A/N: Thanks, as always, to the very wonderful MissyHissy3, for betaing. Thanks to everyone who's left a review, too, I really appreciate them!

Chapter Four

Kathryn woke to the sensation of movement. She stretched out a hand, feeling for him, expecting to find Chakotay seated where he had been when she'd lain down to sleep – his back to her on the edge of the bunk, level with her hip. He wasn't there.

She sat up quickly, fresh anxiety flooding her gut like a tidal wave. "Chakotay?"

"It's all right." His voice was somewhere in front of her, against the door of their cell. "I'm here."

Presently she heard the faint scrape of something against stone, and then his footsteps moved toward her. He almost walked straight into her and she touched his leg to let him know where she was before scooting along so that he could sit beside her.

"The hatch?" she asked, wondering what he'd been doing. When he didn't answer, she prompted, "Chakotay?"

"They've given us water," he said. "But there's no food."

"Oh." Janeway frowned, trying to ignore the hunger pangs she'd woken with. The amount of food they had been given had dwindled over the past few deliveries, but this was the first time they'd been given nothing at all. "Well. They seem to vary the times they bring us supplies. Perhaps this is… simply another example of their inconsistency. At least we have water."

Her first officer said nothing in reply, but she felt him shift, the noise of something rustling rising faintly in the darkness. A moment later, she felt his hand brush against her knee before moving to her thigh and resting there. "Captain, give me your hand."

She reached down, their fingers connecting. Chakotay grasped her hand and turned it over, using his other to deposit something in her palm. It felt like part of a slice of the dry, yeastless bread that had been a staple of their diet in captivity.

"I thought you said…"

"An old Maquis habit," he said. "Always save half of what you have until the next meal comes along. Just in case."

She broke the meagre bread in half. Chakotay had taken his hand from her thigh, but she reached for it again, connecting with his back, moving to his shoulder and down until she found it. This had become the norm for them, a light, unobtrusive touch that served as a substitute for sight. It was a gradual language, evolving its own silent vocabulary out of necessity and reassurance in a quest to say, simply, you are not alone.

"No, you eat it, Captain," Chakotay said, as she tried to give him some of the bread back.

"I can't take all of it. You've got to eat."

"There's more of me than there is of you," he said. "I can afford to lose a few more pounds. I doubt they're intending to starve us. I can wait."

"Please, Chakotay."

Eventually he relented, accepting the bread. They each ate slowly, making the bread's stale taste last long in their mouths.

"Are you tired?" she asked, some time later. "Do you want to sleep?"

"Not at the moment."

Kathryn sighed. She had dreamed of an open meadow in spring, vibrant with leaf and flower. It returned to her now, not in images but in the fleeting sense of open air, so that reality seemed doubly oppressive. The dark silence rose up, threatening to choke her, and she fought to swallow back the sensation.

"How long do you think we've been here, Chakotay?" she asked. "A week? A month? A day?"

"I don't know. More than a week, I'm certain. Less than a month – possibly."

"I keep thinking of Voyager," she admitted. "Part of me hopes they're still looking for us. But another part…"

"I know."

"They can't look for us forever. They have to carry on."

"Tuvok will know that."

"Yes," Janeway said, dryly, "but what about the rest of the crew? Remember last time…"

Chakotay chuckled, a deep, throaty sound that made her smile. "Actually," he said, "I've been trying not to."

Surprise made her turn toward him as if she'd be able to see his face. "What do you mean?"

She could imagine his shrug as he said, with amusement, "I'm not sure what to think of the cosmic irony that we were rescued from paradise only to end up here a few years later."

"Well, yes," she conceded. "I suppose there is that." And then, a few minutes later, "Is that really how you saw it? Paradise?"

Chakotay said nothing for a while. "It was a beautiful place, Kathryn. I'm not saying that I would have chosen to be there if not for the circumstances, but recent experience has demonstrated that there are far worse places to end up."

Kathryn lifted a hand to push her hair behind her ears. It was greasy, filthy with the unavoidable dirt that lurked around them so that it hung in lank strands that grew increasingly matted no matter how many times she tried to comb it out with her fingers. "Can't argue with that," she muttered. "What I wouldn't give to beam that bathtub of yours in here right now."

His quiet laughter filled the room with a light she couldn't see. "It wouldn't fit," he pointed out. "I'd be forced into a corner so tight I'd asphyxiate. Just so you could enjoy a nice relaxing bath."

She had a feeling that the solution to this theoretical problem occurred to both of them at the same time, because there followed a sudden, awkward silence. Into it cut a vivid slice of memory that Kathryn had spent years successfully suppressing. It was a glimpse of his face in darkness, slightly illuminated by the faint yellow light from their shelter, his eyes downcast to her naked shoulder.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

"Do you ever think," he asked, softly, "of how things would have turned out if you hadn't been trapped by the array? How your life would have panned out if Voyager's mission had gone exactly to plan?"

"Sometimes," she admitted.

"Where would you have been now?" he asked. "Still commanding Voyager?"

She considered the question. "Probably not, actually."

"Oh?"

"Voyager was always intended to be a vessel of exploration – cutting edge, too, when I first took her out. Starfleet might not have sanctioned a journey quite as long as the one as we ended up on straight away, but sooner or later she'd have been given a long-term mission."

"You wouldn't have wanted that command?"

"It wouldn't have been a decision I could have taken alone. If Voyager had returned as scheduled, Mark and I would have married six months later, as we'd planned."

Chakotay shifted slightly. "He… wouldn't have wanted to join you?"

"I don't think, if he was really honest, that he would have wanted us to embark on something like a three-year mission, no. He had his own commitments that were based firmly on Earth, after all – he wouldn't have wanted to abandon them and I certainly wouldn't have forced him."

"So what would you have done?"

"Taken a command that meant staying closer to Earth. There are plenty of them."

Chakotay sighed.

"What?"

"I just can't imagine it."

"You can't imagine what?"

"You… Not being Captain Janeway of the Starship Voyager."

"It's all you've ever known me as, that's why."

"Not quite all," he observed, quietly.

"What about you?" she asked. "Where would you have been, if the Val Jean hadn't been caught by the array?"

There was a pause. "Dead, probably. With the rest of the Maquis."

Her gut clenched. "I'm sorry. That was thoughtless in the extreme."

"It's all right."

"It's not."

He laughed slightly, though there was no humour in the sound this time. "No. I suppose it's not. I dream about them, sometimes. What it must have been like. How they must have fought. How I wasn't there to fight with them."

"I'm so sorry, Chakotay."

"Not your fault."

She puffed out a breath, leaning back against the cold brick. "You know, during those first few weeks in the Delta Quadrant, I used to have dreams that I'd found a way to change our history. One where we caught you before you even entered the badlands. One where the array sent us back where we came from. Over and over, every night, slight variations, all with the same result – that we were home in the Alpha Quadrant."

"I think we probably all had similar dreams in those early days."

"But however desperate I was to wake up and find that one of them had become reality… I'm so glad that I never did."

"You wouldn't change what happened?" he asked. "Even now? Despite everything?"

She swallowed, words she couldn't possibly say catching on the lump in her throat. If it meant never knowing you? If it meant sending you – and B'Elanna and all those other Maquis I have come to know and love - to certain death versus the chance that you and I might still survive this place? "I don't think I could. Would you?"

He found her hand in the darkness, his thumb tracing up and down hers. "No," he said. "I don't think I could either."

[TBC]