REFLEX ATTRACTION
by ardavenport
- - - Part 3
Janeway stared at him and then looked down at her plate, this time to hide her flush of excitement. Chakotay had obviously strayed from the script. From the direction of Chakotay's glance, she guessed that Senoebi had kicked him under the table.
Why?
"Well, it's time to continue." Senoebi laid his napkin down and got up. The doctor and Chakotay dragged the table back to the doctor's corner, leaving Senoebi facing Janeway from the center of the room, under the lights. He stepped toward her, his face pleasant, and drew her out of her chair as if inviting her out to a dance floor.
Janeway barely remembered this from when Senoebi first came into room, but now she watched every movement. The healer was as composed as when he'd entered. She looked back at his face, trying for her own pretense of composure.
He positioned her in the center of the room and then he drew Chakotay toward to her and placed them in exactly the same position as they'd been in before lunch. She only had a brief impression of his tattooed face and dark hair, but it seemed as if his expression was worried, unhappy. Then Senoebi wordlessly went back to his chair and sat down next to the doctor.
Janeway let her shoulders drop, her face resting at his shoulder, her body next to his, but she was past the point of embarrassment now. She kept her expression neutral as she stared off to the side, toward the doctor's corner of the room.
Chakotay didn't move, but the rise and fall of his chest were familiar to her, Human. She noticed that they tended to synchronize their breathing. They stood alone in the center of the plain, stripped Sickbay ward. She turned her head so that she faced away from the doctor and Senoebi.
"Chakotay," she said very quietly, hopefully low enough so that Senoebi would not hear everything. "Why are we still standing here?" Perhaps he would give her more information than the evasive healer.
There was a long pause. She could feel him inhale.
"Because you need help."
He'd spoken low, as she had, as if he didn't want Senoebi or the doctor to overhear then either. She felt a twinge of real hope that he might tell her what she needed to do to get out of this whole ritual. The doctor and Senoebi were merely trying to fix a problem. Chakotay cared.
"How am I supposed to need help?"
"Senoebi's joining affected you more than you realize."
Joining. That was what Senoebi had called it. But she had not named it in her own mind until now. Senoebi's flurry of explanation on the damaged space station had hardly prepared her for it. But even if she'd known exactly what it was beforehand, she would have accepted it just the same. To save Chakotay's life.
She made her own change to Senoebi's planned therapy and put her arms around Chakotay and hugged him. Despair welled up in her from the thought of him dying a useless, accidental death, on an alien space station, just out of reach of medical help. She hugged him tighter, but the hopelessness increased. She heard a noise, from the doctor's corner of the room.
Janeway felt Chakotay's hands caress her back, moving into a real embrace and not Senoebi's sterile stance.
"I know you can get through this, Kathryn," she heard him say very softly.
Her thoughts and fears melted and she sighed. Her body relaxed though she kept her arms around him. Her thoughts unraveled as if a huge knot came undone in her mind. The tension left her. She let it go and stared off toward Chakotay's empty chair in his corner of the room.
After a time a figure moved in front of her. Senoebi. She noticed his body, his presence standing right in front of her, blocking her view of the empty corner. Senoebi spoke, his hands moving. The doctor spoke.
Words floated past her in disjointed segments . . .
Senoebi: . . . don't move . . .
Senoebi: . . . you cannot give her any support, Commander . . .
A couple of Senoebi's hands waved in front of her.
Doctor: . . . another fine mess you've got . . .
Chakotay: . . . I'm sorry, I . . .
Senoebi: . . . not undone, but this can easily be the be . . .
Chakotay moved just a tiny bit, barely a shift of position, but she felt it and tightened her arms around Chakotay's middle, wanting to get closer.
Senoebi: . . . don't move . . .
Doctor: . . . physical response to . . .
Senoebi: . . . know your species was so . . . I can . . .
. . . the rest of it washed past her with no meaning. After a time Senoebi left and her view was empty again. She daydreamed without thought, close and content.
Her arms circled him at the waist, firm, but a little rounded with middle years. But not soft. He didn't move anymore.
Her head resting against his shoulder, she saw his rank insignia at the collar of his gray uniform shirt. His black body suit was open a bit at the neck, just below the red material at his shoulders. The details surprised her. She had been looking at them the whole time, but . . .
Janeway started. Her feet were beginning to hurt again. She looked around her with just her eyes, without moving her head. Nothing had moved in . . . . she did not know how long. Again. She felt a twinge of anxiety. But not panic this time.
The whole front of her body felt sweaty and soiled, but she kept still. His uniform smelled like both of them. They'd been standing there for much too long, but she did not move from her embrace. Her thoughts unfolded on their own . . .
The involuntary flush, the body warmth, the trance, it was all gone. She was just standing under the lights of a gray, empty room in Sickbay with her arms around her first officer.
She gave him a little squeeze. He didn't move. His hands were again placed, palms flat at a neutral point at the middle of her back. Thank you, Chakotay, for being here, she thought silently. If her feet were hurting, then she knew his probably were, too.
Captain Janeway lifted her head and looked up at him. There was just a flicker of surprise in his dark brown eyes before he stifled it. Her eyes went to the doctor's table and the two there were both openly watching her.
She took her arms away from the commander's middle and stepped back from him. His arms fell away from her. She turned and went to her chair in the room. Commander Chakotay stood alone under the bright lights in the center of the room. He let his arms fall back to his sides. Janeway could see from his expression and the quick glances toward the doctor's corner of the room that he did not know what came next in the script.
That was what they wanted all along.
Janeway closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair.
