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“You don’t have to agree with everything.”
He turned back to her, where she remained a few steps away from him.
Engineering was quiet, but the smell of burning, the scorch marks blackening the floor around the warp core, the shattered lights and twisted metal, spoke to the attack they had suffered what felt like both a million years and simultaneously minutes ago. He had been thrown so hard against the con during a particularly violent blast, that he suspected his shoulder had suffered a serious injury but he’d yet to get it seen to because he couldn’t quite stomach the prospect of medical, with so many people injured and groaning and the thick, cloying smell of blood.
That was too unbearable, too much of a challenge to contend with when his emotions were already perilously close to the surface. There were lots of things he was able to ignore - he’d had to, in the Maquis. But blood was something he couldn’t abide. So instead of going to sickbay, he cradled it close to his chest, keeping as still as possible to avoid the burning pain.
He studied her face for a moment and it was an unusual mix of defiant and sheepish. He’d seen it very few times across the course of their friendship.
He felt an almost familial obligation to her, even in this moment. Part of it was that, at their very core, they were similar people. Similarly angry, similarly loathing of authority and longing for its approval.
Outsiders.
Clever, lonely, outsiders who’d found each other in a fetid, dangerous outpost in the Imtar sector and bonded over their losses, their shared expulsion from their dream. And now they were stuck here, at the end of the universe, forced back into the uniform, and it was both poetic and unfair.
“What did you say?”
She was not one to balk at a challenge, but he could see the regret passing over her face for a second, before it was scattered by rage.
“You heard me,” she said. “And you know exactly what I mean. “
“No,” he answered, in spite of the truth.
He was keen for a fight anyway, and he needed somewhere to channel the adrenaline of another near-miss. “Please, explain yourself.”
“She made a bad call today. She presses and presses and doesn’t back down. We are lucky we weren’t blown to bits. You should have intervened Chakotay.”
“Don’t question her decisions,” he answered, words beating out from between clenched jaws. “She is the captain. It’s my job to support her.”
He turned to go, happy to leave the conversation unfinished, unprepared to further explore the accusation being made. He didn’t want this when he was in pain, and exhausted, and fraught with the horror of the day. Worse than that, he didn’t want to have this conversation with B’Elanna because, more than anything, he couldn’t cope with her disapproval, her clear dislike of the woman and the system he’d pledged his crew’s allegiance to in the face of their death.
“You more than support her.”
The words made him stop dead, grind to a halt on the first step away from the core.
The silence was so profound, ringing with the truth of it, that it was impossible to ignore. He turned back.
“Watch your mouth B’Elanna.”
“It’s patently obvious to everyone, and you’re an astute man. You know it yourself.”
“I know what?”
He was daring her, daring her to say the thing he could not bear to hear, could not bear to acknowledge. The thing that kept him awake at night, that felt like a knife edge and breathing all at once.
It was drowning him.
B’Elanna looked him dead in the eye, unflinching.
“You’re in love with her.”
He felt a snarl that was also a grin, like it was possessing him, curling his mouth against his will, while his brain screamed at him not to give himself away, not to speak the words that lived on the tip of his tongue.
Yes, I am. He wanted to say. More than anything.
“Bullshit,” he shouted, his temper cracking.
“You’re lying to yourself, and you’re an idiot for doing it, and it’s going to get us all killed,” she bellowed back, striding towards him.
“She’d die for all of you.”
“Only after she’s ripped this fucking ship to shreds.”
They were screaming now, and it occurred to him this was the primal moment they both had needed, for a whole host of reasons. He had needed it since they returned from that planet, and the secret had been living in his skin.
Janeway was reckless, fearless and beautiful.
And B’Ellana was right.
And he was drowning.
He stepped back, suddenly aware of how close B’Elanna was, how absurd this argument was.
They stared at each other, breathless for a few seconds, before she spoke.
“I’m telling you because it’s obvious to everyone,” she shook her head, “and because it’s not going to change, and because we’re all going to die if you don’t start using your fucking brain instead of that big stupid heart.”
