The Opportunity to Be Fully Human

Disclaimer: Star Trek Voyager, its characters, etc. belong to Paramount.

Chapter 3

The turbolift ride to the bridge seemed at once to take forever and no time at all. When the door whooshed open, she found herself stepping forward into the familiar environs of the bridge, seeing the faces of her crew and basking in their smiles as they noticed her arrival.

"Captain on the bridge," Harry announced, standing erect at his post with a quite un-Starfleet grin plastered across his shining face. The bridge crew rose in unison and stood at attention as she made her way towards the command chairs. She met them with a gracious half-smile and a nod, swallowing through the sudden tightness in her throat. As she walked, she held each of their gazes in turn, touching a shoulder, patting a hand. They were her crew, her family. She continued on until she reached her first officer who was already ensconced in his seat, studying data on the console between their chairs.

"Good morning, Commander. It's good to see you." She couldn't stop the warmth from flooding her voice, the unrestrained smile from overtaking her lips, her joy at seeing him trickling over her usual command distance. They hadn't spoken for three days, not since that night in Sickbay, and she had missed him with everything in her. She needed to make everything right. She needed to tell him how she felt. How much she felt.

Heck, what she really needed was him.

But his next actions told her that he certainly didn't need her.

"Captain." Chakotay's voice was cold, and his gaze didn't as much as flicker in her direction. She might as well have been invisible. Actually, she would have preferred that—it was better than being deliberately and publicly almost-ignored. She felt her heart plummet through her stomach and down to her toes. He was still angry with her. He hadn't gotten over it, he hadn't worked through it.

Kathryn felt herself draw inward, felt her lungs squeezing until there was hardly breath left to sustain her. She truly had thought that things would be all right once she was back on duty. Chakotay had been her constant companion for years, and she thought she knew him. He had never—never—hesitated to forgive her, to take her back into his life and into his heart. No matter what hurt she had caused between them.

What was different this time?

I hate you for doing this to me, Kathryn.

She winced at those haunting words, replayed in her head more times than she cared to count in the past three days. He was different this time. Something inside of him had been broken, his unrelenting bond to her had been snapped. Usually it was him that was left picking up the pieces of her anger. This time it was her holding the other end of the line.

She didn't know if she was strong enough to hold on without him by her side.

Stop it, Kathryn. You're in the middle of the bridge. You can't fall apart.

She drew in a very deep, very long, very difficult breath and straightened her back, tilting her chin into its defiant stance and pulling her command cloak around her. She was hiding once again, knowing that she would have to forgive herself for already breaking her vow. But at this moment, there was no other way.

"Do you have anything new to report regarding repairs to the ship, Commander?" she snapped, letting her authoritative tone speak for itself. He could ignore her personally, but he would respond to her as the captain of this vessel.

To her relief, he replied immediately. She was loathe to initiate conflict between the two of them in front of the bridge crew and was relieved that he was maintaining some type of professional courtesy.

The next forty-five minutes lingered in what could only be described as a perpetual tide of slow-motion. She fought the urge to ask Ensign Kim about ten thousand times if there was something wrong with the ship's internal chronometer. She stared at the vast empty viewscreen hopefully, straining her eyes to find some hidden nebula, spatial anomaly or even a hostile alien ship that was eluding the sensors. She crossed and uncrossed her legs until her thigh muscles began to ache and then did the same with her arms.

Just as she was about to admit defeat and retreat to her Ready Room without the repair updates, Ensign Kim's console beeped, and she sighed in relief, much louder than she'd anticipated in the very careful quiet of the bridge. With lightning fingers, she downloaded the reports into a PADD.

"You have the bridge, Commander." She didn't look back to notice if he had acknowledged her words.

In the seclusion of her Ready Room, Kathryn Janeway sat down at her desk, typed in a few commands onto the PADD, and then attempted to read the updates. But the words swam before her eyes, and suddenly she no longer cared what they said so she gave up, laid her head down in her arms, and cried.

**********

The door to the Ready Room chimed, and Kathryn answered it without thinking, engrossed in the console before her as she mulled over prioritizing the remaining repairs to the ship while taking into account their depleted energy stores. The encounter with the Borg vessels had not been kind to Voyager, and she had been left in a weakened and somewhat vulnerable state. A shadow fell across her desk, and she glanced up, startled. Then she quickly turned her attention back to the console when she realized it was Chakotay. She mentally kicked herself and considered doing it literally. Although the deluge had stopped much earlier in the day, she had been unable to stifle the occasional tears that slipped down her cheeks even when her mind was a million miles away from thinking about him. She had eventually just given up and kept a tissue close by to wipe them away when they got bad enough to drip onto her desk.

And now here he was. And here she was, as vulnerable and weakened as Voyager. She knew he had seen her tears.

Brace for impact. Here comes another blow.

"What is it, Commander?" she bit out, gathering every ounce of command tone into her voice.

Chakotay's response was brusque. "Ensign Vorik just delivered this to me. We may have a serious problem with the warp core." He handed her the PADD which she quickly perused, shaking her head.

"Is there anything else, Commander?" She hoped there wasn't.

He hesitated for just a fraction of a second. Or had she imagined it? Their eyes met, briefly, intensely, then he spun on his heel and left.

And then she answered her own question. Yes, there was something else. There was definitely something else.

I love you.

I need you.

I don't know how to live without you.

But I don't know how to live with you like this.

And then the simplest something of all.

Please forgive me.

And for the second time that day, Kathryn Janeway buried her face in her hands and gave in to her aching heart.