I'm just going to leave. I'm going to rest here for a minute and then I'm going to get up and go to my quarters and take a long, hot bath. If they want to stop me, they'll have to tell me what else they expect me to do.
They started to move about, but Janeway didn't feel like reacting to whatever they were doing. She did sit up and look when she heard the door open.
She saw the backs of the doctor and Chakotay leaving. The door closed behind them. Senoebi also watched them leave and then he picked up his chair and brought it over to her. He took off his dark coat, pulling each of his four arms out of the sleeves and hung it over the back of his chair.
He sat directly in front of her, the room's door and central overhead light behind him. The light shone through the thin bit of hair on his head. He sat with his lower pair of hands in his lap and the upper pair resting at the inside elbows of the forward pair of arms.
Janeway pressed her lips together, the sudden privacy now intimidating. She looked back at him. She felt a bit intimidated, but refused to show it. At least she hoped it didn't show. Presumably, he was not going to read her thought without her permission. She sat up straight, hands on the chair's armrests. And she waited for him to start.
He didn't. He sat with what she though was a practiced enigmatic smile on his pleasant, and greenish face.
"I can't see that I have anything more to do in this," she began after she got tired of looking at him.
"No, the physical aspects have been completed."
Captain Janeway looked back at him, waiting for him to continue, but he didn't. Was he going to force her to pry every bit of information from him?
"Just what is that supposed to mean?" she demanded.
"You have acknowledged all the physical revelations of the joining, but none of the personal ones. You haven't spoken about it."
"I'm not the only one who needs to speak about it." She leaned forward. "Just what did you do to me? What did you do to Commander Chakotay?"
"Commander Chakotay was quite oblivious to and unaffected by your condition at the time, but I did explain the situation to him last night with the doctor."
Janeway sighed, exasperated. "That is not what I asked."
"But you did want to know it."
"All right." She nodded. "But you haven't told me what happened."
"You know what happened. You were there."
Janeway looked up at the ceiling. "I don't know what you did."
"Yes, you do." She looked back at him. "You know everything that I do. It was a shared experience. Thought to thought. Body to body."
"Why did you do it?" she challenged him. "You had my cooperation in it. You didn't need to . . . violate me."
"I needed to be quick. Your physical reflex when I entered your mind was a sexual one. It was much simpler and faster for me to use your pleasure reflex to examine you and make you my tool." He gestured with his upper arms. "I did speak with Lieutenant Tuvok and he confirmed that this is your usual reaction."
"Tuvok talked with you about it?" she asked, shocked.
"No, he didn't do anything more than confirm it. For a telepath, he has an extraordinarily guarded mind. He demanded his own examination of me before he would agree to this."
"He is my security officer."
"Why did you ask me why I violated you? You don't feel violated. You've experienced both telepathy and sex. You don't shrink from either. And I know that you accept the necessity of the situation."
Janeway got up to stare down at him.
"Both telepathy and sex are considered private among my people." She paced around his chair. Senoebi stood up as well, destroying her height advantage.
"You were quite willing to sacrifice your privacy to preserve life. I haven't seen that you've changed on that."
Janeway continued to pace and Senoebi turned, following her motion. "All right," she conceded, holding up her hands. "Yes, given the same circumstances, I'd do it again. But it didn't stop after Chakotay was out of danger."
"I did warn you - - "
"You didn't warn me about that!" She stopped and stared back at him. "You didn't expect it to go that far, did you?" she realized out loud. Senoebi gestured with his lower hands, his face all innocence.
"I had no idea that your species was so susceptible to your own appetites . . . and addictions. You must have a terrible problem with it."
"We compensate for it." They faced each other in the center of the room, discarded chairs around them. Senoebi raised his upper set of hands and stepped toward her.
"I knew that there was a serious problem as soon as I initiated the joining, but it was too late for me to do anything about it then."
"You might have said something to me, communicated something about it then. You were inside my head."
"To establish the kind of control I needed, I shut down all of your higher thought processes. You wouldn't have listened." He stopped in front of her. "I was quite busy with the emergency after dealing with you and your commander. I left inquiries about you with some of your ship's personnel when I saw them among the rescuers, but the first intimation I had about any problems were from the doctor, when he contacted me and told me that you were acting strangely."
Janeway straightened and glared back at him. "I was not acting strangely."
"Excessive fidgeting, nervous movements, hormone levels three times higher than normal and the doctor said that you were stuttering."
"I was not!" she denied.
"I wasn't here to see it, but I trust the observations of Mister Tuvok and your doctor. I heard your doctor's assistant saying that your actions might have been normal if, 'you drank fifty cups of coffee and an aphrodisiac,' Senoebi quoted. "I did try the coffee; it was very good." He smiled pleasantly back at her, both sets of hands folded before him.
Paris, Janeway thought. It had to be Tom Paris. The helmsman wasn't even the doctor's full-time assistant, but he was in Sickbay. She remembered him hovering over Commander Chakotay when she woke up in Sickbay but she had left as quickly as possible, so she didn't know what he'd seen, or thought he'd seen. And Senoebi hadn't been on the ship then. When had he arrived? She had not approved him coming aboard.
It had to have been Chakotay. He could have authorized Senoebi coming aboard without her. If she were incapacitated. Janeway frowned unhappily and looked about her at the barren room and the discards of this session. Had she been acting that strangely? She remembered people looking quickly away from her in the corridors and on the bridge. And Torres had seemed nervous when she'd spoken to her chief engineer about the assistance Voyager was giving to the damaged space station.
- - - End Part 3