He tried to speak, and he wanted to. He wanted to call her out, to disagree with her. But of course, as always, B’Elanna was right.
He was irreversibly in love with Kathryn and it was killing him. He has been wrong not to stay the captain’s hand far sooner today. And he was letting his love for her - was always letting his love for her - get in the way of the right decisions.
“You’ve known me for a long time,” B’Elanna continued, because he wouldn’t. “I am not saying this to hurt you. Chakotay, I don’t like her but I do respect her. Most of the time, I even agree with her. But when she’s making mistakes, it’s your job to stop her.”
“I-”
“I don’t want anything from you,” she barked, and he could see her frustration. “But fuck, Chakotay, you’re vanishing.”
He nodded, unable to answer, and instead turned on his heels and left the silence of engineering.
She was right, of course. In so many ways. And he should have intervened today when the captain prevented Tom from carrying out evasive maneuvers, and instead rounded to fire on their attackers again. And again. When Tuvok had eventually suggested she withdraw, long after Chakotay should have insisted - she had relented. But his earlier, quiet suggestion that she withdraw, in the small lull between blasts, had fallen on deaf ears.
“You’re deep in thought, and holding that shoulder like you haven’t had it seen to, like you might have defied my order,” she spoke, pulling him from his own thoughts, as she came towards him in the corridor in which they were quartered.
Her face was flushed, and there was a kind of satisfaction in the way she moved. He’d seen it before; the delight of battle, the joy she derived from victory. The high.
She chased them, he knew. Dangerous situations, dangerous adversaries. Dangerous men.
At one point he had been enough for her, but now…now there wasn’t enough of him, now he was not enough of a risk.
Or maybe he was too much of a risk, he couldn’t be sure. There was so little he could be sure of when it came to her.
“Guilty of both,” he said, leaning against the bulkhead.
“Come on, let’s get you to sick-”
“I can’t, Captain,” he interrupted. “I -”
She looked at him for a moment, eyes scanning his face. To have her full attention was something unusual, but something breathtaking too.
“I can sort it,” she said softly, eyes not leaving his face. “If you don’t mind my rudimentary skills.”
He shrugged, and then flinched as pain burst across the top half of his body.
“Please,” she said, reaching out to touch his uninjured arm, pulling him gently. “Come on.”
She led him to the dark, grey quiet of her quarters.
“Sit,” she ordered, disappearing into her bedroom and out of his sight.
She returned a moment later, bearing a duffle and a bottle of whiskey. She set them down on the low table in front of her sitting area and, unzipping the bag, proceeded to lay out a variety of medical paraphernalia that should have rivaled sickbay, had it not been completely against regulation for her to have it.
“I can hear you judging me,” she said, screwing the top off the bottle and offering it to him.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“You know me Chakotay, I don’t like being predictable.”
“I do know that,” he said, watching as her fingers made light work of the closure of his uniform jacket.
In another life, on an entirely other world, she had undressed him quickly and often. And had he the bravery he’d had then, he would have taken her in his arms this moment, shown her how he loved her. How he loved her still, how he loved her in spite of it all.
She bunched it at his shoulders and slid the sleeves down, supporting his injured shoulder as she tugged it off of his wrist.
He watched her fingers as they pushed upwards, over his forearm and his bicep, and finally, softly, settling on the violent bruising that had bloomed over his deltoid to cover most of his shoulder, that had spread so it disappeared under the material of his tank.
She let out a little moan of worry, low and almost imperceptible in her throat, as she mapped it with her fingers, grazing the edge of his tank.
“This is awful,” she said softly, frowning down at him. “I’m sorry.”
She reached behind her, lifting the tricorder from the table and opening it up.
“Take off your tank,” she said, assisting him as she supported one arm over his head to pull it off. “I wish you’d gone to sick bay when I asked.”
He flinched as she pulled it from his wrist, and she grimaced.
“I don’t always do as you ask,” he said, handing her the whiskey.
