary sights to compensate for what they lacked in reality. Janeway started it in a move that surprised him, not so much for the request itself, but for what it alluded to.

'Tell me a story, Commander – I seem to remember you're good at that."

He let a pause develop for a moment. "A story, Captain?"

"Yes," she said, and the sudden hesitance in her voice had made him wish for enough light to see her expression. "Please, Chakotay. Tell me a story of your people. There must be real ones."

So he did. He spun a yarn about the first winter, an allegory for the promise of renewal that lay beneath even the most frozen of ground. When he'd finished, she stayed silent so long that he wondered if she'd gone to sleep. Her voice, when it filtered to him through the heavy dark, was quiet.

"You have such a talent for that," she said, and he thought there was a tremor there, though he'd deliberately picked a tale with a positive bent. "I thought perhaps my memory had cheated, but…"

"But?"

Chakotay waited for her to elaborate, but instead she blew out a sharp breath of air and made a sound that he thought was her hand slapping her thigh. "Well now, I guess it's my turn, Commander, if fair's fair."

He let the reference drift back into the valley of years it had come from and closed his eyes, leaning back against the cold wall and shutting out everything but the rasp of her familiar voice.

Later – much later, once they had run out of happy fairytales to tell each other, they resorted to the truth.

"Have you ever been in this kind of situation before?" she asked.

They were sitting side by side on the one remaining bunk. To Chakotay it felt as if they'd been talking for days. He had tried to keep track of the hours, but to no avail. The time faded into the darkness, along with everything else.

He tried to picture Janeway's face as he formulated a reply. He hadn't spoken of this for a long, long time. "You mean imprisoned like this? Yes."

"Tell me about it."

"I don't think…"

She moved beside him. He felt her arm press against his. "Please. Unless – is it too difficult for you to talk about?"

Chakotay shook his head, though she couldn't see it. "It was a long time ago." He thought for another moment, working out where best to begin. "I don't know how much of my background was in the file that Starfleet gave you about me, but The Val Jean wasn't the first Maquis ship I served on. They didn't give me a command straight away – given my Starfleet background, I had to earn their trust. My first assignment was on a weaponised cargo ship called the Star of Phoebus."

"A weaponised cargo ship?" Janeway asked. "How did they manage that?"

"Badly," he admitted. "It was a bucket of bolts as it was and the additions didn't help. We had to operate the weapons separately from the rest of the ship's systems as they refused to integrate. In any case, they were forever failing. Technically we were only supposed to be running medicines to the colonies, but on our first trip out we received a distress call from an unidentified ship that seemed to be adrift not far off our course."

"Let me guess," Janeway said, dryly. "Ambush?"

"Ambush," Chakotay confirmed. "We didn't stand a chance. I was one of five they took captive. For interrogation."

He felt a tremor pass to him from her arm, and remembered that she, too, was no stranger to Cardassian interrogation methods. Perhaps it should be a comfort to him that she could truly sympathise with his memories, but instead the idea of her trapped in a place like the one he'd been in sickened him into silence.

"How long?" she prompted, after a moment.

"Three weeks."

"How did you get out?"

Chakotay raised his legs, pulling his feet up to the edge of the bunk and resting his elbows on his bent knees. The action pressed his hip against Janeway's thigh, but he didn't move away. The memory of those three lost weeks was a blur of pain that he'd always chosen to deal with alone. Here, in the dark, he was grateful of the chance to remind himself of her presence, as unseen as it was.

"They… went too far. Or at least, they thought they had. If they'd carried on for much longer, they probably would have killed me. As it was, they thought I was dead and dumped me with the rest of the trash. Luckily for me, their disposal methods were running slow." Chakotay failed to keep the bitterness from his voice as he added, "I guess they'd killed just a few too many Maquis in that particular facility that week. Too many to keep proper track of."

Janeway moved again, pressing closer. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "You don't have to tell me this. I didn't mean to-"

"No, it's all right," he told her. "Anyway, I came around before I ended up in the incinerator. I'd lost a lot of blood and was very weak. I hid for three nights. On the fourth there was a Maquis raid on the facility – a team, trying to get us out. I was the only survivor. That was considered a success, mainly because I hadn't told the Cardassians a thing. When they'd stitched me up and I'd recovered enough, they offered me a ship."

"The Val Jean?"

"The Val Jean. And let's just say that my hate of the Cardassians hadn't diminished during our little chats."

Janeway expelled a long breath. "Three weeks and you didn't break?"

Chakotay smiled into the darkness. "I would have. Eventually. Everyone does."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry that you've ended up here, Chakotay, in this place. I'm sorry that you're having to go through this again."

"It's not the same," Chakotay told her.

"No," she agreed. "No interrogation, at least."

"There's that," said Chakotay. "And I'm not alone."

[TBC]