Work Text:
Chakotay-
Captain Kathryn Janeway walks along the stream at the edge of her mother’s property. It’s part of every morning, strolling the property line, coffee in one hand, bouncing her thoughts off her former first officer.
The version of him that lives in her head, anyway.
Going to be a clear day today. It’s going to be a better season than we deserve.
It’s a habit she fell into over the last couple years, as the list of things she couldn’t talk about with the real Chakotay got longer and longer. Not to mention the list of things he chose not to say. But she could always hear him, even when he wasn’t speaking. And if she ever referenced a conversation that never happened or countered an argument he hadn’t made, he’d never pointed it out.
I’ve seen forest planets and ocean planets, voids and nebulae, worlds made of lava and ice, but I still think an Indiana cornfield is the basic form of the universe. The lowest energy state. Peel back the layers of spacetime, and eventually you hit corn. Everything else is just set dressing.
And she finds herself fitting back into it, the farm, the planet, the chain of command, better than she’d expected to. Or maybe she hadn’t expected she’d have to at all.
The number of times I pictured Voyager returning home, flying low over the Golden Gate, the whole population of San Francisco cheering below her, I never saw myself in the captain’s chair. It was always you, or Tom, or, hell, Naomi Wildman - I just never thought I’d make it this far.
She’d hoped she wouldn’t make it this far, to be honest. Hoped she wouldn’t see it all play out. She’d never thought she’d be the one to deal with the admirals and the paperwork, to see her crew split once again into Starfleet and Maquis, to be surprised at the reminder of which were which. At the back of her mind and the core of every decision, she’d preemptively barred herself from the promised land; it had made the past couple years easier, anyway. Now, wandering her mother’s cornfield and having won, categorically, her battle against the Delta Quadrant, she wonders if she was always willing to bargain away the chance to see victory if it meant she wouldn’t bear witness to defeat.
Now they’re both back on Earth, back home ( her home, at any rate), and everything turned out all right, all things considered, and she feels the farthest from him that she has in seven years. And she’s started talking to him in paragraphs.
I always believed what they say, that you can’t go home again. Turns out it was easy. I take it that it hasn’t been for you.
The messages she gets from the flesh and blood Chakotay are short and cold, whether by Starfleet’s design or his choice. She’s not sure which. She doesn’t like that she isn’t sure. But the fact that he’s still in San Francisco, confined to Starfleet HQ, tells her that he hasn’t taken the admirals’ offer - the confidentiality agreement, the reinstatement of his commission. The hint that charges from seven years ago have not yet been entirely dropped. The understanding that he could be accepted back with open arms if he so chose. The underlying threat that he would not be allowed to leave the fold again.
She knows what it is he’s facing because they had made her a similar offer. She’d accepted it instantly, which is why she’s basking in the Indiana sunrise while he’s still stuck on the other side of the continent.
I’ve been thinking about state functions lately. The parameters of a system that are always the same, no matter how you got there. Position is one. 150,000 light years, give or take, and now I’m back in Indiana. Zero displacement. Path independent.
It all seems so inevitable now. She can barely understand that crushing sense of distance she felt seven years ago, when she had adopted a bravado she did not yet feel, drawn a Maquis stranger to her side, set a course for Earth, and sworn to anything listening that Voyager would complete it.
Now she’s brimming with confidence, overflowing with it. It rattles when she walks.
These admirals - I know the type. They think I’ve spent so long focused on the same goal that I’ll be adrift without it. Maybe you thought so, too. No need to worry about that. I know what I want. I spent too long at the top of the food chain, and I’ve developed a taste for it.
It’s why she took this “optional” three months of leave - not because she needed it, but because that was what was expected of her, the damaged-but-healing captain they needed her to be.
I grew up hearing the gossip of Starfleet brass around the dinner table; I know how these people think. I know just the right amount of vulnerable to be. Once they decide to let me come back, they’d better be ready to get out of my way.
I was expecting you’d still be there, at my side.
It baffles her. There’s no other word for it. The man who spent the past seven years at arm’s reach, no more and no less; who had worn the uniform and quoted the protocol; who could pour himself into whatever container she asked of him; whose mind she thought she knew as well as she knew her own, has dug in his heels. As if hitting Earth’s atmosphere had reactivated the Maquis in him, brought back the rebel captain who’d been furious about so-called Federation imperialism and looking for a chance to spit in Starfleet’s face. As if he hadn’t really changed, either.
I guess we never talked much about what you would do, once we got back. Maybe I assumed you’d keep following me. Maybe that was presumptuous.
But he’d been easier to read at the beginning, when things were simpler, and at some point she must have stopped reading him. She’d gotten so used to his presence at her shoulder that she’d forgotten he was more than a silhouette, learned to anticipate his every counterargument and moral objection and joke so accurately that she hadn’t noticed when he’d stopped making them. Now she’s recontextualizing everything he did and worked for and sacrificed over the past seven years and wondering if it wasn’t just for her, and it shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.
I thought I knew what you wanted. I thought it was me.
She absently grabs at a piece of wild grass as she passes by, ripping off its seeds and scattering them to the wind.
Sometimes I forget that when all this started, I was the one chasing you. Sometimes I wonder if that ever really changed.
The sun is getting higher, reflecting off the creek and dazzling her every few steps. She stops, frowning, as she reaches the corner of her mother’s property. She ought to turn back, but she has the distinct impression that something is going unsaid, and she’s not sure what it is. She kicks at a rock in the drying mud, sends it tumbling into the stream.
I need you here, Chakotay. I need you to remind me that the path matters. That energy can be lost to friction. To help me see distance and not displacement.
She throws her head back to get the last sip of coffee out of the mug and turns back toward the house. Enough , she can feel him saying. Enough time spent brooding about the woman who saw lightyears as her only obstacle and cataloging the forces that brought her home again, now painfully aware of how many forms distance can take.
I think love isn’t nearly as complicated as we all keep trying to make it.
It’s not an apology, or a declaration, or an invitation, but it’s the closest she’s willing to come right now to any of those things. And Chakotay - the real one, back in San Francisco, trapped in meetings and hearings and inquiries - can take it or leave it.