“I know,” she said, examining the tricorder. “You’ve got a sprain, you’ve dislocated your shoulder, and you’ve fractured your collarbone. The fact you tried to sneak to your-”
“I was checking on B’Elanna,” he interrupted. “They got it rough down there.”
“Mmmm, we all did.”
He was silent, then she spoke as she handed him the whiskey.
“Drink.”
He did as he was told, and then she tipped his head to the side and pressed a hypo against his neck.
“This will help dull it,” she said. “I don’t have the good stuff. Even I don’t have the gall to ask the Doc for that…”
“He’d worry.”
“You’d worry,” she said, lifting his arm above his head, clambering over him to settle her knees on either side of his hips. “This is going to hurt.”
“It always does,” he whispered, and he wasn’t just talking about his dislocated shoulder.
She wouldn’t acknowledge it, wouldn’t answer it. But her fingers grazed his jaw.
“Right,” she said softly, “right.”
She pushed her weight on him with her left hand, crossing over his body to hold his arm against the wall.
“The doc would knock me out for this,” he said, his other hand digging into the couch in preparation as she pressed his shoulder as hard into the back of the settee as it would go.
“He would, so you can change your mind,” she said, looking down at him. “Like I should have earlier - I should have listened to you.”
“Yes, you should have,” he gritted his teeth as she pushed her weight into him.
“Ready?”
“Yeah.”
He cried out as her entire weight thrust his upper shoulder hard into the couch, and he felt it burn wildly as it realigned itself into the socket. He sucked a breath through his teeth, moaned, let his head fall with a thump against the bulkhead.
“Drink,” she pressed the bottle to his lips before clambering out of his lap and retrieving the regenerator. “The analgesic will wear off. I’ll replicate more and send it to your quarters.”
“We can’t spare it,” he said.
“We can,” she flicked it on, floating it over the bruise, which began to fade almost instantly. “We can always spare it. Captain’s prerogative.”
She brought her other hand up to his face, up to drift over his forehead, trace the lines of his tattoo. She had done this, once, too. Underneath the blistering sun, as they lay - naked - on a blanket on the bank of the river. He had watched every droplet evaporate from her skin.
“I am sorry you got hurt so badly.”
“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” he said, closing his fingers around his wrist to stall her hand.
“I’m not sure of that,” she sighed, switching the regenerator off as the last of the bruises faded.
“I should have been more insistent,” he said, lifting his arm up gingerly to test it out. He winced as he brought it up to his head, pushed slowly towards her ceiling.
She took his face between her hands. For a moment, he saw all the thing she wouldn’t dare to say flash in her lovely, cold eyes.
“You’ve tried that, you’ve tried everything. There’s nothing you could do,” she whispered. “That’s how it is. And this is who I am.”
He brought her lips down to his, knowing he shouldn’t. Knowing that this was it - time, and time, and time and again. Moments they would pay for, for months.
She breathed against his mouth, tasted temptation, and pulled back, “We can’t.”
“We can’t,” he agreed, because it was true.
For her, at least.
She stepped back, and began to tidy the contents back into the bag.
“I won’t ignore you again,” she whispered, and it was her version of an apology.
“Yes, you will, but I’ll keep speaking. It’s the only way we won’t blow this ship to fucking pieces,” he spoke into the silence.
She laughed a little, but he knew it wasn’t real.
“You’ll wait that long?”
“I’ll wait forever,” he stood, pulled on his tank and jacket.
She watched him the entire time, from the safety behind her coffee table. Her restraint was, almost, a real and tangible thing in that moment, and her tell was the pain that was evident, like the burst of a supernova, across her face. She crumpled for just a second, before she rebuilt herself.
“Make my apologies to B’Elanna,” she said softly, brushing at the tears on her cheek with a furious hand.
“I always do,” he smiled, trying to be reassuring, trying to let her see his words were real and true.
He turned to go, but was stopped - once more - by her voice.
“Chakotay, we’re okay aren’t we?”
She was so alone in that moment, cast in stars and shadows, and vast and infinite as those stars too.
He wanted to weep.
“We always are.”