A/N: As always, thanks much to MissyHissy3 for making time to beta so quickly for me.

Chapter Five

The light, when it came, was brutal. It scythed through the open door like a blade, slicing into the darkness with palpable force. They'd had no warning it was coming until the scrape of metal had alerted them – greater than the small movement of the hatch that brought their food, it brought Janeway and Chakotay to their feet.

Instantly, the light reduced any attempt at preparedness they may have made to a struggle to cover their eyes. After so much time in the absolute dark, it blinded as surely as the lack of it had just moments earlier.

Chakotay raised his arm to cover his face, trying to shield himself from the onslaught. The next seconds were confused, fractured. There was noise – not Janeway, from whom he'd heard a stifled cry as the light had assaulted them, but something else. Footsteps, a flurry of them, moving too fast to separate into beings, assuming what was coming at them was bipedal. Then something grabbed at him, grasping both arms and dragging him forwards. The motion pulled his arm away from his eyes and he was forced to squeeze them shut: inadequate protection against the onslaught. He struggled, flailing, wanting to punch but unable to see and aware that somewhere beside or behind him the Captain was in close proximity.

His weight wasn't what it had once been, and weeks of enforced inactivity had weakened him beyond the lack of nutrition, but Chakotay knew how to use what he had. He made himself a dead weight, throwing his centre of gravity low. To move him they'd have to put themselves off balance, which would give him an advantage…

"Chakotay!" Janeway's gasped shout shocked him as he realised she was in front of him and so must already be outside their prison. There came the sounds of a scuffle and he knew she was fighting. Then came the sound of a thump and she cried out, incoherent this time – nothing but a sound of pain, followed by her silence.

"Captain!" He lurched forward, following the sound of her voice, fighting his captors, struggling to open his eyes against the light in an attempt to force them to adjust. It was impossible - he was as blind out of their cell as he had been inside it. "Captain!"

Against the footsteps that forced him ever forwards he heard a faint groan that may have been her. Chakotay opened his eyes again, and again, and then again. Shapes began to coalesce in the dense white of his vision, shadows moving with confusing speed around him. He fought to distinguish Janeway among the fray, but could not.

Whoever was gripping his arms changed direction, forcing him to turn right so quickly he stumbled and almost fell. The light changed - it dimmed, though not by much. The hands on him did not let go.

"Who are you?" he demanded, "What do you want?"

There was no answer. Instead, something tugged at the filthy jacket of his uniform, and then came the sound of tearing. He struggled again, pushing against the hands that held him, trying to get away, but the tearing continued as he was forcefully divested of his jacket.

"What are you doing? What…" His sight was coming back now, gradually, helped by the dimmer nature of this light. He had the sense of another four walls, white this time, delineating a large space. The figures around him were still blurred – two either side of him, holding him still as a third stripped him of his clothing.

They started on his rollneck, ripping and tearing the fabric, the cold air rushing across his now-naked skin.

"Stop it," he heard a cry from a mass of dull movement on the other side of the room, recognising her voice immediately. "Stop –"

"Captain?"

"Chakotay!"

He could hear tearing and knew they were stripping her, too, even as his own uniform pants became nothing more than scraps of fabric, split and torn asunder as they were removed from his body. Then they took his undergarments, so that he stood there, shivering, naked and exposed.

His sight was still blurred, but he was no longer completely blind. Chakotay wrenched himself out of the grasp that enveloped his right arm and swung at the unclear face of the being that held his left. The punch was off keel and by no means his best, but it slammed into something hard enough to evince a noise of pain that sounded distinctly human. The being he'd hit stumbled back.

"Let her go," he said, taking advantage of the slight freedom of movement to lunge backwards, attempting to put his second captor off guard enough to land another punch. "Let her–"

The blow landed square against his unprotected ribs, hard enough to drop him to his knees, gasping for breath. He crouched, kneeling, forehead to the cold, hard floor, trying to recover. As he did he heard more movement around him, the sound of feet moving away, followed by the scrape of metal against metal and the bang of a door.

Silence.

"Chakotay?" Her voice bounced like a faint echo across the cavern of white. "Chakotay – I can't see you. Are you there? Are you all right?"

Chakotay pushed himself up and looked across the room towards an indistinct figure that he assumed was Janeway. He crawled toward her across a hard, smooth surface to see that she had her back against the tiled wall, knees drawn to her chest with her forehead resting on them. She was shivering.

"I'm here," he said, hoarsely. "Captain, are you all right?"

Kathryn lifted her face. This close his sight had returned enough for him to see that her eyes were closed. Her eyelashes rested against cheekbones sharpened through lack of nutrition and streaked with grime, and there was a bruise on her forehead – a product, he assumed, of the scuffle he had heard as they'd been dragged from their cell.

"I still can't see," she said.

"Your eyes will adjust soon. It's dimmer here."

"Is there any sign of what we're doing here? Why they've… taken our uniforms?"

He looked around the room, which was square and featureless apart from what appeared to be drainage outlets in the floor. He looked up and saw two pipes, about three feet apart, opening into the room from the ceiling. A sick feeling gripped him, but he chose to keep his fears to himself. If they had any foundation, they'd find out soon enough, and if she couldn't see what he could then there was no point in telling her.

"Chakotay?"

"It just looks like another cell, Captain."

"No obvious way out?"

"Not unless you count the way we came in, which seems as impenetrable as the door in our other cell."

"Well, perhaps-"

The sound cut her off. A hissing, bubbling sound. Chakotay found himself reaching for her, finding Janeway's knee before he remembered she was as naked as he was.

"Chakotay? What is it?"

He looked up at the pipes in the ceiling, heart thumping against his aching ribcage. Then clear liquid began to cascade from the ceiling – a steady stream from each of the pipes.

"Is that – is that water?" Janeway asked, trying to open her eyes.

"Stay there," he told her, getting to his feet. He walked forward, the fluid lapping at his toes. It was faintly warm. He held out a hand into the stream, and then brought it to his mouth.

"Chakotay?"

"It's water, Captain. It's definitely water."

"But – why?" she asked, incredulous.

"I'd say they want us to shower."

Janeway found her way to her feet, one arm across her chest, one leg bent awkwardly in an effort to hide her nakedness. Her eyes were open, but she was blinking frequently, evidently still trying to focus. Chakotay moved to her, eyes on her face though it hadn't taken much of a glance to note how her ribs were showing through the pale skin of her torso.

"This doesn't make any sense, Chakotay," she said with a frown that creased the dirt on her face. "Unless…"

He reached out and took her hand, pulling her gently toward the water. "There's a saying among my people, Captain. 'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth'."

Janeway's mouth quirked in a lop-sided smile. It was an expression Chakotay had recalled a thousand times during the dark days of their captivity, but none of his memories matched the reality of seeing it again.

"I have a feeling you may have misappropriated that particular saying, Commander, but even so…"

Smiling, he drew her to the water and she gasped slightly as it glanced off her shoulder. A second later she raised her face into it, lifting both her hands to sluice the grime away from her skin, the urge to be clean outweighing any embarrassment over her nakedness.

Chakotay stepped into the other stream, turning his back on her. He had the privacy of her lack of sight. It was only right that he should afford her the same.

[TBC]