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“You know,” the person who got Chakotay into all this trouble remarks casually, leaning against the wall just next to the forcefield, “in fifteenth-century Turkey a woman could actually divorce her husband if he didn’t provide her with required quantities of coffee, so…”
Oh, this is going to be good, he thinks, and opens his narrowed eyes a little wider to observe the guard’s reaction.
Predictably, the man is no more impressed with that little bit of trivia than he was with her passionate diatribe delivered moments ago. He doesn’t even look up from his PADD, ticking off on his fingers, “These are the twenty-three-hundreds, not the fourteen-hundreds. I am, thankfully, not married to you, or any other lunatic. And you should have probably considered your caffeine addiction before you proceeded to destroy public property.”
She puts her paint-covered hands on her hips, glaring. “From where I stand, I improved it.”
“You’re standing in a prison cell. Go figure.”
“So you’re not going to get me any coffee?”
“Leave it, kiddo. Sit down and wait for your attorney, or your parents. Then we’ll talk.”
“Now that’s a happy prospect,” she mutters, and kicks gently at the wall before coming to sit back down on the narrow cot across from his. She looks positively gloom, with whisps of red hair having come apart from a long braid, smudges of paint on her face and the corners of her—quite lovely, he can’t help noticing—mouth turned downwards.
Sighing, he rummages through his pocket and pulls one last protein micro-bar, laced with a generous helping of caffeine: he was supposed to eat it tonight while studying for the quantum mechanics exam, but since there’s no way he’s doing that now, it would better serve as a way to help someone through their withdrawal. “Here,” he says, and cannot help but smile at the way her eyes glint when she sees the candy. “Catch.”
She catches the bar mid-air, and flashes him a grateful grin. “Thanks. You’re the best, uh-huh—what’s your name again?”
He smirks, nodding off-handedly: his back hurts too much for him to move right now. “Chakotay.”
“Right. You’re Will’s friend.”
“More like a passing acquaintance,” his mouth quirks as he tries to swallow a snarl. She may have put him in all this trouble, but it simply wouldn’t do to badmouth her boyfriend right now. “He was in my Introduction to Anthropology class.”
She hums, making an I’m-in-more-trouble-than-I-thought face even as she munches happily on her candy. “I thought you were a third-year cadet, not a professor? Well,damn.”
“I am,” he reassures her, turning to his side to see her better. “I’m an assistant teacher for that one. Not in your curriculum?”
She shakes her head, red hair catching on bright-blue smudges. “Not really, sorry. I’m more interested in temporal variances, plasma phenomena, and quantum mechanics, the like…”
Chakotay raises an eyebrow, suddenly feeling a change in his mood. “You don’t say…”
–
The night drags on, but they don’t really notice the flow of time.
After she’d explained to him how to approach the problems he’d be facing on the exam, the conversation somehow turned to mutual friends, books and travels. The guard has vacated his spot long ago, probably having decided neither of them could cause any serious trouble and it was thus safe to grab a nap or a bite to eat. The paint-smeared graffitist is now sitting next to Chakotay, their thighs touching gently as she tells him yet another story of a prank she’d done to a fellow student, shaking her head at herself.
“Will’s clearly a bad influence on me,” she declares solemnly. “A mutual friend introduced us a while back, said she’d figured I would benefit from knowing someone who could break my nerdy bookworm habits. And now look where that got me. I could never do things halfway, it would seem.”
“So…” he stumbles, cursing his penchant for suffering, “have you been together long?”
She gapes at him, mouth hanging open, and bursts out laughing. “What—even—you thought Riker and I—“ She wipes at her eyes, leaving further smudges of paint on her cheeks, and shakes her head in amazement. “I’d have to tell him you’d said that: although it would probably go straight to his head, and we really don’t need his ego to get even more inflated, now do we?”
“So… you’re not together?” He knows he’s probably being pathetically dim, but this evening has left him thrown completely out of his element; when he’d left his dorm a few hours ago, he was hoping for a quiet work-out session at the gym and did not plan on joining a band of students in writing bitterly critical graffiti on said gym’s walls.
Not to mention getting arrested, and thrown into a cell with a tiny redhead, who seemed to be in charge of the whole band of ‘revolutionaries’, even more so than one Will Riker, him of the infamous reputation. He looks down at her, lips pursed as she watches him thoughtfully, and thinks she should look ridiculous, covered in paint and sweat like that—and yet, laughter is the farthest thing on his mind.
“No, we’re not,” she says, her voice dropping an octave and sending a shiver down his spine. “I’m not. With anyone. Just so you know.” She glances down at her hands and frowns, wiping them off on her shirt, utterly unsalvageable at this point. “I look a mess. Great.”
He reaches out and brushes a thumb across her cheekbone, taking some of the paint off and leaving a flush of red in its stead. “You look amazing. Like all the colors in the universe rolled into you.”
“A revolutionary and a poet?” she smirks and arches an eyebrow in challenge.
–
“Wow, what happened to you?” his roommate asks as Chakotay stumbles through the door many hours later. “Your face is all blue. Are you alright? Have you caught something?”
He grins in reply and crosses the room to the bathroom, eager to get a quick shower before grabbing an overnight bag and joining Kathryn—that’s her name, and it sits on top of his mind like a blessing—for a long overdue breakfast. “I sure hope I have.”
/end