A/N: Thanks, as always, to the very wonderful MissyHissy3 for her excellent betaing. And thanks to everyone who has reviewed, I really appreciate the kind words!

Chapter Eight

She woke first, momentarily disoriented – not by the lack of light but by the almost-forgotten sensation of being held. It was probably no more than a couple of hours since Kathryn had calmed her heart enough to shut her eyes and sleep – their imprisonment had consisted of frequent naps rather than any proper sleep cycles – and yet she felt the most rested she had in a long time. She was still tangled beneath the warm weight of her first officer's limbs. Chakotay, though relaxed in slumber, still held her as firmly as he had while awake. She could feel the steady thump of his heart and hear his measured breathing stirring above her head. Her face was so close to his neck that when she blinked, her eyelashes brushed against his skin.

After so many years of sleeping alone, it shocked her that she could feel so completely comfortable to be this enveloped by the physicality of someone else. Though that shock, it had to be said, paled into insignificance when she recalled afresh the touch of their lips, which should have simply given rise to a hurried apology, and instead had become a deliberate kiss.

The soft drift of his breath against her cheek. His lips, finding hers – seeking them, wanting them. The slow and absolute care of it. The feeling of-

She felt her heart rate tick up again. No. No. Think about something else.

Janeway couldn't extricate herself without waking him, and so she lay still and cycled her mind through the hypothesis she had developed. The Vorbrath. At the time of their truncated encounter, she'd been relieved that Voyager had managed to remove herself from further involvement with relative ease. It had meant doing nothing about a slave system that Janeway detested, and that had left her with considerable guilt – but in all practicality one lone Federation starship had little hope of changing the political traits of an entire species. The best they could do was thwart the Vorbrath's intent to weaponise further. Their arsenal had been confined to small arms and short-range ballistic missiles that had kept their region of space in check but had no hope of competing with Voyager's superior firepower.

That being the case, could the Vorbrath really have engineered what must have been a very sophisticated kidnap and extortion plot? Over the weeks of their incarceration, she and Chakotay had painstakingly pieced together where the moment of their capture must have occurred. Voyager had stopped off at a small planet on the far edge of a system of five planetoids, orbiting a weak sun. They hadn't intended to stop at all, but a small scout ship had dogged the ship's tail, begging attention. The race – the Do'rai – were friendly and open, curious about these visitors to their small patch of the universe. The crew had been invited to tour the Do'rai's various municipal installations.

The Do'rai had seemed as small and harmless as their homeworld, but they had strict protocols. If Janeway could not visit every place they wished to show off, then it had to be her closest subordinate. After some wrangling with Tuvok, a solution had been negotiated – two away teams, one led by the Captain, one by her first officer, the rest of the teams to be made up by security personnel and a single engineer. Tuvok remained aboard ship. The trips had passed off without incident, and the two teams had reconvened later that same evening, still on the planet, for a traditional Do'rai feast.

They both remembered eating and drinking. They both remembered looking forward to being back aboard their own ship, in their own beds. Neither of them remembered anything after that. Presumably something they'd ingested had been drugged, but as for how they were taken, nothing of their memories remained.

Kathryn realised that for her hypothesis to be correct – that they were back at Trianine 3, being held by the Vorbrath – relied on a considerable chain of assumptions. For one, that the Do'rai were in league with the Vorbrath, an alliance that would be, if she were honest with herself, highly unlikely. The Vorbrath were abrasive and unyielding, whereas the Do'rai she had met were uniformly the opposite. Secondly, such an alliance would mean that the Vorbrath would have had to leap-frog Voyager's trajectory, strike up a relationship with the Do'rai, and persuade them to launch an attack against a species clearly far in advance of their own, all in the space of the two-to-three weeks it had taken the Federation ship to travel from the orbit of Trianine 3 to the Do'rai's front door.

Another aspect of her theory that seemed highly unlikely.

Janeway let out a frustrated sigh. The breath washed against Chakotay's neck, and she felt him react – a tremor of movement vibrating through his body. His arms tightened around her, but he didn't wake. Her frustration became reflexive: God only knew what was happening to her ship and crew, while here she was, lying in the arms of her first officer, doing absolutely nothing. Although 'absolutely nothing' wasn't entirely true, was it? Or at least it hadn't been, two hours ago…

Janeway's mind returned to a piece of advice she had received in command school. Captaincy training was not only tactical, but behavioural, too. It took skill and discipline to manage the personnel of an entire starship, and as recruits rarely began their Starfleet careers with the single-minded idea of attaining that rank, there were habits of familiarity that had to be modified.

Before you do something, the simple advice had run, imagine how it would read in an official report.

Janeway had rarely, if ever, felt compelled to modify any report in her favour. She prided herself on her honesty to her superiors, and what that honesty meant for the trust the people under her command could place in her leadership. But if they ever got out of here… if she ever had the opportunity to sit at her ready room desk and write a report about this – well. That clean slate would effectively be broken in two, because she couldn't imagine any report in which she'd be comfortable admitting the breach of protocol that had led to her kissing her second in command.

So much care, in such a brief touch…

He wanted to kiss you, whispered a tiny voice in the back of her mind. Every bit as much as you wanted-

No.

No.

A sound echoed into the cell behind her – the hatch, opening swiftly and something being pushed inside. The noise woke Chakotay properly – Janeway felt him jerk awake and then freeze as he registered her close proximity.

"Kathryn?" he murmured, sleepily.

The sound of her name from his lips at that moment made her disentangle herself from his warm hold as swiftly as dignity would allow. "I think they've given us food," she said, cursing the unintentional edge of husk in her voice. She found her way to the tray that had been pushed into their prison, her bare toes instantly chilled by the cold floor. Janeway could hear him sitting up; the rasp of his hand rubbing over his unshaven face.

She returned to the bench and sat beside him, holding the tray. Tentatively she felt for what was on it – the familiar shape of a carafe that probably held water, and a plate of the flatbreads they had become used to. Janeway thought that was all, but as she moved her hand, her fingers connected with something else that was also lying on the tray.

It was cylindrical, about the span of her hand in length, widening at one end. Janeway picked it up, turning it around in both hands, trying to work out what it was.

"Captain?"

"There's something here. A… device of some kind, I think. I don't know-"

Her fingers brushed against a button, which depressed under her touch. Instantly, a halo of blue-white light bloomed against her chest.

A flashlight.

[TBC]